The Vesta Conspiracy

by Felix R. Savage

  “So is that data scraper program of yours.”

  “Not if I don’t do anything with it.” Why was she even arguing with him? She bounced across the office towards the door.

  “Ms. Blaisze, please, one moment! We’ll have to confirm that you haven’t in fact infiltrated our network.”

  The truth was that she’d given it a try during their conversation, but as she might have expected, VA had better security than the U-Vesta dean’s office. Her scraper program had bounced off their wireless signal encryption. “I’ve got a reputation to protect. I wouldn’t do anything illegal,” she said. “Unlike some people.” She reached the door.

  With a piercing hiss, a security phavatar thudded into the room and blocked her way. It was humanoid, in the sense that a mountain gorilla was humanoid. It kind of looked like a mountain gorilla. Seven feet tall. Wearing a red overall with the VA logo on its chest. And gripping a PEPgun in one hairy fist.

  Cydney stood her ground. “I’ve faced charging elephants,” she said to the security phavatar. “They were a lot scarier than you. I’m the daughter of a Xhosa chieftain. Those elephants? We ate their testicles.”

  Macdonald looked up from his screen. “Elephants don’t have solid-state non-lethal laser weapons,” he pointed out.

  Cydney swallowed.

  The PEPgun, beloved of law enforcement and peacekeeping personnel, was non-lethal, all right. It used a laser-generated plasma pulse to cause pain so intense that people swallowed their own tongues just to make it stop.

  The security phavatar stomped towards her, pneumatics hissing.

  “If you mess with me, you’ll be sorry! I’ve got a feed with seven million registered viewers!”

  “Only four million six hundred thousand and eighty-nine, now,” Macdonald said. “Your relocation to Vesta seems to have cost you a lot of fans. I don’t blame them. This place is boring. And we hope to keep it that way, despite the best efforts of your friends at the university.”

  “Well, that’ll change when I splash your corporate misdeeds all over the solar system!” Cydney said, still backing up. She managed a weak giggle, and then she flung herself out of the window.

  ★

  “They threatened me.” Cydney clutched handfuls of Big Bjorn’s fur. Her wet cheek rested on his lap. She was crying. “He c-c-called security. It was this big ugly phavatar with a PEPgun. It was going to s-s-shoot me!”

  “It’s OK,” Bjorn said, patting her back. “It’s OK.”

  “But I called their bluff. I mean, they didn’t have any right to detain me! So I tried to get past it. And it g-g-grabbed me and threw me out of the window!”

  That wasn’t quite what had happened. But Cydney didn’t want to admit that she’d jumped out the window in a panic.

  “You should sue them!” said Shoshanna.

  That made Cydney stop crying. “I don’t think so. I couldn’t bear to relive the experience.” She was pretty sure that Virgin Atomic wouldn’t go after her. After all, she hadn’t infiltrated their network. But if she sued, they’d make an issue out of her data scraper program. Everyone knew that curators used gray-zone tools to get the news. The trick was not getting caught. If you did get caught, it was game over.

  Besides, if VA released vid of her self-defenestration, she’d never be able to hold up her head again.

  She sat up, dabbing her dirty knees through the rips in her thermal tights. She’d landed in the vegetable garden. That had been the worst part of the whole experience: doing a swan dive into the carrots, hurting her knees, and then having to flee on foot while everyone stared at her.

  She’d come straight to Big Bjorn’s place, knowing she would find the gang here. Since the raid, they’d abandoned what they had called their ‘safe house,’ a.k.a. David Reid’s pad. Now they gathered at Bjorn’s place, halfway up a micro-gee-adapted hickory tree in the hills behind the Branson Habs.

  Bjorn’s treehouse, built by Bjorn himself, was one of the coziest places Cydney had ever been in. Rain plinked on the sheet metal roof, but did not find its way in. The walls were rustic mosaics of scrap, which you could get lost in for hours, especially if you were vaping dope. Bjorn believed in bricolage as an alternative to recycling. He had carried off ergoforms from here and there, disabled their smart functionality, and crafted the resulting blocks of polyfoam into sprawlchairs with hand-carpentered wooden frames. The only drawback of his home was that it was not heated. But Bjorn’s own fur was warm and thick enough that Cydney felt as if she were snuggling up with a blanket.

  She leaned against him, sniffling and wiping her eyes,. “I just wanted to find out if Virgin Atomic was involved with the James clique,” she said, referring to the astrophysics lab the way her friends did.

  “Of course they are!” said Shoshanna. A spiky woman with green hair, Shoshanna believed that being spaceborn made you both special and smart. In her own case, she was wrong on both counts, Cydney believed. But Shoshanna’s boundless self-confidence had enabled her to step into the role of leader when David Reid was hospitalized. “They’re neck-deep in it with Dr. James! Whatever it is.”

  “So I thought now they might be ready to distance themselves from him,” Cydney said. “I might have gotten a few clues about their Secret Project.”

  “Well, did you?” Shoshanna said.

  “I said I might have. I didn’t. Because they threatened me and then threw me out of a window!”

  “Don’t cry,” Bjorn pleaded.

  Cydney took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Well, now we know they’ve definitely got something to hide.”

  “Metalfucking Secret Project,” Shoshanna said, her sharp chin in her hands, one skinny leg kicking rhythmically. “What kind of scam requires round-the-clock use of Ali Baba, and information security so tight that they don’t even back their data up on the university servers?”

  “Hey,” said Win Khin, who was a sleek, androgynous phavatar. He kept his flesh-and-blood self in one of the life-support cubicles the department provided for phavatarists.

  “Sorry,” Shoshanna said. “Metafucking Secret Project. What was it, or is it? I want to know what they were working on.”

  “Well, we don’t really need to know, do we?” said a timid girl from the Transhumanist Studies program. “We can use Ali Baba as much as we like? I mean, we kind of won?”

  “No, we didn’t,” Shoshanna said. “David’s in hospital, or have you forgotten? And Cydney just got tossed out of a window. They’re escalating this thing, because they’re afraid we’re getting close to the truth.”

  “If only the astrophysics workstation hadn’t been damaged beyond repair,” sighed Cydney, who did not believe it had been. On the night of the raid, Shoshanna and some of her dodgier associates had carried the workstation off. Ever since, Cydney had been trying to find out where they’d taken it. She assumed they were trying to fix it, with no success. That would explain Shoshanna’s frustration.

  “We have to step our resistance up,” Shoshanna said. “We can’t let them trample on our rights like this. I talked to David in hospital this FirstLight. He had a couple of ideas.”

  “If you plan on breaking the law, count me out,” Cydney said.

  “Oh, Cydney,” Shoshanna said. “We need you. Even if we find out the truth, what’ll happen? They’ll bury it. You’re the only one who can expose their crimes to the light of justice.”

  “Not if I’m in jail, I can’t.”

  “You won’t go to jail. None of us will. There are only five of those so-called peacekeepers, and the lay judge of Vesta is none other than Dean Garcia.”

  “What about your girlfriend?” Win Khin said to Cydney. “Doesn’t she work for the UN?”

  “Yes,” Cydney said. “The Space Corps. But she’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Y-yes.” Cydney’s throat tightened. This time, her distress was genuine. “Last night. She just vanished out of our apartment. She didn’t even leave me a note. She left her stabilizer braces!
”

  “Oh my God,” Shoshanna said. “Do you think they’ve hurt her?”

  Cydney shook her head. “I checked with the STEM people. They’ve both gone. Her and that UNVRP guy she works with. They went off on some kind of mission for the geology lab.”

  “Oh my God,” Shoshanna said again, with a different intonation. “They’re all in it together!”

  “Not necessarily,” Cydney insisted. She didn’t want to believe that Elfrida could be involved with Dr. James’s Secret Project, could have been keeping that big of a story from her all this time. But the alternative interpretation was even worse. “Maybe they just went off together.” Tears spilled down her cheeks. “I should have guessed. The amount of time they spend together, just the two of them. I did think it was kind of suspicious, but she always insisted there was nothing going on.”

  “Her … and that guy?”

  Cydney nodded violently. “Mendoza. A data analyst.”

  “Oh Cydney, really? He’s male.”

  “Why would that stop her? He’s not totally unattractive. I think his first name’s John. John!” She lost control of her emotions and hid her face in Bjorn’s shoulder, shaking with sobs of grief and betrayal.

  Win Khin laid a cool chrome hand on her ankle. “Oh, Cydney. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” Shoshanna said. “That majorly sucks.” For once, she sounded sincere. She tried to pull Cydney into a hug, but Cydney clung to Bjorn as if he were a teddy bear.

  Bjorn was in fact a bear, in his own mind. One of the disunified tribe known as bestialists, he had spent all his money on surgery that bulked him up, grew shaggy brown fur all over his body, and reshaped his face into lines that echoed a favorite childhood toy of Cydney’s called Love-A-Lot Bear. Unlike some bestialists, Bjorn had no interest in sex with actual female bears. He just wanted to live in a tree (despite the fact that real bears lived in dens), eat out of the garbage, and shamble around the woods thinking bearish thoughts. Life in microgee was kind to his frame, whose ursine padding would have overly stressed his skeleton in stronger gravities. He was a student at the university, and had been for the past fifteen years, with no prospect of graduation. He was the gentlest person Cydney had ever met.

  He patted her shoulders with hairy, blunt-clawed fingers, murmuring, “It’s OK. I know it hurts. But it’s gonna be OK.”

  “At least you’ve got friends,” Shoshanna said. “We’ll be here for you no matter what.”

  Cydney reached out blindly for Shoshanna’s hand and squeezed it.

  xiii.

  At the same time, 700 kilometers away, Elfrida and Mendoza were sitting in their rover, contemplating the ringrail canyon. They had driven away from the refinery for two Vestan days, paralleling the graben. Mendoza had a theory that they would be able to cross over to the southern hemisphere on the far side of the protoplanet, where the walls of the graben were supposedly lower.

  Lower turned out to be relative.

  “There’s no way we’re getting the rover down there,” Elfrida said.

  The rim of the graben fell away before the rover’s nose like a precipice. Sheared-off steps and near-vertical scarps of petrified igneous slag tumbled down to the manmade canyon two hundred meters below, where the maglev track ran. That canyon lay in shadow right now, with the sun low on the horizon. Elfrida could see the rover’s shadow on the opposite wall of the graben, as small as a woodlouse.

  “Mendoza?”

  He looked up from his tablet. “Sorry. I was just trying to figure whether we could jump it.”

  “It’s three kilometers wide!”

  “Just the canyon at the bottom. That’s only a hundred and eight meters. We could get down there no problem. But I don’t think it’s gonna work. We’re too heavy.” He went back to air-typing.

  Elfrida used her contacts—piggybacking on the rover’s uplink—to check the view from the UNVRP comms satellite. Orbiting sedately in its geostationary posture, it could see the refinery they had left behind ten hours ago. The launch cradle was there. The handler bots were loading it with tanks of liquid hydrogen big enough to be visible from space.

  If we’d stayed at the refinery, I might have been able to get onto the Vesta Express and have a look around, she thought.

  But she didn’t know how she would have managed that. She had no plan for gaining access to the train. That was why she’d gone along with Mendoza’s alternate plan to go have a look at Rheasilvia Crater.

  Which wasn’t going to happen, either, if they couldn’t get across this graben.

  “You know what might work?” Mendoza said.

  “I bet you’re going to tell me.”

  He did.

  ★

  “This,” said Elfrida, “is seriously crazy.”

  “I think the word you want is ‘audacious,’” Mendoza said.

  Elfrida perched on the nose of the rover, holding tightly to a carbon fiber cable, which was wrapped around the winch on the rover’s rear end. Her end of the cable was tethered to her suit, so she didn’t actually have to hold onto it, but she felt better holding onto something.

  “Ready?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

  “Then here goes nothing,” Mendoza said.

  The rover tilted over the rim of the graben and began to descend the 60° slope.

  Backwards.

  From her perch on the nose of the rover, Elfrida had a better view of their descent than she really wanted. The rover slid down the volcanic scarps with its brakes locked. When it came to sheer drops, it simply sailed over them, landing several meters below and rebounding into the vacuum, which took it over the next drop, and so on. Elfrida gave up clinging to the cable, and clung instead to the chassis, her teeth jarring in her skull at every impact. Mendoza was not using the ski-pole arms to arrest their descent. He was pushing off with them. The point of this descent was to build up as much speed as possible.

  In a sudden, beautiful accident of perspective, false-colored by Elfrida’s faceplate filter, the walls of the graben framed the Milky Way.

  The black abyss of the ringrail canyon hurtled up at her.

  “Oh God,” she gulped.

  And the rover stopped dead.

  Mendoza had driven the drilling attachment into the rock, its artificial diamond tip dragging deep and finally halting the rover on the very edge of the canyon.

  The rover’s nose snapped upwards, all three wheels leaving the ground.

  Like a mangonel of yore, it catapulted Elfrida across the canyon.

  Mendoza had calculated the heck out of her probable ballistic trajectory. He had shown her that her momentum would be more than sufficient to carry her to the other side, given that she weighed two kilos in her spacesuit, and air friction was zero. The x-factor would be their velocity at the moment when the rover crash-braked, but Mendoza had said he would try to get it as high as possible. “So you’re saying it’ll be like a car crash,” Elfrida had summarized. “And I’ll be the one who wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.”

  “Uh, yeah. Pretty much.”

  Now she flew / fell through the vacuum, while Vesta’s minimal gravity warred with Newton’s first law of motion. I am going to be sick, she thought. The canyon yawned beneath her. Her helmet’s infrared filter lit up the maglev track. The other side of the canyon approached. Instinctively trying to make herself more aerodynamic, she stretched out her arms and legs in what was commonly called the Superman pose. “Yee-ha!” she screamed. “Look at me!”

  She belly-flopped onto the regolith, a body-length beyond the edge of the canyon.

  “You OK there, Goto?”

  She sat up to see Mendoza standing outside the rover on the other side of the canyon. “Oh my God, Mendoza, I made it. I made it!”

  “I knew you would. Um. Were you really doing the Superman pose?”

  “Did I look cool? Uh huh, uh huh.”

  “I guess. But, Goto, you are aware there’s no air here, right? So it doesn’t matter whether you’
re aerodynamic or not.”

  “Oh, frag off. Are you coming across, or what?”

  Mendoza attached a hand drill to the cable and flung it across the trench. She reeled it in. The drill served as an anchor to make a basic zipline. Running the cable through a carabiner on the handle of the drill, she threw its end back to him. He then set about unloading the rover and sending everything over to her along the line.

  “Careful with my immersion kit!”

  “I am being careful. Why’d you bring this, anyway?”

  “I thought I might have some free time to get a bit of work done,” Elfrida said ruefully.

  She was sweating in her suit, sucking frequently at the nipple in her helmet that vended a nasty grapefruit-flavored rehydration drink. Micro-gee notwithstanding, lifting and hauling and dragging was work. Not her kind of work, but the kind of work that their medieval ancestors had done on a daily basis. Sweat tickled her neck inside her helmet, where she couldn’t wipe it away. Finally Mendoza was ready to come across. He clipped onto the line and jumped, legs cycling, arms flailing.

  “Ho ho, hee hee,” Elfrida cackled. “Look, I took a picture of you.” She flipped it over the data channel to him as he crashed into the edge of the canyon and hauled himself up. “Remember, Mendoza, there’s no air here, so waving your arms like a drowning man doesn’t really make you move any faster. Not that it would on Earth, either.”

  He did not respond to her gibe. He lunged at the winch, which he’d unbolted from the rover and sent across separately, and began to fiddle with the cable, reattaching it.

  “Mendoza? What’re you doing?”

  “Gotta get the rover across the trench.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Now. Track’s vibrating. The train is coming.”

  Elfrida did not need to hear this twice. When loaded, the rail launcher stuck up above the top of the canyon. It would hit their zipline.

  “This cable’s got a tensile strength rating of three hundred GPA,” Mendoza said, looping it around the winch. “The Vesta Express will be going at Mach 2 when it gets here. I’m seeing this vision of the cable slicing through the tops of the tanks and spraying liquid hydrogen all over the sky.”