The Vesta Conspiracy

by Felix R. Savage

  “It’s an effect. So people know you’re shooting them.” Kiyoshi kicked the captive thing like a football. He was surprised how much satisfaction he was getting out of this.

  “Are you sure this guy is one of them?” Haddock said.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “Not like you can. That’s weird. Also, where did you learn to shoot like that?”

  “At home,” Kiyoshi said. “We used to have pirate trouble.” He grinned.

  “You high?” Haddock said suspiciously.

  “Just a few cc’s of morale juice. The same stuff Star Force uses.”

  The captive thing’s eyes opened and fastened on them.

  “Hullo,” it slurred, “You here for the secret of human happiness?”

  “That was it,” Haddock said. “You know, I had a shipmate once who downloaded a porno sim from the wrong site; his BCI crashed. This reminds me of that.”

  “Let’s keep it alive, for now.” Kiyoshi looked across the blood-splattered cubicle farm. A door led off the walkway on the far side. That was where Shoshanna had come from. “Stay here. Make sure it doesn’t try anything.”

  Pirates were not good at obeying orders. Haddock tied the captive thing up more securely and followed Kiyoshi into the storage module. Though Kiyoshi didn’t say anything, he was glad of the company. They darted in and out of cavernous rooms stuffed with consumables and spare parts. “Captious caterpillars!” Haddock gloated. “This mission is definitely going to have been worth it.”

  Kiyoshi’s rifle sight tracked across white ceramic walls. When they came to a locked door, he dialed the HabSafeTM’s pulse energy and frequency up to maximum and set the muzzle against the lock. Five smoky, noisy minutes later, the door swung back. They aimed their helmet lamps into darkness. The beams picked out the ragged tusk-like shape that had haunted Kiyoshi since the first time he saw it on the Unicorn’s optic feed. But now the inner curve of the tusk hung open: a hatch.

  Kiyoshi drifted closer.

  Inside was a human-sized cavity, encrusted with instruments and life-support equipment.

  A fighter pilot’s cockpit, Kiyoshi thought, realizing at last what the fragment was.

  In the couch lay a naked girl, sucking her thumb.

  “Did you say something?” Haddock said.

  “No,” Kiyoshi started, and then he heard it, too. The same voice he’d heard over his suit radio, fourteen long months ago. The slurred voice of someone talking in her sleep.

  “Warum ist … warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?”

  “What the hell is that?” Haddock said.

  “Spam,” Kiyoshi said. He’d ignored it back then, and he could ignore it now. It was just another version of the Infinite Fun Space package. Different bait, same trap.

  “Yonezawa-san! Yonezawa-san!”

  Elfrida Goto arrowed into the room. She bounced off the top of the tusk and floated over their heads. She raised gloved hands to shade her eyes from their lamps. She must have seen the life-support cradle and its occupant, but she was not to be sidetracked. “This isn’t over,” she gasped. “Not even close. I guess you aren’t aware. The Heidegger program—it’s loose in the Bellicia ecohood—it’s slaughtering purebloods, enslaving everyone else! Don’t you watch the news?”

  “Well, yeah,” Kiyoshi said, annoyed. “But what do you want me to do about it? We’re up here. They’re down there.”

  “The ISA will kill them all!”

  “Probably. But we’ve got the original copy of the program.” He waved at the fragment. “This, right here. This is where it started. This is what counts.”

  “People don’t count?” She pushed tangles of dark brown hair away from tear-filled eyes. She was prettier in reality than in her sim.

  “You got someone you care about down there?”

  “Y-yes. My—my girlfriend.”

  Jun, uncharacteristically, was silent. Kiyoshi subvocalized to him: ~No comment?

  “You’re right,” Jun said via Kiyoshi’s transducer implants. “We can’t do anything for them.”

  ~Good to know your crusading zeal has limits.

  “I may be a crusader. I’m not a kamikaze. That habitat is a death trap. But that doesn’t mean the people inside are doomed. See this [attached]? Those are ships.”

  ~Huh? Let me talk to them.

  “Sure, if you want. But you’ll need to use my translator program. They only speak Chinese.”

  ★

  The personnel of the Big Dig were evacuating. The VA staff had their own ship in the camouflaged parking lot at the foot of Rheasilvia Mons, the SUV (Space Utility Vessel) Giggle Factor. The Chinese pioneers had two ships in addition to the Kekào, which was not here at the moment. Both the Zhèngzhou and the Húludao towered over the Giggle Factor like skyscrapers. They were that big because they had originally transported the Chinese construction machinery to Vesta. The construction machinery was now being abandoned. Everything was being abandoned.

  Fiona Sigurjónsdóttir sank into her couch on board the Giggle Factor with a whimper of despair. Everyone else was staring into the middle distance. They were all watching the feeds streaming out of the Bellicia ecohood. The PLAN agent had brought the transmitter at the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport back online, in an act of pure malice, it seemed, just so that it could spew forth these scenes of carnage and terror. Sigurjónsdóttir had watched, too, until she saw a girl the age of her elder daughter bludgeoned with a tree branch, and then she hadn’t been able to take it anymore.

  Someone touched her arm. She looked up at José Running Horse. His expression was unfamiliar. Kind. “Gonna be OK, Fee. The Heidegger program sent three phavatars our way. I slagged ‘em from orbit. The only real advantages it had were stealth and surprise, and now it’s lost those, it can’t mess with us. We’ll be out of here in a few minutes, back in London in a few weeks. You’ll be stepping off the plane and hugging your kids. Just focus on that.”

  “I’m not worried about us,” Sigurjónsdóttir said. She slumped against him.

  Running Horse sat down beside her and held her while she cried.

  ★

  Cydney cowered in Big Bjorn’s treehouse. From downhill, she could hear shouts, screams, and explosions. This was everyone’s worst nightmare: phavatars turning on humans, slaughtering their makers. Some of the STEM students were fighting back. But it sounded like more was going on than that. It sounded like a war.

  “It’s gonna be OK,” Bjorn said, patting her back.

  She twisted away, unable to bear his reassurances. “It is not gonna be OK! Shoshanna’s doing this. I don’t know how, but she’s doing it. I told you she was psychotic. She’s going to kill everyone!”

  “I guess things kinda spiraled out of control,” Bjorn said sadly.

  “We had a chance to stop her, and we didn’t. This is on us.” With a moan of despair, Cydney burrowed under the edge of Bjorn’s rustic patchwork quilt. The fragrance of dry herbs overpowered the smell of smoke in the air.

  Her head bumped into something with sharp corners.

  “Ow! Did you stuff your quilt with e-waste?”

  Bjorn’s ursine face was not very expressive. Even when grimacing guiltily, he still looked like Love-A-Lot Bear. But that grimace told Cydney all she needed to know.

  She tugged at the seams of the quilt. Bjorn sighed, moved her out of the way, and ripped a claw through a patch with the U-Vesta logo on it. Polyfoam scraps and dried herbs spilled over their knees. Cydney reached forward and brushed off the astrophysics lab’s supercomputer workstation.

  “It was here all along,” she said with an accusing glare.

  Bjorn sighed. “I believed,” he said. Gunfire punctuated his words. “I believed we were being treated unfairly. The STEM guys were keeping secrets from us. That’s not right, you know? A community can’t flourish without transparency and equality.”

  “I dunno,” Cydney said. “Earth’s managed it all these years.”

  She heaved the work
station onto its side. The housing was cracked. One panel had been removed. Leaves and stalks clogged the delicate circuit boards within.

  “Guess they never got it talking?”

  Bjorn shook his head.

  “Not like it matters anymore.”

  But Cydney snapped a few pictures with her necklace camera and sent them to Aidan in LA with a note: Does this look totally fragged to you, or fixable? Since the comms came back online, she’d been in intermittent contact with her team, although they couldn’t, of course, do anything to help.

  A couple of minutes later, she got a message from Aidan. He wouldn’t have seen her pictures of the workstation yet. This had been sent a quarter of an hour ago.

  “Hey, Cyds, your feed’s not updating. Have the comms gone down again? If you get this, update your feed ASAP.”

  The truth was that Cydney had stopped vidding when she and Bjorn fled into the woods. It wouldn’t help her image for her fans to see her hiding under a bear’s bed while a war was going on.

  “Our access figures are out of the freaking atmosphere,” Aidan continued. “We’re the go-to feed on this story, but the viewers want live vid. Every second they don’t see it, they’re clicking away to BelterNews and Adam the Aggregator. So, y’know, if you get this …”

  “Adam the Aggregator,” Cydney gasped. “I hate that fucking sleb.”

  She put her eye to one of the leafy gaps in the treehouse walls. All she could see was trees. She bounded over to the top of the ladder.

  “… be careful, of course,” Aidan’s tiny voice concluded.

  “Where are you going?” Bjorn said.

  “To get the story.”

  xxxviii.

  After a short but hair-raising hop around the circumference of Vesta, the Zhèngzhou and the Húludao landed at the Bellicia-Arruntia spaceport. Actually, it would be more accurate to say they landed on it. The launch pad was not designed to accommodate two cargo transports the size of ten-storey buildings. Their fusion drives incinerated the terminal, the control tower, and the fuel depot. When the heat and light from this act of apathy-based utility died down, the two ships plonked themselves on the wreckage like a pair of elephants sitting on the ashes of a campfire.

  The Extropian Collective, watching from the Kekào, said, “Cool!”

  The Kekào flew down to the surface and buzzed the Bellicia ecohood. Its AI made a series of blindingly fast calculations about the terrain. Determining that it could safely land on the road to the spaceport, the Kekào alighted outside the Bremen Lock and melted the airlock’s iron gates with its drive.

  The Chinese ban on armaments for spaceships—a policy driven by 10% ideology and 90% domestic political considerations—had ironically prompted Chinese ships to master the gray art of slagging things with their own exhaust.

  “We call this ‘fart-bombing,’” a robot stewardess told the Extropians, who were rubbing their bruises from the rough landing. “The Chinese people have a dark sense of humor!”

  Just how dark was soon to be revealed.

  The Kekào deployed its drones, a.k.a. the cabin crew. Clad in their jaunty uniforms, they picked their way around the molten ruin of the gates. They found the actual entrance to the airlock, a giant valve hidden beneath the overhang, and proceeded to demolish it with cutter lasers (sanctioned for repair and maintenance purposes).

  From its rear end the Kekào extruded the same jointed tunnel it had used to rescue the Extropian Collective from 550363 Montego. This looked remarkably like a boarding gate. The cabin crew sealed the gate to the airlock with what appeared to be clingfilm. Then they walked into the Bellicia ecohood, much as the PLAN agent’s phavatars had done a few hours earlier.

  Below, a dirty blanket of smoke obscured the pastoral vista of lake, town, and woods.

  “Good afternoon, humans! This is the pre-boarding announcement for Flight 001 to the nearest place of safety. We are now inviting those passengers with small children, and any passengers requiring special assistance, to begin boarding at this time!”

  Silence; the distant crackle and pop of gunfire.

  “Don’t all rush the gate at once,” the Kekào, in the form of the lone male steward, commented to itself, in the form of the other stewards. They tittered obligingly.

  ★

  Cydney edged around the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center, her heart pounding. Something exploded inside the building. She and Big Bjorn flinched. They had seen nothing newsworthy on their way here, except for a few people running in the other direction. The emptiness of the campus was scarier than a riot would have been.

  A girl sailed around the corner at the micro-gravity equivalent of a dead run, each step carrying her ten meters through the air. A muscular man, naked but for a zebra-print thong, hurtled after her.

  ~Holy crap, guys, Cydney subvocalized to her fans. ~Is it just me, or does that guy look like Marmaduke Shagg?

  She and Bjorn shrank into the green curtain of the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center. The man caught the girl and dragged her, screaming, across the quad into the STEM building.

  “Come on,” Cydney told Bjorn. Her heart still pounded, but now it was the rhythm of a Xhosa war drum, pulsing adrenaline into her veins. She dragged Bjorn across the quad.

  They climbed the green curtain, past the NO CLIMBING signs, to the patio of the STEM cafeteria, on the second floor.

  The patio windows were closed. People’s backs pressed against the inside of the glass, as if a packed-out rally were being held in the cafeteria. Cydney cracked the window open and slid in. The people nearest rolled their eyes like terrified goats. They smelled of body odor and fear.

  Cydney jumped on tiptoes. Beyond the crowd, at the doors of the cafeteria, stood two nearly-naked people who looked like the hermaxploitation stars Butto Klüsterfück and Lotta Rogering. The crowd was so dense that they hadn’t seen her slide in through the window.

  “OK,” she murmured to her fans. “We have half the student body being held captive by a dangerous gang of, um, porn stars.”

  “They’re phavatars,” muttered a woman sitting on the floor by her legs.

  “Oh. OK. Phavatars based on porn stars.”

  “They killed all the purebloods. They took our guns and, oh my God, it was like a mass execution. Like something out of the twenty-first century. They dumped the bodies in Olbers Lake.”

  “Whoa. Whoa. Update that,” Cydney said quietly. “We are being held captive by the PLAN.”

  “And the other half of the student body,” the woman said. “And half of the faculty. They’re showing their true colors. You guys were right about them. I wish I’d never taken this job.”

  There was a disturbance at the far door. Cydney bounced on her tiptoes again. Dean Garcia swaggered in at the head of a phalanx of professors and lab assistants, all stripped to their underwear. Garcia, surprisingly, favored lacy lingerie. Blood striped their limbs and faces, as if in grotesque imitation of warriors painted up for a tribal festival.

  ~This is some Cro-Magnon shit, Cydney subvocalized. ~I thought the PLAN were all high-tech. Maybe this is what you get when you cross high-tech terror with academic politics. Her trademark giggle sounded weak.

  Menacing the crowd with the STEM students’ homemade rocket launchers, Garcia and her henchpersons grabbed the nearest captives and dragged them out. The remainder cowered.

  “They’re giving everyone a choice,” said the woman beside Cydney. “Convert or die.”

  Cydney looked at the woman for the first time. The woman only had one eye—the other was a steel metrology instrument. It brimmed with tears. Her chunky body quivered in panic.

  “Haven’t we met?” Cydney said. “Oh, I remember: you were visiting Dr. James when I was there. You were totally rude. Hang on, I’ve got a call.”

  “Cydney?”

  “Elfrida,” Cydney gasped. Suddenly, she wanted to cry.

  “Are you OK?”

  “No. Yes. No.”

  “Listen. We’re watching your feed
. Get out of there. Most people are hiding downtown. The PLAN attacked the campus first. I guess they’re recruiting an army to capture the town. But anyone that hasn’t been corrupted can still escape. There are ships …”

  Cydney wriggled back to the window. She could see Bjorn waiting for her on the patio, his fur full of leaves, the rucksack that held the workstation on his back.

  “Cydney? Cydney!”

  “I’m here. Ships. When. Now? Where. Bremen Lock, I guess. I gotta find a spacesuit.”

  “No, you don’t. The evacuation shuttle is docked with the airlock. They kinda remodelled it to enable direct docking. But Cydney? I need your help. Those people downtown. Some of them are children, Cydney. There are families hiding in the Branson Habs, too. Hundreds of them.”

  Cydney slid out onto the patio. The air, although smoky and foul, smelt like perfume after the stench in the cafeteria.

  “Cydney, I need you to gather them up. Find some people that you’re sure aren’t corrupted to help you. But the shuttle can only take about two hundred people at a time, so if everyone tries to board at once, it’s going to be a disaster. Make people understand that they can get away, but they must let the children and old people and pregnant women and so forth go first. And they might need help getting to the airlock, so I need you to organize—”

  “Who do you think I am, the captain of the Titanic?”

  Cydney jumped off the patio. Bjorn and the cyborg woman followed her. It was only two floors down, so they landed lightly.

  Elfrida’s voice sounded far away. “I think you’re the daughter of a Xhosa chieftain. I think you’re too ambitious to pass up this chance to be a heroine. And I also think you’re a better woman than you yourself know.”

  Cydney clenched her fists. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she said. Then she subvocalized to her fans: ~Guys? Listen up. I need your help …

  ★

  The evacuation of the Bellicia ecohood was celebrated system-wide as a triumph of crowdsourcing. Cydney’s appeal went viral. Within an hour it had reached pretty much all the scattered friends and relations of the people trapped in the ecohood. Most of these were already on the net with their loved ones, helplessly witnessing their travails from afar. Now they put them in touch with Cydney. Based on the profiles her team in LA crunched for her, she instructed only those with small children or invalids in the family to head for the Bremen Lock. In this way the Kekào was able to make several runs to the Zhèngzhou and Húludao, evacuating the most vulnerable residents, before the news got out, and the rush started.