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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Mendoza?”

  He looked up from his tablet. “Sorry. I was just trying to figure whether we could jump it.”

  “It’s three kilometers wide!”

  “Just the canyon at the bottom. That’s only a hundred and eight meters. We could get down there no problem. But I don’t think it’s gonna work. We’re too heavy.” He went back to air-typing.

  Elfrida used her contacts—piggybacking on the rover’s uplink—to check the view from the UNVRP comms satellite. Orbiting sedately in its geostationary posture, it could see the refinery they had left behind ten hours ago. The launch cradle was there. The handler bots were loading it with tanks of liquid hydrogen big enough to be visible from space.

  If we’d stayed at the refinery, I might have been able to get onto the Vesta Express and have a look around.

  But she didn’t know how she would have managed that. She had no plan for gaining access to the train. That was why she’d gone along with Mendoza’s alternate plan to go have a look at Rheasilvia Crater.

  Which wasn’t going to happen, either, if they couldn’t get across this graben.

  “You know what might work?” Mendoza said.

  “I bet you’re going to tell me.”

  He did.

  ★

  “This,” said Elfrida, “is seriously crazy.”

  “I think the word you want is ‘audacious.”

  “Already spinning our gruesome and unnecessary deaths, huh?”

  Elfrida perched on the nose of the rover, holding very tightly to a carbon fiber cable, which was wrapped around the winch on the rover’s rear end. Her end of the cable was tethered to her suit. So she didn’t have to hold onto it. But she felt better that way.

  “Ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Then here goes nothing,” Mendoza said.

  The rover tilted over the rim of the graben and began to descend the 60° slope.

  Backwards.

  From her perch on the nose of the rover, Elfrida had a better view of their descent than she really wanted. The rover slid down the volcanic scarps with its brakes locked. When it came to sheer drops, it simply sailed over them, landing several meters below and rebounding into the vacuum, which took it over the next drop, and so on. Elfrida gave up clinging to the cable, and clung instead to the chassis, her teeth jarring in her skull at every impact. Mendoza was not using the ski-pole arms to arrest their descent. He was pushing off with them. The point of this descent was to build up as much speed as possible.

  In a sudden, beautiful accident of perspective, false-colored by Elfrida’s faceplate filter, the walls of the graben framed the Milky Way.

  The black abyss of the ringrail canyon hurtled up at her.

  “Oh God,” she gulped.

  And the rover stopped dead.

  Mendoza had driven the drilling attachment into the rock, its artificial diamond tip dragging deep and finally halting the rover on the very edge of the canyon.

  The rover’s nose snapped upwards, all three wheels leaving the ground.

  Like a mangonel of yore, it catapulted Elfrida across the canyon.

  Mendoza had calculated the heck out of her probable ballistic trajectory. He had shown her that her momentum would be more than sufficient to carry her to the other side, given that she weighed less than two kilos in her spacesuit, and air friction was zero. The x-factor would be their velocity at the moment when the rover crash-braked, but Mendoza had said he would try to get it as high as possible. “So you’re saying it’ll be like a car crash,” Elfrida had summarized. “And I’ll be the one who wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.”

  “Uh, yeah. Pretty much.”

  Now she flew / fell through the vacuum, while Vesta’s minimal gravity warred with Newton’s first law of motion. I am going to be sick, she thought. The canyon yawned beneath her. Her helmet’s infrared filter lit up the maglev track. The other side of the canyon approached. Instinctively trying to make herself more aerodynamic, she stretched out her arms and legs in what was commonly called the Superman pose. “Yee-ha!” she screamed. “Look at me!”

  She belly-flopped onto the regolith, a body-length beyond the edge of the canyon.

  “You OK there, Goto?”

  She sat up to see Mendoza standing outside the rover on the other side of the canyon. “Oh my dog, Mendoza, I made it. I made it!”

  “I knew you would. Smile.” He waited a beat. “Were you really doing the Superman pose?”

  “Did I look cool? Uh huh, uh huh.”

  “I guess. But, Goto, you are aware there’s no air here, right? So it doesn’t matter whether you’re aerodynamic or not.”

  “Oh, frag off. Are you coming across, or what?”

  Mendoza attached a hand drill to the cable and flung it across the trench. She reeled it in. The drill served as an anchor to make a basic zipline. Running the cable through a carabiner on the handle of the drill, she threw its end back to him. He then set about unloading the rover and sending everything over to her along the line.

  “Careful with my immersion kit!”

  “I am being careful. Why’d you bring this, anyway?”

  “I thought I might have some free time to get a bit of work done,” Elfrida said ruefully.

  She was sweating in her suit, sucking frequently at the nipple in her helmet that vended a peculiarly nasty grapefruit-flavored rehydration drink. Micro-gee notwithstanding, lifting and hauling and dragging was work. Not her kind of work, but the kind of work that their medieval ancestors had done on a daily basis. Sweat tickled her neck inside her helmet, where she couldn’t wipe it away. Finally Mendoza was ready to come across. He clipped onto the line and jumped, legs cycling, arms flailing.

  “Ho ho, hee hee,” Elfrida cackled. “Look, I took a picture of you.” She flipped it over the data channel to him as he crashed into the edge of the canyon and hauled himself up. “Remember, Mendoza, there’s no air here, so waving your arms like a drowning man doesn’t really make you move any faster. Not that it would on Earth, either.”

  He did not respond to her gibe. He lunged at the winch, which he’d unbolted from the rover and sent across separately, and began to fiddle with the cable, reattaching it.

  “Mendoza? What’re you doing?”

  “Gotta get the rover across the trench.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Now. Track’s vibrating. The rail launcher is coming.”

  Elfrida did not need to hear this twice. When loaded, the rail launcher stuck up above the top of the canyon. It would hit their zipline.

  “This cable’s got a tensile strength rating of three hundred GPA,” Mendoza said, looping it around the winch. “The Vesta Express will be going at Mach 2 when it gets here. I’m seeing this vision of the cable slicing through the tops of the tanks and spraying liquid hydrogen all over the sky.”

  “Surely the drill bits would just get jerked out of the regolith?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Thus hitting the rail launcher and potentially damaging it. Virgin Atomic would not be happy with us after that. We could wave goodbye to our chances of exploring Rheasilvia Crater.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Crank.”

  Since it was no longer connected to the rover, the winch had no electrical power. They had to crank it like a windlass, using the manual handle that was meant to be for emergencies only. Well, this was one. The drum took up the slack. The rover lurched forward and dived into the canyon.

  “It won’t hit the bottom. It’ll just—oh, shit!”

  The winch scooted towards the precipice, taking Mendoza with it. Elfrida lunged at him and grabbed his legs. She managed to hook one knee around the hand drill, which was still anchored in the regolith, arresting their slide.

  “Keep winching!” she cried. “I’ve got you!”

  Lying on the ice-rink-smooth rock, she could feel it vibrating under her. The Vesta Express couldn’t be far away.

  Mendoza cranked frantically. �
�Susmaryosep! It’s stuck on something! No, I’ve got it!”

  The rover rose over the lip of the precipice, its headlights glowing, like a googly-eyed sea creature emerging from the deep.

  Elfrida’s heads-up display notified her that the left knee of her suit, the one wrapped around the drill, was being slowly sliced open by the razor-edges of the drill bit; in a few seconds she’d have a suit breach.

  Mendoza winched the rover the rest of the way up and fell on it, gibbering in relief.

  The ground throbbed. In a split-second blaze of light, the Vesta Express whipped by at a speed slightly greater than 2,000 kilometers per hour. The tops of the hydrogen tanks in the launch cradle rose out of the trench, as did the engine. It was like being passed, at twice the speed of sound, by a string of warehouses coupled to the Guggenheim Museum.

  Elfrida struggled to integrate all the data her suit was showering her with. First and foremost was the imminent breach at the back of her left knee. She got on that.

  Mendoza knelt in a quasi-prayerlike attitude, his faceplate turned in the direction where the Vesta Express’s tail-lights had vanished. “How do you think they cope with that?”

  “What?” Elfrida said. She sat in an awkward position, squeezing splart onto the back of her knee.

  “The refinery crew. The R&D guys. Whoever else lives in the hab modules. What’s it like to continuously travel around the world, slowing down and speeding up in accord with the launch schedule?”

  “They probably don’t even notice,” Elfrida said tartly. “If they’ve got spin gravity in there, a little accel/decel would be nothing. What I don’t understand is why they don’t just park the hab modules at the refinery, or somewhere.”

  “Because the rail launcher would crash into them. It goes all the way around the equator to build up speed. Launch speed is something like Mach 4.”

  “Oh.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Fixing my suit.”

  “Are you … putting splart on it?”

  “Yeah. I know it’s got self-repair functionality, but I don’t trust it. Splart, you can trust.”

  “Um,” Mendoza said.

  “Splart is good stuff. I once visited a rubble-pile asteroid hab that was made of splart. Nothing else between them and the vaccum. It worked fine.” It had worked for the residents of 11073 Galapagos until the PLAN nuked them, anyway.

  “Yeah, but when it hardens …”

  “Done,” Elfrida said. She stood up. The splart fill had locked her suit’s left knee joint at a permanently bent angle.

  “What I was going to say,” Mendoza sighed.

  “Oh, crap on it! Bother, bother, bother! Fuckadoodle-doo!” Elfrida swore at her own stupidity. All she’d been thinking about was getting that near-breach fixed. Here was another legacy of 11073 Galapagos: an overly sensitive panic button lodged inside her head. She made to stamp her foot in irritation, and overbalanced sideways.

  “Not laughing,” Mendoza said. “Not laughing.”

  “Laugh all you like, dorkbucket,” Elfrida snarled. But sitting on her ass, with the rover and all their gear safely on their side of the canyon, she saw the funny side. “All right, fine! I’m laughing, too.”

  “‘Fuckadoodle-doo,’ Goto?”

  “Haven’t you ever said that? Fucka-fucka-fucka; it sounds like a chicken.”

  “‘Dorkbucket’?”

  “Oh, I got that one from my dad. He’s into ancient slang. It means someone who works in data analysis.”

  They quieted, and began to pack up their gear. Elfrida had to hop on her right leg. She couldn’t wait to get into the rover and get this suit off.

  “By the way, what was that you said, Mendoza? When you thought the rover was stuck?”

  “I don’t remember saying anything except ‘shit.’”

  “You did. It sounded like susmaryep. I was just thinking, you’ve got some funny swear words of your own.”

  “Oh, that,” Mendoza said. “It’s Tagalog. Susmaryosep. It’s just something we say, like ‘Oh, crap.’”

  A funny little chill passed over Elfrida. “Susmaryosep?”

  “Yeah: Jesus, Mary, Joseph.”

  “Mendoza, that isn’t Tagalog. That’s the names of the Christian God and, you know, his parents. Or I guess, his mother and his stepfather.”

  “Is it?” Mendoza’s voice was a shade too casual. “Well, how about that? I don’t know anything about religion.”

  Elfrida swallowed. She picked up her immersion kit and stuffed it into the cargo net. “I’ve got another question,” she said.

  But before she could ask it, Mendoza let out a shout. “Look at that!”

  Elfrida whirled.

  On the far side of the trench, someone was scrambling down the wall of the canyon the same way they’d come. The person’s limbs were spindly, but moved with mechanical precision. He/she was balancing something on his/her shoulder which looked like a rocket launcher.

  “Helloo-oo!”

  It was not a person. It was Rurumi.

  “Well, this is just great,” Mendoza said. “She caught up.”

  “Is that a rocket launcher? Mendoza, maybe we’d better get under cover—”

  But Rurumi had not come to frag them. The object on her shoulder was a harpoon gun of the type used by spaceport crews for retrieving stray cargo. She unlimbered it and fired. The harpoon arced across the trench, trailing a length of cable, and struck near the rover. The bulb of splart on its tip burst on impact, gluing it to the rock.

  Splart, as Elfrida had mentioned, was powerful stuff. Known as the superglue of the space age, it hardened rapidly in sub-zero temperatures to the consistency of titanium. Rurumi pulled the cable taut and splarted her end of it to the regolith.

  “We should have thought of that,” Mendoza said.

  “Yeah, although I wouldn’t have wanted to use up all the splart in our repair kits.”

  Calmly, Rurumi strolled across the rope like a tightrope-walker. Her short skirt swirled and her hair rippled in the micro-gravity.

  “I feel irradiated just looking at her,” Mendoza commented.

  “Their skulls are five centimeters thick. The rest is mechanical.”

  With a gratuitous stumble, Rurumi stepped off the cable and lowered her head to them. She wrung her hands, knees knocking. “Don’t leave me behind again! Please. Onegai.” She raised her face, saucer-like eyes brimming with stars. “Isn’t we a team?” she lisped.

  “Well,” Mendoza started.

  Elfrida elbowed him out of the way. “Can the act, Lovatsky. You would have tried to stop us from getting this far. But now we’ve got the rover over here, so—”

  “No, I wouldn’t have tried to stop you,” Gregor Lovatsky, B.Sc., MA, said in the phavatar’s voice. “Don’t you get it? I don’t know how you managed to get the rover across the ringrail, but it can’t have been easy. It would have been much easier if you’d waited for Rurumi. As she just demonstrated.”

  “All right, Lovatsky,” Mendoza interrupted. “Why don’t you tell us what your game is?”

  “Well, if you’d hung out at the refinery a bit longer,” Lovatsky started. At threatening coughs from both Elfrida and Mendoza, the phavatar tittered and played with its hair. “All right, all right. What you apparently don’t know is that Virgin Resources and the Big Dig are separate projects. They’re even incorporated separately. Both are subsidiaries of Virgin Atomic, but there’s next to no contact between them, and the guys at the refinery have no idea what’s going on in Rheasilvia Crater”

  “Oh,” Elfrida said. “I’m starting to get it.”

  “A while back, a bunch of the refinery crew decided to hike south and have a look for themselves. That was when the Big Dig instituted an area-exclusion policy which has been enforced ever since with extreme prejudice. They zapped a couple of phavatars from space. Their own guys!”

  “Uh huh,” Elfrida said. “OK. And you think they won’t zap us?”

  “That’s right
,” Lovatsky said. “Because you work for the UN. So I took the liberty of bringing this along.” Rurumi danced over to the rover and dug in the cargo net under the chassis. She brought out a bundle of fabric which she unfolded into a giant UNESCO flag. “Stick this on the roof,” she said from beneath the blue and white folds.

  “Did you bogart that from the peacekeepers?” Elfrida said.

  “Guilty,” the phavatar said. “But you get the idea, right? Now we’re here, we change our cover story. This isn’t a geology mission anymore, it’s a UN inspection.”

  “Uh, we don’t work for UNESCO,” Mendoza said.

  “Dude,” Lovatsky said. “Who’s gonna know?”

  xiv.

  A gaggle of Virgin Atomic satellites danced in their respective orbits, never colliding, constantly communicating, like a flock of starlings.

  In theory, a human comms officer monitored each of the satellites. But the flesh is weak. Telenovels, solitaire, role-playing games, news feeds, and online dating sites beckoned. To compensate for these inevitable lapses, each satellite was equipped with a machine intelligence smart enough to do its operator’s job.

  “Looks like they’re heading south,” said the satellite belonging to the de Grey Institute, as Virgin Atomic’s R&D division was pretentiously named. To be accurate, this is what it would have said if it had used human language. “Over to you, big guy.”

  The largest satellite in this dispersed flock occupied a geostationary orbit that gave it a bird’s-eye view of the Rheasilvia crater. This was the machine that Mendoza had identified as an orbital gun platform. Its actual descriptor was Precision Orbital Risk Management System (PORMS). Many such systems orbited Earth and Luna, where they were referred to as “cops in the sky.” This accurately described their baseline functionality. This PORMS’s settings had been retooled so that it behaved more like a bouncer at a scuzzy nightclub where the drinks were electrified and black tech dealers hung out in the toilets. In response to its colleague’s salutation, it said nothing.

  “Who are they, anyway?” said another of the satellites, this one operated by Virgin Resources. It was being disingenuous.

  “Didn’t you get their IDs when they visited the refinery?” said the de Grey Institute.