Kiyoshi had had enough of this. What were things coming to, when you couldn’t even count on a sim for escapism? He turned and left the observation deck. He headed for the ship’s pharmacy, a fluorescent-lit hole in the wall modelled on the one near their home on 11073 Galapagos. He dragged a finger along the rows of dingy bottles, cursing the constraints he’d programmed into it himself, which wouldn’t let him get a fix without jumping through the sim’s hoops.
“Do you even pray anymore?” Jun said.
Kiyoshi twitched, bottles cascading from his hands. With his back to Jun, facing the shelves, he said, “It’s not that simple. I lost my faith when I first went into space. You know that. The bigness of the solar system, the choices you get … I made a lot of wrong choices. I admit that. But I’m clean now.”
“Apart from the nicotine, the caffeine, the tranquilizers—”
“Now you’re getting on my case about a few cigarettes?”
The cyberwarfare officer pinged Kiyoshi. “Done with that decrypt, sir.” At the same instant, Jun’s head twitched in an inhuman way. “Hey, that’s interesting.”
“Lemme see.”
Jun clicked his fingers. Out of thin air, he unrolled a scroll of washi paper inscribed with a list of names, IDs, dates, and IRCS coordinates. “What’s this?”
“It’s the contact log from the wrist tablet of a recycler captain called Alicia Petruzzelli.” Kiyoshi took the scroll and scanned it. Going back a week, the log was briefer than he would have expected. Petruzzelli apparently didn’t have very many friends.
“Oh, so that’s where you were last night,” Jun said.
“Yeah. I grabbed this while she was sleeping.” Fingerprint recognition security was excellent, but it had one big drawback: you could break it by pressing the finger of its owner onto the screen, if she was sleeping soundly. If she was very tired.
“Thou shalt not steal,” Jun muttered.
Kiyoshi met his eyes, daring him to say that again. “She’s one of Haddock’s friends. Would have been better if she never found out who I am. But she did, and now she knows too much. This evens up the score … kinda.”
One ID cropped up twenty times in a row. The calls to it had been made from Petruzzelli’s ship’s hub. She’d synced its comms log with her tablet. If Kiyoshi had known she was in the habit of doing something as dumb as that, he could have dredged a lot more information off her wrist tablet. Too late now. But at least he had this ID, and the name that went with it. “Goto … Elfrida.”
Jun propped his shoulders against the shelves. He looked like he was in need of a pick-me-up. It took a lot to make an MI look like that.
“I remember her,” Jun said.
“Yeah.”
“She ate me.”
xxiii.
The Guangrong-class technical vessel Kekào—Elfrida had been told that its name meant trustworthy—lifted off from a crater a few kilometers to the south of Rheasilvia Mons. At blinding speed, it vanished into space.
The Virgin Atomic satellites in orbit around Vesta sent a storm of panicky queries to each other and to their human operators.
“What the hell?” demanded the de Grey Institute’s satellite. “That looked like one of the Chinese ships!”
“It was,” said Resources, which had gotten the best pictures. “It was the mission-capable Guangrong-class technical Kekào. I’m not sure that mission-capable is an accurate translation, though. It isn’t armed: the Chinese government doesn’t permit its ships to carry lethal weapons. That being the case, I wouldn’t call it a technical, either. A better translation might be … hmm … tuk-tuk.” It made an electronic noise which some of its colleagues interpreted as computerese for laughter.
“This is no time for your puerile humor,” the de Grey Institute said. “They’re running away! Rats off a sinking ship.”
“I don’t think so,” the Big Dig’s comms satellite said. “Based on the Kekào’s acceleration and mass profile, there were no humans on board. Or if there were, they’re strawberry jam now.”
José Running Horse spoke up via the PORMS. “No one on board. Ship was launched without our knowledge. Now under the control of its navigation computer.”
The de Grey Institute shouted, “Why didn’t you shoot it down, you meat-fingered halfwit?”
At the same time, Resources said, “Are you sure?”
There was a momentary silence on the satellites’ communication band. Running Horse broke it. “XX Resources: yes, I am comfortable with the assumption that the Kekào is on autopilot. If the chinkies had lost control of the ship, they’d be in here yelling their heads off. Which they aren’t. They’re lying low, hoping we haven’t noticed that it’s gone. XX de Grey Institute: Thanks for proving why MIs need human controllers.”
“Let’s try to guess where it’s going,” the de Grey Institute said. “Personally, I vote for ‘To fetch the Chinese army.’’ It referred to the force officially known as CTDF (China Territorial Defense Force), whose brief was to defend Chinese investments in space against the PLAN, but which was suspected to have broader military capabilities. “That might be an option, actually.”
“You haven’t had a security breach, have you?” Resources screeched.
“Absolutely not!” the de Grey Institute said. “We were having some cooling issues, but we’ve sorted those out now. Same old, same old, in fact. Stalemate, with no prospect of a breakthrough. Or of a breakdown on our side, just to reassure you and your operators. No, all’s copacetic here! Except for the fact that the ISA is threatening to cut off the power to a hundred thousand people. That’s what I’m concerned about. No further directives from corporate regarding that situation, eh?”
“Still waiting,” said the Big Dig comms satellite.
“Fuck corporate,” said José Running Horse.
“Seconded,” said Resources.
The remaining satellites, which belonged to the Bellicia ecohood, were silent. Shoshanna Doyle had taken them over, and she was even now maneuvering them into new orbits, a development that José Running Horse was watching closely.
Therefore, he could be forgiven for not paying close attention to the other half of his job: monitoring the excavation at the Big Dig.
The first he knew of Jimmy Liu’s change of heart was when Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir came flying into his office, screaming, “Oh my God! Do something! Stop it!”
Running Horse looked up from his 3D radar plot. His assistant sat slack-jawed in front of a screen that depicted the junction of the up- and down-ramps. The entrance to the down-ramp was not visible at the moment. It was blocked by the wasp-striped bulk of a boom-type roadheader. Meter by meter, the colossal machine emerged into view. It resembled a brontosaurus whose head was a chain-saw.
Trundling on eighteen hollow titanium tyres, it turned towards the cavern that held the staff habs.
Running Horse reached into his 3D display and punched a red button. A gun safe appeared. He twisted the handle. This graphic represented the emergency defense system. It contained a flechette cannon, which would rise out of a cunningly disguised trapdoor in front of the staff habs, aimed at Liberty Village. Corporate had thought it wise to take precautions when dealing with the Chinese. That now looked to have been prescient. He hoped the flechette cannon would stop the roadheader.
Before he could fire it, however, he needed to answer his security questions.
“Oh my God,” his assistant shouted, overcoming stupefaction as the roadheader loomed into the cavern. “They’re going to kill us all!”
Sigurjónsdóttir started to cry. “My children are going to be orphans. I knew I shouldn’t have taken this job.”
“Fuck it,” Running Horse muttered. “What did I put for ‘favorite food in tenth grade?’ I know it was Count Chocula.”
The roadheader stopped in the middle of the cavern. It raised its chainsaw-like slicer head.
“Choc Insanity!” Running Horse exclaimed. “I switched after the health nazis took the marshmallows
outta Count Chocula. Now I remember.” The gun safe swung open. The flechette cannon rose out of the cavern’s floor like a submarine’s periscope.
Five figures burst from the airlock of Liberty Village. They dashed to the excavator and vaulted into its scoop. Four of them were people in EVA suits. One was a dog, ditto. The roadheader started to back up.
Sigurjónsdóttir clamped her hands around Running Horse’s wrists. “Don’t fire! They’re going away!”
“Exactly,” Running Horse growled.
“Don’t fire,” Sigurjónsdóttir said, her soft weight resting on his arms. Her tears fell on his tattoos. “Let them go, if they want to. No more senseless deaths. Please.”
Reluctantly—he had wanted to try out the flechette cannon—Running Horse relented. “’No more senseless deaths? I figure we’re just getting started.”
★
“We made it!” Elfrida exclaimed, laughing wildly. The Rheasilvia Crater spread before them. The roadheader lurched downhill along a set of tyre tracks even broader than it was.
“That’s an interesting way of putting it,” Mendoza said. “Looks to me like we just embarked on a thousand-kilometer journey, on a digger. With no supplies. With—”
“Would you rather stay behind, Mendoza?”
“No, I—”
“Because you don’t have to come. The guy who let you out of that capsule? He’s probably going to be in a lot of trouble when they realize you’re gone. So if you’re just going to sit there and moan—”
“Goto. Thanks. I mean it. I would’ve lost my mind if I had to lie there and stare at the walls any longer, wondering what the hell is going on.”
“That guy owed Jimmy a favor. But I think he also must have realized that it was just stupid to keep you imprisoned when the whole freaking asteroid is now …” Elfrida shivered in her suit. She was thinking: a prison.
But they weren’t trapped here. This wasn’t like being stuck in the ruin of St. Peter’s, tumbling through space with only the corpse of Jun Yonezawa for company. Escape would be theirs for the asking. The Chinese had more ships.
“So what’s been happening while I was in the brig?” Mendoza said.
Elfrida did her best to fill him in. She had reached the part about Cydney being held hostage by Shoshanna’s gang, when Jimmy interrupted. “We are being pursued!”
He was remotely monitoring the Chinese-installed cameras in the Big Dig.
“A small vehicle is climbing the ramp at high speed! It will overtake us within a few minutes. Please prepare to return fire!”
“We don’t have weapons,” Elfrida said.
“Oh,” Jimmy said. “I thought all those suits are equipped with plasma pistols.”
Mendoza and Elfrida looked down at the logo-bedizened EVA suits they had ‘borrowed’ from the Big Dig. Elfrida noticed that one of the bulges on her thigh had a skull-and-crossbones icon on it. She remembered Sigurjónsdóttir drawing down on Rurumi. She unsnapped the pouch. “Oh my,” she said as a plasma pistol floated into her glove. Her fingers physically tingled with knowledge of the weapon’s lethality, as if she were handling a snake.
“Holy crap,” Mendoza swore, handling his own pistol. “This ain’t no PEPgun.”
“Here they come!” Jimmy shouted.
“I can’t do this,” Mendoza said. “I’ve never fired a weapon in my life.”
Elfrida cast him an irritated glance. “Neither have I.” They were riding in the roadheader’s cab, an unpressurized box that was meant to defend the operator against flying rubble, not the (lack of) elements. She scrambled out and ducked under one of the hydraulic pistons that powered the boom. Far below, scree like broken glass spurted lazily from the roadheader’s tyres. But the conveyor belt attached to the scoop was as broad as a road. She took a deep breath and jumped down to it. She bounded to the back of the roadheader, where the rubble would ordinarily cascade off into a hopper.
“They are catching up!” Jimmy squealed. The pursuing vehicle sprang into view, hopping down the track after them.
Wrapping an elbow around one of the struts that supported the upper chassis, Elfrida tried to aim. The pistol’s laser sight bounced over the cliffs of Rheasilvia Mons.
“Don’t shoot!” Mendoza shouted in her helmet.
“What? Why?”
“It’s our rover!”
Elfrida instinctively tried to shade her eyes to see better. Her pistol clonked against her faceplate. The pursuing vehicle soared off a low rise and hurtled straight at her. She flung herself aside, swinging out with her legs parallel to the ground. The vehicle landed on the conveyor belt and braked just in time to avoid zooming off the front end. It was their rover.
Rurumi jumped out. She tapped her head and pointed at Elfrida’s helmet. Then she shinned up the struts and vanished over the edge of the upper chassis.
Elfrida followed, growling to herself.
In the cab, the phavatar was having a blissful reunion with Amy the terrier. Mendoza had figured out why Rurumi hadn’t been able to hail them: information security again. After fiddling with their suits’ comms settings, they were able to communicate with the phavatar.
“Lovatsky, you there?” was Elfrida’s first question.
“No,” Rurumi said. “He’s abandoned me. You did, too.” Her mouth wobbled. “You promised you wouldn’t leave me behind again!”
“We were in a hurry,” Mendoza apologized. He turned his faceplate towards Elfrida. “Well, now we’ve got some gear: whatever was in the rover. Pouch noodles. The suction toilet.”
“We were going to pick up supplies from the Chinese parking lot,” Elfrida said grumpily.
“Now we won’t have to. Right, Jimmy?”
“It is not necessary,” Jimmy agreed. “We will make a bigger head start if we don’t stop.”
But Rurumi was not done with her faux victim pose. “You were going to shoot me!” she said to Elfrida, saucer-like eyes glistening.
“Sure,” Elfrida said.
“She wouldn’t have,” Mendoza laughed. “She doesn’t even know how to use that thing.”
“Turns out it’s easy,” Elfrida returned. “Just point and squeeze.” And you were going to pull the trigger, a little shocked voice whispered to her. Even though you thought you’d be shooting at humans. “I still have to get the hang of aiming,” she admitted.
Their other companion, who had been entirely silent so far, spoke up. “I want try.” He extended his glove. Elfrida looked up—and up—at him. Built like an Imperial-red brick shithouse, Wang Gulong was, she suspected, the long-lost Chinese twin of José Running Horse. Jimmy had introduced him as a software expert.
“Uh. OK,” she said, surrendering the pistol.
Even though he was wearing an EVA suit and standing behind her, she felt Mendoza tense up.
“Cool,” said Wang Gulong, ejecting the pistol’s supercapacitor power pack. He returned the pistol to her. “You. Give,” he said to Mendoza.
After a long moment, Mendoza surrendered his pistol. He opened an encrypted channel to Elfrida. His voice shook with anger and anxiety. “I hope you’re right about these guys, because the Jolly Red Giant here has just taken away our only advantage.”
“They’re OK,” Elfrida insisted. “I didn’t get a chance to tell you, but they’ve even lent us a spaceship.”
★
The Kekào screamed through space on a brachistochrone trajectory topping out at 6 gees of acceleration, under the apathetic control of its navigation computer. Spaceships built by UN corporations were not normally designed with specific impulse capabilities this great. It would have been pointless, since humans could not tolerate more than a few gees continuously without surgical adaptation, and spaceships were always crewed by humans. The exceptions—very fast couriers and very slow ITN cyclers—were not autonomous but remotely operated, again by humans.
Things were different on the Chinese side of the Great Firewall. The fact was that the Chinese relied on AI to an extent unthinkable
in the UN. If this fact were widely known, it might have sparked the war that both sides desperately wanted to avoid.
The Kekào was designed to fly by itself, and it was doing so. But it possessed equipment specifically for the purpose of preventing anyone from finding this out.
It deployed this equipment upon docking with the asteroid 550363 Montego.
“Hello, Extropians!” cooed a sweet female voice. “Your ride’s here!”
Hugh Meredith-Pike, who had masterminded their relocation to the asteroid belt, raised his head blearily. He focused on the screen inches from his face (he had tied himself to the operations console before going to sleep, lest anyone should try to dislodge him from it). On the screen, an East Asian woman with a pretty girl-next-door face smiled and waved at him. “Who are you?” he grunted.
“I’m the cabin manager of the Trustworthy! We’re friends of Janice Rand’s. She asked us to come and pick you up!”
Meredith-Pike pushed himself upright. His self-inflicted bonds stopped him from floating away. He had thought that the UNVRP woman had abandoned them. She hadn’t. She’d sent the Trustworthy to their rescue. Or had she? Could he trust this visitor?
The lights, dimmed to save power, cast the wobbly shadows of his drifting, cretinously beaming companions on the walls. They were blissing out in shifts, after what had happened last time. There was a smell of vomit. The air tasted stale. In a corner, the children were fighting over the last pouch of cherry-vanilla pudding.
“Beam us the fuck up, Scotty,” croaked Meredith-Pike, who had been fatally influenced as a child by fictional visions of the future.
The smiling, friendly crew of the Trustworthy escorted the Extropian Collective to their ship. After their ordeal, it seemed like a luxury hotel.
The dilapidated phavatar belonging to the Kharbage Collector was left in the Bigelow hab, a mute witness to man’s indifference to machines—and for that matter, machines’ indifference to each other.
Aboard the Trustworthy, the Extropians devoted themselves to their first real meal in weeks (no one minded that it was mostly rice), and the cabin crew went back into the ‘cockpit’ and turned themselves off.
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 20