The Vesta Conspiracy
Page 6
“And on we go, and on we go,” Elfrida hummed, breaking the connection.
“He’s a placeholder,” said Mendoza.
“It wasn’t always like this. What happened is our director, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, wangled a seat on the President’s Advisory Council. So he can’t be bothered to actually run the Space Corps anymore. Have you got the satellite reprogrammed yet?”
★
The UNVRP satellite’s ion thrusters flared. Powered by molten salt batteries and an onboard solar array, it skimmed into a low equatorial orbit, which gave it a new view of the protoplanet.
Vesta was not spherical. Viewed from orbit, it looked like a giant human brain preserved in the cryogenic darkness of outer space. The resemblance was emphasized by the natural grooves that ran around its equator. These graben, carved by stresses from the primordial Rheasilvia impact, resembled the division between the brain’s left and right hemispheres, corresponding here to the protoplanet’s north and south hemispheres.
However, if this were a brain, it had been augmented.
The longest of the graben had been extended so that its ends met up, circling the equator. And in that canyon ran a maglev track. The engine that ran on it was not a train. It was a rail launcher, the second largest in the solar system after Earth’s mighty Baikonur Gun. Twice a week, it flung a load of liquid hydrogen into space, accelerating it towards Ceres, or Hygiea, or elsewhere in the solar system. (In fact, that was the vibration Elfrida had felt during the raid on the astrophysics lab; she had forgotten that a launch was scheduled for that night.)
The satellite glided over the hydrogen-rich regions around the equator. Pits pocked a wide belt north of the graben like data points on a scatter graph. Clouds of dust spread over the edges of these manmade craters. They teemed with hacking, jack-hammering bots. Elfrida remembered the D/S bots on 550363 Montego. I have to get back there ASAP, she thought guiltily.
Gliding further around Vesta’s circumference, the satellite passed over the hydrogen refinery operated by Virgin Resources, the owner of the mining bots, a subsidiary of Virgin Atomic. Waves of heat and gas radiated into space. Etched in dayglo orange and white, the refinery looked like an abacus in the middle of a complicated sum. Cylindrical tanks nuzzled up against each other. Mechanical arms loaded apatite-rich rubble into the furnace. Mountains of slag shadowed the facility and the group of habs where the refinery crew lived.
“That refinery’s older than I am,” Mendoza said.
“I’m sure it’s safe.”
“Unless the toilet rolls take it into their heads to pay a visit. They were detected near here a few years back, you know.”
“Yeah, I remember. Star Force headed them off, for a change.”
“They might even have been coming here.”
Elfrida did not want to talk about the PLAN. “What’s your point?”
“Just that Virgin Atomic can’t be making much of a profit. It’s less efficient to refine hydrogen from mineral ores than to suck it out of the atmosphere on Titan. Back when they started up here, people still thought there might be life on Titan. VA’s management must’ve gambled that full-scale atmospheric mining would never happen. But now …” Mendoza shrugged.
“VA’s still got the advantage of a location closer to the inner system. And the rail launcher must have paid for itself by now.”
“I know. I’m not saying they’ve got no competitive advantages. Just that their margins have to be hurting. And when the supermajors finally scale up their technology for scooping H2 out of the atmospheres of Neptune and Uranus …” Mendoza’s teeth gleamed in the light from his screen. “Look out.”
“Why, Mendoza, you almost sound like you’re gloating.”
“Virgin Atomic sponsors U-Vesta. We’ve got them to thank for this place.”
“Point,” Elfrida acknowledged.
Rain stippled the window film. A soycloud hung low overhead, drenching the university campus in shadow and water.
The soyclouds irrigated themselves by lowering tubes into Olbers Lake. They then shifted position so that the runoff dripped out of their spongy undersides onto the trees and grass below. Elfrida believed this ‘rain’ had to be contaminated with fertilizer chemicals, but the locals walked through it without a care. The system, anyway, was ingenious. And as Mendoza said, it would not exist if not for Virgin Atomic, which had provided the seed money for the Bellicia ecohood, and continued to kick in big donations. The problem with the system was more fundamental, philosophical even. Who came all the way to the asteroid belt to get rained on?
The spaceborn, Elfrida supposed. People had very different ideas of utopia. Hers was … less wet.
She swivelled her ergoform back to face Mendoza’s screen. The refinery glided towards the edge of the satellite’s optical sensor field. “I thought the thieves might have taken the workstation out to the mines, to hide it,” she said. “Except it looks like they didn’t, huh?”
The premise of their search was simple. They assumed that if the workstation wasn’t busted up beyond repair, it would be in communication with something, somewhere. To get the data out of it, the thieves would have to turn it on. Lacking the rat’s nest of secure cabling in the STEM building, they’d have to interface with it wirelessly. The comms satellite would be able to pick up those signals.
So far, however, not a bleep. All the satellite had detected was normal radio traffic between the mining facilities.
“It doesn’t really make sense that they’d have taken it out to the mines, anyway,” Mendoza said. “I can see the STEM guys having connections out there, but not the Humanities gang. Don’t they basically oppose everything Virgin Atomic stands for?”
“You mean, like funding for their programs?”
“Ba-da-boom. Yeah. But still.”
“Yeah. Actually, I know Dr. James has connections in the VA R&D division, what’s it called? The de Grey Institute. He went out there last week to talk to someone, I think about the Big Dig.”
The Big Dig was Virgin Atomic’s bid for immortality. As its name suggested, it was a hole bored down into the crust of Vesta, eventually to reach the protoplanet’s center. What exactly it would be good for, Elfrida wasn’t sure. Most people dismissed it as a PR stunt. If it was one, however, it had fallen flat. Interest had died down during the project’s slow progress, and Elfrida rarely heard anyone at the university mention it. On the other hand, Dr. James served in some kind of advisory capacity to VA’s R&D team, so he at least must believe the project had some scientific value.
“Maybe they dropped the workstation into the Big Dig,” Mendoza said.
“And maybe they’ll drop us down after it if we get too close to … the … scandalous… truth. Sinister music!” Elfrida wiggled her arms as if conducting an invisible orchestra.
“You are feeling better, aren’t you?”
“No,” Elfrida said, instantly self-conscious. “I just had one too many shots in my coffee this morning.”
“You should keep doing that.”
The satellite glided onwards, following the maglev track into darkness. On the far side of Vesta from the Bellicia ecohood, the Rheasilvia Crater dominated the southern hemisphere. Lights winked in the bottom of the basin, near Rheasilvia Mons, the highest known peak in the solar system.
“Wanna go look at the Big Dig?” Mendoza said, pointing at the lights.
The Big Dig was in the bottom of the Rheasilvia Crater. The location put it that much closer to the middle of Vesta. The digging operation also harvested heavy metals exposed by the long-ago impact. For all Elfrida knew, that might be the actual purpose of the project, the ‘journey to the center of the world’ business so much PR fluff.
“Sure, why not?”
Data flowed across Mendoza’s second screen. Elfrida watched it while Mendoza issued new instructions to the satellite, subvocalizing and air-typing at the same time. Mendoza had the standard data-jock’s augments: a BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) and EEG crystals fo
r wireless transmissions. Elfrida had neither. She’d just never gotten around to it. But she did have a natural ability to spot patterns. Search was one of her strengths. She let her mind slip into a half-focused, half-dreaming state of awareness, scanning for any clue in those clumps of red and green figures, anything at all …
“Here we go,” Mendoza said.
The rail launcher slid into view, like a skeleton leaf fallen on the maglev track. It presently had no hydrogen tanks aboard, and was cruising around the equator at a modest pace of about 500 kph. The stem of the leaf was an articulated string of carriages, like a real train. They looked tiny from the satellite’s altitude, but they weren’t. Elfrida had heard they had spin gravity in there, for the Very Important Scientists at the de Grey Institute to enjoy.
The density of the data traffic increased. The train was communicating with the Virgin Atomic hardware in orbit, which retrieved empty tanks on their return journey and parachuted them back to the surface.
The UNVRP satellite veered away from the maglev track, puttering south over the Rheasilvia Crater. Below, all was dark. The bright, irregular line of the crater’s rim stood out against the stars.
“Someone’s bouncing radar off of us,” Mendoza said.
The data flow speeded up.
“XX communications satellite located at the stated coordinates. Supply identification and orbit plan immediately. Repeat, supply your identification and orbit plan immediately.”
“I’m telling them who we are,” Mendoza said. Half a second later he exclaimed, “They’re targeting us!”
“Go back,” Elfrida said. “Go back to where we were! I saw something!”
Data choked the screen, the satellite reporting a cascade of incoming radar pings.
“Holy shit,” Mendoza yelped.
“XX UNVRP communications satellite. Return to your designated orbit. This is a restricted area. Return to your designated orbit. You have ten seconds to comply. If you do not comply, area-exclusion measures will be implemented. Repeat …”
“OK! OK!” Mendoza yelled. “We’re leaving!”
The satellite maxed out its thrust capacity and engaged its reaction wheels. It was impossible for a body in orbit to turn tail, but the satellite very nearly managed an acute angle.
“Don’t shoot! I’m thrusting as hard as I can!”
The satellite hustled across the top of the Rheasilvia crater, while simultaneously gaining altitude, and waltzed back into the feeble brilliance of Vesta’s day.
Elfrida regarded Mendoza, who was slumping in his ergoform, his forehead glistening with sweat. “Y’know, that sounded kind of salacious,” she said.
“What? Oh.” Mendoza eked out a smile. “That was freaking scary.”
“Who was it?”
“Let’s find out.” Mendoza scrolled back. “It was Virgin Atomic’s orbital gun platform.”
“They have an orbital gun platform?”
“You didn’t know that? Sure. They’re not gonna leave a surface mining operation completely undefended, waiting for the PLAN to come and take a chunk out of it.”
“Yeah, but …” Elfrida shook her head. “Were they really going to shoot us down?”
“I don’t know.” Their eyes met. “Maybe. It sounded like it was automated.”
“That’s dangerous!”
“You’re telling me. Well, maybe there’s a guy on the surface, monitoring it when he’s not busy vidding porn flicks. Anyway, we got away fast enough to satisfy its exclusion parameters, thank God.”
“If we went back, how close do you think we could get before it glommed onto us again?”
“It first pinged us when we were here,” Mendoza pinpointed a spot near the edge of the Rheasilvia crater, “maneuvering 400 kilometers up. That’s a lot lower than our designated orbit. That’s probably what set it off. But regardless, I’m not taking the sat anywhere near there again. No way, no how.”
“Oh, Mendoza! Come on!”
“There’s obviously something in the Rheasilvia Crater they don’t want us to see. Maybe it’s something to do with the Big Dig. Maybe it’s something to do with the missing workstation. Maybe this is just what private-sector information security looks like these days. Either way, if we get the satellite shot down, regardless of whether we had authorization for the search, our jobs are toast. Do you know how much those babies cost?”
“I got a whole space station shot down once,” Elfrida said. “And I’m still here.”
After a pause, Mendoza said, “Yeah, but that wasn’t your fault. I heard about the astrodata leak. But it wasn’t you. It was your phavatar.”
“And I should have figured out what the phavatar was up to.” Elfrida shook her head. “Never mind. What I wanted to say was, couldn’t we just go back and look at the maglev again?”
“The rail launcher?”
“Or the actual train bit.”
“Why?”
“I saw something in the traffic from its comms.” She had found it again while they were talking. “Here. Look. This signal.”
“What about it? It’s encrypted to hell and back, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
It means they learned their lesson from last time, Elfrida thought.
“Not the signal itself. The destination. They had their antenna pointed towards Gap 2.5.”
★
The Kirkwood Gaps were regions in the asteroid belt which had been swept clear of asteroids by Jupiter’s gravitational influence. Viewed in a 2D starchart, they looked like narrow stripes on a spinning top. There were five pronounced Gaps, with radii of between 2.06 and 3.27 AUs. Vesta’s orbit would bite into Gap 2.5 at aphelion, when it swung furthest from the sun.
Eighteen months ago, during the 11073 Galapagos mess, Elfrida’s stross-class phavatar had sent a stream of unauthorized reports to someone lurking on an isolated rock in Gap 2.5. The name of that rock was 99984 Ravilious.
Elfrida had learned these facts with military trace and decryption tools, which she shouldn’t have been using. The results of her search had been passed on to Star Force. She had assumed that whoever or whatever was on 99984 Ravilious, Star Force had taken care of them. There hadn’t been anything about it on the news. But then again, there wouldn’t have been.
But what if, for some reason, 99984 Ravilious had slipped through Star Force’s fingers?
Political considerations could screw up the simplest things. Star Force answered to the Select Security Council, and the SSC could be influenced by the President’s Advisory Council. Which was now adorned by the presence of Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, the director of the Space Corps, and the man with the most to lose if the truth about the 11073 Galapagos incident ever came out.
“Sounds to me,” Mendoza said, “like you’re getting pretty far ahead of the evidence.”
“You’re right,” Elfrida said humbly. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”
They were standing outside the STEM building, in the rain. Elfrida had insisted on leaving their office to talk in the open, on the off chance that—as Mendoza frequently joked—their office was bugged. Of course, if their office was bugged, the whole habitat was probably bugged. But the splashing of the rain, and the gurgle of water flowing down the gutters, would help to foil any hidden microphones.
“You already have jumped to conclusions,” Mendoza said. “I’m not saying you’re wrong. But what evidence do we actually have? One signal from the VA maglev to a location that may be in Gap 2.5, or may be on the far side of it, where this mysterious asteroid of yours may or may not be now.”
“I agree it’s not much to go on. But I remember that 99984 Ravilious was near Vesta. That was eighteen months ago, but it was near enough that it should have a similar orbital period. So I bet you it’s still within signalling range. I mean, it’s not gonna be on the other side of the sun. And there’s one more thing.”
“What?”
“That was a direct signal.”
“True.”
“15.5 GHz.”
“Right. So I’m wondering why they chose to send this one signal at a different frequency, aimed at a totally different region of the sky, nowhere near any of the VA comms satellites. And I remembered 99984 Ravilious. And it just seems like too much of a coincidence.”
Rain dripped down Elfrida’s face. The soycloud parked overhead blocked the sunlight from the roof. They stood in a dark, watery microclimate. The fungi that grew at the bottoms of the walls of the STEM building were opening like primroses. What if the mysterious entity on 99984 Ravilious had somehow escaped (been protected) and was still out there? Up to its old tricks again. What data could it be receiving from Vesta?
She scowled up at the soycloud. Its underside was dark green, its rim pixellated with leaves. The water pattering onto her face definitely tasted like fertilizer.
“Wanna borrow my umbrella?” said Mendoza, who was standing under a large red one printed with the legend BREATHING IS FOR WIMPS.
“I’m all right. I mean, I’m wet already. I’ll have to go home and change. But Mendoza, don’t you think it’s worth investigating?”
“If you’re right, the people on the other end of that transmission have already caused kilodeath. And got away with it.”
“I know! That’s why! OK, it’s probably not them, but we need to find out. What if the data they’re transmitting is related to whatever Dr. James is hiding? What if he’s working for 99984 Ravilious? What if 4 Vesta is being targeted?”
Something struck her on the head. She screamed and clapped her hands to her scalp. A small shape landed on the path. It was a frog. It sat stunned for a moment, and then hopped off into the grass.
“Wow,” Mendoza said. “Isn’t that in the Bible? A rain of frogs. A plague of frogs. I’ve never seen that before.”
“Listen, Mendoza. You do what you like, but I’m going to follow this up as far as I can. And if you breathe a word, I will personally make you regret it. I may not be connected, but I have got resources on Earth.”