After a pause, the radio said in English: “Is this regarding the activities of the de Grey Institute?”
No, Elfrida was about to say, but then she caught herself. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”
xx.
Having made up her mind to help her old friend Viola Budgett, Petruzzelli headed straight for 6 Hebe. She programmed a brachistone trajectory into the astrogation computer. During the tricky midpoint of the journey—when the Kharbage Collector had to flip 180° so that its acceleration became deceleration—Michael came to her with some rumors he’d found on the internet about 4 Vesta.
“Can’t you see I’m busy?” she shouted at him.
But later she had a look, and grew alarmed. Whatever was going on, the powers that be were trying their damnedest to keep it out of the public eye. Most of Michael’s links had already disappeared.
There was only one organization that could mount a news blackout with even 80% or 90% success.
The ISA.
Unlike most people in the solar system, Petruzzelli had met the ISA—and known it at the time. After the 11073 Galapagos incident, a man had come all the way from Earth to interview her aboard the Kharbage Can. Middle-aged Anglo guy. Kind, polite. His kind, polite demeanor had not changed as he informed her what would happen to her family, and her friends, and basically everyone she’d ever bumped profiles with, if she breathed a word about that stross-class phavatar that went rogue on 11073 Galapagos, or about the asteroid called 99984 Ravilious.
From which Petruzzelli had concluded that the ISA weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Their threats had told her exactly what they didn’t want known.
They were plenty scary, though. She’d signed their non-disclosure agreement and kept her mouth shut from that day to this.
Now, she wondered if the ISA was taking a hand on 4 Vesta. If so, Elfrida Goto and Viola Budgett might need rescuing.
But someone else would have to do it. Apart from everything else, Petruzzelli was committed to her course. When you were burning at almost three million kilometers per hour, it was physically impossible to turn around.
She was going to make UNVRP pay for her fuel, too. She spent most of the journey contentedly filling out invoices.
25 hours later, 6 Hebe swelled on the Kharbage Collector’s screens, angular, glittering. One of the larger asteroids in the Belt, about 200 kilometers square, 6 Hebe had also been one of the first exploited for its minerals. It did not, however, offer riches beyond the dreams of anyone—just nickel-iron. Therefore, it had also been one of the first asteroids to move up the value chain. The miners had long since left, and the current owner, Centiless Corporation, had built a spaceport on top of the old-timey mining infrastructure. Now 6 Hebe was a node in the ITN, the Interplanetary Transit Network of low-energy pathways that slow cargo ships could ‘surf’ around the solar system, utilizing gravitational resonances. Near aphelion—where 6 Hebe was now—it actually orbited within Gap 2.5, where Jupiter’s gravity held sway like the ghostly hand of a wizard.
Tankers and container ships orbited the rock. They were moon-sized in comparison to the Kharbage Collector. Superlifters puttered around them, loading and unloading cargo before the cyclers drifted off on the next stage of their multi-year journeys. Petruzzelli navigated through the throng of radar blips. She synced and clamped.
“That wasn’t a very good landing,” Michael said, looking around from the comms officer’s workstation, where he was filing their arrival notification. “I felt the bump.”
“Take it up with the hub,” Petruzzelli said. “I’m going dirt-side. You stay here.”
“I want to go dirt-side, too.”
“No. We’re only going to be here for a few hours. Besides, we have recycling to offload and cargo to pick up. I need you to supervise that.”
“The hub can do it.”
“No,” Petruzzelli said. She braced one elbow against the flopping reflective cladding of the elevator shaft to hold it up. She used it as a mirror to spritz her face with foundation. False eyelashes came next, then hairspray to keep her mop in shape in the low gravity awaiting her. Might as well look good. She headed for the elevator. “You stay right here, or … or …”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll tell your daddy,” Petruzzelli said with finality, wagging a finger at his crestfallen face.
Michael Kharbage was nine years old. He was the biggest pain in the ass Petruzzelli had ever worked with, and she’d known a few.
A sense of freedom uplifted her as she strode out of the spaceport into Karl Ludwig City.
6 Hebe had no gravity to speak of. Mooching, browsing crowds jostled, and the public comms channel seethed with catcalls, quirky personal manifestoes, shopkeepers’ patter, and party invitations. The chaos spawned an aura of possibility that was missing from Petruzzelli’s workaday life. She glanced at shop displays, wondering if she could afford to treat herself to a new tattoo.
Her fantasies were interrupted by Captain Haddock. “We’ll be seeing you, then, darlin’,” he texted her. “Thanks for the ride.”
She spun, glimpsed the pirates on an upper-level street, and bounded after them.
Built on two enormous gantries that had been deliberately toppled after the cessation of mining operations on 6 Hebe, Karl Ludwig City was basically a multi-level, five-kilometer bridge from Port Hebe to nowhere. It sloped down. An expansion coil enclosed it, generating a magnetic field that provided active radiation shielding: essentially, the hab existed inside a giant superconducting magnet. Steam and smoke from sauna baths and kebab joints drifted in layers beneath the sun-lamps.
Petruzzelli caught up with the pirates. “Not so fast,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
“Ye can’t.” Haddock and his family were all in disguise: they wore burkas. This was a mistake, in Petruzzelli’s opinion. 6 Hebe was known for its post-Islamist culture. You would be more likely to encounter Muslim fundamentalists on Ceres. “People are staring,” Haddock pleaded.
“At you, not me,” Petruzzelli said.
They glided in giant strides past the bazaar; past water wholesalers’ offices and virtual ship showrooms; past niche IP agents specializing in every tiny part of a fusion engine that could break. After about four kilometers the multiple levels converged into a single, dark street. Holographic tigers, elephants, and belly dancers gyrated outside doors vanishingly high up in the walls. Petruzzelli smelled an aroma that made her think of her first boyfriend. A hundred meters further on, she caught herself thinking that Captain Haddock was actually quite attractive. She consulted her email, using her wrist tablet’s backlight to see by. They had come to nowhere—literally, Nowhere, Karl Ludwig City’s red-light district.
“Should be somewhere around here.”
“Aye, it’s that place,” Haddock said, pointing at a holographic Ganesh in a blue bikini.
The elephant god cued Petruzzelli to expect an Indian-themed bar, but instead they floated into a dive that could’ve been anywhere in the Midwest. A band played rock ‘n’ roll covers, abusing the wah-wah pedal. Human waitresses carried burgers and fries out of a tiny kitchen.
“Most people here used to be Indonesian,” Kiyoshi Yonezawa explained.
“I wish they’d switch the freaking pheromones off,” Petruzzelli huffed. She was still turned on from walking through the psychotropic misters positioned outside the bars and clubs of Nowhere. It was a form of advertising that hadn’t yet been made illegal. Ban something and people would come up with something worse.
“Oh, come on,” Yonezawa said. “It’s not that bad in here.”
She pinged for a drink, buying time to study him. Spaceborn and then some: two point four meters tall, two point five. Hips so narrow she could probably span them with her hands. Shaggy black hair hacked off at the shoulders. Smiling lips and the biggest, saddest bedroom eyes she’d ever seen. Dammit, those pheromones haven’t worn off yet, have they?
She deliberately focused on the epicanthic fo
lds rounding off those eyes, the sallowness of his skin. He could’ve passed as an East Asian mutt, but because she knew differently, his actual heritage seemed obvious. Pureblood. Pureblood. Ugh. Pureblood. The word killed her unreal feelings of lust. Better than a cold shower.
“So,” she said. “We’ve never met, but you’re famous, dude.”
She’d intended to alarm him, and his sudden stillness betrayed that she’d succeeded. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, I know all about you.”
“Whatever those slebs told you, the truth is worse,” he bantered, nodding at the pirates, who were sitting near the stage, drinking cola through the slits of their burkas.
“Oh, they haven’t told me anything about you. Tried to lose me on the way here, even. That’s how you can tell the real criminals: they don’t rat out their friends. Whereas people that are naturally law-abiding, in over their heads, people who landed themselves on the dark side through one moment’s surrender to greed or curiosity … they sing like fucking vid stars, dude. I’m talking about our mutual friend, Viola Budgett.” Petruzzelli sucked on the autoseal straw of her drink, which was ginger ale without any add-ins. She wanted to keep her wits about her. “Actually, scratch that. You’re not her friend. You’re blackmailing her to the tune of eight thousand a month. Or, if that’s how you treat your friends, you’re really not a very nice guy.”
Yonezawa recovered fast. “That’s libel,” he informed her
“Fact, buddy.”
There was a pause while he presumably tried to figure out how much proof she had. Presently he said, “Those payments are instalments. You can’t call it blackmail.”
“So you didn’t threaten to ruin her career, and her professor’s career, and get the entire astrophysics lab at the University of Vesta prosecuted for criminal activities?”
“How could I? They aren’t engaging in any criminal activities that I know of.”
His English was accented. Slight, but you could tell he wasn’t a native speaker.
The band segued into ‘Festa It Up,’ and Petruzzelli drank some more ginger ale. The conversation had reached the limits of her knowledge. She’d asked Budgett what, exactly, Kiyoshi Yonezawa was threatening them with, but on that point Budgett had kept mum. There was an omertà protocol in place at the U-Vesta astrophysics lab, and Petruzzelli didn’t know whether they were hiding something very, very bad, or something trivial that they only thought was very, very bad because they were law-abiding nerds who could easily be convinced that they would get the death penalty for not separating their recycling.
But Budgett had worked on the Kharbage Can. She was no stranger to gray-zone operations. She wouldn’t freak out over breaking some dumb rule.
So, on the whole, given the ISA angle, Petruzzelli was leaning towards very, very bad.
She’d hoped to get the truth out of Kiyoshi Yonezawa.
That was clearly not going to be easy.
“Chill out, buddy,” she said. “I’m just busting your chops. Instalments, you say? As in, payments on a transaction? Did you sell them something they shouldn’t have, like black tech?”
“Something like that. By the way, if you’ve been talking to Budgett, maybe she mentioned that they owe me ten K this month, actually. That’s including a late fee of twenty-five percent.” It was hard to see in the dim light, but his eyes seemed to be flickering from side to side.
“You’re pinging her as we speak,” Petruzzelli hazarded. “But she’s not answering.”
“She’s hiding behind you, I guess.”
“Nope. No one in the Bellicia ecohood is answering right now. Not email, not voice calls. Even Cydney Blaisze’s feed has quit.”
“Who are you, anyway?” The question sounded inattentive; she figured he was confirming her claim.
“Like I said, I’m a friend of Budgett’s.”
“Yeah?”
“Haddock and company have been travelling on my ship. Which isn’t such a coincidence, if you think about it. Haddock knows Budgett, and he knows you. He’s like this human ITN, connecting far-flung planets.”
“The planet of good and the planet of evil.”
“You could put it like that. But I wouldn’t. Reality is gray, not black and white. Budgett may have some good colleagues at the university, but she’s a cyborg engineer with no sense of right and wrong. And I don’t think of myself as evil.”
His gaze came back to her. “Don’t you?”
“Check my public profile,” she shrugged. “Actually, I’m sure you already have.”
“Captain of the Kharbage Collector, achieved the rank of general in Existential Threat IV, currently an Idiran commander in Second Idiran War. Mixed Anglo-European heritage. That tells me nothing about you. Well, actually, it tells me one thing.”
“What?”
“The only people who put their DNA in their public profiles are—”
“Idiots. You have to be dumber than shit to put your actual DNA out there for hackers to grab. That’s just my ethnic category. I’m—”
“Scared. The only people who put their ethnic category, if you like, in their public profiles are scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of being mistaken for purebloods.”
“I’m three-quarters Italian. One-quarter American mutt.”
“OK.”
Petruzzelli sucked air through her straw. She thumbed through the menu on her wrist tablet.
“I understand the logic,” Yonezawa said. “You wouldn’t want anyone to think you were like me.”
Petruzzelli ordered a halal Scotch—screw the cost—and looked up. “Dude, I’m not like you. I pilot a recycling barge. I’m not a smuggler with a sideline in extortion.”
“No? Based on what I hear from Haddock, it seems like that’s a distinction without a difference.”
Petruzzelli leaned across the table. She noticed a pendant in the open neck of Yonezawa’s shirt. It was a silver plus sign, the vertical arm a bit longer than the horizontal one. “If you even think about blackmailing me, chinkie, let me tell you right now: try it, and you’re gonna take a one-way ride to a world of sorrow. Like you can’t even imagine.”
“You don’t know what I can imagine,” Yonezawa said. The waitress brought Petruzzelli’s Scotch, together with a plate of cheese fries that Yonezawa must have ordered. “Anyway, you called me ‘chinkie,’” he said in a softer tone. They had both been yelling over the noise of the band. “That’s not accurate. I’m not Chinese, I’m Japanese.”
Petruzzelli sat back, feeling a bit stupid. Her outburst had been excessive. She watched Yonezawa eat fries. He was unnaturally neat about it, wiping his fingers after each one. She confessed, “I knew that. It just kind of popped out.”
“Understandable.”
“I knew you were Japanese.” The time had come to fess up. “I used to work on the Kharbage Can. I was the one who piloted the Cheap Trick to 11073 Galapagos.” With these words, she violated her NDA with the ISA for the first time. Wasn’t much harm in telling the truth to a fellow criminal. “I had a Star Force combat program to work with. Program and me got three of the toilet rolls, but we missed the last one. The one that blew your home rock to pieces.”
He was silent.
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault,” he said.
“Anyway; Budgett told me that’s where you’re from. Small solar system, huh?”
Yonezawa ate another fry. He scratched the inside of his left forearm through his shirt. “So, have you got my money?”
xxi.
Elfrida held Amy on her lap. The Jack Russell kept trying to lick her nose. “She likes you,” Jimmy said, laughing.
“I like dogs. We had a beagle when I was a kid.” They were sitting in the communal kitchen of Liberty Village. The other Chinese jostled in the doorway, staring. Elfrida had a pouch of green tea in front of her. Jimmy was chain-vaping a clove cigarette.
“Beagles are lovely,” he said. “I am a member of the Dog Worshipping
Society of Outer Space. Many of our members own beagles. They were popular on the Asteroid of the Heavenly Perfume especially.”
“Asteroid of the Heavenly Perfume?”
“Yes, in the Inner Belt. Certainly you know that the PLAN attacked it five years ago and killed many thousands of people.”
“I must have missed those headlines,” Elfrida said. No way she wouldn’t have heard about a kilodeath incident. “Was it a—a Chinese colony?”
“Of course.”
Elfrida said slowly, “Is it … I’m getting the feeling that it isn’t true, after all, that the Chinese don’t come into space.”
“Of course we do. There are many Chinese colonies in the Belt. You don’t know this?”
He was looking at her as if she were brain-damaged. “The Great Firewall,” she said. “I guess your government doesn’t advertise what it’s doing. Ha. Advertise.” Dancing, singing, begging, pleading advertisements covered the walls of the kitchen, and even the appliances. Elfrida’s head was starting to ache all over again from the background noise. She didn’t know how the Chinese stood it. “Well, I guess that’s understandable. Given the—the external risks.”
“Our government lies,” Jimmy said flatly.
“That’s kind of like the definition of government,” Elfrida offered.
He leaned towards her, his pouchy face taut with intensity.“They hide the risks. But they couldn’t hide the destruction of the Asteroid of the Heavenly Perfume. Too many people had family members there, so it became news. After that, many people thought that it is better to disembowel a frog than to swallow a chainsaw! So we decided to found a new colony that would not be subject to these external risks.” He reached out and tapped the back of her hand. Elfrida flinched. She had already noticed that the Chinese had a different concept of personal space: they thought nothing of brushing past you, or casually touching you to make a point. “Therefore we set up a syndicate and made a contract with Virgin Atomic. But now we think that VA was dishonest with us. We are angry.”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 18