The Luna Deception Page 14

  Jun laughed. He shook his head, and laughed and laughed. It made Kiyoshi happy to see it, although he did not share Jun’s inclination to laugh at their own wasted efforts.

  “We were looking for the probes themselves, as opposed to the stuff they brought back,” Jun explained.

  “Wasted a whole month dicking around on Luna, getting nowhere,” Kiyoshi said.

  “Then you must see, it’s all connected!” Father Tom exclaimed. “The Mars probes are a project of the Hope Center for Nanobiotics, which is a subsidiary of Hope Energy. And Derek Lorna is friendly with the Hope family. Ten to one the Hopes are neck-deep in this plot.”

  “Correlation doesn’t prove causation,” Kiyoshi said. The Hopes basically own Luna. They’re involved with everything that happens there.”

  “For Christ’s sake, man! There may be a violent coup on Mercury within the next forty-eight hours! Do you not think it’s worth checking out?”

  Kiyoshi retrieved his cigarette and inhaled. He blew out a prodigious cloud of vapor. Nicotine and THC seeped into his veins, delivering their gifts of calm and distance from the mess he was in, the mess he seemed to have spent half his adult life trying to get out of.

  “It all adds up to something,” he allowed. “Definitely worth telling the boss-man about. But we still aren’t going to Mercury.”

  “Why not?” Mendoza shouted.

  “You don’t know much about spaceships, do you? This is a Hitachi-Samsung Longvoyager. It’s almost a century old. I keep meaning to get a new drive, but for that price, you could get a new ship, and I’m kind of attached to this one. We get 70,000 newtons of thrust on a good day. Against that, we mass 100,000 tons, and that’s just payload, not counting propellant mass. So we could get to Mercury, but our delta-V budget would not stretch to getting back again. Sorry.”

  xiii.

  The Longvoyager transport Monster—formerly the Chimera, formerly the Unicorn, formerly the St. Francis—coasted into orbit around Midway 16 hours later. Kiyoshi had changed the ship’s name (again), and Jun had re-registered its transponder with a faked-up record of inner-system haulage.

  Mendoza sat at the comms officer’s workstation, visibly tense. Kiyoshi was going to slug him if he opened his mouth.

  Traffic Control greeted them with a laid-back “How’s it hanging, Monster?”

  “Could be worse!” Kiyoshi said brightly. “I’m in the market for long-term parking. You got any places available?”

  On the secondary comms screen in front of the captain’s couch, Traffic Control—a very young woman with a shaved head—giggled. “Take your pick, man, take your pick.”

  This was sarcasm. Midway, also known as the L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point, owned the record for most-crowded region of deep space. Shipyards, fuel depots, habitats, factory farms, and giant fabs manufacturing everything from ball bearings to pharmaceuticals waltzed in coordinated halo orbits around this libration point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Here, the gravitational forces of Earth and the Sun balanced out. You could hang out here forever, with only modest applications of juice for station-keeping. Kiyoshi’s radar plot teemed with dots, like a mist of blood droplets on the screen.

  Traffic Control guided him through the maze into a halo orbit trailing the Rocking Horse, a habitat that served as Midway’s commercial hub. “We do require a deposit of five thousand spiders for the first week. But as a first-time visitor, you’re eligible for a special discount! So only four thousand spiders.”

  “Thanks,” Kiyoshi said with a lock-jawed smile. It was blatant monopoly pricing. He accessed the account he maintained in the name of Erich-Maria Holdings, LLC, one of his newer front companies, and transferred S4,000 to the Midway Parking Authority. Erich-Maria Holdings, LLC, was one of his newer front companies. Right now it had a bit of money in it. But soon it would be empty. Parking fees weren’t the half of it.

  “Got that. Thank you very much! Have a Goddess-blessed day!”

  “You can stay here,” Kiyoshi said to Mendoza and Father Tom. “I’m going to go rent a ship.”

  Rent a ship.

  The boss-man had come up with the idea, after Kiyoshi passed on Mendoza’s information to him.

  If you can’t make it in that rotten old ship, rent a different one. Problem solved.

  What the boss-man said, Kiyoshi did. But he was simmering with resentment. It was easy enough for the boss-man to say, hey, yeah, that could be something. Go check it out. It was Kiyoshi who’d actually have to do it. And spend his own money on it, too.

  He took the Katana—now the Wakizashi—across to the Rocking Horse, alone. Mendoza said he’d like to go, too, but Kiyoshi ignored him. He had not forgotten the smug look on the Filipino’s face when Kiyoshi was forced to reverse his former stance and agree to this crazy mission.

  He stepped out of the Superlifter’s airlock into a small-craft docking bay, one of five clinging to the Rocking Horse’s 32-kilometer length.

  The Rocking Horse was the third-largest space station in existence. It consisted of two parallel, tubular habs that curved through a quarter of an imaginary circle. These were tethered to a convex mirror, in the center of the circle, which collected the eternal sunlight that shone on Midway. Diametrically opposite the habs, a radial arm supported a counterweight of fused chunks of asteroid rock. More rocks had been added, as the mass of the habs increased, so that at this point in time, the counterweight did indeed look like a horse’s head.

  The Rocking Horse was home to several hundred thousand people. It rotated once every two minutes, producing a pseudo-gravitational effect of half a gee at its rim.

  Kiyoshi felt his internal organs shifting downwards in the unaccustomed gravity. He had to consciously strive not to slouch. He slipped on a pair of sunglasses, to match his favored dirtside garb of head-to-toe black (fake) leather. His hair hung below his shoulders, a surprise—it floated on shipboard, so he hadn’t realized it had got so long.

  The docking bay echoed with mechanical thumps, screeches, and whines. The Wakizashi lay in its horizontal position, like a giant shuttlecock on its side, in a row of similarly sized landing craft, shuttles, and tugs. In-dock automated trolleys carried ships to and from the giant airlocks set into the floor. Humans and bots scuttled around the ships, making repairs, upgrading components, and dangling in harnesses to touch up their bodywork. Even in deep space, people liked to flaunt their artistic talents, or lack thereof.

  Kiyoshi glanced back at his own Superlifter. The Katana had been a present from the boss-man to support his subterfuge on Luna. It had had at least three previous owners, but it still felt new to him—looking at it now, he still thought, I can’t believe that’s MINE.

  But the ugly silver patch on the radome spoilt his pride of possession. One of his nieces had painted a winged giraffe there when he first got the ship. He’d covered the painting with a sheet of insulation foil on their way to Midway. The kludge was obvious, and the lettering he’d slapped on top of the foil (WAKIZASHI @ MONSTER) was wonky.

  ~If you’re going to be the Monster from now on, he subvocalized to Jun, ~I’m going to get us a new logo. I just need to come up with some ideas.

  He meant that in a broader sense. He needed to come up with some ideas for repossessing his life from the forces that had taken control of it.

  It had all started out so innocently. He’d been piecing his trade networks back together, hustling for haulage jobs, working up new money-making schemes—doing everything he could to put 4 Vesta behind him. Then the boss-man had got in touch. New job for you. Interested? Sure, of course I am. When the boss-man puts it like that, you’re interested, even if the topic is the sex lives of llamas. Great, glad to hear it. Ever been to Luna?

  And that was how Kiyoshi had wound up skulking around Shackleton City for a month, trying to get a fix on the alleged location where the Hope Center for Nanobiotics was allegedly manufacturing tiny probes, smaller than a speck of dust, that had allegedly succeeded where all others failed, and delivere
d pictures of the nightmare the PLAN had wrought on Mars. The boss wanted those pictures. More importantly, he wanted the probes themselves. The concept of undetectable, un-fraggable surveillance tickled his paranoia in the worst way. Kiyoshi suspected that had he found the fab where the probes were being made, he’d have been asked to blow it up.

  But the operation had run into the sand. No one would talk, or at least not to a 2.6-meter Japanese guy pretending to be a purchasing rep for a Ceres-based He3 mining start-up. Kiyoshi had received permission from the boss-man to give up, and he would have been halfway back to the Belt by now … if he hadn’t received a desperate last-minute call from Father Tom.

  And now this.

  “You think we’re doing the boss’s dirty work,” Jun said in his ears.

  ~We are.

  “But what if this is exactly what it looks like? A disaster spiraling out of control? Are we going to pass by on the other side of the road, like everyone else in the solar system?”

  Jun never let up. He just kept hammering away at you. That hadn’t changed since he was alive in the flesh.

  “Thousands of people on Mercury are in danger. Could you live with yourself if we didn’t try to save them?”

  Easily, Kiyoshi thought. His own people had sacrificed everything for their faith. That made sense to him, but Jun’s understanding of Christianity demanded even more. It demanded sacrifice for complete fucking strangers. That was where Jun and Kiyoshi parted ways. Except they couldn’t part ways, because Kiyoshi’s ship was Jun, and Jun was the ship.

  ~I’m not happy about leaving you here alone, he subvocalized.

  That was an excuse, but it was also true. According to the boss’s plan, the Monster would stay here while Kiyoshi went to Mercury in a rented ship. Kiyoshi was not at all happy about that. Midway had a mellow, anything-goes vibe, but the place was infested with chancers who’d steal the implants out of your skull if you blinked. That was, unfortunately, typical of deep-space settlements. They had nothing except what they could grab as it went by. And if it was in long-term parking? You might as well put up a sign saying FREE SHIP PARTS.

  “I won’t be alone,” Jun said. “I’ve got my brothers.”

  “So ne [Yeah, I know],” Kiyoshi said. He walked past Big Bob’s Bodyshop, Sensors Unlimited, Drive Solutions For LeSS, and Julissa’s Pre-Owned Parts. The roof of the docking bay was a full kilometer overhead. Propellant gas hazed the air. A small man in a helicopter beanie, which enabled him to fly in the Rocking Horse’s gravity, buzzed the crowd, shouting, “What can I do to get you in a HIGH-SPEC, LIGHTLY USED ship today?!” Kiyoshi smiled at the salesman’s antics.

  Jun popped up ahead of him. He stood amid the colorful throng like a small black stone. Jun was a monk of the Order of St. Benedict of Passau, or at any rate, he had been one when he was alive, and he claimed still to be one. Kiyoshi did not think anyone had consulted the good fathers in Munich about whether they took AIs.

  “There were nine crusades in the Middle Ages,” Jun said. “One in the 21st century. That makes ten, and now there’s us.”

  Kiyoshi twisted his head.

  Jun’s projection moved to stay centered in his field of vision. “There’s only us.”

  “There’s everyone at home. There are the folks on Ceres. There’s that crazy lady, Domenika, that Father Tom is obsessed with.”

  “Do they give a damn about Mercury?”

  “Sure they do. They like cheap consumer electronics.”

  “Do any of them have nukes?”

  Kiyoshi flushed at the bald reference to another of his impulse buys. Someone on Hygiea had been selling, and he’d snapped up 600 tons worth of TNT equivalent, on the principle that you couldn’t be too safe.

  Jun said, “Civilization is like a spaceship. It’s old. It’s got a lot of klicks on the odometer, it’s been taking a lot of damage. It’s embrittled.” He walked backwards in front of Kiyoshi. “We slip up once, we’re finished. This could be that. A spot of labor unrest on the edge of the solar system. A crack in humanity’s collective shield. And what if this is the crack that shatters it into a billion pieces?”

  Kiyoshi snarled soundlessly. He elbowed Jun’s projection out of his way, earning a curse from the man whom he actually bumped into. He walked past Economy Ship Rentals, Uber Galaxy, and GetThereNow (The Most Trusted Ship-Share Club).

  “Where are you going?”

  Kiyoshi did not answer. He left the row of ship rental companies behind and stepped onto one of the moving walkways that curved up the docking bay’s side wall. People pushed past him.

  Jun’s projection reappeared in the standing lane of the walkway. “I thought you were going to rent a ship!”

  ~Yaru yo! [I’ll do it!] Japanese was a great language for evasions.

  The walkway rose through a open pressure gate and dumped Kiyoshi into the Rocking Horse’s interstitial space, between the docking bays and the residential habs up top. Local wits called this ‘N-Space,’ after the extra dimension that scientists imagined to exist between our real ones. Gargantuan struts and atmospheric rebalancing units blocked lines of sight. Around the top of the walkway, tents, shanties, and booths lined haphazard streets, giving the impression of a music festival that had settled in for the long haul.

  Kiyoshi veered into the chaos of N-Space. Rage-rock and emo-clash leaked from poorly sound-baffled pubs. Dazed but happy-looking tourists mingled with the locals. Local fashions tended towards the gothic, so Kiyoshi fit in. He smelled BBQ, marijuana, and freshly baked bread. A girl drifted towards him, smiling, and offered him a coupon for a free hug.

  Not every N-Space resident was a predatory hustler, but those that were had it down to an art. Advertising was illegal in the UN? Fine; talking wasn’t. They brushed past Kiyoshi, smiling, always smiling (some of them had had surgical help with that) and whispered about their services and special bargains. He shook his head: I’m not interested in replacing my eyes with multi-spectrum cameras, thanks. Or increasing my penis size 3 to 5 centimeters. No problem, man. The network absorbed his feedback and looped it back to the sales force. Their pitches shifted in tone. Girls, drugs, boys, prettier girls, stronger drugs … A black-skinned beauty caught his elbow and murmured an offer he could not refuse.

  “You’ve got yourself a customer, honey. How much?”

  Jun’s projection flashed up again, lips moving—his pleas inaudible now; Kiyoshi had turned his cochlear implants down.

  Kiyoshi followed his lovely companion into her tent. Mercury could wait.

  xiv.

  On board the newly renamed Monster, Mendoza, BCI-less, floundered through the news. The more he read and watched, the more he panicked. Events on Mercury were moving fast. The Earth-based feeds framed it as labor unrest, but the ‘disturbance’ following the electoral victory of Angelica Lin was clearly more than that. The feeds were saying that a bunch of phavatars had malfunctioned. Or, Lin herself had weaponized them.

  Only Mendoza knew the truth. Vinge-classes … In real life, they’re bigger.

  He couldn’t find any live feeds from Mercury. Elfrida was still blocking his ID. His calls to other UNVRP employees on Mercury went unanswered. Best case scenario, Star Force was interdicting comms to and from the planet.

  Worst case scenario …

  The worst case scenario (thousands of people dead) took on increasing solidity in his mind as minutes stretched into hours and Kiyoshi Yonezawa still had not come back.

  But his imaginings turned out to fall far short of the truth.

  In the middle of the night, a renegade feed based on Luna (where else?) broke the news that Mercury owed its troubles to a new iteration of the Heidegger program.

  Mendoza raised his shocked gaze to Fr. Lynch. The Jesuit held up his own tablet, and a babble of voices burst forth: “… the Heidegger program …” “… downloaded from the internet …” “… human error …”

  “Lightning doesn’t strike twice,” said a deeper, authoritative voice from the tablet. �
��Our preliminary analysis indicates that some disaffected cretin did this on purpose.”

  “Maybe they did,” Mendoza whispered.

  “It would not be at all impossible for a wrongdoer with some knowledge of computing to recompile the Heidegger program from quarantined PLAN spam on unsecure private servers,” the voice opined.

  “They’ve wheeled out the director of the bloody ISA to address public concerns,” Fr. Lynch marvelled. “That bastard never sticks his head up above the parapet. They must be terrified of another system-wide panic.”

  Mendoza shook his head. “They’re just taking the opportunity to scare even more people off the internet. He’s talking crap. No one could recompile the Heidegger program from spam. It’s way too complex. And it’s too big to be disguised as junk mail. When it sent itself out from 4 Vesta, it pretended to be a third-wave poetic syncretic film.” He threw his own tablet across the cabin. “Derek Lorna mentioned a piece of software he’d written! He’s on the team studying the original Heidegger program. He must have smuggled a copy out of the sandbox and—and given it to Angelica Lin … who installed it on the UNVRP supercomputer. That’s how it hijacked the phavatars.”

  “No one could be that evil.”

  “You need to stop giving people the benefit of the doubt, Father.” Hurling the tablet had propelled Mendoza backwards. He twisted in the air and slammed his foot into the viewport screen in the wall. It hurt. Twenty-four hours in zero-gee had helped his feet to heal, but his heels were still tender.

  Originally intended to sleep the dozens-strong crew that had operated the ship in its heyday, this room was ten times the size of what Mendoza thought of as a cabin. Now it was empty of bunks, littered with random floating objects, from sacks of splart to farming implements. The big screen took up the end wall. Mendoza’s foot left a gray bruise of crushed capacitors on it.

  “Hey! Jun!” he shouted. “Thing! AI! Where are you?”