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

by Felix R. Savage

  “I can’t get into this,” Sigurjónsdóttir said, snapping her fingers at her screen.

  “Oh. It’s encrypted. You could apply to UNVRP to have it decrypted, or I could do it for you.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Elfrida went around behind Sigurjónsdóttir’s desk. She blinked at the iris scanner on Sigurjónsdóttir’s computer and answered a couple of her security questions. “There.” She lingered. Sigurjónsdóttir’s other screen showed the bottom of the Big Dig. Figures in yellow and red EVA suits scurried around, dwarfed by rubble-haulers and an excavation bot that resembled a flower made of guillotine blades. “Wow. I’ve never seen a bot like that before.”

  “Grisly, isn’t it? Not ours. The Liberty Rock syndicate provided most of the equipment in use here.”

  “Is that … OK?” So Mendoza was right. The rubble-hauler that nearly ran them off the ramp had been Chinese. “Is it safe?”

  “So they tell us.”

  “But don’t the Chinese use different operating protocols?”

  “Not just protocols. You’ve heard of the Great Firewall, I assume.”

  The Great Firewall was a cultural phenomenon and a technological fact rolled into one. Even previous to the Mars Incident, Chinese exceptionalism had led the nation to develop its own internet—the precursor to today’s sinanet—based on a separate physical infrastructure, and to pursue robotics development in isolation from the rest of the world. After the Mars Incident, the Big Disconnect had accelerated this divergence, as China blamed the then-United States and the rest of the West for unleashing the ASI explosion thought to have caused the catastrophe. By differentiating its internet at the code level, China had sought to wall its cyber-territory off from the risk of self-propagating MI.

  Now the shoe was on the other foot. Though the UN did not openly blame China for the emergence of the PLAN, Mendoza’s conspiracy theory had plenty of echoes in high places. No matter how many anti-AI treaties the Chinese signed up to, no matter how strenuously they decried the very existence of AGI (human-equivalent AI) and ASI (superintelligent AI), and no matter how much they suffered at the hands of the PLAN … no one was ever going to trust them again.

  So the two worlds of machine intelligence had continued to develop separately, as it were in a mutual huff. Ecosystems of algorithms had evolved that were not only incomprehensible to each other, but mutually hostile. At this point, you couldn’t even use a Chinese computer on a regular wifi network without crashing both things.

  “So let me get this straight,” Elfrida said. “If those construction bots were to go berserk, you would have no way of stopping them?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “But your computers can’t even talk to theirs.”

  “That’s why we have humans in the loop.”

  “Who rely on computers to talk to each other. Do you have anyone here who actually speaks Mandarin?”

  Sigurjónsdóttir smiled weakly.

  On the screen, the Chinese construction workers sprinted over to the side of the cavern where they were working. They took cover behind a buttress. A blizzard of rock and dust blanked the screen out.

  “Uh, that didn’t look very safe.”

  The blast wave propagated through the hab, jolting them. Sigurjónsdóttir’s teacup rattled on its saucer.

  “Don’t worry,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “They’re culturally risk-averse.”

  Elfrida had thought that here, nestled in the bowels of Rheasilvia Mons, she was at least safe. But she didn’t feel that way anymore.

  “Well, I’m going to grab some lunch and get back to work,” she said.

  “Try the crab au gratin,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “We import all our own food. None of that recycled, MSG-flavored sludge in this hab.”

  ★

  For the second time, Elfrida flew towards 550363 Montego, towed by a couple of the Kharbage Collector’s drones.

  No robot sharks swarmed out to greet her. “All clear, I think,” she radioed to Petruzzelli. “Their Superlifter’s gone, too.”

  “I’m sending a drone in ahead of you, just in case.”

  Crab au gratin gurgled uneasily in Elfrida’s stomach. “I wonder how far they’ve gone. Superlifters are tugs. They’re not made for interplanetary travel.”

  “Do not mock the humble Superlifter. We used to use ‘em to tow asteroids across the system.”

  “Yeah, but without people on board. Their life-support capacity is really limited. Anyway, I hope they’re all right.”

  Petruzzelli blew a raspberry into the radio. “Don’t waste your sympathy on those baboons.”

  Elfrida glided over the surface of 550363 Montego. Riddled with old and new impacts, it looked like a charcoal soufflé. The mouth of the pirates’ excavation yawned between mini-mountains of tailings that had settled back to the surface. Her damaged wreck of a phavatar had zero scanning capabilities, so she couldn’t gather any data on the mineral composition of the asteroid. But she saw nothing to contradict Mendoza’s initial hypothesis that it was a big old hunk of basaltic rock. The excavated chamber would make a handy vessel for UNVRP’s payloads of gengineered microbes. And the asteroid was massive enough that when it impacted Venus, it would blow a hefty chunk of atmosphere into space.

  “Oh crap,” Petruzzelli said.

  “What?”

  “You’d better get in there.”

  Elfrida’s drones dived into the cave mouth, pulling her behind them. A beam of light danced up ahead, emitted by the drone that Petruzzelli had sent in as a scout. It played over the side of a Bigelow hab.

  From which a spacesuited figure had just emerged, waving its arms.

  “Help!” it shouted on the public band. “Help! Help!”

  The pirates had gone, all right.

  But they had left behind the hapless colonists who’d hoped to settle on 550363 Montego.

  ★

  “I need oxygen and water. Now!”

  “I don’t have much to spare.”

  “Crap on it, Petruzzelli, just send the stuff! There are twenty-seven human beings in here and they’ve only got about fifty liters of oxygen left! They’re dehydrated, most of them can’t even move or speak. This one guy might be dead. I can’t tell. This shitty fucking phavatar doesn’t have any telemetric scanning capability, or a light source, and it’s dark in here. And cold. Can you send a medibot, too, and some supercapacitors, so I can get the backup generator going?”

  “Oh dog. I didn’t know it was that bad. All right, emergency consumables coming up.”

  Drones zoomed into the cavern, towing the emergency supplies Elfrida had asked for. She worked flat out, transferring the stuff into the airlock of the Bigelow hab. The people inside were too weak to help, even if they had had more than a handful of functioning EVA suits between them.

  Fortunately, she had seen habs like this before, so she already knew how to change out its oxygen reserve tanks. The Bigelow Deep Space Life Support System was a mass-produced low-end model, ‘ideal for longer-term resource extraction missions,’ according to the company, which shifted thousands of them on a wink-wink-say-no-more basis to aspiring colonists. Its 2,000 m3 pressurized volume was divided into four decks: galley/recreation/operations; crew quarters/storage; work/hygiene; and stowage/subsystems at what would have been the bottom, if the hab were in gravity.

  The Extropia Collective had squeezed into the operations deck and depressurized the other levels when their oxygen started to run out. Thus cut off from the toilets and the water recovery unit, they had been reduced to drinking their own urine. Someone had tried to cut a hole in the wall to get at the water in the hab’s shell that was used for radiation shielding purposes. Fortunately, they had succeeded only in shorting out the lights.

  Elfrida repressurized the crew quarters and carried the sickest would-be colonists down there so that Petruzzelli’s medibot could tend them. She kept the others on the operations deck. Soot coated everything, a relic of the elect
rical fire which had destroyed the CO2 removal assembly. The handful of people clustered around Elfrida’s phavatar looked like urchins in an e-waste dump.

  “What motivated you to illegally occupy this asteroid?” she said. She had to put it like that, for the record.

  The man who spoke for the collective, Hugh Meredith-Pike, croaked, “We were seeking the secret of human happiness.”

  ★

  When she’d kludged the air circulation system into working order, Elfrida reported to Petruzzelli.

  “I think we’ve got the situation stabilized. But their viability stats suck. We’ve got twenty adults and seven children in a pressurized volume of about 2,000 cubic meters, with ten functioning EVA suits between them, and a few weeks’ worth of basic supplies, thanks to you. They had nothing left. Those pirates ought to be prosecuted for murder.”

  “But no one’s actually dead, are they?”

  “No, but they would have been in another sol or two.”

  “Well, let’s get them the hell off that rock. I’ve got plenty of room in my passenger module.”

  “Um.”

  “What?”

  “They don’t want to go.”

  “What?”

  “I know. After what they’ve just been through … But they’re unanimous.”

  “Did you offer them a, cough cough, incentive?”

  “Yes. Wonder of wonders, that was a big no thank you. They’re wireheads. They spent their entire life savings to get here, and they’re staying.”

  “Oh, FFS. I’ll just tow the hab out.”

  “It wouldn’t fit through the cave entrance.”

  “… You’re right. They must have inflated it inside.”

  “I’ll stay here with them.”

  “Say again, ‘cause I did not copy. It sounded like you said you’re staying here with them.”

  “I did. I will. This is my job. This is what the Space Corps does. Helping and supporting communities. I’m gonna put in a purchase recommendation, but we’ll be dealing with Centiless, so it’s not going to be immediate, to say the least. When that goes through, we’ll get an evacuation order, and I’ll make sure that business goes to Kharbage LLC, if you’re still in the volume. Then we can go in with bots, drag them out kicking and screaming. But I don’t want to go there until I’ve got the evacuation order. So in the meantime, I’m just going to stay here and see if I can help them not die. They don’t know crap about surviving in space.”

  “ … Sounds like you’ve thought it through.”

  “It’s not a big deal. You don’t need this phavatar anymore, anyway, right? Smile.”

  “Smile. Well, I guess if you’re OK with that … I wish I could stay, but …”

  “But you’ve got bills to pay. I totally understand. Just, could you send over some more stuff before you go? They have a fuel cell generator, but it’s out of hydrogen. Their organic matter recycling unit needs new filters. The smell in here is something else, I’m told. We could also use the loan of one of your drones, in case I need to tow stuff around. Oh, and splart: as much as you’ve got.”

  “Coming up. I hate to mention it, but can I invoice UNVRP for this stuff?”

  “Of course. And Petruzzelli? Don’t worry about being too precise. You can kind of round off the figures, if you get my drift.”

  “… Thanks.”

  ★

  “You can come out now!”

  Alicia Petruzzelli’s shout echoed into the dark recesses of the passenger module’s economy deck.

  She stepped out of the elevator. Her red leather Gecko Docs squelched on rubber tiles. Closely spaced rows of couches receded into dimness. The air was hot and stale. It smelled like a second-hand car: sickly-mint sanitizer spray and Cheetos.

  “I said you can come out now! She’s gone!”

  Five figures rose up from among the couches. They were Captain Haddock, his wife Anemone, his son Kelp, his brother Codfish, and Codfish’s wife Coral. Kelp was eating Cheetos from a white-label economy-size bag he had pinched from the galley.

  “Blistering barnacles, that was a close call,” Haddock said.

  “Not really,” Petruzzelli said. “In that fragged-out suit, she wasn’t exactly going to notice that the command module is a few centimeters closer to the keel than it should be, if we really didn’t have any passengers out here to balance for. Anyway, she’s gone now. She decided to stay with them.” Petruzzelli measured the construction crew with a look. “You didn’t mention that you only left them a week’s worth of air.”

  “Arrrr! It’s not even been a week since we left. You were going to go back after you dropped us off—”

  “Well, apparently that second-hand carbon dioxide removal assembly you sold them malfunctioned. Caught on fire.”

  “A fire in a hab? They’re lucky to be alive.”

  “They are alive,” Petruzzelli said, “no thanks to you.”

  “Don’t deserve to be. Dumbest bunch of squatters I’ve ever met,” said Codfish. “Bet they forget their lines, too. What a waste of time.”

  “Hasn’t been a waste of time for me,” Petruzzelli said. “I’ve got a green light to invoice UNVRP for all the stuff you didn’t leave them, and then some.”

  “Can we go back to the command module? The air’s bad in here,” said Coral, with no sense of irony at all.

  They went. A contrail of orange Cheetos dust hung in the air of the transfer point like forensic evidence. But no one would ever know that the pirates had been travelling on the Kharbage Collector. No one else was there to see them. Their Superlifter was moored in the ship’s auxiliary craft bay, on the principle that the best place to conceal something is where you’d normally find it. Petruzzelli had slapped some spare Kharbage LLC decals over the Jolly Rogers on its drive shield (that was what she’d been doing when Elfrida telecasted in), just in case Elfrida took a peek in the auxiliary bay. Which she hadn’t.

  Back on the bridge, Petruzzelli flapped a hand at the pirates. “Make like a banana. I’m tired of looking at you. Go hang out in the crew lounge.”

  “I’m going to read the Narnia books again,” Kelp said. “Your ship’s got a really great library, Captain Petruzzelli.”

  “You can thank my colleague, Captain Okoli, for that,” Petruzzelli said. “He was on a mission for a while to get everyone in the company to read. I’m more of a gamer myself.”

  Kelp, Coral, Anemone, and Codfish scattered. Haddock lingered.

  “Are we under thrust?” he asked.

  “Will be in a minute.”

  “And are you going to drop us off on 3982440 Twizzler?”

  “That’s our deal.”

  “Be a darlin’ girl and take us on a wee bit further.”

  “Why? It’s a good rock. Fits all the UNVRP criteria. You’ve got people lined up. Haven’t you?”

  “Aye, but …” Haddock came and sat on the corner of Petruzzelli’s workstation. Nervously twirling his ebony goatee, he confessed, “It’s too close to here. I don’t feel safe in this volume nae more. Nor does my lady wife.”

  “Space is big, Min-jae.”

  “The name’s Archibald.”

  “Whatever. You folding?”

  “No. Have I not a pirate’s soul, and a rare lust for livin’ on the edge? I have that. But I’ve no desire to be nobbled. And I’d remind you that if we’re caught, you’ll be in a heap o’ trouble yourself, lassie.”

  “Oh, screw it,” Petruzzelli said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Ye could take us on to 6 Hebe.”

  Petruzzelli grumbled, but agreed. With that concession in hand, Haddock promptly asked to use the internet for a long-distance call. Suspecting that he was going to arrange for someone else to pick him and his family up from 6 Hebe, Petruzzelli consented, and got ready to listen in. If Haddock expected privacy on the Kharbage Collector, he was very much mistaken in his assumptions.

  The pirate’s real name was Min-jae Park. He and his family were members of an ethnically mixed nom
adic community with roots in the Korean peninsula. They called themselves namsadang; those who fell afoul of them called them a criminal network. Perhaps it was not so curious that Min-jae had developed an obsession with pirates. Anyway, he and his near and dear had long since gone their own way, buying a secondhand Superlifter and taking it from there.

  For Petruzzelli, they were the human equivalent of a starmap. Some data points were known, some were concealed in the possession of others. And all the empty spaces in between tantalized her. She wanted to know more about Haddock’s connections, especially since he could get her in trouble, as he had tactlessly pointed out.

  Alone in an unused cabin, with only some old pornographic posters for witnesses (as he thought), Haddock used his BCI to ping an ID unknown to Petruzzelli. The signal travelled through the asteroid belt for seven minutes, covering about 108 million kilometers. It reached a destination that was moving on a trajectory wrongly angled to be an asteroid, so it had to be a ship cruising in the volume around 6 Hebe. What a coincidence. Not.

  “Y what?” the unknown owner of the ID typed.

  “Ahoy! Haddock here. That you, Yonezawa?”

  ★

  Petruzzelli radioed her ex-colleague Viola Budgett.

  “You know anything about a guy called Kiyoshi Yonezawa?”

  Budgett took a minute and a half to respond. “No,” she said.

  “You sure? Because whoever he is, Haddock and company have arranged for him to pick them up from 6 Hebe.”

  Petruzzelli had already told Budgett by email how Elfrida Goto had busted the pirates on 550363 Montego. She now explained that Haddock was scared to pull another job in this volume, at least for a while.

  “Well, that’s just great,” Budgett said despairingly.

  On the screen, Budgett’s jowly face was framed by a pink balaclava. Her telescopic steel left eye—an implanted microscope / telescope—stared expressionlessly; her brown right one skittered about.

  “If they aren’t gonna work any more jobs, where’s the money going to come from?” she whined.

  “You let me worry about that,” Petruzzelli said.