The Galapagos Incident: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  The galley hatch rose, revealing a wide-nozzled food pouch on a paper doily, and an artificial voice chimed, “Your meal / snack / drink / select one is ready. Hasta la vista, baby! Hur hur hur!”

  “Goddamn Cap’n. He reprogrammed it with a bunch of his everlasting quotations, totally screwed it up.” Petruzzelli sucked on the nozzle of the pouch, made a face. “Maybe that’s why the minestrone is crap.”

  “That smells really good, actually,” Elfrida said. The rich aroma reminded her that she was hungry. “I think I might have some, too.”

  “Go for it.”

  They sat side by side, slurping their soup and idly mocking the vid stars, actors, and politicians who capered across the screen. Elfrida tried to tell herself that someone as friendly as Petruzzelli couldn’t be part of a dastardly conspiracy. But that did not mean the conspiracy didn’t exist.

  Did she dare to ask Petruzzelli about dos Santos’s whereabouts, and thus possibly give her away? Better, she thought, to wait until Petruzzelli went back to bed, and then search for dos Santos herself.

  “That boss of yours,” Petruzzelli said, slicing a metaphorical axe through her dilemma. “She’s nice, isn’t she?”

  Of all the possible descriptors that could be applied to dos Santos, nice was not one Elfrida would have chosen. She recognized the question as a tentative probe, intended to elicit Elfrida’s own feelings about her boss.

  Not falling for that. “Yeah, she’s cool. A bit demanding sometimes. But that comes with the territory.”

  “It can’t be a lot of fun working on Botticelli Station,” Petruzzelli said sympathetically.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean, you’re stuck in one place. Always seeing the same people, the same planet. And doesn’t your gravity kind of suck?”

  Here we go again. Put any two people who lived and worked in space together, and the oneupmanship soon started. “We had a ninety-meter radius torus rotating at two point two RPM,” Elfrida said, unable to help herself. “Yeah, it was kind of monotonous at times. But I never minded looking at Venus. I love Venus. That’s the whole reason I took this job.”

  “I took this job because I wanted to travel,” Petruzzelli said. “I really wanted to go to the outer planets, though. Oh well. Our contract with UNVRP is the company’s biggest revenue source.”

  “Is it really?”

  “Sure. We get paid for hauling your swat teams around, and we get paid more for hauling your ex-colonists off to jail, excuse me, to Ceres. That’s not even counting asteroid sales.” Petruzzelli bit the nozzle of her empty soup pouch, pensively. “If Botticelli Station can’t be saved, do you think the Project will be cancelled?”

  Elfrida had not yet grappled with this question herself. But off the top of her head, the answer seemed sadly obvious. “I would expect so. Maybe not cancelled, but suspended, anyway. The thing is, we’ve got a lot of enemies in the UN bureaucracy, and they would totally seize on the loss of the station to argue that we can’t justify the cost of replacing it. They would want to implement a comprehensive costing review. And you know, once you put a giant project like this on hold … everything has to dovetail, and if you halt Phase 1, what happens to the other phases? So the worst-case scenario is that it would be the end of terraforming Venus for at least a couple of generations.”

  “Sigh,” Petruzzelli said. “Then I hope the techies can make this mass-driver scheme work, or we’ll be totally screwed, too.”

  This observation forced Elfrida to consider a factor she had not taken into account. Kharbage LLC depended on the Venus Remediation Project, as much as the UNVRP workforce did. The attack on Botticelli Station represented a body blow to their livelihood. So did it really make sense to imagine that they would be in league with the PLAN, the single biggest downside catalyst in the solar system?

  But maybe they hadn’t known that the PLAN would seize the opportunity to hit B-Station on their way to 11073 Galapagos. Yeah, that has to be it.

  “This sucks,” Petruzzelli said softly.

  “Yeah.”

  The screen was now showing a new release from Jairafoon, a tribe of musicians who had recorded an eulogy to the casualties of Botticelli Station. They had used some bits of the Can’s all-too-familiar footage. None of the bits that showed PLAN ships.

  “It really sucks,” Petruzzelli repeated.

  “What do you do, anyway? I mean, what’s your job on the Can?”

  “Oh, me? I’m the 2/M. The astrogator.”

  xvi.

  Jun Yonezawa wadded his cassock in a corner and went home. The bishop was there, drinking tea with Jun’s father. Hiroki Yonezawa was nobody, just a night watchman. But on 11073 Galapagos, you didn’t have to be somebody to be important.

  “What are you going to do now, Yonezawa-san?” the bishop said.

  Out of his vestments, Bishop Okada was no less imposing. His belly spread like a sack of rice across his knees. He lifted his teacup with the delicacy of a girl picking a flower. The house was dark, as per curfew regulations, lit only by an electric candle burning behind the screen in the corner. The Yonezawas had the honor of keeping the Eucharist in their house, since Jun was a monk and two of his sisters were nuns.

  “Call Kirin, I guess,” he answered. He went to the door and looked out. The street, a green tunnel smelling hotly of tomatoes, was still quiet. Coming along, he’d been awed by the silence. It reminded him of the great nanorot epidemic, when quarantine had been enforced over half the asteroid. Patrolling the deathly-silent streets with orders to shoot anyone he found outside, Jun had turned a corner and come face-to-face with an old schoolmate, two years his senior, busily raping a woman. Or a girl. Maybe even someone Jun knew. Couldn’t tell. Senpai had tied her own blouse over her head like a bag.

  Jun had stared at senpai. Senpai had stared back at Jun. Then Jun had backed off and patrolled around the block. When he came back, senpai and the girl were both gone. Jun might have imagined the whole thing, down to the pimples on senpai’s wobbling rump. He had never said anything about it to anyone. The incident had entered into no record. But it remained in Jun’s memory. That was the day he’d first become aware of evil.

  He was not going to repeat that mistake. Not going to look the other way this time.

  He turned from the street door, brushing against his mother. The bishop, sitting in seiza at the low table, said, “Where is Shimada Yumiko?”

  “I left her with Father Hirayanagi. I don’t think she’ll hurt him. She seems grateful to have been received into the Church.”

  “Praised be the Lord,” the bishop said.

  “Yup. In the end, she rolled right over,” Jun agreed. He wasn’t going to bother explaining to anyone else that the phavatar had multiple operators, possibly including at least one demon. A powerful demon, Jun speculated. They were close enough to Mars in this orbit, and what did distance mean to the princes of hell, anyway? But that might be going a bit far for the bishop, who for all his commitment to dogma, was not a very spiritual man.

  “If she’s truly repentant,” the bishop said hopefully, “maybe she’ll put in a word for us with her employers.”

  Then Jun knew what Bishop Okada was doing here at this hour, why he was acting as if nothing had ever gone wrong between him and the Yonezawas. He hoped that Yumiko could save the Galapajin.

  “Put in a word for us with who? With Leviathan, or Beelzebub?” Jun said. He picked up the teacup his mother had set before him, drank.

  “The UN isn’t all bad,” his mother said.

  “I wasn’t talking about the UN,” Jun muttered, unheard.

  “They’ve got ships,” his father said.

  “They’ve got super-cool artillery systems that can blow up entire asteroids,” his youngest sister said.

  Jun set down his teacup sharply. “They’ve got fancy algorithms that tell them where, when, and how much to risk against the PLAN. It all comes down to the money, and it’s cheaper to lose thirty thousand colonists than a sin
gle Starcruiser. But sure, I’ll ask her to put in a word for us. If she ever wakes up. She turned herself off before I left St. Peter’s; said she needed a break.”

  He had not only locked her up, this time, but left his Kalashnikov with Takagi-san of the yado, instructing the confused hotelier to shoot her if she acted hostile. Not that he thought much of Takagi-san’s chances against those cutter lasers.

  He stood up, pushing his nephew aside with a rough motion that made everyone twitch. “I’m going downstairs to talk to Kirin.”

  ★

  Like every residence in the asteroid, the Yonezawas’ house had a deep basement that was supposed to function as a panic room. In fact, the airlock leading to the basement was so old it probably wouldn’t work, even if they cleared out all the stuff that had accumulated inside it over the decades. Jun swung himself over broken gardening tools, ping-pong bats, bundles of used packaging materials, and unused squeezebags of splart—Galapajin treasures.

  The basement itself was even more crammed, but less chaotic. Stacks of oddly shaped shrinkfoam-wrapped items, each one precisely labeled, filled the cavern. This stuff had arrived more recently, via the tunnel in the corner of the basement that was not supposed to be there, which led ultimately, via a newer and better-maintained airlock, to the surface of the asteroid. It came in all at once and it went out little by little, via the Order of St. Benedict, to certain key families. But the basement of the Yonezawas’ house was the warehouse, and just now it was full. That was why Jun didn’t expect much from the call he was about to make.

  He settled onto the floor in the corner behind the desk where he did stuff-related paperwork. He located the comms unit under a pile of requests from customers. The things they wrote on! Rags, pieces of cut-up waterbags, bits of green skin from the Parks and Gardens Service—all of it destined, eventually, for the recycling facility.

  Beep, beep, beep.

  The comms unit was hooked up to a high-gain antenna on the asteroid’s surface. It was now sending out a signal in search of a server. Jun had formerly used the one on Botticelli Station, his signals unnoticed in the eternal cataract of internet traffic.. Now that Botticelli Station was no more, his signal had additional light-seconds to cover before it found one of the megaservers on Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, or Hygiea.

  Beep, beep—“You have successfully established a connection with the net! You don’t seem to have an ID embedded in your signal. Please manually enter your ID so that we can take you where you want to go!”

  “Fuck off and die,” Jun muttered in English. He keyed in his fake ID.

  “Thank you very much, Communications Officer Alden! How can we help you today?”

  Jun entered Kirin’s ID (also fake) and waited. The whole asteroid seemed to wait with him, breathing heavily, turning in its bed of stars like a man having a nightmare.

  “Now connecting you to Captain James T. Kirk,” the server announced chirpily. “Have a nice day!”

  “That you, Jun?” said the voice of his elder brother. Kirin sounded sleepy, as usual.

  “Yeah. There’ve been developments. I guess you’ve seen the news, but here’s what you don’t know.” Jun started telling Kirin about the events involving Yumiko Shimada, got tangled up in the multiple-personalities thing, and decided to skip it. After all, she couldn’t help them, even if she was disposed to try, no matter what his family and Bishop Okada thought. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. We’ve only got one to two sols before the PLAN gets here. So—”

  Kirin interrupted, reacting to Jun’s first words. The time lag between them was roughly three minutes. “I’m coming back. It takes time to turn this thing around, goddammit. But I’ll be there within the week.”

  Jun rested his forehead on the heel of his hand. Within the week was no better than next year. He had always been somewhat in awe of Kirin. That wasn’t his brother’s real name, but everyone called him Kirin [giraffe] because he looked like one, with his spindly height, long neck, and unlucky-in-love eyes. Jun still respected him, and would defend him against any accusations, even though Kirin was not the same person he had been. “That’s not the promise I want from you,” he said. “I want you to promise you won’t come back. Go away, Kirin. You can’t get here in time. Go away, far away, and if they get us, at least the memory of 11073 Galapagos will survive.”

  “What’s this crap about a phavatar?” Kirin said, having finally heard Jun’s explanation of recent events. “Is this the same one you told me about? Listen. Get her to negotiate with the PLAN. Robot to robot. If nothing else, maybe she can stall them until I get there.”

  At this point Kirin must have heard Jun telling him not to come back, for he interrupted himself.

  “Oh, no, little brother. Don’t say that. Have faith! ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil …’”

  Kirin talked on, quoting from the New Testament and the Psalms, as fiery and inspiring as he ever had been. The threat of the PLAN had snapped him out of his usual drug-induced snooze. He also had a couple of practical suggestions. Jun found himself accepting his brother’s message of hope. When he came down into the basement, he had been near despair; when he returned upstairs, he was in a different frame of mind.

  “We might try to evacuate the asteroid,” he suggested to the bishop. “It could go hideously wrong. But my humble opinion is that we should try.”

  Bishop Okada bowed his head. “We’re in your hands.”

  Jun hid a disbelieving smile. So it had come to this. Former Public Enemy No. 1 Yonezawa Jun, second only to that notorious arch-sinner Yonezawa Kirin, was now to be in charge of saving their lives. The world really had changed. Or, maybe not. This way, everyone could blame him in the moments before they died.

  “Pray for me.” He picked up his spare Kalashnikov and went out the door.

  xvii.

  The Kalashnikovs had been printed right here on 11073 Galapagos; they were made of the same tough plastic that the Galapajin used for everything from spacesuit parts to furniture. The ammunition had arrived via the tunnel in the Yonezawas’ basement. The guns had originally been intended for use against Bishop Okada and his yes-men in the yakusho [mayor’s office]. The plot had never got beyond the half-assed planning stage, but Jun’s arrest had revived enthusiasm for it, as he found out when he reached Cathedral End.

  This region of the habitat was like a rocky canyon, so narrow that the sun-tube had made permanent scorch marks on the walls closest to it. The canyon dead-ended at the cathedral airlock; this side of the airlock was the construction staging site. The Order of St. Benedict had long since taken over the area, as they were in charge of construction. They had dug a warren of caves in the walls of the canyon, where they lived in monastic simplicity, girls and boys strictly separated.

  Now the whole canyon teemed with kids with guns. In the grey pre-dawn light, they clung to the walls like flies and floated in the freefall zone. Some of them were even perching on the gigantic solar battery at the end of the sun-tube. They swarmed him like a returning hero.

  “Are we going to overthrow the hierarchy now?”

  “We are not,” Jun said. “We’re going to evacuate the asteroid.”

  They stared at him blankly. This was their world. How did you evacuate the world?

  Through their eyes, Jun himself momentarily reverted to seeing it as an impossible task, but he reminded himself of what Kirin had said, and repeated it to them. “Our ancestors planned for this. We can’t let them down by refusing to even try.”

  Ushijima’s words came back to him— We’ve got a mission … We’ve forgotten what we’re supposed to be living for …

  “You, you, you and you, go to the yakusho and get them to make an announcement. Most important thing is, no one is to bring more stuff than they can carry.”

  He gave them all their instructions, based on the evacuation plan handed down by the founders of the Order, which had long ago been dismissed as a quaint relic of the colony’s
early years. When they had scattered, he booted up one of the construction crew’s robots, an eight-legged crawler, and loaded its platform with equipment. The sun-tube brightened, casting shadows that sharpened by the moment. Flecks of ore glittered in the rocks. Birdsong filled the unnatural silence, as starlings and pigeons pecked for insects in the tufts of grass that grew out of the cracks.

  Jun put on an EVA suit and headed for the cathedral airlock. The crawler lurched after him, holding its load on with its foremost pair of legs. They hadn’t used the airlock since they pressurized the interior of the cathedral, but he cranked the handle, just to make sure it still worked.

  Sister Emily-Francis bounced in through the hatch before it closed. She was wearing another of their bright yellow, communally owned EVA suits. “You’ll need some help,” she said.

  They fell into eye-smacking beauty. Saints, angels, and martyrs rioted around the bases of a forest of pillars radiating from the walls of the vast, spherical space into its center, where they supported a geodesic lattice that marked off the sanctuary. The sanctuary itself was still under construction, shrouded in protective mesh to catch splinters from work in progress.

  Jun had hoped to see the cathedral completed in his lifetime, filled with worshippers. Now he forced himself to imagine it filled with refugees.

  Leaving Emily-Francis behind, he flew through moist, frigid air and prised up a panel of aged pine, which lay flush against its neighbors without the benefit of nails or glue, a feat of traditional Japanese carpentry. Underneath the panel was a layer of insulation. Jun scratched that up with his gloves to reveal a dull pink sheet of self-healing graphene composite.