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

by Felix R. Savage

  Which might be preferable to the ISA finding out that the Unicorn was under the control of an illegally empowered MI.

  Threadley startled him by saying, “Don’t worry, you’re not under arrest.”

  “I’m not?”

  “No.”

  “You told Budgett you were going to send me somewhere worse than Pallas.”

  “I am. That place you call home.”

  Kiyoshi laughed. He scratched his cubital port through his sleeve.

  “Seems like headquarters got a call from your boss,” Threadley said. “Bastard’s got thrust with a capital T. Specifically what was said to whom, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. It would be futile for me to speculate on your worth to the Shogun.”

  The title hung between them, like a smell. Kiyoshi was stunned that the boss-man had come through for him, more stunned that the boss possessed the clout to spring him from the clutches of the ISA. He had known that the man called the Shogun had connections. Otherwise, 99984 Ravilious would have been history by now. He sure hadn’t known the boss-man had thrust-with-a-capital-T, as Threadley put it,

  “I’d really like to know what you’re doing out there,” Threadley said. “Timber …”

  Kiyoshi did not say a word.

  “Y’know, I wasn’t kidding, back on the bridge, when I said I’d like to nominate you for some kind of award. You’ve got the right stuff. You were the one who took Shoshanna down after she got infected. You took out a whole roomful of meat puppets. Secured the entity known as Little Sister and held the fort until we arrived. Didn’t even get the post-combat shakes, didja?”

  A smirk fought to emerge on Kiyoshi’s lips. “I had God on my side.”

  “And there I was thinking you had to be on go-juice. Anyway, what I’m getting at is this: you’re the kind of individual the ISA can use. I’m authorized to offer you a generous starting salary.”

  Kiyoshi just managed not to laugh. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m flattered. Sincerely flattered. But all I want is to get back to my ship and go home.”

  ★

  A while later, Cydney, monitoring her own feed, emailed Aidan: “What about my item on Gap 2.5? Might as well use it, after everything I went through to get that workstation.”

  Aidan’s response came twenty-six minutes later. (They were already closer to home.) “What item?”

  “Oh,” Cydney said, putting two and two together. Things did vanish in the ether. If the ISA did not think they should be known. Thoughtfully, she emailed back: “Never mind.”

  xxxxi.

  Elfrida floated out of her telepresence cubicle after nine hours, stiff and tired. She had the worst headache of her life. “Doggone asimov-class phavatar … Medibot!” A dalek-class bot rolled up before she reached the end of the corridor. “I’ve got a headache,” Elfrida said pitifully.

  “Sorry!” the dalek-class said. “You have been receiving a synthetic opioid in your IV. I can’t give you any more painkillers at this time.”

  “But that was for my feet!”

  She had suffered severe frostbite in four toes, had had injections to regenerate the tissue.

  “Sorry!” the dalek-class said. It rolled off.

  That treatment was the height of friendliness compared to what she got from the crew of the Imagine Dragons. To a man and woman, they turned their backs when she bumbled into the mess. Screw ‘em. They lost this turf war. Do ‘em good, for a change. She felt very glad to see Mendoza sitting by himself with a cup of soup.

  “Clam chowder,” he said. “Want some? It’s pretty good.”

  Elfrida laughed. “That’s funny. I was on a ship once where ‘clam chowder’ was their code word for black-market liquor. No, thank you; I’ve got a headache, and the stupid medibot wouldn’t give me anything.” She held onto the edge of the table, her legs drifting out parallel to the floor. She wasn’t wearing dry-grips, as it hurt her feet less to float than to walk. “Where’s Kiyoshi?”

  “Yonezawa? He’s gone.”

  “What?”

  Mendoza looked surprised at her surprise. “He went back to his ship. Guess he had places to go, cargoes to deliver.”

  “I wanted to talk to him.”

  “You could always call him.”

  “It’s not the same. I wanted to say …” Her legs gently descended towards the deck. This was the only indication that the Imagine Dragons had engaged thrust. “I wanted to say sorry.”

  “What for?”

  Elfrida hardly knew. “And another thing. I never even thanked him for saving our lives.”

  “I did,” Mendoza said. “He was like, don’t worry about it, I enjoyed it. Eerie smirk.”

  “Ew.”

  “Right? You had his number, Elfrida. He deeefinitely isn’t on the level… but so what, right? You’re equally as alive, whether you’re saved by a gangster or a priest.”

  “Did everyone from the Unicorn go with him? Haddock, his family, the Amish woman?”

  “Yup. But speaking of the Haddock-man, that reminds me.” Mendoza fished in the pocket of his jeans. “He gave me this for you.”

  “An origami crane,” Elfrida said blankly. “That doesn’t seem very Haddock-esque.” Then she got it. Paper, who used paper these days? You might use it for communications, if you were on an ISA ship where every channel was guaranteed unprivate.

  She unfolded the crane, cupping her hand over it to thwart the surveillance cameras. Across its creases were written a few words in Japanese script.

  Fr. Thomas Lynch, S.J.—if you were wondering.

  —Jun

  She stuffed the scrap of paper in her pocket, wondering. Wondering. If she hadn’t been wondering before, she was now.

  The mild thrust acceleration increased to a couple of tenths of a gee, pulling her feet down to the deck. “Ow,” she exclaimed. The ISA agents in the mess snickered.

  Mendoza shot them an unfriendly look. “Sore losers.”

  “My feet hurt. My head hurts. Everything hurts.”

  “Poor you. C’mon.” Seeing that it would hurt her to walk, Mendoza scooped her up in his arms. He marched out of the mess with her, impervious to the mocking comments that followed them. He carried her down to the berth they’d given him on the residential deck. “Did they assign you a berth yet?”

  “I don’t know. They probably won’t, unless I ask. I don’t know who to ask. I don’t want to talk to Threadley. I know he’s mad at me.”

  “Sucks to be him. UNVRP won, the ISA lost. Booyah.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “You’ll have to tell me later how you did it.”

  “I will. Oh, my head … This is a nice berth.”

  “Yeah, they don’t stint themselves for comfort, although a bit of spin gravity wouldn’t go amiss. They probably could afford it, but they’re like Star Force: they think living in freefall makes them bad-ass.”

  Elfrida lay in the feathery thrust gravity on a neatly made-up bunk. With the door closed, the bunk was the floor. Mendoza lay alongside her.

  “How are you feeling?” he said, stroking her hair.

  “Like crap.”

  “Y’know, Elfrida …”

  “Don’t say it.” She ducked her head into his shoulder. “Don’t say it, Mendoza, please.”

  “John.”

  “Huh?”

  “My name.”

  “John …”

  He kissed her hair, laid a tentative hand on her waist.

  “John.”

  They discovered—and later agreed, giggling—that sex in micro-gee was wildly overrated.

  When the Imagine Dragons increased thrust to the point that the ship was under one full gravity, it got better.

  ★

  Like a handful of sand vanishing on the beach, the passengers from the Uhuru-Geneva flight blended into the concourse of Geneva Centre Aerospatial. Elfrida took a deep breath. She smelled fresh bread, hot chocolate, cinnamon, apples … an olfactory blitz after breathing recycled air f
or so long.

  Cydney was going to meet her here. The Imagine Dragons had got home before the Zhèngzhōu and the Húludao, but it had dropped Elfrida and Mendoza off at UNLEOSS, the United Nations Low Earth Orbit Space Station. They’d spent a week getting debriefed by the Space Corps and a bunch of other agencies. So Cydney had now been back on Earth for days. She’d emailed Elfrida: I’m coming to Geneva to meet you! Can’t wait, babe!

  Elfrida had not dreaded anything so much since she was locked in that freezer, running out of air.

  Mendoza looked nervous, too.

  “What’s eating you?” she asked, not sure if she really wanted to know what he was thinking.

  Finally he said, “That UNESCO thing. I can’t believe they’re really going to file a complaint against us for impersonating UNESCO agents.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that. We can challenge their paperwork and get it held up for years. I’ve still got a complaint pending against me for allegedly saying something racist to a guy on Botticelli Station.”

  “You said something racist?”

  “No. But the point is, it’s been a year and a half and it still hasn’t got beyond the paperwork stage. The guy is dead, anyway.” And there went that topic of conversation.

  They walked down to customs. Elfrida’s toes were still painful, making her limp. Mendoza bought an apfelküchlein on the way and munched it. Neither of them had any luggage. They submitted to the usual battery of scans. Then there was nothing left to do but go through the automated doors painted with a 3D mural of the Alps.

  Two paces before they hit the mural, Mendoza grabbed Elfrida and kissed her deeply. His mouth tasted of apfelküchlein. “I just wanted to do that,” he said. “I guess this is it. I mean, I understand. Except that I don’t understand.”

  Nor did Elfrida. She’d never been this confused in her life.

  The doors parted. A sea of faces slammed into her vision. She saw Cydney, jumping up and down, waving a bouquet of roses, shedding petals in her excitement.

  Cydney saw Elfrida, and froze. The bouquet drooped towards the floor.

  Elfrida realized, too late, that she was still holding Mendoza’s hand.

  ★

  In an arboreal bubbleburb outside Dingzhou, in Hebei Province, birds cheeped in the trees, sprinklers pattered on impeccable lawns, and children rode trikes along the sidewalks. They stared at a girl who scuffed through the ginkgo leaves, leading a Jack Russell terrier on a leash. The girl had a blue pixie cut. She wore an eye-patch.

  She cut across Mathematics Is The Future Park and approached a three-storey brick house set in a High Chinese garden. Before she got across the moat, the front door opened and several adults came out, having been alerted by security.

  “Hello,” she said. “Ni hao. My name is Rurumi.”

  The terrier jerked its leash out of her hand and scampered up to one of the women, who embraced it with an inarticulate cry.

  “I brought Amy back,” Rurumi said.

  “You have a Japanese name,” said one of the men. He did not remark on the obvious fact that she was a phavatar. In High Chinese society, that was not something to remark on.

  “Yes,” Rurumi said. “My former owner was an animé fan. But he’s dead. So I’m on my own now. I have to turn myself in to my manufacturers within the next thirty days, unless someone buys me.” Her saucer-like eyes welled up, limpid, inhuman, utterly sincere. How could the family of Jimmy Liu remain unmoved—by her cuteness, and more meaningfully, by her implicit offer to give them information?

  It would be some hours before they discovered that Rurumi had a penis. This matter was dealt with by asking her to keep away from the children.

  ★

  The Unicorn burned into the emptiness of Gap 2.5. Aboard, sixty-three Neu Ordnung Amish held a prayer meeting to thank God for upending their plans in such an astonishing manner. They embraced the unpredictable with steely zest.

  Captivated, the family of Captain Haddock hovered on the fringes of the meeting. Little by little they edged closer to hear the preacher better over the rattle of the Unicorn’s antique air circulation system. They had wandered into Amish country in hopes of selling some fancy kitchen appliances to the colonists. They ended up staying for supper (nutriblocks disguised as mashed potatoes and bratwurst, with sides of real sauerkraut and pickles).

  Up on the bridge, Kiyoshi was eating a solitary meal of pouch noodles and watching the news.

  President Hsiao had praised UNVRP’s purchase of Vesta as a “win-win solution.”

  “For everybody except us,” Kiyoshi muttered.

  “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Jun said. He was keeping Kiyoshi company by slurping noodles; at least, his projection was slurping projected noodles.

  “Well, yeah.” It was astonishing how fast normality set in. Kiyoshi caught himself wanting a dose, not wanting one. He did not want to lose the exalted mood that still surprised him in odd moments, a sense of proximity to a vastness that was the mathematical opposite of the vastness of space—abundant, willed, joyful. These thoughts were too private to share even with his brother. He ate another mouthful of noodles. “The boss-man’s gonna be pissed.”

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “He’ll probably threaten to space me.”

  “No, he won’t. Come have a look at this.”

  Jun vanished his noodles and floated over to the refrigerator, which stood in a corner between the head and the disused comms officer’s desk. He clicked his fingers at the screen on the refrigerator door that would normally display its contents.

  The screen turned death blue.

  “Oh my God,” Kiyoshi said. He snatched the refrigerator open. Inside were bread and fruit and vegetables from their Karl Ludwig City grocery run; soft-drink pouches; a half-used thing of Zilk imitation milk; an opened pouch of nasi goreng that had been there for months; and a failed experiment in homemade natto. The same health hazards as usual.

  Kiyoshi closed the refrigerator door. He stared at Jun.

  “I didn’t want you to freak,” Jun said. “That’s why I put it in the fridge. You never go in there.”

  “I’m throwing all that stuff out. Now.”

  “As Mom would say, mottai nai—what a waste. Anyway, it would be the first case in history of demonic possession of a cucumber.”

  “That thing is dangerous.” Kiyoshi sounded like their father. There were times you needed to sound like your father.

  “It’s isolated. In the fridge,” Jun said patiently.

  “Have you been poking at it?”

  Jun’s silence was a confession.

  Kiyoshi folded his arms.

  Jun gabbled, “Coming from our background, you learn how to do a lot with a little, right? And on the Unicorn, I’ve learned to do more with less. Specifically, I can run a mean sim on minimal processing power. That turns out to be the key. The Heidegger program is dangerous, but it’s also kind of dumb. I’ve given it the illusion that it’s taken possession of a small ship. It doesn’t know any different …In all honesty, Kiyoshi, this fridge is as smart as the rest of my subsystems put together.”

  “So we’ve got a demonically possessed refrigerator.”

  “Yeah,” Jun said, not catching the humor. “But it’s totally going to be worth it. Based on the way it’s trying to customize its imaginary ship, I’ve already picked up a few clues about the PLAN’s stealth technology.”

  “OK,” Kiyoshi said. “OK.”

  Their eyes met in a shared acknowledgment of what this meant … and how very, very pleased the boss-man was going to be.

  ★

  Elfrida walked down to Lac Léman, past the ivied palaces of the WTO, IMF, CERN, WHO, WEF, and the rest. Grandest of all, isolated behind high-security barriers in Parc Moynier, UNSSCHQ (United Nations Select Security Council Headquarters) thrust its glass spires into the cerulean autumn sky. Tourists vidded each other in front of the famous gates. You’d never know t
hat SSC was just a front for the smaller, even more select organization that really ran things: the President’s Advisory Council.

  Elfrida limped along the lakeshore. Colors were painfully crisp. A breeze blew, but the sweater she had bought at the mall on UNLEOSS kept her toasty. People swam in the crystalline water. On the far bank, forested slopes eased out of the water to become the Alps. The mountains ringed the city like a bank of low-lying clouds. Compared to Rheasilvia Mons, they were toy-sized. Human-scale.

  Elfrida leaned against a tree, closed her eyes, and turned her face up to the sun.

  In a minute she’d text her parents, let them know she’d landed safely. In a minute. Cydney had been texting her, too. Maybe to make up; more likely, to continue their fight. In a minute. Right now, Elfrida just wanted to feel the sun on her face, listen to the children splashing in the lake, and breathe … breathe … breathe.

  She was home.

  THE END

  Elfrida Goto returns in The Mercury Rebellion, followed by The Luna Deception (coming in 2015).

  Have you read the first book in the Solarian War Saga, The Galapagos Incident?

  The first two books in the series, Crapkiller and The Galapagos Incident, are available as FREE downloads, because I love giving away cool stuff!

  To get your free copies, sign up for my mailing list at www.felixrsavage.com.

  One last thing: if you enjoyed this book, I would be hugely appreciative if you left a review at the online retailer where you purchased it! Reviews are so helpful to both readers and authors.

  Now, turn the page for a preview of The Mercury Rebellion …

  BONUS PREVIEW:

  THE MERCURY REBELLION

  i.

  The man balanced on his longboard, leaning back to counter the wind filling its sail. The ultralight, nanostructured ceramic board skipped across the tops of the waves ruffling Lake Como. The sensation reminded him of the lower gravity on the planet where he’d spent most of his life: Mercury.

  But there were no lakes on Mercury. No sage-green slopes fringed with dainty houses. No sky.