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

by Felix R. Savage

  The Unicorn’s operations module resounded with the excited voices of Kiyoshi’s newly embarked passengers. The racket made his head hurt. Eyemask in place, he exited the bridge and walked down the dark, cool corridor that led to the peaceful environs of the St. Francis.

  “We’re cleared to launch,” Jun said. “Cargo’s all loaded. Including the Koreans.”

  Jun Yonezawa had died on 11073 Galapagos. Kiyoshi had brought him back by customizing a high-end software-based MI—the type sold as add-ons for game play—with archived video and the tearful recollections of their mother, recorded without her knowledge at their new home on Ceres.

  Alive, Jun had been gifted, devout, a natural leader. Going places, for sure. Now he was trapped in the hub of the Unicorn, going nowhere except the places where Kiyoshi could make a buck for the boss-man. You win some, you lose some.

  Through the machine-learning process, the software-based Jun had become so realistic that he was often a pain in the proverbial. But as Kiyoshi had hinted to Alicia Petruzzelli, he couldn’t do without him anymore.

  “They’re namsadang,” he told Jun. “Not really Korean. Their native language is English. Did you introduce yourself?”

  “I’m not that stupid.”

  On the re-imagined bridge of the St. Francis, officers walked around, typed on antiquated consoles, and sailed paper airplanes across the low-ceilinged, hexagonal space. They were phantoms with limited interactivity. The Unicorn’s hub was feeble by modern standards: there were more powerful processing crystals in the ship’s fridge. Kiyoshi could not give more than a fraction of the hub’s capacity over to the sim, much as he might’ve liked to, and the lion’s share of that had to go to Jun.

  His brother’s black eyebrows knitted. Kiyoshi could always tell when Jun was pissed. It made him smile.

  “Did you tell them where we’re going?” he asked, while heading for the cyberwarfare officer’s workstation. (The St. Francis had not originally had a cyberwarfare officer, being a simple cargo ship. Kiyoshi had created the position because, c’mon. Cyberwarfare.)

  “No,” Jun said. “I didn’t tell them where we’re going, because we’re not taking them.”

  Kiyoshi affected puzzlement. “We’ve got sixty-three emigrants on board. We’ve got consumables, habs, D/S bots, the whole construction kit. And you want to offload the guys who make the magic happen?”

  “They told me to forget about 3982440 Twizzler. Too risky.”

  “We’re not going to 3982440 Twizzler.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Kiyoshi cleared his throat to get the cyberwarfare officer’s attention. “Hey. Busy? Sorry.” He was polite to the imaginary man, keeping up his end of the simulation. “Mind decrypting this, if you’ve got a minute?” He handed over a a memory crystal embedded in a signet ring. Rockin’ it 2200 style. In reality, he was transferring the file from his BCI to the hub.

  He turned around and found Jun right behind him. “I’ve been listening to the passengers,” Jun said.

  “Eavesdropping again? Tch, tch.”

  “I’m an MI grafted to the hub, with access to all its data inputs. I can’t selectively turn my eyes and ears off when I hear something you don’t want me to know about.”

  Kiyoshi looked sorrowfully at him. “Total immersion killer,” he said.

  “Whoops, my bad,” Jun said, unapologetic.

  Kiyoshi sauntered over to the pilot’s workstation. He sat down (the simulation of gravity was unsatisfactory) and initiated the launch procedure. The commands he gave here were executed IRL. That was an absolute no-no in sim design, a risk factor for catastrophic mix-ups. But Kiyoshi hadn’t put a foot wrong yet, and was confident he never would. He made a little speech to the passengers, welcoming them to the Unicorn, congratulating them on their decision to start a new life in the asteroid belt, and instructing them to prepare for acceleration in approximately thirty minutes. Then he ran a few fuel / payload calculations.

  Though dwarfed by the tankers in orbit around 6 Hebe, the Unicorn was one stupid-big space truck. Its century-old deuterium-deuterium fusion drive kicked out a mere 70,000 newtons of thrust under realistic conditions. Against that, its bulbous hull enclosed a total volume of 277,000 cubic meters. On the plus side, the only cargo on board right now was the stuff for the planned excavation on 3982440 Twizzler. Kiyoshi’s sixty-three paying passengers and the five pirates were all travelling in the operations module (designed on last-century assumptions to accommodate a crew of 100 or more). So the ship massed just 97,621 tons right now, and he’d refueled ahead of the surge in demand he was anticipating. He could make it home from here in a week, if he decided to do that.

  The Unicorn declamped and fell away from Port Hebe under auxiliary power. You weren’t allowed to burn too near an inhabited rock, for obvious reasons. Kiyoshi rose from the pilot’s workstation. Jun was waiting for him.

  “They’re talking about 4 Vesta. No one knows what’s going on there. Total information blackout; that probably means the ISA is involved. Even Cydney Blaisze’s feed has quit.”

  “Yeah. About that,” Kiyoshi said. He led Jun off the bridge. They went up to the observation deck that Kiyoshi had added to the sim, in disregard of authenticity and the basic principles of spaceship design, because c’mon: an observation deck. 6 Hebe hung in front of the vast windows, slowly rolling, like a misshapen die.

  “I talked to the boss-man,” Kiyoshi told his brother.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Because I called him while I was in Karl Ludwig City.” Because I didn’t want you listening in. But he was telling Jun now.

  “What’d he say?”

  “He wants us to bug out. He didn’t even want me to wait for our passengers to board. He said, and I quote, ‘Come home. Burn everything that rotten old ship’s got to burn. Just get away from 4 Vesta. Preferably, several hundred million kilometers away.”

  “He’s pissed.”

  “He’s scared. Maybe he knows something we don’t. Or maybe he’s just being rational.” Kiyoshi shrugged. “I’m not scared. We’ve got a thousand tons of hybrid oak waiting for us on 1034472 Petergrave, already paid for, and a shitload of soy products for 976011 Lamorra in the freezer. I figure we make those runs and then head home. The passengers can come along for the ride.”

  “That’s gonna be fun.”

  “A laugh a minute,” Kiyoshi agreed.

  Jun flicked a smile at him: on, off. Then his face went dark and hard, like the day he’d followed Kiyoshi to the cave where the junior high goof-off gang drank home-brewed shochu and discussed girls. “This is wrong,” he said, and that was exactly what he’d said that day, when he was ten years old.

  “Draft that course, would you?”

  “It’s the thing. If it gets loose, everyone on 4 Vesta will be in danger. That asteroid has 122,684 inhabitants. Their lives will be in jeopardy, and it’s our fault.”

  “If it gets loose? I’m assuming it already has.”

  Jun went quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Can’t have. We’d know about it. Even the ISA can’t silence that many people, not completely.”

  “So what do you want me to do about it?”

  “I want you to goddamn man up.”

  Kiyoshi breathed in and out, counted to five. “Let’s get one thing straight. You’re here to provide light entertainment. You’re not my conscience.”

  “Oh no? Because I thought that’s exactly what I was. You sure need one, and your own seems to have gone missing. Maybe you killed it with all the drugs. Oh, sorry.” Kiyoshi had raised one hand. “Aren’t I being entertaining enough?”

  Kirin had been going to hit him, but had realized just in time how stupid it would be to hit someone who a) wasn’t real and b) was deliberately winding him up.

  “You’re too goddamn realistic, is all.”

  He meant that to ratchet down the tension, but Jun didn’t take the off-ramp.

  “So log out of the s
im. Go and talk to your passengers. Tell them everything’s OK, but they won’t be getting the fresh start they expected. Oh yes, and the extinction of human civilization may be just around the corner. But everything’s just hunky-dory.”

  Kiyoshi had had enough of this. What were things coming to, when you couldn’t even count on a sim for escapism? He turned and left the observation deck. He headed for the ship’s pharmacy, a fluorescent-lit hole in the wall modelled on the one near their home on 11073 Galapagos. He dragged a finger along the rows of dingy bottles, cursing the constraints he’d programmed in himself, which wouldn’t let him get a fix without jumping through the sim’s hoops.

  “Do you even pray anymore?” Jun said.

  Kiyoshi twitched, bottles cascading from his hands. With his back to Jun, facing the shelves, he said, “It’s not that simple. I lost my faith when I first went into space. You know that. The bigness of the solar system, the choices you get … I made a lot of wrong choices. I admit that. But I’m clean now.”

  “Apart from the nicotine, the caffeine, the tranquilizers, the morale juice—”

  “Now you’re getting on my case about a few cigarettes?” Kiyoshi let out an exasperated laugh.

  The cyberwarfare officer pinged him. “Done with that decrypt, sir.” At the same instant, Jun’s head twitched in an inhuman way. “Hey, that’s interesting.”

  “Lemme see.”

  Jun clicked his fingers. Out of thin air, he unrolled a scroll of washi paper inscribed with a list of names, IDs, dates, and IRCS coordinates. “What’s this?”

  “It’s the contact log from the wrist tablet of a recycler captain called Alicia Petruzzelli.” Kiyoshi took the scroll and scanned it. Going back a week, the log was briefer than he would have expected. Petruzzelli apparently didn’t have very many friends.

  “Oh, so that’s where you were last night,” Jun said.

  “Yeah. I grabbed this while she was sleeping.” Fingerprint recognition security was excellent, but it had one big drawback: you could break it by pressing the finger of its owner onto the screen, if she was sleeping soundly. If she was very tired.

  “Thou shalt not steal,” Jun muttered.

  Kiyoshi met his eyes, daring him to say that again. “She’s one of Haddock’s friends. Would have been better if she never found out who I am. But she did, and now she knows too much. This evens up the score … kinda.”

  One ID cropped up twenty times in a row. The calls to it had been made from Petruzzelli’s ship’s hub. She’d synced its comms log with her tablet. If Kiyoshi had known she was in the habit of doing something as dumb as that, he could have dredged a lot more information off her wrist tablet. Too late now. But at least he had this ID, and the name that went with it. “Goto … Elfrida.”

  Jun propped his shoulders against the shelves. He looked like he was in need of a pick-me-up. It took a lot to make an MI look like that.

  “I remember her,” Jun said.

  “Yeah.”

  “She ate me.”

  xxiii.

  The Guangrong-class technical vessel Kěkào—Elfrida had been told that its name meant trustworthy—lifted off from a crater a few kilometers to the south of Rheasilvia Mons. At blinding speed, it vanished into the blackness of space.

  The Virgin Atomic satellites in orbit around Vesta loosed a storm of panicky queries to each other and to their human operators.

  “What the hell?” demanded the de Grey Institute’s satellite. “That looked like one of the Chinese ships!”

  “It was,” said Resources, which had gotten the best pictures. “It was the mission-capable Guangrong-class technical Kěkào. I’m not sure that mission-capable is an accurate translation, though. It isn’t armed: the Chinese government doesn’t permit civilian ships to carry lethal weapons. That being the case, I wouldn’t call it a technical, either. A better translation might be … hmm … tuk-tuk.” It made an electronic noise which some of its colleagues interpreted as computerese for laughter.

  “This is no time for your puerile humor,” the de Grey Institute said angrily. “They’re running away! Rats off a sinking ship.”

  “I don’t think so,” the Big Dig’s comms satellite said. “Based on the Kěkào’s acceleration and mass profile, there were no humans on board. Or if there were, they’re strawberry jam now.”

  José Running Horse spoke up via the PORMS. “No one on board. Ship was launched without our knowledge. Now under the control of its navigation computer.”

  The de Grey Institute shouted, “Why didn’t you shoot it down, you meat-fingered halfwit?”

  At the same time, Resources said, “Are you sure?”

  There was a momentary silence on the satellites’ communication band. Running Horse broke it. “XX Resources: yes, I am comfortable with the assumption that the Kěkào is on autopilot. If the chinkies had lost control of the ship, they’d be in here yelling their heads off. Which they aren’t. They’re lying low, hoping we haven’t noticed that a spaceship just took off ten klicks from here. XX de Grey Institute: Thanks for proving why MIs need human controllers.”

  “Let’s try to guess where it’s going,” the de Grey Institute said. “Personally, I vote for ‘To fetch the Chinese army.’’ It referred to the force officially known as CTDF (China Territorial Defense Force), whose brief was to defend Chinese investments in space against the PLAN, but which was suspected to have broader military capabilities. “That might be an option, actually.”

  “You haven’t had a security breach, have you?” Resources screeched.

  “Absolutely not!” the de Grey Institute said. “We were having some cooling issues, but we’ve sorted those out now. Same old, same old, in fact. Stalemate, with no prospect of a breakthough. Or of a breakdown on our side, just to reassure you and your operators. No, all’s copacetic here! Except for the fact that the ISA is threatening to cut off the power to a hundred thousand people. That’s what I’m concerned about. No further directives from corporate regarding that situation, eh?”

  “Still waiting,” said the Big Dig comms satellite.

  “Fuck corporate,” said José Running Horse.

  “Seconded,” said Resources.

  The remaining satellites, which belonged to the Bellicia ecohood, were silent. Shoshanna Doyle had taken them over, and she was even now maneuvering them into new orbits, a development that José Running Horse was watching closely.

  Therefore, he could be forgiven for not paying the closest attention to the other half of his job: monitoring the excavation at the Big Dig.

  The first he knew of Jimmy Liu’s change of heart was when Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir came flying into his office, screaming, “Oh my dog! Do something! Stop it!”

  Running Horse looked up from his 3D radar plot. His assistant sat slack-jawed in front of a screen that depicted the junction of the up- and down-ramps. The entrance to the down-ramp was not visible at the moment. It was blocked by the wasp-striped bulk of a boom-type roadheader. Meter by meter, the colossal machine emerged into view. It resembled a brontosaurus whose head was a chain-saw.

  Trundling on eighteen hollow titanium tyres, it turned towards the cavern that held the staff habs.

  Running Horse reached into his 3D display and punched a red button. A gun safe appeared. He twisted the handle. This graphic represented the emergency defense system. It contained a flechette cannon, which would rise out of a cunningly disguised trapdoor in front of the staff habs, aimed at Liberty Village. Corporate had thought it wise to take precautions when dealing with the Chinese. That now looked to have been prescient. He hoped the flechette cannon would stop the roadheader.

  Before he could fire it, however, he needed to clear the security checks.

  “Oh my dog,” his assistant shouted, overcoming stupefaction as the roadheader loomed into the cavern. “They’re going to kill us all!”

  Sigurjónsdóttir started to cry. “My girls are going to be orphans. I knew I shouldn’t have taken this job.”

  “Fuc
k it,” Running Horse muttered. “What did I put for ‘favorite food in tenth grade?’ I know it was Count Chocula.”

  The roadheader stopped in the middle of the cavern. It raised its chainsaw-like slicer head.

  “Choc Insanity!” Running Horse exclaimed. “I switched after the health nazis took the marshmallows outta Count Chocula. Now I remember.” The gun safe swung open. The flechette cannon rose out of the cavern’s floor like a submarine’s periscope.

  Five figures burst from the airlock of Liberty Village. They dashed to the excavator and vaulted into its scoop. Four of them were people in EVA suits. One was a dog, ditto. The roadheader started to back up.

  Sigurjónsdóttir clamped her small, plump hands around Running Horse’s wrists. “Don’t fire! They’re going, they’re going away!”

  “Exactly,” Running Horse growled.

  “Don’t fire,” Sigurjónsdóttir said, her soft weight resting on his arms. Her tears fell on his tattoos. “Let them go, if they want to. No more senseless deaths. Please.”

  Reluctantly (he had wanted to try out the flechette cannon), Running Horse relented. “’No more senseless deaths?’” he said. “I figure we’re just getting started.”

  ★

  “We made it!” Elfrida exclaimed, laughing wildly. The Rheasilvia Crater spread before them. The roadheader lurched downhill along a set of tyre tracks even broader than it was.

  “That’s an interesting way of putting it,” Mendoza said. “Looks to me like we just embarked on a thousand-kilometer journey, on a digger. With no supplies. With—”

  “Would you rather stay behind, Mendoza?”

  “No, I—”

  “Because you don’t have to come. The guy who let you out of that capsule? He’s probably going to be in a lot of trouble when they realize you’re gone. So if you’re just going to sit there and moan—”