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

by Felix R. Savage

  This afternoon the sky had turned unfriendly. Gusts of rain pelted the man’s face, mingling with the windspray. Leaden clouds threatened heavier rain before dark. A wet afternoon in April was not ideal for windsurfing. But he’d squeezed this day in between meetings, and he wasn’t staying off the water just because the locals had gone and scheduled a rainstorm.

  Shame it wasn’t more of an outing for Angie. Her bikini had stayed in her bag. She’d camped out on the terrace of the hotel where they’d had lunch, beneath an oversized umbrella, occasionally looking up from her tablet to wave.

  Spray hammered his face. (Spray or rain? He couldn’t tell anymore.) He pulled on the bar. His grip seemed weak, his fingers unresponsive. Getting tired. Or just out of shape. Progressive bone and muscle loss kicking in. Time to call it a day.

  But Charles K. Pope had not got where he was in life by caving in to adverse conditions.

  He performed a planing jibe. Swung into another beam reach. Before the sail hid the shore from him, he looked for the giant sunflower of Angie’s umbrella, but couldn’t see it anymore. She must have gone in.

  ★

  The woman sat on a bar-stool in the lounge of the Hotel Panorama, sipping an espresso. She’d added sugar and cream to the tiny cup, which made the bartender roll his eyes. But, so what? She wasn’t from around here, and she didn’t care who knew it.

  Words crawled over her retinal implants, like ants crawling on the eyeballs of a corpse. She blinked them aside. Who could get any work done in here? The view from the bar’s floor-to-ceiling windows was phenomenal. Even in the rain, Lake Como stunned. God’s leaden thumbprint, pressed into the peaks of the mountains. Not that anyone in their right mind could believe there was a God.

  The rain was getting heavier. She spotted Charlie’s rig. It flaunted the logo of the agency he headed. He was so goddamn proud of the Venus Project.

  The sail wobbled. It heeled over and crashed into the water.

  A chime rang behind the bar. The grizzled bartender glanced at his wrist tablet. His eyes widened.

  “Signora, it seems your, ah, husband has triggered his emergency beacon.”

  At the same time a ping from Charlie, who wasn’t her husband, flashed up on her retinal implants. She looked away from it.

  “Please do not be alarmed. Our rescue drones have already been dispatched. They will reach him within one minute.”

  The bartender came out from behind the bar. Together, they moved to the windows. The bartender pointed at a pair of tiny orange lights receding through the rain. The rescue drones carried life-vests, flares, and twang cords with which they might tow Charlie to shore. There was no way they could lift his fat ass. She knew; she’d researched their capabilities.

  “They will reach him very quickly,” the bartender repeated. “He will be OK.”

  She enabled the zoom function of her retinal implants.

  Charlie wallowed in the water, several meters from his board. His wetsuit, buoyant, was keeping him afloat. She glimpsed the pale circle of his face for an instant, and then a wave washed over it.

  Her implants kept blinking. You have a call from Charles K. Pope.

  “I can’t see,” she said thickly. “The rain.”

  The water obscuring her vision was tears.

  You have a call from Charles K. Pope …

  She turned away, cramming her hands over her face. A Modigliani silhouette in cream with black accents, curved like a broken cup. A woman crumpling with grief.

  Ignore.

  ii.

  Later on the same day, two women, one young and one ageless, sat in a small room on a high floor in Naples. Shelves groaned with handmade pottery; a spare ergoform was stacked with baskets and bowls woven from seagrass; in a corner, a marble David, after Michelangelo, modelled swathes of jewelry made from found objects.

  The atmosphere in the room was decidedly tense.

  “What’s the problem? Do I need more therapy?”

  “Sometimes, time is the best medicine of all.”

  “I know. It was that bracelet I made out of old phones. It suggested that I don’t take this seriously.”

  “Take what seriously?”

  “Y’know. Therapy. Thing.”

  “Don’t you take therapy seriously?”

  “I do. I was just saying that based on that bracelet, you might have thought I didn’t. Oh, never mind.”

  “I thought it was quite witty.”

  “ … Really?”

  “Yes. A comment on the performative nature of communication in the modern era. Humanity has colonized the solar system, spread out over interplanetary distances, but people still haven’t outgrown the need for intimate associations. Families. Tribes. Groups. Teams. If anything, the need to belong is more acute than in the past.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Would you like to be a bit more specific, Elfrida?”

  “No. I stuck my finger.”

  “Ah.”

  Elfrida Goto sucked her finger. She tasted blood. She had pricked herself on the seagrass that she was braiding into a basket. She loathed basket-weaving slightly less than making unwearable jewelry or lopsided pots, but that didn’t mean she was any good at it.

  Elfrida had been in therapy for six months, following the dramatic conclusion of her last assignment. It was a bureaucratic requirement. She’d blown off a few of the sessions. Maybe that was the problem.

  “Why didn’t you clear me for field assignments?”

  Louise looked up from her weaving. Their eyes met, a rare occurrence. Louise’s were gray-green, startling in her brown face, and slightly glassy, as if she were concealing extreme boredom. Maybe she was.

  “If I’m forced to be honest, Elfrida, you experienced significant trauma on 4 Vesta. You’re still very fragile. It would be unethical to make you face the rigors of prolonged telepresence missions in outer space at this time.”

  “I don’t feel fragile.”

  Louise smiled faintly. The shelves full of craft projects whispered of shrunken ambitions, compressed horizons, agents removed from the field and reduced to seeking fulfillment in wet clay or baubles. The Space Corps was well known for chewing field agents up and spitting them out. It was all the human contact that did it.

  “You might enjoy working at a café or in a boutique for a while,” Louse said. “That kind of job confers a sense of belonging, and plenty of human contact, without the responsibilities. Also, there are fewer deadly AIs, space pirates, and rogue ISA agents in Italy.”

  “You suggested that before.”

  “I did.”

  “And I said that if you suggested it again, I would jump out of the window.”

  “Are you going to jump out of the window?”

  They both looked out of the window. Pigeons flurried up from the dome of the former San Francesco di Paola, reacting to the passage of a delivery drone.

  “No,” Elfrida said. “The Space Corps frowns on suicide attempts. Also, I wouldn’t want to land on that guy selling balloon animals.”

  “There’s an idea for a sabbatical.”

  “Louise, sometimes I suspect you of having a sense of humor.”

  “Ha, ha,” Louise said. “But I understand that you have been offered an alternate assignment, if you wish to accept it?”

  “Two alternate assignments. I get to choose. I can go to Luna as a coordinator for Space Corps field operations in the Inner Belt region. That would mean I would no longer be involved with the Venus Project. Or I can stay on the UNVRP contract, and go to the Project’s headquarters, on Mercury, as a human resources consultant.”

  “Coordinator. Consultant!” Louise marvelled. “Either of those sounds like a promotion.”

  Elfrida shook her head. “Those titles are meaningless. They hand them out like lollipops to people who aren’t qualified for promotion to field manager.”

  “Is that what you wanted?”

  “Yeah. I really … After 4 Vesta, I thought … Ow!” Elfrida had pricked
her finger again. She stared at the bead of blood on her skin. Dozens of dried blood smears from similar accidents already dotted her basket, such as it was. “Stupid, huh?”

  “You could think of this as putting in the time to burnish your resume,” said Louise, ever the optimist. “Have you decided which assignment to take?”

  An ear-splitting ululation pierced the office. Far below the window, atop the 21st-century minaret that topped the dome of the former San Francesco di Paola, a black-clad muezzin yearned in the direction of Mecca. The shower scheduled for 17:21 started to fall, a minute early. Raindrops stippled the glass.

  “If it were me,” Louise mused, “I’d go for Luna. Shackleton City’s got it all: culture, theater, great dining experiences, the zoo, concerts, and extreme sports if you’re into that kind of thing …”

  Elfrida put down her basket. “Concerts?” she said. “Great dining experiences? Louise, you’re a robot. What the hell would you know about that kind of thing, what it means to a human being, its—its relative importance?”

  Louise’s gray-green eyes blinked rapidly. She bowed her head. Elfrida had committed an indiscretion. All therapists were robots. It was well-established that people confided more freely in machines than in their fellow humans. (Elfrida was doing her best to singlehandedly prove the research wrong.) Louise 361AX was a geminoid bot, realistic enough in appearance to fool almost anyone, but the so-called brain inside that shapely head was just a bunch of processor crystals. But it had been rude to rub Louise’s face in it, as the robot was now emphasizing with her body language. Despite herself, Elfrida muttered, “Sorry.”

  ★

  After saying goodbye to Louise, Elfrida hopped on her Vespa and navigated through traffic to the A3 autostrada. She could have got home faster by train, but one of the pleasures of being back on Earth was riding her Vespa, and she intended to make the most of it while she was here.

  She joined the motorcycle lane of the A3 and kicked back, sipping a can of San Pellegrino. The bike maintained a safe distance from the Harleys and Ducatis weaving around her. Some of them were going so fast they must have been jailbroken—their autodrives illegally disabled to allow manual control. Elfrida had her Vespa on the “Basta!” setting, but this, like so much else, was relative.

  The rain stopped on schedule, and the sky cleared. The sun descended into a bubblebath of pink clouds in the Bay of Naples. The autostrada plunged into wet, dense forest. By law, every square meter of Europe not otherwise in use had to be forested, to assist the global climate’s recovery from centuries of abuse. In fact, parts of the continent—though not southern Italy—had returned to a state of wildness not seen since the Visigoths menaced the Roman Empire. Some people found the bosky landscape depressing, but Elfrida liked being enclosed by towering corkwoods and stone pines.

  Exhaust vapor glowed around the lamps that lined the autostrada. She raised the visor of her helmet. The damp May evening smacked her face, blowing away her lingering feelings of irritation.

  She loved Earth. Loved fresh air, weather, sunsets, seasons. So why was she so eager to get back into space?

  She’d reconnected with her old friends during this furlough. Now that they were all nearing thirty, some of them had found spouses. Some had begun to have kids. They seemed happy enough, but that path just wasn’t for her.

  Feet on the handlebars, she considered the two assignments that she’d been offered.

  Luna

  Mercury

  Pro

  Con

  Pro

  Con

  Close to home. Could see more of Mom and Dad

  Micro-

  gravity = head bloat, stabilizer braces

  Never been there before. Exciting?

  Never been there before. Boring?

  “Coordinator”—sounds impressive

  They would never let me back on the Venus Project again

  Would be interesting to work at UNVRP HQ

  I just know I would suck at HR

  Concerts, theater, great dining experiences, etc.

  Stupid dress code

  Gravity of 0.38 gees = no head bloat, could skip the stabilizer braces

  ?

  Could see more of Mendoza

  Could see more of Mendoza

  Could see more of Cydney

  Could see more of Cydney

  She reached Rome at half past eight. The traffic was as awful as it had been for the last 23 centuries. As the capital of the ramshackle UN member state called the New Holy Roman Empire, Rome boasted several glitzy highrises that disfigured the Quirinal and the Via Veneto. The outer districts had been subjected to rewilding and restoration schemes of varying degrees of lunacy. Hillvilles—high-rise residential complexes buried in artificial mounds, planted with the native, scrubby greenery of southern Italy—squatted on either side of the restored Via Triumphalis. The traffic parted around the Arch of Constantine.

  And stopped.

  All the vehicles had received the same command from Mobility Control Rome: halt immediately.

  This wasn’t unusual. It happened several times a day, when Mobility Control couldn’t keep the traffic moving by slowing a few cars down here and speeding up others there. It was a hazard of living in a city with lots of ancient narrow streets, and lots of Italians.

  What was unusual was that the traffic still hadn’t started up again after fifteen minutes.

  Elfrida texted her mother— “Looks like I’m going to be late; you and Dad might as well go ahead and eat.” She got off her Vespa and paced, not going too far, lest the traffic should start up again without warning. Other people emerged from their cars and trucks, stretched their legs, glanced up at the night sky. Shooting stars popped: spaceplanes aerobraking in the upper atmosphere. This was another familiar Earth sight, as ordinary as rain.

  A public service announcement blared in unison from Elfrida’s Vespa and all the other cars and bikes in earshot. Despite having lived in Rome for years as a child and teenager, Elfrida couldn’t speak Italian. But she was hardly the only one. The PSA repeated in English: “Remain where you are. It is recommended that you not leave your vehicles. The polizia municipale are carrying out random security checks in your area. Please cooperate. Thank you!”

  Elfrida gritted her teeth, forced herself to relax. Someone, somewhere, must have forgotten to pay a parking ticket. Everyone settled in to wait.

  A tap on her sternum made her jump. It was her new phone. She hadn’t got used to its haptics yet.

  She clicked Accept in the interface linked to her contacts, and unbuttoned the neck of her motorcycle jacket. The phone’s lanyard flexed, tugging the pendant-shaped gadget out of her clothes. The lanyard stiffened and turned into a brace that supported the phone at eye level. It was designed for people so vain or confident that they wanted to be able to make screen calls anywhere and everywhere. The camera had been given to Elfrida by Cydney Blaisze, the media personality who happened to be her girlfriend—whose face now showed on the phone’s 2cm-diameter screen.

  “Ellie! Why are you wearing your bike helmet?”

  “I’m stuck in traffic. What’s going on?”

  “Oh my dog, have you seen what’s happened?”

  “What’s happened?”

  Cydney sounded excited, rather than alarmed. “There’s been a murder!”

  “A murder? Whoa.”

  In 23rd-century Europe, murder was rare. Reports of it were rare, anyway. People looked at Elfrida. She cringed, and dragged the phone closer to the visor opening of her helmet. It fought its lanyard, trying to maintain a distance that wouldn’t make her look like a mutant. “Who’s been, uh?” she whispered.

  “It’s crazy. Charles K. Pope!”

  “Oh my dog,” Elfrida said. “Oh. My. Dog.”

  The Via Triumphalis seemed to spin around her.

  “Crazy, right?” Cydney said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure? That he’s dead? Of course I’m sure. Everyone’s talking
about it. I’m sorry, Ellie, you didn’t know him, did you?”

  “Know know him? No.”

  Charles K. Pope was—had been—the director of the United Nations Venus Remediation Project.

  “I never even met him,” Elfrida said. “But still. Kind of close to home.” Her thoughts spun off in all directions. Would the Project suffer? This is the last thing we need, after 4 Vesta, and all the shitty publicity in the last few years. Who would take Pope’s place? Would this affect either or both of the assignments she’d been offered?

  “Murdered?” she said.

  “Well, they aren’t saying it’s murder, but he drowned in freaking Lake Como. That does not happen. There are more rescue drones stationed around that lake than on the Riviera, OK? Anyway, how else would you explain the fact that they’ve locked down every city between Zurich and Athens?”

  Elfrida looked at the static river of traffic that stretched out of sight beyond the Arch of Constantine. “I’m only half an hour from home. Maybe I should just leave my bike and walk.”

  “Don’t do that,” Cydney said. “You haven’t yet adjusted to being back on Earth, have you?”

  It was eerily silent on the Via Triumphalis, with everyone’s car stereos and televisions disabled by Mobility Control. Into that silence penetrated a thin warbling. Blue lights winked into sight around the skeletal curve of the Colosseum.

  “Cyds, I gotta go,” Elfrida said. She cut the connection and sat astride her bike, nervously gripping the handlebars.

  Three police striders bobbed around the Colosseum. They looked like prehistoric raptors with wraparound tinted eyes. They were designed to navigate nimbly through traffic, putting their feet down in the slivers of space between vehicles. People said that they were also designed to intimidate. The Italian bikers around Elfrida scowled, muttered “Cazzo la polizia,” and spat on the asphalt. The warbling sirens sounded like hunting cries. Drivers selected for random checks slid out of their vehicles and assumed the position in the shadow of the striders’ fuselages, while their bodies and cars were scanned. Of course, this was just theater. The police would be scanning everything in range.