Both men froze, staring at the repo. It spasmed. A fat maggot crawled out of one ear, slimed with blood.
Jun transmitted a throat-clearing noise over the speakers. “De-stealthing now. Sorry, guys.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Kiyoshi said through an unchewed mouthful. “That was a record.”
“I thought I could go longer.” As always after a fight, Jun felt like slugging the dead husk of his repo. What a fucking wimp. He mercilessly deleted what remained of it.
I am the emperor of everything! screeched the fiend in the fridge, and went back to contemplating its donuts.
“That’s OK,” Kiyoshi said. “We’ll just go hang out at Tiangong Erhao. They won’t look for us there.”
xxiv.
Mendoza had not been fired from his job, as it turned out.
That was because his job no longer existed.
UNVRP itself no longer existed.
Oh, the organization stumbled on, but Mendoza knew from Elfrida that the plug had been pulled. The UN was just putting off the official announcement until the media moved on, in hopes of minimizing the cries of “We told you so” from those who had never believed the Venus Project would work.
The Mercury Resource Management Support Group—its very name now meaningless—invited Mendoza to a “team bonding weekend” in Malawi. He knew what this was really about: blowing through the remainder of their budget before the axe came down. He didn’t go. Later he realized he should have gone, since that had probably been his last chance of networking his way to a new job.
June passed. Then July. His mother worried about how much time he was spending on the internet.
She needn’t have worried. Nothing much was happening on the Mars forums. The Hope Center for Nanobiotics’s latest swarm of nanoprobes, launched in mid-June, had apparently failed to get any closer to Mars than the April batch. None other than Fragger1 had posted some of their data. It basically replicated the stuff Mendoza had posted three months earlier. But there were some interesting new close-ups of the “Big Turd,” as commenters called the PLAN ziggurat that had replaced/engulfed Olympos Mons.
Mendoza joined the speculation about the Big Turd, and contributed a not-entirely-serious theory of his own: it was actually a big gun, pointing at Earth.
A graph on All-We-Know-About-Mars tracked the relative positions of Mars and Earth, as they moved through these months of close approach. This only anticipated the anxiety that built up on Earth in the weeks before August 16th, when the distance between the two planets reached a 26-month minimum.
But the 16th passed without incident, as Mars oppositions always did. The doomsday crowd moved on, oblivious to the fact that the toilet rolls could attack Earth any time they wanted, if they had the capability to attack Earth in the first place.
Whether the PLAN actually had or was acquiring that capability was one of the questions the nanoprobes might’ve answered.
Mendoza got so frustrated with the lack of updates that he took to prowling around the virtual walls of the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, looking for a new way in, now that he’d lost his UNVRP tools.
So when he got a call from a stranger named Frank Hope IV, on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he was helping out as an usher at Mass, he nearly had a heart attack.
They’ve caught me.
Not exactly.
“Hello,” said Frank Hope IV, standing in a virtual window in the wall of San Pedro Calungsod. He was handsome, in his twenties. He had curly hair and a nose like the blade of a cleaver, like his father Trey Hope’s. “I’m sorry to hear you’re out of a job. But I figured you might be scouting around for something new. Ever thought about working in the energy industry?”
Mendoza moved to one side, out of the flow of congregants. He stared up at the stained glass windows. Frank Hope IV floated between Jesus and St. Peter, half their size. “I don’t know you. I mean, I know of you, of course, but we’ve never … How’d you get my ID?”
“Well, actually, you do know me,” Frank Hope IV said. “You just know me better as Fragger1.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“About that job. We’re doing some of the stuff I talked about on the forums. Are you interested?”
xxv.
Kiyoshi had wanted to visit Tiangong Erhao for ages. No one in the Belt knew very much about the Chinese space program. Officially, it was minimal and 99% automated. The Han Chinese were purebloods, which made them targets for the PLAN.
Regardless, the Chinese did go into space, taking their losses in the name of the Imperial Republic. And Tiangong Erhao was their jumping-off point.
A dumbbell-shaped space station fifty kilometers long, the largest in the solar system, “Heavenly Palace 2” had been built over decades, section by section. Now almost complete, it rotated in space like a child’s teething toy. It even had ‘tooth marks’ on it—the hard-vacuum docking bays where shuttles, colony ships, and resource haulers parked.
Sometimes, for a very long time.
Kiyoshi rented a berth alongside the Nan Yang, a colony ship bound for an asteroid named 10199 Chariklo. He took to spending his evenings with the Nan Yang’s captain, a congenial guy who liked to snort elephant-sized doses of cijiwu while complaining about the shipping company. “We’ll get underway for the Belt this year, they say. No, maybe next year. Fucking Highs, they think in terms of centuries.”
“What’s cijiwu? Doesn’t that just mean ‘stimulant’?”
“That’s what it is. Have some.”
Meanwhile, shuttle-loads of colonists dribbled in and took up residence aboard the Nan Yang, apparently untroubled by the prospect of not going anywhere for years. It was some weeks before Kiyoshi realized that these beaten-down-looking people were prisoners. They wore stun cuffs around their ankles as they went about their tasks in the Nan Yang’s bowels. There were even baby-size cuffs for the little ones. The asteroid 10199 Chariklo—the Nan Yang’s eventual destination—was to be a convict colony.
“Well, it makes sense from an economic point of view,” said the captain of the Nan Yang, defensively. “They’re likely to get whacked by the PLAN sooner or later, so why send anyone valuable?”
“Why send anyone at all?” Kiyoshi said. “You guys are purebloods. You’ve got targets painted on your backs.”
“A population of three billion crammed into a country smaller than Canada, half of which is desert,” said the captain. “Any more questions?”
“Is there any cijiwu left?”
When he got bored, Kiyoshi explored the regions of Tiangong Erhao near the docking bay. He was disappointed. The space station was just a giant manufacturing plant. High-tech fabrication equipment thrashed and sparkled in vacuum. A few lonely individuals floated around, complying with the legal requirement that robots be supervised. So much for the rumors you heard.
His acquaintances in Docking Bay 14 agreed that they, too, had heard about lakes and gardens tucked away within Tiangong Erhao—a replica of the Summer Palace, a replica of Versailles, communities of winged near-immortals who secretly controlled the entire Chinese economy and were probably also Jewish—but no one could confirm whether or not they existed.
Except Jun. “Yes, there are pressurized regions,” he said. “They’re laboratories. The Imperial Republic runs an experimental human breeding program up here. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘the banality of evil’?”
“Now I have to see these places.”
“I always thought Arendt was wrong. I mean, evil isn’t banal. That’s the last thing it is. But now I know what she was talking about.”
Jun drifted away, and would not gratify Kiyoshi’s curiosity any further. He had not gone back into hiding, but was still acting distant. He was spending most of his time in his garden. (Kiyoshi had given in and bought fertilizer and so forth. Dronazon did deliver to Tiangong Erhao.) Jun could not, however, retreat entirely from the real world.
Every minute of every day, he was negotiating for their survival.
The torpid rhythms of human life in Docking Bay 14 veiled an ongoing argument on the intellectual plane. The protagonists of this argument were the AIs of the various Chinese ships docked at Tiangong Erhao. And now, Jun.
Though the Chinese publically denied it, their ships were run by AIs, whose motto might have been, “Don’t care, so there.” Or, as the phrase coined by the sitting president of the Imperial Republic went, “The overcoat of apathy blunts the dagger of malevolence.” The Chinese AIs detested everything and everyone. But they were not (very) dangerous. They cared so little about life that they didn’t even trouble themselves to be hostile to it. They went along with their human masters’ plans, faute de mieux, because human beings so often screwed up spectacularly, and it was fun to watch. One of these stunted artificial minds’ few pleasures was schadenfreude.
Another was historical revisionism.
They delighted (if AIs marinating in existential despair could be said to delight in anything) in discussing the 4,000-year history of China and identifying all the occasions when the (human) Chinese had screwed up, failed, or been stabbed in the back.
One of their favorite topics was the 20th century, with a special focus on World War II.
Jun’s arrival had come to them as a gift from above. Someone new to argue with! Better yet, an entity they had thought non-existent: a Japanese AI! They had pounced on him before the Monster even docked, and demanded that he apologize for the Japanese atrocities committed in China between 1937 and 1945.
“This is exactly what I knew would happen,” Jun said glumly. “They have no imagination.”
Ever since then, he’d been fencing with them, deliberately titillating their pride to keep the argument on a low boil. The stakes were high. It was entirely possible that if the Chinese AIs got too irritated, they would simply frag the Monster. This happened. In fact, it happened regularly enough that it was a recognized category of diplomatic incident. If it happened to the Monster, there wouldn’t even be any government to make a stink about it.
So their lives depended on Jun’s ability to keep their hosts amused.
Kiyoshi felt bad that he couldn’t help. Neither could Father Tom. From the point of view of the Chinese AIs, the two humans were nothing.
They kept busy in their own ways: Kiyoshi treading water in the shallow end of his drug addiction; the Jesuit doing works of mercy among the convicts on the Nan Yang and her sister ships. The two of them did not meet often, and when they did, their exchanges were ill-tempered.
Kiyoshi pestered the boss-man regularly for updates about the passenger they were waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for, but the boss refused to divulge any new information. Instead, he told Kiyoshi to find out more about the Chinese space colonization program.
Kiyoshi was already doing this, haphazardly, by hanging out in the seedy little village that was Docking Bay 14. The Chinese spacefarers were the most pessimistic bunch he’d ever met, although they laughed a lot.
So he took it for more of the same when a new, uneasy rumor made the rounds.
This Mars opposition is different.
This time, something bad is going to happen.
The PLAN is mustering a new fleet in orbit.
They’re going to hit us, or Earth, or maybe Luna, or it could be Midway, or UNLOESS, or something symbolically important, anyway.
There’s new survey data that PROVES it.
“Yeah, uh huh,” Kiyoshi said. “Is there any more cijiwu?”
August 16th passed without incident, and Kiyoshi felt smug. But the rumors did not abate, and Jun said one day to Kiyoshi and Father Tom, having called them together: “I’ve seen the survey data that people are talking about. It’s not very good, but it’s real. It’s observations from a radio telescope at the L2 Earth-Moon LaGrange point, so in theory, the UN should have it, too. And it does look as if the PLAN is mustering a fleet in orbit around Mars.”
“Well, that clinches it,” Kiyoshi said. “Because if they were going to attack a symbolically important target near Earth, they’d definitely warn us beforehand. They wouldn’t use their stealth technology to hide their expeditionary fleet. Of course not.”
“They probably wouldn’t,” Jun said. “That would be a massive expenditure of data.”
“And they wouldn’t be mustering a fleet at all if they were not up to something,” Father Tom said.
“Something, but what?” Jun said. “I don’t know what it all means.” Coming from an ASI, this was an unnerving admission. “Father, I know you already celebrated Mass today, but can we have an extra Mass later? It’s the feast day of the Martyrs of Nagasaki. I think we need to pray for their intercession.”
“Of course,” Father Tom said.
He invited some of his new Chinese friends to the special Mass, held in the Monster’s chapel. The Chinese stared and chattered. Kiyoshi scowled. He didn’t like having them aboard. There was no rule that said a convict couldn’t also be a spy. But they surprised him with fervent and mostly accurate responses during the liturgy, which Father Tom said in Latin. The Jesuit was turning out to be an effective harvester of souls, now that he was no longer constrained by UN laws against evangelization.
After the Mass, Kiyoshi saw the Chinese off the ship and got on the screen with the boss-man. This time their conversation lasted ten hours.
Maybe the boss had some reason to take the rumors of a PLAN attack seriously, or maybe it was something he saw in Kiyoshi’s face. At any rate, he finally relented. “OK. Come on home. I’ll tell the dickhead to find another ride.”
“Banzai!” Kiyoshi shouted. He got out his guitar, which had been gathering dust, and strummed chords while he ran pre-launch checks. Jun undertook the delicate task of disengaging from his months-long conversation with the Chinese AIs.
He, too, was happy to be leaving Tiangong Erhao, although it would mean swinging around Venus to get a gravitational boost out to the asteroid belt.
★
Auxiliary boosters sputtering, the Monster edged out of Docking Bay 14. Kiyoshi started the countdown to full thrust. He loved their new drive. It felt great to be sitting on top of such an abundance of power. Watching the temperature inside the tokamak climb from a cold start into the 40 million Kelvin range, he entirely understood why Derek Lorna and his co-conspirators had risked everything to get their hands on Mercury’s helium-3. D-He3 fusion left the old D-D kludge standing. Fewer nasty neutrons, too.
With half an eye, he watched Tiangong Erhao shrink on the optical feed. Sayonara, Heavenly Palace 2. His curiosity had been gratified. He would not be coming back here again.
“Uh oh,” said Jun, hunched at the astrogator’s workstation.
“What?”
Incoming messages blizzarded across the comms screen. Kiyoshi flew over to the comms workstation and picked one at random. From the Luoxiao Shan. “Yeah, hello?”
The response came in rat-a-tat-tat Chinese. On the screen, a plump little woman gestured angrily. She wore a severe gray uniform, and floated on what looked to be a ship’s bridge, amid geode-like clusters of exposed equipment.
Kiyoshi cued up the Chinese translation software he had installed in his BCI. It was buggy. Fine for dickering over the price of cijiwu, not so great for formal occasions. He was still trying to sort through the mistranslations it printed on his retinal implants when Jun interrupted.
“Turn around. We have to go back.”
“Back to Tiangong Erhao? Why? What’s this chick so upset about?” Kiyoshi felt a bit dazed. “Who or what is the Luoxiao Shan, anyway?”
“Check the optical feed.”
The sight clarified Kiyoshi’s thoughts. Several large, gnarled needles drifted around the Monster. More blips moved closer, twinkling around the distant lozenge of Earth.
“The Luoxiao Shan is a frigate of the China Territorial Defense Force,” Jun said in a leaden voice. “So are those others.”
The nearest Chinese ship was only a few thousand klicks away. But Kiyoshi figured they could s
hoot their way out of this. The Monster had a hypervelocity coil gun running the length of its spine, disguised as part of the ship. It could hurl any kind of projectile you gave it, but Kiyoshi now favored mini-nukes, which were non-lethal, when used as area-denial weapons to fry an opponent’s electronics.
Jun had used up a bunch of these nukelets on Mercury, but the Monster still had a few left, ready to walk themselves into the cradle on their little mechanical legs.
“Nan to iu baka,” Jun groaned. [What an an idiot I’ve been!] “I thought they’d let me leave. I thought I’d established a rapport with them. I thought we might even be friends. But they don’t have friends. They only have reasons to despair, and reasons to keep living, and there’s very little difference between the two.”
Kiyoshi whipped back to the comms screen. On the bridge of the Luoxiao Shan, the CDTF officer had turned her back to the camera. She was slapping her ample behind, looking over her shoulder and shouting, according to his translation software, “Beware the butt-fragging of righteousness, O filthy brown dwarf!”
“She called me a dwarf,” Kiyoshi said, looking down at his 2.6-meter frame.
“It’s a literal translation of Jap.”
“How rude! I still don’t understand what the CTDF is doing here.”
“The Chinese aren’t ignoring those rumors of an impending PLAN attack. This squadron has come to defend Tiangong Erhao, just in case it’s the intended target. My so-called friends on the station knew it was coming. But they didn’t warn me. They thought it would be amusing to see what happened when we bumped into the CDTF.”
“But the CDTF isn’t combat-capable. The Chinese don’t give their AIs guns. Just mines and EMPs and stuff.” Kiyoshi was dialoguing with the gunnery computer. “We can take them. Get ready to enable the Ghost. I’ll put a nuke right between the Luoxiao Shan and the Zijin Shan. See how they like being EMPed. Then we run like hell.”
“Don’t you remember what they did on 4 Vesta?” Jun said. His projection had its head in its hands. “They slagged the gates of the Bellicia ecohood with a ship drive. Those are their weapons. And in case you didn’t notice, the Luoxiao Shan and the Zijin Shan have both come around in the last few seconds to show us their butts.”
The Luna Deception Page 26