“Whoa! Hold on a minute! I never said I was against it. Are you kidding? I’m going to investigate this thing, and you can come along for the ride, or not, as you like.”
Elfrida started to smile in relief, but Mendoza, uncharacteristically, wasn’t smiling. His face wore a peaky, fixed expression. She realized that she didn’t know anything about him, only that he worked all the hours God sent, and enjoyed—an unlikely hobby—classical music.
“I’ve never mentioned this,” he said, “but my sister got whacked by the PLAN. She worked for a trading company. They were docked at a legit settlement on the asteroid 470108 Gironda, delivering a cargo of consumables, when the PLAN hit the rock. Everyone killed.”
“Oh my God. I remember that.”
“The settlers were Spanish nationalists. Catalan, or some thing. They were asking for it. But my sister was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I totally sympathize with anyone that’s had that experience. And I have no sympathy at all for anyone that’s enabled the PLAN, or might be cooperating with them.”
“Well, I don’t think there was ever any suggestion of that,” Elfrida said nervously. “It was more that the people on 99984 Ravilious, whoever they are, screwed up.”
“That’s just as bad. They need to pay.”
Elfrida hesitated. She had never known Mendoza had this kind of vengefulness in him. The rain started to ease off. She heard a chirruping sound and realized it was frogs, lots of them.
“I think the workstation might actually be on the train,” she said. “The passenger compartment’s rad-shielded, so we wouldn’t have detected any wireless signals within the shielding.”
“Or it might be in Rheasilvia Crater.”
“But either way, if we can’t take the satellite back there without it getting slagged…”
“Then,” Mendoza said, “I guess we’re gonna find out how that orbital gun platform feels about people trekking in on foot.”
“Well, that’s one idea,” Elfrida said, thinking, Oh my God, Mendoza, you mean it, don’t you? And he looked so harmless under his joke umbrella. “But I have another idea that might be, uh, less death-defying.”
“What?”
“We’re not the only ones who would like to get that workstation back. So why are we doing this alone?”
x.
Dr. James had been incarcerated, pending his bail hearing, at the koban downtown. Constructed, or rather grown, on the same organic substrate as the permanent buildings of the university, the koban had not been tended with the same fanatical care. It looked like an overgrown mop-head abandoned on a corner between taller, neater buildings. Tendrils of its green curtain crawled across the sidewalks. Higher up, the greenery twitched.
“We’re here to see Dr. James. We’re from UNVRP,” Elfrida explained.
“Yeah, I know.” The UNESCO peacekeeper on duty stared at her and Mendoza. His stare telegraphed the uniquely implacable hostility that throve between UN agencies. “What do you want?”
“Well, we work with him,” Elfrida said, wishing Mendoza would help her out.
“And?”
“And we want to talk to him.”
“He’s been charged with aggravated assault.”
“I know, but—”
A cloud of peacock-green and lemon-yellow twirled in from the street. It was Cydney.
“Ellie!”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’ve just come to visit Dr. James.” Cydney beamed at the peacekeeper on duty. “What about you?”
“We were hoping to do the same thing,” Elfrida said.
Two minutes later they were being ushered up to Dr. James’s cell. As they scrambled / bounced up the zipshaft, someone else came zooming down. She was a large person, so large in fact that she bulged out of her lane and nearly knocked Elfrida off her wimp handle. Without apologizing, she landed bent-kneed at the bottom of the shaft and scuttled away.
Elfrida frowned after her. “Hey …”
“That was incredibly rude!” Cydney shouted after the woman.
“No, it’s not that. I know her, but I can’t place her.”
“Maybe you’ve seen her around the STEM building. She’d be hard to miss.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“In here,” said the peacekeeper, while he operated an iris scanner and a DNA reader embedded in the wall. “I’ll have to lock you in with the suspect, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, don’t lock me in,” Cydney said. “I’m not staying. I just came to drop off this care package. Ta-daah!” She brandished a bunch of carnations in the face of the palely hovering Dr. James. “These are from your friends in the dean’s office. And these are from Dean Garcia herself. Home-baked! I must dash. I’ve got a seminar, but it’s great to see that you’re holding up so well! That’ll be a load off people’s minds.”
She breezed off. The door closed behind Elfrida and Mendoza.
“Flowers,” Dr. James said morosely. “The last thing anyone needs in this place.”
Elfrida made sympathetic noises. Now she was face to face with Dr. James, her suspicions seemed excessively paranoid. He probably wasn’t working for the mysterious entity on 99984 Ravilious. But that didn’t mean he was innocent.
“They mean well, I suppose,” he continued. “I was surprised to see your friend. She’s in PHCTBS Studies, isn’t she?”
“She’s got a good heart,” Elfrida said.
The cell was about two meters square. Roots poked through the inside of its slimy walls, rotting for want of care. There was a fetid organic smell. Water pooled in a corner of the floor, which was not level. Dr. James squatted on his prostheses. “I’d offer you a seat,” he said, “but there isn’t one.” He opened the box of cookies Cydney had brought. “White chocolate chip and macadamia nut. Home-baked, she said.”
Mendoza, speaking for the first time, said, “I’d steer clear of those.”
“You may be right,” Dr. James said. “I wasn’t aware I had any friends in the dean’s office. It’s astrophysics that justifies the existence of this university, but the administration is caught in a trap of moral equivalence that compels them to stiff us in favor of disciplines that don’t deserve the name. I’ll be very surprised if anyone testifies in my defense. Thank God for Virgin Atomic: they’ve lent me a lawyer. He’s supposed to be good. He’s en route from Ganymede as we speak.”
Elfrida held up the bag she was carrying. “Well, it isn’t home-baked, but we brought coffee. The barista at the Virgin Café said you usually get a triple full-fat macchiato. I don’t know if you’re interested, but …”
“Give me that,” Dr. James said.
Some moments of devoted slurping later, Elfrida said, “Uh, we actually came to ask a favor.”
“I knew it.”
“I might be wrong, but doesn’t the astrophysics lab have a surface rover?”
★
Cydney Blaisze zoomed up the zipshaft of the Tariq L. Clinton administration building, basking in the pleasure of a good deed done. Poor Dr. James! He might be misguided, he might even be a criminal, but he didn’t deserve to be locked up like an—actually, you wouldn’t even treat an animal like that. Like a virus, a dangerous virus that needed to be quarantined.
She was well aware that was how her friends in PHCTBS Studies saw him.
But Cydney, while sympathizing with their grievances against the STEM department, did not think they really understood the conflict they were involved in.
She didn’t, either.
But now, at last, she was getting close. She knew it.
And she had methods that were far superior to theirs. Masks and pellet guns in the dead of night? Honestly.
She bounced into the dean’s office and displayed her empty hands to the dean’s secretary. “Mission accomplished! He was so touched. He said he’s incredibly grateful for the support of the faculty.”
“Like him or loathe him, Eliezer James is one of ours,” said Dean Garcia, coming out of he
r office. She was a thin, silver-bunned woman, clad in a greyish-green kaftan that she’d probably hand-woven from the excretions of gengineered caterpillars that lived in the walls of her yurt. Despite her lack of fashion sense, she managed the difficult trick of projecting authority while being spaceborn, her long and emaciated body crooked over at the shoulders like a predatory insect. “It’s extremely important at this time of crisis,” she pronounced, “to emphasize that the university community stands shoulder to shoulder against the arbitrary excesses of law enforcement.”
“Ma’am, you should see the cell they’ve got him in,” Cydney said. “It’s tragic.”
The secretary said, “Ma’am, I just wanted to remind you that you’ve got a lunch appointment with the UNESCO prosecutor. Would you like me to postpone, or …”
“Is that the time? Ye gods! Call down to the telepresence center and have them set up a private cubicle straight away.” Garcia grimaced at Cydney. “I shun UNESCO on principle, but this is my one opportunity to argue for a condign, not punitive, settlement. It would only exacerbate tensions if Dr. James were seen to be a victim of prosecutorial bias.”
Translation, Cydney thought, you’ve remembered that Dr. James is the biggest star on your faculty. “Absolutely, ma’am,” she said. “I totally agree. Fairness must be our watchword.”
Cydney had wormed her way into the dean’s good graces by presenting herself as a spokeswoman for the Humanities students in the wake of David Reid’s shooting. But this was only the latest, opportunistic twist in a campaign that had started with her arrival on Vesta, when she’d presented her credentials to Dean Garcia and hinted that her enrollment at U-Vesta might lead to favorable media coverage.
Not that she’d delivered on that promise. Her feed had been sliding down the rankings. People just weren’t interested in the goings-on at a podunk university in the asteroid belt.
But that, Cydney believed, was about to change.
Garcia used the surface of a Greenpeace Good Governance award as a mirror to apply lipstick. “I don’t know why I’m bothering with this,” she said. “It’s a telepresence session, after all. Speaking of which—” she turned to her secretary. “If this lasts the scheduled three hours, I’m going to get hungry. Order me a sandwich. Something I can gnaw on during the latency periods, while my phavatar in Geneva stuffs its plastic gullet with filet mignon and asperges aux sauce polonaise. Don’t you think that remotely experiencing a fine meal is torture?” she asked Cydney.
“It’s the absolute worst, ma’am.”
“Ma’am, shall I ring down to the cafeteria, or—”
“No! I can’t abide so-called sandwiches in pouches. Get me a ham and swiss on rye from Reuben’s.”
“Ma’am, they don’t take online orders.” This was a posture adopted by many of the earthier businesses in Bellicia.
“Then go get it, darling, go get it. That’s why evolution gave you legs.”
“I’ll go,” Cydney volunteered.
“Not necessary. Jordan needs the exercise.”
Cydney waited a few more minutes. As Dean Garcia prepared to sweep out the door, Cydney said, “I actually wanted to tell you a little more about my visit with Dr. James.” This was pure invention, as her visit with Dr. James had been all of twenty seconds long. “If you have a few minutes this SecondLight, or …?”
“Do I? Do I? I don’t know. Wait here and ask Jordan what my schedule looks like. I must go.”
Garcia sailed out.
Left alone in the office, Cydney grinned to herself. She’d been waiting months for a chance like this.
She now had to move fast. Jordan would be gone awhile, considering the usual length of the lines at Reuben’s, but someone else could come in at any minute.
Cydney wandered across the room, crossing behind Jordan’s desk. As she’d hoped, the resentful and wilfully incompetent secretary had left zis computer on, with zis administrative-level database access enabled. Cydney couldn’t touch the machine without the risk that hidden surveillance cameras would see her, but she didn’t need to touch it. Wifi was so insecure.
Using her BCI, she sent a single command to the calendar program running on the computer. If it were even noticed, it would look like a misvocalized entry. In fact, it was a zipped data scraper program. Within milliseconds, it unzipped itself and wriggled away into the bowels of the university’s databanks, pretending to be Jordan.
Cydney permitted herself a sigh of satisfaction. But not a large one. She wouldn’t know until she got the results of the scrape, and analyzed them, whether she actually had anything or not.
She yawned. For the benefit of any hidden cameras, she pretended to admire the vids on the wall of Dean Garcia meeting famous people.
This might be a wild goose chase.
But Cydney Blaisze had a nose for a story.
She always had had, even when she was plain Cydney Blaise-without-a-Z, the daughter of a machine politician in a crappy little sub-Saharan microstate.
And she knew the University of Vesta was hiding something big. Something downright illegal.
Something that could make a struggling news curator’s career.
★
Cydney received the scraper program’s first report just a few minutes later. She forwarded it to her data analysis team in Los Angeles.
“Hey,” Jordan said, toppling into the office. “I’ve got her sandwich. Where is she?”
“In the telepresence center, I guess.”
“Expletives,” Jordan said. Ze wiped sweat out of zir long black beard. Zis breasts heaved. Jordan was a hermaphrodite. Ze stared balefully at Cydney. “Why don’t you wear stabilizer braces? Your muscles will atrophy. You’ll end up in an exoskeleton when you get back to Earth.”
“Got your package, Cyds,” said a voice in her skull. “Unpacking it now.”
“That’s what surgery is for,” Cydney smiled, on her way out the door. “Those braces totally ruin the line of your clothes. I’d much rather spend a week or two in rehab when I get home.”
“Fine if you’ve got the money for it, I guess.”
“Exactly! Toodle-oo.”
“Aaaand analyzing. Get back to you in a few.”
The voice belonged to Aidan Wahlsdorf, Cydney’s top data miner. The back office of Cydney Blaisze Enterprises, Inc., was a grotty apartment in Los Angeles which her employees viewed as luxurious, no joke, because it had air conditioning. Some of them had moved their families in. She let them, and in return had earned their unwavering loyalty.
Behind every successful curator stood a small army of data miners. The internet in the 23rd century was a cesspit. The sheer volume of malware and spam infesting the solar system’s servers had overwhelmed consumer-facing search technology as much as a century ago. As a result, people stuck to curated feeds, private databanks, and niche aggregators for their information needs.
That high-profile 0.01% of content providers—among whom Cydney still, barely, counted herself—got 99% of the system’s traffic. But the other umpty-million petaflops of data were still out there, and those data weren’t valueless, or meaningless. They were where the news came from—the interesting news, anyway. They just had to be mined.
Compared to that quotidian slog, analyzing the data stolen by Cydney’s scraper program took Aidan and his team all of five minutes per packet. She skimmed the results as they came in, while she ate lunch, while she sat in her SecondLight seminar, while she hung out with the gang at the Virgin Café. And she grew increasingly disappointed. The records on the university’s servers provided no evidence of illegal activity in the Rheasilvia crater, much less of the university’s involvement.
The final slew of results came in as she was lying in the SecondDark gloom on her bed at home. This was the period corresponding to evening. Elfrida had joined her for a while, but was now in the other room, immersed in her everlasting Venus sim.
“This looks kinda interesting, Cyds. Not what you were looking for, but there’s a whiff
of malfeasance. Check the expenditures for the astrophysics lab.”
Hope igniting, Cydney opened the attached file.
“See that item, quote, consultant fees, unquote? Eight thousand smackeroos. Enough to buy a small car, or a trip to Jupiter. They’ve been paying out a sum like that every month for fourteen months, going back to March 2286. And better yet, this Dr. Eliezer James character has signed off on the payments personally.”
“Consultant fees,” Cydney snorted joyfully. “That’s the oldest scam in the book.”
“He’s either embezzling the university’s moolah, with the connivance of the whole lab. Or they’re being blackmailed.”
“Blackmail!” Cydney whooped, jumping off the bed. “Now we’re talking!”
“I said the university’s moolah,” continued Aidan’s imperturbable voice, transmitted fourteen minutes ago from Earth. “But there’s some doubt about that. If you look at the astrophysics lab’s budget, there are some shady incoming payments, too. Also passed off as consulting fees. So pulling it all together, it may be that we’re looking at a money laundering operation.”
“Money laundering!” Cydney shrieked in ecstasy. “This is it! Dr. James is dead meat!” She stopped, remembering that Elfrida was in the other room. Elfrida wouldn’t have heard her exclamations, immersed in her virtual farm, but … “Babe?”
“However, there’s another wrinkle: the incoming payments are bigger than the outgoing so-called consultant fees. But they’re highly irregular. They only started coming in six months back. The department is in the red …”
Cydney muted Aidan’s voice. “Babe?” It would kind of suck if Elfrida had heard her gloating over Dr. James’s impending downfall. “Babe, time to come back to reality!”
She bounced into the other room.
Elfrida was not there.
Her stabilizer braces lay in a neat pile on the couch.
She had taken her immersion kit with her.
xi.
Elfrida panted up the last stage of the ramp to the airlock, her immersion kit in its case under her arm. She had left her stabilizer braces at home, the better to attempt the climb to the airlock—fifteen kilometers, most of it at a killer gradient. The Bremen Lock was tucked up under the roof of the habitat. Kilometers below, soyclouds drifted like spinach pancakes in a rusty frying-pan. From up here, it was terrifyingly obvious that the little green paradise of the Bellicia ecohood lay at the bottom of a crater.
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 7