The Galapagos Incident: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 1)
Page 27
“I’d have to borrow one of their phavatars. All they have is asimov-classes. Those always give me a headache. On the other hand; steak.”
“Envisioning a romantic dinner à deux? Mood lighting, a nice Cabernet Sauvignon, something mellow on the audio channel?”
“Curb your imagination, Mendoza.” But Elfrida blushed, because she had been thinking of something like that. In practice, any such romantic gesture would surely backfire, she reflected.
Mendoza sensed the shadow that had fallen across her mood. “I know I can’t expect you to treat me to a romantic dinner, but you could at least have brought me coffee,” he said, mock-hurt.
“Oh, but I did!” She opened the Virgin Café bag and passed one of the recycled-foam cups to him. “Goat’s-milk latte with an extra shot, right?”
“And it even tastes like it,” Mendoza said, slurping ecstatically. “Beats the stuff in the staff lounge by a light-year.”
Elfrida popped the nipple of her own coffee—an Americano with what purported to be real milk; maybe it even came from 847221 Handy—and perched on the edge of her desk, looking out the window. Their office was on the eighteenth floor of the University of Vesta’s STEM building. It was a loaner cubicle just large enough for their two desks, with organic biostrate walls that resembled loofah sponges. The roots of the squash vines that covered the outside of the building poked through the outer wall, dripping on the floor. They had a good view, anyway. From the window, Elfrida could see over the roof of the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center, clear across campus.
Students, professors, and locals on their way to work hurried along zigzag pathways between groves of apple and avocado trees. Blowsy and exuberant, the trees grew to the size of oaks in Vesta’s 0.22 gees. To the north lay Olbers Lake, an emerald lima-bean. The campus lay between the Branson Hills residential district and what was laughingly called Bellicia City. To a casual observer, this could have been any small university town on Earth. But the gauzy early-morning light came from slits around the edges of the roof, six kilometers overhead. The shafts contained louvered mirrors that both refracted sunlight into the habitat and blocked out harmful radiation.
Vesta—technically 4 Vesta, the fourth asteroid ever discovered—was so big, at 525 km diameter, that its boosters called it a protoplanet. The ‘ecohood’ of Bellicia occupied an impact crater in its northern hemisphere. The roof of the habitat was a teensy M-type asteroid that had been maneuvered into place three generations ago. Those early, can-do pioneers had melted the captured asteroid’s native iron by the simple expedient of turning their ships around and aiming the exhaust from their primitive fusion drives at it. The molten metal had sintered to the carbonaceous regolith of Vesta, capping the crater with a 2-km thick, radiation-proof lid. Et voilà, instant habitat. Just add air.
Shame about the gravity, or rather lack thereof, Elfrida thought for the hundredth time, shifting her limbs in the stabilizer braces she wore to simulate gravitational resistance. They chafed her thighs, and didn’t do a damn thing for encroaching farsightedness, increased homocysteine levels, and the stuffed-up feeling she always got in microgravity, which was colloquially known as head bloat.
Watching the people cross campus, it was easy to tell who shared her reservations about the Vestan gravitational environment. A scant majority wore stabilizer braces and gecko boots like hers, which gave them bulked-out silhouettes and a normal gait. But many of the students were spaceborn; they loped along in long bounds, reflecting the fact that they each weighed about four pounds here. The merriest students leapt right over the heads of their trudging peers, their long scarves swirling like the tailfeathers of exotic birds .
Elfrida sighed.
“Cold, isn’t it?” Mendoza said.
“Freezing,” Elfrida agreed, tugging the lapel of her coat, which she had not taken off. “I was just noticing there’s no one sitting out on the benches to eat breakfast today.”
“So,” Mendoza said, “it’s not that the university is literally trying to freeze us out.”
“They’d probably be a bit more subtle than that.” Elfrida stood up and waved her hand pointlessly under the heating vent. A barely-warm breeze trickled from it. “Did Dr. James cough up the rest of the asteroid survey data?”
“Quote, it’s still being processed, unquote.”
“Oh well.” She resisted the temptation to start grumbling about the lack of cooperation they were getting from the university. “We’ve still got plenty of rocks from the first batch to work through.”
Putting her butt where her mouth was, she settled into the ergoform behind her desk and blinked a command to her screen, which brought up a display of their ongoing and recently terminated jobs. Paperwork and more paperwork. Mendoza had a sign above his desk:
—meaning that paperwork increased in inverse proportion to the amount of actual paper involved. That was certainly true when you worked for the United Nations Venus Remediation Project (UNVRP). And it went double for UNVRP contractors such as the Space Corps, Elfrida’s own employer. The fallout from the Galapagos Incident had inflicted stringent new compliance requirements on all Space Corps field agents, as well as personally affecting Elfrida herself.
They worked in silence for half an hour. Elfrida finished her coffee and stared at the swirl of grounds in the bottom of the cup. Wasn’t there a fortune-telling method that used coffee grounds? Cydney would know. She was into that stuff.
But Elfrida didn’t want to think about Cydney right now, either.
“Hey, Mendoza.”
“Yeah?”
“Can we call the Kharbage Collector and request a trip to 550363 Montego? I’m looking at your preliminary candidacy assessment here, and it scores pretty high on all geophysical criteria.”
“What, you’re gonna pass on the chance to score some crypto-organic steaks?”
“I can also do without the crypto-organic cow farts,” Elfrida said. “Those asimov-class suits do have olfactory sensors. But no, I figure this is a good chance to catch up with my old friends at Kharbage LLC. Haven’t seen them in a while.”
“They don’t operate many ships in this volume. I’ll put the call through.” The UNVRP office on Vesta didn’t have many frills, but it did have a dedicated comms satellite in orbit—a must for a two-man field office that was currently 200 million kilometers from Earth.
Just 90 seconds later, Mendoza’s screen flashed. ”Hello, UNVRP Vesta, this is Captain Petruzzelli of the Kharbage Collector speaking. What can I do for you?”
Elfrida sprang up from her ergoform, exceeding the resistance of her braces, and inadvertently crashed into Mendoza’s back. With a hasty apology, she bent towards the screen. “Alicia!” she yelped joyously.
KEEP READING ...
Books by Felix R. Savage
The Solarian War Saga, in chronological order:
Crapkiller
The Galapagos Incident
The Vesta Conspiracy
A Very Merry Zero-Gravity Christmas (short story)
The Mercury Rebellion
The Luna Deception (coming in 2015)
Stand-alone
Finity (A Story of Mars Exploration)
Mercy (A Fantasy Novella of Revenge)
… and more to come!
THE GALAPAGOS INCIDENT
(THE SOLARIAN WAR SAGA, BOOK 1)
A Science Fiction Thriller
Copyright © 2015 by Felix R. Savage
The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.
First published in the United States of America in 2014 by Knights Hill Publishing.
Table of Contents
The Galapagos Incident
A Note from the Author
More Books by the Author
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Felix R. Savage, The Galapagos Incident: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 1)