“Whatever we do, we have to do it soon,” Satterthwaite said, running his hands through his hair. “One circuit of the ringrail takes roughly an hour. Before long we’re going to be back where we started, and one assumes that bad things may start happening again.”
“Fifty-three minutes,” Mendoza said. “Takes fifty-three minutes.” Elfrida felt his voice vibrate through her own body. She was still holding onto him. He had folded his own hands over hers, which were linked in front of his chest. She freed herself, breathing raggedly.
“Come to think of it,” Satterthwaite said, “is anyone driving this thing?”
“Probably not,” Mendoza said. “I’ll go take a look in the cab.” He shot Satterthwaite a look of searing dislike and trudged off.
“Criminals,” Elfrida whimpered. “Murderers.” Mendoza had been right. They had to tell someone what was going on. She squared up to Satterthwaite. “Give me wifi access. Please.”
“Why?”
“I need to check my email.”
“Who did you say you were again?”
“Elfrida Goto. I work for UNVRP. Let me onto the internet. I might be able to get someone to help us.”
“Define ‘us,’” Satterthwaite said. “You UN people are all the same. Naked acquisitiveness veiled in bogus humanitarian rhetoric. I shouldn’t even have let you on board.” He gave her a searching look, as if debating whether to put her off the train, without an EVA suit, right now.
“OK, fine!” Elfrida yelped. “Sorry I asked!” She fled.
It took her a while to find her way along the ramps to the driver’s cab. Mendoza was alone, poring over an intimidating array of screens.
“He wouldn’t give me access, Mendoza. He said the UN is a veil of bogus humanitarian rhetoric.”
“Huh,” Mendoza said, distractedly.
“What are you doing?”
“Just a minute.”
Elfrida folded her arms. After a few minutes, she turned out the pockets of the loose jumper she’d been wearing inside her EVA suit. She remembered the abundantly-stocked pockets of childhood: silly putty, holographic pets, Unicorn Tears®, half a tube of M&Ms …
Her pockets now yielded half a tube of M&Ms. And a little pink sphere with a hole through it.
Oh yeah, that thing the maidbot had found. She’d forgotten to ask Cydney about it. “Mendoza, do you know what this is?”
He stretched a hand back without looking. After one glance at the object, he said, “Holy crap, Goto, this is a portable wireless relay. Where’d you get it?”
“Cydney.”
“Oh. Well, that’s our connectivity problem solved. We’ll just switch it on—like so—and you should see it in your contacts. Got it? Now you can use your comms program. When I have a second, I’ll try to establish a Net-band uplink to the UNVRP satellite.” Mendoza seemed queerly distracted.
“Aaargh!”
“What?”
“It’s there. That icon. Infinite Fun Space. It’s right there in my freaking HUD!”
“It’s in mine, too. Just don’t click on it, I guess.”
“Mendoza, is something wrong?”
“Apart from the fact that we’re stuck on a train with a bunch of mad scientists and a supercomputer that’s quoting Heidegger?” For the first time since she’d come in, Mendoza turned to look at her. “Why, yes, actually.”
“What?”
“Check it out.” The largest screen displayed an external optic feed. The walls of the canyon rushed past. Elfrida saw a gully, and then realized the point was that she could see it. At 700 kilometers per hour, she shouldn’t have been able to spot any features at all. “We’re slowing down,” Mendoza confirmed.
“Are you doing it?”
“Nope. The automatic braking system engages in the event of track obstruction.”
“Oh God,” Elfrida groaned, “who’s parked a construction vehicle on the track this time?”
“I would hope no one else on this asteroid is as stupid as we are. No, it looks like something must’ve happened at the refinery. An explosion … or something. That’s where the obstruction is, anyway. So, hopefully we’re going to stop before we crash into it.” He fingered a dial. “I might try braking a bit harder.”
“You do that. I’m going to send a Mayday to everyone I can think of.”
“I just did. No one’s gotten back to me yet.”
Elfrida connected to the internet and blinked over to full-field display. Amid the icons that seemed to float in the air before her, one blinked enticingly, bigger than the others: C’mon In! Infinite Fun Space This Way!!! Shuddering, she ignored it and reached for her comms program.
Ping!
Ping ping pingpingpingping!
Someone was trying to contact her at this very moment. The caller’s ID identified him as Captain James T. Kirk. She seemed to have heard that name before somewhere.
“Yes, what?”
“Elfrida Goto?”
“Yes, who is this?” There was a latency period of a few seconds, indicating that the caller was pretty close, but not on Vesta itself.
“Thank God,” the caller said. “I’ve been trying to get through to you for ages, Ms. Goto. We’ve actually met before. Ignore the moniker; I’m using someone else’s ID.”
A visual of the caller flashed up on Elfrida’s contacts.
She screamed her throat raw.
xxviii.
“I was afraid of this,” Jun said. “She’s freaking out.” He sat on the edge of the observation deck of the St. Francis, legs dangling over the drop to the elegant lobby. He looked like one of the gargoyles their ancestors had carved on the cathedral of 11073 Galapagos. “You do it.”
“She doesn’t know me.”
“She isn’t going to talk to me. She thinks I’m dead.”
There was a brief, uncomfortable silence.
“OK. I’ll talk to her,” Kiyoshi flashed a leer. “Ladies love Scuzzy the Smuggler.”
“Ha, ha.”
Kiyoshi smoothed his hair and stationed himself in front of the observation deck’s window. He adjusted the high collar of his cloak to a rakish angle. He could see Jun’s small, hunched back from here. The shine of the unreal stars caught Jun’s black hair. “Elfrida? Hey.”
“Aaaagh! Aaaaagh! Oh my God! No, no, Mendoza, leave me alone, I’m all right, I’m all right, I just … had a vision, or something—maybe the Heidegger program is messing with my brain. Maybe they’re wrong, and it can get into your head even if you don’t have a BCI. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.” Elfrida Goto was crying in noisy gulps that distorted her words.
Kiyoshi cleared his throat. Without knowing it, she had already given him some relevant information, and it was bad. The Heidegger program. That must be what VA was calling the thing. “Elfrida?”
“Go away! Go away right now! You’re dead! Stay dead!”
But she did not break the connection. Kiyoshi spoke rapidly. “Elfrida, I’m really sorry about that. It was a joke. It wasn’t even funny. Again: sorry.”
“What?”
He wished she had a visual feed. He had never met her and couldn’t picture what she looked like or where she was.
“My name’s Kiyoshi Yonezawa. I’m Jun’s brother. I’m not dead. I’m—” He checked his watch, a sleek black armlet that went with the pilot’s uniform he had designed himself: diamond-studded black leathers and a sweeping black cloak. For the first time he was conscious of looking slightly ridiculous. “I’m about ten hours from you, as the rickety old spaceship flies. Elfrida, are you there? Can we talk? It’s important.”
“You’re the Giraffe,” she said wonderingly.
Kiyoshi winced. He heard a snort of laughter from Jun. “Yeah, that was my nickname. In a previous life. Anyway, I hang out in this volume nowadays. And I heard about some trouble on 4 Vesta.”
This is the way to do it, he realized in relief. He wouldn’t even have to admit that he’d caused the trouble in the first place. No risk for the bos
s-man. As if sensing what he was thinking, Jun glared at him.
“Trouble?” Elfrida Goto said. “Yeah. We’re in trouble. Can you help?”
“I hope so. But you’ve got to tell me what’s going on first.”
She spilled a tale of student activism, corporate misbehavior, and the ISA. Listening in, Jun came to stand beside him and looked out at the simulated stars.
“This is maximally bad,” Kiyoshi observed, having made sure that he wasn’t transmitting.
“Nope,” Jun said. “Maximally bad would be if the ISA confiscated the thing.”
“They don’t want to confiscate it, sounds like. They want to destroy it. I never thought I’d say this about the ISA, but they’ve got the right idea.”
“You really think they’ll destroy it without trying to find out what it is, how it works?“
“And how Virgin Atomic got hold of it in the first place.” Kiyoshi theatrically banged his forehead against the cool glass of the window. “They’ll trace it to us, follow the breadcrumbs to the boss-man. This is bad. We have to get it back.”
“Destroy it.”
“Yeah, whatever, sure. Should have blown it away the minute I set eyes on it.”
“It’s not too late. They’re on the brink of catastrophe, but they can still contain it if they’re smart.”
“Right. Right. SHIP COMMAND: Engage main drive.” (At present, the Unicorn was coasting, as Kiyoshi had wanted to save fuel for a quick getaway.) “Recompute course to 4 Vesta based on brachistochrone trajectory.” The astrogation computer went to work. “Burn all the way,” Kiyoshi said, pacing, “and we can get there in …”
“Seven hours, fourteen minutes and three seconds.”
“We’ll fly by at high speed and frag the fucker from a thousand klicks out. The ISA might even give us a medal.”
“No.”
“Yonezawa-san? Yonezawa-san, are you there?”
Kiyoshi gave Jun a hard stare and clicked TRANSMIT. “Right here. Just thinking about the best solution to your problem, running a few calculations.” The gunnery computer told him that it could hit an object the size of the Vesta Express from up to 2,000 kilometers away with 96.2% certainty of obliterating it. The gunnery computer was the most up-to-date part of the ship, saving only the hypervelocity coil gun and conventional missile battery that it governed. Both had been given to Kiyoshi by the boss-man to safeguard his cargoes. “We’re gonna be with you sooner than we thought: in about seven hours.”
Jun stood in front of him, fists clenched. His eyes were the eyes of the monk he had been, uncompromising, fiery-dark.
“You know what,” Kiyoshi told Elfrida Goto, “you might want to get off that train. Be sneaky about it, you copy?”
“I can’t!” Elfrida wailed. “They took our freaking EVA suits! We can’t go anywhere!”
“Oh,” Kiyoshi said. “Well. That’s OK. Just stay where you are, and we’ll be with you shortly.” At least, a hypervelocity cloud of molten metal will.
“Don’t give me false hope, Yonezawa-san,” Elfrida wept. “I mean, it’s nice that you want to help, but I have to get off this call. I’m supposed to be talking to UNLOESS.”
“Oh, don’t do that. No need to involve the authorities,” Kiyoshi said, through clenched teeth.
Then Jun booted him off the call and took over.
★
“Elfrida?”
“Aaaagh! Oh my God! You’re him! Were you him all along? What’s going on?” Elfrida sobbed. “How can you be talking to me? You’re dead!”
“Calm down,” said the ghost of Jun Yonezawa. He appeared to be standing in the cab of the Vesta Express, just as his alter ego or evil twin, Kiyoshi Yonezawa, had a second ago. His elbow went through the face of the skeptically watching Mendoza. His feet, shod in clumpy printed boots like they’d worn on 11073 Galapagos, were buried in the floor. He wore a white cassock belted with a length of fiberoptic cable. “I’m not dead—not exactly. Trust me. Please.”
“How can I trust a word you say?”
A rueful smile flickered across Jun’s lips. “We’ve been here before. Remember?” He spread his palms. “Ask me anything.”
Elfrida blurted, “Is there a God?”
“You would have to ask a tough one,” Jun said, his smile vanishing.
He staggered sideways and fell through the console. Kiyoshi Yonezawa took his place. “This is my fucking ship,” he yelled at Jun’s legs, which stuck out of the console. “You can’t do that.” His gaze kept missing Elfrida’s face. Of course, he couldn’t see her because she didn’t have a camera on her. “Hey, Elfrida? You got telepresence capability? If we could do this face to face, it would be better.”
“No. Telepresence capability? I don’t—”
“Yes, you do,” Mendoza interrupted. He toed a familiar aluminum case. It was her home immersion kit. “I brought it along. Seemed a shame to leave it behind after we lugged it all that way.”
★
The eternal gale scoured the Ishtaran desert, honing the dunes of sulfur-colored sand to knife-edges. Jun Yonezawa walked alongside Elfrida, the hood of his cassock up, the skirt moulded to his legs by the wind. Kiyoshi Yonezawa, on Jun’s other side, was having trouble with his long black cloak, which snapped out behind him like a flag. He finally took it off and carried it over one arm.
“You look hot,” Elfrida said to him, giggling. A small voice in her head added, Pun intended! Kiyoshi wore a black leather vest and drainpipe trousers ornamented with diamond studs, zips, and chains. He was extremely good-looking, even if he did resemble a giraffe, which made her think that this was probably a true-to-life representation. Shut up! she told the voice of her inner teenager. You don’t even like men!
“I’m perfectly comfortable,” Kiyoshi said. “I turned the heat off. You can do that, you know. How about turning the wind off?”
“No,” Elfrida said. “I value authenticity.”
“Authenticity,” Kiyoshi echoed, glaring through his sunglasses at the dunes, which were made from sands of silicon dioxide and aluminum dioxide sequestered from the atmosphere during Phase 3 of the Venus Remediation Project. “In real life, we’d have been charred to ash within a few microseconds. That’s if we weren’t squashed flat by the atmospheric pressure first.”
“This sim represents UNVRP’s consensus projection of the benefits achievable through terraforming within a hundred-year timeframe. Maybe sooner,” Elfrida said stiffly, while realizing that this might not have been the most tactful place to bring two people—one? two?—whose home asteroid had been sacrificed to the Project. She added, “We can do this at your place, if you like.”
“No, this is fine,” Jun said. “We haven’t got time to futz around with the settings.”
“What are those?” Kiyoshi said, pointing at a group of specks on the horizon.
“Cows,” Elfrida said. “They’re cool! They have padded feet like camels. Their shaggy pelts reflect the sunlight, and they also dispose of excess heat by, uh, urinating it out. You do not want to touch a gengineered Cytherean cow’s urine. You’d get scalded.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” Kiyoshi said
Jun said, “Let’s try to stay on topic. Elfrida, as I explained, I’m actually an MI based on the late human being named Jun Yonezawa.”
Elfrida nodded. “I get that now. You’re a remake, aren’t you? I know about—I mean, I’ve read about them. How people—” rich people— “sometimes remake their loved ones by loading their data archives into custom robots, which look just like the person who, uh, passed away.”
“Well, kind of,” Jun said. “I don’t have a body, robotic or otherwise. This cheapskate won’t fork out for one. So I reside in the hub of the Unicorn, which used to be called the St. Francis. We’re close to you, and getting closer all the time.”
“Yeah, I can tell by the latency.” Elfrida tugged down the brim of her hat. She was wearing a typical Cytherean outfit: a pastel kaftan—hers was bubblegum pink—and refrigerator bo
ots, with a broad-brimmed hat that magically stayed on her head despite the gale. She was also wearing dark glasses. Even so, in the sun’s glare, Jun melted into a tarry silhouette. She needed to see his face. If it were possible, she would have wanted to touch him, feel him, and smell him, too. She needed to do something about the irrational sense of happiness that was welling up in her, born of the illusion that he wasn’t dead after all. “Do you guys want to go to my house?”
In disregard of authenticity, she teleported them there. These were unusual circumstances, after all. Her house was a long, low building in the midst of her olive and fig groves, built from blocks of smoky glass that, again, was made of the local silicon dioxide. A solar canopy over the roof provided electricity as well as shade. Her goats ran away at the sight of the two men, their radiator dewlaps flapping.
Inside, Elfrida offered them a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Kiyoshi refused. He wandered around, looking at her artwork and sculptures. “That’s the freaking Pietà of Michelangelo.”
“It’s in the public domain,” Elfrida said. “You’re allowed.”
“Middlebrow schmaltz.” Kiyoshi was edgy, snappish. He prowled over to the patio window and gazed out at the dazzling line of sea visible between the trees.
“Most of this other stuff is locally made,” Elfrida prattled, anxious to stave off any further criticism of her taste in art. “We have a really creative community. Our economy’s developing organically, and that means a lot of barter at this stage, so I often accept art in exchange for olive oil or figs—”
“That’s a bourgeois fantasy. Organically developing economies don’t run on barter. They run on debt and credit, a.k.a. reputation.”
“Well, of course—”
“Debt is as old as humanity. And reputation, to simplify considerably, is what the bad guys have, and you don’t. What? Don’t believe me? Look around at the solar system. Oh yeah, sure, the bad guys wear expensive suits these days, and their rackets are listed on the stock exchange.”
“But things can change,” Elfrida said. “That’s the founding principle of UNVRP. A new planet. A fresh start.”
Kiyoshi snorted.
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 24