The Vesta Conspiracy

by Felix R. Savage

  “Well?” Dr. James said. “Stumped?”

  “Not only didn’t they answer us, they’re not emitting any signals on any frequency. Maybe they’re all dead in there.”

  “If that’s a possibility,” Dr. James said, “this is a rescue operation.”

  He did something to the right sleeve of his spacesuit, braced himself on the ladder, and shot the airlock with the laser embedded in his prosthetic arm.

  ★

  Satterthwaite bounded along the residential corridor with Elfrida and the two Chinese on his heels, in search of Hugh Meredith-Pike. Elfrida tried not to look into Smith’s cabin as they passed. She failed. The glimpse she got of his battered body would haunt her dreams for years to come. If she lived that long.

  She caught up with Satterthwaite in the kitchen. Or did you call it a galley, when it was on a train? Uncooked rice crunched under her boots. The contents of cabinets littered the worktops. Pasta sauce spattered not only the walls, but the ceiling. This was the kind of mess you could only get in zero- or micro-gravity. Wang Gulong said something, and Jimmy translated, “Engineers are the same everywhere.”

  Satterthwaite dived into a walk-in freezer. The fog rolling out of the door reminded Elfrida of the dry ice in the supercomputer silo. Seconds later, he stumbled back out. “Gone. It’s gone.”

  Jimmy and Wang Gulong exchanged a look. The powerfully built Wang backed Satterthwaite against the dishwasher. He rapped out some words in Chinese.

  Jimmy translated: “Enough games. You have lied to us about this Heidegger program. You will now stop lying, or Wang will break your neck.” He added, “Wang is a champion of the Greater Imperial China Amateur Duan Quan League.”

  “All right, all right,” Satterthwaite coughed. “Let me go, you ape! The thing was in the freezer. It looked like a girl, an adolescent female of the species Homo sapiens, but it wasn’t. Not sure whether it was grown or manufactured; there may not be any difference when you get to that level of biological approximation. Anyway, we—acquired it—in an advanced life-support cradle, which appeared to be a fragment of a PLAN ship. The cradle was damaged. The ship must have been disabled …”

  Elfrida yelped. Jimmy’s eyes bulged. He started translating, but Wang cut him off. He had heard the word PLAN and that was enough.

  “You have a PLAN agent captive on this train?” Jimmy translated. “In the freezer?”

  “Had. Had,” Satterthwaite said. “Meredith-Pike’s clearly found it and walked off with it.”

  “He can’t have gone far,” Elfrida said. “There aren’t any EVA suits! The thing must still be on the train! Is it … is it alive? Or dead?”

  Satterthwaite seemed to take that as an accusation. Bristling, he snapped, “We put it in the freezer to keep it safe. It was cold-adapted. In fact, it seemed to have the ability to hibernate. That’s just one of the secrets we hoped to unravel by studying it. We have a nanoscopic imaging system on order. We began studying the life-support cradle while waiting for it to arrive …”

  “And that’s how Bob got infected,” Elfrida said. “You guys sure are brainy.” All the fine hairs on her body stood on end. This was her worst nightmare. Actually, it went beyond any nightmare her imagination could have devised.

  Wang Gulong left the kitchen.

  Jimmy touched Elfrida’s arm. His melancholy gaze brimmed with knowledge of the tragedies humanity brought upon itself. “It’s OK,” he said.

  Elfrida felt ashamed that he was trying to comfort her, when he must be equally terrified. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You came here because you thought it was safe. What must you think of us?”

  Jimmy shook his head. She’d misinterpreted his reassurance. He’d meant it. “This is our theory. The Heidegger program is a type of software called shénjiàn—neuroware? Is this the right translation?”

  “Neuroware, I don’t know what that is.”

  “It doesn’t exist. Or precisely, the theory exists, but the real thing cannot be developed. It is software designed to run on the human brain. The brain is the most complex and powerful computer in existence! We only use one fraction of it, you know? So far, it is too complex for us to write neuroware, even if we develop the right interface protocols. But now we think the PLAN has mastered this complexity.” Jimmy looked wistful. “It is very exciting.”

  “Not you, too!”

  “Don’t worry. It is not dangerous. I simplify, but if you don’t install the program, it can’t run.”

  “That’s what we thought,” Satterthwaite said. “Until poor bloody Smith downloaded it to his BCI.”

  “Maybe it automatically executes when downloaded?”

  “Obviously, yes.”

  “And maybe Smith did not have the right hardware.”

  “He had a BCI.”

  “Exactly,” said Hugh Meredith-Pike from the door of the kitchen. He strolled in, followed by Wang. He should have looked like a prisoner escorted by a guard. Instead, his confident, loose-limbed gait made him look like a celebrity leading a big poodle.

  Hiding behind him, as if shy, was a girl wearing nothing but an oversized Vesta Valkyries t-shirt.

  “Smith had a BCI,” Meredith-Pike explained. “I’ve got a BCI plus neural stimulation implants. Oh, it’s just a rough approximation of what Little Sister, here, has in her head. But it suffices. The underlying principle is the same.” He directed at the girl a smouldering, utterly vacant smile. “Infinite fun, not half!”

  “You’re blissed out of your mind, Hugh, you moron,” Satterthwaite said, stumbling to his feet.

  Elfrida said, “Little Sister? Whose little sister?”

  “This man has installed the neuroware,” Jimmy said, pointing out the obvious.

  “My question is—” Meredith-Pike directed it to Elfrida, with smugly raised eyebrows, like a newscaster posing a gotcha question— “why on earth are we fighting these people?”

  “They aren’t people,” Elfrida yelped.

  After her spell on 11073 Galapagos, she had developed an odd acuity when it came to distinguishing humans from robots. The Galapajin had been able to instantly identify a post-geminoid phavatar that would have passed for human anywhere else in the solar system, and Elfrida seemed to have picked up the knack from them. This Little Sister was setting off all her alarms. She didn’t seem to be a robot, per se, but nor was she human.

  Elfrida had a sensation of falling helplessly from the heights of understanding where she had been born and lived all her life, into an abyss of barely grasped horrors. She thought, but could not say out loud: Little Sister is a demon.

  xxxii.

  “Not bad, for an egghead,” Shoshanna complimented Dr. James, when he had cut away the outer door of the airlock.

  “In Israel, everyone fights,” Dr. James said.

  “In the New Hesperides, too.” There she went again. She contemplated the seared wreckage of the door. They were standing in the chamber, still in their suits. “But now we’ve got a new problem. This airlock is no longer, in fact, an airlock. It’s an ex-airlock.”

  “It is no more,” Dr. James intoned. “It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. Its vacuum-denying function is now history.”

  Shoshanna laughed. “You’re a funny guy when you want to be. But the problem remains: now we can’t get in without depressurising the R&D module.”

  “For an ISA agent, you’re not actually very ruthless, are you?” Dr. James said. The amusement was gone from his voice. “You didn’t turn off the power to the Bellicia ecohood, despite threatening to. And now you’re saying that depressurising this module—which holds a potentially unstoppable threat to humanity—is a problem?”

  Shoshanna hesitated. “Point,” she said eventually. “Cut through the inner door.”

  ★

  Mendoza, alone in the driver’s cab, kept panic at bay by listening to the St. Matthew’s Passion of Bach, one of the thousands of music files in his BCI’s memory crystals. He had high-quality iEars transdu
cer implants, which had been a present to himself on his thirtieth birthday. He watched the fallen handler bot rise into the air, balanced on the makeshift tyre iron, while the phavatars tromped in circles around the windlass they had built. It was a spectacular feat of improvisation. He wished they’d hurry up.

  Distantly, over the music, he heard an explosive boom.

  “Susmaryosep, what now?”

  The handler bot crashed onto the south rim of the cutting. The phavatars started running back towards the train.

  Screw ‘em, they’re only machines, can be replaced.

  Spooked by the boom he’d heard, Mendoza lunged at the propulsion systems console. He engaged thrust. The Vesta Express leapt down the track.

  O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig … Mendoza sat tensely at the console, watching the sides of the canyon slip past faster and faster. He wished he hadn’t flunked out of psephology. He wished he’d never left Manila. He wished …

  He noticed an alert scrolling across the life-support systems monitor.

  … event! Click here for details. Click here to dispatch repair bots. Click here to learn more about emergency life-support options. Depressurization event! Click …

  ★

  “Depressurization event,” barked the tannoy in the kitchen. It confirmed what Elfrida had just heard: the explosive noise of an air mass meeting the vacuum. “Oh my God,” she gasped.

  Meredith-Pike pivoted to Satterthwaite. “Looks like we’re running out of time. Are you going to be sensible, Jules?”

  “Sod off.”

  Meredith-Pike shook his head sorrowfully. “Remember, I didn’t want to do this,” he said, and punched Satterthwaite in the temple.

  Satterthwaite’s eyes rolled up. He fell over backwards, hitting his head on the microwave.

  Elfrida screamed.

  Meredith-Pike turned towards her with a dispassionate frown. His eyes had gone slitty, more like the eyes of a goat than a human being. Whatever the Heidegger program had done to his intracranial wiring, it had tipped him straight into the uncanny valley that Glory dos Santos had told Elfrida about, way down into the zombie zone between ‘alive’ and ‘not alive.’ His eyes were no longer windows to his soul. They were slit trenches in a clayey landscape that only happened to resemble a human face.

  Little Sister tugged on his arm.

  “Oh,” Meredith-Pike said. “Right.”

  Meredith-Pike and Little Sister moved at the same time. Meredith-Pike punched Wang Gulong in the temple, his fist a blur, felling the big man before he could react at all, much less deploy any duan quan moves. He then snatched a bread knife from the webbing above the nearest worktop and slashed Wang’s throat. Blood sprayed across the kitchen. Little Sister didn’t bother with a knife. She merely pointed at Jimmy Liu. A laser beam leapt out of her stubby middle finger and burnt a hole in his forehead. He collapsed on top of his friend, jerking grotesquely.

  Meredith-Pike glanced at Elfrida. “Hope that didn’t shock you too badly? They were purebloods. That lot are behind it all, you know, pulling the strings of interplanetary finance, prosecuting a war that no one wants, using their hereditary connections and secret influence to set natural allies at each other’s throats. They have to go. It is unpleasant, I admit.”

  Little Sister dragged him out of the kitchen.

  At about this time Elfrida felt the tug of a gentle wind. Her jumper rippled.

  Her Space Corps training kicked in.

  In the unlikely event that a depressurization event occurs at your workplace, proceed to the nearest airtight room, compartment, or cubicle, and await further instructions.

  Elfrida threw Jimmy, Wang Gulong, and Satterthwaite into the freezer and tumbled in after them. The door had no handle on the inside. She pulled at it with her fingernails. Slowly, it swung towards her. Its flanges kissed the frame, and sealed.

  ★

  There were no pressure-seals in the architecturally lauded atrium of the de Grey institute. Shoshanna and Dr. James jogged along the spiraling ramps, through a gale that pelted them with potted plants, stress-reliever toys, lost socks, thermoses, tablets, framed photographs of loved ones—anything, in fact, that wasn’t splarted down. The water sculpture had slumped sideways, losing about half of its mass before the remainder froze solid. They trod on patches of ice. Dirt, dust, and fog obscured the air, generated by the sudden change in the air’s vapor holding capacity. Arachnoid repair bots scrambled past, toting sacks of splart.

  When they reached the computer room—Dr. James leading the way; he’d been here before—they found several bodies.

  Shoshanna checked them for signs of life. As she expected, she found none. The pressure was down to 0.6 atmospheres, with a corresponding loss of oxygen. That wasn’t what had killed these men and women, however. They were all holding hands. Their faces had a pink flush, regardless of their original skin color, and their tongues protruded from their mouths. They had self-euthanized, probably with the prescription tablets known as ‘peace pills’—which was something of a misnomer.

  “Now what?” she said, thinking out loud.

  Before she could answer herself, her suit reported lateral acceleration.

  “Metalfucker! Someone’s started the engine. Is there a separate operator’s compartment? Is it pressure-sealed?”

  ★

  The answer was yes. On the downside, someone had pinched the rebreather and the rest of the life-support kit that should have been in the emergency locker. Eyeballing the cramped dimensions of the driver’s cab, Mendoza figured he had about six hours before he died of carbon dioxide poisoning, unless a miracle happened first.

  He locked the engine into maximum acceleration mode and slumped back, hands over his face. The St. Matthew’s Passion throbbed into his ears. I just can’t catch a break.

  After a few minutes, he did some calculations. Without a payload slowing it down, the Vesta Express could accelerate to Mach 4 in less than one full circuit of the equator.

  He blinked up his comms program. “Goto,” he said, trying not to hope that she was still alive. “Do you copy?”

  She did not answer.

  ★

  At the same time as Mendoza was pinging Elfrida, two figures dashed across the atrium, beneath the frozen cascade of the water sculpture. The wind pushed them sideways. Meredith-Pike stumbled. He stopped and projectile-vomited. Little Sister dragged him onwards, her short legs pumping like pistons.

  Not all the atmosphere had yet left the de Grey Institute. Given the small size of the breach in the airlock, and the volume of air that was trying to escape, it would take a few hours for the pressure inside the module to equalize with the vacuum outside. At the moment, the air pressure in the atrium was about half of normal—but that wasn’t zero. It was survivable.

  Hugh Meredith-Pike, however, was not in the best shape. He stumbled to his knees. Then he blacked out.

  Little Sister slung him over her shoulders and sprinted on. She did not suffer from oxygen deprivation. She was a voluntary breather, with enlarged blood vessels around her lungs that could store oxygen for hours.

  She had none of her weaponry, but she had brought along a knife from the kitchen, the same one Meredith-Pike had used to cut Wang Gulong’s throat.

  ★

  “As you may have figured out,” Dr. James said to Shoshanna, “the thing was a fragment of a PLAN ship. Yes, I know. Don’t sputter at me. The risks, we thought, were not severe enough to preclude a cautious, fully sandboxed investigation of its capabilities. We hoped to gain a better understanding of …”

  He named several topics that were top concerns of the ISA, and another couple of items that were sore points with Star Force in its role of first responder.

  “Principally, of course, we hoped to gain some insight into the PLAN’s stealthing technology.”

  That caught Shoshanna’s attention. She paused in her exploratory pinging of the infected supercomputer.

  The PLAN’s stealthing technology was perhaps the biggest
riddle confronting humanity today. Not that 99% of humanity had ever even thought about it, but a rudimentary knowledge of physics exposed the riddle to contemplation—and ensured frustration. How did the PLAN get from one place to another without being spotted? They used fusion engines, as proven beyond a doubt by their drive signatures. Engines generated heat. Therefore, according once more to physics, stealth in outer space was an impossibility. A basic infrared scan could find every spacecraft on your side of the sun.

  Except, neither infrared nor any other kind of scan could find the PLAN when they were in stealth mode. Their ships routinely popped up without warning, attacked human facilities, and vanished again. How the hell did they do it?

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s something we’d like to know, too.”

  She bounced up from her ergoform and grabbed Dr. James by the shoulders.

  “Did they? Find out anything about it?”

  “I don’t know. As I said, they didn’t keep me in the loop. But my educated guess is no. We’d have seen some patent applications by now. Please let go of me, Shoshanna.”

  “I want that ship.”

  “Fragment.”

  “No one has ever captured a PLAN ship, or even a fragment of one. They autodestruct. Nothing to study but dust. This is un-fucking-precedented. Where is it?”

  “Unprecedented. Exactly,” Dr. James said. “Taking into account everything that’s happened, I’m starting to suspect that the PLAN is trying out a new battle strategy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The space oddity wasn’t a fragment of a ship destroyed in an engagement. It was a plant.”

  xxxiii.

  It was pitch dark in the freezer with the door shut. Elfrida was trying not to cry, because her tears froze on her cheeks. Working by touch, she pulled Jimmy Liu’s sweater off over his head. “I’m sorry,” she babbled. “I’m so sorry. But I need all the insulation I can get, or I’ll die of hypothermia long before I run out of air.”