The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy

by Felix R. Savage

“Chill out, buddy,” she said. “I’m just busting your chops. Instalments, you say? As in, payments on a transaction? Did you sell them something they shouldn’t have, like black tech?”

  “Something like that. By the way, if you’ve been talking to Budgett, maybe she mentioned that they owe me ten K this month, actually. That’s including a late fee of twenty-five percent.” It was hard to see in the dim light, but his eyes seemed to be flickering from side to side.

  “You’re pinging her as we speak,” Petruzzelli hazarded. “But she’s not answering.”

  “She’s hiding behind you, I guess.”

  “Nope. No one in the Bellicia ecohood is answering right now. Not email, not voice calls. Even Cydney Blaisze’s feed has quit.”

  “Who are you, anyway?” The question sounded inattentive; she figured he was confirming her claim.

  “Like I said, I’m a friend of Budgett’s.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Haddock and company have been travelling on my ship. Which isn’t such a coincidence, if you think about it. Haddock knows Budgett, and he knows you. He’s like this human ITN, connecting far-flung planets.”

  “The planet of good and the planet of evil.”

  “You could put it like that. But I wouldn’t. Reality is gray, not black and white. Budgett may have some good colleagues at the university, but she’s a cyborg engineer with no sense of right and wrong. And I don’t think of myself as evil.”

  His gaze came back to her. “Don’t you?”

  “Check my public profile,” she shrugged. “Actually, I’m sure you already have.”

  “Captain of the Kharbage Collector, achieved the rank of general in Existential Threat IV, currently an Idiran commander in Second Idiran War. Mixed Anglo-European heritage. That tells me nothing about you. Well, actually, it tells me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “The only people who put their DNA in their public profiles are—”

  “Idiots. You have to be dumber than shit to put your actual DNA out there for hackers to grab. That’s just my ethnic category. I’m—”

  “Scared. The only people who put their ethnic category, if you like, in their public profiles are scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of being mistaken for purebloods.”

  “I’m three-quarters Italian. One-quarter American mutt.”

  “OK.”

  Petruzzelli sucked air through her straw. She thumbed through the menu on her wrist tablet.

  “I understand the logic,” Yonezawa said. “You wouldn’t want anyone to think you were like me.”

  Petruzzelli ordered a halal Scotch—screw the cost—and looked up. “Dude, I’m not like you. I pilot a recycling barge. I’m not a smuggler with a sideline in extortion.”

  “No? Based on what I hear from Haddock, it seems like that’s a distinction without a difference.”

  Petruzzelli leaned across the table. She noticed a pendant in the open neck of Yonezawa’s shirt. It was a silver plus sign, the vertical arm a bit longer than the horizontal one. “If you even think about blackmailing me, chinkie, let me tell you right now: try it, and you’re gonna take a one-way ride to a world of sorrow. Like you can’t even imagine.”

  “You don’t know what I can imagine,” Yonezawa said. The waitress brought Petruzzelli’s Scotch, together with a plate of cheese fries that Yonezawa must have ordered. “Anyway, you called me ‘chinkie,’” he said in a softer tone. They had both been yelling over the noise of the band. “That’s not accurate. I’m not Chinese, I’m Japanese.”

  Petruzzelli sat back, feeling a bit stupid. Her outburst had been excessive. She watched Yonezawa eat fries. He was unnaturally neat about it, wiping his fingers after each one. She confessed, “I knew that. It just kind of popped out.”

  “Understandable.”

  “I knew you were Japanese.” The time had come to fess up. “I used to work on the Kharbage Can. I was the one who piloted the Cheap Trick to 11073 Galapagos.” With these words, she violated her NDA with the ISA for the first time. Wasn’t much harm in telling the truth to a fellow criminal. “I had a Star Force combat program to work with. Program and me got three of the toilet rolls, but we missed the last one. The one that blew your home rock to pieces.”

  He was silent.

  “Sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” he said.

  “Anyway; Budgett told me that’s where you’re from. Small solar system, huh?”

  Yonezawa ate another fry. He scratched the inside of his left forearm through his shirt. “So, have you got my money?”

  xxi.

  Elfrida held Amy on her lap. The Jack Russell kept trying to lick her nose. “She likes you,” Jimmy said, laughing.

  “I like dogs. We had a beagle when I was a kid.” They were sitting in the communal kitchen of Liberty Village. The other Chinese jostled in the doorway, staring. Elfrida had a pouch of green tea in front of her. Jimmy was chain-vaping a clove cigarette.

  “Beagles are lovely,” he said. “I am a member of the Dog Worshipping Society of Outer Space. Many of our members own beagles. They were popular on the Asteroid of the Heavenly Perfume especially.”

  “Asteroid of the Heavenly Perfume?”

  “Yes, in the Inner Belt. Certainly you know that the PLAN attacked it five years ago and killed many thousands of people.”

  “I must have missed those headlines,” Elfrida said. No way she wouldn’t have heard about a kilodeath incident. “Was it a—a Chinese colony?”

  “Of course.”

  Elfrida said slowly, “Is it … I’m getting the feeling that it isn’t true, after all, that the Chinese don’t come into space.”

  “Of course we do. There are many Chinese colonies in the Belt. You don’t know this?”

  He was looking at her as if she were brain-damaged. “The Great Firewall,” she said. “I guess your government doesn’t advertise what it’s doing. Ha. Advertise.” Dancing, singing, begging, pleading advertisements covered the walls of the kitchen, and even the appliances. Elfrida’s head was starting to ache all over again from the background noise. She didn’t know how the Chinese stood it. “Well, I guess that’s understandable. Given the—the external risks.”

  “Our government lies,” Jimmy said flatly.

  “That’s kind of like the definition of government,” Elfrida offered.

  He leaned towards her, his pouchy face taut with intensity.“They hide the risks. But they couldn’t hide the destruction of the Asteroid of the Heavenly Perfume. Too many people had family members there, so it became news. After that, many people thought that it is better to disembowel a frog than to swallow a chainsaw! So we decided to found a new colony that would not be subject to these external risks.” He reached out and tapped the back of her hand. Elfrida flinched. She had already noticed that the Chinese had a different concept of personal space: they thought nothing of brushing past you, or casually touching you to make a point. “Therefore we set up a syndicate and made a contract with Virgin Atomic. But now we think that VA was dishonest with us. We are angry.”

  “Join the club,” Elfrida mumbled.

  “4 Vesta is not safe!”

  “No shit.” The thought of Cydney was like a constant, dull pain in her stomach.

  “Do you know what they are doing at the de Grey Institute? The ISA agent, Miss Doyle, wants them to tell her, but they are refusing. This is putting many people’s lives in danger.”

  Elfrida straightened. She looked past Jimmy, to the rubbernecking construction workers in the doorway. “I don’t know what they’re up to.” In her mind, that mysterious signal etched its trajectory across the screen. Calling Gap 2.5. Calling 99984 Ravilious. “But I want to find out, too.”

  She explained what she had in mind. As she spoke, Jimmy Liu began to smile. “The highest mountain is low at the bottom,” he said joyously.

  “I knew you had a spark of Abenteuerlust,” Elfrida said, striking back with her kitchen German. “That means ‘spi
rit of adventure.’”

  “This is a wonderful idea, Miss Goto. But wait. Isn’t there a problem? They do not trust us, they don’t tell us anything—”

  “Got that covered,” Elfrida said. “I assume you guys have a spaceship hidden somewhere on this rock?”

  ★

  “Here’s your doggone money,” Petruzzelli said. Banging at her wrist tablet, she sent a secure payment to the ID Kiyoshi Yonezawa had given her. “I hope you aren’t one of those foilhats who only accepts physical palladium, because what you’re getting is what I’ve got. Ten thousand spiders, payable to Loyola Holdings, Inc. And that’s obviously a front company officered by rent-a-directors.”

  “I actually prefer physical iridium,” Yonezawa said. “But spiders are good. Thanks … Where are you going?” She had stood up. “Stay a bit longer. You haven’t even finished your drink.”

  “Freaking halal Scotch,” Petruzzelli said. “Might as well pour it straight into the recycler.” But she sat down again.

  “Personally, I prefer C-and-C to alcohol,” Yonezawa said, referring to the compounds of cathine and cathinone that were commonly used as alcohol substitutes in sharia-compliant drinks. “It doesn’t screw with your mental faculties in the same way.”

  “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

  “I’m a solo operator. If I pass out drunk, who’s going to take over?”

  “Your hub, I assume?” Petruzzelli sniped. “Unless you’re one of those purists who won’t work with machine intelligences.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to,” he said seriously. “But extreme purism just doesn’t work. It’s not possible for a human to pilot a spaceship alone. It’s not even possible for a hundred humans.”

  “You could, but you probably wouldn’t have your spaceship very long. We’re apes. We’re not optimized for this stuff.”

  “Right. You need some help from the machines. So the question becomes, where do you draw the line?”

  “I’ve never been a huge fan of drawing lines,” Petruzzelli drawled. She realized to her consternation and amusement that she was flirting with him. It wasn’t the artificial pheromones this time: the Ganesha didn’t pump that stuff. Calling ironic attention to her mood, she cooed, “So, do you come here often?”

  He didn’t seem to get the joke. “Sometimes. When I’m on-rock.”

  “I guess that’s your truck in 30-A.”

  “How’d you know?”

  Petruzzelli swallowed a sudden lump of sadness. “Because I’ve seen one just like it before. It’s a Hitachi-Samsung Longvoyager. You don’t see many of them lumbering around the solar system nowadays.”

  “We had two of them: the St. Francis and the Nagasaki. When we settled on 11073 Galapagos, we splarted the Nagasaki to the asteroid. We used her attitude adjusters to spin the rock up. Then we covered her over and turned her into a cathedral.”

  “And when the PLAN came, your people escaped in her. It was amazing.”

  “Most of them,” he corrected her. “Two thousand, three hundred, and eighty-seven of us died. But, hey, that’s still a great survival rate for a PLAN attack, right?” He toyed with the cuff of his left sleeve. “The survivors live on Ceres now. They’re OK, they’ve got jobs.”

  “So you aren’t acting as their agent.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Who are you working for, then?”

  “Myself. The Unicorn—I renamed her—is old, as you noticed. To be honest, she’s falling apart. I need to replace the reactor.”

  “That’s gonna cost a ton.”

  “Exactly, but you helped a little bit today.” He smiled and pushed off from his chair.

  Petruzzelli reached out and grabbed his wrist. “A minute ago you were asking me to stay, and now you’re the one trying to leave.”

  “Is there some reason I shouldn’t leave?”

  Because I don’t believe a word you’ve told me, Petruzzelli thought. Well, maybe about your ship needing repairs. But that’s it.

  Because you’re obviously a junkie, and you want to slink off and shoot some dope into your cubital port. And I won’t let anyone do that shit if I can stop them.

  Because my friends are in danger on 4 Vesta, and you’ve got something to do with it, and I won’t let you just walk away.

  Because …

  “Because,” she said, looking into his eyes, “I saw outside that they have private party rooms here.”

  ★

  Several hours later, Petruzzelli woke up in mid-air. She’d kicked the mattress in her sleep, which had been enough to dislodge her and send her drifting towards the ceiling. She caught the sex trapeze, hung by her knees, and laughed. Yonezawa lay sprawled on his back, snoring.

  At the sound of her laughter, he opened one eye and then the other. “Hey there.”

  Petruzzelli floated down on top of him. She matched the position of her feet to his, which put her face in the middle of his chest—she was that much shorter. She rested her cheek on his skinny chest and played with his pendant. “This is cool. What is it?”

  “You don’t know?” He stroked her back. “It’s zero four hundred local time. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Maybe we can do this again sometime.”

  “Yeah. You’re pretty hot in the sack, for a …”

  “Pureblood?”

  “I was going to say, for a junkie.”

  “Junkie?”

  “The port would be a pretty big clue.” She fingered the tiny port implanted in his left forearm to give access to the cubital vein.

  “There are other reasons to have a cubital port. I use it as an IV. Telepresence. I sim some.”

  Petruzzelli wrinkled her nose. He reached to the other side of the bed and retrieved an object like a skinny black caterpillar from the sheets. He made it walk up her arm. It was one of her false eyelashes.

  “Give me that!” Laughing, Petruzzelli grabbed for it. They wrestled.

  “Anyone can be a great lover in micro-gee,” she panted.

  “True. I did notice that you’re a bit out of shape.”

  “Who’s out of shape?”

  “Stop it!”

  “Uhhhnnh ….”

  “… On second thoughts: don’t stop it.”

  “Uhhh.”

  They parted outside the Ganesha. The holograms of Nowhere flickered and the pleasure-seekers meandered just as they had eight hours ago. Day never came here.

  The pirates sat on the path that led down to the hab floor. Kelp was curled up asleep on a pile of burkas.

  “Ahoy, miscreants!” Haddock hailed Petruzzelli and Yonezawa. “Have the pair o’ ye no decency?”

  “Not a shred,” Petruzzelli said. She made her eyebrow smileys stick their tongues out. Then she looked at her wrist tablet. “Blistering barnacles! I gotta run.”

  The pirates cracked up.

  “It’s catching,” Petruzzelli admitted. “I even said that when Elfrida was on board. I don’t think she noticed, though.”

  She blew a kiss to Yonezawa and hurried back towards the spaceport.

  Back on board the Kharbage Collector, she brushed aside Michael’s questions about where she’d been. She went straight down to sick-bay and swabbed herself. She handed the results to the diagnostic terminal, went back to the bridge, and checked the duty log.

  Michael had unloaded the pirates’ Superlifter, embarked a clutch of passengers for remote asteroids in the Vesta sector, loaded the cargo that they were scheduled to pick up here, and consigned their recycling to the 6 Hebe processing facility, getting a pretty good price for it. “Well done,” she congratulated him, surprised.

  Then she saw that he’d done all that in an hour and a half, and spent the rest of the time playing Second Idiran War, as her.

  “Grrrrr!”

  Sick-bay pinged her workstation. “Sequencing complete. Save this DNA record?”

  “Save,” Petruzzelli typed. Then she accessed the hub’s search space. “SEARCH TER
MS: . SEARCH RANGE: all.”

  “A search of the entire internet will take an estimated 57 hours, 2 minutes, and forty-seven seconds.”

  “Go for it.”

  Kiyoshi Yonezawa might have evaded her questions. He might hide his skulduggery behind shell companies. But DNA was a different kind of data. It couldn’t lie, dissemble, or hide (not without cash outlays far beyond the reach of a smuggler, anyway). And it left traces behind, if you were as careless with it as Kiyoshi Yonezawa had already proved himself to be. However long it might take, the Kharbage Collector’s hub would find them.

  xxii.

  Back on the Unicorn, Kiyoshi settled into his nest and plugged his IV into his cubital port. He dialed in a cocktail of sodium chloride, potassium, vitamin B, an anti-nausea drug, and a mild painkiller.

  He hadn’t lied to Petruzzelli: he wasn’t a junkie. In a world where anti-addiction treatment was cheaply and widely available, no one had to be a junkie if they didn’t want to be. Ergo, he wasn’t one. This dose would have embarrassed any recreational doper, anyway. It was a hangover cure.

  The Unicorn’s operations module resounded with the excited voices of Kiyoshi’s newly embarked passengers. The racket made his head hurt. Eyemask in place, he exited the bridge of the Unicorn, and walked down the dark, cool corridor that led to the peaceful environs of the St. Francis, his sim version of the ship.

  “We’re cleared to launch,” Jun said. “Cargo’s all loaded. Including the Koreans.”

  Jun Yonezawa had died on 11073 Galapagos. Kiyoshi had brought him back by customizing a high-end software-based MI—the type sold as add-ons for game play—with archived video and the tearful recollections of their mother, recorded at their new home on Ceres.

  Alive, Jun had been gifted, devout, a natural leader. Going places, for sure. Now he was trapped in the hub of the Unicorn, going nowhere except the places where Kiyoshi could make a buck for the boss-man. You win some, you lose some.

  Through the machine-learning process, the software-based Jun had become so realistic that he was often a pain in the ass. But as Kiyoshi had hinted to Alicia Petruzzelli, he couldn’t do without him anymore.