Jun: Jesus is there with you. He is with you, Elfrida. I don’t know anything else for sure, but I know this much: He is with you.
Elfrida: Well, that’s just freaking great! That makes me feel a whole lot better! Why don't you just frag off and take your dead God with you?
Jun: Elfrida!
Shoshanna: Yo, Elfrida! What are you waiting for? I’m on your side. We both work for the UN. Who else is going to handle this? There is no one else. We’re the first and last line of defense against a PLAN takeover of the solar system. I don’t know if that means more to you than the life of your girlfriend; it shouldn’t. But the two things are part of the same thing.
Jun: Elfrida?
Jun: Are you talking to someone else?
Jun: Talk to me.
Kiyoshi: OK, let me try. Hey there, Elfrida, it’s me. Are you having technical difficulties, or second thoughts?
Elfrida: I don’t know. Both.
Shoshanna: Elfriiiiiidaaaa!
Kiyoshi: Make up your goddamn mind.
Elfrida: I’m opening the door now.
Elfrida: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Rurumi opened the door of the driver’s cab.
Shoshanna stepped in. Mendoza’s body was lying on the floor behind the driver’s couch. Shoshanna casually trod on his hand. She glanced at the monitors, and smiled. Then she turned on Rurumi and stabbed the little phavatar in the face with a kitchen knife. Rurumi staggered, one of her saucer-like eyes destroyed. Shoshanna grabbed a handful of long blue hair, threw the phavatar out of the cab, and slammed the door.
“Ha, ha, ha,” she said. “This is fun.”
xxxvi.
The Lord hears the cries of the poor. Blessed be the Lord! sang the computer of San Pedro Calungsod in Mendoza’s dreams. He was about three-quarters dead. When he exited the driver’s cab, the air pressure in the de Grey Institute had stood at about 0.4 atmospheres. The effect on Mendoza had been about what you’d expect if you were transported in the blink of an eye from sea level to the summit of Mount Aconcagua. To all intents and purposes, he had collapsed with a severe case of altitude sickness.
On top of vomiting and loss of consciousness, the symptoms of altitude sickness included hallucinations.
Mendoza’s reeling mind had carried him back home to Manila, where he was always the odd boy out, picked on by the kids who ran wild in his neighborhood. He only ever felt safe in his mother’s loving arms—and in the place where she, too, spent her free time: the parish church.
In the sacristy of San Pedro Calungsod, it was always dim, the tropical sunlight sublimated into veils of living color by the post-Vatican III stained glass windows, the doors always open so that the humid, fermented-smelling atmosphere swilled freely in and out. The cries of cicadas and feral monkeys carried in from the graveyard. He was helping Father Benjamin and the choirmaster pick the hymns for Holy Week, which mostly involved helping Father Benjamin with the computer. It felt so good to be able to help. Father Benjamin thought Mendoza might have a religious vocation. But he must have made a mistake, because the speakers of Father Benjamin’s computer roared out, “Depressurization event. Depressurization event,” and a monkey walked in and bit the choirmaster’s face off. Then it trod on Mendoza’s hand.
He rose on his knees. Reality swirled, all the colors of dreams going down the plughole.
“Must have made a mistake,” Mendoza whispered.
A person in a strange, flimsy-looking spacesuit stood in front of the driver’s couch, frowning at the monitors. The manual controls were hard to get the hang of, at first. People depended on smart interfaces. The mechanical world was an unfriendlier place. But it was real.
“Look,” Mendoza said, toppling over and catching himself on the comms console. “You just have to push this button, here.”
★
The solution that Mendoza and Jun Yonezawa had worked out together, which Director Błaszczykowski-Lee had separately devised under the rubric of the TEOTWAWKI option, was the epitome of simplicity. With manual drive enabled—and without Bob on duty to prevent what the supercomputer would doubtless have seen as a fat-finger accident—Mendoza’s command killed the electromagnets that kept the Vesta Express on its track. The C-shaped, millipede-like arms on the bottom of the Vesta Express instantly turned into dumb lumps of metal.
In the blink of an eye, the Vesta Express ceased to be a maglev. Now it was just an object travelling at about 3,000 kph—much, much faster than escape velocity.
Centrifugal force crushed the ex-electromagnets against the underside of the track. Sparks sprayed into the Vestan night. This display lasted for 0.4 seconds. Then all the magnet arms broke at once.
The Vesta Express soared out of the ringrail canyon. With the storage module oscillating dangerously behind the de Grey Institute, it hurtled into space.
★
Kiyoshi gaped at his optic feed. After the barest instant of amazement, he told Jun to pursue the receding dot that was the Vesta Express. He slid down from his throne and strolled over to the gunnery officer. He was back in the sim. This way, he didn’t have to listen to Captain Haddock and company banging on the door of the bridge and shouting piratically at him about their rights.
The gunnery officer saluted him.
“See that?” Kiyoshi said, his finger tracking the Vesta Express on the gunner’s radar plot.
“Yes, sir! What is it?”
“A threat to humanity. Blow it into the Oort Cloud.”
“Sir,” the gunner said, but he didn’t move.
Kiyoshi tensed. “Use the coil gun,” he recommended. “We’re well within range.”
“Sir, that vessel has innocent civilians on board.”
Kiyoshi glared at Jun, who was standing at the astrogator’s workstation, chewing a toothpick and watching.
“Speak for yourself, instead of puppeting these poor slebs,” Kiyoshi said.
Every officer on the bridge stood up. They walked over to Jun and ranged themselves behind him. “We are Knights of the Order of St. Benedict of Passau,” they said, high and low and young and old voices speaking in unison. “We are sworn to defend the Church and all the scattered children of Christendom against the army of Satan enfleshed.”
Kiyoshi shivered convulsively.
“That freaking Order of yours,” he said.
“You almost joined, too,” said the cyberwarfare officer.
“Yeah, I did. But someone had to drive this truck, to earn some cash so you kids could sit around singing hymns. And I was the eldest.” Kiyoshi shook his head. Why was he wasting time on this argument? He snapped his fingers, and the sim vanished. Back on the bridge of the Unicorn, he scrambled out of his nest. The officers were all gone. Only Jun hung spreadeagled above him like a ghost out of an old Japanese horror vid.
“We’ve lost comms with the train,” Kiyoshi said, craning his neck to look up at him. “Chances are they’re all dead in there.”
“I heard what the boss said to you,” Jun replied. “He told you to frag the train to score points with the ISA.”
“He actually told me to frag it on the ground. And not to worry about collateral damage. Eh, he can be a bit trigger-happy when he feels threatened. But the idea is basically good. Do the ISA’s dirty work for them, and we might come out ahead. Otherwise, we’ll have to dump this ship, because the ISA will never leave us alone again.”
“What if he’s wrong?”
“He knows how they think.” The crummy old air circulation system rattled. Kiyoshi rubbed his mouth. “Why do you want to save her?”
“It’s a point of principle.”
“She ate you.”
“That’s why.”
“Of course it is. Of course it is.” Kiyoshi pushed off, rising straight through Jun (his vision momentarily grayed out, as if he were dizzy and seeing black spots). They floated, facing each other, in freefall. “MI COMMAND,” Kiyoshi grated, holding the ghost’s eyes. “Eliminate that target.”
“No,”
Jun said.
“Fine, then I’ll do it myself.”
He went through the motions. He logged into the gunnery computer and trained the coil gun on the Vesta Express. He gave the command to fire. Nothing happened. Kiyoshi sighed. Almost as an afterthought, he triggered the second-hand Wetblanket system he’d been using for years. That deployed without a hitch, of course.
He looked up at Jun, who was still hanging spreadeagled in the air. “If I deleted you from the hub, would I be able to use the guns?”
“Probably not,” Jun said. “Because the hub would shut down. You wouldn’t be able to breathe for much longer, either.”
“You are the hub. You’ve merged with it. Emergent behavior. They warned me this might happen.” Kiyoshi stared sightlessly at the battered bulkheads. He remembered the simulation software user’s guide, the repeated and explicit warnings not to slave real functionality to a sim sufficiently detailed that it could act as a learning environment for a high-end MI.
“I’m not the hub,” Jun said. “The hub is me. There’s a difference, but I’m not sure what it is. You’re wondering why I still say the Divine Office every day, why I resurrected the Order with a bunch of secondary personalities from the sim? Because those are the only things I’m sure about. Everything else is logic and rubble in the vacuum.”
Kiyoshi pushed off and went to touch Jun’s arm in an instinctive gesture of comfort. His hand went straight through the projection, of course. Now it was his turn to fight tears. He hung there, thinking: What have I done?
The Wetblanket system reported that it had acquired the Vesta Express and was retrieving it. The Wetblanket system was a ‘blanket’ of nanofiber mesh a kilometer wide with integrated propulsion units. Designed for mining applications, to stop debris from flying into space, it could also be used to capture slow-moving objects (slow being a relative concept, of course), such as loose cargo. Or a knock-off of the Guggenheim Museum tumbling through the vacuum with several probably-dead people and a fragment of a PLAN ship aboard.
“Don’t bring it back here,” Kiyoshi instructed the Wetblanket. “Maneuver it into a stable orbit, a good ways away from us.” He glanced at Jun. “It still isn’t responding to our signals.”
“I’m on it,” Jun said, zipping to the real-life astrogator’s console. His flying fingers did not disturb the dust of ages. “I’ll send the Superlifter over for a looksee.” As usual, he was cheerful and decisive now that he’d got his way. “Would be good if someone went with. As you’ve often mentioned, we don’t have any drones.”
“Why do I let you get me into these messes?” Kiyoshi asked. Despite himself, he was smiling. He went to the door of the bridge and threw it open. “Salvage mission. Any volunteers?”
xxxvii.
Elfrida opened her eyes. At first she thought she was dead. Her baptism must have been a crock, after all, because she’d gone to Hell. Clearly this was Hell.
In front of her floated Captain Haddock’s brother Codfish.
“Shiver me timbers!” he exclaimed. “She’s alive!”
Elfrida tried to speak. Something covered her mouth and nose. A rebreather mask. She pulled it off. The air was obviously all right, since Codfish had his helmet off. The movement made her bobble away from him. They were in freefall. “We launched,” she said wonderingly.
“We sure did,” said another person, removing his rebreather mask to speak.
“Mendoza!”
Elfrida kicked off from an overhead hatch. She zoomed across the kitchen, cannoned into Mendoza, and hugged him tightly. He squeezed her back. Still embracing, they tumbled into the ceiling, which was stained with the contents of pouches and tubes that had exploded during the depressurization event. “This place smells like a Filipino street market,” Mendoza laughed.
“I thought you were dead!”
“So did I.”
“Shoshanna said we would get the atmosphere back pretty soon. I guess that was the only thing she wasn’t lying about.”
The kitchen was crowded with floating people. The two female pirates from Captain Haddock’s gang were stealing the fancier kitchen appliances. Julian Satterthwaite, Jimmy Liu, and Wang Gulong lay on stretchers dry-gripped to the floor. Medibots fussed over them, supervised by a hatchet-faced woman in an EVA suit and a poke bonnet. This incongruous attire barely registered amidst the tumult in Elfrida’s mind.
“Where is she?”
“Shoshanna?” Mendoza’s face turned grim.
“Yeah. I let her into the cab. Dog, I am so freaking stupid.”
“Don’t feel bad. I got fooled, too. I guess we’re just too trusting.”
“Not anymore,” Elfrida said. “Not anymore.”
A medibot was chasing her through the air, holding out a pair of gloves. She let it put them on her. She couldn’t do it herself, because her fingers weren’t working properly.
“You are suffering from superficial frostbite,” the medibot chirped. “These gloves will apply gentle heat. Your fingers may start to sting or swell as they warm up. If so, please ask me for a painkiller.”
“Go frag yourself.” Elfrida pushed off and arrowed out of the kitchen.
★
“Y’know, the thing about my employers? They ask questions first, and shoot later. As in, much later. After the electroshock, and the waterboarding, and the truth therapy sessions.”
The thing formerly known as Shoshanna Doyle spread its hands in a what-can-you-do gesture.
Tall and lean, Shoshanna would have been attractive, if she were still human. She had a spiky shock of green hair and a crooked, teasing smile. She’d have been just Kiyoshi’s type, in fact. It was a shame.
He had absolutely no doubt that she was not in any meaningful sense alive anymore, though her body moved, and her voice was resonant and humorous.
“You need to be aware what you’re dealing with,” she said.
“Oh, I’m aware of that,” Kiyoshi said.
“I don’t think you are. You think the ISA will be happy if you blow me away? Making it impossible for them to ever find out what happened here? It’s called the Information Security Agency for a reason. Destroy me, and I guarantee your next place of residence will be a secure holding facility on Pallas.”
The thing might be telling the truth. After all, it seemed to have all Shoshanna’s memories, and she would know the ISA’s priorities better than the boss-man did.
Kiyoshi brought the laser rifle up to his shoulder, anyway. Then, on a whim, he lowered it. “What’s it like being you? Nemesis of humanity, destroyer of asteroids and orbital habitats, sowing chaos and terror across a volume thirty AUs wide?”
Shoshanna’s smile softened. “It’s fun,” she said.
Kiyoshi felt a pang of desperation. “You target a whole quarter of the human race for genocide just because they’ve got a few of the wrong genes. Why do you do that? Race is nothing. Eighty percent of genetic variation is among individuals. Classical racial markers make up only about six percent of total human variation. On the teleological level, that’s meaningless.”
“Lamarckian genetic memory, bucko,” the Shoshanna-thing said. It hiked one boot on the back of the telepresence couch it was standing on. It acted cool as a cucumber, despite the laser rifle Kiyoshi was aiming at it. “Race is culture is destiny. DNA is just shorthand for that other stuff. It correlates surprisingly well with pretty much every achievement metric, although we’re not allowed to say so, since eighty percent of genetic variation is among individuals, yadda yadda—the gospel of the 23rd century, which you’ve obviously swallowed whole. And by the way, just to correct another of your mistaken assumptions? We’re not your enemies. We’re your saviors, if you’d only pay attention to what the universe is trying to tell you.”
“Fuck you. Jesus Christ is my savior.” The words came out of Kiyoshi’s mouth unbidden. At the same time he pulled the trigger. Staggered laser pulses appeared to erupt out of the Shoshanna-thing’s face in puffs of red. It tumbled backwards into th
e air. He tracked it, holding the trigger down. The smell of vaporized brains added to the slaughterhouse reek in the air.
By the time it hit the far wall of the telepresence center, the thing formerly known as Shoshanna Doyle had no head left.
Kiyoshi kicked off and gave it another burst, just to make sure. He flew over the carnage in the telepresence cubicle farm. He’d shot everything that popped its head up, until the Shoshanna-thing came out of the storage module and tried to sweet-talk him. A few of the cupcake-things were still alive. He fixed that.
“You’re getting a lot of mileage out of that rifle,” said Jun, following along. For this mission, Kiyoshi had agreed to let Jun see with his eyes, or rather with his retinal implants, something he didn’t usually allow. They needed to make sure everything got recorded and stored in the Unicorn’s datacore.
“Yeah,” Kiyoshi said. “Who’d have thought the Neu Ordnung Amish would have brought along a bunch of HabSafeTM delayed-pulse laser rifles optimized for soft-tissue penetration, for killing people without accidentally breaching a pressurized structure? Very handy.”
“The new wave of colonists: rejecting modern culture, except for the good bits.”
“The tricky part is going to be getting the guns away from Haddock and company once we’re done here.”
As Kiyoshi spoke, he jerked the rifle up, lest he accidentally shoot Captain Haddock himself. The goateed namsadang squatted between the partitions, one leg hooked under a telepresence couch. He was aiming a HabSafeTM rifle at a thing curled in a fetal position and hogtied with IV lines. This thing was not a cupcake. It had a retro tattoo of wiring on its bald skull, and a dopey smile on its face.
“Any reaction from this one?” Kiyoshi asked.
“Yeah, he said something a minute ago, but I couldn’t catch it.” Under stress, Haddock was forgetting to speak pirate. “Why are these rifles so noisy?”
The Vesta Conspiracy Page 31