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

by Felix R. Savage

  “But we need the money!”

  “Is it cold there, or something?”

  Budgett’s breath puffed white, momentarily obscuring her face on the screen. “Not really,” she said.

  Petruzzelli switched her attention between Budgett and another screen, where she was earning credits to use in the game Second Idiran War, by devoting a portion of the Kharbage Collector’s hub’s computing resources to simulating a superintelligent Mind. She was playing an Idiran. Lots of days, she just didn’t want to be human anymore. Talking to Budgett made her feel that way in spades.

  “We need money, like yesterday,” Budgett whined.

  Petruzzelli thought of a quote that her former boss, Martin Okoli, had liked to use. “Who you calling we, white man?”

  A minute and a half later, a smile of recognition flashed on Budgett’s face. “That’s one of Captain Okoli’s lines. Dog, I miss the Kharbage Can. Everything was so simple then.”

  “Everything was never simple,” said Petruzzelli, but she felt the same way. Budgett’s rarely-glimpsed smile reminded Petruzzelli of the period when they’d worked together on the Kharbage Can, part of Martin Okoli’s tightly knit, happy-go-lucky crew. She’d never realized just what an accomplishment it was to manage a crew that well, and how many difficult decisions Okoli must have faced on a daily basis, until she got promoted to captain herself.

  Impulsively, she said, “OK, check it out. How much do you need? I’ll cover it.”

  Budgett’s eyes welled up. A plump hand rose to wipe them. “Oh my dog, Alicia, thank you. Thank you so much. We, uh, we need fifty thousand spiders.”

  “What are you buying this time? A particle accelerator?”

  “No, we’ve got one of those. No, this, uh … it’s for something else.”

  “What?”

  Budgett’s hands, one flesh and the other a maniple equipped with several tool sockets, fluttered. With visible reluctance, she explained.

  Budgett was not a cyborg—that is, she did not identify with the cyborgist movement. But the amount of augments she had put her squarely in the category. Petruzzelli wondered if having that much electronics in your body made you think and feel differently. Certainly, she could not comprehend how anyone as supposedly smart as Budgett could have got herself into such a mess.

  “You really are screwed, aren’t you?” She made her eyebrow tattoos do disapproving scowls.

  Budgett hung her head. At least she had enough self-awareness to be ashamed. “We just have to keep paying him,” she said hopelessly. “There’s no way out.”

  We’ll see about that, Petruzzelli thought.

  “Do you, uh, want his ID? To get in touch with him?”

  “Bothead,” Petruzzelli said affectionately. "I’ve already got it. Swiped it from Haddock. I’m pinging him now.”

  xix.

  In the crepuscular light of ThirdLight’s splinter-moons, plastisteel gorillas surrounded the Facilities Management building. These were Virgin Atomic’s security phavatars. They were familiar to Bellicians from parades and festivals, when they would dress up in tuxedos and serve refreshments to the delighted humans. Now they hulked like monsters in black EMP-proof hooded capes. They bounded towards the building with no pretense of stealth, demanding the surrender of the activists holed up inside. When this was not forthcoming, they appeared to be at a loss.

  “Wait for it,” Shoshanna said to her troops.

  The shadow of a soycloud engulfed the building. Its PHES thrusters were not working very well, since they depended on thermal updrafts to convert into kinetic energy, and the atmosphere had cooled several degrees since Shoshanna turned off the sun. The soycloud wallowed a scant hundred meters above Facilities Management. One of the Virgin Atomic security phavatars made a dramatic gesture. Rain poured down on the building. Actually, poured was an understatement. Reprogrammed at VA headquarters, the soycloud released all its excess water at once. Biostrate roofs were not made to cope with a deluge like this. The ceiling of the reception area sprang multiple leaks. The activists laughed.

  “Anything to avoid visuals of phavatars shooting at human beings,” Shoshanna said.

  The leaks turned into gushers. The Let’s Make Friends With Soil! corner collapsed, burying several people.

  “Stay calm! Stay calm! They think we’re going to come out, soaked and shivering, looking stupid. They’re going to look stupid. Wait for it …”

  Cydney still had her BCI and retinal interface. In the children’s activities coordinator’s office, where she had been locked with some meds for her ear, she could view events from multiple angles. Most of these amateur feeds were provided by citizens standing at a distance on the road, part of the unofficial bug-out initiative, which had by now, in spite of official reassurances, created a tailback from the Bremen Lock several kilometers long. Several of the activists inside were also covertly vidding.

  Astonished commentary flooded every feed when the VA phavatars abruptly went ape. They jumped about, thumped their chests, and knuckle-walked, hooting.

  (Shoshanna had never seen a real gorilla; she was going on cartoons.)

  With mighty bounds enabled by their twisted-polymer muscles, the phavatars leapt up to the hovering soycloud and grabbed its edges. They clambered aboard, as if returning to their home in the treetops.

  A hatch opened in the center of the soycloud. An access ladder snapped down.

  The activists filed out of the building and climbed the ladder. They were soaked and shivering, but they did not look stupid. Illuminated by the blaze of light from Facilities Management, they looked like pagan warriors ascending to some elysian firmament. At the last minute, Shoshanna unlocked the children’s activities director’s office and dragged Cydney along.

  “All aboard for the soycloud tour! Don’t worry, I’m in control. I just let them soak us so everyone could see how powerless they are.”

  ★

  This message had been received loud and clear at VA headquarters in Bellicia, which was now in a state of pandemonium. The staff had lost control first of Facilities Management, and then of the override systems that had allowed them to stage their soycloud stunt. Now they had even lost their own security phavatars.

  Jay Macdonald, the highest-ranking VA executive present on Vesta, climbed to the roof in the company of two now-hostile phavatars and was escorted up the ladder to the soycloud occupied by Shoshanna and her troops, which had come to hover over the building.

  The topside of the soycloud smelled of phlox and sweet william. It was a far cry from the tightly packed racks of lettuces and sweet potatoes found in your average farm-in-a-bottle. Gooseberry and raspberry bushes, as well as marrows and squashes grown on frames, dotted three moonlit acres of soybeans. There were even a few fruit trees scattered around. They provided shade (when the sun was shining) for chives, dill, and other herbs beloved of the pollinating insects whose inculturation was the agronomy department’s greatest success.

  The activists were munching on apples, normally out of reach on a student’s budget. They lounged on the deck outside the rustic shack where the soycloud gardeners stored their tools. Relaxed laughter greeted Macdonald’s appearance. Most of them assumed they had triumphed, and were ready to talk about coffee machines and student grants.

  Not Shoshanna, who sat crosslegged on the deck with her revolver in her lap. “How you doing? Gotta say, you don’t look so good, Jay.”

  Even by the Vestan equivalent of moonlight, Macdonald was visibly pasty and trembling.

  “How did you do that?” he blurted, gesturing at the phavatars who flanked him. No longer his, but hers. “It shouldn’t be possible!”

  “How do you mean, Jay?”

  “Telepresence encryption is unbreakable! You booted our operators out. Now they can’t log in. But you can’t hijack a telecast. It’s not possible. Can’t bloody well be done!”

  “Oh, wise up,” Shoshanna said. “Any encryption protocol is only as good as the computer applying it.”
/>   There was a moment’s silence.

  “Oh, crap,” Jay Macdonald said.

  Shoshanna grinned. “Updated your anti-virus software recently? Maybe you should have. Or maybe it wouldn’t have done any good.”

  “You’ve infiltrated our hub.”

  “Correct. Facilities Management gave me a back door into the VA hub. I blocked your operators’ signals at the source. Then I took control of the phavatars and the soyclouds, using your own encryption protocols and override keys.”

  Macdonald glanced at Cydney.

  She was torn. Despite the agony she’d suffered at Shoshanna’s hands, her pride wanted her to pretend that she was one of the gang, not a hostage who’d stupidly walked into a trap. She raised her chin defiantly.

  “Oh, she didn’t have anything to do with it,” Shoshanna said, deflating Cydney’s pretense. “She’s just a newshound. She may have a few grey-hat tools, but nothing offensive. Nothing like what I’ve got.”

  Some of the activists looked at Shoshanna uneasily.

  “So.” She bit into a freshly picked Cox’s Pippin. “Yum. Are you ready to meet our demands?”

  “Based on your wish list, you ought to be addressing the university administration. I can’t speak for them.”

  Shoshanna rolled her eyes. “I thought you had to be brainy to be the chief financial officer of a listed corporation. Maybe I was wrong.”

  Another silence ensued. A breeze rustled the flowers growing around the edges of the deck. Under Shoshanna’s control, the soycloud was gaining height. Cydney shivered as the cold wind cut through her still-damp clothes.

  “Oh,” Macdonald said presently. “My God.”

  “Yeah. This didn’t come out of nowhere, Jay. It’s the continuation of our ongoing conversation, by other means.” Shoshanna spat out an apple seed. “It’s a war out there. That’s what you guys say, isn’t it? Thing is, you’re wrong. It would be a war if we ever wanted to fight. And in that case, we would walk all over you. Like I’m walking all over you right now.”

  She threw her apple core at Macdonald. It hit him on the chest.

  “We don’t like going noisy. But the lesson you should be drawing right now is: we will if we have to. And part two of that lesson is: we will stop at nothing to keep humanity safe.”

  Cydney gasped. She finally understood. She pinged Aidan Wahlsdorf, her team manager on Earth. Oh my dog. Shoshanna is an ISA agent.

  “So,” Shoshanna encouraged. “Give.”

  Unexpectedly, Macdonald smiled. “You haven’t been able to break into our subsidiaries.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nor will you be able to. We have a strict information security policy that includes physical segregation of key computing assets. You may have compromised our Bellicia hub, but that won’t give you access to Virgin Resources, or the de Grey Institute, or the Big Dig. Your violation of our corporate privacy stops here, I’m afraid.”

  “Wrong,” Shoshanna said, standing up. “I’m only just getting started. You have a pacemaker, don’t you, Jay? Which is monitored by medibot software at your headquarters?”

  Macdonald clutched his chest. Several of the activists stared at Shoshanna in horror.

  “Do your worst,” Macdonald said hoarsely.

  “Then again, I could just shoot you,” Shoshanna mused.

  “Sassenach! You’ll never conquer the human spirit! Dh'aindeoin co theireadh e!”

  With that, Macdonald lumbered into a run and leapt off the deck. Ungainly as he was, he weighed so little that his running jump carried him all the way over the edge of the soycloud.

  No one would ever know if he had meant to do that.

  Nor would they know whether he had been aware that the soycloud, previously hovering above the rooftops of Bellicia, was now 1.5 kilometers up.

  The activists rushed to the edge of the soycloud. Clinging to stems of Glycine max, they were in time to see Jay Macdonald hit the pavement of Olbers Circle, outside the Virgin Café. He bounced like a yo-yo. The sack of pulped flesh and broken bone rose high enough that they could ascertain with their own eyes that even on Vesta,

  would kill you deader than a mackerel.

  “I didn’t do that,” Shoshanna said defensively.

  Silence.

  “He jumped. You all saw him. I wouldn’t really have stopped his heart. Or shot him. I was just threatening him. That’s the way to get what you want.”

  Big Bjorn said, “Maybe you’d better tell us what it is you do want, Shosh.”

  “He called me a Sassenach. I’m not English. I’m Jewish.”

  “Shosh?”

  “If I knew what I wanted, I wouldn’t have to ask for it!” she shouted. “All right, all right! Everyone calm down. I’ll explain.”

  Cydney’s ping to Earth had not been answered—any more than her preceding pings had. She concluded that Shoshanna had taken over the ecohood’s routers. No more signals would get out of here unless this madwoman wanted them to.

  “I’m here to save humanity,” Shoshanna said. “And on that note, I think it’s time to have a chat with one of my prominent co-religionists: Eliezer James.”

  ★

  “Oh, not again,” Elfrida said.

  The Extropia Collective stared at her in bemusement.

  “More of you,” she said. “Seeking the secret of human happiness. You’re the third lot in less than a year. What is this, a new fad? Has plain old freedom gone out of style?”

  Hugh Meredith-Pike cleared his throat and drank some gatorade from the supplies Petruzzelli had sent over. “I can’t tell you anything about any other seekers. There may be others, but—”

  “There are. Correction, there were. On 395792 Nurislam and 1000384 Sybilsmith. Recently established colonies. As in very recently. As in, they were still living in inflatables at the bottom of holes. Like you.”

  At this point, she heard Meredith-Pike saying: “—we don’t know anything about them.”

  “No? Well, I’ll tell you about them.” As she spoke, her phavatar dismantled the hab’s oxygen generation system to replace the wrecked parts of the C02 removal assembly with new ones that Petruzzelli had run off on her industrial printer. The would-be colonists watched with fascination, as if they’d never seen anyone use a screwdriver before. “Neither of those groups ever planned to build a permanent habitat. They said they did, but the truth came out pretty quickly. Their real deal was: pay us to go away. The secret of human happiness? Bitter laugh! Cash, that’s what they were seeking. And they got it, because some genius decided a couple of years back that UNVRP should offer monetary compensation for the damage that resettlement would inflict on people’s uuuniiiique cultural vaaaalues.”

  “We weren’t even told where we were going.”

  “Now, I’m pretty sure that those two groups were both planted on us by the same gang of crooks that brought you here, and then abandoned you. So if you’re tempted to pull the same crap they did … just think about whether those pirates deserve their cut of what you will have bought with your pain and terror and suffering.”

  “They told us they would take us to 4 Vesta.”

  “They what?”

  Only now did the Extropia Collective hear her accuse them of trying to extort compensation from UNVRP. All twenty-seven unwashed, traumatized men, women, and children smirked in alarm. The youngest child, an eight-year-old with a shaved head, piped up: “We aren’t going anywhere! We spent our entire life savings to get here, and we’re staying!” It looked at a parent for approval of this performance.

  To their credit, the Extropia Collective burst out laughing. The confused child looked as if it might cry. Its mother hugged it. “Oh, Kurzweila. You did learn your lines. No, no, we aren’t laughing at you, darling. We’re laughing at ourselves, I suppose.”

  Meredith-Pike cleared his throat. “Not much I can add to that,” he admitted. “We were to put up a convincing resistance, and then accept resettlement in exchange for as much compensation as could be wru
ng out of your organization.”

  “I knew it,” Elfrida said.

  Meredith-Pike cocked his head. He had just heard her saying: “They what?”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “When we first got here, we were shocked. We were expecting to go to 4 Vesta, you see. They deceived us. But there was nothing we could do about it: they had the only ship. Mr. Haddock said that you might be persuaded to resettle us, actually, on 4 Vesta ...?”

  “Ha,” Elfrida said when she heard this. “You aren’t the first to make that request. All I can say is …” In your dreams. “There’s only one place to live on 4 Vesta: the Bellicia ecohood. And the corporate owner enforces strict population limits.”

  But she thought of the Liberty Rock settlement, which would soon house 200,000 new emigrants in comfort and security. Against that, Virgin Atomic’s immigration policy seemed even less fair. They were eager to welcome 200,000 Chinese. How could they justify turning everyone else away?

  “I’m afraid you’re most likely to end up on Ceres,” she said. “We sometimes place people on other asteroids where there are employment opportunities—Eunomia, Hebe, Cybele, Davida … but generally, Ceres is it. Or if you want to go back to Earth, of course, you can do that. As recent emigrants, I assume you’ve all got citizenship somewhere. But you’d have to buy your own tickets.”

  Hugh Meredith-Pike bobbled closer to her. His shaved skull sported an all-over tattoo of electronic circuitry, harking back to the days when transistors were built of silicon. The fashion statement underlined the quaint aspirations of the Extropia Collective. Wireheads were an old subset of the transhumanist subculture. They aimed to achieve bliss by means of implanted electroceuticals that could switch off unpleasant feelings. Certainly, their ability to flood their brains with serotonin must have helped them to endure their ordeal on Montego without killing and / or eating each other. They were basically junkies, in Elfrida’s opinion.

  Who would be so irresponsible as to land a bunch of junkies, and their kids, on an undeveloped rock, and leave them there, in the blithe expectation that the UN would not only pick up the tab but pay for the privilege of doing so?