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

by Felix R. Savage

  Meredith-Pike swore out loud and took a step backwards.

  He knew this had to be ‘the thing.’ But he had not expected to find himself staring at the naked body of a young girl.

  xxxi.

  Shoshanna’s malware had already captured the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport’s hub, so it didn’t take her and Dr. James long to steal a Flyingsaucer.

  In service all over the solar system, the Flyingsaucer boosted cargoes and passengers from micro-gravity environments to larger ships in orbit. Functionally a lighter version of the industrial-use Superlifter, it was officially called the Flyingsaucer because the manufacturers had long ago thrown up their hands and admitted that people were right: it did look like one. The toroidal form factor was simply practical, but folk humor trumped logic. The company had even changed its name to LGM Industries and adopted an eponymous mascot of a little green man, which bowed and grinned annoyingly in the corner of Shoshanna’s screen until she overrode the autopilot.

  “What was LGM Industries originally called?” said Dr. James, talking to break the silence. He had gone a bit green himself, as the Flyingsaucer soared around the curve of Vesta in a steep ballistic trajectory.

  “Toyota,” Shoshanna said. “It was a Japanese company.”

  “Ah; so that’s why they changed their name.”

  “Probably.”

  “Some people say that the Japanese are the new Jews. Homeless exiles, condemned to wander in time and space.”

  “That’s bullshit. The Jews are the new Jews. Always have been, always will be.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “What do you think?”

  “No.”

  “Right.”

  “And yet your name—Shoshanna, rose of Judah; your parents must have wanted to pay tribute to their heritage.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Professor. You can be a Jew without believing in God. I don’t know what your personal beliefs are, but you must’ve met plenty of Jewish atheists. That’s what my parents are.”

  Carrying on the conversation with half her brain, while she piloted the Flyingsaucer, she was aware that she was telling him too much about herself, and would have to eliminate him as a result. She wondered if she was doing this because she wanted to eliminate him anyway, and just needed a reason. Then she reflected that this kind of self-doubt was a very Jewish reaction to have.

  “Anyway, it’s not the twenty-second century anymore,” she said. “People aren’t as scared of sounding ethnic.”

  “True. There’s a greater acceptance of diversity. We’ve come full circle, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Still got a long way to go. That’s why the Friends of David Reid agitated for the establishment of a literature course.”

  The optic feed screen displayed the refinery. She smiled at the destruction her DIY missile had wrought. Better yet, the train was right there, halted by an obstruction on the track. Perfect.

  “Literature is the key to understanding who we are and where we come from,” she said. “Like, I’ll never forget the first time I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It was like the author was talking to me, telling me that it was OK to be different. But you can’t find those books anywhere, because they’re too pureblood-y. Whatever. That’s just stupid.”

  Dr. James looked at her with a half-smile. “Do you really believe that? Wasn’t your wish list of demands just dezinformatsiya?”

  “Yes and no.” Shoshanna calculated the Flyingsaucer’s angle of descent and then gave the professor her full attention for the first time. “I’ll be clear. What we’re fighting for? Is this. Precisely this. A podunk university in an asteroid crater 250 million kilometers from earth, complete with student activists, a lake that’s too full of algae to swim in, and a really good Goan restaurant. I could go on. We’re fighting for Zen gardeners on the moon, the Semi-Professional League of Kabaddi in the Inner Belt, fish farming on Europa, Wagner performed by nudists in the Andalusian desert, the electroceuticals industry, the hunter-gatherer movement, Oktoberfest, chess clubs, the re-wilding of the Congo, the opening ceremonies at the G30, Sufi dancers, homeschoolers, the perfect espresso drunk on a foggy afternoon on a bench overlooking the Seine, and even that crazy bunch of ultra-expansionists who want to splart an engine onto Pluto and drive it to Alpha Centauri. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. Human beings are crazy, amazing, creative, stupid, anachronistic, quarrelsome, and just generally the best thing that has ever happened to this solar system; possibly to this galaxy; possibly to the entire fucking universe, because as far as we know, there is no other life out there, let alone intelligent life. And yet the whole dang show hangs by a thread. The ISA is that thread. Am I getting my point across? We’re fighting for you.”

  Dr James said, “Then why treat the private sector as an adversary?”

  “Because,” Shoshanna snarled, “the private sector accomplishes a lot, but when they fuck up, it’s everyone else who pays. See below.”

  At the moment, below was a literal term, as the FlyingSaucer descended towards the Vesta Express on a trajectory not that much different from that of the satellite that had come this way a few hours ago. “Urk,” Dr. James said, covering his mouth with his hand and his claw. So Shoshanna got the last word, but it did not compensate her for the sight she saw as the resolution of her optic feed improved. A bunch of people—no, phavatars—were dashing for cover. They left behind a jerry-rigged arrangement on the south side of the cutting, which was obviously intended to lever the obstruction off the track.

  The metalfuckers just never stopped trying to run away from their own misdeeds.

  Well, she’d stop them.

  The Flyingsaucer landed as lightly as a sycamore seed on the higher ground south of the canyon. Its jackstands skidded on a patch of regolith scoured down to glass by its thruster exhaust. Shoshanna hurried to the airlock. Dr. James came with her. He easily kept up on their sprint towards the Vesta Express, bouncing along like some kind of bizarre two-legged insect in his custom spacesuit.

  “Help!” Shoshanna cried over every available comms channel as she ran. “Help, help!”

  It had worked for the Chinese.

  But answer came there none.

  ★

  Meredith-Pike backed out of the freezer. Then he went in again. Shivering, he bent over the body of the girl. She lay curled in the fetal position behind some boxes of salmon filets. She had been zipped up in a sleeping bag, which Meredith-Pike now opened far enough to see that she was, indeed, naked as the day she was born. “Sleeping Beauty,” Meredith-Pike murmured, inappositely.

  The girl had a lumpen, flat-nosed face with a bulgy forehead. Her skin was the exact café au lait shade of ‘flesh-tone’ in a box of crayons, just a bit lighter than Meredith-Pike’s own. Her hair, a shade or two darker, stood out in a three-centimeter nimbus. She looked to be about fourteen.

  “Need a kiss?” he whispered.

  In a loud voice, the freezer observed that its door was open. Meredith-Pike jumped out of his skin.

  Tension singing down his nerves, he dragged the girl’s corpse out of the freezer. He assumed she was a corpse, but watched her carefully, taking nothing for granted. There were researchers working on mtDNA tweaks that would allow humans to function better in extreme cold—useful for colonists on the Jovian moons, say, whose habitats could then be kept at arctic temperatures, lowering their energy bills. It was -10° in the freezer.

  “Where did you come from?” Meredith-Pike asked the girl, laying her on the kitchen floor.

  The kitchen was a mess. Presumably the researchers had programmed the housekeeping bots to stay out so they wouldn’t find the girl. Flour and chocolate chips dusted the floor from someone’s cookie-baking session.

  “Why did they put you in there?”

  She was definitely cold-adapted. Chunky-bodied, flat-faced, with a narrow little nose. Was that a blush of pink returning to her cheeks? Could she be alive?

  “Here’s my theory,” Meredi
th-Pike said. “You’re a Martian.” He chuckled. “This is huge. Huge.” His intracranial implants worked harder, pumping out endorphins and serotonin to compensate for his instinctive urge, which was to run away screaming. “No one was even sure that you existed. To catch one of you, dead or alive … this is huge,” he repeated. “You ought to be in a cutting-edge government research facility. Not hidden behind the frozen fishfingers in a train on a bloody asteroid.” He leaned forward. “Are you breathing?”

  The girl sat up. She winced and rubbed her neck. Her eyes fastened on his; they were unnaturally reflective, clearly augmented. Her bosom heaved.

  “Oh my dog,” Meredith-Pike said.

  She made a mewling sound. Pointed at her mouth, shook her head, and mewled again.

  “Can’t you talk?”

  “Oooahnhhh.” She pointed at his head and then her own.

  “Oh, I see! You want to text.” Meredith-Pike blinked up his comms program. Then he hesitated. Distantly, as it were from beyond the waves of bliss and upon-a-peak-in-Darien excitement pulsing through him, came the thought that this might not be a very good idea.

  “I don’t have your ID,” he stalled.

  The woman seemed to understand. She leaned over and wrote with one finger in the flour that dusted the floor.

  ★

  Standing on the roof of the de Grey Institute, Shoshanna inspected the module’s airlock. It was a standard valve-type. To hack it, she’d need a route into the Vesta Express’s hub, and they still hadn’t taken the bait of her cries for help.

  “Well?” Dr. James said. “Stumped?”

  “Not only didn’t they answer us, they’re not emitting any signals on any frequency. Maybe they’re all dead in there.”

  “If that’s a possibility,” Dr. James said, “this falls into the category of a rescue operation.”

  He did something to the right sleeve of his spacesuit, braced himself on the ladder, and shot the airlock with the laser embedded in his prosthesis.

  ★

  Satterthwaite bounded along the residential corridor with Elfrida and the two Chinese on his heels, in search of Hugh Meredith-Pike. Elfrida tried not to look into Smith’s cabin as they passed. She failed. The glimpse she got was enough to convince her that Smith was very, very dead. His battered body would haunt her dreams for years to come. If she lived that long.

  She caught up with Satterthwaite in the kitchen. Or did you call it a galley, when it was on a train? Uncooked rice crunched under her boots. The contents of cabinets littered the worktops. Pasta sauce spattered not only the walls, but the ceiling. This was the kind of mess you could only get in zero- or micro-gravity. Wang Gulong said something, and Jimmy translated, “Engineers are the same everywhere.”

  Satterthwaite dived into a walk-in freezer. The fog rolling out of the door reminded Elfrida of the dry ice in the supercomputer silo. Seconds later, he stumbled back out. “Gone. It’s gone.”

  Jimmy and Wang Gulong exchanged a look. The powerfully built Wang moved up on Satterthwaite and backed him against the dishwasher. He rapped out some words in Chinese.

  Jimmy translated: “Enough games. You have lied to us about this Heidegger program. You will now stop lying, or Wang will break your neck.” He added, “Wang is a champion of the Greater Imperial China Amateur Duan Quan League.”

  “All right, all right,” Satterthwaite coughed. “Let me go, you ape! The thing was in the freezer. It looked like a girl, an adolescent female of the species Homo sapiens, but it wasn’t. Not sure whether it was grown or manufactured; there may not be any difference when you get to that level of biological approximation. Anyway, we—acquired it—in an advanced life-support cradle, which appeared to be a fragment of a PLAN ship. The cradle was damaged. The ship must have been disabled …”

  Elfrida yelped. Jimmy’s eyes bulged. He started translating, but Wang cut him off. He had heard the word PLAN and that was enough.

  “You have a PLAN agent captive on this train?” Jimmy translated. “In the freezer?”

  “Had. Had,” Satterthwaite said. “Meredith-Pike’s clearly found it and walked off with it.”

  “He can’t have gone far,” Elfrida said. “There aren’t any EVA suits! The thing must still be on the train! Is it … is it alive? Or dead?”

  Satterthwaite seemed to take that as an accusation. Bristling, he snapped, “We put it in the freezer to keep it safe. It was cold-adapted. In fact, it seemed to have the ability to hibernate. That’s just one of the secrets we hoped to unravel by studying it. We have a nanoscopic imaging system on order. We began studying the life-support cradle while waiting for it to arrive …”

  “And that’s how Bob got infected,” Elfrida said. “You guys sure are brainy.” All the fine hairs on her body stood on end. This was her worst nightmare. Actually, it went beyond any nightmare scenario her imagination could have devised.

  Wang Gulong left the kitchen.

  Jimmy touched Elfrida’s arm. His melancholy gaze brimmed with knowledge of the tragedies humanity brought upon itself. “It’s OK,” he said with an unconvincing smile.

  Elfrida felt ashamed that he was trying to comfort her, when he must be equally terrified. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You came here because you thought it was safe. What must you think of us?”

  Jimmy shook his head. She’d misinterpreted his reassurance. He’d meant it. “This is our theory. The Heidegger program is a type of software called shénjiàn—neuroware? Is this the right translation?”

  “Neuroware, I don’t know what that is.”

  “It doesn’t exist. Or precisely, the theory exists, but the real thing cannot be developed. It is software designed to run on the human brain. The brain is the most complex and powerful computer in existence! We only use one fraction of it, you know? So far, it is too complex for us to write neuroware, even if we develop the right interface protocols. But now we think the PLAN has mastered this complexity.” Jimmy looked wistful. “It is very exciting.”

  “Not you, too!”

  “Don’t worry. It is not dangerous. I simplify, but if you don’t install the program, it can’t run.”

  “That’s what we thought,” Satterthwaite said. “Until poor bloody Smith downloaded it to his BCI.”

  “Maybe it automatically executes when downloaded?”

  “Obviously, yes.”

  “And maybe Smith did not have the right hardware.”

  “He had a BCI.”

  “Exactly,” said Hugh Meredith-Pike from the door of the kitchen. He strolled in, followed by Wang. He should have looked like a prisoner escorted by a guard. Instead, his confident, loose-limbed gait made him look like a celebrity leading a big poodle.

  Hiding behind him, as if shy, was a girl wearing nothing but an oversized Vesta Valkyries t-shirt.

  “Smith had a BCI,” Meredith-Pike explained. “I’ve got a BCI plus neural stimulation implants. Oh, it’s just a rough approximation of what Little Sister, here, has in her head. But it suffices. The underlying principle is the same.” He directed at the girl a smouldering, utterly vacant smile. “Infinite fun, not half!”

  “You’re blissed out of your mind, Hugh, you moron,” Satterthwaite said, stumbling to his feet.

  Elfrida said, “Little Sister? Whose little sister?”

  “He has installed the neuroware,” Jimmy said, pointing out the obvious.

  “My question is—” Meredith-Pike directed it to Elfrida, with smugly raised eyebrows, like a newscaster posing a gotcha question— “why on earth are we fighting these people?”

  “They aren’t people,” Elfrida yelped.

  After her spell on 11073 Galapagos, she had developed an odd acuity when it came to distinguishing humans from robots. The Galapajin had been able to instantly identify a post-geminoid phavatar that would have passed as human anywhere else in the solar system, and Elfrida seemed to have picked up the knack from them. This Little Sister was setting off all her alarms. She didn’t seem to be a robot, per se, but nor
was she human.

  Elfrida had a sensation of falling helplessly from the heights of understanding where she had been born and lived all her life, into an abyss of barely grasped horrors. She thought, but could not say out loud: Little Sister is a demon.

  xxxii.

  “Not bad, for an egghead,” Shoshanna complimented Dr. James, when he had cut away the outer door of the airlock.

  “In Israel, everyone fights,” Dr. James said.

  “In the New Hesperides, too.” There she went again. She contemplated the seared wreckage of the door. They were standing in the chamber, still in their suits. “But now we’ve got a new problem. This airlock is no longer, in fact, an airlock. It’s an ex-airlock.”

  “It is no more,” Dr. James intoned. “It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. Its vacuum-denying function is now history.”

  Tickled, Shoshanna laughed. “You’re a funny guy when you want to be. But the problem remains: now we can’t get in without depressurising the R&D module.”

  “For an ISA agent, you’re not actually very ruthless, are you?” Dr. James said. The amusement was gone from his voice. “You didn’t turn off the power to the Bellicia ecohood, despite threatening to. And now you’re saying that depressurising this module—which holds a potentially unstoppable threat to humanity—is a problem?”

  Shoshanna hesitated. “Point,” she said eventually. “Cut through the inner door.”

  ★

  Mendoza, alone in the driver’s cab, kept panic at bay by listening to the St. Matthew’s Passion of Bach, one of the thousands of music files in his BCI’s memory crystals. He also had high-quality iEars transducer implants, which had been a present to himself on his thirtieth birthday. He watched the fallen handler bot rise into the air, balanced on the makeshift tyre iron, while the phavatars tromped in circles around the windlass they had improvised. It was pure jugaad. It was beautiful. He wished they’d hurry up.

  Distantly, over the music, he heard an explosive boom.

  “Susmaryosep, what now?”