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

by Felix R. Savage

  “So you were on lookout duty. That means you were downstairs the whole time. You must’ve been one of the people who carried the workstation away.”

  “And almost got shot. I hope they give Dr. James life on Pallas!”

  “Where did you take it?”

  “It was pretty smashed up. They probably just dumped it.”

  “So you don’t know what they did with it.”

  Cydney sucked on her cigarette. A cloud of vapor hid her face. “Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you, Ellie. Sorry, but you’ve made it pretty clear that you’re on their side.”

  ★

  “Cydney didn’t know anything,” Elfrida said to Mendoza. “She just tagged along.”

  They were sitting on a bench on the shore of Olbers Lake, wearing warm coats and nursing takeout coffees from the Virgin Café. Mendoza was eating a danish. He chewed in silence for a moment or two, letting Elfrida know that he was aware of her wish to protect Cydney. She looked away. She felt all twisted up inside. But she believed Cydney truly was ignorant of the raid’s real purpose.

  At last Mendoza said, “So she doesn’t know who organized it?”

  “No. But it has to be someone in PHCTBS Studies, if David Reid was involved.”

  “Poor guy. I hope he recovers.”

  “Yeah. Mendoza, we have to find out what they were after.”

  “Well, presumably whatever it was, they got it.” Mendoza looked at the last bit of his danish and wadded it up in the wrapper. “Unless the workstation was busted beyond repair, which is a possibility.”

  “Mendoza, don’t you remember what I told you last night? They said the whole hab is in danger.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” Mendoza stuffed wrapper, danish, and all into the dedicated recycling pocket of his coat. “That was pretty nasty. It’s never good when you can taste the soy. I did a bit of asking around last night. Turns out Dr. James and his team didn’t back up their database. They haven’t even logged into the off-site storage center in more than a year. That’s … well, it’s really unusual.”

  “That proves it! They’re hiding something … something dangerous.”

  Out on the lake, a fish jumped up through the mat of bluey-green CO2-sink algae that covered the water. Elfrida had got her contacts back from the peacekeepers. Her HUD display indicated that the temperature was slightly warmer today, although a cutting breeze blew off the lake. No one else was around. They were all at the demo downtown, demanding justice for David Reid.

  “Maybe if Dr. James goes on trial, it’ll all come out,” she said.

  “I dunno about that. By the way, did you confront him about giving us bad survey data, like you said you were going to?”

  “Yeah. He denied it. But now I don’t believe him about that, either. They’re all so ideological out here.”

  The shadow of a soycloud passed slowly over them. Mendoza said, “Do you ever feel like you’re a long way from home?”

  All the time, would have been Elfrida’s honest answer, but it would have been a misleading one, because she felt like her real home was Venus. And it would probably be years before she got back there, if ever.

  “Mendoza,” she said, instead of answering. “What say we have a look for the workstation ourselves?”

  “Whaaaat?”

  “We’ve got the resources to do it. And like you said, we’re not going to get much work done for a while, anyway.”

  “Well …”

  “Come on! It’’ll be fun.”

  ix.

  When Elfrida said that they had the resources to look for the missing workstation, she was referring to UNVRP’s dedicated comms satellite. They cleared their proposed search operation with their respective head offices before proceeding. Mendoza received a limp “Sure, go ahead” from his manager at UNVRP Analysis & Acquisition, 2.0 AU – 3.5 AU Region. Elfrida had been less confident of getting approval, and prepared to go ahead without it, but this turned out not to be necessary. Her supervisor at Space Corps HQ on UNLEOSS, the glossy-tressed Jake Onwego, said, “Yeah, OK. Sounds reasonable. Just, if you find the thing, you know. Grab the data. Then return it, yeah?”

  “That’s exactly what I was planning to do, sir,” Elfrida said.

  She watched Onwego watching a soccer game on his office computer for twenty-eight minutes.

  “Good on ya,” he said, with a big wink. “If those professors have been screwing us over, I want to be the first to know about it. Keep me in the loop, and remember to file your paperwork!”

  “And on we go, and on we go,” Elfrida hummed, breaking the connection.

  “He’s a total placeholder,” said Mendoza.

  “It wasn’t always like this. What happened is our director, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, wangled a seat on the President’s Advisory Council. So he can’t be bothered to actually run the Space Corps anymore. It’s outrageous. Have you got the satellite reprogrammed yet?”

  ★

  The UNVRP satellite’s ion thrusters flared. Powered by molten salt batteries and an onboard solar array, it skimmed into a low equatorial orbit, which gave it a new view of the protoplanet.

  Vesta was not spherical. Viewed from orbit, it looked like a giant human brain preserved in the cryogenic darkness of outer space. The resemblance was emphasized by the natural grooves that ran around its equator. These graben, carved by stresses from the primordial Rheasilvia impact, resembled the division between the brain’s left and right hemispheres, corresponding here to the protoplanet’s north and south hemispheres.

  However, if this were a brain, it had been augmented.

  The longest of the graben had been extended so that its ends met up, circling the equator. And in that canyon ran a maglev track. The engine that ran on it was not a train. It was a rail launcher, the second largest in the solar system after Earth’s mighty Baikonur Gun. Twice a week, it flung a load of liquid hydrogen into space, accelerating it towards Ceres, or Hygiea, or elsewhere in the solar system. (In fact, that was the vibration Elfrida had felt during the raid on the astrophysics lab; she had forgotten that a launch was scheduled for that night.)

  The satellite glided over the hydrogen-rich regions around the equator. Pits pocked a wide belt north of the graben like data points on a scatter graph. Clouds of dust spread blobbily over the edges of these manmade craters. They teemed with hacking, jack-hammering bots. Elfrida remembered the D/S bots on 550363 Montego. I have to get back there ASAP, she thought guiltily.

  Gliding further around Vesta’s circumference, the satellite passed over the hydrogen refinery operated by Virgin Resources, the owner of the mining bots, a subsidiary of Virgin Atomic. Waves of heat and gas radiated into space. Etched in dayglo orange and white, the refinery looked like an abacus in the middle of a complicated sum. Cylindrical tanks nuzzled up against each other, while mechanical arms loaded apatite-rich rubble into the furnace. Mountains of slag shadowed the facility and the group of habs where the crew lived.

  “That refinery’s older than I am,” Mendoza said disapprovingly.

  “I’m sure it’s safe.”

  “Unless the toilet rolls take it into their heads to pay a visit. They were detected near here a few years back, you know.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Star Force headed them off, for a change.”

  “They might even have been coming here.”

  Elfrida did not want to talk about the PLAN. “What’s your point?”

  “Just that Virgin Atomic can’t be making much of a profit. It’s less efficient to refine hydrogen from mineral ores than to suck it out of the atmosphere on Titan. Back when they started up here, people still thought there might be life on Titan. VA’s management must’ve gambled that full-scale atmospheric mining would never happen. But now …” Mendoza shrugged.

  “VA’s still got the advantage of a location closer to the inner system. And the rail launcher must have paid for itself by now.”

  “I know. I’m not saying they’ve got no competitive advantages. Just t
hat their margins have got to be hurting. And when the supermajors finally scale up their technology for scooping H2 out of the atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus …” Mendoza’s teeth gleamed in the light from his screen. “Look out.”

  “Why, Mendoza, you almost sound like you’re gloating.”

  “Virgin Atomic sponsors U-Vesta. We’ve got them to thank for this place.”

  “Point,” Elfrida acknowledged.

  Rain stippled the window film. A soycloud hung low overhead, drenching the university campus in shadow and water. The soyclouds irrigated themselves by lowering tubes into Olbers Lake. They then shifted position so that the runoff dripped out of their spongy undersides onto the trees and grass below. Elfrida believed this ‘rain’ had to be contaminated with fertilizer chemicals, but the locals walked through it without a care. The system, anyway, was ingenious. And as Mendoza said, it would not exist if not for Virgin Atomic, which had provided the seed money for the Bellicia ecohood, and continued to kick in big donations. The problem with it was more fundamental, philosophical even. Who came all the way to the asteroid belt to get rained on?

  The spaceborn, Elfrida supposed. People had very different ideas of utopia. Hers was, well, less wet.

  She swivelled her ergoform back to face Mendoza’s screen. The refinery glided towards the edge of the satellite’s optical sensor field. “I thought the thieves might have taken the workstation out to the mines, to hide it,” she said. “Except it looks like they didn’t, huh?”

  The premise of their search was simple. They assumed that if the workstation wasn’t busted up beyond repair, it would be in communication with something, somewhere. To get the data out of it, the thieves would have to turn it on. Lacking the rat’s nest of secure cabling in the STEM building, they’d have to interface with it wirelessly. The comms satellite would be able to pick up those signals.

  So far, however, not a bleep. All the satellite had detected was normal radio traffic between the mining facilities.

  “It doesn’t really make sense that they’d have taken it out to the mines, anyway,” Mendoza said. “I can see the STEM guys having connections out there. Not the Humanities gang. Don’t they basically oppose everything Virgin Atomic stands for?”

  “You mean, like funding for their programs?”

  “Ba-da-boom. Yeah. But still.”

  “Yeah. Actually, I know Dr. James has connections in the VA R&D division, what’s it called? The de Grey Institute. He went out there last week to talk to someone, I think about the Big Dig.”

  The Big Dig was Virgin Atomic’s bid for immortality. As its name suggested, it was a hole bored down into the crust of Vesta, eventually to reach the protoplanet’s center. What exactly it would be good for, Elfrida wasn’t sure. Most people dismissed it as a PR stunt. If it was one, however, it had fallen flat. Interest had died down during the project’s slow progress, and Elfrida rarely heard anyone at the university mention it. On the other hand, Dr. James served in some kind of advisory capacity to VA’s R&D team, so he at least must believe the project had some scientific value.

  “Maybe they dropped the workstation into the Big Dig,” Mendoza said.

  “And maybe they’ll drop us down after it if we get too close to … the … scandalous… truth. Sinister music!” Elfrida wiggled her arms as if conducting an invisible orchestra.

  “You are feeling better, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Elfrida said, instantly selfconscious. “I just had one too many shots in my coffee this morning.”

  “You should keep doing that.”

  The satellite glided onwards, following the maglev track into darkness. On the far side of Vesta from the Bellicia ecohood, the gigantic Rheasilvia Crater dominated the southern hemisphere. Lights winked in the bottom of the basin, near Rheasilvia Mons, the highest known peak in the solar system.

  “Wanna go look at the Big Dig?” Mendoza said, pointing at the lights.

  The Big Dig was in the bottom of the Rheasilvia Crater. The location put it that much closer to the middle of Vesta. The digging operation also harvested heavy metals exposed by the long-ago impact. For all Elfrida knew, that might be the actual purpose of the project, the ‘journey to the center of the world’ business so much PR fluff.

  “Sure, why not?”

  Data flowed across Mendoza’s second screen. Elfrida watched it while Mendoza issued new instructions to the satellite, subvocalizing and air-typing at the same time. Mendoza had the standard data-jock’s augments: a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) and EEG crystals for wireless transmissions. Elfrida had neither of the above. She’d just never gotten around to it. But she did have an unaugmented ability to spot patterns. Search was one of her strengths. She let her mind slip into a half-focused, half-dreaming state of awareness, scanning for any clue in those clumps of red and green figures, anything at all …

  “Here we go,” Mendoza said.

  The rail launcher slid into view, like a skeleton leaf fallen on the maglev track. It presently had no hydrogen tanks aboard, and was cruising around the equator at a modest pace of about 500 kph. The stem of the leaf was an articulated string of carriages, like a real train. They looked tiny, but they weren’t. Elfrida had heard they had spin gravity in there, for the Very Important Scientists at the de Grey Institute to enjoy.

  The density of the data traffic increased. The train was communicating with the Virgin Atomic hardware in orbit, which retrieved empty tanks on their return journey and parachuted them back to the surface.

  The UNVRP satellite veered away from the maglev track, puttering out over the Rheasilvia Crater. Below, all was dark. The bright, irregular line of the crater’s rim stood out against the stars.

  “Someone’s bouncing radar off of us,” Mendoza said.

  The data flow speeded up.

  “XX communications satellite located at the stated coordinates. Supply identification and orbit plan immediately. Repeat, supply your identification and orbit plan immediately.”

  “I’m telling them who we are,” Mendoza said. Half a second later he exclaimed, “They’re targeting us!”

  “Go back,” Elfrida said. “Go back to where we were! I saw something!”

  Data choked the screen, the satellite reporting a cascade of incoming radar pings.

  “Holy shit,” Mendoza yelped.

  “XX UNVRP communications satellite. Return to your designated orbit. This is a restricted area. Return to your designated orbit. You have ten seconds to comply. If you do not comply, area-exclusion measures will be implemented. Repeat …”

  “OK! OK!” Mendoza yelled. “We’re leaving!”

  The satellite maxed out its thrust capacity and engaged its reaction wheels. It was impossible for a body in orbit to turn tail, but the satellite very nearly managed an acute angle.

  “Don’t shoot! I’m thrusting as hard as I can!”

  The satellite hustled across the top of the Rheasilvia crater, while simultaneously gaining altitude, and waltzed back into the feeble brilliance of Vesta’s day.

  Elfrida regarded Mendoza, who was slumping in his ergoform, his forehead glistening with sweat. “Y’know, that sounded kind of salacious,” she said.

  “What? Oh. Snigger.” Mendoza eked out a smile. “That was freaking scary.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Let’s find out.” Mendoza scrolled back. “It was Virgin Atomic’s orbital gun platform.”

  “They have an orbital gun platform?”

  “You didn’t know that? Sure. They’re not gonna leave a surface mining operation completely undefended, waiting for the PLAN to come and take a chunk out of it.”

  “Yeah, but …” Elfrida shook her head. “Were they really going to shoot us down?”

  “I don’t know.” Their eyes met. “Maybe,” Mendoza said. “That shit sounded like it was fully automatic.”

  “That’s dangerous!”

  “You’re telling me. Well, maybe there’s a guy on the surface, monitoring it when he’s not busy
vidding porn flicks. Anyway, we got away fast enough to satisfy its exclusion parameters, thank dog.”

  “How … if we went back, how close do you think we could get before it glommed onto us again?”

  “It first pinged us when we were here,” Mendoza pinpointed a spot near the edge of the Rheasilvia crater, “maneuvering 400 kilometers up. That’s a lot lower than our designated orbit. That’s probably what set it off. But regardless, I’m not taking the sat anywhere near there again. No way, no how.”

  “Oh, Mendoza! Come on!”

  “There’s obviously something in the Rheasilvia Crater they don’t want us to see. Maybe it’s something to do with the Big Dig. Maybe it’s something to do with the missing workstation. Maybe this is just what private-sector information security looks like these days. Either way, if we get the satellite shot down, regardless of whether we had authorization for the search, our jobs are toast. Do you know how much those babies retail for?”

  “I got a whole space station shot down once,” Elfrida said. “And I’m still here.”

  After a pause, Mendoza said, “Yeah, but that wasn’t your fault. I heard about the astrodata leak. But it wasn’t you. It was your phavatar.”

  “And I should have figured out what the phavatar was up to.” Elfrida shook her head. “Never mind. What I wanted to say was, couldn’t we just go back and look at the maglev again?”

  “The rail launcher?”

  “Or the actual train bit.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw something in the traffic from its comms.” She had found it again while they were talking. “Here. Look. This signal.”

  “What about it? It’s encrypted to hell and back, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  It means they learned their lesson from last time, Elfrida thought.

  “Not the signal itself. The destination. They had their antenna pointed towards Gap 2.5.”

  ★

  The Kirkwood Gaps were regions in the asteroid belt which had been swept clear of asteroids by Jupiter’s gravitational influence. Viewed in a 2D starchart, hey looked like narrow stripes on a furiously spinning top. There were five pronounced Gaps, with radii of between 2.06 and 3.27 AUs. Vesta’s orbit would bite into Gap 2.5 at aphelion, when it reached its greatest distance from the sun.