The Vesta Conspiracy

by Felix R. Savage

  Petruzzelli peeled her suit off and stowed it in the quarterdeck locker. Turning back to the phavatar, she said, “I doubt that suit could feel it even if I did hit you. We fixed it, but for ‘fixed,’ read ‘restored basic functionality’ …”

  Elfrida grimaced. “I’m really sorry—”

  “Blistering barnacles, please don’t do that.”

  “Memo to self. Do not attempt any expressions. No, I should have checked in with you long before this, and I apologize. But I’ve been out of the office. Have you seen what’s happening on 4 Vesta?”

  The Kharbage Collector was now half a million kilometers from Vesta, trucking between isolated asteroid settlements, dropping off consumables and picking up recycling.

  “Yeah!” Petruzzelli said. “Are those students loony? Or are they just completely unfamiliar with the concept of tightly coupled systems? I’m Earthborn, and even I know that you do not screw with the life-support functions of your own damn habitat. Just. No. That stuff is way too easy to fuck up, and one little fuck-up is all it takes to make a very bad day in space.”

  Elfrida gulped, feeling hollow at this reminder of the danger Cydney was in.

  “In fact, an asteroid is just like a big spaceship. But with less redundancy.” Petruzzelli ushered Elfrida out of the quarterdeck. “Everyone’s down in engineering. Let’s go up to the bridge so we can talk in peace.”

  Elfrida flailed her way up the zip tube that ran the length of the Collector’s 150-meter keel. Transferring from the keel tube to the elevator was always a challenge on a Startractor. Petruzzelli had to manhandle her phavatar’s clumsy frame into one of the two apertures in the rotating transfer point.

  “Did you even get my emails?”

  “Not until just now,” Elfrida apologized. “I haven’t been able to check—”

  Spin gravity took hold, and Elfrida thumped to the floor of the elevator. Petruzzelli landed lightly beside her. “I pinged you like twenty times. They rejected my application for compensation.”

  “Oh, crap. I’m sorry. Did you fill in the form like I showed you?”

  “Yes. Well …”

  “Alicia.”

  “I said the phavatar was destroyed. Which it isn’t, obviously. But they don’t know that. Anyway, we thought it was trashed. Michael managed to get it operational, but it’s still basically useless … as you see.”

  The elevator opened on the bridge. Elfrida stumbled out, and looked back. In the reflective surface cladding of the elevator shaft, she saw the phavatar she was using. Her head was a lump of mangled plastisteel and splart, with two steel lenses poking out, and a speaker instead of a mouth. The damage done by the pirates on 550363 Montego had not looked as bad as this repair job did. “Wow. Yes, I do see. They shouldn’t have refused to compensate you. Did you attach pictures?”

  “Before and after.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t make any other mistakes on the form?”

  Petruzzelli balanced one knee on the ergoform at her workstation. Spinning around in circles, she said, “Well, I may have said that it was a čapek-class mark three, not a mark one.”

  “Oh. That’s it, then.”

  “There isn’t much difference.”

  “Except for about eighty thousand spiders on the secondary market.”

  “But they look the same. And after being smashed up by a bunch of pirates, you definitely wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. And I attached mark-three specs.”

  Elfrida shook her head. “They would know. They would look you up and find out that you don’t have a čapek-class mark three registered to this ship. Honestly, you’re lucky they haven’t come after you for making false representations. Alicia, you just can’t do that.”

  “Everyone scams the system,” Petruzzelli said tightly. She plucked a chunk of glittering asteroid ore off her desk and threw it from hand to hand.

  “Yeah, maybe, but … Don’t take this the wrong way, but did you really need the extra eighty K that bad?”

  Petruzzelli turned her gaze up to Elfrida’s lenses. “In all honesty? No spin, no corporate happy-talk? Yes.”

  “OK.” Elfrida had asked the question, but now that she had the answer, she didn’t know what to do with it. She realized she didn’t know what it was like to work for an outfit where the cash might literally run out. “Still, you should have thought about it a bit harder,” she mumbled. “They might blackball you. I might log in one day and find out the Kharbage Collector isn’t on my list of approved logistics and transport partners anymore.”

  “God! You think they’d really do that? Over one little mistake on a form? They didn’t even give me the money!”

  “I dunno if they would or not. But I get the feeling that the new asteroid procurement guidelines aren’t working out, so they might be in a contractor-firing mood.”

  “I wish you would go back to the old procurement system. It worked so much better when you were allowed to buy asteroids from us. You don’t even know what this has done to our cash flow. Our CEO is, like, selling ships to pay his kid’s tuition fees.” Petruzzelli thew her chunk of ore at the wall. It curved in the air and hit someone’s workstation. “A transport fee here and a phavatar leasing fee there is just, it isn’t shit. ”

  “I know,” Elfrida said helplessly. “I wish there was something I could do. But, I know this isn’t much, but there’s another fee on offer if you want it.”

  “I want,” Petruzzelli said in a flat voice.

  “I need to go back to 550363 Montego.”

  “What for? Those meatheads are sure to be gone.”

  “Yeah, exactly. And if they are, and the rock checks out, I can put in a purchase recommendation. Which would make a whole four recommends I’ve been able to file this year.”

  “This isn’t working out for you, either, is it?” Petruzzelli said. She frowned at her screens. “I dunno. We’re burning kind of fast in the wrong direction.”

  Elfrida was silent. She didn’t have access to a starmap, but the rate at which the phavatar’s coordinates were changing with respect to Vesta’s orbit implied a relatively slow burn. For that matter, it would make no sense for Petruzzelli to be burning fast when she had to stop every day or so to pick up someone’s recycling.

  “Well, I guess if you’ve got a lot of other scheduled stops to make,” Elfrida said. “Or if you’re carrying passengers who need to get someplace …”

  The Kharbage Collector, in addition to multiple cargo bays, had a passenger module that could hold up to four thousand souls at a squeeze. It was the counterweight to the command module, rotating around the nose of the ship like a propellor.

  “Oh, no,” Petruzzelli said. “No passengers at all on this run.”

  “Then … can we do this?”

  Petruzzelli called up her holographic 3D starmap and climbed onto her desk, arching back from the waist so her head wouldn’t be inside the display. “Here we are, see? And here’s 550363 Montego, and here’s 6 Hebe, which is my final destination on this run. It’s in the opposite direction.”

  Elfrida felt talked down to, in more than the literal sense. “I know that. But 550363 Montego is also close, compared to 6 Hebe.”

  “Yeah, but changing direction eats a lot of fuel. And honestly? The fee isn’t worth the PITA factor.”

  Elfrida knew what Petruzzelli was driving at. And she felt as sad as her phavatar looked. She had unconsciously expected warmth and sympathy from Petruzzelli. Instead, she was getting treated like an ATM.

  It was her own fault, she realized. She never had told Petruzzelli about her relationship with Cydney, although she wasn’t sure why. She also hadn’t told Petruzzelli that she was being detained by Virgin Atomic at the moment. Strangely, that seemed to matter less than her reluctance to explain the whole Cydney situation. Anyway, her reticence had created a gulf between her and Petruzzelli. As a recycler captain with bills to pay, Petruzzelli was quite naturally filling the gap with wheeler-dealing.

  Elfrida sighed. “H
ow about this? Give me a lift to 550363 Montego, and I’ll help you refile that compensation request. To make up for the PITA factor.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. If you like, we can also apply for a hazard bonus for this trip, since you’ll be entering a volume where hostile entities have recently been active.”

  “Hostile entities? A pirate fanboy and his family,” Petruzzelli scoffed. “Anyway, no way they’ll have stuck around.”

  “I know. Actually, hazard bonuses are only supposed to be paid when there’s a high statistical risk of bumping into the PLAN.”

  “I never heard of anyone getting a hazard bonus from UNVRP.”

  “They don’t make a huge effort to publicize them.”

  “How much?”

  “Fifty percent on top of the usual fee.”

  “Sweet!” Petruzzelli’s eyebrow smileys suddenly turned pink and happy. “I’d kiss you, if you didn’t look like the love child of a cyborg and an industrial accident.”

  Elfrida smiled sadly, which made Petruzzelli shudder.

  She despised herself for bending the rules to pay Petruzzelli off. But—she thought, lying in her capsule in the Big Dig, while Petruzzelli altered the Kharbage Collector’s course, up to her elbows in stars—you had to put it in perspective. Virgin Atomic was breaking a whole raft of laws about stakeholder disclosure and transparency, and that was just the infractions Elfrida had found out about so far. If a big corporation could do that and get away with it, why shouldn’t Petruzzelli be able to scam the system, too? There was nothing (Elfrida insisted to herself) morally wrong about fixing her up with a little sweetener.

  xviii.

  Elfrida marched up to Sigurjónsdóttir and held out a memory crystal. “Here’s the record of my session, like I promised.”

  “Thank you. I’m sorry we had to insist on this, but …”

  “Information security. I get it.”

  One of the reasons Elfrida had explicitly criticized Petruzzelli was because she knew she’d have to hand over a copy of the data dump to Sigurjónsdóttir later. Not that the VA stakeholder relations coordinator had any power to get either her or Petruzzelli in trouble, but still, it was important to stay clean on the record. She was confident she hadn’t said anything that could be construed as breaking the rules. The hazard bonus was technically allowable, just.

  “I can’t get into this,” Sigurjónsdóttir said, snapping her fingers at her screen.

  “Oh. It’s encrypted. You could apply to UNVRP to have it decrypted, or I could do it for you.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  Elfrida went around behind Sigurjónsdóttir’s desk. She blinked at the iris scanner on Sigurjónsdóttir’s computer and answered a couple of her security questions. “There.” She lingered. Sigurjónsdóttir’s other screen showed the bottom of the Big Dig. Figures in yellow and red EVA suits scurried around, dwarfed by rubble-haulers and an excavation bot resembling a flower made of guillotine blades. “Wow. I’ve never seen a bot like that before.”

  “Grisly, isn’t it? Not ours. The Liberty Rock syndicate provided most of the equipment in use here.”

  So Mendoza had been right. The rubble-hauler that nearly ran them off the ramp had been Chinese. “Is that safe?”

  “So they tell us.”

  “But don’t the Chinese use different operating protocols?”

  “Not just protocols. You’ve heard of the Great Firewall, I assume?”

  The Great Firewall was a cultural phenomenon and a technological fact rolled into one. Even before the Mars Incident, Chinese exceptionalism had led the nation to develop its own internet—the precursor to today’s sinanet—based on a separate physical infrastructure. China also pursued robotics development in isolation from the rest of the world. After the Mars Incident, the Big Disconnect had accelerated this divergence, as China blamed the then-United States and the rest of the West for their reckless development of true AI. By differentiating its internet at the code level, China had sought to wall its cyber-territory off from the risk of a repeat tragedy.

  Now the shoe was on the other foot. Though the UN did not openly blame China for the emergence of the PLAN, Mendoza’s conspiracy theory had plenty of echoes in high places. No matter how many anti-AI treaties the Chinese signed up to, no matter how strenuously they decried the very existence of AGI (human-equivalent AI) and ASI (superintelligent AI), and no matter how much they suffered at the hands of the PLAN … no one was ever going to trust them again.

  So machine intelligence had continued to develop separately on each side of the Great Firewall. Ecosystems of algorithms had evolved that were not only incomprehensible to each other, but mutually hostile. At this point, you couldn’t even use a Chinese computer on a regular wifi network without crashing both things.

  “So let me get this straight,” Elfrida said. “If those construction bots were to go berserk, you would have no way of stopping them?”

  “That won’t happen.”

  “But your computers can’t even talk to theirs.”

  “That’s why we have humans in the loop.”

  “Who rely on computers to talk to each other. Do you have anyone here who actually speaks Mandarin?”

  Sigurjónsdóttir smiled weakly.

  On the screen, the Chinese construction workers sprinted over to the side of the cavern where they were working. They took cover behind a buttress. A blizzard of rock and dust blanked the screen out.

  “Uh, that didn’t look very safe.”

  The blast wave propagated through the hab. Sigurjónsdóttir’s teacup rattled on its saucer.

  “Don’t worry,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “They’re culturally risk-averse.”

  Elfrida had thought that here, nestled in the bowels of Rheasilvia Mons, she was at least safe. But she didn’t feel that way anymore.

  “Well, I’m going to grab some lunch and get back to work,” she said.

  “Try the crab au gratin,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. “We import all our own food. None of that recycled, MSG-flavored sludge in this hab.”

  ★

  For the second time, Elfrida flew towards 550363 Montego, towed by a couple of the Kharbage Collector’s drones.

  No robot sharks swarmed out to greet her.

  “All clear, I think,” she radioed to Petruzzelli. “Their Superlifter’s gone, too.”

  “I’m sending a drone in ahead of you, just in case.”

  Crab au gratin gurgled uneasily in Elfrida’s stomach. “I wonder how far they’ve gone. Superlifters are tugs. They’re not made for interplanetary travel.”

  “Do not mock the humble Superlifter. We used to use ‘em to tow asteroids across the system.”

  “Yeah, but without people on board. Their life-support capacity is really limited. Anyway, I hope the pirates are all right.”

  Petruzzelli blew a raspberry into the radio. “Don’t waste your sympathy on those baboons.”

  Elfrida glided over the surface of 550363 Montego. Riddled with old and new impacts, it looked like a grey soufflé. The mouth of the pirates’ excavation yawned between mini-mountains of tailings that had settled back to the surface. Her damaged wreck of a phavatar had zero scanning capabilities, so she couldn’t gather any data on the mineral composition of the asteroid. But she saw nothing to contradict Mendoza’s initial hypothesis that it was a big old hunk of basaltic rock. The excavated chamber would make a handy vessel for UNVRP’s payloads of gengineered microbes. And the asteroid was massive enough that when it impacted Venus, it would blow a hefty chunk of atmosphere into space.

  “Oh crap,” Petruzzelli said.

  “What?”

  “You’d better get in there.”

  Elfrida’s drones dived into the cave mouth, pulling her behind them. A beam of light danced up ahead, emitted by the drone that Petruzzelli had sent in as a scout. It played over the side of a Bigelow hab.

  From which a spacesuited figure had just emerged, waving its arms.

  “Help!
” it shouted on the public band. “Help! Help!”

  The pirates had gone, all right.

  But they had left behind the hapless colonists who’d hoped to settle on 550363 Montego.

  ★

  “I need oxygen and water. Now!”

  “I don’t have much to spare.”

  “Crap on it, Petruzzelli, just send the stuff! There are twenty-seven human beings in here and they’ve only got about fifty liters of oxygen left! They’re dehydrated, most of them can’t even move or speak. This one guy might be dead. I can’t tell. This shitty fucking phavatar doesn’t have any telemetric scanning capability, or a light source, and it’s dark in here. And cold. Can you send a medibot, too, and some supercapacitors, so I can get the backup generator going?”

  “Oh God. I didn’t know it was that bad. All right, emergency consumables coming up.”

  Drones zoomed into the cavern, towing the emergency supplies Elfrida had asked for. She worked flat out, transferring the stuff into the airlock of the Bigelow hab. The people inside were too weak to help, even if they had had more than a handful of functioning EVA suits between them.

  Fortunately, she’d seen habs like this before, so she already knew how to change out its oxygen reserve tanks. The Bigelow Deep Space Life Support System was a mass-produced low-end model, ‘ideal for longer-term resource extraction missions,’ according to the company, which shifted thousands of them on a wink-wink-say-no-more basis to aspiring colonists. Its 2,000 m3 pressurized volume was divided into four decks: galley/recreation/operations; crew quarters/storage; work/hygiene; and stowage/subsystems at what would have been the bottom, if the hab were in gravity.

  The Extropia Collective had squeezed into the operations deck and depressurized the other levels when their oxygen started to run out. Thus cut off from the toilets and the water recovery unit, they had been reduced to drinking their own urine. Someone had tried to cut a hole in the wall to get at the water in the hab’s shell that was used for radiation shielding purposes. Fortunately, they had succeeded only in shorting out the lights.