The Sol System Renegades Quadrilogy

by Felix R. Savage

  “Not the PLAN,” she said. They were staring at her like she had the answers. Where was Sergeant McWhorter? Where was Captain Malouf?

  Dead.

  She bounded back to C-Mutt. “What the fuck is going on?”

  C-Mutt didn’t have the answers, either, but he at least knew how to act like he did. “Dray! Stand down! Await orders, you dumb fuck!” he yelled at Drayawray, who was guarding the airlock, swinging a chair at anyone who tried to get into it and get at the EVA suits inside.

  “There is no one to give orders, C-Mutt,” Angelica said. “They’re all fucking dead.”

  He exhaled sharply. “I know.”

  “Do it, C-Mutt. Take charge. Reassure the civilians. You might even get a medal.”

  “More likely, we’ll get blamed for everything.” He raised his voice. “All right! Everyone stay fucking calm! Return to your desks! Do not attempt to leave the module at this time! We do not know what the fuck just happened, but comms is on that, ain’tcha, comms?”

  “I can’t raise anyone,” the civilian comms officer squeaked. “I think our transmitter is fucked.”

  “Cheese. All right! There are an estimated forty Marines patrolling the area, who won’t have been affected by the, uh, unscheduled landing. Some of those teams have UHF transmitters. We will get in touch with them and they can contact the Serge Gainsbourg.”

  This was the Space Force Heavypicket stationed in orbit around Callisto, which had been shadowing the Farhauler.

  “In the meantime—”

  A life support tech screeched, “They’re coming out!”

  Everyone rushed back to the screen, including C-Mutt and Drayawray.

  The lifeboat’s airlock had opened. Stairs extended at an angle that skimmed the still-hot drive shield. Spacesuited human beings emerged. An unacknowledged dread lifted from Angelica’s heart. At least they were human.

  “Phew,” someone muttered, expressing her own thoughts. “There still aren’t any aliens.”

  Everyone dreaded that aliens would show up in the solar system some day.

  But today was not that day.

  The invaders were human. And carrying guns. That was all Angelica could see, given how far away the camera was.

  “Who are they?” Gloria dos Santos begged.

  C-Mutt faced the airlock. “I think we’re about to find out.”

  xvii.

  Elfrida gave up her search for the spare oxygen tank. It must have come out of her suit’s webbing when she fell, and rolled away. Or maybe it had been missing all along, and she hadn’t noticed until she ran an integrity check.

  She tried to breathe slowly and mindfully, like Louise 361AX had taught her.

  Do not panic.

  She was already panicking.

  They’ll notice my emergency beacon. They’ll come and find me.

  She had triggered her emergency beacon as soon as she realized she was a) lost and b) low on air. Fifteen minutes ago.

  But what if they don’t come?

  After all, there was no network coverage down here. So how was her emergency signal meant to reach the hab?

  Maybe the beacon transmitted on a satellite frequency.

  In which case, it was designed to be used on the surface.

  Maybe Vlajkovic had told her about it just to make her feel safe, neglecting to mention that it wouldn’t work down here.

  Other possibilities crowded her mind. The beacon was working, but they were ignoring it, to punish her. Or, no one had noticed it, because the rebellion had already started.

  “Fourteen minutes of oxygen remaining,” her suit said.

  Elfrida broke into a run. She sprinted through the abandoned room-and-pillar excavations like a rat in a maze. She was careful to keep her head down on her long leaps this time.

  “Eleven minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  A tunnel mouth yawned. This had to be the way to the water processing plant.

  The floor sloped down.

  Or, not.

  Still, a tunnel had to lead somewhere.

  Didn’t it?

  Out of breath, Elfrida dropped back to a walk. “Oh God, don’t let me die like this. Please. I was baptized on 11073 Galapagos, remember? I signed on with Your crowd—”

  —not that she’d ever lifted one finger to follow up on that. She’d gone on with her life as if it had never happened—

  “—and I know You’ve been looking out for me. You saved me on 4 Vesta, didn’t you? Please, help me find the way out. Please, please. I’ll do whatever You want, just please please don’t let me die down here. Please. Please. Amen.”

  Her helmet lamp glanced off a solid black wall.

  Ice in front of her, ice to the left of her, ice to the right of her.

  The tunnel was a dead end.

  “Six minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  Elfrida battered the wall with her gloves.

  “Five minutes of oxygen remaining. Please top up now.”

  Abruptly, the fight went out of her. She sat down in a heap on the tunnel floor, and cried.

  23 Years Earlier. Callisto

  The muzzle of a flechette cannon poked out of the airlock. The three Marines, lined up shoulder to shoulder, tensed. None of them were armed. It was against regs to carry weapons in the admin module.

  The airlock opened the rest of the way. The flechette cannon emerged, together with the man aiming it at them. He wore an UNSA spacesuit, minus the helmet. Angelica thought idiotically, You’re too pretty to work for UNSA.

  He didn’t work for UNSA, of course. Whoever he was, he’d stolen this spacesuit, just like he stole the lifeboat.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Dark brown hair, long, needed a wash. Medium brown skin. Thin lips, hooked nose. Typical mestizo face. Dude could’ve been from anywhere—but then he smiled, and his face became so captivating that Angelica almost forgot to clock his accomplices.

  There were four of them, which was the airlock’s max capacity. They, too, wore UNSA suits, and brandished laser and projectile weapons. They herded the REMFs to the other end of the module.

  REMFs, slow on the uptake: “You from UNSA?”

  Woman, square-cut afro, cheek piercings, leaning into the screens at the life support center: “This module secure. Go check out those other modules, Jax.”

  The three Marines, marked out by their uniforms, stood facing the long-haired dude.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  He had a surprisingly soft voice. Mid-twenties, maybe. He carried the flechette cannon with his fingers splayed outside the trigger guard, like he knew how to use it.

  “Me,” C-Mutt said, after a beat. “And who the fuck are you?”

  “Someone that’s got you outnumbered, outgunned, and beat.” The dude’s smile widened. “Meh, to be honest, we didn’t mean to land on the barracks. Just got lucky.”

  Angelica found herself smiling in response, as if he’d said something funny, instead of admitting to mass murder.

  “So I guess I’m looking at the totality of the Space Force garrison.”

  “You fucking wish,” said Drayawray. “We got forty, fifty guys out on patrol right now.” The Marines had been patrolling in depth, just to keep busy. “They’re gonna come back up in here and whoop your ass with the wrath of a thousand suns.”

  C-Mutt slapped him on the back of the head.

  “Thanks for the warning,” the dude said. “I’ll be sure and tell my people to watch out for them. But honestly, even if there are fifty of them, which I doubt, I don’t think they are gonna whoop our asses. For the same reason that the Serge Gainsbourg isn’t gonna interfere. Because we’ve got you.”

  Afro’d chick at the life support center: “All modules secure, X. Got the scientists. Five LGM guys, nine Liquid Space. Guess the Adastra crew bought it.”

  “Great, tell Jax to bring ‘em over here.” The dude shifted his gaze back to C-Mutt. “This is like having thirteen aces in my hand. The media are gonna go ape. For some re
ason, they always act like scientists are more valuable than grunts.”

  “OK,” C-Mutt said. “How’d you pull it off?”

  “I bet you can figure it out,” the dude invited him.

  “Maybe I can. You must’ve got yourself hired onto the Farhauler. You hijacked it in deep space, and stopped off somewhere to pick up your buddies. That’s why you were behind schedule.” He shook his head admiringly. Angelica tensed. C-Mutt was playing the dude, flattering him to put him off his guard. A hundred and fifty Marines dead and C-Mutt still had his game. If anyone could save them, he could.

  The only trouble was, Angelica figured this X dude had a solid game of his own. He’d flattered C-Mutt by appealing to his intelligence. In other words, he’d needed just a few seconds to identify C-Mutt’s weak spot. That was … scary.

  She opened her mouth, but Drayawray got there first. “So, we’re hostages.”

  “Aren’t you the brainy one,” Nick mocked. Angelica shivered, realizing that X-dude had already decided Drayawray was no use to him.

  “What do you want?” C-Mutt said bluntly.

  “All we want is for the UN to respect its foundational principles. Equality before the law for you, for me … and for them.” He nodded at his accomplices.

  The woman with the afro was standing at the life support center. A wire extended from the console to a port in her temple. She must have one of those new implants, Angelica thought enviously. A Brain-Computer Interface.

  C-Mutt got it first. “Holy crap. She isn’t human. None of them are. They’re bots.”

  “I’m human,” X-dude said. “Cut me and I bleed. Although I’ll blast your head off if you try, just so you’re warned.”

  C-Mutt gave an odd, polite little laugh.

  Drayawray said, “You fuckers, you fuck, you’re fucking Cyberd-d-d-destiny.”

  xviii.

  “Six minutes of oxygen remaining,” Elfrida’s suit told her.

  Just like on 11073 Galapagos, when she knew that she was going to die, a terrible peace stole over her.

  She cleared her throat and spoke into her suit radio. Though it couldn’t transmit, it could still record her voice. “Hey, Jun.”

  Maybe someday, someone would find her body, and get this recording to its intended recipient. Although that would be tricky, since Jun Yonezawa was a) a highly capable MI, and b) hiding off the net somewhere.

  “I’m really sorry I never got in touch after 4 Vesta. I couldn’t find you … no, that’s an excuse. I wanted to put it all behind me. But whatever you put behind you, will end up biting you in the ass. How’s that for last words? Laugh.”

  “Five minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  “But what I really want to say is …” She hesitated. “I should have gone with you.”

  Jun and his human brother, Kiyoshi, had saved her life on 4 Vesta. They’d vanished before she could even say thank you. Now she understood that she’d needed to say more than that.

  “I owed you more … more … What’s that word? Repentance. The door was open. But I turned away. I just wanted to go home. But when I got there, it didn’t feel like home anymore. That’s what you get for wimping out, playing by the rules.”

  “Four minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  “So I came out here, looking for someplace I could belong. Someplace I could be. But now Mercury is messed up, too. Typical: everything goes to shit as soon as I show up.”

  Self-pity overwhelmed her. Two big tears splatted on the inside of her faceplate.

  “Three minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  “So … yeah. Deep breath. I remember you used to talk about God. I should have listened. I just assumed it was a bunch of superstitious crap. But now I get it. God is the answer.”

  She was quiet for a moment, living with that revelation.

  “But I was so stupid. I turned my back on God. No, it was worse than that, I told Him to frag off. So … no wonder I’m going to end up dying alone in the dark, after all.”

  “Two minutes of oxygen remaining.”

  The wall she was sitting against moved. She fell over backwards. Light blazed into the tunnel. A spindly mining bot scooped her up in its front legs and strode back the way it had come.

  “Hello? Hello? You alive in there?” a voice blared into her helmet.

  “Yes!” she screamed, dangling upside-down. “Please, quick, I’m almost out of air! One minute left! Help!”

  “Shee-it,” said the voice. “On it.”

  The bot raced downhill, burst out of the tunnel into bright light, and dumped Elfrida on her feet. She swayed, breathing carbon dioxide. Black spots crinkled her vision.

  “I got you, hon.”

  EVA suits loomed. She fell to her knees. The American flag bulged on someone’s chest. Hands pushed her to and fro, replacing her oxygen tank.

  “There!”

  Elfrida wheezed—and breathed.

  Canned air had never tasted so good.

  “Thank you,” she gasped. “Thank you, thank you.”

  “Don’t thank us. Thank UNVRP for being cheap. They’re still using the same damn suits we gave them forty years ago. If those valves weren’t compatible, you’d be dead right now.”

  Elfrida tried to wipe tears and slobber from her face. Her gloves bumped her faceplate. “D-Doug? I mean, Mr. President?”

  “Doug’s fine. Were you coming to see me, by any chance?”

  “Yes, actually, I was.”

  ★

  “Oh, I feel fine now,” Elfrida said, in response to Doug’s question. “I mean, now that I can breathe. Laugh.”

  She took in her surroundings. She and Doug were standing in a large cavern. Floods lit EVA-suited people working around a central tangle of machinery. Thick cables vanished into a shaft.

  “Is this your water mine?”

  “Yup,” Doug said. “You just had a pretty traumatic experience, Ms. Goto. I know you feel fine, but I believe you ought to get out of that suit and let a medibot look you over. It’s on us.”

  “Well, all right. Thank you.”

  She’d come for a face-to-face meeting with Doug. She’d have to make sure he didn’t just hand her off to a medibot.

  As they walked around the hoist, she saw a skip full of ore rising to the surface. Dumptrucks stood ready to receive it.

  “Hop in,” Doug said, swinging up into a high cab.

  They drove along a broad, dusty tunnel to the Mt. Gotham service entrance. Inside, everyone they met deferred to Doug. Even the elevator seemed to move faster than it had before. Elfrida was processed through the decontamination clinic in ten minutes flat. They emerged into the parking lot, and Doug led her into the fields on foot.

  The sun lamps overhead were just coming on. Their pink-tinted light filled the hollowed-out mountain with the magic of dawn. A flock of birds wheeled over the fields, and dived. But instead of spreading out to land, the whole tightly packed flock vanished, as if they’d moved off the edge of a screen. Watching them, Elfrida trod in a cowpat.

  She wiped her boot on the grass. The mishap didn’t disturb her. She was entranced by the beauty of this ordinary field, the ordinary cows watching them from a distance, the ordinary smell of manure, the crisp chilly air. Maybe she was in shock.

  “Doug—Mr. President—I need to talk to you.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  They reached a patch of woodland. Bushes filled the spaces between elongated fruit trees. A path between the trees opened out into a clearing where a wooden cabin stood, checked curtains fluttering.

  “My little getaway,” Doug said, heavily.

  Elfrida sensed that something was wrong. But she faced him, determined to go through with it. “I came here to ask for your help. Mike Vlajkovic and his friends? They’re, I guess, you gave them some weapons. And I’m afraid they’re going to use them. It might be too late already, but if you could use your influence … or can you, maybe, remotely disable the guns?”

  Doug was shaking his head. />
  “No?”

  “It is,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Too late.”

  “Oh no, oh no.”

  Elfrida sat down on the cabin porch. She knuckled her eyes. If she hadn’t got lost—if she hadn’t banged her head and lost her spare oxygen tank—if, if …

  “Want to see? We can get a feed.”

  She nodded, numb.

  “Stay here.”

  Doug went into the cabin and brought out a wall screen. He propped it against the railing of the porch. Elfrida perched on the edge of a glider. Doug slumped in a wicker chair.

  Camera’s-eye views flashed by. The feed stabilized on a view of the L1 mezzanine. An individual with pink hair, whom Elfrida recognized as one of Zazoë Heap’s retinue, lay face down on the floor. No one else was in sight. The mezzanine wrapped all the way around the atrium. On the other side, a blue beret—now a ‘blue helmet,’ as he/she was in a spacesuit—lurked at the entrance to one of the Hotel Mercury radial corridors.

  Suddenly, the blue helmet exploded into a red mist. The now-headless peacekeeper stayed upright for a dreadful moment. Then he/she slid down it, out of sight.

  Elfrida jumped to her feet, leaned over the porch rail, and threw up.

  “Sorry,” she choked. “Sorry.”

  “I feel the same way, Ms. Goto.”

  “That peacekeeper. They shot him or her. They’re really doing it.”

  “Looks that way. I’m gonna scan the news feeds, see what they’ve got.”

  The bitter taste of vomit filled Elfrida’s mouth. A maidbot rolled out of the cabin and offered her a glass of water. She took it, rinsed her mouth, spit on the grass.

  When she sat down again, the screen had split in two. Headlines scrolled down the left side. Gunmen Attack Mercury Peacekeepers … Conflict Erupts on Mercury … Ahead of Vote, Violence Breaks Out at UN Facility … Gunmen Identified as Hasselblatter Supporters.

  “This is really happening,” she muttered. “People are dying. Because I screwed up.”

  “Wasn’t you, Ms. Goto. Don’t be so quick to take responsibility for other people’s stupidity.”

  The righthand half of the screen showed a surveillance-cam view of the life support operations center. Blue helmets crowded the room. Medibots attended the wounded. Other peacekeepers tinkered with the consoles, their postures relaxed. They were all wearing rebreather rigs and/or EVA suits.