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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Probably doing drugs, too,” Mendoza said. “Look at that guy.” The phavatar in question was trying to burrow into the wall of the hab with his head.

  “It’s a thing,” Elfrida said. “Party hearty from the comfort of your sofa. Let your phavatar have all the fun, while you get the hangover. I don’t understand it, personally.”

  “I wonder where the operators are.”

  “In orbit?”

  “Maybe back in the Bellicia ecohood. Virgin Atomic’s regional HQ is there in the middle of town.”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  “Anyway, they must be close. Zero latency.”

  Had the operators been running their phavatars from any great distance, they’d have been crashing into each other left and right. Well, more than they were already. More tellingly, they interacted with the humans without any perceptible delay.

  “C’mon, have a drink!” insisted the large male-styled phavatar who had greeted them. It looked like the vid star Marmaduke Shagg. “We mixed this fruit punch specially for you! Real ingredients!”

  Elfrida accepted a pouch out of politeness, and to make Marmaduke go away. But then she asked on a whim, “Have you had any other human visitors recently?”

  “Yo! None! That’s why this is such a special occasion for us!”

  “I was just wondering why you had real vodka and fruit juice on hand.”

  “Rurumi comes up here sometimes by herself. And when we’re thusly honored by her presence, we like to give her a little pressie to take home with her! Courtesy of VA, dig?” Marmaduke winked, and wove back into the throng.

  “Lovatsky, you dog,” Mendoza said. “A luxury goods procurement scam. Guess holistically fermented mead with algae foam doesn’t always do the trick, huh?”

  “I’m not sure I believe that,” Elfrida said. “I think maybe someone else was here recently, and brought their own merrymaking supplies.” She tasted the contents of the pouch, and then closed it. “I don’t care for thieves’ leftovers.”

  “You think the workstation might really be here?”

  “No.” She floated to her feet. “Shall we go outside?”

  They explained that they were going to retrieve their stuff from the rover, and crawled back into their EVA suits.

  The silence of Elfrida’s helmet was a relief after the deafening music. She said, “The thing is, realistically, the workstation could be anywhere by now. There’s plenty of foot traffic back and forth from the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport, and we don’t have data on who’s been going in and out. Only Facilities Management has that. The thieves could have put the workstation in a box, walked it down to the spaceport, and put it on a ship to anywhere in the solar system.”

  “You would hope the peacekeepers are investigating that angle,” Mendoza said.

  Elfrida sniffed. “Also, it might be at the bottom of Olbers Lake.”

  “Or in the recycling.”

  “Yeah. If it was so badly smashed up they couldn’t get the data off it. But from what I saw, it wasn’t totaled, just damaged. So we have to assume they took it somewhere to repair it. And now that I’ve seen these guys, I personally wouldn’t trust them with my electronics.”

  Mendoza’s faceplate tilted towards the refinery. If Vesta had had an atmosphere, the crash and slam of tonnes of rock being thrown around would have been deafening. As it was, the handler bots made a balletic, if violent, spectacle.

  “I want to go look at Rheasilvia Crater,” Mendoza said.

  “I want to go look at the train.”

  They walked back to the rover and, by common consent, retrieved a couple of packaged meals. The prospect of getting anything real to eat out of the refinery crew had dwindled to a remote unlikelihood.

  When they went back into the hab, the phavatars were having sex.

  Metal and plastic bodies intertwined. Clothes drifted like autumn leaves across the floor. Chrome hips pumped, and stretchy rubber mouths gobbled at appendages that …

  Elfrida looked away, but not before she had spotted Rurumi at the center of the orgy, her tiny, fragile body being penetrated by Marmaduke and two other phavatars, while she, in turn—

  “Uh, can we get out of here?” Elfrida said.

  Mendoza was staring, open-mouthed. She elbowed him.

  “Mendoza. C’mon. This is gross.”

  “Rurumi’s got a dick.”

  “I saw. Let’s vamoose.”

  “That one’s got tentacles.”

  “I know. Please, let’s go.”

  “Yeah, sure, OK.”

  They hadn’t taken their EVA suits off, so there was no need to put them back on. As they retreated to the airlock, Marmaduke unplugged himself from the fray and bounded at them. “Guys! You’re not going?”

  “This isn’t our kind of thing,” Mendoza said.

  “Oh, don’t be a party pooper,” Marmaduke cooed, stroking Mendoza’s arm through his suit. “Look, FWIW, I’m a woman. My name’s Sharlene. I’m watching you from the Vesta Express, and boy, you’re so hot. You’re totally turning me on. I’m as hard as hell. Look!” Marmaduke/Sharlene attempted to guide Mendoza’s glove downwards.

  Mendoza yanked his arm back. “I don’t do men, I don’t do women pretending to be men, I don’t do phavatars, I don’t do orgies, and let me see, what else? I don’t do tentacle sex. I think that just about covers it.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Gonna sleep in the car.”

  “But we pressurized this hab just for you!” Marmaduke cried, sweeping an arm around the low-ceilinged, ribby-walled room. The hab would have been about as appealing as a cardboard box under a bridge, even if it had not currently been echoing to the sound of pornographic groans. “It took ages to get all the dust out!”

  “Well, you can depressurize it again now,” Mendoza said. “See you in the morning.”

  He joined Elfrida in the chamber of the airlock. As they plodded back towards the rover, Elfrida broke the silence. “Did you hear what she said? She was watching us from the Vesta Express. That must be what they call the train.”

  “Yeah, makes sense that’s where the operators are. I heard they’ve got a real hab in the passenger compartment, with spin gravity.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  Silence fell again. They got into the rover and took off their EVA suits. Elfrida felt deeply embarrassed by what they’d just seen. She was searching for another topic when Mendoza said thoughtfully, “I’m kind of surprised …”

  “What?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I would have thought you’d go for it.”

  “You mean—me—with them? Dog! Mendoza! Don’t you know me at all?”

  As she spoke, she remembered that no, he didn’t really know her, and she didn’t really know him, either.

  “Like I said, sorry. I just had the impression that you’re the free and easy type. It’s interesting to know you’re not like that.” He hitched a shoulder. “Kind of good to know.”

  Elfrida wanted to ask how he’d got that impression. Was it because she lived with Cydney? How did that equate to free and easy? It was funny that he could have thought that of her, when she used to be considered the most uptight chick on Botticelli Station, and in fact, she still thought of herself that way. But she was too uncomfortable to probe the subject any further.

  “Well, I’m glad you didn’t go for it, either,” she said. “Even though Rurumi is cute.”

  “She’s a moe-class. They’re designed to be cute. Would be cuter if she weren’t a hermaphrodite, though. Ugh, Lovatsky! Talk about hidden … lengths.” Mendoza opened his meal pouch, squeezed, and sniffed. “Fettucine alfredo. I am not a fan. Oh well, it’s calories.”

  Elfrida opened her own meal pouch. The picture of salmon meunière on the label did not bear much resemblance to the contents. “Dean Garcia’s secretary is a hermaphrodite,” she said.

  “I know. There’s a bunch of them running around campus. Probably because of the PHCTBS
Studies program.”

  “That’s what the H stands for.”

  “What’s the rest of it, again? I always forget.”

  Elfrida ticked off on her fingers. “Phavatarism, Hermaphroditism, Cyborgism, Transhumanism, Bestialism, and Spaceborn Studies. I always think it must kind of irk the spaceborn to be lumped in there. Cydney thinks so, too.”

  “All those isms. It really is a hothouse of ideology out here.”

  Elfrida sucked on her drink pouch—iced tea; it didn’t go well with the salmon meuniere. Whoever stocked the rover must have tossed handfuls of pouches in without looking at the labels. “I know,” she said. Her heart was pounding. This conversation was an order of magnitude more intimate than if they’d carried on talking about sex. “Remember you once said, do you ever feel like you’re a long way from home? Well, that’s when I do. When I’m around Cydney’s friends. They’ve all got so many … ideas.”

  Mendoza nodded. Seated in the driver’s couch, he twiddled the manual dial of the radio, meaninglessly—it wasn’t on. “But you’ve worked in space before.”

  “Yeah, but I was on Botticelli Station, and before that I was on Luna, and that’s a lot closer to Earth. Well, no, that wouldn’t explain it. I don’t know why this place is the way it is.”

  “I’ve got a theory about that,” Mendoza said, still twiddling. He was doing it, she realized, as an excuse not to look at her. “It’s because there’s only seven UN people here, counting us.”

  “And the blue berets. But why would that make such a big difference?”

  “They’re not the ones who are different. We are.”

  “I don’t get you. I don’t think it’s very different to be non-ideological.”

  Mendoza swung around and pointed at her. He had a strange, embarrassed smirk on his face. “But you work for the UN. And, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do your parents work for the UN, too?”

  “How did you know? My mom does. And actually, her mother did, too. And my grandfather on my father’s side. And my paternal grandmother, although she was just a TS who worked part-time.”

  “See! You’re a third-generation UN person. TS, trailing spouse. You even use the jargon.”

  “Well, what about you? Were your parents UN employees?”

  “Nope. That’s why I know the difference. I …” Mendoza hesitated. She saw him overcome the internal barrier to revealing personal information. “I grew up in the Philippines. Nth-generation hapa pilipino prole. My dad wasn’t around. My mom worked in corporate IT. She was pretty proud when I landed a UN apprenticeship, and then a job.”

  “Guess you followed in her footsteps, in a way,” Elfrida said awkwardly. She never knew what to say when people revealed personal information. That was probably because it almost never happened outside of intimate relationships.

  “No, I didn’t. That’s the point. I moved to a different universe. I went from taking it for granted that, just for instance, parents are optional, to a culture where it’s almost weird if you don’t have two parents. I bet your parents are married, even.”

  Tomoki Goto and Ingrid Haller were going to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary this year. Elfrida was starting to feel vulnerable, picked-on. She realized that it was her own reference to her paternal grandparents that had made her feel that way, even though she hadn’t revealed that they were pureblooded Japanese, survivors of the Mt. Fuji eruption. “Well, so what?” she said. “Everyone’s allowed to make their own choices.”

  “Of course they are. That’s not my point. I’m just saying, the UN is a bubble. It thinks it’s the whole of humanity, but it isn’t. It’s stagnant, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s even gone backwards. Again, I don’t mean that in a bad way. But there hasn’t been any social progress on Earth for centuries.”

  “Oh, come on! Just look at the way you never used to see phavatars in public, and now they’re everywhere.”

  “Well, yeah, but I mean in general. There aren’t any isms on Earth. Liberal technocracy won, the end. That’s what people think. But the isms haven’t gone away. They’ve just been pushed out to the periphery, to the places where the UN doesn’t totally dominate. Like the Philippines.”

  The Philippines were only an affiliate of the UN, not a full member state, as were most countries within China’s sphere of influence.

  “Like the asteroids. Like Mercury. Like the Jovian moons. Like random little enclaves in space where people stay on-station for years because of corporate penny-pinching, and get all incestuous and weird,” Mendoza went on relentlessly. “Like here.”

  “I don’t think having phavatar orgies is an ism.”

  “Oh, what is it that the P in PHCTBS stands for, again?” Mendoza scoffed. Then he quieted. “Sorry. It’s just a theory, anyway, based on what I’ve seen on the job.”

  Elfrida, as a Space Corps agent, had seen even more. She’d visited dozens of asteroid colonies with fringey, freaky cultures that would never survive on Earth. So what Mendoza said rang true. It was just that she’d never conceived of lifestyles as ideologies. Mendoza was implying that lifestyle and ideology were two sides of the same coin, if they weren’t in fact the exact same thing. “I dunno,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “You don’t need to think about it,” Mendoza said, and added something else in a mumble that she couldn’t catch over the hum of the air circulation.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, go on, Mendoza, you said something.”

  “I said that you don’t have to think about it if it disturbs your complacent worldview. But that wasn’t fair. I know you’re not complacent.”

  Upset, Elfrida lapsed into Space Corps-speak. “I just think that everyone has a right to make their own choices.”

  “Of course they do.” Mendoza sighed. He stuffed his empty meal pouch into the recycling compactor and folded his arms behind his head, as if making ready to sleep, although that would have been an uncomfortable position to sleep in.

  “Well,” Elfrida said after a moment that felt way too long. “So much for getting a shower, a good meal, and a good sleep at the refinery, huh? Here we are sleeping in the rover, eating pouch noodles again. And I really ought to apologize for the way I probably smell at this point.”

  “Snigger. You don’t smell,” said Mendoza, who had begun to smell a bit ripe himself. He opened one eye. “Goto.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You just made me think.”

  “What?”

  “I figure Rurumi’s going to be busy for a while.”

  “Probably.”

  “And the rover’s batteries are fully recharged.”

  Elfrida’s heart started to pound again, for different reasons than before. “Mendoza, are you suggesting what I think you are?”

  “I guess that scene in there must’ve really twisted us up. I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before.”

  “Ditch her and head for the Vesta Express?”

  “Or for the Rheasilvia Crater.”

  “But what if she takes control of the rover remotely?”

  “If this thing had remote control functionality, they wouldn’t have needed to send her along in the first place.” Mendoza slapped the dashboard. “It’s not even smart. My desk is smarter.”

  “Then let’s go,” Elfrida said, bouncing gleefully. Her bounce carried her into the passenger seat.

  “Lovatsky, your predilection for hermaphroditic sex has undone you,” Mendoza said, hitting the button that disconnected the charging cable. “It’s like, if you’re into that kind of thing, man up and get the surgery. But hey. As you said, Goto. Freedom of choice.” The rover started to move. “The lesson he’ll take from this, if he’s got an IQ in the triple digits? There are good choices. And then there are dumb ones.”

  As the rover plunged into the Vestan night, Elfrida just hoped they weren’t making one of the latter.

  xii.

>   Cydney skipped her morning lecture and headed downtown, dressed in a mao jacket and microshorts that showed off her legs. (Critically, she noted that her legs were looking less toned these days. Oh well, there was always rehab.)

  Her team’s analysis of the data stolen by her scraper program had turned up some more nuggets. In addition to the evidence of money laundering, or possibly blackmail, related to the astrophysics lab, there was a fascinating sequence of emails involving the dean’s office, the university’s financial department, and an individual who worked at Virgin Atomic headquarters in downtown Bellicia.

  The town, at the head of Olbers Lake, wasn’t laid out on a sensible grid, but had grown organically into a sprawl of alleys defined by the odd shapes of the buildings. Cydney got lost, which was quite the feat in a town of no more than fifty thousand souls. She was no good at navigating without satellite guidance, which the Bellicia ecohood didn’t offer, owing to the thickness of the roof. Delicious and dubious scents drifted from restaurants prepping for the lunchtime rush. Monkeys leapt up and down the faces of the green buildings. Cydney wondered if they tasted good.

  She was warm from her walk by the time she reached VA headquarters, a low-slung green building with a lake view. The vegetable garden out front was the most ostentatious thing about the place.

  “So why did you try to sell the Arruntia crater to a corporation based on Ganymede?” she said to Jay Macdonald, the CFO of Virgin Atomic.

  Macdonald’s round face turned a shade more rubicund. He hadn’t been expecting that question. She had landed the interview on the pretext of doing a piece about soycloud technology development. But her curveball had clearly hit him square in the goolies.

  “No comment, Ms. Blaisze,” he said frostily.

  “You should have known you’d run into opposition from the university. They don’t want Christians moving in next door. It would degrade the cultural environment, and if VA had to provide life support for new colonists, it would divert important resources from U-Vesta’s educational mission.”