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

by Felix R. Savage

“No.” Petruzzelli sounded wan. “We ran out of fuel. Well, we’ve still got some, but only just enough to get back. And plus, that acceleration burn was … really … tough. Now I know why they pay SF pilots the big bucks. Anyway, I just wanted to say the bleeper got away. It’s probably heading your way right now. So … I dunno. Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” Elfrida said stupidly.

  She hovered above the denuded grounds of St. Peter’s. Where cherry trees and manicured shrubs had been, only rumpled green rubber remained. She remembered, randomly, that they printed it out of human skin cells.

  “Yonezawa?”

  If she used her mobility pack to escape, she could probably get far enough away to survive a second nuke.

  “Yonezawa?”

  She caught sight of him vanishing through the church doors.

  “Tell your people to launch,” she said, catching up with him. “There’s another PLAN fighter coming.”

  After the brilliant sun-tube light, the interior of the church seemed pitch black. Elfrida’s suit automatically engaged a night vision filter that turned everything shades of green.

  Overturned pews, the altar cloth skew-whiff—nothing had been touched since Yumiko staged her Antichrist skit here, except that the pieces of the smashed crucifix had been taken away.

  “Over there,” Elfrida whispered, touching Yonezawa’s arm.

  In the corner of the sanctuary, a woman knelt with her head inside a box on legs. Elfrida remembered an old picture she’d once seen of a woman committing suicide by sticking her head in a domestic appliance called an oven. So this was Yumiko. She looked just as good in person as she did in the search space, except that her posture made her appear headless.

  “In the name of Jesus Christ, vade retro me, Satana!” Yonezawa shouted. He whipped his sword out of its scabbard and swooped at her.

  Without taking her head out of the box, Yumiko waved one hand at him. A lance of plasma seared through the vacuum and burnt into his torso.

  Elfrida screamed. Yonezawa tumbled, propelled backwards by the needle-jet issuing from the hole in his spacesuit. Strings of blood globules traced his path.

  His suit was so old that it didn’t have self-repair functionality.

  It was so old that instead of enveloping his body with a mesh of shape-memory alloy, it enveloped him in an aerogel that was 95% air.

  Yumiko waved her hand again, and flames rippled through the vacuum as the escaped oxygen caught fire. The flames raced towards Yonezawa.

  “Conflagration detected,” Elfrida’s suit brayed. “Engaging fire extinguisher.” It lifted Elfrida’s hand and aimed a jet of foam at the flames, which fell out of the air in frozen chunks.

  “He’s got a suit breach!” Elfrida chased Yonezawa’s still-tumbling form over the altar. “What do I do?”

  “Well,” her suit said in its hair-stylist voice, “I recommend patching it.”

  “Show me how!”

  Her suit walked her rapidly through the patching procedure, which amounted to squirting splart on the hole. Behind his faceplate, Yonezawa’s face looked lifeless. Her suit estimated that he was still breathing, but that he had a punctured lung which was gradually filling with fluid. If he didn’t get help within minutes, he would die.

  Elfrida looked up to see Yumiko floating over them. “Are you happy now, bitch?” she shouted.

  “He was rude to me,” Yumiko said. “He used discriminatory language, and he ogled me when he thought I wasn’t looking.”

  She had crumbs around her lips.

  “What were you doing with your head in the whatsit?” Elfrida demanded.

  “The tabernacle,” Yumiko said. She gave Yonezawa a kick, sending him to bob against the rafters. “I was recharging. I connected the photovoltaic array to the steeple; there’s a big battery up there for the gliders. It’s also wired up to the tabernacle, to provide round-the-clock climate control for the Host. Which actually doesn’t taste like anything.”

  “You’ve got to come home with me.”

  “I’m a robot. I don’t have a home,” Yumiko said. “Except, I guess maybe here. So no thanks.”

  Several of the Stations of the Cross fell off the walls. The last remaining stained-glass window broke. Elfrida’s suit informed her that a wave of radiation was pouring over her.

  “Oh my dog,” she screamed. “We’re being nuked.”

  xxvi.

  Elfrida was wrong. They were not being nuked.

  At the far end of the asteroid, the cathedral’s main drive had engaged. Gouting radioactive waste gas—for this was a z-pinch fusion engine, at the time hailed as miraculously clean, a judgment that later generations would qualify with scorn—it liquefied the strata of rock and epoxy that had disguised it for eight decades. Two minutes ago Father Hirayanagi had received a brief communication from Jun Yonezawa, telling him to launch because the PLAN was coming back. “Don’t worry about me,” he’d said.

  Grieving for Jun and all the others they’d lost, the old priest enabled the propellant feed and monitored the temperature of the coolant tanks. His lips formed silent Hail Marys. The people crowding the bridge watched in tense silence as he executed the half-forgotten launch checklist.

  Extending its radiator fins like wings, the cathedral once known as the Nagasaki Maru lifted off from the rock.

  In its first 100 microseconds of acceleration, it shed spires and lattices, statues clothed in gold and palladium mined from 11073 Galapagos’s rich trove of ores, and a million fragments of rock. Bits of this granitic casing stayed attached to the needle-nose which had been the cathedral’s spire, giving it the appearance of a drill bit covered with barnacles.

  Within its first ten seconds of acceleration, the cathedral had left 11073 Galapagos one kilometer behind.

  Ten seconds later, that distance tripled.

  Ten seconds after that, the surviving PLAN fighter brushed past the asteroid at 200,000 km/h. Like a bird laying an egg on the wing, it deposited its last nuclear bomb on the surface.

  Half a second after that, the asteroid exploded into hundreds of large and small fragments which accelerated throughout the surrounding volume, masking the cathedral’s trajectory in rocky chaff.

  ★

  Elfrida looked out of the church. She saw the sun. She turned back to Yumiko. “Well,” she said. “Guess this is it.”

  “I feel so alone,” the phavatar said, her eyes big and glittery. They were strange, those eyes. Flat. Elfrida could now see why the Galapajin had not been taken in by her.

  “You feel alone …” she said.

  Yonezawa was there, too, trapped under a pew that had gotten stuck in the corner, but neither the woman nor the robot paid any attention to him.

  “I’ve turned on my Mayday beacon,” Elfrida said, “but I don’t think it’s working. Doggone radiation. I must be glowing in the dark by now.”

  “It’s not working,” Yumiko confirmed.

  Sunlight blinked on and off as the asteroid fragment spun haphazardly. Stars filled the space that had been the church’s roof. Elfrida spotted Venus. Tears filled her eyes as she gazed at it.

  “I’m not giving up,” she muttered. “I’m not. Dad, Mom, Baba, Jiji …” Real and false memories blended into a surge of pure willpower. She puttered towards Yumiko and grappled her. Her suit’s servo-powered chops matched the phavatar’s inhuman strength. “You have to help me.”

  “Fuck off and die,” Yumiko said, wriggling. “You don’t belong out here. You’re just a maladapted zoo monkey, and besides, you have fat tits and no waist to speak of.”

  Elfrida drew the katana Yonezawa had given her. This was your great-grandfather’s sword. She jammed her feet against the phavatar’s torso, while seizing its long, luxuriant black hair with her left glove. Swinging the katana, she snarled, “Don’t—call—me—fat.”

  xxvii.

  Four sols later, the Cheap Trick fell into Venus orbit like an exhausted runner falling to the ground. With its fuel reserves depleted, th
e Heavypicket had only burned for a few hundred seconds of the return journey, and coasted the rest of the way. The other reason it had not attempted significant acceleration was because it was towing the cathedral.

  The Nagasaki’s main drive had quit within five minutes of launch. Actually, Father Hirayanagi had shut it down just in time to prevent it from overheating and blowing up the ship. Making contact with the Cheap Trick, he had coaxed the cathedral to a rendezvous using its better-maintained attitude adjusters.

  The Heavypicket had grappled the cathedral and hauled it all the way back to Venus orbit. During their journey, spacewalkers and bots had shuttled perilously back and forth between the two ships, carrying oxygen and water one way and casualties the other. Those initial seconds of thrust had temporarily put the cathedral under one full gee. Given that twenty-nine thousand people had been floating, unsecured, in the hab module at the time, it was amazing (a miracle, the Galapajin said) that only eleven had died. Broken bones and contusions, however, numbered in the thousands. The sanitation problem was also out of control. Bots from the Cheap Trick (designed for hazardous waste management) tirelessly swept the air in the cathedral, but barely made a dent. Their efficiency, it was fair to say, was degraded by the Galapajin children’s determination to play with them.

  ★

  Glory spent most of the journey under sedation, getting her bones nanocemented together. The Cheap Trick’s extreme burn in pursuit of the last PLAN ship had flattened her and Lieutenant Kliko against the bulkheads under five gees. “I told you to strap in,” Petruzzelli had said tearfully afterwards. “But you didn’t! I couldn’t wait.”

  “You made a decision to potentially sacrifice two people to save thirty thousand.” Glory had smiled through her agony. “It was the right call, but not everyone would have made it. You’ve got a stellar career in Star Force ahead of you, if you still want it.”

  “I’m not sure I do.” Petruzzelli had wincingly cupped her hands over her cheeks to catch her tears. Although she had been strapped in and breathing gel during the extreme burn, she had two black eyes that made her look like an exotic raccoon. “This is so stupid. You’re the one with a zillion fractures and two collapsed lungs, and I’m the one crying.”

  “Maybe you’re not crying for yourself.”

  “No, I guess I’m not,” Petruzzelli had said, turning away.

  While the Cheap Trick was rendezvousing with the cathedral, it had picked up Elfrida Goto’s Mayday signal. Glory had been unconscious at the time, and Petruzzelli’s excuse was that she hadn’t noticed the signal. Glory suspected that maybe she had, but had again made the—technically correct—decision to sacrifice one individual to save thousands. She wondered if she herself could have made the same choice. She was glad she hadn’t had to.

  By the time they’d secured the cathedral, the Mayday beacon had gone dark, and a drone dispatched to its last recorded location had found nothing.

  ★

  Venus orbit was now quite crowded. In addition to the Kharbage Can and the newly-returned Cheap Trick, a squadron of Graves fighters circled the planet. These had been dispatched in response to the attack on Botticelli Station by Star Force, which had to be seen doing something, even if that consisted of sending resources to where the PLAN had been a week ago.

  Glory and Dr. Hasselblatter, in their original calculation, had deemed that the fighter squadron would show the flag and then buzz off before the Cheap Trick returned to Venus orbit. That way, no one else would ever have to know about the Heavypicket’s unauthorized side trip. As it turned out, the fighters hadn’t left yet. But that didn’t matter: The recovery of the cathedral had already changed their calculus.

  During the Cheap Trick’s return journey, in a series of contentious and occasionally vituperative screen calls, Glory had hashed out a new bargain with Dr. Hasselblatter. The cover-up was abandoned. Instead, the Space Corps would trumpet the rescue of the Galapajin as a humanitarian triumph. Star Force would also get credit for executing the operation.

  The only person to pay a price, in fact, would be Glory herself.

  Commander Andrew Kim, putative pilot on the operation, found himself transformed in the blink of an eye from middle-aged no-hoper to media darling. His characteristic response of “Ah—ah” to every interview question was taken for the condign modesty of a hero. Though apparently dazed by the spotlight, neither this, nor his own knowledge that he had not in fact done any of what he was being credited for, deterred him from trousering a promotion to commodore.

  Dr. Hasselblatter maximized the media opportunity, easily parrying the few skeptical questions that came his way, and positioning the Space Corps for a substantial budget increase in the next fiscal year.

  Amidst all this self-congratulation, the death of Elfrida Goto struck a harmonious note of sadness. She was acknowledged to have gone along on the Cheap Trick. That acknowledgment had to be made, since she hadn’t come back. Dr. Hasselblatter shed a few crocodile tears on Tonight In Space and described her as one of the Space Corps’s rising stars. “Her loss diminishes all of us.”

  But Glory refused to accept it.

  Within hours of reaching Venus orbit, she had herself stretchered over to the Pearl Jam, the lead fighter of the Star Force squadron. The captain was disgusted at having missed all the fun and resentful at being used for PR purposes. To top it all off, he had gotten involved in a running battle with Captain Okoli about the rescue of Botticelli Station.

  He invited Glory into his cabin and offered her a duty-free miniature (correctly labelled) of Bushmills. As she had foreseen, her full-body cast intrigued him. It proved that the brass were lying about something.

  “I’ll tell you what really happened,” she said, “if you do me a favor.”

  ★

  Glory’s BCI awakened her with a ping. The aquiline visage of Captain Nikolopoulous of the Pearl Jam floated before her retinas. Through a haze of sedation, she could see he was smirking. “We’re back,” he said.

  “And?” Glory said groggily.

  “You want to do this IRL?”

  “Yeah.” Glory looked down at her full-body cast, the various tubes penetrating it and the wires hooked up to it. “Gimme ten.”

  “Your chariot awaits.”

  The captain clicked out. Glory started the excruciating process of getting dressed.

  Half an hour later, she hobbled into the toilet-sized, brass-knobbed vestibule of the Pearl Jam. She could take baby steps in her cast, although a helper bot still had to shuffle behind her to keep her vertical. Her neck was the only part of her that she could move independently. She had got dressed by commanding the bot to perform all the actions she’d normally have performed for herself: legs into trousers, hands into sleeves, feet into boots … The only garment she’d found that fit over the cast was a coverall with the Kharbage LLC logo on the back. At least it hid her catheter bag. Vanity, oh vanity.

  The cockpit door irised.

  Out floated Elfrida Goto, carrying Yumiko Shimada’s head by the hair.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’d like to go back to the Kharbage Can.”

  She transferred the head to her other hand in order to salute Captain Nikolopoulos. It was a semi-ironic salute, a bit cheeky.

  “Thanks for the ride, sir.”

  “It was my pleasure.” Nikolopoulos gravely returned the salute. “Anyway, you made it well worth the journey, Ms. Goto. Star Force thanks you.”

  On the way back to the Kharbage Can, Glory broke a silence that had seemed to be entirely occupied by the head, as if Yumiko Shimada’s dead lips were sucking up all the air.

  “What did he mean, you made it worth the journey? How?”

  “Oh, I just let him have a look at this.” Goto lifted the head to eye level and swung it back and forth. “He ran some scans, did some data recovery. I guess there was some interesting stuff in there.”

  Oh, Glory thought. Shit.

  xxviii.

  Elfrida did not even have time to change
out of her borrowed Star Force shipwear before she was summoned to a private teleconference with Dr. Hasselblatter himself.

  Seated behind a crescent-shaped desk like the President’s, wearing a suit and tie, the executive director of the Space Corps looked deeply pissed. In no uncertain language, he chastised her for … what?

  Stealing a spaceship?

  Kidnapping August Kliko?

  Having to be rescued by a Gravesfighter at immense cost to the taxpayer?

  None of the above. He was pissed at her for disclosing confidential data to Star Force.

  At least that confirmed her own take on the data Captain Nikolopoulos had gleaned from Yumiko Shimada’s memory crystals. It was a mystery inside a crime wrapped up in a public relations disaster waiting to happen.

  Dr. Hasselblatter did not come out and mention the data, although he had obviously learnt the whole story through back channels. Instead, he just scolded her about information security protocols.

  It seemed surreal that he was focusing on her misconduct, when Yumiko Shimada had caused the deaths of a thousand people. But then again, Yumiko Shimada was just an MI, and she was dead.

  Dr. Hasselblatter closed by expressing “grave disappointment” and pointing out that Elfrida had violated the terms of her employment.

  Near tears, Elfrida said, “I guess I’m guilty, sir. But I thought it was important for us to know what the phavatar was doing all this time, and I guess I didn’t understand that Star Force wasn’t supposed to know.” She felt her mind going blank, and smoothed her hair panickily. “Anyway, I guess I was in violation of my terms of employment as soon as I stole the Cheap Trick. And I really appreciate that we’re not being blamed for that, I mean I’m really proud that UNVRP and Star Force could coordinate our public response … oh, dog. I don’t know what to say, sir. I guess … I admit it all, and I’m sorry.”

  For the next twenty minutes she upbraided herself for being a wuss. She should have asked Dr. Hasselblatter about 99984 Ravilious. She should have asked him how the stross-class telepresence platform ever got past quality control.