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

by Felix R. Savage

  “Order,” boomed a peacekeeper over the PA system. “Order in the court!”

  The protestors quieted down. The prosecutor, a meek man who ran a Goan restaurant in town, read out the charges. “The community of Bellicia,” he said, “opposes pre-trial release on the grounds that the accused represents a substantial flight risk.”

  Cheers greeted this statement. Cydney used her earlobe camera to zoom in on Dr. James’s face, capturing his dejected expression. She subvocalized commentary. She was uploading the hearing live to her feed. This was great stuff. So hokey!

  Shoshanna nudged her. “Hey, Cydney.”

  “What?”

  “I’m gonna step out for a few minutes. Can you keep me updated? If I don’t get back before the verdict, let me know which way it went.”

  “Just access my feed. Cydneyblaisze.cloud.”

  “Oh,” Shoshanna said. “OK.” She scriggled away through the crowd.

  ~So, I’ve often wondered. Maybe you have, too, Cydney said to her fans. ~What happens when you commit a crime in paradise? How does that criminal-justice thing work when there’s no government? Well, this is how it works in the Bellicia ecohood: the UN is represented by a prosecutor appointed by the Interplanetary Court of Justice. And given that crimes are pretty rare here, the prosecutor’s job is a part-time gig. Hence, I give you the spectacle of a mild-mannered restauranteur going up against a corporate lawyer with a five-figure hourly rate. Snerk!

  The Goan restauranteur laid out the prosecution’s case. He called only one witness: David Reid himself, who appeared as a phavatar to recount how he’d been shot. The Virgin Atomic lawyer challenged him repeatedly to explain the circumstances of the confrontation. The crowd grew restive. Finally, Dean Garcia shut down the lawyer’s line of questioning on the grounds that it was irrelevant. The phavatar—Win Khin’s second-best one—tottered off the stage and was seen no more.

  Then came the defense’s turn to explain why Dr. James should not be denied bail.

  “Your honor, I’d like to call a witness as a surety for the defense.”

  “Yes? Who?”

  “Elfrida Goto.”

  ★

  Five kilometers beneath Rheasilvia Mons, Elfrida had no way of knowing that her name had just been called. She and Mendoza were drinking tea in Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir’s office, which was decorated with photographs of Sigurjónsdóttir’s two small daughters. “They live with their father in London,” Sigurjónsdóttir explained. “I miss them awfully.”

  It was possible, in the culture of 2287, to use personal information as a weapon. If you didn’t mind revealing it, you could instantly put the other person at a disadvantage by forcing them to respond to remarks which had no correct answers.

  “Do you have any children of your own, John?”

  “I’m not married,” Mendoza said stiffly. “No.”

  “Elfrida?”

  “Me neither.”

  “Well, you’re young. There’s still time! They really light up your life.”

  “We’d like to talk about your apprenticeship program,” Mendoza blurted, making no pretense of a polite segue.

  “Oh, well, of course!”

  Elfrida flashed a grateful smile at Mendoza.

  “Let’s see.” Sigurjónsdóttir gestured, and one wall of the office turned into a whitescreen. “We launched the apprenticeship program in 2283, as a part of our commitment to holistic stakeholder involvement …”

  They sat through an hour of powerpoints with a high spin-to-information ratio. Elfrida, suppressing yawns, blinked over to slebsandplebs.cloud, only to have her contacts return the message NO SIGNAL. Oh. Of course. Duh.

  The final vid in Sigurjónsdóttir’s presentation featured the model village that stood on the other side of this cavern. Elfrida woke up. “So that’s actually the dormitory where your apprentices live? Wow. That’s pretty luxe. Could we have a look IRL?”

  Sigurjónsdóttir hesitated.

  Aha, Elfrida thought, and glanced at Mendoza. It was frustrating that with no access to the cavern’s wifi environment, they couldn’t communicate privately.

  “I don’t see why not,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. She floated to her feet. “Jimmy!” she said into an implanted throat mic. “Ms. Goto and Mr. Mendoza are coming over for the grand tour! Make sure Amy’s on her leash. Chuckle.” She hesitated again. “I do have to make one request, I’m afraid.”

  “What’s that?”

  “As I mentioned earlier, we have a rather strict information security policy here at the Big Dig. Now, while I would never suggest that UN agents might be complicit in IP theft, I also haven’t got the authority to exempt you from the checks that we do ask all visitors to undergo.”

  “Checks?”

  “Oh, just scans. The usual, really.”

  It was not usual at all to scan visitors to a corporate facility. In fact, since they had no way of knowing for sure what scans had been administered, it might be an invasion of their privacy. But obviously this was the price of getting any further.

  Elfrida left the decision up to Mendoza, since he was the one with a BCI. He fingered the port hidden in his hair over his left ear. “All right,” he said at last. “Meta only?”

  “Meta only,” Sigurjónsdóttir confirmed.

  They stepped in turn through a full-body scanner. On the other side of the scanner, they passed the open doors of offices where people were working, goofing off, and joking around.

  There was another airlock at the back of the hab cluster. Sigurjónsdóttir provided them with Virgin Atomic EVA suits from a communal locker. Elfrida was getting more and more frustrated by her inability to communicate in private with Mendoza. She wanted to say: Is it just me, or is it weird that they have to put on EVA suits to walk a hundred meters to the apprentices’ dormitory, and then take them off again? Why not join all the habs up?

  They walked towards the model village. People clumped in the airways that connected the mini-skyscrapers, staring down at them. As the trio approached, the pictures on the exterior walls rippled into life. Elfrida jumped.

  Giant girls flicked their shiny black hair. Titanic athletes showed off their running shoes. Snazzy electronic gadgets demonstrated their functions. And text, text was everywhere, scrolling and leaping and flashing. Only a very small proportion of the text was in English, or indeed in roman script; nearly all of it was Chinese.

  The blitz of images stopped both Elfrida and Mendoza in their tracks. “WTF?” Elfrida blurted.

  “Chuckle,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “Contributions from a few of our corporate partners! Don’t you think they liven the place up?”

  “I know what this is,” Mendoza said. “It’s advertising.”

  “Adver-what?” Elfrida said.

  “We’ve got it in the Philippines. Not in a major way, but some vids, some feeds, you have to watch a bunch of this stuff before you get to what you want.”

  “Why?”

  “To make you buy things you don’t need,” Mendoza said. “It’s illegal in the UN, I know that.”

  “That’s correct,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “And I’d like to stress that this isn’t, quote, advertising, unquote. These Your Homes! were donated by some of our corporate partners, including Empirical Solutions and Huawei Galactic, as you can see there, if you read Chinese. They come like this. There are no advertising fees involved.”

  They entered the airlock of the closest Your Home! and took off their EVA suits. The inner lock irised. A thin, sad-faced man stood at the head of a goggling crowd. He was holding a Jack Russell on a leash, so Elfrida knew who he was before he said, “Hi! Jimmy. Welcome to Liberty Rock.”

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” Elfrida shouted. The ‘advertising’ continued down the hall, strobing and flashing, now with noisy sound effects. No wonder it was illegal.

  “Thanks! Your Homes exclamation mark are an innovative type of building for lower-gee environments. They’re mostly made of aerographite, the lightest rigid con
struction material in the solar system, and can be flexibly styled to meet customer needs. Your Homes exclamation mark are currently in use in many asteroid settlements throughout the Belt.”

  None I’ve ever been to, Elfrida thought. Jimmy still sounded like a robot, but he was obviously human. The sheen of sweat on his face, and the dots of scum at the corners of his mouth, proved it. What gives?

  They were steered around the inside of Liberty Rock. It seemed like a typical corporate dormitory, apart from the advertising everywhere. Also typical, there was a pervasive smell of Chinese food. They peeked into rooms where people were working, napping, and eating pouch noodles. In a big common room, a dozen people jumped about, roaring support at Hong Kong FC, who were playing Bahrain on a 3D wallscreen. When Elfrida and Mendoza came in, the football fans quieted.

  Thus, Elfrida clearly heard the one voice that had not fallen silent.

  “Mama? Mama, zěnmeliǎo?”

  A little boy of five or so peeked out from behind an ergoform. A girl a year or two younger joined him. She met Elfrida’s eyes and shrieked with laughter.

  Elfrida turned to Jimmy and Sigurjónsdóttir. “Well,” she said. “Aren’t they a bit young to be studying asteroid engineering?”

  “It’s unusual, I agree,” Sigurjónsdóttir said gamely.

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  Elfrida could no longer refrain from connecting the dots that had been staring her in the face ever since they got here. She hadn’t worked for the Space Corps all these years only to fall for a deception as flimsy as this.

  “You aren’t digging a hole to the center of Vesta at all, are you?” she said. “You’re building an illegal settlement.”

  ★

  “Not illegal,” Sigurjónsdóttir said emphatically. They were in Jimmy’s office. Here, instead of advertisements, the walls were covered with a personalized display of bookcases. “4 Vesta is an asset of Virgin Atomic. We have a legal and moral right to develop the asteroid in any way that aligns with our corporate policy and long-term objectives.”

  Correction: 4 Vesta is the only asset of Virgin Atomic, Elfrida thought. Compared to the supermajors, VA was a shrimp. It had had the luck to get to Vesta first, and that was all. Recalling what Mendoza had said about the company’s declining profits, she figured that its long-term objectives could be summed up as making a buck any way possible.

  “If everything’s above-board, why disguise it as an apprenticeship program?” she said.

  Jimmy seemed about to say something, but Sigurjónsdóttir spoke first. “Technically, it is an apprenticeship program. Jimmy and his people are learning the ropes, learning about micro-gee agriculture—” she gestured at the farm-in-a-bottle, visible outside the window— “and observing the construction process. Sometimes they even drive the machines themselves!” Her smile was as bright and hard as a knife.

  She despises them, Elfrida thought. “Hang on,” she said. “Construction process, of what?”

  “The settlement,” Mendoza guessed, glancing at Sigurjónsdóttir for confirmation. She nodded. “This is just a pilot installation, am I correct? A prototype. The actual settlement’s going to be at the bottom of that hole.”

  “How many people are you expecting to come live here?” Elfrida said.

  “Not yet determined,” Sigurjónsdóttir said.

  “Mmm.”

  Sigurjónsdóttir dropped her voice confidentially. “We would ask you not to divulge this information to our other stakeholders.”

  “Meaning the University of Vesta.”

  “Principally, yes. It’s so easy for misperceptions to take hold.”

  “But if you aren’t doing anything illegal, why would they object? This is a big asteroid, and they’re all the way up in the northern hemisphere.”

  Sigurjónsdóttir appeared to be at a loss.

  “Unless,” Elfrida said, “you’re planning to evict them, and sell the Bellicia ecohood, too?”

  “Of course not!” Sigurjónsdóttir cried. She seemed relieved, and Elfrida realized she was barking up the wrong tree. “The University of Vesta is our flagship achievement. It’s not just a prestige project, but a living community that makes immense contributions to the sum of human knowledge.”

  “And is probably a net drain on your coffers,” Elfrida hazarded.

  “We are absolutely not considering any diminution of our support for the university.”

  Pursing her lips, Elfrida wandered over to the bookcases. Actually smart wallpaper, they appeared to groan with ancient tomes. All the titles were in Chinese. She touched one at random. It worked its way out of the shelf and spread its virtual pages before her. Diagrams separated dense blocks of characters.

  “You’ve got a lot of books here,” she said to Jimmy.

  He came to stand beside her, cradling Amy the Jack Russell in his arms. He put that book back and pulled out others. He flipped pages to show her embedded vid of a garden city, layered like a sandwich. Mustard-squiggle UV lights bathed strata of hydroponic paddies and surburban-looking homes and gardens. The artist had dotted the scene with families picnicking, children playing, and commuters swooping around on gliders.

  “This is how Liberty Rock will be in the future. It is a very capacious and delightful prospect, certain to provide a healthy environment for families to live in harmony. Most importantly, Earth-level security is guaranteed by the advantageous location.”

  “It looks like the Bellicia ecohood.”

  “Yes, yes, that is our inspiration.”

  “Several Bellicia ecohoods, stacked up vertically,” said Mendoza, looking over their shoulders.

  “No advertising in these vids,” Elfrida observed.

  Jimmy grinned shyly.

  xvi.

  Shoshanna Doyle strolled up the road towards Facilities Management. A sprawling green building, it stood in an isolated location on the slope overlooking the town. It housed the hub that controlled the weather, the air circulation, and most importantly of all, the power grid.

  ~Feed, Shoshanna subvocalized, and accessed Cydney Blaisze’s live vid of Dr. James’s bail hearing.

  Following the non-appearance of Elfrida Goto, the defense lawyer had resorted to calling character witnesses. Someone from the astrophysics lab was testifying that Dr. James was an upstanding individual who would never dream of jumping bail. Shoshanna tongue-clicked the feed off.

  She pushed open the door of Facilities Management. The lights in reception were dimmed. The customer service engineers were home in bed, or at the hearing.

  As were all five of Bellicia’s peacekeepers.

  “Excuse me?” Shoshanna called out. “I need some help here.”

  Smart posters declared this to be Bellicia’s ‘Year of Soil.’ They cycled through reminders that soil was a precious resource, and instructions for making it at home with polymer pellets and your own feces.

  “I thought this place was open around the clock?”

  “Technically, yes,” said a speaker in the ceiling. Shoshanna’s BCI—which contained some rather advanced processing tools—identified it as the female-styled voice of the hub itself. “I was just trying to work out why you’re carrying a gun.”

  Bother, thought Shoshanna. She resisted the urge to touch the home-printed revolver concealed under her baggy top. “Self-defense,” she said. “You might have noticed that things are pretty tense in the ecohood these days.”

  “Tell me about it,” sighed the hub. “What can I help you with tonight?”

  “I’d like to sign up for a soycloud tour. Are you still doing those?”

  “Absolutely! I’m so glad you’re interested! Let me show you a brochure.” The hub displayed one on the nearest smart poster.

  “Looks great,” Shoshanna said. “Can I sign up right now?”

  “Sure thing,” the hub gushed. It sent her a sign-up form. Instead of her name and ID, Shoshanna filled the form in with a string of zipped code containing a virus based on a self-learning alg
orithm. She was pretty sure that the hub was just stalling her while it summoned the peacekeepers, but also that its customer service goals would compel it to go through with the charade of accepting the sign-up form. Security in the Bellicia ecohood was shitty. These people were in denial, acting like they were still living on Earth. You had to be spaceborn to truly understand that the universe was out to get you.

  She was right about the hub’s fallibility. Eighty-two milliseconds after she sent the form back, it stuttered, “Invalid data entry. Invalid data entry. Invalid …”

  Back at the community hall, Dr. James’s lawyer had finally called off his blitz of character witnesses. They were wrapping up the procedural loose ends.

  “Invalid.” There was a momentary pause, and then the hub’s voice returned to normal. “Thank you for signing up for a soycloud tour, Ms. Doyle! Is there anything else I can help you with tonight?”

  Shoshanna’s virus had exploited a zero-day vulnerability to convince the hub that it was a native .exe process. It was now propagating itself through the machine’s subsystems.

  “Well,” Shoshanna said. Now it was her turn to stall, one eye on Cydney’s feed.. “I’d really like it if you would walk me through that home soil manufacturing method.”

  Tense silence gripped the community hall as everyone awaited Dean Garcia’s verdict. Garcia spoke three words. Her voice trembled noticeably. “Bail is denied.”

  The hall erupted.

  “Whoa!” Cydney broadcast. “That’s a surprise! Guess money can’t buy freedom, after all! Snerk, snerk.”

  Shoshanna, as astonished as anyone else, texted Cydney. “Srsly? She just denied him bail?”

  “Y,” came the response. “BTW, where is everyone?”

  Shoshanna did not bother to answer. She fired off a group text to ‘everyone,’ a.k.a. the other core members of Justice For David Reid. They were lurking in the undeveloped rocky terrain around Facilities Management. “Well, that kind of destroys our pretext for being here. What do you guys want to do?”