The Vesta Conspiracy: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 2)

by Felix R. Savage

  “Shy?” said one of the smaller spacesuits. “We’re pirates! Pirates aren’t shy. Shiver me timbers,” it added, and giggled.

  “Hell,” said the first voice. “She’s from the Venus Remediation Project.”

  So much for tact. Colonists weren’t dumb.

  “Yes,” Elfrida admitted. “The Space Corps is a top-level agency, but our mission is to facilitate UNVRP, among other things. But that doesn’t mean I’m here to kick you out and take your asteroid.” Which isn’t even yours. “As I mentioned, my goal at this time is to conduct a preliminary geological survey and population assessment.”

  “Assess this,” the leader of the pirates said. “Middle finger.” His use of the emoticode proved that he wasn’t living in the seventeenth century, after all.

  Slow-moving pebbles clonked against Elfrida’s frame. The phavatar completed its systems check and reported that it had sustained cosmetic damage to its head and torso, but was otherwise functional. The čapek-classes were built to take a pounding.

  “Maybe we could get started by introducing ourselves?” she suggested.

  While she waited for the pirates to respond, she replied to Petruzzelli’s increasingly urgent pleas for information. “I’ll give you a visual feed as soon as there’s anything to see.” She was putting Petruzzelli off. You weren’t supposed to share everything with your chauffeur. She felt bad about that, but not too bad, considering that Petruzzelli’s drones had gotten her off on the wrong foot with these people by trashing several of their D/S bots. “For the moment, it looks like they’re mining the asteroid for valuable minerals.”

  “In situ?” Petruzzelli asked skeptically. “Why not just bag it up and tow it back to their base?”

  “It’s too big for that.”

  “I’ve heard of asteroids the size of Manhattan being lifted. They vanish from their orbits and are never seen again, until their minerals turn up on freaking Ganymede or somewhere.”

  “Well, maybe these guys don’t have a base. It looks like a shoestring operation.” Elfrida broke off. The pirates had finished their encrypted colloquy, and their leader was speaking to her on the public channel.

  “Your drones have put four of our D/S bots out o’ commission. Beyond repair, they are. If ye really are a UN agent, we’ll be wanting compensation for that.”

  Elfrida laughed to herself. These guys had a handle on the system.

  “Listen,” she said. “You aren’t dumb. And I don’t think you’re really pirates, either. So can we take the yo-ho-ho’ing as read, grab some air—” she gestured at the two inflatable habs— “and discuss how we can work together?”

  Eleven seconds. Twelve seconds.

  “Ye’re on,” said the leader. “But I warn ye, it’s a mess.” He streaked towards the smaller of the habs. “We weren’t expecting company. Arrr!”

  ★

  With their EVA suits off, the pirates turned out to be two women, two men, and a boy of about twelve. The child, so thin that Elfrida could almost see through his bare hands and feet, was prepubescent, but closing in on two meters tall. Spaceborn. The adults, in contrast, had standard Earthborn frames. Nevertheless, they all shared a buttery-brown skin tone and straight black hair. The leader wore his in dreadlocks.

  “Haddock,” he introduced himself. “Ye can call me Captain. These are Coral and Anemone—” the women— “Codfish, and the kid is Kelp.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Elfrida smiled. “Are you all related?”

  Coral shuddered, Kelp giggled, and even Haddock winced. Elfrida figured they were reacting to her phavatar’s axe-murderer smile, rather than her question. “Aye,” Haddock said. “How did ye guess? Anemone is my lady wife, Kelp is the fruit o’ our loins, Coral is Nemmie’s sister, and Codfish is my brother and married to Coral.”

  “For my sins,” said the dour-faced Codfish. “Also, I get the least cool name.”

  “Someone had to be Codfish,” Haddock said. “Come tell me, who am I? A codfish, only a codfish!”

  This gibberish was obviously a quotation, and Elfrida thought of Captain Okoli of the Kharbage Can. He’d have known where it came from. She queried the UNVRP databank on Vesta with a video clip of Haddock delivering the line, not expecting much. In the meantime, she said, “Am I really meant to believe that you reside on this asteroid?”

  The Bigelow hab did not give the impression of a home, so much as a spherical tool-shed. It measured about ten meters across. Fabric partitions walled off a couple of private compartments for sleeping, but there was no furniture in the hab apart from basic life-support equipment. The triple-stage airlock through which they’d entered contained an electrostatic scrubber, to make sure they brought no dust inside. Her phavatar’s olfactory sensors transmitted a reek similar to the smell of ripe kimchi, overlaid with air freshener. Magnetic clamps held tools and spare parts for the D/S bots. Wall screens displayed the ongoing excavation, as well as panoramas of the asteroid’s surface.

  “Care for a cup of char?” Haddock said, while Anemone stuck a handful of drink pouches into the microwave. “Oh no, I forgot; ye’re a phavatar. And the real you is probably sitting comfortably on some palatial space station, enjoying the gravity and the high-O2 air, wi’ a cozy bunk and a real dinner awaiting ye at the end of the day.” He shook his head sadly. “Ye’ve no idea what it is to be alone in the solar system, despised by one and all, wi’ nowhere to lay your head. All we want is a place to call home, humble as it may be, where we can live in peace, troubling no one. And for this sin ye’d treat us like criminals—”

  At this point Elfrida interrupted, having begun to speak at the start of his self-pitying threnody. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You aren’t settlers, any more than you’re pirates. Dude. Haddock, or whatever your name really is. You’re not fooling this chick.”

  She smiled to take the sting out of her accusation, and all five of them shuddered. “Would you mind not doing that?” Coral fished a crumpled tablet out of her webbing, smoothed it out, and said, “Mirror.”

  In the now-reflective surface, Elfrida saw a spectre out of a horror vid. Her collision with the wall had rearranged her phavatar’s face, leaving pink polyfoam and nanofiber muscles exposed by hanging shreds of fake skin. Her telescopic left eye stared from its bare plastisteel socket. She now looked less like an axe murderer than an axe murderer’s victim. Her grin was the final, awful touch.

  She pawed fruitlessly at her hair, which was sticking out in all directions, and said, “Sorry.”

  ~Cosmetic damage? she subvocalized to the phavatar’s MI. ~This is a cosmetic disaster!

  “As I said, I’m sorry,” she ploughed on. “But you’re not fooling anyone. You’re already known to us, as it happens. While we’ve been talking here, I queried our databanks …” Her query about Haddock’s ‘codfish’ quotation had turned up some interesting results. “Facial recognition and voice analysis puts the five of you with 99.9 percent certainty on 1856902 Alhambra, 738688 Duxi, and probably several other asteroids before that. I wasn’t involved in those missions personally, but my colleagues based on Hygiea were. Apparently, when you were operating in the outer Belt, you called yourself ‘Hook.’ And I do know that reference. Hook! was a twenty-first-century musical about pirates by Walt Disney. However, the record makes it clear that you aren’t pirates. If anything, I guess you’re the solar system’s smallest pirate fan club.”

  “Peter Pan was a novel by Sir James Matthew Barrie! Disney was a philistine,” said the child Kelp.

  “Sure they’re all bloody philistines in the UN,” Haddock said. He pushed off from the wall he was holding onto. Anemone released the handful of drink pouches she had just taken from the microwave. Globules of hot tea escaped into the air. “You’re right,” Haddock said to Elfrida. “We’re not pirates. We don’t jack passing spaceships, or mine asteroids that ain’t ours. Billions of blistering blue barnacles! Who would bother mining a water-poor vestoid? You’d scarcely cover your costs. No, me beauty.” He drifted closer
to the phavatar—in, Elfrida realized too late, a menacing posture. He held a socket wrench in one hand. “We’re just construction workers, trying to earn a crust in the outer-space home-building industry.”

  “You’re already wanted by the UN Occupational Health and Safety Agency on charges of illegal construction,” Elfrida said urgently. “Don’t make things worse for yourselves!”

  A violent impact blacked out her optic sensors. The phavatar’s audio feed lasted a few seconds longer. The olfactory, a few seconds beyond that. By the time she lost the smell of body odor and kimchi, she was fighting the restraints that held her on the couch, pulling her headset off. She floated upright, gasping, in the golden evening light that poured through the windows of the U-Vesta telepresence center.

  v.

  “I need a drink,” Elfrida said, pulling off her coat.

  She had spent the day filing the necessary paperwork on the 550363 Montego disaster. To be sure, a day on Vesta was only five and a half hours long, but that was still a lot of paperwork. She’d helped Petruzzelli—who was understandably outraged about the loss of her phavatar—prepare an initial application for compensation. She had also written a report for her supervisor back in New York. Her formal debrief was scheduled for tomorrow.

  She had also decided to pay a visit to Dr. James, the head of the astrophysics program at U-Vesta.

  But before tackling Dr. James, she needed a break from the whole mess, so she’d come home.

  UNVRP had rented an apartment for her in one of the best buildings in Branson Hills, a sprawl of habs climbing the slope north of Olbers Lake. While the newer habs were just that—expandable Bigelows, like snowmen squatting among the trees—Elfrida’s building dated back to the early days of the Vesta colony. Those first settlers had held to Earth-centric ideas of how to live, never contemplating the sacrifice of right angles for cost-efficiency. So her apartment had four walls. It had a ceiling. It had floors that did not give at every step. And it had doors that closed and even locked, so you could shut out the world.

  That sounded really good to Elfrida right now.

  She dropped onto the ergoform couch. “I said I need a drink!” she shouted. “What are you, stupid?”

  From the miniature kitchen came a grinding noise and a series of beeps.

  “Oh, dog. Not again.”

  Elfrida heaved herself off the couch and squelched in her dry-grip boots to the kitchen. Spilt breakfast cereal littered the counter. The beeps were coming from the corner behind the refrigerator. Elfrida got down on her hands and knees. Jammed into the corner, her housekeeping bot beeped at her. Its sucker-feet retracted and extended, fastening onto the floor and ripping free again—that was the noise she’d heard—as it tried to gain leverage to free itself. Its vacuum nozzle was stuck behind the fridge.

  “Aw,” Elfrida said. “Did poor wittle bottikins try to vacuum up the spice rack again? I put it back there, you know, so you wouldn’t. My mom gave me that spice rack, and all the spices in it, because everything tastes like crap in micro-gee. But you’re just convinced, aren’t you, that nutmeg and turmeric are hazardous substances. Diddums.”

  She jerked the maidbot out of the corner, not caring if she broke it. The vacuum nozzle came free. It had a noticeable bulge near its tip. Maybe the maidbot had just been trying to vacuum up the spilt cereal. Feeling a bit guilty, she set it on the counter.

  “Spit it out!”

  The maidbot hiccuped. Out of its nozzle rolled a sphere the size of an eyeball.

  “Hmm.”

  Elfrida examined the sphere. It was pink. It had a hole through the middle. It had what seemed to be an ON button, but nothing happened when she pressed it.

  “Maybe I owe you an apology, bot,” she said. “What is this? … Oh, right.” She raised her voice to an imperative pitch. “BOT COMMAND! Enable voice communication.”

  “Dunno,” the maidbot said. “It’s a foreign object! It was on the floor! I have to keep the floor clean! It’s very important for your health and safety!”

  “Now I remember why I muted you. BOT COMMAND! Disable voice communication.”

  The maidbot clattered at her with what seemed uncannily like pique, and began to vacuum up the cereal on the counter.

  Elfrida fixed her own drink, a margarita flavored with chili pepper from her mother’s spice rack, and carried it back into the living-room. She sat on the couch and treated herself to a trip to Venus. After a while, she removed her stabilizer braces, although she knew she shouldn’t. The dang things were just so uncomfortable. Ahhh … that’s better.

  Headset in place, gel mask over her face, gel gloves on her hands, she wandered among the wind-bowed fig and olive trees along the shore of Venus’s warm, planet-girdling sea. Behind her, the Lakshmi Plateau raised its serrated skyline against the blueberry-colored noon sky.

  Post-terraforming, Venus was still an inhospitable world: a shallow, brine-saturated ocean covered 80% of its surface, and its continents were arid. Ferocious winds circled the planet. Only the polar regions were cool enough for mammalian life. The day remained long—the dispute about how long was still ongoing, but Elfrida had picked a best-guess setting of 40 sols. A day, then, was an Earth month. Seasons were nonexistent, due to the low obliquity of the planet’s spin axis, and most people lived underground, to escape the sun’s relentless glare (or, at night, the endless dark), as well as the hurricane-force winds.

  But you could go outside. Without an EVA suit. Without gecko boots. Without stabilizer braces. You could walk on Cytherean rock, breathe Cytherean air, and irrigate your GMO fig and olive trees with Cytherean water piped from the local desalination plant. The Venus Remediation Project had achieved its goal of transforming the solar system’s problem child into a shirt-sleeve environment.

  Elfrida picked a fig and sat down in the shelter of the rocks to watch the windjammers. These sailboats zipped back and forth from Ishtar to the southern continent of Aphrodite, making use of the very same gales that foiled air travel on Venus. They looked like giant butterflies skimming on the silver sea. She bit into the fig. It was not quite ripe, a touch of realism she appreciated.

  “Ellie! Ellieeee! I’m ho-ome!”

  Elfrida’s jaw clenched. With deliberate slowness, she exited the immersion environment. The fig in her hand dematerialized. The Cytherean landscape vanished, to be replaced by the log-out screen. She spat out her gel tongue-tab, took her mask and gloves off, and removed her headset.

  Cydney Blaisze, Elfrida’s girlfriend, stood in front of the couch, bouncing up and down impatiently on bare feet. “Put that boring old thing away. Let’s go out! I’m so glad you’re home! I didn’t expect you to be back yet. I actually just came back to change. Do you think I should wear this? Or maybe this?” She held up two trendy wide-legged jumpsuits. One was a retro transistor print, the other was solid pink with a snake twining up one leg and down the other. “I’m kind of favoring the pink,” Cydney went on.

  Her stream-of-consciousness chatter had buried the question of Elfrida’s early return several sentences back, so Elfrida didn’t have to explain it, even if she’d wanted to. “You’ll be cold in either of them,” she said, the phantom taste of fig lingering in her mouth.

  “Urrrr. I’ll wear my coat, of course. It is totally freezing out there! Facilities Management is so cheap. But if I wear the pink, there’s an accessory problem. I mean, none of my scarves go with it. I suppose I could do a statement necklace. The stainless steel choker might work. But it’s so 2286. Snerk. I was planning to recycle it, but it’s handmade, and I hate doing that. It just seems wrong.”

  Cydney bounced into the bedroom, presumably to look for the necklace in question. Elfrida packed her immersion kit into its case.

  The apartment seemed brighter now that Cydney was here, and it wasn’t just because Cydney had switched on the lights. Her Chanel No.666 perfume perked up the flat air, and even the boring black walls seemed stylish, not oppressive, when they were serving as a backdrop for Cydney
’s gazelle-like form.

  Cydney came from a more elite background than Elfrida herself. She had been born in Johannesburg and grown up in another gated community on the Cape. She was half Xhosa, a quarter Afrikaaner and a quarter Anglomutt, not that you’d ever guess any of that from her milky-coffee skin, slightly oversized green eyes, and silky blond hair—all courtesy of pre-birth genetic tweaking. She had got her start in the media thanks to her father’s contacts in the Xhosaland government.

  She bounced back into the living-room, stark naked except for a necklace. “Look what I found! Remember when you gave me this?”

  Elfrida did. It was when they’d only been dating a month or so. They had met on Earth, when Elfrida had been home recuperating after the 11073 Galapagos incident. Well, technically, they’d met on the net, when Cydney interviewed Elfrida about her amazing survival story. After she returned to Earth, Cydney had taken her out to lunch to thank her for the interview, which had given a big boost to Cydney’s curated news feed, CydneyBlaisze.com. They’d hit it off IRL, and things had just kind of evolved.

  “We were on that gondola in SoHo,” Cydney reminisced. “I thought the trip was a disaster. I thought you hated me. I was thinking, urrrr, I shouldn’t have asked her to come to New York, we’ve only just met … and then you gave me this.”

  She fingered the necklace, which was a string of ten beads representing the consensus number of Sol’s planets. The Venus bead was blueberry enamel, with sand-colored continents, representing UNVRP’s vision of how the planet would one day look. In fact, the necklace came from UNVRP’s public-relations department, as did the immersion environment Elfrida had been simming. The necklace wasn’t just a freebie like the software, though. It had cost Elfrida a packet.