“Surely the drill bits would just get jerked out of the regolith?”
“Yeah, maybe. Thus hitting the rail launcher and potentially damaging it. Virgin Atomic would not be happy with us after that. We could wave goodbye to our chances of exploring Rheasilvia Crater.”
“What can I do?”
“Crank.”
Since it was no longer connected to the rover, the winch had no electrical power. They had to crank it like a windlass, using the manual handle that was meant to be for emergencies only. This was one. The drum took up the slack. The rover lurched forward and dived into the canyon.
“It won’t hit the bottom. It’ll just—oh, shit!”
The winch scooted towards the precipice, taking Mendoza with it. Elfrida lunged at him and grabbed his legs. She managed to hook one knee around the hand drill, which was still anchored in the regolith, arresting their slide.
“Keep winching!” she cried. “I’ve got you!”
Lying on the ice-rink-smooth rock, she could feel it vibrating under her. The Vesta Express couldn’t be far away.
Mendoza cranked frantically. “Susmaryosep! It’s stuck on something! No, I’ve got it!”
The rover rose over the lip of the precipice, its headlights glowing, like a googly-eyed sea creature emerging from the deep.
Elfrida’s heads-up display notified her that the left knee of her suit, the one wrapped around the drill, was being slowly sliced open by the razor-edges of the drill bit; in a few seconds she’d have a suit breach.
Mendoza winched the rover the rest of the way up and fell on it, gibbering in relief.
The ground throbbed. In a split-second blaze of light, the Vesta Express whipped by at a speed slightly greater than 2,000 kilometers per hour. The tops of the hydrogen tanks in the launch cradle rose out of the trench, as did the engine. It was like being passed, at twice the speed of sound, by a string of warehouses coupled to the Guggenheim Museum.
Elfrida struggled to integrate all the data her suit was showering her with. First and foremost was the imminent breach at the back of her left knee. She got on that.
Mendoza knelt facing in the direction the Vesta Express had gone. “How do you think they cope with that?”
“What?” Elfrida said. She sat in an awkward position, squeezing splart onto the back of her knee.
“The refinery crew. The R&D guys. Whoever else lives in the hab modules. What’s it like to continuously travel around the world, slowing down and speeding up in accord with the launch schedule?”
“They probably don’t even notice. If they’ve got spin gravity in there, a little accel/decel would be nothing. What I don’t understand is why they don’t just park the hab modules at the refinery, or somewhere.”
“Because the rail launcher would crash into them. It goes all the way around the equator to build up speed. Launch speed is something like Mach 4.”
“Oh.”
“What are you doing?”
“Fixing my suit.”
“Are you … putting splart on it?”
“Yeah. I know it’s got self-repair functionality, but I don’t trust it. Splart, you can trust.”
“Um.”
“Splart is good stuff. I once visited a rubble-pile asteroid hab that was made of splart. Nothing else between them and the vaccum. It worked fine.” It had worked for the residents of 11073 Galapagos until the PLAN nuked them, anyway.
“Yeah, but when it hardens …”
“Done,” Elfrida said. She stood up. The splart fill had locked her suit’s left knee joint at a permanently bent angle.
“What I was going to say,” Mendoza sighed.
“Oh, crap on it! Bother, bother, bother! Fuckadoodle-doo!” Elfrida swore at her own stupidity. All she’d been thinking about was getting that near-breach fixed. Here was another legacy of 11073 Galapagos: an overly sensitive panic button lodged inside her head. She made to stamp her foot in irritation, and overbalanced sideways.
“Not laughing,” Mendoza said. “Not laughing.”
“Laugh all you like, dorkbucket,” Elfrida snarled. But sitting on her ass, with the rover and all their gear safely on their side of the canyon, she saw the funny side. “All right, fine! I’m laughing, too.”
“‘Fuckadoodle-doo,’ Goto?”
“Haven’t you ever said that? Fucka-fucka-fucka; it sounds like a chicken.”
“‘Dorkbucket’?”
“Oh, I got that one from my dad. He’s into ancient slang. It means someone who works in data analysis.”
They quieted, and began to pack up their gear. Elfrida had to hop on her right leg. She couldn’t wait to get into the rover and get this suit off.
“By the way, what was that you said, Mendoza? When you thought the rover was stuck?”
“I don’t remember saying anything except ‘shit.’”
“You did. It sounded like susmaryep. I was just thinking, you’ve got some funny swear words of your own.”
“Oh, that,” Mendoza said. “It’s Tagalog. Susmaryosep. It’s just something we say, like ‘Oh, crap.’”
A little chill passed over Elfrida. “Susmaryosep?”
“Yeah: Jesus, Mary, Joseph.”
“Mendoza, that isn’t Tagalog. That’s the names of the Christian God and, you know, his parents. Or I guess, his mother and his stepfather.”
“Is it?” Mendoza’s voice was a shade too casual. “Well, how about that? I don’t know anything about religion.”
Elfrida swallowed. She picked up her immersion kit and stuffed it into the cargo net. “I’ve got another question,” she said.
But before she could ask it, Mendoza let out a shout. “Look at that!”
Elfrida whirled.
On the far side of the trench, someone was scrambling down the wall of the canyon the same way they’d come. The person’s limbs were spindly, but moved with mechanical precision. He/she was balancing something on his/her shoulder which looked like a rocket launcher.
“Helloo-oo!”
It was not a person. It was Rurumi.
“Well, this is just great,” Mendoza said. “She caught up.”
“Is that a rocket launcher? Mendoza, maybe we’d better get under cover—”
But Rurumi had not come to frag them. The object on her shoulder was a harpoon gun of the type used by spaceport crews for retrieving stray cargo. She unlimbered it and fired. The harpoon arced across the trench, trailing a length of cable, and struck near the rover. The bulb of splart on its tip burst on impact, gluing it to the rock.
Splart, as Elfrida had mentioned, was powerful stuff. Known as the superglue of the space age, it hardened rapidly in sub-zero temperatures to the consistency of titanium. Rurumi pulled the cable taut and splarted her end of it to the regolith.
“We should have thought of that,” Mendoza said.
“Yeah, although I wouldn’t have wanted to use up all the splart in our repair kits.”
Calmly, Rurumi strolled across the rope like a tightrope-walker. Her short skirt swirled and her hair rippled in the micro-gravity.
“I feel irradiated just looking at her,” Mendoza said.
“Their skulls are five centimeters thick. The rest is mechanical.”
With a gratuitous stumble, Rurumi stepped off the cable and lowered her head to them. She wrung her hands, knees knocking. “Don’t leave me behind again! Please. Onegai.” She raised her face, saucer-like eyes brimming with stars. “Aren’t we a team?” she lisped.
“Well,” Mendoza started.
Elfrida elbowed him out of the way. “Can the act, Lovatsky. You would have tried to stop us from getting this far. But now we’ve got the rover over here, so—”
“No, I wouldn’t have tried to stop you,” Gregor Lovatsky said in the phavatar’s voice. “Don’t you get it? I don’t know how you managed to get the rover across the ringrail, but it can’t have been easy. It would have been much easier if you’d waited for Rurumi. As she just demonstrated.”
“All ri
ght, Lovatsky,” Mendoza interrupted. “Why don’t you tell us what your game is?”
“Well, if you’d hung out at the refinery a bit longer,” Lovatsky started. At threatening coughs from both Elfrida and Mendoza, the phavatar tittered and played with its hair. “All right, all right. What you apparently don’t know is that Virgin Resources and the Big Dig are separate projects. They’re even incorporated separately. Both are subsidiaries of Virgin Atomic, but there’s next to no contact between them. So the guys at the refinery have no idea what’s going on in Rheasilvia Crater.”
“Oh,” Elfrida said. “I’m starting to get it.”
“A while back, a bunch of the refinery crew decided to hike south and have a look for themselves. That was when the Big Dig instituted an area-exclusion policy which has been enforced ever since with extreme prejudice. They zapped a couple of phavatars from space. Their own guys!”
“Uh huh,” Elfrida said. “OK. And you think they won’t zap us?”
“That’s right,” Lovatsky said. “Because you work for the UN. So I took the liberty of bringing this along.” Rurumi danced over to the rover and dug in the cargo net under the chassis. She brought out a bundle of fabric which she unfolded into a giant UNESCO flag. “Stick this on the roof,” she said from beneath the blue and white folds.
“Did you bogart that from the peacekeepers?” Elfrida said.
“Guilty,” the phavatar said. “But you get the idea, right? Now we’re here, we change our cover story. This isn’t a geology mission anymore, it’s a UN inspection.”
“Uh, we don’t work for UNESCO,” Mendoza said.
“Dude,” Lovatsky said. “Who’s gonna know?”
xiv.
A gaggle of Virgin Atomic satellites danced in their respective orbits, never colliding, constantly communicating.
In theory, a human comms officer monitored each of the satellites. But the flesh is weak. Telenovels, solitaire, role-playing games, news feeds, and online dating sites beckoned. To compensate for these inevitable lapses, each satellite was equipped with a machine intelligence smart enough to do its operator’s job.
“Looks like they’re heading south,” said the satellite belonging to the de Grey Institute, as Virgin Atomic’s R&D division was pretentiously named. To be accurate, this is what it would have said if it had used human language. “Over to you, big guy.”
The largest satellite in this dispersed flock occupied a geostationary orbit that gave it a bird’s-eye view of the Rheasilvia crater. This was the machine that Mendoza had identified as an orbital gun platform. Its actual descriptor was Precision Orbital Risk Management System (PORMS). Many such systems orbited Earth and Luna, where they were referred to as “cops in the sky.” This accurately described their baseline functionality. This PORMS’s settings had been retooled so that it behaved more like a bouncer at a scuzzy nightclub where the drinks were electrified and black tech dealers hung out in the toilets. In response to its colleague’s salutation, it said nothing.
“Who are they, anyway?” said the Virgin Resources satellite, a bit too casually.
“Didn’t you get their IDs when they visited your refinery?” said the de Grey Institute.
“Er,” said Resources.
“Say no more. Your operators were otherwise occupied. Sometimes, I swear, I think they need to be referred to the mental health department.”
“We have a mental health department?”
“It was just an expression.”
“Oh, look,” twittered a third satellite, which handled comms for the Big Dig. “What’s that?”
All the satellites eagerly zoomed in.
The rover had stopped on the rim of Rheasilvia Crater, where rolling scarps sank to the plain that was the unthinkably vast crater’s basin. A person in an EVA suit exited the rover and unfolded a piece of fabric over the vehicle’s roof. A logo became visible.
“There’s your answer,” said the de Grey Institute.
“I don’t get it!” said the Big Dig. “That’s the UNESCO logo. Why is UNESCO coming to see us?”
“Maybe they think you’re using indentured labor,” suggested Resources. “Ha, ha!”
The rover descended into the crater on a switchback course, skidding sideways where the gradient was steepest, throwing up rooster-tails of dust that had not been disturbed since the solar system was young. The satellites watched its progress. Had they been human, they would have held their breath.
The rover reached the floor of the crater.
The PORMS spoke to it.
“XX rover at the given coordinates. Identify yourself immediately.”
“Uh, yeah,” came a faint human voice. “We are an inspection team from UNESCO. We’re en route to the Big Dig to perform an inspection.”
“Yoroshiku ne!” squealed another voice
“Translation,” said a third voice from the rover. “Don’t shoot us, OK?”
“This is a restricted area. Turn back immediately. If you fail to obey this order, area-exclusion measures will be initiated.”
“Are you crazy?” said the de Grey Institute. “They’re from the UN! Shoot them and we’ll all be looking at major legal grief. Plus publicity, which none of us want, amirite?”
“You have ten seconds to comply with this order. Ten … nine …”
At that moment the de Grey Institute satellite’s controller returned to his desk. He was a junior lab assistant who did his duties conscientiously, on the whole. He had just stepped away to grab a snack. Seeing how things stood, he choked and had to clear his throat before he could speak. “José! José! Do you copy?”
“Six … five …”
“For fuck’s sake don’t slag ‘em! The last thing we need is blue berets crawling all over this rock!”
Silence on the air. Silence in the comms cubicle aboard the Vesta Express, where lab assistant Julian Satterthwaite’s mouthful of Cheezy Bytes had turned to ashes on his tongue. Silence in the rover, except for Mendoza gabbling under his breath: “fullofgracethelordbewiththee …”
“Countdown aborted,” said the PORMS. “You have permission to proceed. Follow the course I am about to transmit (attached). Any deviation from this course will trigger area-exclusion protocols. Transmission ends.” <
Satterthwaite slumped on his ergoform, his breath rasping harshly. “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” he said. “You scared the fuck out of me, José.”
“Chill. I was just screwing with their itty bitty minds.”
The PORMS, unlike the other satellites, really was under the control of a human operator at all times, without exception. Satterthwaite had never met José Running Horse, who worked at the Big Dig. But he suspected that he knew where the PORMS got its sociopathic demeanor.
“Figure they’re onto us?” Running Horse said. “If they get too nosy, they might have to have an ‘accident.’”
“It’s probably some World Heritage shit,” Satterthwaite said. “We warned you that bashing holes in Rheasilvia Mons would stir up the conservation crowd.”
“Yeah, well, screw you. You guys in R&D are the ones messing with shit that could kill us, and everyone in the known universe.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“If the UN finds out what you’re up to, we won’t get away with a slap on the wrist.”
“You know nothing about it.”
“I know you just had a narrow fucking escape, Satterthwaite. What if these UN bigots wanted to inspect your facility, instead of ours?”
“Well, they don’t. They haven’t even attempted to communicate with us.” Satterthwaite upended the last of his Cheezy Bytes into his mouth. “Be a mate and take one for the team,” he typed, his screen wavering in the wisps of fog that drifted through the door behind him, from the kilos of dry ice packed as a last-ditch hack around the outside of the de Grey Institute’s supercomputer.
★
“Rheasilvia Mons,” Elfrida read from her contacts. “Tallest peak in the solar
system, rising 22 kilometers from the floor of the crater of the same name. Created by an impact … blah, blah … named after Rhea Silvia, a mythological vestal virgin. Rheasilvia Mons is classified as a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value.” She snapped her fingers joyfully. “Boom. That’s it, Mendoza, that’s why we’re here.”
“This isn’t a mountain,” Mendoza said. “It’s a freaking mountain range.”
They appeared to be driving towards a wall. Jagged cliffs and steep cols, illuminated by the light of another Vesta day, filled the sky. Rheasilvia Mons was so vast that it looked more like an allegory than a physical fact. Elfrida twitched. She kept wanting to tweak her settings, as if this were computer-generated topology that was out of whack. Silly, but that was how it looked: like the product of a runaway algorithm, not a real mountain in the real solar system.
“Ookii ne!” said Rurumi.
“Yup,” Elfrida said, glancing at the phavatar with dislike. “Pretty big.”
For four Vestan days they had followed the course transmitted by the PORMS. Their route threaded between craters in the floor of the Rheasilvia impact basin, which was only flat in comparison to the massif at its center. Elfrida and Mendoza had traded shifts at the wheel. Neither of them trusted Rurumi not to antagonize the PORMS by steering off-course.
Now, they were following overlapping sets of tracks in the dust. The width of the tracks suggested they’d been made by vehicles with wheelbases as broad as a four-lane highway. The dotted green line on the rover’s navigation screen followed the tracks up the foothills ahead, into a crater that yawned in the side of Rheasilvia Mons like a cave mouth.
“Can’t we think of a different cover story?” Mendoza said. “I don’t know crap about World Heritage.”
“I do. I grew up in Rome. But OK.”
“So tell me what the Sistine Chapel has in common with this pile of rock.”
“You got me,” Elfrida admitted. “Fine, I’m not married to the idea. But what else is there for us to inspect here?”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 11