A female voice hissed in the darkness, “James. Jamesss! Where’s the metalfucker gone?”
“He’s gotta be here somewhere,” panted another of the invaders.
A burst of bluish light lit up the lab, printing monstrous shadows on the walls and ceiling.
“Eat plasma, meatheads!” yelled Dr. James.
Lying on her back, Elfrida saw the distinctive rods of an electrolaser weapon, like a handful of glow-in-the-dark kebab skewers flung across the lab.
“Drop the fucking computer!”
“James!” shouted the same female voice. “You metalfucking psycho, are you out of your mind? You’re putting the whole hab in danger, and now this?”
A scream drowned out the last words. Elfrida scooted on her butt across the floor. Afterimages floated on her retinas. The invaders wore masks, identical white joker-faces with red lips. You’re putting the whole hab in danger. Dr. James was hiding something, and he was prepared to kill to defend it.
At that moment, the internet returned a first tranche of answers to her query: BRAH I JUMPT OFF FROOKING DOOM MONS & ONLY BUST ME ANKEL ROFLMAO
More of this kind of thing continued to scroll across her field of vision until she turned her contacts off. The internet was so useless.
The invaders were shooting wildly. The pungent smell of the propellant in their guns filled the lab. Then suddenly the shooting stopped.
“Are they gone?” She could see Dr. James in the weak light from the window. She crawled towards him. He leant out of the window, craning down.
She rose to her feet, her stabilizer braces half-off and interfering with her movements.
“When I told them to drop the computer,” Dr. James groaned, “I didn’t mean literally drop it.”
Far below, LED cobblestones illuminated the path leading to the Humanities building. A dark mass lay on the path. It was Ali Baba. Whatever the effect might have been on a human being, the fall had clearly not done the supercomputer any good. Even under a fifth of Earth’s gravity, state-of-the-art electronics required delicate handling. Elfrida remembered how carefully the invaders had been carrying the supercomputer. Until Dr. James shot one of them.
“You shot one of them,” she reminded him.
The invaders poured out of the STEM building’s ground-floor entrance. They streamed towards Ali Baba and surrounded it.
“Hey!” Dr. James hollered. He elbowed Elfrida out of the way and fired down at them. His electrolaser weapon was a slim tube integrated into his prosthetic arm. The sleeve of his shirt flapped, a charred rag. The ionized plasma beam might have hit the invaders. It did hit a cobblestone, whose machined surface reflected it back at an angle into the STEM building.
The invaders fled into the night, carrying the remains of Ali Baba.
“That’s the trouble with lasers,” Dr. James said. “I wanted a coil gun, but they said the magnets would interfere with the electronics in the arm. So I went for the laser. You get pinpoint targeting, an effective range of several kilometers, and you also get to shoot whatever’s located at an angle equal to the angle of incidence.”
“Still pretty wicked,” Elfrida said.
“Those dickshits were using liquid-propellant projectile guns. They must have access to a high-spec printer.”
“You shot one of them.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to.”
The lights came back on, revealing the body of Dr. James’s victim lying on the floor, next to a hole where the particle accelerator had toppled over and taken its piece of the floor with it. His joker mask had come off. Apart from the blackened spot on his forehead, David Reid looked exactly the same as he had at the Virgin Café an hour earlier.
★
The fire alarm went off. Dr. James’s reflected beam had started a conflagration on the third floor. The firefighters arrived in record time. They were an all-volunteer outfit, highly trained and motivated. They aimed jets of aqueous foam at the building.
Elfrida watched with a handful of others from the lawn. Her colleague John Mendoza was there, too. He’d been working through FirstDark, but had known nothing about the invasion until the fire alarm went off.
“They stole the supercomputer,” Elfrida told him. “Dr. James shot one of them.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not. That prosthetic arm of his? It’s a laser weapon.”
“No, I mean, how could they steal the supercomputer? It’s the size of a room. And anyway, it’s in the basement. It vents its waste heat into the lake. Everything’s connected.”
“Well, maybe they didn’t know that.”
“Which would narrow down the field of suspects a lot,” Mendoza said, grinning. “To, maybe, one Space Corps field agent, and whoever else in this habitat doesn’t know that a supercomputer isn’t something you can just pick up and walk off with.”
“Stick it up your socket, Mendoza. I majored in art history.”
“So you belong over there,” Mendoza said, nodding at the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center, from whose windows people were leaning to watch the foam dripping off the green curtain of the STEM building
“I’m not cool enough for them.” Elfrida grimaced. “The guy Dr. James shot? Was a Humanities student. I know him. I mean, I’d met him. I was just talking to him, like, an hour ago.”
Mendoza’s eyes opened wide. He had cocoa-colored eyes, which looked even darker in contrast with his milky skin. “Well, then, I guess we know who did it.”
“… Yeah.”
“Of course, we can’t jump to conclusions,” Mendoza backpedaled.
“If Cydney was involved, I’m going to find out about it. And I mean I’m going to find out all about it.”
“You’d probably do a better job than they will,” Mendoza said, pointing into the sky.
Another pair of gliders landed on the lawn. Unlike the volunteer fire-fighters’ electrically powered Bumblebees, these were two-man flyers with streamlined cockpit bubbles and rotating jackstands that tore up the turf. Hand-painted mascots and slogans decorated their fuselages. One pilot sprang out of his cockpit and posed on the wing of his glider, his scarf fluttering heroically. The other three new arrivals edged towards the STEM building, sub-lethal PEPguns leveled at the firefighters’ backs.
The peacekeepers had arrived.
Throughout the solar system, police and security duties were handled by an assortment of paramilitary contractors, private individuals, and troops employed by one or another UN agency. These last were collectively known as blue berets, or peacekeepers. Even UNVRP had its own peacekeepers, although not on Vesta. This heterogeneity made for a lot of variation in terms of professionalism, funding, and overall seriousness. The peacekeepers in the Bellicia ecohood were generally held to be on the low end of the seriousness scale. They worked for UNESCO—all five of them.
As the tiny size of this ‘police’ force indicated, Bellicia was not a place where anyone expected trouble. In fact, since Elfrida had been here, the only conflicts she’d witnessed had been between the peacekeepers and the people they were supposed to be looking out for.
Watching four of the Fab Five accost the firefighters, she could see why.
“Well, we’re not going to get much work done for a while,” Mendoza said brightly.
“Why?”
“According to you, they tossed Ali Baba out of a twentieth-floor window and ran off with it.”
“But you said that wasn’t the supercomputer!”
“Correct. The actual supercomputer is a million processor crystals running in parallel in the basement. What they ran off with was most likely the astrophysics workstation. Of course, Dr. James’s team is bound to have off-site backups.”
“Backups of what?”
“Its memory. Each workstation stores its own data in its own memory crystals. Safer than the cloud.”
“Oh.”
“So they’ll have backups. But you said the lab was trashed, right? It’ll take them a while to get up and running
again. They’ve got pretty good manufacturing capabilities here, but I don’t think they can make memory crystals yet.”
“You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.”
Mendoza turned to look at her. “Sorry,” he said. “Just trying to keep things light.”
Elfrida sighed. “No, I’m sorry.” She trailed off, watching the Fab Five escort Dr. James to one of their flyers. The professor’s hands were plasticuffed behind his back. Foam soaked his hair and clothes. “Mendoza, one of the invaders said to Dr. James, You’re endangering everyone in this hab.”
“What do you think that meant?”
“I don’t know. But he is definitely hiding something. We’ll have to find out what.”
viii.
The dim effulgence of ThirdLight flooded the patio of Elfrida’s apartment. To help people sleep through the latter third of the Bellicia ecohood’s 26-hour sol, Facilities Management darkened the sun mirrors during ThirdLight. The mirrors looked like slivers of moon fixed high in the sky, illuminating the soyclouds, picking out the PHES (Pumped Heat Electrical Storage) thrusters on their undersides.
Elfrida pushed the patio door open. It wasn’t locked. “Cydney?”
The peacekeepers had taken Elfrida down to their headquarters to ask her about the raid. She’d had to tell her story over and over. She was shaken up. The familiar confines of her living-room did not soothe her.
“Cydney?”
“Babe! You’re back!”
Cydney hurtled out of the bedroom. She wrapped her arms and legs around Elfrida, propelling both of them onto the couch.
“Where were you, babe? I kept pinging you.”
“They confiscated my contacts. I said I wasn’t recording, but I guess they want to check for themselves. I should have recorded everything. That way, they’d know Dr. James isn’t a killer.” But he’s hiding something dangerous. She hadn’t told the peacekeepers about that.
“He is a killer!” Cydney said, bouncing upright. “He shot David in cold blood!”
“Oh, you know about that?”
“Everyone knows about it.”
“But he isn’t dead. Dr. James had his laser on the lowest setting. He was only stunned.”
“He only suffered cardiac arrest. He’s only in a coma. The whole campus is up in arms. There’s going to be a demo tomorrow.”
“I guess you’ll be going?”
“Of course. David’s a friend.”
“You said he was an asshole.”
Cydney took Elfrida’s hands in both of hers. “Sweet Ellie. Someone can be impossible to get along with, and you can still care about them. You can still love them, even.”
Elfrida worked her hands free, She took off her stabilizer braces and the nanofiber leggings and tank top she wore under them. As usual, the straps had left red weals around her waist and across her shoulders. Cydney reached for her, but Elfrida pretended not to notice. She went into the bedroom and opened the closet. She grabbed a pair of pyjamas and stepped into them, banging her head on the ceiling in the process.
“Careful, babe,” said Cydney, in the doorway.
Elfrida riffled through the clothes in the closet. Almost all of them were Cydney’s: white, shocking pink, aquamarine, burnt orange, or one of the other attention-getting hues Cydney favored. The only thing Elfrida could smell in the closet was Chanel No.666.
“Are you looking for something, babe?”
Elfrida sailed into the kitchen. She opened the recycling bin. Its plastic liner held an empty Virgin Café takeout bag, a microwave meal tray, and under that, spattered with coffee dregs and grains of rice, a crumpled bundle of black fabric. Elfrida shook it out. The loose-weave thermal fabric was slick to the touch, a sign that it had been printed from cheap material. She smelled that sweet, pungent odor.
There was one thing left in the bin. A joker mask. Elfrida held it up between two fingers.
“Well?”
Cydney’s big green eyes welled up. Elfrida expected her to dissolve in tears. But Cydney surprised her.
“We had to do something,” she said. “The astrophysics lab has been monopolizing the supercomputer. It’s totally unfair. We complained to the dean. We got a ruling that they have to give us equal time. But they just ignored it! After all, we’re not real scientists, right? So they kept right on locking us out of the system. We haven’t been able to do any data analysis for weeks! It’s outrageous. Why do they even need to run Ali Baba around the clock? Why does an asteroid survey need that much processing power?”
“I don’t know,” Elfrida said. She was pretty sure by now that whatever Dr. James’s team was using the supercomputer for, it wasn’t the asteroid survey.
“It’s not fair! Just because we study people instead of stupid rocks!”
Cydney was getting worked up, wringing her hands, her cheeks flushed. Elfrida felt oddly calm. “Here,” she said, getting the cigarette box down from the shelf. “Have one of these.”
Cydney tossed her head angrily, but she took a cigarette and pushed a cartridge into it. She exhaled candy-scented vapor laced with a mild tranquilizer. This was Cydney’s little vice.
“Where did you take Ali Baba?” Elfrida asked.
“That wasn’t Ali Baba itself. It was only the astrophysics lab’s workstation.”
With all their data in it, Elfrida thought. “Yeah, I know, but where did you take it?”
“I don’t know. I was just a lookout. I wasn’t in the lab when … I didn’t know you were there, either. You should have told me where you were going when you left the café.”
“So you were on lookout duty. That means you were downstairs the whole time. You must’ve been one of the people who carried the workstation away.”
“And almost got shot. I hope they give Dr. James life on Pallas!”
“Where did you take it?”
“It was pretty smashed up. They probably just dumped it.”
“So you don’t know what they did with it.”
Cydney sucked on her cigarette. A cloud of vapor hid her face. “Even if I did know, I wouldn’t tell you, Ellie. Sorry, but you’ve made it pretty clear that you’re on their side.”
★
“Cydney didn’t know anything,” Elfrida said to Mendoza. “She just tagged along.”
They were sitting on a bench on the shore of Olbers Lake, wearing warm coats and nursing takeout coffees from the Virgin Café. Mendoza was eating a danish. He chewed in silence for a moment or two, letting Elfrida know he knew that she was trying to protect Cydney. She felt all twisted up inside. But she believed Cydney truly was ignorant of the raid’s real purpose.
At last Mendoza said, “So she doesn’t know who organized it?”
“No. But it has to be someone in PHCTBS Studies, if David Reid was involved.”
“Poor guy. I hope he recovers.”
“Yeah. Mendoza, we have to find out what they were after.”
“Well, presumably whatever it was, they got it.” Mendoza looked at the last bit of his danish and wadded it up in the wrapper. “Unless the workstation was busted beyond repair, which is a possibility.”
“Mendoza, don’t you remember what I told you last night? They said the whole hab is in danger.”
“Yeah, I remember.” Mendoza stuffed wrapper, danish, and all into the dedicated recycling pocket of his coat. “That was pretty nasty. It’s never good when you can taste the soy. I did a bit of asking around last night. Turns out Dr. James and his team didn’t back up their database. They haven’t even logged into the off-site storage center in more than a year. That’s … well, it’s really unusual.”
“That proves it! They’re hiding something dangerous.”
Out on the lake, a fish jumped up through the mat of bluey-green CO2-sink algae that covered the water. Elfrida had got her contacts back from the peacekeepers. Her HUD display indicated that the temperature was slightly warmer today, although a cutting breeze blew off the lake. No one else was around. They were all at the pro
test downtown, demanding justice for David Reid.
“Maybe if Dr. James goes on trial, it’ll all come out,” she said.
“I dunno about that. By the way, did you confront him about giving us bad survey data, like you said you were going to?”
“Yeah. He denied it. But now I don’t believe him about that, either. They’re all so ideological out here.”
The shadow of a soycloud passed slowly over them. Mendoza said, “Do you ever feel like you’re a long way from home?”
All the time, would have been Elfrida’s honest answer, but it would have been a misleading one, because she felt like her real home was Venus. And it would probably be years before she got back there, if ever.
“Mendoza,” she said, instead of answering. “What say we have a look for the workstation ourselves?”
“Whaaaat?”
“We’ve got the resources to do it. And like you said, we’re not going to get much work done for a while, anyway.”
“Well …”
“Come on! It’’ll be fun.”
ix.
When Elfrida said that they had the resources to look for the missing workstation, she was referring to UNVRP’s dedicated comms satellite. They cleared their proposed search operation with their respective head offices before proceeding. Mendoza received a limp “Sure, go ahead” from his manager at UNVRP Analysis & Acquisition, 2.0 AU – 3.5 AU Region. Elfrida had been less confident of getting approval, and prepared to go ahead without it, but this turned out not to be necessary. Her supervisor at Space Corps HQ on UNLEOSS, Jake Onwego, said, “Yeah, OK. Sounds reasonable. Just, if you find the thing, you know. Grab the data. Then return it, yeah?”
“That’s exactly what I was planning to do, sir,” Elfrida said.
She watched Onwego watching a soccer game on his office computer for twenty-eight minutes.
“Good on ya,” he said, with a big wink. “If those professors have been screwing us over, I want to be the first to know about it. Keep me in the loop, and remember to file your paperwork!”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 5