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

by Felix R. Savage

  Blind with rage at Captain Haddock and company, Elfrida bent her head to the oxygen generation system rack. Her phavatar’s MI was doing the work, not her. The čapek-class excelled at mechanical repairs, if nothing else.

  “I’m not just anyone,” Meredith-Pike whispered at the side of her head, as if she had ears instead of an omnidirectional microphone. “I know people. I’ve a very good friend at Virgin Atomic. Get in touch with him, he’ll certainly let us land on Vesta.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He works in the think-tank there. Decent chap. His name’s Julian Satterthwaite.”

  ★

  Elfrida logged out and fell back on her bunk. She had been logged in for ten hours, and her crappy little immersion kit didn’t have an IV to supply her with fluids. She was dehydrated, and so stiff, from the combination of immobility and nonstop command-gesturing, that she yelped in pain when she tried to sit up. Her head throbbed with the worst stress headache of her life.

  “Medibot,” she croaked. “Medibot!”

  No medibot appeared. The hab’s bots had not been instructed to recognize her. She had no alternative but to roll off her bunk and out of her capsule. She limped down to the ground level of the hab. She didn’t know where they kept the meds, but near the hygiene module was usually a good bet.

  Passing an open office door, she halted. What looked like all the VA personnel on site stood staring at the screen on someone’s desk. A voice said on speaker: “—the continuation of our ongoing conversation, by other means.”

  That’s someone I know, Elfrida thought. Heard that voice before somewhere.

  “It’s a war out there,” the voice continued. “That’s what you guys say, isn’t it?”

  “Fast-forward it,” someone in the room said.

  Bouncing on her tiptoes, Elfrida glimpsed the screen between the shoulders of the watchers. It showed a murky nighttime scene. A crowd of people. That’s Big Bjorn! His ursine silhouette was unmistakable. Now she recognized other people from the PHCTBS Studies gang. Where was Cydney? What had they done with her?

  “You know what they’re doing at the de Grey Institute,” challenged the same voice as before. Elfrida now recognized it as the voice of Shoshanna Doyle, that green-haired chick from Belter Studies.

  The camera shakily zoomed in on the face of Dr. James.

  “No, I don’t,” Dr. James said. “I know they’re doing something … big. About fourteen months ago, they asked us to share our processing resources on an ongoing basis. We agreed, of course. But I don’t know anything about the content of their research.”

  Oh my dog! Elfrida realized that Dr. James was talking about the very data she and Mendoza had set out to find. It was a crushing revelation. If he was telling the truth, they’d been on the wrong track all along. And so, apparently, had Shoshanna’s crew.

  The data was not on the astrophysics lab’s workstation at all. It was in the de Grey Institute.

  Shoshanna, for one, did not seem disposed to accept this. “You’re lying,” she challenged Dr. James.

  “I assure you I’m not.”

  “You never even wondered what kind of research problem requires two supercomputers—they’ve got one on the train, and Ali Baba makes two—running around the clock?”

  “Of course I wondered,” Dr. James said. “But whatever it is, it’s clearly sensitive. They wouldn’t talk to me about it, and I very much doubt that this stunt will encourage them to talk to you.”

  “I’m only just getting started,” Shoshanna promised.

  “No matter what you do,” Dr. James said, “or who you represent, I promise you that violence won’t get you anywhere.”

  “She’s already killed our fucking CFO!” cried someone in the Big Dig office.

  Elfrida edged into the office, desperate to get a better look at the screen and see if she could see Cydney.

  But before she got any closer, José Running Horse spotted her. “Hey,” he said, shouldering through the crowd. “Out.”

  “Let me see! Please!”

  “No.” He grabbed her arm and spun her around.

  “Cydney!”

  “She’s there,” said Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir, not unkindly. “She’s the one filming, we think. They’ve taken over the routers, but the ecohood’s wireless environment is still functioning, and we do have a back-up transmitter at the Bremen Lock that hasn’t been corrupted.”

  “Yet,” someone else said.

  “We’ve notified all the relevant authorities. Help is on its way.”

  Running Horse yanked Elfrida out of the office. Sigurjónsdóttir made no move to stop him. Elfrida understood that she was no longer the focus of Sigurjónsdóttir’s concern. The woman now had real stakeholder relations problems.

  “’Help is on its way,’” Running Horse mocked under his breath, towing Elfrida through the hab.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Pretty to think so. Problem is, the relevant authorities are the same people who have just taken over the Bellicia ecohood.”

  “Uhhnnnh?”

  “That bitch is an ISA agent. She incited the protests, everything. Now she’s holding the entire ecohood hostage. That pretty little head is stuffed full of military-grade malware.” Running Horse looked Elfrida up and down. The eagle on his forehead seemed to stare scornfully at her, too. “Yours isn’t. But that doesn’t mean you’re not working with her. Out.” He shoved her into the vestibule of the airlock.

  “Don’t kill me!” Elfrida screamed, clawing at his forearms.

  “EVA suits in that locker,” he said with contempt.

  She struggled into one. Running Horse closed the airlock on her and cycled it. Sobbing inside her helmet, Elfrida stumbled out into the watery light of the cavern.

  She felt that she had behaved shamefully. Cydney … Mendoza … She had to rescue them. “Help. Someone please help,” she wailed. Of course, the suit’s radio was disabled. She was completely isolated, just like Running Horse had intended.

  The geology lab’s rover sat in the corner of the cavern, beyond Liberty Village (as the pilot settlement was called). Still crying, Elfrida scrambled inside. She took off the VA spacesuit in the tiny airlock and eeled into the cabin. The familiar odor of pouch noodles and farts smelled like home.

  “Nan de naite’ru?” [Why are you crying?] said Rurumi.

  “Leave me alone, you dog-damned machine,” Elfrida screamed.

  But after a while, too weary and miserable to resist Rurumi’s pre-programmed compassion, she told her. Not that the phavatar could help, of course. Her areas of competence were limited to sex and rocks, so all she could do was pat Elfrida’s arm and say, “That sounds scary.”

  “Do you think I’m scared?” Elfrida said. “Do you, eh? Well, you’re wrong! I’m not some pencil-thighed waif with more hair than brains. I’m the senior UN field agent on this asteroid, and I’ve survived two PLAN attacks, and I’ve spacewalked outside a foundering space station in the troposphere of Venus, and I survived for nine days on a fragment of an asteroid with nothing to eat or drink except the body of another human being. I survived that,” she insisted in a near-shriek. Then she dosed herself with more grapefruit-flavored rehydration fluid, and took another tranquilizer. The rover had a small stock of meds. It was a shame it didn’t have any of the legendary Star Force energy drink known as morale juice. That was what she really needed. “So there,” she said. “I’m not scared. I’m going to get through this, and I’m going to get Cydney and Mendoza out, too.”

  “Oooh!” Rurumi exclaimed, scrambling up on the dashboard. “Wan-wan! Kawaii!”

  Jimmy’s Jack Russell, in her miniature pink spacesuit, stood on the hood of the rover. Her helmet bumped the windshield. She seemed to be trying to lick it. Rurumi patted the inside of the windshield and cooed.

  The rover’s radio clicked on. “Niǐ hao, Ru-chan.”

  “Niǐ hao!” Rurumi responded. Elfrida stared at her.

  “Amy shuō niǐ hao, tài.” Jimmy sto
od outside the rover, EVA-suited, holding the other end of a tether that served as Amy’s leash. “Niǐ jīntiān hao ma?”

  Elfrida lunged for the radio. “Hello, hello? Uh, Jimmy! This is Elfrida Goto. I’m in here with Rurumi. I need help. Please! It’s really important!” She scrambled into her EVA suit, intending to chase him and beg him on her knees to ping New York for her. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t thought of asking the Chinese for help before.

  After a pause, the radio said in English: “Is this regarding the activities of the de Grey Institute?”

  No, Elfrida was about to say, but then she caught herself. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  xx.

  Having made up her mind to help her old friend Viola Budgett, Petruzzelli headed straight for 6 Hebe. She programmed a brachistone trajectory into the astrogation computer to get them there faster. During the tricky midpoint of the journey—when the Kharbage Collector had to flip 180° so that its acceleration became deceleration—Michael came to her with some rumors he’d found on the internet about the goings-on on Vesta.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?” she shouted at him.

  But when she had a look later, she grew alarmed. Whatever was going on, the powers that be were trying their damnedest to keep it out of the public eye. Most of Michael’s links had already disappeared.

  There was only one organization that could mount a news blackout with even 80% or 90% success.

  The ISA.

  Unlike most people in the solar system, Petruzzelli had met the ISA—and known it at the time. After the 11073 Galapagos incident, a man had come all the way from Earth to interview her aboard the Kharbage Can. Middle-aged white guy with stubby dreadlocks. Kind, polite. His kind, polite demeanor had not changed as he informed her what would happen to her family, and her friends, and basically everyone she’d ever bumped profiles with, if she breathed a word about what had happened with that stross-class phavatar, and the PLAN, and the asteroid called 99984 Ravilious.

  From which Petruzzelli had concluded that the ISA weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Their threats had told her exactly what they didn’t want known.

  They were plenty scary, though. She’d signed their non-disclosure agreement and kept her mouth shut from that day to this.

  Now, she wondered if the ISA was involved in the trouble on Vesta. If so, Elfrida Goto and Viola Budgett might need rescuing.

  But someone else would have to do it. Apart from everything else, Petruzzelli was committed to her course. When you were burning at almost three million kilometers per hour, it was physically impossible to turn around.

  She was going to make UNVRP pay for her fuel, too. She spent most of the journey happily filling out invoices.

  25 hours later, 6 Hebe swelled on the Kharbage Collector’s screens, angular, glittering. One of the larger asteroids in the Belt, about 200 kilometers square, 6 Hebe had also been one of the first exploited for its minerals. It did not, however, offer riches beyond the dreams of anyone—just nickel-iron. Therefore, it had also been one of the first asteroids to move up the value chain. The miners had long since left, and the current owner, Centiless Corporation, had built a spaceport on top of the old-timey mining infrastructure. Now 6 Hebe was a node in the ITR, the Interplanetary Transit Network of low-energy pathways that ships could ‘surf’ around the solar system, utilizing gravitational resonances. Near aphelion—where 6 Hebe was now—it actually orbited within Gap 2.5, where Jupiter’s gravity held sway like the ghostly hand of a wizard.

  Tankers and container ships orbited the rock. They were moon-sized in comparison to the Kharbage Collector. Superlifters puttered around them, loading and unloading cargo before the cyclers drifted off on the next trajectory of their multi-year journeys. Petruzzelli navigated through the throng of radar blips. She synced and clamped.

  “That wasn’t a very good landing,” Michael said, looking around from the comms officer’s workstation, where he was filing their arrival notification. “I felt the bump.”

  “Take it up with the hub,” Petruzzelli said. “I’m going dirt-side. You stay here.”

  “I want to go dirt-side, too.”

  “No. We’re only going to be here for a few hours. Besides, we have recycling to offload and cargo to pick up. I need you to supervise that.”

  “The hub can do it.”

  “No,” Petruzzelli said. She braced one elbow against the flopping reflective cladding of the elevator shaft to hold it up. She used it as a mirror to spritz her face with foundation. False eyelashes came next, then hairspray to keep her mop in shape in the low gravity awaiting her. Might as well look good. She headed for the elevator. “You stay right here, or … or …”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I’ll tell your daddy,” Petruzzelli said with finality, wagging a finger at his crestfallen face.

  Michael Kharbage was nine years old. He was the biggest pain in the ass Petruzzelli had ever worked with, and she’d known a few.

  A sense of freedom uplifted her as she strode out of the spaceport into Karl Ludwig City.

  6 Hebe had no gravity to speak of. Mooching, browsing crowds jostled IRL, while the public comms channel seethed with catcalls, quirky personal manifestoes, shopkeepers’ patter, and party invitations. The chaos spawned an aura of possibility that was missing from Petruzzelli’s workaday life. She glanced at shop displays, wondering if she could afford to treat herself to a new tattoo.

  Her fantasies were interrupted by Captain Haddock. “We’ll be seeing you, then, darlin’,” he texted her. “Thanks for the ride.”

  She spun, glimpsed the pirates on an upper-level street, and bounded after them.

  Built on two enormous gantries that had been deliberately toppled after the cessation of mining operations on 6 Hebe, Karl Ludwig City was basically a multi-level, five-kilometer bridge from Port Hebe to nowhere. It sloped down. An expansion coil enclosed it, generating a magnetic field that provided active radiation shielding: essentially, the hab existed inside a giant superconducting magnet. Steam and smoke from sauna baths and kebab joints drifted in layers beneath the sun-lamps.

  Petruzzelli caught up with the pirates. “Not so fast,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Ye can’t.” Haddock and his family were all in disguise: they wore burkas. This was a mistake, in Petruzzelli’s opinion. 6 Hebe was known for its post-Islamist culture. You would be more likely to encounter Muslim fundamentalists on Ceres. “People are staring,” Haddock pleaded.

  “At you, not me,” Petruzzelli said.

  They glided in giant strides past the bazaar; past water wholesalers’ offices and virtual ship showrooms; past niche IP agents specializing in every tiny part of a fusion engine that could break. After about four kilometers the multiple levels converged into a single, dark street. Holographic tigers, elephants, and belly dancers gyrated outside doors vanishingly high up in the walls. Petruzzelli smelled an aroma that made her think of her first boyfriend. A hundred meters further on, she caught herself thinking that Captain Haddock was actually quite attractive. She consulted her email, using her wrist tablet’s backlight to see by. They had come to nowhere—literally, Nowhere, Karl Ludwig City’s red-light district.

  “Should be somewhere around here.”

  “Aye, it’s that place,” Haddock said, pointing at a holographic Ganesh in a blue bikini.

  The sign of the elephant god cued Petruzzelli to expect an Indian-themed bar, but instead they floated into a dive that could’ve been anywhere in the Midwest. A band played rock ‘n’ roll covers, abusing the wah-wah pedal. Human waitresses carried burgers and fries out of a tiny kitchen.

  “Most people here used to be Indonesian,” Kiyoshi Yonezawa explained.

  “I wish they’d switch the freaking pheromones off,” Petruzzelli huffed. She was still turned on from walking through the psychotropic misters positioned outside the bars and clubs of Nowhere. It was a form of advertising that hadn’t yet been made illegal. Ban somethi
ng and people would come up with something worse.

  “Oh, come on,” Yonezawa said. “It’s not that bad in here.”

  She pinged for a drink, buying time to study him. Spaceborn and then some: two point four meters tall, two point five. Hips so narrow she could probably span them with her hands. Shaggy black hair hacked off at the shoulders. Smiling lips and the biggest, saddest bedroom eyes she’d ever seen. Dammit, those pheromones haven’t worn off yet, have they?

  She deliberately focused on the epicanthic folds rounding off those eyes, the sallowness of his skin. He could’ve passed as an East Asian mutt, but because she knew differently, his actual heritage seemed obvious. Pureblood. Pureblood. Ugh. Pureblood. The word killed her unreal feelings of lust. Better than a cold shower.

  “So,” she said. “We’ve never met, but you’re famous, dude.”

  She’d intended to alarm him, and his sudden stillness betrayed that she’d succeeded. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, I know all about you.”

  “Whatever those slebs told you, the truth is worse,” he bantered, nodding at the pirates, who were sitting near the stage, drinking cola through the slits of their burkas.

  “Oh, they haven’t told me anything about you. Tried to lose me on the way here, even. That’s how you can tell the real criminals: they don’t rat out their friends. Whereas people that are naturally law-abiding, in over their heads, people who landed themselves on the dark side through one moment’s surrender to greed or curiosity … they sing like fucking vid stars, dude. I’m talking about our mutual friend, Viola Budgett.” Petruzzelli sucked on the autoseal straw of her drink, which was ginger ale without any add-ins. She wanted to keep her wits about her. “Actually, scratch that. You’re not her friend. You’re blackmailing her to the tune of eighty big ones a month. Or if that’s how you treat your friends, you’re really not a very nice guy.”

  Yonezawa recovered fast. “That’s libel,” he informed her

  “Fact, buddy.”

  There was a pause while he, she assumed, tried to figure out how much proof she had. That was impossible, of course. Presently he said, “Those payments are instalments. You can’t call it blackmail.”