“Join the club,” Elfrida mumbled.
“4 Vesta is not safe!”
“No shit.” The thought of Cydney was like a constant, dull pain in her stomach.
“Do you know what they are doing at the de Grey Institute? The ISA agent, Miss Doyle, wants them to tell her, but they are refusing. This is putting many people’s lives in danger.”
Elfrida straightened. She looked past Jimmy, to the rubbernecking construction workers in the doorway. “I don’t know what they’re up to.” In her mind, that mysterious signal etched its trajectory across the screen. Calling Gap 2.5. Calling 99984 Ravilious. “But I want to find out, too.”
She explained what she had in mind. As she spoke, Jimmy Liu began to smile. “The highest mountain is low at the bottom,” he said joyously.
“I knew you had a spark of Abenteuerlust,” Elfrida said, striking back with her kitchen German. “That means ‘spirit of adventure.’”
“This is a wonderful idea, Miss Goto. But wait. Isn’t there a problem? They do not trust us, they don’t tell us anything—”
“Got that covered,” Elfrida said. “I assume you guys have a spaceship hidden somewhere on this rock?”
★
“Here’s your doggone money,” Petruzzelli said. Banging at her wrist tablet, she sent a secure payment to the ID Kiyoshi Yonezawa had given her. “I hope you aren’t one of those foilhats who only accepts physical palladium, because what you’re getting is what I’ve got. Ten thousand spiders, payable to Loyola Holdings, Inc. And that’s obviously a front company officered by rent-a-directors.”
“I actually prefer physical iridium,” Yonezawa said. “But spiders are good. Thanks … Where are you going?” She had stood up. “Stay a bit longer. You haven’t even finished your drink.”
“Freaking halal Scotch,” Petruzzelli said. “Might as well pour it straight into the recycler.” But she sat down again.
“Personally, I prefer C-and-C to alcohol,” Yonezawa said, referring to the compounds of cathine and cathinone that were commonly used as alcohol substitutes in sharia-compliant drinks. “It doesn’t screw with your mental faculties in the same way.”
“You say that like it’s a good thing.”
“I’m a solo operator. If I pass out drunk, who’s going to take over?”
“Your hub, I assume?” Petruzzelli sniped. “Unless you’re one of those purists who won’t work with machine intelligences.”
“I wish I didn’t have to,” he said seriously. “But extreme purism just doesn’t work. It’s not possible for a human to pilot a spaceship alone. It’s not even possible for a hundred humans.”
“You could, but you probably wouldn’t have your spaceship very long. We’re apes. We’re not optimized for this stuff.”
“Right. You need some help from the machines. So the question becomes, where do you draw the line?”
“I’ve never been a huge fan of drawing lines,” Petruzzelli drawled. She realized to her consternation and amusement that she was flirting with him. It wasn’t the artificial pheromones this time: the Ganesha didn’t pump that stuff. Calling ironic attention to her mood, she cooed, “So, do you come here often?”
He didn’t seem to get the joke. “Sometimes. When I’m on-rock.”
“I guess that’s your truck in 30-A.”
“How’d you know?”
Petruzzelli swallowed a sudden lump of sadness. “Because I’ve seen one just like it before. It’s a Hitachi-Samsung Longvoyager. You don’t see many of them lumbering around the solar system nowadays.”
“We had two of them: the St. Francis and the Nagasaki. When we settled on 11073 Galapagos, we splarted the Nagasaki to the asteroid. We used her attitude adjusters to spin the rock up. Then we covered her over and turned her into a cathedral.”
“And when the PLAN came, your people escaped in her. It was amazing.”
“Most of them,” he corrected her. “Two thousand, three hundred, and eighty-seven of us died. But, hey, that’s still a great survival rate for a PLAN attack, right?” He toyed with the cuff of his left sleeve. “The survivors live on Ceres now. They’re OK, they’ve got jobs.”
“So you aren’t acting as their agent.”
“Not anymore.”
“Who are you working for, then?”
“Myself. The Unicorn—I renamed her—is old, as you noticed. To be honest, she’s falling apart. I need to replace the reactor.”
“That’s gonna cost a ton.”
“Exactly, but you helped a little bit today.” He smiled and pushed off from his chair.
Petruzzelli reached out and grabbed his wrist. “A minute ago you were asking me to stay, and now you’re the one trying to leave.”
“Is there some reason I shouldn’t leave?”
Because I don’t believe a word you’ve told me, Petruzzelli thought. Well, maybe about your ship needing repairs. But that’s it.
Because you’re obviously a junkie, and you want to slink off and shoot some dope into your cubital port. And I won’t let anyone do that shit if I can stop them.
Because my friends are in danger on 4 Vesta, and you’ve got something to do with it, and I won’t let you just walk away.
Because …
“Because,” she said, looking into his eyes, “I saw outside that they have private party rooms here.”
★
Several hours later, Petruzzelli woke up in mid-air. She must have kicked the mattress in her sleep. That had been enough to dislodge her and send her drifting towards the ceiling. Below her, Yonezawa sprawled on his back, snoring. She caught the sex trapeze, hung by her knees, and said, “Wake up.”
Yonezawa opened one eye and then the other. “Hey there.”
Petruzzelli floated down on top of him. She matched the position of her feet to his, which put her face in the middle of his chest—she was that much shorter. She rested her cheek on his skinny chest and played with his pendant. “This is cool. What is it?”
“You don’t know?” He stroked her back. “It’s zero four hundred local time. I’ve got to get going.”
“Me, too.”
“Maybe we can do this again sometime.”
“Yeah. You’re pretty hot in the sack, for a …”
“Pureblood?”
“I was going to say, for a junkie.”
“Junkie?”
“The port would be a clue.” She fingered the tiny port implanted in his left forearm to give access to the cubital vein.
“There are other reasons to have a cubital port. I use it as an IV. Telepresence. I sim some.”
Petruzzelli rolled her eyes. He reached to the other side of the bed and retrieved an object like a skinny black caterpillar from the sheets. He made it walk up her arm. It was one of her false eyelashes.
“Give me that!” Laughing, Petruzzelli grabbed for it. They wrestled.
“Anyone can be a great lover in micro-gee,” she panted.
“True. I did notice that you’re a bit out of shape.”
“Who’s out of shape?”
“Stop it!”
“Uhhhnnh ….”
“… On second thoughts, don’t stop it.”
“Uhhh.”
They parted outside the Ganesha. The holograms of Nowhere flickered and the pleasure-seekers meandered just as they had eight hours ago. Day never came here.
The pirates sat on the path that led down to the hab floor. Kelp was curled up asleep on a pile of burkas.
“Ahoy, miscreants!” Haddock hailed Petruzzelli and Yonezawa. “Have the pair o’ ye no decency?”
“Not a shred,” Petruzzelli said. She made her eyebrow smileys stick their tongues out. Then she looked at her wrist tablet. “Blistering barnacles! I gotta run.”
The pirates cracked up.
“It’s catching,” Petruzzelli admitted. “I even said that when Elfrida was on board. I don’t think she noticed, though.”
She blew a kiss to Yonezawa and hurried back towards the spaceport.
Back on board the Kharbage Collector, she brushed aside Michael’s questions about where she’d been. She went straight down to sick-bay and swabbed herself. She handed the results to the diagnostic terminal, went back to the bridge, and checked the duty log.
Michael had unloaded the pirates’ Superlifter, embarked a clutch of passengers for remote asteroids in the Vesta sector, loaded the cargo that they were scheduled to pick up here, and consigned their recycling to the 6 Hebe processing facility, getting a pretty good price for it. “Well done,” she congratulated him, surprised.
Then she saw that he’d done all that in an hour and a half, and spent the rest of the time playing Second Idiran War, as her.
“Grrrrr!”
Sick-bay pinged her workstation. “Sequencing complete. Save this DNA record?”
“Save,” Petruzzelli typed. Then she accessed the hub’s search space. “SEARCH TERMS:
“A search of the entire internet will take an estimated 57 hours, 2 minutes, and forty-seven seconds.”
“Go for it.”
Kiyoshi Yonezawa might have evaded her questions. He might hide his skulduggery behind shell companies. But DNA was a different kind of data. It couldn’t lie, dissemble, or hide (not without cash outlays far beyond the reach of a smuggler, anyway). And it left traces behind, if you were as careless with it as Kiyoshi Yonezawa had already proved himself to be. However long it might take, the Kharbage Collector’s hub would find them.
xxii.
Back on the Unicorn, Kiyoshi settled into his nest and plugged his IV into his cubital port. He dialed in a cocktail of sodium chloride, potassium, vitamin B, an anti-nausea drug, and a mild painkiller.
He hadn’t lied to Petruzzelli: he wasn’t a junkie. In a world where anti-addiction treatment was cheaply and widely available, no one had to be a junkie if they didn’t want to be. Ergo, he wasn’t one. This dose would have embarrassed any recreational doper, anyway. It was a hangover cure.
The Unicorn’s operations module resounded with the excited voices of Kiyoshi’s newly embarked passengers. The racket made his head hurt. Eyemask in place, he exited the bridge of the Unicorn, and walked down the dark, cool corridor that led to the peaceful environs of the St. Francis, his sim version of the ship.
“We’re cleared to launch,” Jun said. “Cargo’s all loaded. Including the Koreans.”
Jun Yonezawa had died on 11073 Galapagos. Kiyoshi had brought him back by customizing a high-end software-based MI—the type sold as add-ons for game play—with archived video and the tearful recollections of their mother, recorded at their new home on Ceres.
Alive, Jun had been gifted, devout, a natural leader. Going places, for sure. Now he was trapped in the hub of the Unicorn, going nowhere except the places where Kiyoshi could make a buck for the boss-man. You win some, you lose some.
Through the machine-learning process, the software-based Jun had become so realistic that he was often a pain in the ass. But as Kiyoshi had hinted to Alicia Petruzzelli, he couldn’t do without him anymore.
“They’re namsadang,” he told Jun. “Not really Korean. Their native language is English. Did you introduce yourself?”
“I’m not that stupid.”
On the re-imagined bridge of the St. Francis, officers walked around, typed on antiquated consoles, and sailed paper airplanes across the low-ceilinged, hexagonal space. They were phantoms with limited interactivity. The Unicorn’s hub was feeble by modern standards: there were more powerful processing crystals in the ship’s fridge. Kiyoshi could not give more than a fraction of the hub’s capacity over to the sim, much as he might’ve liked to, and the lion’s share of that had to go to Jun.
His brother’s black eyebrows knitted. Kiyoshi could always tell when Jun was pissed. It made him smile.
“Did you tell the namsadang where we’re going?” Kiyoshi asked, while heading for the cyberwarfare officer’s workstation. (The St. Francis had not originally had a cyberwarfare officer, being a simple cargo ship. Kiyoshi had created the position because, c’mon. Cyberwarfare.)
“No,” Jun said. “I didn’t tell them where we’re going, because we’re not taking them.”
Kiyoshi affected puzzlement. “We’ve got sixty-three emigrants on board. We’ve got consumables, habs, D/S bots, the whole construction kit. And you want to offload the guys who make the magic happen?”
“They told me to forget about 3982440 Twizzler. Too risky.”
“We’re not going to 3982440 Twizzler.”
“So where are we going?”
“I don’t know yet.” Kiyoshi cleared his throat to get the cyberwarfare officer’s attention. “Hey. Busy? Sorry.” He was polite to the imaginary man, keeping up his end of the simulation. “Mind decrypting this, if you’ve got a minute?” He handed over a a memory crystal embedded in a signet ring. Rockin’ it 2200 style. In reality, he was transferring the file from his BCI to the hub.
He turned around and found Jun right behind him. “I’ve been listening to the passengers,” Jun said.
“Eavesdropping again?”
“I’m an MI grafted to the hub, with access to all its data inputs. I can’t selectively turn my eyes and ears off when I hear something you don’t want me to know about.”
Kiyoshi looked sorrowfully at him. “Total immersion killer,” he said.
“Whoops, my bad,” Jun said, unapologetic.
Kiyoshi sauntered over to the pilot’s workstation. He sat down (the simulation of gravity was unsatisfactory) and initiated the launch procedure. The commands he gave here were executed in real life. That was an absolute no-no in sim design, a risk factor for catastrophic mix-ups. But Kiyoshi hadn’t put a foot wrong yet, and was confident he never would. He made a little speech to the passengers, welcoming them to the Unicorn, congratulating them on their decision to start a new life in the asteroid belt, and instructing them to prepare for acceleration in approximately thirty minutes. Then he ran a few fuel / payload calculations.
Though dwarfed by the tankers in orbit around 6 Hebe, the Unicorn was one stupid-big space truck. Its century-old deuterium-deuterium fusion drive kicked out a mere 70,000 newtons of thrust under realistic conditions. Against that, its bulbous hull enclosed a total volume of 277,000 cubic meters. On the plus side, the only cargo on board right now was the stuff for the planned excavation on 3982440 Twizzler. Kiyoshi’s sixty-three paying passengers and the five pirates were all travelling in the operations module (designed on last-century assumptions to accommodate a crew of 100 or more). So the ship massed just 97,621 tons right now, and he’d refueled ahead of the surge in demand he was anticipating. He could make it home from here in a week, if he decided to do that.
The Unicorn declamped and fell away from Port Hebe under auxiliary power. You weren’t allowed to burn too near an inhabited rock, for obvious reasons. Kiyoshi rose from the pilot’s workstation. Jun was waiting for him.
“They’re talking about 4 Vesta. No one knows what’s going on there. Total information blackout; that probably means the ISA is involved. Even Cydney Blaisze’s feed has quit.”
“Yeah. About that.” Kiyoshi led Jun off the bridge. They went up to the observation deck that Kiyoshi had added to the sim, in disregard of authenticity and the basic principles of spaceship design, because c’mon: an observation deck. 6 Hebe hung in front of the vast windows, slowly rolling, like a misshapen die.
“I talked to the boss-man,” Kiyoshi told his brother.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Because I called him while I was in Karl Ludwig City.” Because I didn’t want you listening in. But he was telling Jun now.
“What’d he say?”
“He wants us to bug out. He didn’t even want me to wait for our passengers to board. He said, and I quote, ‘Come home. Burn everything that rotten old ship’s got to burn. Just get away from 4 Vesta. Preferably, several hundred million kilometers away.”
“He’s pissed.”
<
br /> “He’s scared. Maybe he knows something we don’t. Or maybe he’s just being rational.” Kiyoshi shrugged. “I’m not scared. We’ve got a thousand tons of hybrid oak waiting for us on 1034472 Petergrave, already paid for, and a shitload of soy products for 976011 Lamorra in the freezer. I figure we make those runs and then head home. The passengers can come along for the ride.”
“That’s gonna be fun.”
“A laugh a minute,” Kiyoshi agreed.
Jun flicked a smile at him: on, off. Then his face went dark and hard, like the day he’d followed Kiyoshi to the cave where the junior high goof-off gang drank home-brewed shochu and discussed girls. “This is wrong,” he said. Same thing he’d said that day, when he was ten years old.
“Draft that course, would you?”
“It’s the thing. If it gets loose, everyone on 4 Vesta will be in danger. That asteroid has 122,684 inhabitants. Their lives will be in jeopardy, and it’s our fault.”
“If it gets loose? I’m assuming it already has.”
Jun went quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Can’t have. We’d know about it. Even the ISA can’t silence that many people, not completely.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“I want you to man up.”
Kiyoshi breathed in and out, counted to five. “Let’s get one thing straight. You’re here to provide light entertainment. You’re not my conscience.”
“Oh no? Because I thought that’s exactly what I was. You sure need one, and your own seems to have gone missing. Maybe you killed it with all the drugs. Oh, sorry. Aren’t I being entertaining enough?”
Kirin had cocked his fist, but had realized just in time how stupid it would be to hit someone who a) wasn’t real and b) was deliberately winding him up.
“You’re too goddamn realistic, is all.”
He meant that to ratchet down the tension, but Jun didn’t take the off-ramp.
“So log out of the sim. Go and talk to your passengers. Tell them everything’s OK, but they won’t be getting the fresh start they expected. Oh yes, and the extinction of human civilization may be just around the corner. But everything’s just hunky-dory.”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 19