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

by Felix R. Savage

  It was possible that she was on a wild goose chase.

  But Cydney Blaisze had a nose for a story.

  Always had had, even when she was just plain Cydney Blaise-without-a-Z, the daughter of a machine politician in a crappy little sub-Saharan microstate.

  And she knew that the University of Vesta was hiding something big. Something downright illegal.

  Something that could make a struggling curator’s career.

  ★

  Cydney received the scraper program’s first report just a few minutes later, encoded and disguised as a letter from Student Services. She forwarded it to her data analysis team in Los Angeles.

  “Hey,” Jordan said, toppling into the office. “I’ve got her sandwich. Where is she?”

  “In the telepresence center, I guess.”

  “Expletives,” Jordan said. Ze wiped sweat out of zir long black beard. Zis breasts heaved. Jordan was a hermaphrodite. Ze stared balefully at Cydney. “Why don’t you wear stabilizer braces? Your muscles will atrophy. You’ll end up in an exoskeleton when you get back to Earth, you don’t watch it.”

  “Got your package, Cyds,” said a voice in her skull. “Unpacking it now.”

  “That’s what surgery is for,” Cydney smiled, on her way out the door. “Those braces totally ruin the line of your clothes. I’d much rather spend a week or two in rehab when I get home.”

  “Fine if you’ve got the money for it, I guess.”

  “Exactly. Snerk! Toodle-oo.”

  “Aaaand analyzing. Get back to you in a few.”

  The voice belonged to Aidan Wahlsdorf, Cydney’s top data miner. The back office of Cydney Blaisze Enterprises, Inc., was a grotty apartment in Los Angeles which her employees viewed as luxurious, no joke, because it had air conditioning. Some of them had moved their families in. She let them, and in return had earned their unwavering loyalty, even during this period when they must have been starting to wonder if she’d lost it, or packed it in, as her competitors were keen to insinuate.

  Behind every successful curator stood a small army of data miners. The internet in the 23rd century was a cesspit. The sheer volume of malware and random crap infesting the solar system’s servers had overwhelmed consumer-facing search technology as much as a century ago. As a result, people stuck to curated feeds, private databanks, and niche aggregators for their information needs.

  That high-profile 0.01% of content providers—among whom Cydney still, barely, counted herself—got 99% of the system’s traffic. But the other umpty-million petaflops of data were still out there, and those data weren’t valueless, or meaningless. They were where the news came from—the interesting news, anyway. They just had to be mined.

  Compared to that quotidian slog, analyzing the data stolen by Cydney’s scraper program took Aidan and his team all of five minutes per packet. She skimmed the results as they came in, while she ate lunch, while she sat in her SecondLight seminar, while she hung out with the gang at the Virgin Café. And she grew increasingly disappointed. The records on the university’s servers provided no evidence of illegal activity in the Rheasilvia crater, much less of the university’s involvement.

  The final slew of results came in as she was lying in the SecondDark gloom on her bed at home. This was the period corresponding to evening. Elfrida had joined her for a while, but was now in the other room, immersed in her everlasting Venus sim. The bed vibrated, massaging Cydney’s muscles.

  “This looks kinda interesting, Cyds. Not what you were looking for, but there’s a whiff of malfeasance. Check the expenditures for the astrophysics lab.”

  Hope igniting, Cydney opened the attached file.

  “See that item, quote, consultant fees, unquote? Eight thousand smackeroos. Enough to buy a small car, or a trip to Jupiter. They’ve been paying out a sum like that every month for fourteen months, going back to March 2286. And better yet, this Dr. Eliezer James character has signed off on the payments personally.”

  “Consultant fees,” Cydney snorted joyfully. “That’s the oldest scam in the book.”

  “He’s either embezzling the university’s moolah, with the connivance of the whole lab. Or they’re being blackmailed.”

  “Blackmail!” Cydney whooped, jumping off the bed in mid-massage. “Now we’re talking!”

  “I said the university’s moolah,” continued Aidan’s imperturbable voice, transmitted fourteen minutes ago from Earth. “But there’s some doubt about that. If you look at the astrophysics lab’s budget, there are some shady incoming payments, too. Also passed off as consulting fees. So pulling it all together, it may be that we’re looking at a money laundering operation.”

  “Money laundering!” Cydney shrieked in ecstasy. “This is it! I’m gonna get him!” She stopped, remembering that Elfrida was in the other room. Elfrida wouldn’t have heard her exclamations, immersed in her virtual farm, but … “Babe?”

  “However, there’s another wrinkle: the incoming payments are bigger than the outgoing so-called consultant fees. But they’re highly irregular. They only started coming in six months back. The department is in the red …”

  Cydney muted Aidan’s voice. “Babe?” It would kind of suck if Elfrida had heard her gloating over Dr. James’s impending downfall. The issue had caused enough friction between them already. “Babeee, time to come back to reeealiteee!”

  She bounced into the other room.

  Elfrida was not there.

  Her stabilizer braces lay in a neat pile on the couch.

  She had taken her immersion kit with her, Cydney irrelevantly noticed.

  xi.

  Elfrida panted up the last stage of the ramp to the airlock, her immersion kit in its case under her arm. She had left her stabilizer braces at home, the better to attempt the climb to the airlock—fifteen kilometers, most of it at a killer gradient. The Bremen Lock was tucked up under the roof of the habitat. Kilometers below, soyclouds drifted like spinach pancakes in a rusty frying-pan. From up here, it was terrifyingly obvious that the little green paradise of the Bellicia ecohood lay at the bottom of a crater.

  Vertigo clawed at Elfrida, telling her she was going to fall off the road. Her exhalations soughed in her ears. She had taken one of the rebreather kits that were issued to everyone in the ecohood in case of emergency. It came in handy up here, where the air was Himalayan.

  “Goto!” Mendoza shouted thinly. He stood at the entrance to the airlock, waving.

  She labored up to him. The rover blinked its headlights.

  “This looks pretty good,” she said, when she could speak.

  The rover sat on three fat wheels, like a cross between a tricycle and a humvee. It had an antenna dish on the roof and several appendages drooping from the chassis like a shrimp’s feelers.

  “I’m still amazed they let us borrow it.”

  “Yeah,” Mendoza said, removing the mouthpiece of his rebreather to speak, and immediately plugging it back in again, as Elfrida had done. “But there’s a catch.”

  “University politics,” Elfrida said understandingly.

  The rover actually belonged to the geology lab, not the astrophysics lab. In the past, Dr. James had told them, the geology folks had refused to let anyone else use it. But in the wake of the raid on the astrophysics lab, STEM solidarity had prevailed. The geology lab had acceded to Dr. James’s plea that UNVRP be allowed to borrow the rover to search for the missing workstation.

  However, as Mendoza said, there was always a catch.

  “Do they want us to pick up some rock samples along the way, or something?”

  “Not exactly.”

  The rover unfolded an ladder from its rump. They climbed up, through a cramped airlock with both ends open, into the even-more-cramped interior.

  “Hi,” said a skinny teenage girl with saucer-sized eyes, smiling shyly.

  “Oh,” Elfrida said. “I see.” The girl was clinging to the interior roll bars like a monkey, her short skirt hanging down, revealing panties with hearts on them. �
��Who are you?”

  “Rurumi-chan dessuuu!” the girl said. “Hajimemashite!”

  Elfrida stiffened. She was half-Japanese, her father a pureblood who’d been born in Japan before the Mt. Fuji eruption. She spoke the language pretty well. But it offended her that this—this bot—should assume she did, and try to establish some kind of special connection with her on that basis.

  She spoke in a growl. “Whoever the fuck you are. That. Isn’t. Funny.”

  Mendoza said, “Chill, Goto. It’s just a phavatar.”

  “I can see that.”

  The girl was a sub-geminoid phavatar. No one would mistake it for human. Its limbs were pencil-thin, its eyes took up half its face, its nose was a nub, and its mane of blue hair billowed like a living thing, tangling around Mendoza’s fingers as he familiarized himself with the rover’s controls. “Can you, like, put your hair up, or something?” he said to it.

  “Sure!” Rurumi blinked appealingly at Elfrida. “Would you help me? I love your pigtails! They’re so kawaii!”

  Elfrida shouted into its face, “Hello, hello! Anyone home?”

  “Bollocks,” Rurumi said, in the same piping voice, but with a completely different intonation. “Yeah, hey there. Don’t blow a gasket. Gregor Lovatsky, assistant professor, xeno-geology. This is Rurumi and she’ll be your escort on this adventure. Notice I didn’t say chaperone. She’s just along for the ride.”

  Elfrida said to Mendoza, “That probably means she’s authorized to take control of the rover if we get into trouble.”

  “How did you guess?” said Gregor Lovatsky, in Rurumi’s shrill voice. “Yeah well, it is our rover. And we want to help out, but, y’know, you have got a reputation for recklessness, Ms. Goto.”

  “This isn’t a reckless adventure,” Elfrida said, still able to convince herself of that. Pretty much. “We’re just going to look for the missing workstation. If we run into any trouble, we’ll turn around and come home.”

  Mendoza bent his head to the controls.

  “That’s great,” Lovatsky said. “But the phavatar’s still going with you.”

  Ahead of the rover’s slit-like windshield, the Bremen Lock wheezed open, its lips retracting into the road and the roof. The rover bumped into the airlock’s chamber. Its engine was noiseless, battery-powered, but the cabin’s air circulation made a loud whooshing noise when it started up. Elfrida took her rebreather off.

  “Couldn’t you have sent a different phavatar?” she said. “It’s like, you’re making fun of us here. Haven’t you got anything that would be more suitable for surface exploration?”

  “Rurumi’s perfectly capable,” Lovatsky said huffily. Then he admitted, “Anyway, we don’t have another phavatar. Rurumi doesn’t even belong to the lab. She’s my personal property.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Funding constraints.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Wheeee!” cried Rurumi, as the rover emerged onto the surface of Vesta.

  ★

  Lights sparkled in the foothills of Bellicia Crater, limning the small spaceport that served Bellicia and the nearby Arruntia Crater. Elfrida had heard that Virgin Atomic was going to turn Arruntia Crater into another ecohood, but the project had never gotten off the ground.

  Rurumi proved her worth by communicating with the spaceport’s hub and asserting to its satisfaction that they were just geologists on a sampling expedition. Elfrida didn’t say anything. Mendoza turned the rover towards the equator.

  Tracks in the dust gave the impression of a road to follow, although Mendoza was navigating by satellite. The terrain of Vesta’s northern hemisphere was hilly. In many places, where the top layer of dust had been disturbed, the regolith looked as slick as glass. It was glass—volcanic glass. Unlike other asteroids, Vesta had been resurfaced in the comparatively recent past—only about four billion years ago—by flows of basaltic magma. Since then, rotational rock slumping and impact-triggered seismic activity had caused many landslides, creating stair-step slopes that the rover had to bounce down, using its appendages as ski poles.

  Elfrida was feeling car-sick by the time they stopped for the night. Day had dawned twice since they set out and now it was noon. The sun floated like a split pea in the blackness, winking occasionally when a satellite passed across it. Everything up there would have seen the rover by now. That was OK. They had a cover story: the sampling expedition.

  What they didn’t have was a tent. They’d brought EVA suits, but had opted to do without the inflatable shelter that the geologists used on longer expeditions. Mendoza curled up in the driver’s seat. Elfrida decided to sleep outside. She struggled into one of the geology lab’s EVA suits. Its mesh of shape-memory alloy snuggled around her body, providing an automatic customized fit. But in order to fit a range of body sizes, the suit had a pliable outer layer, not a hard shell, and rocks poked into her back all night long. The rim of the helmet also dug into the back of her neck. Micro-gravity was no panacea against physical discomfort. Lying awake, she stared up at the stars. The suit’s GPS told her she happened to be looking in the direction of Gap 2.5.

  Who—or what—was out there on 99984 Ravilious? Were they laughing, right now, at the feeble antics of Elfrida, and the Space Corps, and UNVRP, and Star Force, and everyone else who could have brought them to justice, but had failed to do so, through self-interest or the fear of bad publicity, or just because they thought someone else would take care of it?

  (That would be me, she recognized miserably.)

  Or were they not the sort of people who laughed at anything?

  Were they, perhaps, not people at all?

  Elfrida thought about Mars. Nowadays, a weird geometrical jungle of stone and iron defaced the planet’s surface, photographed in bits and pieces over the decades by unmanned sats before they, inevitably, got fragged. Everyone in the system knew those pictures. But who—or what—populated the PLAN’s strange cities? What unblinkingly watched Earth from those sky-piercing ziggurats, bathed in a blizzard of radiation?

  Elfrida shuddered. She curled on her side and tried to get comfortable. After a while, she crawled under the rover and tried to sleep there.

  “I am not doing this again,” she said to Mendoza when enough time had passed that she could legitimately give up.

  He looked wan. “Me neither. This seat is really uncomfortable.”

  “The ground isn’t any better. Let’s get moving.”

  Rurumi had spent most of their rest break running around on the surface, doing geology stuff. As the rover bounced into motion, she lodged herself in what seemed to be her favorite position—hanging upside-down by her knees from the roll bars—and sang to herself in Japanese. Elfrida shot her a look. If looks were made of ionized plasma, the phavatar would have been slagged.

  Mendoza plucked Elfrida’s sleeve, pulling her head towards his. “She came on to me,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “I’m not kidding. It was right after you went outside. She started rubbing up against me and uh, you know.”

  “Did you …?”

  “What do you take me for? I told her to get fragged, in no uncertain terms. Then I texted Lovatsky to keep his hands to himself. He said it was her, not him. I told him, if she tries for sex with every male she meets, you’re not gonna have her for long.”

  “Damn straight. Ew, Mendoza.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, we won’t have to bunk with her tonight, thank dog.”

  “I just hope these miners are as friendly as they’re supposed to be.”

  Dr. James had gotten his lawyer to call ahead and alert Virgin Resources, the mining subsidiary of Virgin Atomic, to their arrival. Elfrida had been unsure about this, since she and Mendoza suspected that VA were complicit in the theft of the workstation. They’d be asking the miners for help in solving a crime they might have committed themselves. But Dr. James had pointed out that they wouldn’t get far on the surface without VA’s acquiescence. He had a point.r />
  And as the rover sailed downhill towards the hydrogen refinery, Elfrida felt glad they’d taken Dr. James’s advice. The cluster of habs, which had looked so shabby from outer space, projected a welcoming radius of light. A proper bed, a massage, a shower, and something to eat that didn’t come out of a pouch, all sounded good to her right now.

  They passed the refinery. Titanic handler bots flailed long arms against the stars. Rubble-haulers, arriving overland from the open pit mines, queued for unloading. With weirdly graceful movements, the handler bots tossed the nets of rubble into the feed chute of a giant autoclave. Tanks of liquefied hydrogen lined the siding where the launch cradle would park when it arrived. Each tank was the size of a three-storey building.

  Mendoza got on the radio.

  “C’mon in!” a male voice answered. “Yo, is Rurumi there?”

  “Sure am!” chirped the phavatar. Elfrida and Mendoza exchanged a look.

  “Can’t wait to smooch ya, girl! ‘Bout time you brought some friends to see us!”

  The voice directed them to the electricity pumping station behind the habs, where they left the rover recharging its batteries. Wearing their borrowed EVA suits, they picked their way through a litter of rubble, scraps of microcable nets, and machine parts. Rurumi danced ahead of them, suitless.

  She was embraced by a bulky figure standing in the door of the biggest hab, similarly suitless.

  He waved to the two humans, and the same friendly voice as before crackled in their ears. “Yo there! Let’s paaartay!”

  “Oh brother,” Mendoza said.

  “I,” Elfrida said, “am going to kill Dr. James.”

  The refinery was crewed by phavatars.

  ★

  Susceptible, unlike phavatars, to weariness, the deleterious effects of micro-gravity, and sheer gloom, the two humans sat in a corner of the hab’s central room, watching the bots do the Ganymede Fling to a soundtrack of what sounded like beluga whales mating with a bevy of thrash-metal guitarists. Rurumi twirled and somersaulted from one set of arms to the next. Few of the phavatars were as exquisite as she. Sub-geminoids with various custom tools fitted, they looked more like cyborgs than humanoids. However, they all disported themselves zealously. It was clear that their operators, wherever they were—Elfrida hadn’t been able to get a straight answer to that question—were steadily getting drunk to the point of incapacity.