The Venus Assault

by Felix R. Savage

  “Is our faith that weak?”

  Whatever Yonezawa answered, Elfrida didn’t catch it. She understood that Yumiko had not in fact uttered her announcement. She subvocalized an urgent query. ~Is this thing on?

  ~Sure it is, Yumiko said. ~I just don’t think that you need to upset them any more than they are already.

  ~That’s not your call to make.

  ~Well, excuuuse me, the machine intelligence said huffily. ~I’m only the one who’s here. I don’t particularly want to get spaced just because you feel a need to salve your conscience. But such is the robot’s lot, I guess. Suffer and die for the stupidity of humans. So it goes!

  Elfrida felt a click in her throat. The MI had physically switched her voicebox off to prevent Elfrida from using it. Now the speech function was on again

  ~Have at it, dumbshit.

  Subvocalization was harder to control than speech. There was one less barrier to saying exactly what was on your mind. ~You know, the guys on Luna forgot something when they designed you. They gave you all this cool functionality, they gave you the ass and tits of a vid star, they even gave you a surname … but they forgot to give you a personality. You’re sycophantic one minute, insulting the next—you’re all over the place.

  Which was understandable, actually. The UN’s robotech capabilities were way ahead of its understanding of what made people tick. It was orders of magnitude harder to code a personality than it was to build a high-end robot.

  ~SUIT COMMAND: Disable assistant. For all the good that would do.

  In the cage to her left, Yonezawa was putting on a show for the onlookers. “It’s springtime, and the cherries are bloooooming,” he sang, throwing his weight back and forth so that his cage swung. “Is it a bird? Is it a cloud? Sakura, sakura! Everyone come and see!”

  “What’s wrong with you, Yonezawa-san?” Ushijima pleaded.

  “I’m motion-sick.” Yonezawa grabbed the hip-level bars of his cage, his head drooping.

  Elfrida knew she might not have long before Yumiko disabled her voicebox again. She boosted the phavatar’s voice to bullhorn volume. “Attention. Attention all residents. This is a message from the United Nations.” Her voice rang out over the LED-lit streets, stopping people in their tracks. “You are in danger. The PLAN has recently attacked a civilian installation in this volume and it is believed that 11073 Galapagos may be their next target. You are advised to take defensive measures.” What defensive measures? “We estimate that you have four to five sols before the enemy reaches you. If possible, all residents should be evacuated within thirty-six hours.” And how were they supposed to do that? Maybe Yumiko was right that Elfrida was just salving her own conscience. “Message ends. Message repeats. Attention all residents …”

  People in the street started to throw things. Like the little girl with the catapult, they all had perfect aim, reflexively compensating for the spinwards drift of their pebbles, fragments of epoxy, and used mochi skewers.

  “We’re not stupid,” sneered Yonezawa, taking his share of missiles. “We watch the news. We can put two and two together. Why do you think I wanted to space you?”

  ★

  Elfrida somersaulted out of the telepresence cubicle, dislodging a spray of game crystals from the wall webbing. She kicked off and arrowed through the workshop, where engineers from Botticelli Station and the Can were arguing over a piece of equipment that looked like the vertebra of a dinosaur. They scattered out of her path. She bounced into the keel transit tube and rocketed up the zip line, using the optional motor to drive herself faster. The elevator seemed to take forever to come.

  “Have you seen dos Santos?”

  The long-suffering bodybuilders shrugged.

  “My boss,” Elfrida clarified. “She was down in Cargo Bay No. 2 earlier.” A new anxiety touched her. “She did come back, didn’t she?”

  “Oh, the hot Brazilian chick?”

  Elfrida flushed. “Yeah.”

  “Went out to the passenger module.”

  Elfrida kicked back out into the transfer point. All these gravitational transitions were making her feel sick. She summoned the other elevator, leapt for it, and—tired now—missed; she crashed into the ladder that ran the circumference of the transfer point and hauled herself along it to the gaping, unpleasantly pink cylinder. She travelled out along the arm, gradually getting heavier, and stumbled into the vestibule of the passenger module.

  This hab revealed the Can’s true vocation as an interplanetary cattle truck. Elfrida was familiar, from her many asteroid evacuation missions, with its scratched metal walls and tightly packed rows of ergoforms, upholstered in easy-to-sprayclean plastic. The reek of sterilizer tainted the air. A few of the more traumatized refugees from Botticelli Station huddled in the foetal position, widely separated from one another, among B-Station EVA suits draped over the ergoforms like fat UN-blue corpses.

  Elfrida found dos Santos in the passenger mess, practising lunges and handsprings on top of a long plastisteel table.

  “This is the only place in this whole damn ship where I can get a running start,” she grunted, her face streaming sweat. “Let those dickheads keep their elevators. Lifting weights under hypergravity is the worst thing you can do for your heart.”

  Elfrida walked tentatively into the mess. The ceiling was low, the lighting dark except for one strip directly above dos Santos’s table. The woman looked like a fencer fighting an invisible opponent.

  “I used to compete with the saber,” dos Santos gasped, as if reading her mind. “Might take it up again someday. Delusional. Probably.”

  Elfrida sat crosslegged on another table. She wondered if there were cameras down here, too. Of course there were. She reminded herself that the surveillance data might also work in her favor, by creating a record of her suspicions. If she were right, that would be invaluable. “Ma’am, I feel like shit about this.” She buried her face in her hands for a moment. “I screwed up. I told the population of 11073 Galapagos that the PLAN is coming for them. Well, they’re not dumb, they can put two and two together. They’re already freaking out about it. But they think they’re being targeted for their religion, not their ethnicity.” This summed up what she had learned from Yonezawa’s accusations before she logged out. “And they think they’ve been deliberately betrayed. By me.”

  “You? The phavatar?”

  “Either. Both. It’s a mob scene. I haven’t had a chance to look at the whole record yet, but they wanted to space the phavatar. They thought there was a tracking beacon in it that’s signaling the PLAN.”

  “That’s preposterous.”

  “I know, but you can kind of understand … One of those monks defended me. There was kind of a brawl, I guess. And they’re really strict about physical violence.”

  “You have to be,” dos Santos said tartly.

  “I guess, when you’re living in a rock five kilometers long. So they held this kangaroo court, and two of the monks got sentenced, and I did, too. Maybe to death. I’m not sure.”

  She described the gibbet. Dos Santos’s face went taut. She grabbed a towel, wrapped it around her neck, and tucked the ends into her t-shirt. “That’s crazy.”

  “I know. It’s medieval.”

  “Oh, not that. I’ve seen worse. You will, too, if you stick with this job long enough. No, I’m talking about the idea that we might be responsible for betraying them to the PLAN. They think we’re out here holding up a sign that says Purebloods this way? Seriously? We just got hit! Those toilet rolls killed forty-seven of our people! If they think we’d do that to ourselves—”

  “But someone had to leak the information,” Elfrida said. “You couldn’t find them by accident. They’re not dumb. They’ve been scrubbing their comms of any references to their—their ethnicity. They buy their water and other non-manufacturables through middlemen. They’re totally paranoid. So you can see why they don’t believe it’s a coincidence that we came calling, and a week later the PLAN popped up in this volume for t
he first time ever.”

  “That does seem pretty damning.”

  “But obviously, it wasn’t us, so it had to’ve been … oh, ma’am. You know, don’t you? You said, Where did we get our information in the first place? The same company that coincidentally saved our behinds, and is now being feted all over the system.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Dos Santos raised her arms and wheeled gracefully into a handstand. “It’s not about strength, so much as balance,” she grunted, upside-down.

  “I wish I could do that.”

  “Didn’t they teach you in basic?”

  “No. It was all trust falls and a bit of tightrope-walking.”

  “That could come in handy, too.” Dos Santos walked a couple of steps on her hands. Then she came the right way up, pink-faced. “If there was a leak, it doesn’t have to have been deliberate, Goto. Comms leak. Private-sector encryption is for crap, as a rule.”

  But Elfrida knew that the truth was just the opposite. The restrictive hierarchy of access permissions on the Can reflected Kharbage, LLC’s obsession with information security in general. A recycling company lived or died by its access to exclusive, high-quality data. They used encryption techniques that put to shame anything the UN could bring to bear.

  “Well, maybe the leak happened at Adastra,” she said, referring to the supermajor that had sold 11073 Galapagos to Kharbage, LLC. “They don’t want to look heartless, evicting people from their homes, so when they find out one of their asteroids has been colonized, they sell it on, book a quick profit, and then …”

  Then what? Why would a resources supermajor leak information to the PLAN? That scenario made no sense, and both of them knew it.

  “Anyway,” dos Santos said, “we can chase the leak later. There’s only one thing that matters right now. We have to save these people.”

  “Ma’am!” Elfrida exclaimed, overjoyed. “I thought …”

  She had thought dos Santos didn’t give a damn about the Galapajin; that to her, they were just pests.

  Dos Santos’s wry smile said she knew what Elfrida was thinking. “They may be inconvenient, but they’re still human. We can’t let them die, if there’s anything we can possibly do to save them.”

  Elfrida sprang up, ready for action.

  “I’ve been doing some thinking myself.” Dos Santos sat on the edge of the table to put her socks and shoes on. “I came to the conclusion that I’ve been a coward.”

  She bent her head, placing each velcro tab squarely on its mate.

  “I thought it would be all right to save myself at the expense of other people.”

  With a jolt, Elfrida realized that dos Santos was talking about their aborted escape from Botticelli Station. That must be why she had been sore at Elfrida earlier. She had been licking her psychological wounds.

  “I was going to just hang out here, take my meds—by the way, Goto, did you make another sickbay appointment?—and keep my ass covered. But … I can’t protect myself at the expense of innocent people’s lives. Not again. Not and still call myself a human being.”

  She sat on the edge of the table, feet dangling. With her face sweaty and free of make-up, she looked about twelve.

  “So, there’s something we could try. But this situation you’re describing, the conflict, the trial, the gibbet, that changes the game. That’s a problem. So what you’re going to have to do, Goto, and I’m sorry to have to ask this of you—”

  “I’ll do whatever, ma’am!”

  “Whoa, whoa. It might not work, and even if it does … Well, we’ll see. But the first thing you have to do is go back in and get her out of that gibbet.”

  “How?”

  Dos Santos spread her palms. “This is where we find out if they’re training you kids properly these days.”

  xiv.

  Elfrida knew that in order to have any hope of extricating Yumiko from the gibbet, she needed a better understanding of how she’d gotten there in the first place. Yonezawa refused to answer her questions; he just sang hymns. Ushijima sagged in his cage, LED light reflecting off the shaven spot on the crown of his head. Yumiko, too, was silent—in a huff, Elfrida thought, sulking like a little brat.

  She went back to the archives.

  She had a choice: she could access Yumiko’s own memory crystals, or the data dump on poor, crippled Botticelli Station. The former would be bang up to date. The latter had better search tools. As before, she chose the data dump. Time mattered, and the Botticelli Station server was close enough for instantaneous execution of her commands.

  ~SEARCH KEYWORDS: Yonezawa, Ushijima. TAG: danger. FILTER: relative velocity of any object in vicinity >7m/s. She was thinking of something like a rapidly approaching fist.

  Most of what she got was people working on the cathedral. Hammers and chisels moved fast, too. Yonezawa droned on about the symbology of the things they were carving, tucked away in crevices of the massive structure that no unprotected human eye would ever see. Meanwhile, Ushijima questioned Yumiko about the Venus Project’s resettlement program. Yumiko was snippy with him. She tried to put him off by claiming that 11073 Galapagos was unlikely to be eligible for purchase, and then painted an unfairly bleak picture of life on Ceres. What’s more, she said, the Galapajin would certainly lose their unique cultural values amid the Cerean gumbo of competing beliefs and customs.

  “What is this new emphasis on unique cultural values?” Elfrida fumed to herself. “It used to be incorrect to even mention that stuff. What’s changed? Who’s pushing this new line?”

  She remembered that dos Santos had advanced a similar argument when they first discussed the Galapajin. Even if she had just been playing devil’s advocate, it had to have come from somewhere in the UN.

  “Something the big cheeses dreamed up in New York, I guess. They have to come up with new policy directives to justify their own existence …”

  Unique cultural values sounded to Elfrida like a way of talking about ethnicity without talking about it, but that wasn’t how the Galapajin took it They had automatically assumed Yumiko was talking about their religion. To them, she seemed to be implying that their brand of traditional Catholicism could only thrive in the isolated environment of 11073 Galapagos, and would die on exposure to the rest of the solar system.

  “That’s precisely backwards,” Ushijima insisted. Text scrolled at high speed down his glasses, appearing inverted to Yumiko. Elfrida selected a few individual frames, zoomed in, flipped them, and ran a translation routine. Though the translation was sketchy—Japanese not being a widely used language these days—she gathered that Ushijima was quoting the Bible. “‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ When was the last time we evangelized anybody? Maybe this is the kick in the pants we need.”

  “Ceres is a galactic kick in the pants,” Yumiko said. “All day, every day. There’s no rest for the weary on that rock.”

  “Eleven million souls waiting to be saved,” Ushijima gloated.

  Yonezawa glowered, trapped. He couldn’t very well argue against the Bible. This is where it starts, Elfrida realized.

  But where did it end?

  She pulled out tag strings at random. In the search space, she had an avatar that she’d designed and costumed in self-deprecatingly funky style: a fat East Asian girl with dayglo elastics on her pigtails. Stripy socks, cartoon tats, pinwheel eyes. Most people purchased avatars that were idealized versions of their real selves. Elfrida scorned such vanity. Search wasn’t a game. She laid sheaves of like colors across her porky thighs. Images, smells, and sounds blurred up like butterflies. The human brain was unsurpassed at pattern recognition. You just let yourself relax into the data, like a cheetah becoming one with the savannah, and … there!

  Back in St. Peter’s. Candles blazing on the altar. Real candles; holy shit, think of the freightage … Smoke stained the elaborate stone friezes around the ceiling. Incense scented the air. Yonez
awa was shouting about whited sepulchers. A lot of other people were shouting in the background.

  “I didn’t do it,” Yumiko insisted, her voice hoarse. Sneaking a look at the attached telemetric record, Elfrida learned that the phavatar’s chest was already damaged, and she already had those puncture wounds in her hands and feet. Bother! Elfrida would have to go further back to get at the whole truth. But she could see what had crushed Yumiko’s chest. A pew, now lying upside-down near the altar. Six feet long, made of plastisteel. Its corner exactly fitted the dent in the phavatar’s ribs. Behind the altar, old Father Hirayanagi knelt on the floor, picking something up. The tsunami of angry voices crescendoed. “Uchu ni yare!—Sling her into space!”

  “I only want us to understand each other better,” Yumiko whined.

  Oh God, is that what I sound like? It was awful to remember that the Galapajin thought this was all her.

  Yonezawa froze like a fox, dressed in a white cassock, pricking his ears to the shouts. Elfrida could suddenly see in him the leadership ability that made him the First Knight of the Order of St. Benedict. She saw why he frightened the mayor and bishop. In time, that gift might develop into something to be reckoned with.

  “Spacing her would be a waste,” he pointed out, with a macabre wiggle of his eyebrows that alchemized the shouts into supportive chuckles. “We ought to recycle her. Lot of advanced components in there, kind of thing money can’t buy. We could use that shit.”

  Movement blurred in her peripheral vision. Ushijima wrapped his long arms around Yumiko, trying to shield her with his body, like a knight of old. “Cut it out!” he shouted at Yonezawa. “That would be murder!”

  “Recycling isn’t murder,” Yonezawa said. “So they tell us.”

  The congregation gave tongue like a Biblical mob. They were on Yonezawa’s side. Ushijima had lost the argument.

  Father Hirayanagi shuffled around the altar, his arms full of broken pieces of wood. Falling on his knees between Yonezawa and Ushijima, he prayed aloud, “Forgive our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”