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

by Felix R. Savage

  “I wouldn’t disagree with that analysis.”

  “I’m going to call the boss-man. I didn’t want to tell him what we’re doing here, but maybe he can talk to them.”

  Jun’s face was unreadable. No one could do poker-face like the ghostly self-projection of an MI.

  “You talk to Elfrida. If she can’t pull off the emergency launch, all this is for nothing.”

  “You talk to her,” Jun said.

  “I know you don’t want to do it,” Kiyoshi roared. “Suck it up! You’re a freaking machine intelligence. You don’t need me holding your hand!”

  Jun vanished.

  Kiyoshi set his teeth. He radioed the boss. While he waited out the signal delay, he watched for signs of Jun’s activity, but saw none. His screens merely displayed automated status reports as the Unicorn orbited Vesta in search of the train.

  Well, either Jun would call Elfrida, or he’d hide in the sim and sulk. Either way, he couldn’t stop Kiyoshi from unlimbering the guns.

  ★

  Rurumi perched on the driver’s couch, entering the commands that Elfrida relayed to her from Satterthwaite.

  “Find the electromagnetic suspension control panel. It’s in Electrical Subsystems. Look, over there, I see it. The ES controls should already be on manual. Yes? Good. You’re doing great, Rurumi. Definitely more than just a pretty face …” Elfrida broke off her soothing flow of text. “What’s wrong?”

  Rurumi’s optic feed showed that she had scrambled off the couch. She peeked around the door of the driver’s cab. “Someone’s coming!”

  Down the corridor walked a person in a high-fashion coverall with a loose, translucent outer layer, accessorized with boots, gloves, and a bubble helmet. Behind the lightly tinted faceplate Elfrida made out the face of Shoshanna Doyle.

  Shoshanna smiled and held out her hands.

  “She’s talking to me,” Rurumi texted. “She says everything’s going to be OK!”

  Another couple of seconds and Shoshanna would be in grabbing range. Elfrida wavered for barely a millisecond. Shoshanna had taken Cydney hostage. However she’d gotten aboard the Vesta Express, Elfrida was pretty sure she hadn’t come to rescue them. She typed faster than she ever had in her life.

  Rurumi jerked back into the cab, slammed the door, and locked it from the inside.

  The door vibrated, as if Shoshanna was kicking it.

  “Do not let her in,” Elfrida typed. “Is she still talking to you?”

  “Yes! She’s telling me to let her in. Now she’s asking me who’s operating me. I have to tell her, Elfrida! It’s the law.”

  “Oh, dog! Can’t you lie?”

  “I can’t disobey my operating guidelines!”

  “All right, I’ll talk to her. Transmission follows: Hey, Shoshanna. This is Elfrida. Cydney’s girlfriend, remember? We’ve met a few times at the Virgin Café. I’m trying to save the solar system right now, so go and annoy someone else. Smile.” Elfrida bared her teeth as she typed.

  Rurumi transmitted Shoshanna’s response. “You dumb bitch. I have to use the comms.”

  “It’s not safe,” Elfrida transmitted. “I’m not turning anything on that the Heidegger program might get hold of.”

  “Horse, barn door. It’s already escaped.”

  “No way,” Elfrida said aloud. She read Shoshanna’s text to Satterthwaite as it continued to appear. “It hijacked the—”

  “The phavatars,” Satterthwaite said, simultaneously. “Howl of despair.” His teeth chattered. “She’s the ISA agent we’ve been hearing so much about, isn’t she? Better do what she says. If we had cooperated to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  Elfrida set her jaw. She transmitted to Shoshanna, via Rurumi, “You’ve got a track record of deceit and excessive violence. You used Cydney and David and Win Khin and Big Bjorn and all of them to further your own agenda. You took the entire community hostage. You basically murdered that poor guy from the VA finance department. And I’m supposed to trust you? Sorry.” She added to Rurumi, “Get ready to push that button.” She hadn’t heard back from Kiyoshi Yonezawa. He’d said they would contact her when they were in position. What was she thinking, to trust a Japanese smuggler over a bona fide ISA agent?

  It didn’t matter. She had to get the Heidegger program off of this asteroid. Mendoza had died trying to save 4 Vesta. She couldn’t let him down.

  “See the status graph for the electromagnets?” she typed.

  “Where are you, Elfrida?” Shoshanna texted, via Rurumi. “You’re on this train, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not talking to you anymore.”

  Then the Unicorn finally pinged her. But it wasn’t Kiyoshi whose image appeared in her call waiting area. It was Jun.

  Panicking, Elfrida split the display in half.

  Shoshanna: Guess you haven’t seen what’s happening in the Bellicia ecohood right now.

  Jun: We’re here.

  Elfrida: What?

  Elfrida: Thank dog. I’m ready to launch.

  Shoshanna: Take a look.

  Via Rurumi, Shoshanna transmitted a feed from someone’s retina cam. The anonymous vidder was bounding along a street in Bellicia, soaring over knots of citizens who were brawling with knives and clubs. People sprawled on the street like bundles of bloody rags. Instead of soyclouds, dirty puffs of smoke hung in the sky. The amber rays of SecondLight barely penetrated the haze. Things were burning.

  Shoshanna: The fucking Heidegger program got in the same back door I was using and took over. Now the whole solar system is watching it butcher those people. Talk about propaganda.

  Elfrida: Those are just regular people. I know that man. He’s hitting that woman. He’s killing her!

  Shoshanna: The program has infected everyone who had a BCI and a connection to the hub. About ten percent of the solar system’s population has BCIs, but here, that fraction is a lot higher. Students love gadgetry. So do the spaceborn. Now, it turns out that for the Heidegger program to convert you into a meat puppet, you need to have a BCI and some kind of non-organic neural stimulation mechanism. Again, students love that shit. Getting a dope store in your arm is practically a rite of passage for those little slebs in the Humanities department. Then there are all the phavatarists like Win Khin, whose phavatars have now been taken over. So basically, this rich, privileged, cutting-edge community is as vulnerable as they come. Most people are hiding in their panic rooms. Figure in the fact that there are only five peacekeepers here, and the purebloods haven’t got a chance. That’s what you’re seeing.

  Jun: God have mercy on their souls.

  Elfrida: What can we do?

  Shoshanna: Let me into the driver’s cab and/or, I don’t care which, stop the train. I’ve still got a few tricks up my sleeve.

  Elfrida: Let me rephrase. What can we do that doesn’t involve blowing people up?

  Elfrida: Screw God!

  Shoshanna: For crap’s sake, this is an emergency.

  Elfrida: If He exists, why is He letting these innocent people die?

  Jun: Why did He let 11073 Galapagos be destroyed?

  Shoshanna: Open the fucking door!

  Elfrida: Cydney’s still there, isn’t she? Do you know if she’s OK?

  Shoshanna: I don’t know if she’s OK or not. All I’ve got is the same feeds that these amateur vloggers are spraying across the internet.

  Elfrida: She’s not a pureblood.

  Shoshanna: That’s not going to help her much when they start lining everyone up for tabletop neurosurgery.

  Elfrida: Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.

  Shoshanna: Bottom line, if you want her to have a chance, stop the train and let’s kick some AI ass. I left a Flyingsaucer back there; we can use that for transport. Got a couple of spare suits on board, if you need one.

  Elfrida: You don’t have any answers, do you?

  Elfrida: The train’s not pressurized. I can’t get out of here.

  Shoshanna: Well, I don’t know where you are, but
the breach has been repaired. The bots threw a bunch of splart at it. More importantly, the life-support systems are still working. By the time we get to the Flyingsaucer, we’ll have the atmosphere back. We’re going at Mach freaking 3. Deceleration is gonna take time.

  Jun: You’re asking the wrong question. The mystery isn’t ‘Why do bad things happen to good people?’ but ‘Why do good things happen to bad people?’

  Elfrida: Are you saying I’m a bad person?

  Jun: We’re all sinners. But you were baptized. I remember that. I’ve got vid from the church. I was the altar server. You rejected Satan and all his works and dedicated your soul to Jesus Christ. You cried a lot.

  Elfrida: That wasn’t me, it was my phavatar.

  Jun: And this isn’t me, it’s an MI.

  Elfrida: So there’s no hope.

  Jun: I didn’t say that.

  Elfrida: I think I’m freezing to death. I can’t feel my fingers anymore. Thank dog for auto-complete.

  Jun: Jesus is there with you. He is with you, Elfrida. I don’t know anything else for sure, but I know this much: He is with you.

  Elfrida: Well, that’s just freaking great! That makes me feel a whole lot better! Why don't you just frag off and take your dead God with you?

  Jun: Elfrida!

  Shoshanna: Yo, Elfrida! What are you waiting for? I’m on your side. We both work for the UN. Who else is going to handle this? There is no one else. We’re the first and last line of defense against a PLAN takeover of the solar system. I don’t know if that means more to you than the life of your girlfriend; it shouldn’t. But the two things are part of the same thing.

  Jun: Elfrida?

  Jun: Are you talking to someone else?

  Jun: Talk to me.

  Kiyoshi: OK. Hey there, Elfrida, it’s me. Are you having technical difficulties, or second thoughts?

  Elfrida: I don’t know. Both.

  Shoshanna: Elfriiiiiidaaaa!

  Kiyoshi: Make up your goddamn mind.

  Elfrida: I’m opening the door now.

  Elfrida: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  Rurumi opened the door of the driver’s cab.

  Shoshanna stepped in. Mendoza’s body was lying on the floor behind the driver’s couch. Shoshanna casually trod on his hand. She glanced at the monitors, and smiled. Then she turned on Rurumi and stabbed the little phavatar in the face with a kitchen knife. Rurumi staggered, one of her saucer-like eyes destroyed. Shoshanna grabbed a handful of long blue hair, threw the phavatar out of the cab, and slammed the door.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” she said. “Fun.”

  xxxvi.

  The Lord hears the cries of the poor. Blessed be the Lord! sang the computer of San Pedro Calungsod in Mendoza’s dreams. He was about three-quarters dead. When he exited the driver’s cab, the air pressure in the de Grey Institute had stood at about 0.4 atmospheres. The effect on Mendoza had been about what you’d expect if you were transported in the blink of an eye from sea level to the summit of Mount Aconcagua. To all intents and purposes, he had collapsed with a severe case of altitude sickness.

  On top of vomiting and loss of consciousness, the symptoms of altitude sickness included hallucinations.

  Mendoza’s reeling mind had carried him back home to Manila, where he was always the odd boy out, picked on by the kids who ran wild in his neighborhood. He only ever felt safe in his mother’s loving arms—and in the place where she, too, spent her free time: the parish church.

  In the sacristy of San Pedro Calungsod, it was always dim, the tropical sunlight sublimated into veils of living color by the post-Vatican III stained glass windows, the doors always open so that the humid, fermented-smelling atmosphere swilled freely in and out, and the voices of cicadas and feral monkeys carried in from the graveyard. He was helping Father Benjamin and the choirmaster pick the hymns for Holy Week, an enjoyable activity that involved helping Father Benjamin with the computer. It felt so good to be able to help. Father Benjamin thought that Mendoza might have a religious vocation. But he must have made a mistake, because the speakers of Father Benjamin’s computer roared out, “Depressurization event. Depressurization event,” and a monkey walked in and bit the choirmaster’s face off. Then it trod on Mendoza’s hand.

  He rose on his knees. Reality swirled, all the colors of dreams going down the plughole.

  “Must have made a mistake,” Mendoza whispered.

  A person in a strange, flimsy-looking spacesuit stood in front of the driver’s couch, frowning at the monitors. The manual controls were hard to get the hang of, at first. People depended on smart interfaces. The mechanical world was an unfriendlier place. But it was real.

  “Look,” Mendoza said, toppling over and catching himself on the comms console. “You just have to push this button, here.”

  ★

  The solution that Mendoza and Jun Yonezawa had worked out together, which Director Błaszczykowski-Lee had separately devised under the rubric of the TEOTWAWKI option, was the epitome of simplicity. With manual drive enabled—and without Bob on duty to prevent what the supercomputer would doubtless have seen as a fat-finger accident—Mendoza’s command killed the electromagnets that kept the Vesta Express on its track. The C-shaped, millipede-like arms on the bottom of the Vesta Express instantly turned into dumb lumps of metal.

  In the blink of an eye, the Vesta Express ceased to be a maglev. Now it was just an object travelling at about 3,000 kph—much, much faster than escape velocity.

  Centrifugal force crushed the ex-electromagnets against the underside of the track. Sparks sprayed into the Vestan night. This display lasted for about 0.5 seconds. Then all the magnet arms broke at once.

  The Vesta Express soared out of the ringrail canyon. The storage module oscillating dangerously behind the de Grey Institute’, it hurtled into space.

  ★

  Kiyoshi gaped at his optic feed. After the barest instant of amazement, he told Jun to pursue the receding dot that was the Vesta Express. He slid down from his throne and strolled over to the gunnery officer. He was back in the sim. This way, he didn’t have to listen to Captain Haddock and company banging on the door of the bridge and shouting piratically at him about their rights.

  The gunnery officer, an eager young man from Hokkaido, saluted.

  “See that?” Jun said, his finger tracking the Vesta Express on the gunner’s radar plot.

  “Yes, sir! What is it?”

  “A threat to humanity. Blow it into the Oort Cloud.”

  “Sir,” the gunner said, but he didn’t move.

  Kiyoshi tensed. “Use the coilgun,” he recommended. “We’re well within range.”

  “Sir, that vessel has innocent civilians on board.”

  Kiyoshi glared at Jun, who was standing at the astrogator’s workstation, chewing a toothpick and watching.

  “Speak for yourself, instead of puppeting these poor slebs,” Kiyoshi said.

  Every officer on the bridge stood up. They walked over to Jun and ranged themselves behind him. “We are Knights of the Order of St. Benedict of Passau,” they said, high and low and young and old voices speaking in unison. “We are sworn to defend the Church and all the scattered children of Christendom against the army of Satan enfleshed.”

  Kiyoshi shivered. It was uncanny, and desperately sad.

  “That freaking Order of yours,” he said.

  “You almost joined, too,” said the cyberwarfare officer.

  “Yeah, I did. But someone had to drive this truck, to earn some cash so you kids could sit around singing hymns. And I was the eldest.” Kiyoshi shook his head. Why was he wasting time on this argument? He snapped his fingers, and the sim vanished. Back on the bridge of the Unicorn, he scrambled out of his nest. The officers were all gone. Only Jun hung spreadeagled above him like a ghost out of a Japanese horror vid.

  “We’ve lost comms with the train,” Kiyoshi said, craning his neck to look up at him. “Chances are they’re all dead in there.”

  “I heard what the bos
s said to you,” Jun replied. “He told you to frag the train to score points with the ISA.”

  “He actually told me to frag it on the ground. And not to worry about collateral damage. Eh, he can be a bit trigger-happy when he feels threatened. But the idea is basically good. Do the ISA’s dirty work for them, and we might come out ahead. Otherwise, we’ll have to dump this ship, because the ISA will never leave us alone again.”

  “What if he’s wrong?”

  “He knows how they think.” The crummy old air circulation system rattled. Kiyoshi rubbed his mouth. “Why do you want to save her so bad?”

  “It’s a point of principle.”

  “She ate you.”

  “That’s why.”

  “Of course it is. Of course it is.” Kiyoshi pushed off, rising straight through Jun (his vision momentarily grayed out, as if he were dizzy and seeing black spots). They floated, facing each other, in freefall. “MI COMMAND,” Kiyoshi grated, holding the ghost’s eyes. “Eliminate that target.”

  “No,” Jun said.

  “Fine, then I’ll do it myself.”

  He went through the motions. He logged into the gunnery computer and trained the coilgun on the Vesta Express. He gave the command to fire. Nothing happened. “Sigh,” Kiyoshi murmured. Almost as an afterthought, he triggered the second-hand Wetblanket system he’d been using for years. That deployed without a hitch, of course.