The Vesta Conspiracy: A Science Fiction Thriller (The Solarian War Saga Book 2) Read online

  “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 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 had been the most advanced phavatar ever designed by the UN’s Leadership In Robotics Institute. One of the first to go into service had screwed up spectacularly, triggering the PLAN attacks on Botticelli Station and 11073 Galapagos. Elfrida had been operating it at the time.

  “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.

  “So, uh, were there any consequences for you personally?” Petruzzelli asked awkwardly

  “They sent me back to Earth for six months. I had to do a lot of therapy. Groan.”

  “I know, right? Me, too.”

  “I bet your therapist wasn’t as bad as mine. She made me do fingerpainting and beadwork. Anyway, when they figured I was fixed, they offered me a choice of reassignments. I think they’d have liked to get rid of me, but they couldn’t, because they’d already portrayed me as this heartwarming survival story. So I was offered Luna or Vesta, and I picked Vesta.” Elfrida made the phavatar shrug, lifting its elbows away from its sides. “Luna would’ve been a back-office job. Slow death by paperwork.”

  “And Vesta?”

  “Slow death by paperwork. With a few side trips. Laugh,” Elfrida said, using the emoticode, since the phavatar’s laughter sounded like a drawerful of cutlery being dropped on the floor. Twelve seconds later, Petruzzelli laughed with her. “But hey,” Elfrida added, “at least I got to see you again!”

  “Yeah! Seriously, it’s great to see you.” Petruzzelli whipped off her fez and frisbeed it across the bridge. It caught on the Eiffel Tower of empty drink pouches that someone was building at their workstation. “She shoots, she scores!”

  The playful gesture signalled that they were done sharing. Elfrida felt a bit cheated, since she’d given more than she’d received. There was a lot they hadn’t even touched on. For instance, the third member of their unauthorized ship-borrowing escapade: Elfrida’s then-boss, Gloria dos Santos. Did Petruzzelli know anything about what had happened to her?

  Probably not, Elfrida thought. Dos Santos had jumped ship on Ceres, before she could be brought up on criminal charges. She had simply vanished.

  Instead of mentioning dos Santos, she said, “That’s cool. Is it new?”

  At the same time, Petruzzelli said, “So, about this asteroid of yours—”

  They heard each other simultaneously, and stopped simultaneously. “You first,” Petruzzelli smiled.

  “Oh, I was just saying that’s a cool chunk of gear.” With one mechanical hand, Elfrida indicated the 3D display floating above Petruzzelli’s workstation: a holographic sphere that represented the solar system as seen from 2.4 AUs out, their present location. “Is it new? Captain Okoli didn’t have one.”

  “Yeah. We just got it a few months back. But look at this.” Petruzzelli stood up and reached towards the display. Though she stood 175 centimetres in her gecko boots, her fingers barely reached the bottom of the sphere. “Do they think we’re all freaking spaceborn, two and a half meters tall with the lean mass of a ten-year-old? I’ve asked my techies to reinstall the projector at a lower angle, but they’re scared of breaking it. So we have to do this.” Petruzzelli hopped on top of her workstation. One boot on a crumb-covered plate, the other on a pile of printer substrates, she poked her head and shoulders into the middle of the sphere. “Great view,” she said, asteroids and planets spangling her face.

  “I think I’d better not try that.”.

  “No, better not. If you fell, it would set off the alarms and wake everyone up.”

  While the Kharbage Collector kept Greenwich time, Elfrida was operating on Vesta’s unique schedule. So Petruzzelli had had to get up in the middle of the night for her.

  “I’m really sorry I’m stealing your bunk time,” she belatedly apologized.

  “Oh, pooh. I wasn’t asleep. But my 2i/c is, thank dog. Michael. Ugh, I haven’t even told you about him. I know he’d love to meet you, but you would not, trust me, love to meet him. And with any luck, you won’t have to.” Petruzzelli cocked her head at the center of the display. She pointed, zoomed. The sphere emptied out, leaving only the Kharbage Collector itself, a firefly inching through a dark volume that contained a few tagged sparks. “Bear in mind this is all based on publically available astrodata. Which means it’s wildly incomplete. But according to the coordinates you gave me, here’s your rock. Know anything about it?”

  “Not much. This partnership with U-Vesta is supposed to be a more efficient method of identifying candidates for the Project. But my analyst and I are convinced that they’re not sharing everything they’ve got. Oh, it’s a long story. The short version is: 550363 Montego, V-type asteroid, about 11 km wide across its longest dimension, albedo of 0.15, likely composed of basaltic chondrites. That’s it.”

  Petruzzelli raised one of her tattooed eyebrows. The smiley-face at the eyebrow’s outer corner changed from a standard smile into an evil grin, with devil horns and sunglasses. Smart tattoos: the newest old thing on the block. “I guess it’s more exciting this way, huh?”

  “Oh yeah,” Elfrida said, adding lamely, “Sarcasm.” She wished she had emoticon eyebrows. Someone ought to manufacture a phavatar with those.

  “Well, you’ll know more about the place pretty soon. We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

  ★

  One detail about 550363 Montego that Elfrida had not mentioned, assuming Petruzzelli would already be aware of it, was that it was owned by the Centiless Corporation. Legal ownership of asteroids was first-come-first-served. Thus, most of the asteroids in the solar system had been snaffled by resource mining companies during the early years of space exploration.

  Not by any means all of them. The system was now thought to contain 200 million asteroids large enough to be so classified, and more were still being discovered.

  Such was one goal of the University of Vesta’s astronomical survey program.

  In practice, however, the university was mostly rediscovering asteroids that already belonged to someone. Corporations were not obliged to disclose their assets. In fact, they guarded such data as jealously as dragons. Thus, the university was building a starmap of the Belt’s central region that already existed, in half a dozen more- or less-complete versions, in private hands. Several of the supermajors already had sued the university, trying to have the survey stopped on grounds of breach of privacy.

  But the supermajors were quick enough to disclose ownership of any given asteroid when someone else tried to claim it. The pattern had gotten so predictable that John Mendoza had given up posting claims to any candidates they found. Instead, he just pinged the usual suspects and asked, “Is this yours?” Nine times out of ten, it was.

  Not that Centiless, Elfrida reflected, could have any intention of actually exploiting 550363 Montego. It was too piddling.

  It rotated in Petruzzelli’s 3D d
isplay, a pale gray lump the shape of a ginger root. Its relatively high radar albedo indicated the presence of some silicates in addition to the basaltic chondrites you would expect a V-type to be comprised of. V-type asteroids, or vestoids, as their name suggested, were literally bits of Vesta, having been blown into space by the primordial impact that created the protoplanet’s vast Rheasilvia Crater. They had all their parent’s charms: no gravity, regolith so smooth you could slide on it, overlapping craters that stymied landings—minus the one element that had made Vesta worthy of human attention in the first place: hydrogen. No economically-minded human being could have any use for an object like 550363 Montego.

  But Elfrida had been working with UNVRP for eight years now, and she’d met people living in much worse places. The majority of human beings were not economically-minded.

  So she wasn’t exactly surprised when a voice blared into the bridge of the Kharbage Collector. “Heave to, me hearties, ‘fore I blast yez into yonder void! Resistance is futile! Ye’re in my crosshairs, and vairy pretty do ye look there!”

  After a startled blink, Elfrida’s reaction amounted to: here we go again.

  “Here we go again,” she said.

  “Yez are surrounded by drones armed with infrared-guided projectiles,” the voice threatened. “One word from me and yez’ll have sunlight coming through your tokamak!”

  “Screw you and your lame-ass heatseeking missiles,” Petruzzelli replied. “Do you know what kind of a ship you’re looking at?”

  “A raddled auld twin-module Startractor with a heap o’ tasty-looking cargo in her bays.”

  “Well, this old ship happens to be armed to the teeth. My own drones are currently zeroing in on the source of your signal.” Petruzzelli’s fingers danced over her console. “And if semi-autonomous micro-weapons platforms aren’t scary enough for you, take a look at my forward radome. That’s a rocket launcher loaded with scattershot warheads.”

  “Try penetrating a couple of kilometers of solid rock with ball bearings, me beauty.”

  “Thanks for telling me where you are,” Petruzzelli said.

  The 3D asteroid hanging over their heads developed granular detail as data poured in from the Kharbage Collector’s drones. A Superlifter tug perched on a protrusion, like a mosquito on a knobbly knee. Near the Superlifter, false color identified a cave mouth enveloped in a dangerous cloud of tailings.

  “And now tell me if you ever studied basic math,” Petruzzelli said. “All I have to do is increase my velocity relative to yours, and Ke = 0.5 x M x V2, idiot. Depending on how much I accelerate, each of my ball bearings will deliver kinetic energy equal or greater than its mass in TNT. So, no, they won’t penetrate your rock. I think they’re much more likely to shatter it into a million little fragments. Don’t you?”

  There was a pause. When the voice came back on the air, it sounded somewhat less piratical. “Ye’re not supposed to carry tactical warheads, if ye really are a civilian, and not an undercover.”

  “There are no undercover Star Force patrols,” Petruzzelli scoffed. ”That’s a myth. They’re stretched thin enough without going after plebs like you. Which is why we’ve taken the precaution of tooling up.” She winked at Elfrida, which could have meant that she was bluffing about the warheads, or could have been meant to rope Elfrida into accepting the Kharbage Collector’s flirtation with the wrong side of the law. Many private-sector ships did in fact carry weapons, licensed or not. In a system that included the PLAN, that was basic common sense. Elfrida certainly wasn’t going to report her for it. “Do we understand each other better now?”

  “Sure we do. We’re just innocent colonists trying to scrape a living. Ye’re a great bullying corsair that’s come to steal our resources, pitiful as they are. Ye should be ashamed of yourself.”

  A cold bolt of apprehension slid through Elfrida. Could the pirate’s accusation contain a grain of truth? Had Kharbage LLC really sunk to stealing the resources of asteroid-squatters, such as these seemed to be?

  No, she thought. If that were the case, half the screens on the bridge wouldn’t be broken. There’d be money to mend them. And there’d be more people around.

  “Oh, sigh,” Petruzzelli said. “We haven’t come to steal your shit. I’ve got a UN liaison agent on board. She’s come all this way to talk to you, although I don’t know whether she still wants to, after you were so rude.” She turned to Elfrida. The smiley-faces at the ends of her eyebrows went quizzical.

  “Sure,” Elfrida said. After all, this was only a čapek-class phavatar. “I’ll head over right now, if that’s OK.”

  iv.

  “Sorry I can’t go with you,” Petruzzelli said. “Company regs. But take some of my drones. I’ll give you an uplink. That’s actually against regs, too, but since you’re a friend …”

  “I’m sure I’ll be OK,” Elfrida said. “But thanks. I’ll take the drones.”

  “Just in case.”

  “Just in case,” Elfrida confirmed, noting that Petruzzelli’s eyebrows were doing evil grin, while her expression remained professionally bland.

  The drones were useful for more than offensive applications. Powered by tiny ion-propulsion engines, they could sub for a personal mobility system, which Elfrida’s phavatar did not have. She tethered herself to them and was towed across the gap between the Kharbage Collector and 550363 Montego. She felt ridiculous. Behind her, the Collector matched the asteroid’s slow tumble through space, its radiator fins a-bristle, its radome glinting in the light of the peppercorn-sized sun.

  “Be careful,” Petruzzelli said in her ear.

  “Will do.”

  “Blistering barnacles! We got us a live ‘un!”

  Slim piscine shapes streaked out of the cave mouth at the wide end of the asteroid. Before Elfrida could decide whether to alter course or keep going, they surrounded her. Three times her size, they resembled silvery sharks with arms ending in scoops, grabbers, and drill bits. The phavatar analyzed the wisps of gas they were emitting. ~Ion-propulsion electrical thrusters. Propellant appears to be ammonia-based, it told her in the affectless voice of its onboard MI.

  Jerking with rage on her couch, Elfrida commanded the phavatar to transmit a polite greeting. What was it for, if not to facilitate communication?

  But by this time thirty seconds had passed, and the phavatar had not done anything except geekily chew on its own sensor data. A robot shark bit through Elfrida’s tethers and scooped her up. It rushed her to the asteroid, into the cave mouth, and down a broad tunnel into a cavern shadowed, rather than lit, by the headlights of a dozen more sharks crawling over the walls.

  Released into freefall, Elfrida cannoned into the far wall at autobahn speed. On her couch on Vesta, she flinched instinctively. ~SUIT COMMAND: FULL SYSTEMS CHECK! she subvocalized.

  She rebounded, drifting. Rocky debris littered the air, ranging from micron-scale grains to fist-sized chunks. The robot sharks—demolition/salvage bots, she now understood—teemed on the walls of the cavern like cockroaches in a cheap hostel room. They towed nets that captured most of the debris they were excavating. She spotted a couple of larger structures near the entrance of the cavern. But the most interesting thing in view was several spacesuited figures powering towards her.

  Interesting, and not in a good way, she corrected herself as they approached. There were five of them, in hard-shell spacesuits with old-fashioned detachable mobility packs. The interesting thing was that they had no logos or nametags visible anywhere on their suits.

  “Arrr, it’s only a bloody phavatar,” said the same voice that had hailed the Kharbage Collector. “Ahoy, matey!” He tapped her head with his glove. “Anyone home?”

  At the same time, Petruzzelli said in her ear, “Hey, Elfrida. WTF? Wanna give me a visual feed?”

  Also at the same time, the drones caught up, cheeping updates over her link. They had got into a dust-up with the robot sharks outside, and left several of them the worse for wear. They were prepared to similarly dispat
ch her interrogators if she gave the word.

  “No! Dog, no! Hold off!” Elfrida shouted, praying she wasn’t too late. This, she told herself ferociously, is why you don’t accept the loan of semi-autonomous mobile weapons platforms, even from a friend. “Hello,” she said, making the phavatar smile into the dazzle of her captors’ helmet lamps. “My name’s Janice Rand.” Field agents used different aliases on each mission, randomly assigned by a computer program. “I’m from the Space Corps. If you haven’t heard of us, we’re a UN agency tasked with supporting the diversity, economic viability, and physical and mental health of human populations in space, with a special focus on asteroid-dwellers.”

  This was the post-11073 Galapagos spiel, rewritten to eliminate any reference to the fact that the Space Corps was under contract to the Venus Remediation Project. You weren’t even supposed to mention the Project now unless they asked. The shift in emphasis had been explained as “refocusing on our core mission,” but it had left a lot of agents confused as to what the core mission of the Space Corps was. Most agents of Elfrida’s generation had joined up specifically because of the UNVRP connection. They understood that their role was to procure asteroids for the Project. Now, the emphasis on unique cultural values often conflicted with the Project’s needs.

  One thing had not changed, anyway: Elfrida needed to establish a channel of communication that did not involve drones or robot sharks.

  “This visit is a preliminary assessment. With your cooperation, which is highly appreciated, I’ll be gathering information about your habitat, your population, and your long-term viability plan.” Assuming you have one, she thought, glancing around the cavern. The two large structures tethered to the wall looked like inflatable Bigelow habs. “For your information, I’m operating this phavatar from a remote location, so there will be a lag of several seconds before I can respond to you. But if you have any questions, ask away! Don’t be shy.”