The Vesta Conspiracy Read online

  THE VESTA CONSPIRACY

  SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES

  BOOK 2

  ––––––––

  FELIX R. SAVAGE

  ––––––––

  2nd edition copyright © 2019 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  First published in the United States of America in 2014 by Knights Hill Publishing.

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  THE VESTA CONSPIRACY

  i.

  “ALERT. Unidentified entity logged at 03:34:48 [coordinates attached]. ALERT.”

  Go away. Leave me alone. I’m sleeping.

  “ALERT. Trajectory of unidentified entity implies potential collision. Time to collision: six minutes and fourteen seconds. Deploy collision avoidance system? Yes, no, maybe?”

  “Haven’t got a freaking collision avoidance system.” He spoke out loud this time.

  “I was referring to our guns. Do you want to shoot the thing or not?”

  Kiyoshi Yonezawa surfaced from a deep, sedative-enabled sleep. He floated out of a nest of freezeblankets that had lost their chill, leaving behind a sweaty patch the shape of his body. He let the ship get hot when he had no passengers on board. No sense forcing the rickety old heat exchangers to work overtime.

  “I was dreaming.” His mouth tasted like the intake chute of a recycling unit.

  The bridge was dark, lit only by a single glowing screen at the astrogator’s desk. Clutter nuzzled at Kiyoshi’s body. He pushed off with his fingertips from century-old thermal panels of wood-look polymer.

  “What do you want me to do about this thing? Estimated time to collision: five minutes and three seconds.”

  “Can’t you handle it?”

  “You’re the captain.”

  He was the captain. And also the crew, the only passenger, and the ship’s mascot, bare-butt naked, his dick limply waggling under a fiftieth of a gee of thrust gravity.

  “Why do you keep calling it a thing? Is it a rock or what?”

  “That’s why I woke you up. It isn’t a rock, but it isn’t clear what it is.“

  “Gimme a visual.”

  The screen at the astrogator’s desk strobed. Kiyoshi floated down to it. A composite image derived from infrared and radar scan data depicted a tusk-shaped object, roughly three meters by two. Ragged at the bottom, it might have been ripped from the jaw of some impossible mega-predator that once stalked the vacuum.

  “Space debris,” Kiyoshi said.

  “Yeah, but from what?”

  Kiyoshi smiled. His cubital port itched, and he scratched it absently. His brain was kicking into gear at last. “Let’s find out.”

  ★

  Up close, the tusk-shaped object looked no less strange. Optic sensor and spectroscopic scan data revealed it was made of a metal-matrix composite, with the exception of the ragged end, which profiled as a jumble of refined metals and polymers. Instrumentation?

  It appeared to be partly hollow.

  Kiyoshi fastened the seals of his EVA suit. He clamped his helmet on, stepped into the airlock, and cycled it.

  “This is a bad idea.”

  “This is what you do when you’re too broke to afford drones.”

  “We have the Wetblanket system.”

  “I don’t know yet if I want to take it with us.”

  But he did. Unless it did something really freaky—like blowing up in his face—he was taking it. Something as weird as this was certain to be worth money, and he even had an idea who might buy it from him.

  He stepped into the stars, rolling head over heels under the belly of his ship. The object pierced the blurry sphere of Neptune. He engaged the electrical thrusters of his strap-on mobility pack.

  “Mom always said you’d kill yourself one day. But I don’t think she was imagining suicide by space debris.”

  “Oh, pipe down,” Kiyoshi said to his dead brother, ghostly shipmate, and bodiless companion.

  He puttered towards the object.

  It spoke to him.

  ii.

  Fourteen months later …

  Elfrida Goto ambled into the UNVRP office with her coat on, clutching a bag from the coffee shop on Olbers Circle. “What have you got for me today, Mendoza?”

  The astrodata survey analyst turned from his screen. “The Dodo is making a scheduled stop at 847221 Handy. We’ve also got a flight plan for the Kharbage Collector. It will pass within a hundred thousand kilometers of 550363 Montego this morning—a hop, skip, and a jump in astronomical terms. If we put in a request now, they’ll have time to alter course.”

  “Is five-five-blah-blah Montego inhabited?”

  “No data on that.”

  “But 847221 Handy is inhabited, correct?”

  “Yeah.” John Mendoza glanced at his screen. “Ranchers. 36-kilometer M-type hollowed out and spun up to 0.73 gees. O’Neill-style habitat. They raise grass-fed, quote unquote, beef for the luxury comestibles market. They also sell milk. And methane.”

  “I figure our chances of dislodging them are somewhere between zero and nil. You don’t get much more culturally unique than crypto-organic ranchers in the asteroid belt.” Elfrida yawned. “It might be worth visiting them, though.”

  “You’re just thinking about those steaks,” Mendoza said, grinning.

  “Like I would waste a real steak on a phavatar. But now that you mention it, I could stash some in the Dodo’s deep freeze and take delivery next time they swing by here. The Dodo is owned by NGI, right?”

  “Right. Nature’s Gifts, Inc.” The chintzy moniker illustrated the lengths recycling companies would go to to distance themselves from the unsavory image of their business.

  “I’d have to borrow one of their phavatars. All they have is asimov-classes. Those always give me a headache. On the other hand; steak.”

  “Envisioning a romantic dinner à deux? Mood lighting, a nice Cabernet Sauvignon, something mellow on audio?”

  “Curb your imagination, Mendoza.” But Elfrida blushed, because she had been thinking of something like that. In practice, any such romantic gesture would surely backfire, she reflected.

  Mendoza sensed the shadow that had fallen across her mood. “I know I can’t expect you to treat me to a romantic dinner, but you could at least have brought me coffee,” he said, pretending to be hurt.

  “Oh, but I did!” She opened the Virgin Café bag and passed him a cup. “Goat’s-milk latte with an extra shot, right?”

  “And it even tastes like it,” Mendoza said, slurping. “Beats the stuff in the staff lounge by a light-year.”

  Elfrida popped the nipple of her own coffee—an Americano with what purported to be real milk; maybe it even came from 847221 Handy—and perched on the edge of her desk, looking out the window. Their office was on the eighteenth floor of the University of Vesta’s STEM building. It was a loaner cubicle just large enough for their two desks, with organic biostrate walls that resembled loofah sponges. The roots of the squash vines covering the outside of the building poked through the outer wall and dripped on the floor. They had a good view, anyway. From the window, Elfrida could see over the roof of the Diadji Diouf Humanities Center, clear across campus.

  Students, professors, and locals on their way to work hurried along zigzag pathways between groves of apple and
avocado trees. Blowsy and exuberant, the trees grew to the size of oaks in Vesta’s 0.22 gees. To the north lay Olbers Lake, an emerald lima-bean. The campus lay between the Branson Hills residential district and what was laughingly called Bellicia City. To a casual observer, this could have been any small university town on Earth. But the gauzy early-morning light came from slits around the edges of the roof, six kilometers overhead. The shafts contained louvered mirrors that both refracted sunlight into the habitat and blocked out harmful radiation.

  Vesta—technically 4 Vesta, the fourth asteroid ever discovered—was so big, at 525 km across, that its boosters called it a protoplanet. The ‘ecohood’ of Bellicia occupied an impact crater in Vesta’s northern hemisphere. The roof of the habitat was a teensy M-type asteroid maneuvered into place three generations ago. Those early, can-do pioneers had melted the tiny asteroid’s native iron by the simple expedient of turning their ships around and aiming the exhaust from their primitive fusion drives at it. The molten metal had sintered to the carbonaceous regolith of Vesta, capping the crater with a 2-km thick, radiation-proof lid. Et voilà, instant habitat. Just add air.

  Shame about the gravity, or rather lack thereof, Elfrida thought for the hundredth time, shifting her limbs in the stabilizer braces she wore to simulate gravitational resistance. They chafed her thighs, and didn’t do a damn thing for encroaching farsightedness, increased homocysteine levels, and the stuffed-up feeling she always got in microgravity, which was colloquially known as head bloat.

  Watching the people cross campus, it was easy to tell who shared her reservations about the Vestan gravitational environment. A scant majority wore stabilizer braces and gecko boots like hers, which gave them bulked-out silhouettes and a normal gait. But many of the students were spaceborn; they loped along in long bounds, since they each weighed about four pounds here. The merriest students leapt right over the heads of their trudging peers, their long scarves swirling like the tailfeathers of exotic birds .

  Elfrida sighed.

  “Cold, isn’t it?” Mendoza said.

  “Freezing,” Elfrida agreed, tugging the lapel of her coat, which she had not taken off. “I was just noticing there’s no one sitting out on the benches to eat breakfast today.”

  “So it’s not that the university is literally trying to freeze us out.”

  “They’re a bit more subtle than that.” Elfrida waved her hand pointlessly under the heating vent. A barely-warm breeze trickled from it. “Did Dr. James cough up the rest of the asteroid survey data?”

  “Quote, it’s still being processed, unquote.”

  “Oh well.” She resisted the temptation to start grumbling about the lack of cooperation they were getting from the university. “We’ve still got plenty of rocks from the first batch to work through.”

  Putting her butt where her mouth was, she settled into the ergoform behind her desk and blinked her screen on. Paperwork and more paperwork. Mendoza had a sign above his desk—Paperwork = k / paper—meaning that paperwork increased in inverse proportion to the amount of actual paper involved. That was certainly true when you worked for the UN. And it went double, Elfrida felt, for the United Nations Venus Remediation Project (UNVRP) these days. The fallout from the Galapagos incident had inflicted stringent new compliance requirements on UNVRP’s junior partner, the Space Corps, as well as personally affecting Elfrida herself.

  They worked in silence for half an hour. Elfrida stared at the swirl of grounds in the bottom of her coffee cup.

  “Hey, Mendoza.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can we call the Kharbage Collector and request a trip to 550363 Montego? I’m looking at your preliminary candidacy assessment here, and it scores pretty high on all geophysical criteria.”

  “What, you’re gonna pass on the chance to score some crypto-organic steaks?”

  “I can also do without the crypto-organic cow farts,” Elfrida said. “Those asimov-class suits do have olfactory sensors. But no, I figure this is a good chance to catch up with my old friends at Kharbage, LLC. Haven’t seen them in a while.”

  “They don’t operate many ships in this volume. I’ll put the call through.”

  The UNVRP office on Vesta didn’t have many frills, but it did have a dedicated comms satellite in orbit—a must for a two-person field office 200 million kilometers from Earth.

  Just 90 seconds later, Mendoza’s screen flashed. ”Hello, UNVRP Vesta, this is Captain Petruzzelli of the Kharbage Collector speaking. What can I do for you?”

  Elfrida sprang up from her ergoform, exceeding the resistance of her braces, and inadvertently crashed into Mendoza’s back. “Sorry! That’s Alicia Petruzzelli. I know her. Oh God, what’s she done to her hair?”

  iii.

  “Congratulations!” Elfrida gestured at the captain’s insignia on the fez pinned atop Petruzzelli’s hair. The fez was crimson, and Petruzzelli’s hair was now metallic turquoise. The colors clashed horribly. “Looks great!”

  “Do you really think it suits me?”

  “To a T. Captain Petruzzelli; it’s got a ring to it. And you’re only, what, my age?”

  “I mean the hair.”

  “Hmm. That I’m not so sure about. I think it might have looked better when it was magenta.”

  “I’m just trying out the blue. It’s semi-permanent.”

  They had to wait half a minute to hear each other’s responses, which was the time it took a signal to make a round trip between Vesta and the Kharbage Collector, a recycling barge currently cruising 4.9 million kilometers away.

  “You look great, too,” Petruzzelli said, at the same time as Elfrida blurted:

  “I was kind of worried. I thought they might’ve demoted you to assistant data analyst, or something.”

  Eighteen months ago, Elfrida, Alicia Petruzzelli, and Elfrida’s former boss had ‘borrowed’ a Star Force ship with an experimental hydrogen-boron fusion drive. Piloting the ship, Petruzzelli had fragged no fewer than three PLAN fighters. It had been a rare victory for humanity against the PLAN, the hostile AI that lurked on Mars and savaged the fringes of human civilization. They’d saved thousands of asteroid squatters from being nuked. But owing to political complications, they’d been forced to participate in UNVRP’s shameful cover-up of the whole affair.

  Elfrida had lost track of Petruzzelli after that. It made her happy to know that Petruzzelli had not only escaped any disciplinary consequences from Kharbage, LLC, but even scored a promotion.

  But Petruzzelli did not seem to want to talk about herself. “Seriously, you look really good! I love the barrettes, and you must have lost weight.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Elfrida smiled. “I’ve gained four kilos since I came to Vesta. And I’m all puffy from the micro-gravity.”

  Petruzzelli herself, by contrast, looked fit and lean. The blue hair had initially distracted Elfrida from noticing that she’d had her eyebrows tattooed in swoops that ended in little smiley-faces at the outer corners. She wore a baggy cardigan over a wifebeater and leggings that emphasized her taut physique. Apparently, Kharbage, LLC still had not succeeded in convincing its officers and crewpersons to wear their uniforms.

  The bridge of the Kharbage Collector echoed the theme of sloppiness. Maintenance was clearly going by the board. Cladding had come off the walls and the mirrored sides of the elevator shaft in the middle of the bridge. In some places it had been splarted back, in others left to flap loose. Screens at officers’ workstations flickered, stuck on error messages, or in one case, a porn vid.

  It’s their corporate culture, Elfrida told herself. The spirit of jugaad. Very private-sector.

  But Petruzzelli’s next remark seemed like an oblique apology for the state of her ship. “Sorry we haven’t got a better suit for you.” She reached out and flicked a fingernail against Elfrida’s cheek. “This is like talking to, um, a bot.”

  Elfrida controlled her instinctive flinch. After all, it wasn’t rude to touch a robot.

  Lying on a couch in the
University of Vesta’s telepresence center, she was operating one of the ‘phavatars’—physical avatars—that the Kharbage Collector kept on board for visitors. Petruzzelli’s assessment summed it up: this suit made the widely maligned asimov-class phavatars look luxurious. From the neck down, it was a spacesuit animated by servos and artificial muscles. From the neck up it was a generic, multiracial, androgynous human with a dated geometrical haircut. Its sub-geminoid face, which Elfrida could see in the convex mirror suspended above Petruzzelli’s workstation, had a range of expressions so limited that her polite smile was coming out as a manic grin.

  “I’ve asked head office for something newer,” Petruzzelli said. “I mean c’mon, give me a tezuka-class at least, but noooo.”

  Before the most recent change of policy, it had been usual for subcontractors like Kharbage LLC to host Space Corps-owned phavatars on their ships. Now, Space Corps agents just used whatever phavatars their logistics partners happened to have lying around. It was a funny way for an agency to act that had recently scored a whopping budget increase. But this way Petruzzelli got to bill the Space Corps by the hour, so maybe it worked out more profitable for her.

  “Oh, I’m not complaining,” Elfrida said. “At least a čapek-class can’t drone on at you about its professional aspirations.”

  Twelve seconds later, Petruzzelli’s face crinkled up in a laugh, and her cheeks turned pink.

  “If I never operate a post-geminoid phavatar again, I’ll be happy,” Elfrida went on. “And I probably won’t have to. The stross-class has been recalled. For routine hardware updates, they say.”

  “Riiiight,” Petruzzelli said knowingly.

  The stross-class phavatar Elfrida used for the 11073 Galapagos job had been the most advanced telepresence platform ever designed by the UN’s Leadership In Robotics Institute. Elfrida’s unit had screwed up spectacularly, triggering the PLAN attacks on Botticelli Station and 11073 Galapagos.

  “Was it a true AI?” Petruzzelli asked.

  “No. It was trying to become one, but it never got there.” Far away on her couch, Elfrida shivered at the memory.