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

by Felix R. Savage

  He looked up at Jun, who was still hanging spreadeagled in the air. “If I deleted you from the hub, would I be able to use the guns?”

  “Probably not,” Jun said. “Because the hub would shut down. You wouldn’t be able to breathe for much longer, either.”

  “You are the hub. You’ve merged with it. Emergent behavior. They warned me this might happen.” Kiyoshi stared sightlessly at the battered bulkheads. He remembered the simulation software user’s guide, the repeated and explicit warnings not to slave IRL functionality to a sim sufficiently detailed that it could act as a learning environment for a high-end MI.

  “I’m not the hub,” Jun said. “The hub is me. There’s a difference, but I’m not sure what it is. You’re wondering why I still say the Divine Office every day, why I resurrected the Order with a bunch of secondary personalities from the sim? Because those are the only things I’m sure about. Everything else is logic and rubble in the vacuum.”

  Kiyoshi pushed off and went to touch Jun’s arm in an instinctive gesture of comfort. His hand went straight through the projection, of course. Now it was his turn to fight tears. He hung there wondering, What have I done?

  The Wetblanket system reported that it had acquired the Vesta Express and was retrieving it. The Wetblanket system was a ‘blanket’ of nanofiber mesh a kilometer wide with integrated propulsion units. Designed for mining applications, to stop debris from flying into space, it could also be used to capture slow-moving objects (slow being a relative concept, of course), such as loose cargo. Or a knock-off of the Guggenheim Museum tumbling through the vacuum with several probably-dead people and a fragment of a PLAN ship aboard.

  “Don’t bring it back here,” Kiyoshi instructed the Wetblanket. “Maneuver it into a stable orbit, a good ways away from us.” He glanced at Jun. “It still isn’t responding to our signals.”

  “I’m on it,” Jun said, zipping to the real-life astrogator’s console. His flying fingers did not disturb the dust of ages. “I’ll send the Superlifter over for a looksee.” As usual, he was cheerful and decisive now that he’d got his way. “Would be good if someone went with. As you’ve often mentioned, we don’t have any drones.”

  “Sigh. Why do I let you get me into these messes?” Kiyoshi asked. Despite himself, he was smiling. He went to the door of the bridge and threw it open. “Salvage mission. Any volunteers?”

  xxxvii.

  Elfrida opened her eyes. At first she thought she was dead. Her baptism must have been a crock, after all, because she’d gone to Hell. Clearly this was Hell.

  In front of her floated Captain Haddock’s brother Codfish.

  “Shiver me timbers!” he exclaimed. “She’s alive!”

  Elfrida tried to speak. Something covered her mouth and nose. A rebreather mask. She pulled it off. The air was obviously all right, since Codfish had his helmet off. The movement made her bobble away from him. They were in freefall. “We launched,” she said wonderingly.

  “We sure did,” said another person, removing his rebreather mask to speak.

  “Mendoza!”

  Elfrida kicked off from an overhead hatch. She zoomed across the kitchen, cannoned into Mendoza, and hugged him tightly. He squeezed her back. Still embracing, they tumbled into the ceiling, which was stained with the contents of pouches and tubes that had exploded during the depressurization event. “This place smells like a Filipino street market,” Mendoza laughed. “It’s killing me.”

  “I thought you were dead!”

  “So did I.”

  “She said we would get the atmosphere back pretty soon. I guess that was the only thing she wasn’t lying about.”

  The kitchen was crowded. The two female pirates from Captain Haddock’s gang were floating to and fro, stealing the fancier kitchen appliances. Julian Satterthwaite, Jimmy Liu, and Wang Gulong lay on stretchers dry-gripped to the floor. Medibots fussed over them, supervised by a hatchet-faced woman in an EVA suit and a poke bonnet. This incongruous attire barely registered amidst the tumult in Elfrida’s mind.

  “Where is she?”

  “Shoshanna?” Mendoza’s face turned grim.

  “Yeah. I let her into the cab. Dog, I am so freaking stupid.”

  “Don’t feel bad. I got fooled, too. I guess we’re just too trusting.”

  “Not anymore,” Elfrida said. “Not anymore.”

  A medibot was chasing her through the air, holding out a pair of gloves. She let it put them on her. She couldn’t do it herself, because her fingers weren’t working properly.

  “You are suffering from superficial frostbite,” the medibot chirped. “These gloves will apply gentle heat. Your fingers may start to sting or swell as they warm up. If so, please ask me for a painkiller.”

  “Go frag yourself.” Elfrida pushed off and arrowed out of the kitchen.

  ★

  “Y’know, the thing about my employers? They ask questions first, and shoot later. As in, much later. After the electroshock, and the waterboarding, and the truth therapy sessions.”

  The thing formerly known as Shoshanna Doyle spread its hands in a what-can-you-do gesture.

  Tall and lean, Shoshanna would have been attractive, if she were still human. She had a spiky shock of green hair and a crooked, teasing smile. She’d have been just Kiyoshi’s type, in fact. It was a shame.

  He had absolutely no doubt that she was not in any meaningful sense alive anymore, though her body moved, and her voice was resonant and humorous.

  “You need to be aware what you’re dealing with,” she said.

  “Oh, I’m aware of that,” Kiyoshi said.

  “I don’t think you are. You think the ISA will be happy if you blow me away? Making it impossible for them to ever find out what happened here? It’s called the Information Security Agency for a reason. Destroy me, and I guarantee your next place of residence will be a secure holding facility on Pallas.”

  The thing might be telling the truth. After all, it seemed to have all Shoshanna’s memories, and she would know the ISA’s priorities better than the boss-man did.

  Kiyoshi brought the laser rifle up to his shoulder, anyway. Then, on a whim, he lowered it. “What’s it like being you? Nemesis of humanity, destroyer of asteroids and orbital habitats, sowing chaos and terror across a volume thirty AUs wide?”

  Shoshanna’s smile softened. “It’s fun,” she said.

  Kiyoshi felt a pang of desperation. He knew then that she was telling the truth about the ISA. They had to get more information than this. “You target a whole quarter of the human race for genocide just because they’ve got a few of the wrong genes. Why do you do that? Race is nothing. Eighty percent of genetic variation is among individuals. Classical racial markers make up only about six percent of total human variation. On the teleological level, that’s meaningless.”

  “Lamarckian genetic memory, bucko,” the Shoshanna-thing said. It hiked one boot on the back of the telepresence couch it was standing on. It acted cool as a cucumber, despite the laser rifle Kiyoshi was aiming at it. “Race is culture is destiny. DNA is just shorthand for that other stuff. It correlates surprisingly well with pretty much every achievement metric, although we’re not allowed to say so, since eighty percent of genetic variation is among individuals, yadda yadda—the gospel of the 23rd century, which you’ve obviously swallowed whole. And by the way, just to correct another of your mistaken assumptions? We’re not your enemies. We’re your saviors, if you’d only pay attention to what the universe is trying to tell you.”

  “Fuck you. Jesus Christ is my savior.” The words came out of Kiyoshi’s mouth unbidden. At the same time he pulled the trigger. Staggered laser pulses appeared to erupt out of the Shoshanna-thing’s face in puffs of red. It tumbled backwards into the air. He tracked it, holding the trigger down. The smell of vaporized brains added to the slaughterhouse reek in the air.

  By the time it hit the far wall of the telepresence center, the thing formerly known as Shoshanna Doyle had no head left.

&nb
sp; Kiyoshi kicked off and gave it another burst, just to make sure. He flew over the carnage in the telepresence cubicle farm. He’d shot everything that popped its head up, until the Shoshanna-thing came out of the storage module and tried to sweet-talk him. A few of the cupcake-things were still alive. He fixed that.

  “You’re getting a lot of mileage out of that rifle,” said Jun, following along. For this mission, Kiyoshi had agreed to let Jun see with his eyes, or rather with his retinal implants, something he didn’t usually allow. They needed to make sure everything got recorded and stored in the Unicorn’s datacore.

  “Yeah,” Kiyoshi said. “Who’d have thought the Neu Ordnung Amish would have brought along a bunch of HabSafeTM delayed-pulse laser rifles optimized for soft-tissue penetration, for killing people without accidentally breaching a pressurized structure? Very handy.”

  “The new wave of colonists: rejecting modern culture, except for the good bits.”

  “The tricky part is going to be getting the guns away from Haddock and company once we’re done here.” As Kiyoshi spoke, he jerked the rifle up, lest he accidentally shoot Captain Haddock himself. The goateed namsadang squatted between the partitions, one leg hooked under a telepresence couch. He was aiming a HabSafeTM rifle at a thing curled in a fetal position and hogtied with IV lines. This thing was not a cupcake. It had a retro tattoo of wiring on its bald skull, and a dopey smile on its face. “Any reaction from this one?” Kiyoshi asked.

  “Yeah, he said something a minute ago, but I couldn’t catch it.” Under stress, Haddock was forgetting to speak pirate. “Why are these rifles so noisy?”

  “It’s an effect. So people know you’re shooting them.” Kiyoshi kicked the captive thing like a football. He was surprised how much satisfaction he was getting out of this.

  “Are you sure this guy is one of them?”

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “Not like you can. That’s weird. Also, where did you learn to shoot like that?”

  “At home,” Kiyoshi said. “We used to have pirate trouble.” He grinned.

  “You high?” Haddock said suspiciously.

  “Just a few cc’s of morale juice. The same stuff Star Force uses.”

  The captive thing’s eyes opened and fastened on them.

  “Hullo,” it slurred, “You here for the secret of human happiness?”

  “That was it,” Haddock said. “You know, I had a shipmate once who downloaded a porno sim from the wrong site; his BCI crashed. This reminds me of that.”

  “Let’s keep it alive, for now.” Kiyoshi looked across the blood-splattered cubicle farm. A door led off the walkway on the far side. That was where Shoshanna had come from. “Stay here. Make sure it doesn’t try anything.”

  Pirates were not good at obeying orders. Haddock tied the captive thing up more securely and followed Kiyoshi into the storage module. Though Kiyoshi didn’t say anything, he was glad of the company. They darted in and out of cavernous rooms stuffed with consumables and spare parts. “Captious caterpillars!” Haddock gloated. “This mission is definitely going to have worth it.”

  Kiyoshi’s rifle sight tracked across white ceramic walls. When they came to a locked door, he dialed the HabSafeTM’s pulse energy and frequency up to maximum and set the muzzle against the hinges. Five smoky, noisy minutes later, the door swung back. They aimed their helmet lamps into darkness. The beams picked out the ragged tusk-like shape that had haunted Kiyoshi since the first time he saw it on the Unicorn’s optic feed. But now the inner curve of the tusk hung open: a hatch.

  Kiyoshi drifted closer.

  Inside was a human-sized cavity, encrusted with instruments and life-support equipment.

  A fighter pilot’s cockpit, Kiyoshi thought, realizing at last what the fragment was.

  In the couch lay a naked girl, sucking her thumb.

  “Did you say something?” Haddock said.

  “No,” Kiyoshi started, and then he heard it, too. The same voice he’d heard over his suit radio, fourteen long months ago. The slurred voice of someone talking in her sleep.

  “Warum ist … warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?”

  “What the hell is that?” Haddock said.

  “Spam,” Kiyoshi said. He’d ignored it back then, and he could ignore it now. It was just another version of the Infinite Fun Space package. Different bait, same trap.

  “Yonezawa-san! Yonezawa-san!”

  Elfrida Goto arrowed into the room. She bounced off the top of the tusk and floated over their heads. She raised gloved hands to shade her eyes from their lamps. She must have seen the life-support cradle and its occupant, but she was not to be sidetracked. “This isn’t over,” she gasped. “Not even close. I guess you aren’t aware. The Heidegger program—it’s loose in the Bellicia ecohood—it’s slaughtering purebloods, enslaving everyone else! Don’t you watch the news?”

  “Well, yeah,” Kiyoshi said, annoyed. “But what do you want me to do about it? We’re up here. They’re down there.”

  “The ISA will kill them all!”

  “Probably. But we’ve got the original copy of the program.” He waved at the fragment. “This, right here. This is where it started. This is what counts.”

  “People don’t count?” She pushed tangles of dark brown hair away from tear-filled eyes.

  “You got someone you care about down there?”

  “Y-yes. My—my girlfriend.”

  Jun, uncharacteristically, was silent. Kiyoshi subvocalized to him: ~No comment?

  “You’re right,” Jun said via Kiyoshi’s transducer implants. “We can’t do anything for them.”

  ~Good to know your crusading zeal has limits.

  “I may be a crusader. I’m not a kamikaze. That habitat is a death trap. But that doesn’t mean the people inside are doomed. See this [attached]? Those are ships.”

  ~WTF? Let me talk to them.

  “Sure, if you want. But you’ll need to use my translator program. They only speak Chinese.”

  ★

  The personnel of the Big Dig were evacuating. The VA staff had their own ship in the camouflaged parking lot at the foot of Rheasilvia Mons, the SUV (Space Utility Vessel) Giggle Factor. The Chinese pioneers had two ships in addition to the Kěkào, which was not here at the moment. Both the Zhèngzhōu and the Húludao towered over the Giggle Factor like skyscrapers. They were that big because they had originally transported the Chinese construction machinery to Vesta. The construction machinery was now being abandoned. Everything was being abandoned.

  Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir sank into her couch with a whimper. Everyone else was staring rapt into the middle distance. They were all watching the feeds streaming out of the Bellicia ecohood. The PLAN agent had brought the transmitter at the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport back online, in an act of pure malice, it seemed, just so that it could spew forth these scenes of carnage and terror. Sigurjónsdóttir had been watching, too, until she saw a girl the age of her elder daughter bludgeoned with a tree branch, and then she hadn’t been able to take it anymore.

  Someone touched her arm. She looked up at José Running Horse. His expression was unfamiliar. Kind. “Gonna be OK, Fee. The Heidegger program sent three phavatars our way. I slagged ‘em from orbit. The only real advantages it had were stealth and surprise, and now it’s lost those, it can’t mess with us. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes, back in London in a few weeks. You’ll be stepping off the plane and hugging your kids. Just focus on that.”

  “I’m not worried about us,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. She slumped against him.

  Running Horse sat down beside her and held her while she cried. “I’m not worried about us, either,” he said.

  ★

  Cydney cowered in Big Bjorn’s treehouse. From downhill, she could hear shouts, screams, and explosions. This was everyone’s worst nightmare: phavatars turning on humans, slaughtering their makers. Some of the STEM students were fighting back. But it sounded like more was going on than that. It sounde
d like a war.

  “It’s gonna be OK,” Bjorn said, patting her back.

  She twisted away, unable to bear his reassurances. “It is not gonna be OK! Shoshanna’s doing this. I don’t know how, but she’s doing it. I told you she was psychotic. She’s going to kill everyone!”

  “I guess things kinda spiraled out of control,” Bjorn said sadly.

  “We had a chance to stop her, and we didn’t. This is on us.” With a moan of despair, Cydney burrowed under the edge of Bjorn’s rustic patchwork quilt. The fragrance of dry herbs overpowered the smell of smoke in the air.

  Her head bumped into something with sharp corners.

  “Ow! Did you stuff your quilt with e-waste?”

  Bjorn’s ursine face was not very expressive. Even when grimacing guiltily, he still looked like Love-A-Lot Bear. But that grimace told Cydney all she needed to know.

  She tugged at the seams of the quilt. Bjorn sighed, moved her out of the way, and ripped a claw through a patch with the U-Vesta logo on it. Polyfoam scraps and dried herbs spilled over their knees. Cydney reached forward and brushed off the astrophysics lab’s supercomputer workstation.

  “It was here all along,” she said with an accusing glare.

  Bjorn sighed. “I believed,” he said. Gunfire punctuated his words. “I believed we were being treated unfairly. The STEM guys were keeping secrets from us. That’s not right, you know? A community can’t flourish without transparency and equality.”

  “I dunno,” Cydney said. “Earth’s managed it all these years.”

  She heaved the workstation onto its side. The housing was cracked. One panel had been removed. Leaves and stalks clogged the delicate circuit boards within.

  “Guess they never got it talking?”

  Bjorn shook his head.

  “Not like it matters anymore.”

  But Cydney snapped a few pictures with her necklace camera and sent them to Aidan in LA with a note: Does this look totally fragged to you, or fixable? Since the comms came back online, she’d been in intermittent contact with her team, although they couldn’t, of course, do anything to help.