She lost count of her descents. Some of the soyclouds were further apart than others. But the whole stack was compressing under the invisible hand of Vesta’s weak, but still-lethal, gravity.
A mighty crunch drowned out the noises of friction and rain. The pipe in Cydney’s hands went slack. She threw herself off it, landed in a bed of cabbages, and floundered towards the only light she could see, a distant twinkling. It turned out to be streetlights. She was still pretty high up.
Better to jump than to be crushed beneath the kilotons of soycloud that were sinking towards her head.
She flung herself over the edge.
She plummetted, too breathless to scream, for what felt like an eternity, knowing that these were the last microseconds of her life. They said your whole life flashed before your eyes, but it turned out that wasn’t true. She just wished, passionately, that she hadn’t been going to die before she got a chance to break the biggest story of her career.
★
Elfrida pinged ‘Captain James T. Kirk.’ Kiyoshi Yonezawa didn’t answer, so she left a message: “The phavatar operators are trying to clear the track. Get back to me.” Then she sat down on the carpet behind the shift manager’s desk.
She knew she should go back to the driver’s cab and see how Mendoza was coping. But she quailed at the thought of another trip through the unearthly silence of the de Grey Institute. She imagined Satterthwaite and all his people infected with the Heidegger program, shambling along the ramps in search of raw material for DIY augmentations, intent on becoming … what?
She decided to check her email.
★
Cydney couldn’t see. Her eyes burned. She struck out and encountered gluey resistance. Was this what being dead felt like? Her grandmother, a pureblood Xhosa, used to frighten her with stories about the torments of Hell that awaited spoilt little girls. Cydney seemed to feel fiends jabbing pitchforks into her flesh right now. She opened her mouth to scream, and a watery soup of algae rushed down her throat.
She had bellyflopped from a height of 150 meters into the middle of Olbers Lake.
Consciousness fled. Her last thought was that she’d be the laughing-stock of the entire mediasphere if it got out that she had contrived to die in outer space by drowning.
Her next thought was: I’m still alive
She was floating on her back. Bellicia’s moon-windows glimmered above. Rills of black water trailed from her fingers and toes through the mat of algae that covered the lake. She was moving. No, being towed through the water.
She raised a weak hand to the arm locked under her jaw. She touched sleek wet fur.
“Hold on,” panted Big Bjorn. “Almost there.”
Cydney tried to speak, but her teeth chattered so much that she couldn’t get any words out. In the end, she just relaxed and let him tow her shorewards. Bears were good swimmers.
★
Elfrida skimmed the messages in her inbox. A lot of them came from her supervisor, Jake Onwego. She started to gaze-type a reply, then changed her mind and deleted it. Onwego couldn’t help her now, and she wasn’t going to give him any extra help covering his ass.
Instead, she wrote to her parents.
Mom, Dad: Guess what, I’m having another ‘adventure.’ I dunno, these things just seem to happen to me. Anyway, I just want you to know that even though I haven’t been the best daughter, I not to worry if you see anything on the news about 4 Vesta. Whatever they’re saying, it’s probably not true, and it can’t be a tenth as crazy as what’s really happening. I’ll tell you all about it when I get home! Love, Ellie.
That would do: short and sweet. After she sent it, she remembered what she’d heard about ISA censorship technology. She’d actually heard most of it from her mother, who was quite the foilhat for a middle-class, middle-aged lady.
Would her email ever reach them?
Well, if it didn’t, there was nothing she could do about it.
She leaned back and took in the silence. She ate a protein bar and drank some apple juice she found in a drawer of the shift manager’s desk, which made her hungrier and thirstier than ever. Only then did she look at the rest of her unread emails.
From: Alicia Petruzzelli [IDstring]
To: Elfrida Goto [IDstring]
Hey, Elfrida. I hope you get this! Sounds like the excrement is really hitting the ventilation device where you are. Hope you’re OK. Anyway, I just wanted to warn you about this guy named Kiyoshi Yonezawa, from 11073 Galapagos. He may try to contact you regarding the situation on 550363 Montego. Be warned. He is not to be trusted.
How do I know? Well, Kharbage, LLC has access to certain proprietary databases and gated corporate domains that the average data-miner can’t get into. And did you know that several of the supermajors maintain dossiers on purebloods? Yup. Total privacy invasion, but they do (insurance for their trillion-spider capex programs). And Yonezawa is in there. You can’t hide trace DNA from sniffers illegally installed at spaceports pretty much everywhere that the supermajors have a financial interest, which is, well, pretty much everywhere. I hope I’m not destroying your faith in the private sector.
Anyway, have a look at the attached map, which represents Yonezawa’s movements going back to 2281. I think you’ll agree that the guy is not on our side.
Elfrida pinched the map open.
Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s journeys formed a spidery mandala of guilt. She touched play and watched them traced in one by one chronologically. Over the last seven years, he had made not one, not a few, but scores of trips to 6 Hebe, the ITN hub and entrepot that spent most of its orbit on the edge of Gap 2.5.
Just in case Elfrida couldn’t put two and two together, Petruzzelli concluded her message:
It’s pretty obvious that 6 Hebe is not his final destination. I mean, if he’s just buying water, why go all the way out there? Based on the date-stamps and the specs of his truck, he travels onwards for a few million klicks each time before returning to 11073 Galapagos—or more recently, not. I won’t commit any further speculations to the record, but I guess you know what I’m not saying.
So my advice is, don’t talk to the guy. I actually think the authorities ought to be informed. It might sound better coming from you than me, but I’ll leave that up to your judgment.
Hugs, Alicia
Elfrida closed her comms program. She felt sick. Stupid. And above all, betrayed.
Then she grabbed the side of the shift manager’s desk, gasping.
But it was not her rage at Kiyoshi Yonezawa that had brought her heart into her throat. The train had jolted. A low klaxon hooted. The Vesta Express crawled on for a few seconds, and then halted.
Mendoza’s voice crackled over the tannoy.
“As you may have noticed, we’ve stopped.”
★
Shoshanna stood on the deck of her crippled soycloud. Her jumpsuit was soaking, stained with grass and manure, and a cut on her scalp bled into her eyes. It didn’t matter. She had no one to impress anymore. She stood alone, like a figurine on a divorce cake, atop the teetering stack of soyclouds that now floated on Olbers Lake.
Everyone else was dead, she figured. They’d run, ignoring her warnings that running was nearly always the stupid thing to do.
That said, she’d have to make her own exit soon. The soycloud stack was gradually sinking, as the lowest ones got saturated with water. She couldn’t remember how deep Olbers Lake was. The stack would probably topple before it sank, anyway. It was precariously balanced, the deck yawing under her feet, and none of the PHES thrusters were working anymore.
People milled under the streetlights of Olbers Circle. Some waded in the lake as if hoping to reach survivors. Shoshanna frowned. She remotely accessed Facilities Management and turned the streetlights off.
Then she picked up the encrypted call that was blinking in her HUD.
“No one puts Harry T. Persson on hold,” a gravelly voice said in her head. “No one.”
“Sorry,” Shoshanna said.
“I was busy.”
It took sixteen minutes for her response to reach the Virgin Atomic CEO and his answer to get back to her. During that interval, she climbed down the outside of the stack of soyclouds, rappelling on the vines and roots that trailed from their edges. For a spaceborn woman who’d been manually docking cargoes in hard vacuum at the age of ten, this was a piece of cake. It wouldn’t have been that tricky even for an Earthborn human. The others should have waited.
She slid into the water and swam towards shore, arching out of the water at each stroke, like a flying fish.
“I’ve filed suit against the ISA for destruction of property and reckless endangerment of life,” Persson said. “I’m seeking S12 billion in compensation. That figure may rise. The family of Jay Macdonald has initiated criminal proceedings under the jurisdiction of the Interplanetary Court of Justice. They have also filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. To come will be thousands of individual claims for compensation from the people you’ve subjected to unnecessary danger and stress. If the money doesn’t mean anything to you, think about the reputational hit your agency will take. The ISA is already besieged by privacy campaigners and transparency activists who claim that you’re a law unto yourselves. This is going to reinforce their case. In fact, I see it as a game-changer. For the first time, the UN will be compelled to admit that its efforts to control the private sector are blundering and destructive. Big changes will flow from this, changes that reduce the role of the UN in the asteroid belt and the outer system. And you will be responsible.”
Shoshanna crawled ashore, trailing skeins of pond-weed. “Who said I have anything to do with the ISA?”
Send.
She stomped, relishing the solid ground under her feet. Harry Persson had a lot to learn about plausible deniability.
When Shoshanna was done here, she’d drop out of sight. Cosmetic surgery and a new identity lay in her future. She’d continue her career, whereas Persson’s career would end in obloquy … unless he cooperated. Despite his bluster, he had to know that.
With the streetlights out, the crowds on the lakeshore had dispersed. Shoshanna plodded across campus and into town, turning off more lights to give herself cover. She climbed the hill towards the Bremen Lock. Abandoned possessions littered the road. As she walked, Persson frothed at her about his rights—a nice bit of hypocrisy, since he’d just been fantasizing about the downfall of the UN, which alone guaranteed that he had any rights at all.
She stopped in surprise. A stunted, skeletal-legged silhouette sat on a boulder near the airlock. It bounced toward her on curved blades.
“I thought you’d be coming this way sooner or later,” Dr. Eliezer James said, briefly removing his rebreather mask to speak.
Shoshanna did not have a rebreather, and despite her electroceutically enhanced respiratory capacity, the climb had weakened her. “I’ve got your boss on the line. Want to help me convince him that he should cooperate?”
“Him? Not Dean Garcia?”
“No, meshuggener. Persson, the CEO.”
“I don’t work for Virgin Atomic,” Dr. James said. “However, I can tell you that if you’re waiting for Persson to wave his magic wand and fix this, you’re wasting your time. He’s three-quarters retired. He was a mining guy, anyway. He has no clue what they’ve been doing at the de Grey Institute. Doesn’t understand the science. If you want him to cooperate, you’ll first have to spend a couple of hours explaining black-box neural networks, utility maximization, and the theory of FOOM.”
Shoshanna eyed the crippled astrophysicist. “So you do know what they’re doing at the de Grey Institute.”
“Not in any detail. Błaszczykowski-Lee is a secretive bastard. We turned the thing over to them because they’re MI specialists: a lot of their work has been in the area of industrial robotics. We’re just stargazers. It made sense to let them have it. They proceeded to shut us out of the loop, while shamelessly borrowing our computing power.”
Dr. James’s rebreather mask prevented her from analyzing his expression. She said slowly, “‘The thing’?”
Now Dr. James’s expression was easy to read. It could have been in the dictionary next to Whoops.
“Yes,” he said eventually. “The space oddity.”
“Hmm.” Shoshanna subvocalized a quick message to her controllers: New information (audio file attached). May have to modify our scenario. This may have nothing to do with the Chinese, after all. Will investigate further. She used the ground-based transmitter at the spaceport to send it. With all her satellites down, she was reduced to this clunky method of communication.
“This thing,” she said. “This space oddity. Is it on the Vesta Express?”
“I believe so, yes.”
“That’s where I was going, anyway. Wanna come?”
Dr James nodded. “If your actions have endangered the physical or informational security of the de Grey Institute, the consequences may be … very much sub-optimal. I can’t absolve you of blame, but I’m willing to help you contain the situation.”
Shoshanna smiled at his logic. “Are you a rabbi’s son, by any chance?”
“How did you guess? Reform.”
Dr. James moved towards the airlock.
“We can get transport at the spaceport. It’s not too far.” He ducked behind the boulder he had been sitting on and picked up a spacesuit. “This is mine, obviously. There should be some spares in the airlock that you could use.”
“Not to worry. I’ve got my own,” Shoshanna said. She activated the shape-memory alloy layer of her jumpsuit. Then she unfolded the external garment and booties she had carried in her backpack. She inflated a bubble-style helmet and put her backpack on again: it had a built-in air supply. Packable spacesuits were very expensive, which didn’t help her deniability, but who was keeping track?
As they left, she turned the lights back on. The sun-windows louvred to their SecondLight setting. The light of the distant sun poured down on the wreckage of the Bellicia ecohood. Cleaning up would keep the population busy until she had prevailed … or not.
xxx.
Kiyoshi spacewalked, performing a visual inspection of the Unicorn’s guns. He assumed Jun was watching him. He wanted to hear Jun try to explain why they should not have this option.
Tethered, he walked out along the mighty barrel of the hypervelocity coil gun. The ship’s acceleration pulled him on towards empty space. The Unicorn was now backthrusting, with its drive oriented towards 4 Vesta. Kiyoshi seemed to be walking vertically ‘down’ the thrust axis, anchored by his gecko boots like a spider on a drainpipe.
The gun was mounted longitudinally in the ship’s spine, which pierced the Unicorn’s fuselage like a skewer through several dango dumplings. This antique design had made the hypervelocity coil gun an obvious choice when they tooled up. The ship now effectively had a rail launcher running its whole 350-meter length. That’s what a coil gun was. Hypervelocity meant that it accelerated its projectiles—in this case, metal slugs—so fast that they actually liquefied. The target would be enveloped in a mist of molten metal, each droplet armor-piercing.
Stars filled the universe like a galactic-scale version of that molten mist, forever on its way to engulf him. With Jupiter on the other side of the solar system this year, and Neptune a distant blur, nothing dimmed the stars’ blaze. It still amazed him how many stars were visible out here, compared to inside Venus’s orbit, where he’d been born.
He switched on his handheld spectrum analyzer. The sighting apparatus of the coil gun had failed to report when he ran a remote systems check. He figured a micro-impact had damaged some tiny but vital component. Hoped it was something he had a spare for.
Funny: the power meter function reported that everything was working.
He knelt on the barrel and lowered his head so that he was looking ‘up’ the length of the gun.
“Bang,” whispered a voice in the dark.
Kiyoshi jerked his head out of the barrel and sat back on his heels. “V
ery funny,” he said to Jun.
“This just came in on the Ku-band,” Jun said. “I thought you’d want to see it.” A tiny image popped up in the HUD of Kiyoshi’s helmet. It was a cartoon of a signpost with grass growing at the bottom. Kiyoshi zoomed in. The lettering on the signpost read: C’mon In! Infinite Fun Space This Way!!!
“Where’s it from?”
“4 Vesta. Not addressed to us, of course; it’s a Ku-band broadcast. It’s just a coincidence that we were in the right part of space to pick it up.”
“Delete it.” It was strange how time could seem to slow down when everything was about to go very, very wrong. Kneeling immobile on the end of the gun barrel, Kiyoshi stared at that innocuous little icon and felt as if he were looking at a nuke in the milliseconds before it detonated. “There’s code in there. Something. I don’t want to know what. Delete it. Now.”
Silence.
“MI COMMAND,” Kiyoshi roared. “Delete that fucking file!”
“Deleted,” Jun said expressionlessly.
Kiyoshi found himself shaking. He wasn’t sure that Jun was telling the truth. What if Jun were already infected?
“The thing’s got access to a Ku-band transmitter.” While Kiyoshi spoke, he was accessing the comms suite. “We don’t know how long it’s been broadcasting that shit. The silver lining is, there’s not much else out here, apart from us, to pick it up. Tell me, given the orientation of the signal, would they be able to receive it at home?”
“Unlikely,” Jun said. “The Ku-band has a small-wavelength signal. Reception is a roll of the dice at these distances. The folks at home can’t even pick up television broadcasts from 6 Hebe.”
He sounded normal. Maybe he’s all right. Kiyoshi felt a sudden, overwhelming need for a dose. He looked down at the sighting apparatus. “This isn’t working,” he said. “All the components are drawing power. But it’s not responding. You know anything about that?”
“I turned it off.”
“Well, turn it back on.”
“Is that a command?”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 26