Elfrida repressurized the crew quarters and carried the sickest would-be colonists down there so that Petruzzelli’s medibot could tend them. She kept the others on the operations deck. Soot coated everything, a relic of the electrical fire which had destroyed the CO2 removal assembly. The handful of people clustered around Elfrida’s phavatar looked like urchins in an e-waste dump.
“What motivated you to illegally occupy this asteroid?” she said. She had to put it like that, for the record.
The man who spoke for the collective, Hugh Meredith-Pike, croaked, “We were seeking the secret of human happiness.”
★
When she’d kludged the air circulation system into working order, Elfrida reported to Petruzzelli.
“I think we’ve got the situation stabilized. But their viability stats suck. We’ve got twenty adults and seven children in a pressurized volume of about 2,000 cubic meters, with ten functioning EVA suits between them, and a few weeks’ worth of basic supplies, thanks to you. They had nothing left. Those pirates ought to be prosecuted for murder.”
“But no one’s actually dead, are they?”
“No, but they would have been in another sol or two.”
“Well, let’s get them the hell off that rock. I’ve got plenty of room in my passenger module.”
“Um.”
“What?”
“They don’t want to go.”
“What?”
“I know. After what they’ve just been through … But they’re unanimous.”
“Did you offer them a, cough cough, incentive?”
“Yes. Amazingly, that was a big no thank you. They’re wireheads. They spent their entire life savings to get here, and they’re staying.”
“Oh, FFS. I’ll just tow the hab out.”
“It wouldn’t fit through the cave entrance.”
“… You’re right. They must have inflated it inside.”
“I’ll stay here with them.”
“Say again, ‘cause I did not copy. It sounded like you said you’re staying here with them.”
“I did. I will. This is my job. This is what the Space Corps does. Helping and supporting communities in space. I’m gonna put in a purchase recommendation, but we’ll be dealing with Centiless, so it’s not going to be immediate, to say the least. When that goes through, we’ll get an evacuation order, and I’ll make sure that business goes to Kharbage LLC, if you’re still in the volume. Then we can go in with bots, drag them out kicking and screaming. But I don’t want to go there until I’ve got the evacuation order. So in the meantime, I’m just going to stay here and see if I can help them not die. They don’t know crap about surviving in space.”
“ … Sounds like you’ve thought it through.”
“It’s not a big deal. You don’t need this phavatar anymore, anyway, right?”
“Well, I guess if you’re OK with that … I wish I could stay, but …”
“But you’ve got bills to pay. I totally understand. Just, could you send over some more stuff before you go? They have a fuel cell generator, but it’s out of hydrogen. Their organic matter recycling unit needs new filters. The smell in here is something else, I’m told. We could also use the loan of one of your drones, in case I need to tow stuff around. Oh, and splart: as much as you’ve got.”
“Coming up. I hate to mention it, but can I invoice UNVRP for this stuff?”
“Of course. And Petruzzelli? Don’t worry about being too precise. You can kind of round off the figures, if you get my drift.”
“… Thanks.”
★
“You can come out now!”
Alicia Petruzzelli’s shout echoed into the dark recesses of the passenger module’s economy deck.
She stepped out of the elevator. Her red leather Gecko Docs squelched on rubber tiles. Closely spaced rows of couches receded into dimness. The air was hot and stale. It smelled of sickly-mint sanitizer spray … and Cheetos.
“I said you can come out now! She’s gone!”
Five figures rose up from among the couches. They were Captain Haddock, his wife Anemone, his son Kelp, his brother Codfish, and Codfish’s wife Coral. Kelp was eating Cheetos from a white-label economy-size bag he had pinched from the galley.
“Blistering barnacles, that was a close call,” Haddock said.
“Not really,” Petruzzelli said. “In that fragged-out suit, she wasn’t exactly going to notice that the command module is a few centimeters closer to the keel than it should be, if we really didn’t have any passengers out here to balance for. Anyway, she’s gone now. She decided to stay with them.” Petruzzelli measured the construction crew with a look. “You didn’t mention that you only left them a week’s worth of air.”
“Arrrr! It’s not even been a week since we left. You were going to go back after you dropped us off—”
“Well, apparently that second-hand carbon dioxide removal assembly you sold them malfunctioned. Caught on fire.”
“A fire in a hab? They’re lucky to be alive.”
“They are alive,” Petruzzelli said, “no thanks to you.”
“Don’t deserve to be. Dumbest bunch of squatters I’ve ever met,” said Codfish. “Bet they forget their lines, too. What a waste of time.”
“Hasn’t been a waste of time for me,” Petruzzelli said. “I’ve got a green light to invoice UNVRP for all the stuff you didn’t leave them, and then some.”
“Can we go back to the command module? The air’s bad in here,” said Coral, with no sense of irony at all.
They went. A contrail of orange Cheetos dust hung in the air of the transfer point like forensic evidence. But no one would ever know that the pirates had been travelling on the Kharbage Collector. No one else was there to see them. Their Superlifter was moored in the ship’s auxiliary craft bay, on the principle that the best place to conceal something is where you’d normally find it. Petruzzelli had slapped some spare Kharbage, LLC decals over the Jolly Rogers on its drive shield, just in case Elfrida took a peek in the auxiliary bay. Which she hadn’t.
Back on the bridge, Petruzzelli flapped a hand at the pirates. “Make like a banana. I’m tired of looking at you. Go hang out in the crew lounge.”
“I’m going to read the Narnia books again,” Kelp said. “Your ship’s got a really great library, Captain Petruzzelli.”
“You can thank my colleague, Captain Okoli, for that,” Petruzzelli said. “He was on a mission to get everyone in the company to read. I’m more of a gamer myself.”
Kelp, Coral, Anemone, and Codfish scattered. Haddock lingered.
“Are we under thrust?” he asked.
“Will be in a minute.”
“And are you going to drop us off on 3982440 Twizzler?”
“That’s our deal.”
“Be a darlin’ girl and take us on a wee bit further.”
“Why? It’s a good rock. Fits all the UNVRP criteria. You’ve got people lined up. Haven’t you?”
“Aye, but …” Haddock came and sat on the corner of Petruzzelli’s workstation. Nervously twirling his ebony goatee, he confessed, “It’s too close to here. I don’t feel safe in this volume nae more. Nor does my lady wife.”
“Space is big, Min-jae.”
“The name’s Archibald.”
“Whatever. You folding?”
“No. Have I not a pirate’s soul, and a rare lust for livin’ on the edge? I have that. But I’ve no desire to be nobbled. And I’d remind you that if we’re caught, you’ll be in a heap o’ trouble yourself, lassie.”
“Oh, screw it,” Petruzzelli said. “Where do you want to go?”
“Ye could take us on to 6 Hebe.”
Petruzzelli grumbled, but agreed. With that concession in hand, Haddock promptly asked to use the internet for a long-distance call. Suspecting that he was going to arrange for someone else to pick him and his family up from 6 Hebe, Petruzzelli consented, and got ready to listen in. If Haddock expected privacy on the Kharbage Collector, he was very much
mistaken.
The pirate’s real name was Min-jae Park. He and his family were members of an ethnically mixed nomadic community with roots in the Korean peninsula. They called themselves namsadang; those who fell afoul of them called them a criminal network. Perhaps it was not so curious that Min-jae had developed an obsession with pirates. Anyway, he and his near and dear had long since set out to make their own way in space, buying a secondhand Superlifter and taking it from there.
For Petruzzelli, the namsadang were the human equivalent of a starmap. Some data points were known, some were concealed in the possession of others. And all the empty spaces in between tantalized her. She wanted to know more about Haddock’s connections, especially since he could get her in trouble, as he had tactlessly pointed out.
Alone in an unused cabin, with only some old pornographic posters for witnesses (as he thought), Haddock used his BCI to ping an ID unknown to Petruzzelli. The signal travelled through the asteroid belt for seven minutes, covering about 108 million kilometers. It reached a destination that was moving on a trajectory wrongly angled to be an asteroid, so it had to be a ship cruising in the volume around 6 Hebe. What a coincidence. Not.
“Yeah, what?” the unknown owner of the ID typed.
“Ahoy! Haddock here. That you, Yonezawa?”
★
Petruzzelli radioed her ex-colleague Viola Budgett.
“You know anything about a guy called Kiyoshi Yonezawa?”
Budgett took a minute and a half to respond. “No,” she said.
“You sure? Because whoever he is, Haddock and company have arranged for him to pick them up from 6 Hebe.”
Petruzzelli had already told Budgett by email how Elfrida Goto had busted the pirates on 550363 Montego. She now explained that Haddock was scared to pull another job in this volume, at least for a while.
“Well, that’s just great,” Budgett said despairingly.
On the screen, Budgett’s jowly face was framed by a pink balaclava. Her telescopic steel left eye—an implanted microscope / telescope—stared expressionlessly; her brown right one skittered about.
“If they aren’t gonna work any more jobs, where’s the money going to come from?” she whined.
“You let me worry about that,” Petruzzelli said.
“But we need the money!”
“Is it cold there, or something?”
Budgett’s breath puffed white, momentarily obscuring her face on the screen. “Not really,” she said.
Petruzzelli switched her attention between Budgett and another screen, where she was earning credits to use in the game Second Idiran War by devoting a portion of the Kharbage Collector’s hub’s computing resources to simulating a superintelligent Mind. She was playing an Idiran. Lots of days, she just didn’t want to be human anymore. Talking to Budgett made her feel that way in spades.
“We need money, like yesterday,” Budgett whined.
Petruzzelli thought of a quote that her former boss, Martin Okoli, had liked to use. “Who you calling we, white man?”
A minute and a half later, a smile of recognition flashed on Budgett’s face. “That’s one of Captain Okoli’s lines. God, I miss the Kharbage Can. Everything was so simple then.”
“Everything was never simple,” said Petruzzelli, but she felt the same way. Budgett’s rarely-glimpsed smile reminded Petruzzelli of the period when they’d worked together on the Kharbage Can, part of Martin Okoli’s tightly knit, happy-go-lucky crew. She’d never understood just what an accomplishment it was to manage a crew that well, and how many difficult decisions Okoli must have faced on a daily basis.
“OK,” she said. “How much do you need? I’ll cover it.”
Budgett’s eyes welled up. A plump hand rose to wipe them. “Oh my God, Alicia, thank you. Thank you so much. We, uh, we need fifty thousand spiders.”
“What are you buying this time? A particle accelerator?”
“No, we’ve got one of those. No, this, uh … it’s for something else.”
“What?”
Budgett’s hands, one flesh and the other a maniple equipped with several tool sockets, fluttered. With visible reluctance, she explained the mess she and her friends on Vesta were in.
Budgett was not a cyborg—that is, she did not identify with the cyborgist movement. But the amount of augments she had put her squarely in the category. Petruzzelli wondered if having that much electronics in your body made you think and feel differently. Certainly, she could not comprehend how anyone as supposedly smart as Budgett could have gotten herself into such a mess.
“You really are screwed, aren’t you?” She made her eyebrow tattoos do disapproving scowls.
Budgett hung her head. At least she had enough self-awareness to be ashamed. “We just have to keep paying him,” she said hopelessly. “There’s no way out.”
We’ll see about that, Petruzzelli thought.
“Do you, uh, want his ID? To get in touch with him?”
“Bothead,” Petruzzelli said. "I’ve already got it. Swiped it from Haddock. I’m pinging him now.”
xix.
In the crepuscular light of ThirdLight’s splinter-moons, plastisteel gorillas surrounded the Facilities Management building. These were Virgin Atomic’s security phavatars. They were familiar to Bellicians from parades and festivals, when they would dress in amusing costumes and serve refreshments. Now they hulked like monsters in black EMP-proof hooded capes. They bounded towards the building with no pretense of stealth, demanding the surrender of the activists holed up inside. When this was not forthcoming, they appeared to be at a loss.
“Wait for it,” Shoshanna said to her troops.
The shadow of a soycloud engulfed the building. The soycloud’s PHES thrusters were not working very well, since they depended on thermal updrafts to convert into kinetic energy, and the atmosphere had cooled several degrees since Shoshanna turned off the sun. The soycloud wallowed a scant hundred meters above Facilities Management. One of the Virgin Atomic security phavatars made a dramatic gesture. Rain poured down on the building. Actually, poured was an understatement. Reprogrammed at VA headquarters, the soycloud released all its excess water at once. Biostrate roofs were not made to cope with a deluge like this. The ceiling of the reception area sprang multiple leaks.
The activists inside laughed.
“Anything to avoid visuals of phavatars shooting at human beings,” Shoshanna said.
The leaks turned into gushers. The Let’s Make Friends With Soil! corner collapsed, burying several people.
“Stay calm! Stay calm! They think we’re going to come out, soaked and shivering, looking stupid. They’re going to look stupid. Wait for it …”
Cydney still had her BCI and retinal interface. In the children’s activities coordinator’s office, where she had been locked with some meds for her ear, she could view events from multiple angles. Most of these amateur feeds were provided by citizens in the unofficial bug-out movement, which had by now, in spite of official reassurances, created a tailback from the Bremen Lock several kilometers long. Several of the activists inside the building were also covertly vidding.
Astonished commentary flooded every feed when the VA phavatars abruptly went ape. They jumped about, thumped their chests, and knuckle-walked, hooting.
(Shoshanna had never seen a real gorilla; she was going on cartoons.)
With mighty bounds enabled by their twisted-polymer muscles, the phavatars leapt up to the hovering soycloud and grabbed its edges. They clambered aboard, as if returning to their home in the treetops.
A hatch opened in the center of the soycloud. An access ladder snapped down.
The activists filed out of the building and climbed the ladder. They were soaked and shivering, but they did not look stupid. Illuminated by the blaze of light from Facilities Management, they looked like pagan warriors ascending to some elysian firmament. At the last minute, Shoshanna unlocked the children’s activities director’s office and dragged Cydney along.
; “All aboard for the soycloud tour! Don’t worry, I’m in control. I just let them soak us so everyone could see how powerless they are.”
★
This message had been received loud and clear at VA headquarters in Bellicia, which was now in a state of pandemonium. The staff had lost control first of Facilities Management, and then of the override systems that had allowed them to stage their soycloud stunt. Now they had even lost their own security phavatars.
Jay Macdonald, the highest-ranking VA executive present on Vesta, climbed to the roof in the company of two now-hostile phavatars and was escorted up the ladder to the soycloud occupied by Shoshanna and her troops, which had come to hover over the building.
The topside of the soycloud smelled of phlox and sweet william. It was a far cry from the tightly packed racks of lettuces and sweet potatoes found in your average farm-in-a-bottle. Gooseberry and raspberry bushes, as well as marrows and squashes grown on frames, dotted three moonlit acres of soybeans. There were even a few fruit trees scattered around. They provided shade (when the sun was shining) for chives, dill, and other herbs beloved of the pollinating insects whose inculturation was the agronomy department’s greatest success.
The activists were munching on apples, normally out of reach on a student’s budget. They lounged on the deck outside the shack where the soycloud gardeners stored their tools. Relaxed laughter greeted Macdonald’s appearance. Most of the activists assumed they had triumphed, and were ready to talk about coffee machines and student grants.
Not Shoshanna, who sat crosslegged on the deck with her revolver in her lap. “How you doing? Gotta say, you don’t look so good, Jay.”
Even by the Vestan equivalent of moonlight, Macdonald was visibly pasty and trembling.
“How did you do that?” he blurted, gesturing at the phavatars. No longer his, but hers. “It shouldn’t be possible!”
“How do you mean, Jay?”
“Telepresence encryption is unbreakable! You booted our operators out. Now they can’t log in. But you can’t hijack a telecast. It’s not possible. Can’t bloody well be done!”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 16