Vertigo clawed at Elfrida, telling her she was going to fall off the road. She could hear herself breathing heavily. She had taken one of the rebreather kits that were issued to everyone in the ecohood in case of emergency. It came in handy up here, where the air was Himalayan.
“Goto!” Mendoza shouted thinly. He stood at the entrance to the airlock, waving.
She labored up to him. The rover blinked its headlights.
“This looks pretty good,” she said, when she could speak. The rover sat on three fat wheels, like a cross between a tricycle and a humvee. It had an antenna dish on the roof and several appendages drooping from the chassis like a shrimp’s feelers. “I’m still amazed they let us borrow it.”
“Yeah,” Mendoza said, removing the mask of his rebreather to speak, and immediately putting it back over his mouth and nose, as Elfrida had done. “But there’s a catch.”
“University politics,” Elfrida said understandingly.
The rover actually belonged to the geology lab, not the astrophysics lab. In the past, Dr. James had told them, the geology folks had refused to let anyone else use it. But in the wake of the raid on the astrophysics lab, STEM solidarity had prevailed. The geology lab had acceded to Dr. James’s plea that UNVRP be allowed to borrow the rover to search for the missing workstation.
However, as Mendoza said, there was always a catch.
“Do they want us to pick up some rock samples along the way, or something?”
“Not exactly.”
The rover unfolded a ladder from its rump. They climbed up, through a cramped airlock with both ends open, into the even-more-cramped interior.
“Hi,” said a skinny teenage girl with saucer-sized eyes.
“Oh,” Elfrida said. “I see.” The girl was clinging to the interior roll bars like a monkey, her short skirt hanging down, revealing panties with hearts on them. “Who are you?”
“Rurumi-chan dessuuu!” the girl said. “Hajimemashite!”
Elfrida stiffened. She was half-Japanese, her father a pureblood who’d been born in Japan before the Mt. Fuji eruption. She spoke the language pretty well. But it offended her that this—this bot—should assume she did, and try to establish some kind of special connection with her on that basis.
She spoke in a growl. “Whoever the fuck you are. That. Isn’t. Funny.”
Mendoza said, “Chill, Goto. It’s just a phavatar.”
“I can see that.”
The bot was a sub-geminoid phavatar. No one would mistake it for human. Its limbs were pencil-thin, its eyes took up half its face, its nose was a nub, and its mane of blue hair billowed like a living thing, tangling around Mendoza’s fingers as he familiarized himself with the rover’s controls. “Can you, like, put your hair up, or something?” he said to it.
“Sure!” Rurumi blinked appealingly at Elfrida. “Would you help me? I love your pigtails! They’re so kawaii!”
Elfrida shouted into its face, “Hello, hello! Anyone home?”
“Bollocks,” Rurumi said, in the same piping voice, but with a completely different intonation. “Yeah, hey there. Don’t blow a gasket. Gregor Lovatsky, assistant professor, xenogeology. This is Rurumi and she’ll be your escort on this adventure. Notice I didn’t say chaperone. She’s just along for the ride.”
Elfrida said to Mendoza, “That probably means she’s authorized to take control of the rover if we get into trouble.”
“How did you guess?” said Gregor Lovatsky, in Rurumi’s shrill voice. “Yeah well, it is our rover. And we want to help out, but, y’know, you have got a reputation for recklessness, Ms. Goto.”
“This isn’t a reckless adventure,” Elfrida said, still able to convince herself of that. Pretty much. “We’re just going to look for the missing workstation. If we run into trouble, we’ll turn around and come home.”
Mendoza bent his head to the controls.
“That’s great,” Lovatsky said. “But the phavatar’s still going with you.”
Ahead of the rover’s slit-like windshield, the Bremen Lock wheezed open, its lips retracting into the road and the roof. The rover bumped into the airlock’s chamber. Its engine was noiseless, battery-powered, but the cabin’s air circulation made a loud whooshing noise when it started up. Elfrida took her rebreather off.
“Couldn’t you have sent a different phavatar?” she said. “It’s like, you’re making fun of us here. Haven’t you got anything that would be more suitable for surface exploration?”
“Rurumi’s perfectly capable,” Lovatsky sniffed. Then he admitted, “Anyway, we don’t have another phavatar. Rurumi doesn’t even belong to the lab. She’s my personal property.”
“Gotcha.”
“Funding constraints.”
“I hear you.”
“Wheeee!” cried Rurumi, as the rover emerged onto the surface of Vesta.
★
Lights sparkled in the foothills of Bellicia Crater, limning the small spaceport that served Bellicia and the nearby Arruntia Crater. Elfrida had heard that Virgin Atomic was going to turn Arruntia Crater into another ecohood, but the project had never gotten off the ground.
Rurumi made herself useful by communicating with the spaceport’s hub and satisfying it that they were just geologists on a sampling expedition. Mendoza turned the rover towards the equator.
Tracks in the dust gave the impression of a road to follow, although Mendoza was navigating by satellite. The terrain of Vesta’s northern hemisphere was hilly. In many places, where the top layer of dust had been disturbed, the regolith looked as slick as glass. It was glass—volcanic glass. Unlike other asteroids, Vesta had been resurfaced in the comparatively recent past—only about four billion years ago—by flows of basaltic magma. Since then, rotational rock slumping and impact-triggered seismic activity had caused many landslides, creating stair-step slopes that the rover had to bounce down, using its appendages as ski poles.
Elfrida was feeling car-sick by the time they stopped for the night. Day had dawned twice since they set out and now it was noon. The sun floated like a split pea in the blackness, winking occasionally when a satellite passed across it. Everything up there would have seen the rover by now. That was OK. They had a cover story: the sampling expedition.
What they didn’t have was a tent. They’d brought EVA suits, but had opted to do without the inflatable shelter that the geologists used on longer expeditions. Mendoza curled up in the driver’s seat. Elfrida decided to sleep outside. She struggled into one of the geology lab’s EVA suits. Its mesh of shape-memory alloy snuggled around her body, providing an automatic customized fit. But in order to fit a range of body sizes, the suit had a pliable outer layer, not a rigid shell, and rocks poked into her back all night long. The rim of the helmet also dug into the back of her neck. Micro-gravity was no panacea against physical discomfort. Lying awake, she stared up at the stars. The suit’s GPS told her she happened to be looking in the direction of Gap 2.5.
Who—or what—was out there on 99984 Ravilious? Were they laughing, right now, at the feeble antics of Elfrida, and the Space Corps, and UNVRP, and Star Force, and everyone else who could have brought them to justice, but had failed to do so, through self-interest or the fear of bad publicity, or just because they thought someone else would take care of it?
(That would be me, she recognized miserably.)
Or were they not the sort of people who laughed at anything?
Were they, perhaps, not people at all?
Elfrida thought about Mars. Nowadays, a weird geometrical jungle of stone and iron defaced the planet’s surface, photographed in bits and pieces over the decades by unmanned sats before they, inevitably, got fragged. Everyone in the system knew those pictures. What did the PLAN think–if AI could actually be said to think–as it unblinkingly watched Earth from those sky-piercing ziggurats, bathed in a blizzard of radiation?
Elfrida shuddered. She curled on her side and tried to get comfortable. After a while, she crawled under the rover and tried to sle
ep there.
“I am not doing this again,” she said to Mendoza when enough time had passed that she could legitimately give up.
He looked wan. “Me neither. This seat is really uncomfortable.”
“The ground isn’t any better. Let’s get moving.”
Rurumi had spent most of their rest break running around on the surface, doing geology stuff. As the rover bounced into motion, she took her favorite position—hanging upside-down by her knees from the roll bars—and sang to herself in Japanese. Elfrida shot her a look. If looks were made of ionized plasma, the phavatar would have been slagged.
Mendoza plucked Elfrida’s sleeve, pulling her head towards his. “She came onto me,” he whispered.
“What?”
“I’m not kidding. Right after you went outside. She started rubbing up against me and uh, you know.”
“Did you …?”
“What do you take me for? I told her to get fragged, in no uncertain terms. Then I texted Lovatsky to keep his hands to himself. He said it was her, not him. I told him, if she tries for sex with every male she meets, you’re not gonna have her for long.”
“Damn straight. Ew, Mendoza.”
“I know.”
“Well, we won’t have to bunk with her tonight, thank God.”
“I just hope these miners are as friendly as they’re supposed to be.”
Dr. James had gotten his lawyer to call ahead and alert Virgin Resources, the mining subsidiary of Virgin Atomic, to their arrival. Elfrida had been unsure about this, since she and Mendoza suspected that VA were complicit in the theft of the workstation. They’d be asking the miners for help in solving a crime they might have committed themselves. But Dr. James had pointed out that they wouldn’t get far on the surface without VA’s help. He had a point.
And as the rover sailed downhill towards the hydrogen refinery, Elfrida felt glad they’d taken Dr. James’s advice. The cluster of habs, which had looked so shabby from outer space, projected a welcoming radius of light. A proper bed, a massage, a shower, and something to eat that didn’t come out of a pouch, all sounded good to her right now.
They passed the refinery. Titanic handler bots flailed long arms against the stars. Rubble-haulers, arriving overland from the open pit mines, queued for unloading. With weirdly graceful movements, the handler bots tossed the nets of rubble into the feed chute of a giant autoclave. Tanks of liquefied hydrogen lined the siding where the launch cradle would park when it arrived. Each tank was the size of a three-storey building.
Mendoza got on the radio.
“C’mon in!” a male voice answered. “Yo, is Rurumi there?”
“Sure am!” chirped the phavatar.
Elfrida and Mendoza exchanged a puzzled look.
“Can’t wait to smooch ya, girl! ‘Bout time you brought some friends to see us!”
The voice directed them to the electricity pumping station behind the habs, where they left the rover recharging its batteries. Wearing their borrowed EVA suits, they picked their way through a litter of rubble, scraps of microcable nets, and machine parts. Rurumi danced ahead of them, suitless.
A bulky figure standing in the door of the biggest hab, similarly suitless, folded the phavatar into a hug.
The figure waved to the two humans, and the same friendly voice as before crackled in their ears. “Yo there! Let’s paaartay!”
“Oh brother,” Mendoza said.
“I,” Elfrida said, “am going to kill Dr. James.”
The refinery was crewed by phavatars.
★
Susceptible, unlike phavatars, to weariness, the deleterious effects of micro-gravity, and sheer gloom, the two humans sat in a corner of the hab’s central room, watching the bots do the Ganymede Fling to a soundtrack of what sounded like beluga whales mating with a bevy of thrash-metal guitarists. Rurumi twirled and somersaulted from one set of arms to the next. Few of the phavatars were as exquisite as she. Sub-geminoids with various custom tools fitted, they looked more like cyborgs than standard humans. However, they all disported themselves zealously. It was clear that their operators, wherever they were—Elfrida hadn’t been able to get a straight answer to that question—were steadily getting drunk to the point of incapacity.
“Probably doing drugs, too,” Mendoza said. “Look at that guy.” The phavatar in question was trying to burrow into the wall of the hab with his head.
“It’s a thing,” Elfrida said. “Party hearty from the comfort of your sofa. Let your phavatar have all the fun, while you get the hangover. I don’t understand it, personally.”
“I wonder where the operators are.”
“In orbit?”
“Maybe back in the Bellicia ecohood. Virgin Atomic’s regional HQ is there in the middle of town.”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Anyway, they must be close. Zero latency.”
Had the operators been running their phavatars from any great distance, they’d have been crashing into each other left and right. Well, more than they were already. More tellingly, they interacted with the humans without any perceptible delay.
“C’mon, have a drink!” insisted the large male-styled phavatar who had greeted them. It looked like the vid star Marmaduke Shagg. “We mixed this fruit punch specially for you! Real ingredients!”
Elfrida accepted a pouch out of politeness, and to make Marmaduke go away. But then she asked on a whim, “Have you had any other human visitors recently?”
“Yo! None! That’s why this is such a special occasion for us!”
“I was just wondering why you had real vodka and fruit juice on hand.”
“Rurumi comes up here sometimes by herself. And when we’re thusly honored by her presence, we like to give her a little pressie to take home with her! Courtesy of VA, dig?” Marmaduke Shagg winked, and wove back into the throng.
“Lovatsky, you dog,” Mendoza said. “A luxury goods procurement scam. I guess holistically fermented mead with algae foam doesn’t always do the trick, huh?”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Elfrida said. “I think maybe someone else was here recently, and brought their own merrymaking supplies.” She tasted the contents of the pouch, and then closed it. “I don’t care for thieves’ leftovers.”
“You think the workstation might really be here?”
“No.” She floated to her feet. “Shall we go outside?”
They explained that they were going to retrieve their stuff from the rover, and crawled back into their EVA suits.
The silence of Elfrida’s helmet was a relief after the deafening music. She said, “The thing is, realistically, the workstation could be anywhere by now. There’s plenty of foot traffic between the ecohood and the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport, and we don’t have data on who’s been going in and out. Only Facilities Management has that. The thieves could have put the workstation in a box, walked it down to the spaceport, and put it on a ship to anywhere in the solar system.”
“You would hope the peacekeepers are investigating that angle,” Mendoza said.
Elfrida sniffed. “Also, it might be at the bottom of Olbers Lake.”
“Or in the recycling.”
“Yeah. If it was so badly smashed up they couldn’t get the data off it. But from what I saw, it wasn’t totaled, just damaged. So we have to assume they took it somewhere to repair it. And I personally wouldn’t trust these phavatars with my electronics.”
Mendoza’s faceplate tilted towards the refinery. If Vesta had had an atmosphere, the crash and slam of tonnes of rock being thrown around would have been deafening. As it was, the handler bots made a balletic, if violent, spectacle.
“I want to go look at Rheasilvia Crater,” Mendoza said.
“I want to go look at the train.”
They walked back to the rover and retrieved a couple of meals in pouches. The prospect of getting anything real to eat out of the refinery crew had dwindled to a remote unlikelihood.
When they went back into the hab
, the phavatars were having sex.
Metal and plastic bodies intertwined. Clothes drifted like autumn leaves across the floor. Chrome hips pumped, and stretchy rubber mouths gobbled at appendages that …
Elfrida looked away, but not before she had spotted Rurumi at the center of the orgy, her tiny, fragile body being penetrated by Marmaduke Shagg and two other phavatars, while she, in turn—
“Uh, can we get out of here?” Elfrida said.
Mendoza was staring, open-mouthed. She elbowed him.
“Mendoza. C’mon. This is gross.”
“Rurumi’s got a dick.”
“I saw. Let’s vamoose.”
“That one’s got tentacles.”
“I know. Please, let’s go.”
“Yeah, sure, OK.”
They hadn’t taken their EVA suits off, so there was no need to put them back on. As they retreated to the airlock, Marmaduke unplugged himself from the fray and bounded at them. “Guys! You’re not going?”
“This isn’t our kind of thing,” Mendoza said.
“Oh, don’t be a party pooper,” Marmaduke cooed, stroking Mendoza’s arm through his suit. “Look, FWIW, I’m a woman. My name’s Sharlene. I’m watching you from the Vesta Express, and boy, you’re so hot. You’re totally turning me on. I’m as hard as hell. Look!” Marmaduke/Sharlene attempted to guide Mendoza’s glove downwards.
Mendoza yanked his arm back. “I don’t do men, I don’t do women pretending to be men, I don’t do phavatars, I don’t do orgies, and let me see, what else? I don’t do tentacle sex. I think that just about covers it.”
“Where are you going?”
“Gonna sleep in the car.”
“But we pressurized this hab just for you!” Marmaduke cried, sweeping an arm around the low-ceilinged, ribby-walled room. The hab would have been about as appealing as a cardboard box under a bridge, even if it had not currently been echoing to the sound of pornographic groans. “It took ages to get all the dust out!”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 8