A couple of minutes later, she got a message from Aidan. He wouldn’t have seen her pictures of the workstation yet. This had been sent a quarter of an hour ago.
“Hey, Cyds, your feed’s not updating. Have the comms gone down again? If you get this, update your feed ASAP.”
The truth was that Cydney had stopped vidding when she and Bjorn fled into the woods. It wouldn’t help her image for her fans to see her hiding under a bear’s bed while a war was going on.
“Our access figures are out of the freaking atmosphere. We’re the go-to feed on this story, but the viewers want live vid. Every second they don’t see it, they’re clicking away to BelterNews and Adam the Aggregator. So, y’know, if you get this …”
“Adam the Aggregator,” Cydney gasped. “I hate that fucking sleb.”
She jumped up. Put her eye to one of the leafy gaps in the treehouse walls. All she could see was more trees. She bounded over to the top of the ladder.
“… be careful, of course,” Aidan’s tiny voice concluded.
“Where are you going?” Bjorn said.
“To get the story.”
xxxviii.
After a short but hair-raising hop around the circumference of Vesta, the Zhèngzhōu and the Húludao landed at the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport. Actually, it would be more accurate to say they landed on it. The launch pad was not designed to accommodate two cargo transports the size of ten-storey buildings. Their fusion drives incinerated the terminal, the control tower, and the fuel depot. When the heat and light from this act of apathy-based utility died down, the two ships plonked themselves on the wreckage like a pair of elephants sitting on the ashes of a campfire.
The Extropian Collective, watching from the Kěkào, said, “Cool!”
The Kěkào jinked under them. It flew down to the surface and buzzed the Bellicia ecohood. Its AI made a series of blindingly fast calculations about the terrain. Determining that it could safely land on the road to the spaceport, the Kěkào alighted outside the Bremen Lock and melted the airlock’s iron gates with its fusion drive.
The Chinese ban on armaments for civilian spaceships—a policy driven by 10% ideology and 90% domestic political considerations—had ironically prompted Chinese ships to master the gray art of slagging things with their own exhaust.
“We call this ‘fart-bombing,’” a robot stewardess told the Extropians, who were rubbing their bruises from the rough landing. “The Chinese people have a dark sense of humor!”
Just how dark was soon to be revealed.
The Kěkào deployed its drones, a.k.a. the cabin crew. Clad in their jaunty uniforms, they picked their way around the molten ruin of the gates. They found the actual entrance to the airlock, a giant valve hidden beneath the overhang, and proceeded to demolish it with cutter lasers (sanctioned for repair and maintenance purposes).
From its rear end the Kěkào extruded the same jointed tunnel it had used to rescue the Extropian Collective from 550363 Montego. This looked remarkably like a boarding gate. The cabin crew sealed the gate to the airlock with what appeared to be clingfilm. Then they walked into the Bellicia ecohood, much as the PLAN agent’s phavatars had done a few hours earlier.
Below, a dirty blanket of smoke obscured the pastoral vista of lake, town, and woods.
“Good afternoon, humans! This is the pre-boarding announcement for Flight 001 to the nearest place of safety. We are now inviting those passengers with small children, and any passengers requiring special assistance, to begin boarding at this time!”
Silence; the distant crackle and pop of gunfire.
“Don’t all rush the gate at once,” the Kěkào, in the form of the lone male steward, commented to itself, in the form of the other stewards. They tittered obligingly.
★
Cydney edged around the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center, her heart pounding. Something exploded inside the building. She and Big Bjorn both flinched. They had seen nothing newsworthy on way here, except for a few people running in the other direction. The emptiness of the campus was scarier than a riot would have been.
A girl sailed around the corner at the micro-gravity equivalent of a dead run, each step carrying her ten meters through the air. A muscular man, naked but for a zebra-print thong, hurtled after her.
~Holy crap, guys, Cydney subvocalized to her fans. ~Is it just me, or does that guy look like Marmaduke Shagg?
She and Bjorn shrank into the green curtain of the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center. The man caught the girl and dragged her, screaming, across the quad into the STEM building.
“Come on,” Cydney told Bjorn. Her heart still pounded, but now it was the rhythm of a Xhosa war drum, pulsing adrenaline into her veins. She dragged Bjorn across the quad.
They climbed the green curtain, past the NO CLIMBING signs, to the patio of the STEM cafeteria, on the second floor.
The patio windows were closed. People’s backs pressed against the inside of the glass, as if a packed-out rally were being held in the cafeteria. Cydney cracked the window open and slid in. The people nearest rolled their eyes like terrified goats. They smelled of body odor and fear.
Cydney jumped on tiptoes. Beyond the crowd, at the doors of the cafeteria, stood two nearly-naked people who looked like the hermaxploitation stars Butto Klüsterfück and Lotta Rogering. The crowd was so dense that they hadn’t seen her slide in through the window.
“OK,” she murmured to her fans. “We have half the student body being held captive by a dangerous gang of, um, porn stars. Snerk.”
“They’re phavatars,” muttered a woman sitting on the floor by her legs.
“Oh. OK. Phavatars based on porn stars.”
“They killed all the purebloods. They took our guns and, oh my dog, it was like a mass execution. Like something out of the twenty-first century. They dumped the bodies in Olbers Lake.”
“Whoa. Whoa. Update that,” Cydney said quietly. “We are being held captive by the PLAN.”
“And the other half of the student body,” the woman said. “And half of the faculty. They’re showing their true colors. You guys were right about them. I wish I’d never taken this job.”
There was a disturbance at the far door. Cydney bounced on her tiptoes again. Dean Garcia swaggered in at the head of a phalanx of professors and lab assistants, all stripped to their underwear. Garcia, surprisingly, favored lacy lingerie. Blood striped their limbs and faces, as if in grotesque imitation of warriors painted up for a tribal festival.
~This is some Cro-Magnon shit, Cydney subvocalized. ~I thought the PLAN were all high-tech. Maybe this is what you get when you cross high-tech terror with academic politics. Snerk. Her trademark giggle sounded weak.
Menacing the crowd with the STEM students’ homemade rocket launchers, Garcia and her henchpersons grabbed the nearest captives and dragged them out. The remainder cowered like blades of grass when the wind blows.
“You get a choice,” said the woman beside Cydney. “Convert or die.”
Cydney looked at the woman for the first time. She only had one eye—the other was a steel metrology instrument. It brimmed with tears. Her chunky body quivered in panic.
“Haven’t we met?” Cydney said. “Oh, I remember: you were visiting Dr. James when I was there. You were totally rude. Hang on, I’ve got a call.”
“Cydney?”
“Elfrida,” Cydney gasped. Suddenly, she wanted to cry.
“Are you OK?”
“No. Yes. No.”
“Listen. We’re watching your feed. Get out of there. Most people are hiding downtown. The PLAN attacked the campus first. I guess they’re recruiting an army to take the town. But anyone that hasn’t been corrupted can still escape. There are ships …”
Cydney wriggled back to the window. She could see Bjorn waiting for her on the patio, his fur full of leaves, the rucksack that held the workstation on his back.
“Cydney? Cydney!”
“I’m here,” Cydney gritted. “Ships. When. Now? Where. Bremen Lo
ck, I guess. I gotta find a spacesuit.”
“No, you don’t. The evacuation shuttle is docked with the airlock. They kinda remodelled it to enable direct docking. But Cydney? I need your help. Those people downtown. Some of them are children, Cydney. There are families hiding in the Branson Habs, too. Hundreds of them.”
Cydney slid out onto the patio. The air, although smoky and foul, smelt like perfume after the stench in the cafeteria.
“Cydney, I need you to gather them up. Find some people that you’re sure aren’t corrupted to help you. But the shuttle can only take about two hundred people at a time, so if everyone tries to board at once, it’s going to be a disaster. Make people understand that they can get away, but they must let the children and old people and, uh, pregnant women and so forth go first. And they might need help getting to the airlock, so I need you to organize—”
“Who do you think I am, the captain of the Titanic?”
Cydney jumped off the patio. Bjorn and the cyborg woman followed her. It was only two floors down, so they landed lightly.
Elfrida’s voice sounded far away. “I think you’re the daughter of a Xhosa chieftain. I think you’re too ambitious to pass up this chance to be a heroine. And I also think you’re a better woman than you yourself know.”
Cydney clenched her fists. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she said. Then she subvocalized: ~Guys? Listen up. I need your help …
★
The evacuation of the Bellicia ecohood was celebrated system-wide as a triumph of crowdsourcing. Cydney’s appeal went viral. Within an hour it had reached pretty much all the scattered friends and relations of the people trapped in the ecohood. Most of these were already on the net with their loved ones, helplessly witnessing their travails from afar. Now they put them in touch with Cydney. Based on the profiles her team in LA crunched for her, she instructed only those with small children or invalids in the family to head for the Bremen Lock. In this way the Kěkào was able to make several runs to the Zhèngzhōu and Húludao, evacuating the most vulnerable residents, before the news got out, and the rush started.
Cydney then staged a more muscular intervention. Big Bjorn had rounded up the surviving Friends of David Reid (including David Reid himself, sprung from hospital) and a few other students who did not have BCIs. They fought hand to hand with the PLAN’s meat puppets (as everyone in the system was now calling those infected by the Heidegger program), as well as anyone who refused to wait in line. Cydney’s unthinking phrase, “This is some Cro-Magnon shit,” echoed around the solar system, as images emerged of students, professors, and baristas clubbing each other with homemade guns that had run out of ammo. This went on for hour after bloody hour, while people escaped in small groups.
The true test of the Friends of David Reid came when the PLAN’s phavatars attacked them. For a whole sol, the phavatars had simply ignored the evacuation and continued processing people through the university’s Francis Galton Biomedicine Research Center. Perhaps the surgery ran out of kit, leaving Marmaduke, Butto, and the rest at loose ends. Or perhaps it dawned on the AI animating them, as it emerged from its purloined computing resources like a womb-wet cyclops, that no self-respecting supervillain would let people get away.
The phavatars charged up the hill and plowed into the crowds waiting at the Bremen Lock. They ripped off limbs, twisted off heads, and hurled them into the air. Pandemonium rippled across the crater’s inner slope. Screams sounded like the crying of birds in the thin air.
Cydney was ready. “Do it,” she said to Elfrida.
“Do it,” Elfrida said to her new friend, Colonel Oleg Threadley of the ISA.
“Do it,” Colonel Threadley said to his crew.
A hail of missiles stormed towards Vesta and blew up the power plant that provided Bellicia with electricity.
Instantly, the grid failed.
The air stopped circulating.
The wifi went down.
And the PLAN’s phavatars, dependent as they were on wireless charging—for they had long since exhausted their onboard power reserves—slumped in place like domestic maidbots that some naughty child had nudged out of their operating area.
Cydney bent double, panting, and wiped something dark and gooey out of her eyes.
The sun mirrors, stuck at their brightest setting, bathed the battlefield in the weak but pitiless light of another Vestan day.
It took another twenty-four hours to get everyone out. The last evacuees had to be carried out, breathing supplementary oxygen. With the air circulation down, the atmosphere had decayed into a noxious haze of CO2 and particulate matter, contaminated by the fires that continued to smoulder in town. Cydney, at her own insistence, was the last person of all to be stretchered on board the Kěkào.
“My daddy always said,” she gasped, “utopia is for suckers. Guess he was right.”
★
“I’m filing suit for seventeen trillion spiders in compensation,” said Sir Harry Persson, whose ship was still a week away from Vesta. “And that’s just for the rail launcher. You slebs are going to rue the day you targeted this company. I have friends on the President’s Advisory Council. ”
Over the encrypted channel connecting their ships, Colonel Oleg Threadley said, “I’m on the President’s Advisory Council. And I’m not really a colonel, either.”
He went to do some other stuff. Thirty minutes went by.
“Surprised?” Threadley sent, when he came back to find that Persson still hadn’t responded. “Well, I wouldn’t expect a mere corporate tycoon to know how the world works.”
He went for lunch. Halfway through his composed salad of nutriblocks, he was summoned back to the secure comms room. Persson, on the screen, looked twenty years older than he had this morning.
“You win. I’ll settle for a guarantee that Virgin Atomic will not be prosecuted for our alleged role in this tragedy. Hell, after the survivors have extorted their pound of flesh, there’ll be nothing left for you to expropriate, anyway.”
Threadley informed his superiors that Persson had agreed to keep his mouth shut. He sent Persson a non-disclosure agreement to that effect.
“By the way,” Persson added when he returned the documentation, “I’m keeping my island. Separately incorporated in Nauru. The stakeholders won’t get their grubby little fingers on that. Come and visit when you’re back on Earth; we can talk about how you ended your information blackout of 4 Vesta at precisely the moment when our problems stopped being the ISA’s fault, and turned into a system-wide edumercial for the ISA itself. I expect I’ll be able to chuckle about it by that time.”
Threadley himself chuckled when he heard this. The CEO wasn’t slow—just out of touch. Aloud, he said, “Fine. You keep your island. We’re keeping Błaszczykowski-Lee, Satterthwaite, and Meredith-Pike.”
★
None of this, of course, was publicized. Judging by the news feeds, you would have thought Cydney had evacuated 100,000 people all by herself. Not a word was said about the involvement of the Chinese. That two transports had fortunately been on hand was acknowledged, but not what flag they flew. This was by agreement between the UN and Chinese governments. The former wanted the credit for itself. The latter did not want it known that the Liberty Village experiment had been sanctioned in the first place.
But in Hebei Province, in a posh arboreal bubbleburb, the grieving friends and families of Jimmy Liu and Wang Gulong vowed to try again.
Meanwhile, in Vesta orbit, and in conference rooms on Earth populated by very important and very grumpy people who had not had any sleep in days, the maneuvering continued at a frenetic pace.
xxxix.
Elfrida participated in a low-level meeting in Toronto. The delegates sat around wrought iron tables pushed together on a patio wreathed with convolvulus. Across the street, a café window framed Elfrida’s reflection: an androgynous, multiracial asimov-class phavatar in a Roman-style tunic with a big sticker on its chest.
She felt floaty and unreal, tha
nks to the painkillers coursing through her body. She marvelled at the round yellow sun in Earth’s sky, the sparrows snatching crumbs from the patio, and the comical bustle of waiters threading between the tables under one full gravity. This meeting had been convened at the order of the Select Security Council to produce an expert briefing that would help the pols decide what to do about 4 Vesta.
The delegates represented various UN agencies and institutes specializing in IT, MI, and AI. For all that, it was not a high-level meeting. Elfrida knew that because she was here, and also because they were at a café. The nicer the setting, the less important the proceedings.
A man named Derek Lorna, the acting director of the UN’s Leadership in Robotics Institute on Luna, spoke about self-improvement pathways and resource-acquisition utility goals. Elfrida caught the scary syllable she’d first heard from Mendoza: FOOM.
In response, the woman from MIT rambled on about containment. The thrust of her remarks seemed to be that an isolated asteroid like 4 Vesta was a pretty good sandbox, and the Heidegger program should be kept there for observation, like a virus in a laboratory.
Wise nods greeted this patently terrible idea, which had first been had, of course, by the doomed scientists of the de Grey Institute. Elfrida realized that the further people were from the threat, the less they could grasp it. That was why she was here. She was supposed to tell them about the battle for the Bremen Lock, the murder of 5,639 purebloods by shooting or drowning in Olbers Lake, and the conversion of the Francis Galton Biomedicine Research Center into a chop-shop where phavatars, ankle-deep in blood, had rewired people’s brains to run the PLAN’s neuroware. But words eluded her.
The man from Triton (“Hello! My name is Galt Nursultan, CEO, Scooperships Inc.”) spoke up. “I knew Adrian Smith,” said his phavatar. “He was into third-wave poetic syncretism. Sweetest guy you ever met. The Heidegger program hijacked his ID and sent itself to us. It infected three hundred and forty-one people before we could stop it. Two hundred and eight of those committed suicide. We figure they didn’t have the right hardware to support the program. The others went on a murderous rampage, targeting purebloods. An entire hab had to be abandoned. Sorry, make that flattened. Maybe we overreacted. But we’re 4400 million kilometers from Earth. We were this close to losing baseline life-support. Six hundred and seventy-seven people are dead. So what do I tell their friends and families when they find out the UN is keeping this thing around to study it?”
The Vesta Conspiracy: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 2) Page 33