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

by Felix R. Savage

  “It’s not too late. They’re on the brink of catastrophe, but they can still contain it if they’re smart.”

  “Right. Right. SYSTEM COMMAND: Engage main drive.” (At present, the Unicorn was coasting, as Kiyoshi had wanted to save fuel for a quick getaway.) “Recompute course to 4 Vesta based on brachistochrone trajectory.” The astrogation computer went to work. “Burn all the way,” Kiyoshi said, pacing, “and we can get there in …”

  “Seven hours, fourteen minutes and three seconds.”

  “Fly by at high speed and frag the fucker from a thousand klicks out.” Kiyoshi let out a wheezy laugh. “The ISA might even give us a medal.”

  “No.”

  “Yonezawa-san? Yonezawa-san, are you there?”

  Kiyoshi gave Jun a hard stare and clicked TRANSMIT. “Right here. Just thinking about the best solution to your problem, running a few calculations.” The gunnery computer told him that it could hit an object the size of the Vesta Express from up to 2,000 kilometers away with 96.2% certainty of obliterating it. The gunnery computer was the most up-to-date part of the ship, saving only the hypervelocity coil gun and conventional missile battery that it governed. Both had been given to Kiyoshi by the boss-man to safeguard his cargoes. “We’re gonna be with you sooner than we thought: in about seven hours.”

  Jun stood in front of him, fists clenched. His eyes were the eyes of the monk he had been, uncompromising, fiery-dark.

  “You know what,” Kiyoshi told Elfrida Goto, “you might want to get off that train. Be sneaky about it, you copy?”

  “I can’t!” Elfrida wailed. “They took our freaking EVA suits! We can’t go anywhere!”

  “Oh,” Kiyoshi said. “Well. That’s OK. Just stay where you are, and we’ll be with you shortly.” At least, a hypervelocity cloud of molten metal will.

  “Don’t give me false hope, Yonezawa-san,” Elfrida wept. “I mean, it’s nice that you want to help, but I have to get off this call. I’m supposed to be talking to UNLOESS.”

  “Oh, don’t do that. No need to involve the authorities,” Kiyoshi said, through clenched teeth.

  Then Jun booted him off the call and took over.

  ★

  “Elfrida?”

  “Aaaagh! Oh my dog! You’re him! Were you him all along? What’s going on?” Elfrida sobbed. “How can you be talking to me? You’re dead!”

  “Calm down,” said the ghost of Jun Yonezawa. He appeared to be standing in the cab of the Vesta Express, just as his alter ego or evil twin, Kiyoshi Yonezawa, had a second ago. His elbow went through the face of the skeptically watching Mendoza. His feet, shod in clumpy printed boots like they’d worn on 11073 Galapagos, were buried in the floor. He wore a white cassock belted with a length of fiberoptic cable. “I’m not dead—not exactly. Trust me. Please.”

  “How can I trust a word you say?”

  A rueful smile flickered across Jun’s lips. “We’ve been here before. Remember?” He spread his palms. “Ask me anything.”

  Elfrida blurted, “Is there a God?”

  “You would have to ask a tough one,” Jun said, his smile vanishing.

  He staggered sideways and fell through the console. Kiyoshi Yonezawa took his place. “This is my fucking ship,” he yelled at Jun’s legs, which stuck out of the console. “You can’t do that.” His gaze kept missing Elfrida’s face. Of course, he couldn’t see her because she didn’t have a camera on her. “Hey, Elfrida? You got telepresence capability? If we could do this face to face, it would be better.”

  “No. Telepresence capability? I don’t—”

  “Yes, you do,” Mendoza interrupted. He toed a familiar aluminum case. It was her home immersion kit. “I brought it along. Seemed a shame to leave it behind after we lugged it all that way.”

  ★

  The eternal gale scoured the Ishtaran desert, honing the dunes of sulfur-colored sand to knife-edges. Jun Yonezawa walked alongside Elfrida, the hood of his cassock up, the skirt moulded to his legs by the wind. Kiyoshi Yonezawa, on Jun’s other side, was having trouble with his long black cloak, which snapped out behind him like a flag. He finally took it off and carried it over one arm.

  “You look hot,” Elfrida said to him, giggling. A small voice in her head added, Pun intended! Kiyoshi wore a black leather vest and drainpipe trousers ornamented with diamond studs, zips, and chains. He was extremely good-looking, even if he did resemble a giraffe, which made her think that this was probably a true-to-life representation. Shut up! she told the voice of her inner teenager. You don’t even like men!

  “I’m perfectly comfortable,” Kiyoshi said. “I turned the heat off. You can do that, you know. How about turning the wind off?”

  “No,” Elfrida said. “I value authenticity.”

  “Authenticity,” Kiyoshi echoed, glaring through his sunglasses at the dunes, which were made from sands of silicon dioxide and aluminum dioxide sequestered from the atmosphere during Phase 3 of the Venus Remediation Project. “In real life, we’d have been charred to ash within a few microseconds. That’s if we weren’t squashed flat by the atmospheric pressure first.”

  “This sim represents UNVRP’s consensus projection of the benefits achievable through terraforming within a hundred-year timeframe. Maybe sooner,” Elfrida said stiffly, while realizing that it might not have been the most tactful thing to bring two people—one? two?—here whose home asteroid had been sacrificed to the Project. She added, “We can do this at your place, if you like.”

  “No, this is fine,” Jun said. “We haven’t got time to futz around with settings.”

  “What are those?” Kiyoshi said, pointing at a group of specks on the horizon.

  “Cows,” Elfrida said. “They’re cool! They have padded feet like camels. Their shaggy pelts reflect the sunlight, and they also dispose of excess heat by, uh, urinating it out. You do not want to touch a gengineered Cytherean cow’s urine. You’d get scalded.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” Kiyoshi said

  Jun said, “Let’s try to stay on topic. Elfrida, as I explained, I’m actually an MI based on the late human named Jun Yonezawa.”

  Elfrida nodded. “I get that now. You’re a remake, aren’t you? I know about—I mean, I’ve read about them. How people—” rich people— “sometimes remake their loved ones by loading their data archives into custom robots, which look just like the person who, uh, passed away.”

  “Well, kind of,” Jun said. “I don’t have a body, robotic or otherwise. This cheapskate won’t fork out for one. So I reside in the hub of the Unicorn, which used to be called the St. Francis. We’re not far away from you, and getting closer all the time.”

  “Yeah, I can tell by the latency.” Elfrida tugged down the brim of her hat. She was wearing a typical Cytherean outfit: a pastel kaftan—hers was bubblegum pink—and refrigerator boots, with a broad-brimmed hat that magically stayed on her head despite the gale. She was also wearing dark glasses. Even so, in the sun’s glare, Jun melted into a tarry silhouette. She needed to see his face. If it were possible, she would have wanted to touch him, feel him, and smell him, too. She needed to do something about the irrational sense of happiness that was welling up in her, born of the illusion that he wasn’t dead after all. “Do you guys want to go to my house?”

  In disregard of authenticity, she teleported them there. These were unusual circumstances, after all. Her house was a long, low building in the midst of her olive and fig groves, built from blocks of smoky glass that, again, was made of the local silicon dioxide. A solar canopy over the roof provided electricity as well as shade. Her goats ran away at the sight of the two men, their radiator dewlaps flapping.

  Inside, Elfrida offered them a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Kiyoshi refused. He wandered around, looking at her artwork and sculptures. “That’s the freaking Pietà of Michelangelo.”

  “It’s in the public domain,” Elfrida said. “You’re allowed.”

  “Middlebrow schmaltz.” Kiyoshi was edgy, snappish. He prowl
ed over to the patio window and gazed out at the dazzling line of sea visible between the trees.

  “Most of this other stuff is locally made,” Elfrida prattled, anxious to stave off any further criticism of her taste in art. “We have a really creative community. Our economy’s developing organically, and that means a lot of barter at this stage, so I often accept art in exchange for olive oil or figs—”

  “That’s a bourgeois fantasy. Organically developing economies don’t run on barter. They run on debt and credit, a.k.a. reputation.”

  “Well, of course—”

  “Debt is as old as humanity. And reputation, to simplify considerably, is what the bad guys have, and you haven’t. Don’t believe me? Look around at the solar system. Oh yeah, sure, the bad guys wear expensive suits these days, and their rackets are listed on the stock exchange.”

  “But things can change,” Elfrida said. “That’s the founding principle of UNVRP. A new planet. A fresh start.”

  Kiyoshi snorted.

  Jun was sitting by the ColdfireTM, a product placement that helped to pay the development costs of Homestead Venus. It was an air conditioner that looked like holographic blue flames flickering in a stone hearth. Jun sipped orange juice, patted the bench facing him. “Come here,” he said to Elfrida in Japanese.

  She sat down.

  “We’re going to ask you to do something. Something really big. That’s why my brother is in a bad mood. He doesn’t think we should ask this of anybody. But I have faith in you.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re brave.”

  Unexpectedly, Elfrida’s eyes filled with tears. This was really happening, not just in the sim. “I wish you were right,” she gulped. “But I’m scared out of my skull.”

  “That’s what courage is. Being scared out of your skull, and doing it anyway.”

  “What—what do you need me to do?”

  Jun did not answer immediately. He said, “I don’t have all the memories that … that I should have. I wasn’t augmented. I didn’t have implants recording everything I ever did. So I don’t know … all I know is what other people have told me.”

  Elfrida understood that he was referring to the last hours of his own life, and what had happened afterwards. “I can tell you everything I remember,” she said. A few minutes ago, she wouldn’t even have thought herself capable of talking about it. But he had called her brave. She couldn’t wimp out. “I even have data. I was wearing a borrowed Star Force Marine’s suit. It automatically recorded everything that … everything. They gave me the data dump. I was supposed to review it as part of my therapy. I’ve never actually looked at it. But I could give you a copy, absolutely!”

  “That would be great,” Jun said. He smiled, and it transformed his heavy-browed face the way she remembered.

  “You’re not going to love what’s in the data, though,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I ate you.” It spurted out, a raw confession. “The suit did it. I mean, it wasn’t like I was gnawing on chunks of flesh. It processed the, your proteins and liquids into a form I could consume. I would have died otherwise. I was drifting for nine days. I didn’t want to do it. But the suit just … no, I’m making excuses. I had to authorize it, and the suit used my hands to … to … oh, I can’t bear to remember,” she almost shrieked.

  She stared at the floor. Unshed tears blurred the slaty sheen of the flags. Jun touched her shoulder. “It’s OK. No, really, it’s OK. I believe that God is capable of reassembling our atoms on the Day of Judgement, regardless of where they may have ended up in the meantime.”

  “Father Hirayanagi told me it was a grave sin. He said I had to repent.”

  “Well, it looks to me like you have repented. But he was right, of course. Cannibalism is not justifiable.”

  “My suit said …”

  “It was a Star Force Marine’s suit. Not exactly a theological authority. No, I think you ought to find a priest, make a real confession, and get absolution. Otherwise, this is going to be on your conscience as long as you live.”

  Elfrida was silent.

  Kiyoshi stood watching, arms folded.

  “I’m sorry,” Jun said.

  “You’re sorry?”

  “That I put you in this position.”

  “Crap on that! I owe my life to you. Literally.”

  “Not to me,” Jun said in a whisper. “To him. To who I was.”

  Outside, the olive trees rustled in the breeze that filtered past Elfrida’s windbreaks. One of the goats wandered indoors, chewing its cud.

  “May I?” Elfrida whispered, reaching out to Jun.

  He gave her his hand. She stroked its tawny back with her thumbs. Frustratingly, her home immersion kit’s gloves provided only basic feedback: warmth, firmness, resilience. She couldn’t feel the texture of his skin.

  “May I?”

  The taste function worked better. Receiving a nod from him, she bowed her face over his hand. She touched her lips to it and then tentatively put out her tongue. She tasted the gritty dust that stuck to everything here. The sweetness of orange juice. The salty tang of living skin.

  Kiyoshi said, “I feel like I should tell you two to get a room.”

  Elfrida sat up, cheeks blazing. “Laugh,” Jun said. “I may be dead, but I’m still celibate.”

  “You feel real. You taste real,” Elfrida cried. “But you’re not real. This is so confusing for me.”

  “For me, too,” Jun said, and his eyes went dark, not a human darkness, but the darkness of the star-filled vacuum. She realized that he was deliberately doing this to ground her in the reality that he was not a human being, but the avatar of a machine intelligence. She swallowed and straightened up, primly crossing her legs.

  “You actually don’t look like I expected, Elfrida,” Kiyoshi said. “I’m assuming this isn’t realistic?” He gestured at her avatar.

  For reasons of cheapness, as well as cussed individualism, Elfrida still used the avatar she had built when she was in her early twenties. It was a pimply-faced East Asian teenager, even plumper than she was IRL, with black-and-white pinwheels for irises, and a tattoo of all five members of Las Nerditas on one thigh. At least her kaftan hid that. “No, genius, it isn’t realistic,” she said. “I’m just a baseline human. No augments, nothing. What about you?”

  “What you see is what you get.”

  “That could be really important, actually,” Jun said.

  “What could?” Elfrida said.

  “The fact that you’re not augmented. No BCI? That’s very good news. It means you’re probably immune to the Heidegger program.”

  “Oh my dog, that brain-jacking thing? I told you about that? It’s terrible. That poor guy. He was, like, trying to augment himself with dismantled ergoforms.”

  “He wasn’t connected to the internet?” Jun said.

  “No, they—”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Kiyoshi interrupted. “The apocalypse will not arrive in a tsunami of spam.”

  “Actually, that sounds pretty plausible to me,” Elfrida said, sniggering nervously.

  “It might work more like a virus, attacking selectively. Either way, we don’t want to risk it,” Jun said. “The thing has to be destroyed, along with any computers—and people—that it’s infected. We wouldn’t be killing them: they’re already dead.” He grimaced.

  “I’m all for that.” Elfrida felt the pressure of time ticking away. “So what’s your big idea?”

  Kiyoshi took up the thread. “The thing is on the Vesta Express. Seems like a pretty odd place to store something that dangerous, doesn’t it? But actually, they had a good reason for putting it there.”

  “Is this just speculation? Or …”

  “It’s on the Vesta Express,” Kiyoshi continued, “because the Vesta Express is a rail launcher. They figured that if their research went sideways, they would be able to shoot the whole mess into space. So it was actually a safety precaution. Your guess is as good as m
ine why they haven’t implemented it yet.”

  “Two reasons, off the top of my head. All the senior guys bugged out. And the supercomputer’s down. So maybe there’s no one who can initiate the launch procedure, let alone hack it so that the de Grey Institute itself would be launched into space, which I guess you would have to do.”

  “Not a major challenge. Accelerate to launch speed, and then kill the magnetic field that keeps the train on the track. There might be some hacking involved to get past the security checks. I’ll walk you through it.”

  So now she knew what they were going to ask of her. But it didn’t matter whether she could do it, or whether they were crazy to even imagine that she, a non-techie, could launch the Vesta Express into outer space. “It won’t work.”

  “Yes, it will, “ Kiyoshi said. He knelt in front of her and took her hands, gazing intensely into her eyes. “Listen to me. It will work. You can do it.”

  “I can’t. Because the train’s decelerating as we speak. We can’t go anywhere. There’s an obstruction on the track!”

  ★

  “Who were you talking to?” Mendoza said.

  “A couple of guys from 11073 Galapagos. One’s this sketchy kind of smuggler type, the other one’s a ghost.”

  Mendoza stared at her. He raised both hands and took an exaggerated pace backwards.

  Elfrida laughed. “It’s OK. We’ve got a plan.” She told him about it.

  His reaction—astonished, then thoughtful—went a long way towards convincing her that the Yonezawa brothers were not crazy. This just might work.

  xxix.

  On the bridge of the St. Francis, Kiyoshi sat at the pilot’s workstation, a raised throne of titanium and gold. Screensavers of Japanese dragons coiled over the displays at his knees. It was a far cry from the nest of rags he actually was reclining in on the bridge of the Unicorn. He watched Jun flitting from officer to officer, industriously pretending to be instructing them in their duties.

  Having opposed Kiyoshi earlier, the MI was now trying to please. But Kiyoshi was still pissed off, and determined to keep his options open.