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

by Felix R. Savage

  “We don’t assume that. My point is, how do you explain the fact that thirty-eight out of forty-one candidates …” She trailed off. She had a strong sense that she was losing, even though she had a winning argument. “It’s statistically unlikely. Scratch that. It’s statistically impossible.”

  “Then maybe there’s another explanation,” Dr. James said. “Could your own data management be less than secure?”

  Elfrida flushed. “I bet our information security is better than—”

  The lights went out.

  vii.

  The floor vibrated. Elfrida, standing by the window, pressed her fists against her mouth. In her memory, the robotic voice of the Botticelli Station hub said, All personnel, remain where you are.

  “We’re under attack!”

  “No, we’re not,” Dr. James said. But he didn’t sound too sure.

  Trembling, Eflrida gripped the window frame and poked her head around it. The businesses along the lakeshore were still lit up. Only the building they were in had gone dark.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a power cut. We’ve had some issues with lumpiness in the electricity supply.” Dr. James clicked up beside her and looked out the window. “Everything seems to be all right, doesn’t it?”

  “How would you know?”

  “Ms. Goto, this is the most secure habitat in the asteroid belt. Our founders may not have had the PLAN in mind when they constructed the Bellicia ecohood, but I promise you, no toilet rolls are getting through three kilometers of solid rock.”

  “They could hit your power plant on the surface. Maybe that’s why the electricity’s gone off.”

  “Except it hasn’t. It’s just us.”

  “The building’s shaking! It feels like we’re taking impacts. Or being pushed from side to side. Oh dog, what is it?”

  She felt exposed, and yet she didn’t want to move away from the window—a potential escape route. The tremors continued. Panicking, she blinked out a query to the internet, always a last resort: Will I be OK if I jump out of a window approx 70m up under 0.22 gees? She tried to remember how the Space Corps therapist on Earth had told her to cope with stressful situations. Breathe deeply. Yeah, that was going to help.

  “I’ve just pinged Facilities Management,” Dr. James said. “They confirm that this building has stopped drawing power, but they don’t know why. Doggone it! Ali Baba needs to run around the clock.” He was referring to the supercomputer in the astrophysics lab, dubbed Ali Baba by the researchers who tended it. “It’s got backup batteries, but they can only power it for a couple of hours.”

  The wall shook again. A black shape with a white face burst in through the window, shrieking, “Yaaaah!”

  Elfrida screamed. The invader’s foot hit her in the ribs, knocking her against Dr. James’s desk. As she fell, a steely grip fastened on her arm. She struggled, until she perceived that it was Dr. James. Gripping her arm with his hook, he pulled her towards the door. “What do you want?” he shouted at the invader.

  Invaders.

  Another person hurtled through the window. Landing on his/her feet, he/she raised a weapon and fired. There was a loud phut. One or more projectiles crunched into the wall to Elfrida’s left. She smelled a sweetish, pungent odor.

  She was already throwing herself backwards through the door. She ran along the hall, following Dr. James. With his reverse-jointed legs and blade-feet, the professor had a turn of speed that would put champion sprinters to shame. She assumed he was heading for the zipshaft, until he vanished into a door ahead of her. At the end of the hall, more black-garbed figures burst out of the zipshaft.

  Elfrida plunged after Dr. James. Behind her, shouts of “Yaaah!” and “Get them!” mingled with the phut-phut of more projectiles being fired.

  She cannoned into a table in the dark, rebounded, and scrambled under it. They were in the astrophysics lab. Dr. James had rushed to the defense of Ali Baba, his precious supercomputer. But the invaders were already in here. She heard Dr. James shouting, the wordless battle cries of the invaders, and the long-drawn-out crunches of accelerators, high-spec printers, neutron traps, and other expensive pieces of equipment being thrown around as if they weighed less than the boxes they’d come in. She fumbled to unfasten her stabilizer braces so she could move better. She didn’t give a hoot about the supercomputer. She cared about getting out of here alive.

  A female voice hissed in the darkness, “James. Jamesss! Where’s the metalfucker gone?”

  “He’s gotta be here somewhere,” panted another of the invaders.

  A burst of bluish light lit up the lab, printing monstrous shadows on the walls and ceiling.

  “Eat plasma, meatheads!” yelled Dr. James.

  Lying on her back, Elfrida saw the distinctive rods of an electrolaser weapon, like a handful of glow-in-the-dark kebab skewers flung across the lab.

  “Drop the fucking computer!”

  “James!” shouted the same female voice. “You metalfucking psycho, are you out of your mind? You’re putting the whole hab in danger, and now this?”

  A scream drowned out the last words. Elfrida scooted on her butt across the floor. Afterimages floated on her retinas. The invaders wore masks, identical white joker-faces with red lips. You’re putting the whole hab in danger. Dr. James was hiding something, and he was prepared to kill to defend it.

  At that moment, the internet returned a first tranche of answers to her query: BRAH I JUMPT OFF FROOKING DOOM MONS & ONLY BUST ME ANKEL ROFLMAO

  More of this kind of thing continued to scroll across her field of vision until she turned her contacts off. The internet was so useless.

  The invaders were shooting wildly. The pungent smell of the propellant they were using in their guns filled the lab. And then, as if someone had thrown a switch, the shooting stopped. Someone stumbled into Elfrida, jumped over her.

  “Are they gone?”

  She could see Dr. James in the weak light from the window. She crawled towards him. He leant out of the window, craning down. She rose to her feet, her stabilizer braces half-off and interfering with her movements.

  He spoke tragically. “When I said ‘drop the computer,’ I didn’t mean, you know, literally drop it.”

  Far below, LED cobblestones illuminated the path leading to the Humanities building. A dark mass lay on the path. It was Ali Baba. Whatever the effect might have been on a human being, that fall had clearly not done the supercomputer any good. Even under a fifth of Earth’s gravity, state-of-the-art electronics required delicate handling. Elfrida remembered how carefully the invaders had been carrying the supercomputer. Until Dr. James shot one of them.

  “You shot one of them,” she reminded him.

  The invaders poured out of the STEM building. They streamed towards Ali Baba and surrounded it.

  “Hey!” Dr. James hollered. “Leave that alone!” He elbowed Elfrida out of the way and fired down at them. His electrolaser weapon was a slim tube integrated into his prosthetic arm. The sleeve of his shirt flapped, a charred rag. The ionized plasma beam might have hit the invaders. It did hit a cobblestone, whose machined surface reflected it at an angle into the STEM building.

  The invaders fled into the night, carrying the remains of Ali Baba.

  “That’s the trouble with lasers,” Dr. James said. “I wanted a coil gun, but they said the magnets would interfere with the electronics in the arm. So I went for the laser. You get pinpoint targeting, an effective range of several kilometers, and you also get to shoot whatever’s located at an angle equal to the angle of incidence.”

  “Still pretty wicked,” Elfrida said.

  “Those dickshits were using liquid-propellant projectile guns. They must have access to a high-spec printer.”

  “You shot one of them.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean to.”

  The lights came back on, revealing the body of Dr. James’s victim lying on the floor, next to a hole where the particle accelerato
r had toppled over and taken its piece of the floor with it. His joker mask had come off. Apart from the blackened spot on his forehead, David Reid looked exactly the same as he had at the Virgin Café an hour earlier.

  ★

  The fire alarm went off. Dr. James’s reflected beam had started a conflagration on the third floor. The firefighters arrived in record time. They were an all-volunteer outfit, highly trained and motivated. They aimed jets of aqueous foam at the building.

  Elfrida watched with a handful of others from the lawn. Her colleague John Mendoza was there, too. He’d been working through FirstDark, but had known nothing about the invasion until the fire alarm went off.

  “They stole the supercomputer,” Elfrida told him. “Dr. James shot one of them.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not. That prosthetic arm of his? It’s a laser weapon.”

  “No, no. I mean, how could they steal the supercomputer? It’s the size of a room. And anyway, it’s in the basement. It vents its waste heat into the lake. Everything’s connected.”

  “Well, maybe they didn’t know that.”

  “Which would narrow down the field of suspects a lot,” Mendoza said, grinning. “To, maybe, one Space Corps field agent, and whoever else in this habitat doesn’t know that a supercomputer isn’t something you can just pick up and walk off with.”

  “Stick it up your socket, Mendoza. I majored in art history.”

  “So you belong over there,” Mendoza said, nodding at the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center, from whose windows people were leaning to watch the foam dripping off the green curtain of the STEM building

  “I’m not cool enough for them.” Elfrida grimaced. “The guy Dr. James shot? Was a Humanities student. I know him. I mean, I’d met him. I was just talking to him, like, an hour ago.”

  Mendoza’s eyes opened wide. He had cocoa-colored eyes, which looked even darker in contrast with his milky skin. “Well, then, I guess we know who did it.”

  “… Yeah.”

  “Of course, we can’t jump to conclusions,” Mendoza backpedaled.

  “If Cydney was involved, I’m going to find out about it. And I mean I’m going to find out all about it.”

  “You’d probably do a better job than they will,” Mendoza said, pointing into the sky.

  Another pair of gliders landed on the lawn. Unlike the volunteer fire-fighters’ electrically powered Bumblebees, these were two-man flyers with streamlined cockpit bubbles and rotating jackstands that tore up the turf. Hand-painted mascots and slogans decorated their fuselages. One pilot sprang out of his cockpit and posed on the wing of his glider, his scarf fluttering heroically. The other three new arrivals edged towards the STEM building, their sub-lethal PEPguns leveled at the firefighters’ backs.

  The peacekeepers had arrived.

  Throughout the solar system, police and security duties were handled by an assortment of paramilitary contractors, private individuals, and troops employed by one or another UN agency. These last were collectively known as blue berets, or peacekeepers. Even UNVRP had its own peacekeepers, although not on Vesta. This heterogeneity made for a lot of variation in terms of professionalism, funding, and overall seriousness. The peacekeepers in the Bellicia ecohood were generally held to be on the low end of the seriousness scale. They worked for UNESCO—all five of them.

  As the tiny size of this ‘police’ force indicated, Bellicia was not a place where anyone expected trouble. In fact, since Elfrida had been here, the only conflicts she’d witnessed had been between the peacekeepers and the people they were supposed to be looking out for.

  Watching four of the Fab Five accost the firefighters, she could see why.

  “Well, we’re not going to get much work done for a while,” Mendoza said brightly.

  “Why?”

  “According to you, they tossed Ali Baba out of a twentieth-floor window and ran off with it.”

  “But you said that wasn’t the supercomputer!”

  “Correct. The actual supercomputer is a million processor crystals running in parallel in the basement. What they ran off with was most likely the astrophysics workstation. Of course, Dr. James’s team is bound to have off-site backups.”

  “Backups of what?”

  “Its memory. Each workstation stores its own data in its own memory crystals. Safer than the cloud.”

  “Oh.”

  “So they’ll have backups. But you said the lab was trashed, right? It’ll take them a while to get up and running again. They’ve got pretty good manufacturing capabilities here, but I don’t think they can make memory crystals yet.”

  “You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.”

  Mendoza turned to look at her. “Sorry,” he said. “Just trying to keep things light.”

  Elfrida sighed. “No, I’m sorry. I just …” She trailed off, watching the Fab Five escort Dr. James to one of their flyers. The professor’s hands were plasticuffed behind his back. Foam soaked his hair and clothes. “Mendoza, one of the invaders said to him, You’re endangering everyone in this hab.”

  “What do you think that meant?”

  “I don’t know. But he is definitely hiding something. We’ll have to find out what.”

  viii.

  The dim effulgence of ThirdLight flooded the patio of Elfrida’s apartment. To help people sleep through the latter third of the Bellicia ecohood’s 26-hour sol, Facilities Management darkened the sun mirrors during ThirdLight. The mirrors looked like slivers of moon fixed high in the sky, illuminating the soyclouds, picking out the PHES (Pumped Heat Electrical Storage) thrusters on their undersides.

  Elfrida pushed the patio door open. It wasn’t locked. “Cydney?”

  The peacekeepers had taken Elfrida down to their headquarters to ask her about the raid. She’d had to tell her story over and over. She was shaken up. The familiar confines of her living-room did not soothe her.

  “Cydney?”

  “Babe! You’re back!”

  Cydney hurtled out of the bedroom. She wrapped her arms and legs around Elfrida, propelling both of them onto the couch.

  “Where were you, babe? I kept pinging you.”

  “They confiscated my contacts. I said I wasn’t recording, but I guess they want to check for themselves. I should have thought to record everything. That way, they’d know Dr. James isn’t a killer.” But he’s hiding something dangerous. She hadn’t told the peacekeepers about that.

  “He is a killer!” Cydney said, bouncing upright. “He shot David in cold blood!”

  “Oh, you know about that?”

  “Everyone knows about it.”

  “But David isn’t dead. Dr. James had his laser on the lowest setting. He was only stunned.”

  “He only suffered cardiac arrest He’s only in a coma. The whole campus is up in arms. There’s going to be a demo tomorrow.”

  “I guess you’ll be going?”

  “Of course. David’s a friend.”

  “You said he was an asshole.”

  Cydney took Elfrida’s hands in both of hers. “Sweet Ellie. Someone can be impossible to get along with, and you can still care about them. You can still love them, even.”

  Elfrida worked her hands free, Now she knew for a fact she couldn’t tell Cydney about what she’d overheard in the astrophysics lab. She took off her stabilizer braces and the nanofiber leggings and tank top she wore under them. As usual, the straps had left red weals around her waist and across her shoulders. Cydney reached for her, but Elfrida pretended not to notice. She went into the bedroom and opened the closet. She grabbed a pair of pyjamas and stepped into them, banging her head on the ceiling in the process.

  “Careful, babe,” said Cydney, in the doorway.

  Elfrida riffled through the clothes in the closet. Almost all of them were Cydney’s: white, shocking pink, aquamarine, burnt orange, or one of the other attention-getting hues Cydney favored. The only thing Elfrida could smell in the closet was Chanel No.666.

  “Ar
e you looking for something, babe?”

  Elfrida sailed into the kitchen. She opened the recycling bin. Cydney could’ve ordered the housekeeping bot to empty it already, but she hadn’t. The bin’s plastic liner held an empty Virgin Café takeout bag, a microwave meal tray, and under that, spattered with coffee dregs and grains of rice, a crumpled bundle of black fabric. Elfrida shook it out. The loose-weave thermal fabric was slick to the touch, a sign that it had been printed from cheap material. She smelled that sweet, pungent odor.

  There was one thing left in the bin. A joker mask. Elfrida held it up between two fingers.

  “Well?”

  Cydney’s big green eyes welled up. Elfrida expected her to dissolve in tears. But Cydney surprised her.

  “We had to do something,” she said. “The astrophysics lab has been monopolizing the supercomputer. It’s totally unfair. We complained to the dean. We got a ruling that they have to give us equal time. But they just ignored it! After all, we’re not real scientists, right? So they kept right on locking us out of the system. We haven’t been able to do any data analysis for weeks! It’s outrageous. Why do they even need to run Ali Baba around the clock? Why does an asteroid survey need that much processing power?”

  “I don’t know,” Elfrida said. She was pretty sure that whatever Dr. James’s team was using the supercomputer for, it wasn’t the asteroid survey.

  “It’s just not fair! Just because we study people instead of stupid rocks!”

  Cydney was getting worked up now, wringing her hands, her cheeks flushed. Elfrida felt oddly calm. “Here,” she said, getting the cigarette box down from the shelf. “Have one of these.”

  Cydney tossed her head angrily, but she took a cigarette and pushed a cartridge into it. She exhaled candy-scented vapor laced with a mild tranquilizer. This was Cydney’s little vice.

  “Where did you take Ali Baba?” Elfrida asked.

  “That wasn’t Ali Baba itself. It was only the astrophysics lab’s workstation.”

  With all their data in it, Elfrida thought. “Yeah, I know, but where did you take it?”

  “I don’t know. I was just a lookout. I wasn’t in the lab when … I didn’t know you were there, either. You should have told me where you were going when you left the café.”