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

by Felix R. Savage

  They conferred in an excited cacophony of texts. They had assumed—the whole ecohood had assumed—that Dr. James’s expensive defense lawyer, as well as behind-the-scenes pressure from Virgin Atomic, would secure bail for him. They had prepared for that eventuality by refilling their propellant guns, donning masks and throwaway black coveralls, and surrounding Facilities Management, while Shoshanna scoped out the joint. The prospect of celebrating held little allure. They did not want to just trickle off home.

  Nor did Shoshanna, to be honest. Having inserted her virus into the hub, she’d already achieved her own goal for the night, but she reminded herself that optics were just as important as information.

  She performed a swift self-interrogation, to make sure that she wasn’t merely indulging her violent streak, and then cut through the babble of texts. “OK. What the hell, let’s do this!”

  The Friends of David Reid streamed across the road, screaming “Yaaaah!” and firing their guns. By a miracle, none of them hit each other. As they burst into the building, Shoshanna was already vaulting the symbolic barrier that separated reception from the staff offices, firing her revolver for effect. They spread through the building. Of course, no one was there. To forestall any sense of a letdown, Shoshanna commandeered the services manager’s office and logged into his workstation, whose security protection her virus had already dismantled. Her troops gathered around her. “Here we go,” she said, accessing the emergency tannoy system. “I’m going to announce that we’ve taken over, and then I’m going to present our demands. If anyone wants to add anything, now’s your chance.”

  “Wow!” said an M.A. candidate in Transhuman Studies. “How’d you get into the hub?”

  “Tell you later,” Shoshanna said with a grin. She switched the tannoy on. “People of Bellicia! We greet you in the spirit of justice, equality, and tolerance …”

  ★

  Elfrida couldn’t get to sleep, tired as she was. A destructive process of association led her thoughts from the Liberty Rock project, to a mind movie she’d watched too often before: flash-frozen corpses drifting in freefall, tangling with uprooted trees. The colonists of 11073 Galapagos had thought they were safe, too …

  She sat up, pushing her hair off her clammy forehead. Maybe she should’ve accepted those meds her therapist tried to give her for flashbacks. It was hot in the VA administration hab, where she and Mendoza had been invited to spend the night, and sweat prickled her skin.

  She was about to fish out her tablet and watch a vid, when she heard a commotion outside. Mendoza’s voice broke through. “Can’t a guy go to the jakes without tripping the security alarm? I’ve done enough pissing into suction tubes the last few days.”

  Elfrida giggled quietly in the dark. She knew what he meant. Going to the bathroom in the rover had been a repeated ordeal of back-turning and pretending that you couldn’t hear each other using the suction toilet.

  Two minutes later, the side of her capsule concertinaed open and Mendoza crawled in on top of her legs.

  “What are you doing here? Get out!”

  He waved the door closed. Elfrida frantically hitched her blanket up over her chest. She was sleeping in her underwear.

  “Sorry,” Mendoza whispered. In the glow of the nightlight that had come on when the door opened, Elfrida saw that his expression was strained. He looked scared. “They’ve kept us apart so we can’t compare notes. But we have to talk, just in case.”

  “You’re sitting on my legs.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Just in case of what?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t trust this setup. They’re definitely breaking the law, even if we haven’t figured out how. And—”

  “I knew it was a mistake to come here,” Elfrida rattled out, giving way to the temptation to blame Mendoza for this whole trip. “We should’ve stayed focused on the Vesta Express. That’s where the suspicious signal came from, and we already know that the left hand doesn’t talk to the right hand in this company.”

  “And,” Mendoza overrode her, “have you noticed something else?”

  “What?”

  “All the prospective settlers look Chinese.”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I guess they do.” Elfrida suddenly felt uncomfortable, and not because Mendoza was still sitting on her legs. He only weighed about 1.5 kilos, after all. “They speak Mandarin, too. They’re probably from Africa.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Or Europe, or maybe Canada. There are Chinese people everywhere.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I’m from Manila, Goto. It’s a freaking Chinatown.”

  “When I was a kid, I used to get confused for a half-Chinese person. The Chinese kids would talk to me, all friendly, and send me invites to their social networks. When I had to explain that I’m actually half-Japanese, it would be like, instant one-eighty. Exiled to Pallas. I wouldn’t even exist for them anymore. I ended up avoiding all East Asian-looking people so that wouldn’t keep happening.”

  “I didn’t know you were half-Japanese.”

  Elfrida shrugged, glad the light was so dim. She knew she was red in the face with recollected humiliation. “There aren’t many of us around. You can understand why they would make that mistake.”

  After a moment, Mendoza said, “But diaspora Chinese don’t talk like bots. They speak English, or whatever.”

  “Yeah! The way Jimmy talked, that was seriously weird. What do you think is up with that?”

  “I think he’s a pureblood Chinese national, using translation software and a prompter. Did you notice how he never looked you in the eye when he was talking to you? That’s because he was reading off the prompter in the HUD display of his retinal interface.”

  “Oh my dog, Mendoza.” Elfrida shook his head. “Are you OK? That’s just … impossible.”

  “Chinese translation programs always suck. It’s like impossible to develop a seamless one. And that’s not all. Didn’t you wonder why that rubble hauler nearly ran us off the ramp? It should have reacted faster … if Sigurjónsdóttir’s people were operating it. I don’t think they were. I think it was a Chinese machine, operating on Chinese protocols, and those don’t include getting out of the way for a rover with two humans on board.”

  Elfrida pulled up her knees and laced her arms around them. They were sitting at opposite ends of the capsule. She could see the whites of Mendoza’s eyes. “Come on, that’s just absurd.”

  “Is it? Do you know what they call the Philippines in Chinese?”

  “What?”

  “A tributary state.”

  “Oh. But …”

  “I’m not kidding. We have to pay tribute. Of course, our bureaucrooks call it interest. But my point is, to the Han, if you’re not Chinese, you’re nothing. You just told me you experienced that yourself when you were a kid.”

  Elfrida’s heart thumped. She said firmly, “Well, Jimmy seems kind of nice. I haven’t talked to any of the others, but my take is that even if they are Chinese nationals, they’re still just typical, dumb colonists. But, Mendoza, they can’t be Chinese! It’s impossible.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Chinese don’t come into space. You know that. They invest, and they mine resources and stuff, but they don’t settle. They’re one hundred percent purebloods. They’re scared of the PLAN.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” Mendoza said. “The PLAN is Chinese. They created the toilet rolls in the first place to drive the Americans off Mars. When they’ve driven the rest of us out of the solar system, they’ll have it all to themselves.”

  “Dang! I’m not even going to listen to this.” Elfrida reflexively pushed off from the bunk, and bumped her head on the ceiling. “Ow! We’re supposed to be professionals, not conspiracy theorists. Tell you what, stick to the data, Mendoza. That’s your specialty, and leave the people to me, OK?”

  “Well, speaking of data,” Mendoza started.

  The side of the capsule concertinaed ag
ain. A hand the size of a tiger’s paw, with jagged nails like dried-up orange peels, shot into the capsule, grabbed Mendoza’s leg, and dragged him out. Mendoza clawed at the blanket, taking it with him. There was a thump. Elfrida huddled in the corner, so panicked that all she could do was blink for help. Her contacts, of course, stayed dead.

  A face descended into the cubicle. “Cute sports bra. I’ll give you a free tip, ma’am: never let a guy get your clothes off before he at least removes his shoes.”

  The face had an eagle tattooed on its forehead. Above it undulated a black mohican.

  “José Running Horse. Nice to meet y’all.”

  ★

  “You aren’t from UNESCO,” Running Horse mused. Elfrida did not dare to contradict him. They’d locked Mendoza into his capsule. It turned out that when he was challenged the first time, he hadn’t been coming back from the toilet, but from the rover. He had sneaked out there to transfer a data file containing his observations and theories into Rurumi’s memory. The Big Dig security team had been watching him the whole time. They’d let him talk to Elfrida after that just to see if he would say anything controversial. So much for civilized expectations of privacy. Both their capsules had been bugged.

  Barefoot, wearing someone else’s sweats, Elfrida hunched in the same ergoform she’d occupied that afternoon in Sigurjónsdóttir’s office. Running Horse towered over her. Among the spaceborn and the unfit, he projected the physical presence of an ogre. He was 185 centimeters and seriously shredded. His muscles popped under his skin, no doubt due to nanotic skeletal enhancement and a lot of lifting. He leaned over her, invading her personal space. “We had to check your story. Took a while. Tends to do, when you gotta wait twenty-eight minutes to hear, ‘Your enquiry is not supported by this system,’ and then the fucking customer-service bot tries to upsell you a premium search enhancement package. I hate the UN. Anyway, we got the goods in the end.”

  Running Horse rested one hip on the edge of Sigurjónsdóttir’s desk. He cracked his knuckles.

  “You’ve got quite the track record, Ms. Goto.”

  Elfrida hugged herself and moved her head in circles. She was too frightened to talk.

  “And the other guy, forget about it. Born in the Philippines of mixed origin, technical high school, wins a UN-sponsored poll design contest, earns an apprenticeship in psephology, but can’t make it at pro level. Accepts an entry-level position in UNVRP and spends the next decade shuttling between his office and his capsule, except for when he splurges on a ticket to the Luna Philharmonic. Like I said, forget it. No one’s life is that boring.” Running Horse pushed off from the desk and stabbed a finger in her face. “He’s in deep cover. So are you, probably, but a big chunk of your record’s sealed.”

  Elfrida squeaked, “That’s because I was involved in a PLAN-related incident a couple of years ago.”

  “Do I look like I care? Here’s what I care about: John Mendoza is an agent of the ISA.”

  Elfrida’s jaw dropped. “Oh my dog, that’s completely ridiculous! I mean …” She trailed off. She had, in fact, no way of knowing that Mendoza was not an ISA agent.

  The ISA (Information Security Agency), a top-level agency of the UN, operated system-wide surveillance programs of unknown scope and granularity. Originally established to monitor and preserve the integrity of the internet, it was widely believed to have expanded this remit into physical surveillance and anti-PLAN operations. The ISA was everyone’s favorite boogeyman after the PLAN itself. No one knew exactly what they got up to.

  “It’s a war out there,” Running Horse said. He took out a cigarette, sucked on it, exhaled vapor that smelled like skunk spray. “Right now, right this second, the ISA is trying to hack into our systems. Every private company’s in the same situation. ISA wants to know everything. Period. Everything. Privacy laws? Heh, heh, sucker. It’s Big Data versus the little guy. The Man versus freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of innovation … yeah: all that stuff that the UN supposedly exists to uphold. Ironic, huh?”

  Elfrida had heard this kind of thing so many times before that she started to relax. It was typical private-sector griping.

  Running Horse reminded her of the stakes when he added, “And when they can’t hack us, they get physical. We have excellent information that there is an ISA agent on Vesta.” He blew foul vapor into her face. “And my money says your buddy Mendoza is it.”

  Sigurjónsdóttir came into the office, bearing a tea tray. “You haven’t been scaring her, have you?” she chided Running Horse.

  “Naw. Just proving that I may be muscle, but I’m not dumb.”

  Although Elfrida recognized instantly that they were running a good cop / bad cop routine on her, the presence of Sigurjónsdóttir nevertheless made her feel secure enough to say, “If you think that regurgitating conspiracy theories from the internet makes you sound smart, I’m sorry, but try again.”

  “Oooh. Regurgitating. Figure big words make you sound smart?” Running Horse said nastily.

  “José,” Sigurjónsdóttir said, waving her hand in front of her face. “Would you mind not vaping that filth in my office? Thanks.”

  Running Horse ambled out. At the door, he turned to say, in a passable imitation of a robotic voice, “XX intruder at the given coordinates. Identify yourself, or get fragged.”

  Elfrida let out a scream.

  “Just wanted to remind you that we’ve met before,” Running Horse said. He left.

  “Milk? Sugar?” Sigurjónsdóttir said, pouring through the teapot’s tube. “I’m sorry, this must have been a terrible shock for you.”

  “Both,” Elfrida said faintly. She cradled the hot teacup in her hands.

  “I’m sure you had no idea that your colleague was working for the ISA.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “Well, naturally they haven’t admitted it. We’re negotiating for confirmation. In the meantime, I’m afraid, we will have to ask you both to remain here as our guests.”

  “But you can’t … I mean, you can’t keep us here against our will … that’s illegal.”

  “So is spying. And so, I’m sorry to say, is passing yourself off as an agent of UNESCO, when you aren’t one.”

  Elfrida cringed. Totally busted. She felt a momentary urge to say it had been Gregor Lovatsky’s idea. The urge passed. “I suppose … we thought it didn’t matter, or you wouldn’t dare to call us on it. Because you’re breaking the law yourselves.” She raised her eyes to meet Sigurjónsdóttir’s large gray ones. “You’re lying to your stakeholders and the public to cover up what you’re really doing here: Building a habitat for umpty-thousand Han Chinese who are so pureblooded, they don’t even speak English.”

  There was a moment of silence, during which they could hear Mendoza banging on the wall of his capsule, two levels up in the cluster hab.

  Sigurjónsdóttir nodded. “I’m next door to pureblooded myself,” she said, gesturing at the pictures of her daughters. “And they are pureblooded. I had the poor judgement to marry a guy who’s a couple of alleles more Scandinavian than I am. Divorced the rat a few years back, but the damage was done. So I do feel some empathy with the predicament of the pureblooded, as I think most people do.”

  “Oh, I do, too,” Elfrida said. “In fact, I think it’s great, what you’re doing here. But the lying, the false pretences …”

  “If we had announced at the outset that we were building a habitat for a party of Chinese settlers, do you think we would have had a chance in hell of getting it done?”

  “No,” Elfrida admitted.

  “The entire volume would have been up in arms. The university would have led the charge, on whatever pretext they could find.”

  “So as not to have to share this asteroid with umpty-thousand—”

  “Two hundred thousand.”

  “Ulp. Two hundred thousand, pureblooded … PLAN magnets.”

  “Who were originally attracted to Vesta,” Sigurjónsdóttir said quietly, “becau
se of the opportunity to construct a genuinely PLAN-proof asteroid colony beneath several kilometers of solid rock.”

  “Like the Bellicia ecohood.”

  “Bellicia, version 2.0.”

  Elfrida grimaced, acknowledging the multiple layers of irony. She drank some of her sweet, milky tea. FUK culture definitely had its points.

  Perhaps because of the adrenaline still pumping through her veins, she felt strangely undismayed by the calamitous turn their investigation had taken. It would all be sorted out when they confirmed that Mendoza was not an ISA agent. In the meantime, it was up to her to make what she could of this.

  “You’re not going to lock me in a capsule, are you?” she asked.

  Sigurjónsdóttir did not answer. Her gaze unfocused, indicating that she was reading off contacts or an implanted retinal interface. “Oh my dog. This is outrageous. Shocking! Ms. Goto, I’ve just been notified—I’m afraid something rather odd is happening in the Bellicia ecohood. You’d better have a look at this feed.”

  A screen sprang out of its recess in her desk and spun around to face Elfrida, knocking over the teapot.

  Cydney’s breathless voice filled the office.

  xvii.

  “As you can see for yourselves, a crowd has gathered outside UNESCO headquarters. Everyone mocks the blue berets, but when the doo-doo hits the fan, it’s ‘Mommy, Mommy, help.’ Snerk. Like, what can the peacekeepers do? There are five of them here, versus at least fifty activists holed up in Facilities Management. They claim to be armed with lethal projectile and beam weapons. They might even be telling the truth. You can do a lot with a home printer … and have you ever seen that vid where a modded housekeeping bot goes all Nazi on some kids in the ZUS? This might be what’s about to happen here.”

  Cydney cued the vid to give herself a breathing space. She pulled out her cigarette and took a calming drag. The mob outside the koban was growing. The Fab Five were holed up inside. Frantically asking their bosses what to do, Cydney guessed. With a twenty-eight-minute round-trip signal delay to Earth, that could take a while.