The Mercury Rebellion Read online

  She opened the report on Mike Vlajkovic and skimmed the bullet points while Cydney gathered candy.

  The gengineered trees of the pick-your-own orchard—a major UNLEOSS tourist attraction, despite the fact that you could find similar places on Earth—grew on the bank of the Angelou River at the equator of the sphere. The air was sweet, hot, heavy. Down here, one full gravity obtained. Tourists wandered through the taffy grass, carrying buckets of caramels, trufflefruit, toffee apples, sugarplums, marshmallow berries, and chocolate bananas.

  Mike Vlajkovic (38, married with two children) had lived all his life on Mercury. He worked for UNVRP’s human resources department. Lately, he’d taken on a role so archaic that Cydney’s researchers had added an explanatory footnote: labor organizer.

  “Uh oh,” Elfrida murmured. Suckered again! she thought, not without a certain amount of admiration for Dr. Hasselblatter’s style. He had not pressured her to take this assignment. But she should’ve known that the director of the Space Corps would not meet with one of his roughly 6,000 employees in person unless there were more to it than a routine job transfer.

  Mike Vlajkovic had gotten himself in the news last month by speaking out against UNVRP’s scheduled ramp-up of mining operations. Ponytailed, skull-faced, he raved about ‘anti-humanism’ and ‘AI boosterism’ in an embedded vid clip.

  “This is great stuff, Cyds. Thanks.”

  “My team is the best,” Cydney replied. She bit into a toffee apple. “Oh. My. God. Yummo.”

  So Elfrida was heading back into the land of ‘isms.’ On Earth, there was no such thing as ideology. It had died the gentle death of a bad-tempered but toothless dog. But out on the frontiers of civilization, people still got worked up about ideas and the choices they represented. And apparently, Mercury still qualified as a frontier.

  Suddenly, Elfrida couldn’t wait to shake the candy-flavored dust of this faux-tropical paradise off her heels. “Cyds?”

  “Yeah?”

  Elfrida kissed her, and tasted toffee.

  “What was that for?” Cydney squealed, obviously pleased.

  “I think I made the right choice. You were so wise to tell me to take this job.”

  ★

  Neither of them had ever travelled on a Starliner before.

  “This is the life,” Elfrida acknowledged. She sank beneath the surface of the Olympic-sized scuba pool, which was framed by non-slip cliffs and stocked with tropical fish. She came up spitting and smiling. For a moment she reflected on the irony that she could’ve gone swimming anytime when she was in Italy, but she hadn’t.

  A slender woman in a burkini dashed out of the changing rooms, chasing a boy of four or five. Shrieking in glee, the boy cannonballed into the deep end.

  Elfrida flippered towards the boy. She stopped when another swimmer surfaced from the depths, bearing the child aloft. The swimmer pulled off his scuba mask. It was Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter.

  Elfrida swam away in a hurry. She found Cydney lurking behind a crag, vidding the family scene. “What’s Dr. H doing on board?”

  “You didn’t look at the passenger list?”

  “I didn’t even know he had a family. Are they on vacation, or what?” Life on UNLEOSS was a permanent vacation. To go on vacation to Mercury would be kind of perverse.

  “You could put it like that. And he’s not the only one. Look at the passenger list, Ellie.”

  A winged unicorn presented it to her with a curtsey.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You really don’t access my feed often, do you?”

  ★

  Elfrida pored over the passenger list as she towelled off.

  The ship was infested with minor celebrities. They included:

  —Zazoë Heap, songstress and nose flute virtuoso, known for her outspoken support of euthanasia rights.

  —Theodotus Cellini, flamboyant former mayor of the citystate of Las Vegas.

  —Pyls O. Mani, a deputy vice president of the World Bank.

  —Mork Rapp, famed environmentalist …

  … and of course, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter and his family.

  “What the heck?” Elfrida said.

  “You’re so clueless,” Cydney said affectionately. “They’re candidates for the directorship of UNVRP. Or if they aren’t yet, they will be. They’re all rushing to Mercury to satisfy the residency requirement. I think it’s three weeks? Then the election’s a week after that. Hurry, hurry, little VIPs!”

  “Et tu, Hasselblatter?” Elfrida muttered. After all his noble and politically uninvolved rhetoric.

  Cydney wasn’t interested in Dr. Hasselblatter. “Look, look here, this is the real dark horse.”

  “Angelica Lin? Who’s she?”

  They were out on the promenade that wrapped around the inside of the ship’s passenger module. Cydney directed Elfrida’s gaze to the passengers doing ultimate yoga in the zero-gee area in the central atrium. A woman with long black hair, bodacious in a strapless skinsuit, tucked her ankles behind her neck. “That’s her. She was Charles K. Pope’s girlfriend. Word is she’s running for the directorship, too.”

  Elfrida sighed. The scent of hash browns drifted from the nearby apres-scuba restaurant, and her stomach growled. “I wonder if they do grilled cheese sandwiches,” she said, steering Cydney towards the restaurant. “There’s one big question mark hanging over this, isn’t there, Cyds?”

  “What?”

  “Where in all of this is Wrightstuff, Inc.?”

  iv.

  Wrightstuff, Inc. was the most powerful company on Mercury. It owned both of the planet’s polar zones, insofar as anyone owned anything in the context of the ongoing (three centuries and counting) debate about whether pieces of a planet other than Earth could be owned at all.

  A second-tier company in terms of capitalization, Wrightstuff, Inc. had been the first to arrive on Mercury. Originally, it had laid claim to all of the planet. No one had bothered to argue, except on principle, as long as Mercury remained inaccessibly remote in cost-benefit terms. The planet had a crust rich in iron and other ores, but you had to burn an insane amount of energy just to get there—never mind back again. However, the clean revolution had upended assumptions about what was cost-effective. In the first years of the 23rd century, cheaper spaceflight had dramatically lowered the cost of escaping the sun’s gravity well, and brought more competitors to Mercury.

  In vain did Wrightstuff, Inc. protest to the Interplanetary Court of Justice. Bots on the ground, and the principle of fair competition, trumped paperwork of dubious legality. Wrightstuff, Inc. managed to hang onto the polar zones because it actually had people living there. The rest of the planet got carved up among the supermajors.

  With Mars lost, the solar system had to look elsewhere for raw materials to satisfy humanity’s insatiable appetite for hardware.

  And from the middle of the 23rd century, it looked to the planet nearest the sun.

  Mercury had one important advantage over the asteroid belt: it offered multiple direct trajectories per year to every destination in the solar system. Wherever you were going, whatever you were hauling, odds were you could get it there from Mercury faster.

  The swiftly orbiting little planet now exported not only commodities but products manufactured on Mercury itself.

  It was not too much of a stretch (for the PR types, anyway) to say that Mercury had become the factory of the solar system.

  But even today, the best chunks of polar real estate lay in the possession of Wrightstuff, Inc., unexploited. The company used them as collateral in its fancy financial maneuvers. It also had a long-running partnership with the United Nations Venus Remediation Project.

  ★

  “The name of the game is CSR,” said Lal Subramaniam, who had spent fifteen years in the job Elfrida was about to inherit from him. “The terraforming of Venus! Humanity’s greatest endeavor since the Pyramids were built! A century-spanning project leveraging cross-disciplinary applied science and cuttin
g-edge extraction technologies to transform a toxic hell into a new Eden for mankind! I’m quoting from Wrightstuff’s annual report, by the way. But the verbiage is simply a factual representation of our own goals. What corporation wouldn’t want to be associated with such a salutary undertaking?”

  “A lot of them?” Elfrida said. Subramaniam was sweating visibly. Lank black strands fell from his combover across his deep-set eyes. His intensity worried her.

  “That is correct. UNVRP was the hottest thing in the solar system when it first got off the ground. But the bloom has gone off the rose, no? It’s the strangest thing—the more we succeed, the more people criticize us, the more they line up to find fault with everything from our methods to the underlying assumptions of the Project.”

  “I guess nothing fails like success,” Elfrida said.

  “That’s profound,” Subramaniam said, opening his sunken eyes wide. “Very profound. I think there’s more to it than that, but that’s the problem in a nutshell.”

  “It’s 4 Vesta,” Elfrida said. She still felt guilty about the fate of the second-largest asteroid in the Belt. After the PLAN’s malware hijacked 4 Vesta’s infrastructure, UNVRP had purchased it for the Venus Project. Seventeen years from now it would crash into Venus, blowing off gigatons of excess atmosphere. “I’ve heard all kinds of variations on, hey, what gives UNVRP the right to use a protoplanet as a glorified wrecking ball … well, excuse me, it’s infected with the Heidegger program; there’s nothing else to do with it! But people have this, I don’t know, feeling that we shouldn’t be reconfiguring the solar system at will.”

  “Yes,” said Subramaniam. “Indeed. But the acquisition of 4 Vesta only provided a focus point for an existing trend. Resistance to UNVRP has been building for at least twenty years. And so Wrightstuff, Inc. now regret the deal they did with UNVRP in the golden year of 2247. It no longer benefits their image to be associated with the Project. The humanitarian halo of UNVRP is no longer bright enough to offset their buccaneering investments elsewhere in the system. If they could, they would dissolve the relationship completely.”

  “But they can’t, can they?”

  “Fortunately, no. But they are creating obstacles to our Phase Five mining ramp.”

  The two were walking, or rather trotting at Subramaniam’s rapid pace, around the promenade of the Starliner’s passenger module. The ship had slalomed into the sun’s gravity well, burning enough fuel to light Luna for a year, and settled into orbit 350 kilometers above the surface of Mercury. The trip had taken just six days, since Mercury was in one of its frequent close approaches to Earth.

  Subramaniam popped out of his moustache-chewing trance to stare at the window of a boutique. A red-haired waif was being fitted with a custom set of stabilizer braces.

  “Isn’t that …”

  “Zazoë Heap,” Elfrida said. “We sat next to her at dinner last night. She’s boring.”

  Subramaniam returned his attention to her. “The terms of our agreement with Wrightstuff, Inc. give us the right to mine iron and aluminum—all the silicates, in fact—on their land. This we have been doing on a small scale for decades, to manufacture our own hardware.” Elfrida noticed Subramaniam’s use of we to refer to the Venus Project. It was a slip of the tongue she often committed herself. “They have never objected. It’s not as if there isn’t plenty to go around. But now that we propose to ramp up our mining operation, to implement Phase Five of the Project, they are seeking to impose all kinds of conditions, with the goal of shutting us down entirely. They are a dog in the manger! And I am certain Mike Vlajkovic is in their pay. I haven’t been able to prove it. Maybe you can.” Subramaniam paused for breath. “By the way, who owns this luxurious ship?”

  “Wrightstuff, Inc.”

  “Oh. Whoops.”

  “Nah,” Elfrida said. “If they’re listening in, let ‘em sweat.”

  A group of pensioners parted to go around them, discussing whether to visit the rejuvenation spa or the Graceland Experience. Elfrida and Subramaniam grinned ruefully at each other.

  “Well,” Subramaniam said, “that is how things stand. I hope you’ll be able to parry their dirty tricks better than I could. Frankly, I am very happy to accept early retirement.” His gaze wandered to a pompadoured geminoid robot that was bopping along the promenade, inviting people to the Graceland Experience. “I think I will go and have a look at my cabin now. Ensuite jacuzzi baths, did you say? You have no idea how nice that sounds after fifteen years on Mercury. Farewell, Ms. Goto.”

  He plunged off, leaving Elfrida to make her way down to the departure lounge. She felt oddly uplifted.

  ★

  A modified spaceplane rendezvoused with the Starliner and took the passengers off. It powered into a highly elliptical polar orbit. Elfrida got her first look at Mercury through the virtual windshield at the front of the cabin.

  The dayside of the small planet glowed steel gray, pocked and pitted, like a cannonball. A mesh of wrinkle ridges joined up craters as large as 1300 kilometers across. Oblique sunlight etched the rims of the craters like toothmarks. This was an airless, battered world. Elfrida reminded herself that Mercury had the greatest day/night temperature variation in the solar system. Right now, down there on the equator, it was about 450° Celsius. The temperature fell to minus 180°C during Mercury’s long nights. Sunrise to sunrise, one Mercurian day lasted for 176 Earth days… almost twice as long as the little planet took to orbit around the sun.

  The spaceplane dived towards the surface. As if it were a car driving into the sunset, the ‘windshield’ lit up so brightly that everyone in the cabin shaded their eyes. This was a dramatic effect. They were just looking at a screen. If it were real, they wouldn’t have been able to gaze directly at the sun. Elfrida stared, captivated, at the huge orb with its thistle-fluff corona of superheated gas.

  She planned to see this with her own eyes (suitably shielded) while she was here. “Sunrise on Mercury is one of the Seven Wonders of the Solar System,” she said aloud.

  “What are the others?” Cydney said.

  “Saturn’s rings. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The geysers of Enceladus. Olympus Mons—they haven’t taken it off the list, even though no human has visited Mars in more than a century.” Elfrida hesitated. “And Rheasilvia Mons, on 4 Vesta, formerly the highest mountain in the solar system.”

  “Still is, right?”

  “Only for another seventeen and a half years; then ka-plooey.”

  “That makes two of the Seven Wonders the PLAN have taken away from us,” Cydney said. “What are they going to frag next? Wait a minute, you only mentioned five Wonders. Plus sunrise on Mercury makes six. What’s the other one?”

  Elfrida grimaced. “Earth.”

  The windshield went dark. The spaceplane was now diving down at a steep angle towards Mercury’s nightside. The north polar region filled the screen. Fuzzballs of light glowed in the darkness. Closer, each broke up into discrete pinpricks. These were the beacons of humanity, as inviting as windows on a cold and rainy night, welcoming the travellers to a world 77 million kilometers from Earth, which was nonetheless, because of these lights, a home from home.

  The spaceplane’s elliptical orbit had been calculated to the centimeter. It would kiss the surface of Mercury and hurtle into space again.

  Or rather, it would have, if not for the special kit at Goethe Spaceport.

  Like any terrestrial Hyperplane returning from orbit—but much faster, since Mercury’s lack of an atmosphere meant no aerobraking—the spaceplane touched down on the runway at Goethe Spaceport … and its tailhook snagged an arresting wire of twisted buckysilk. Braking with its attitude boosters, it screamed along the runway. The brutal deceleration squashed the passengers into their couches, which had been reconfigured for landing so that they lay on their sides, facing forward.

  Even decelerating at two gees, the spaceplane needed the full 120-kilometer length of the runway to stop.

  “Please remain seated until th
e spaceplane has come to a complete halt,” the pilot said.

  Ignoring him, the more experienced travellers stood up and retrieved their carry-on luggage from the lockers.

  “Ah, screw y’all,” the pilot said. “By the way, did you know that our landing gear is based on a system invented three hundred years ago for aircraft carriers? Those were terrestrial ships that carried aircraft. Crazy, huh? And I’ll tell you something else, what we just did was nowhere near as dangerous as the landings that twentieth-century fighter pilots carried out every day. Welcome to Mercury, folks.”

  “Ow, ow,” Cydney moaned, peeling herself off her couch. “I totally grayed out there.”

  Elfrida handed her her carry-on. The journey nearly over, impatience consumed her. She bounced on her toes, getting the measure of the low gravity. “A whole new world! I wonder how long it’s going to take me to wreck this one?”

  “Oh, Ellie. Don’t be a goof.”

  A ground transfer vehicle carried them to Tolkien Crater, where UNVRP had its headquarters. They emerged, stiff from hours of bumping, into an underground parking lot. A skull-faced man with a dirty blond ponytail stood holding up a tablet with Elfrida’s name scrawled on it.

  Recognizing her one-man welcoming committee, Elfrida walked up to him with a determined smile. “Hi!” She pointed at his tablet. “That’s me.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Mike Vlajkovic.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Manager of the human resources department.” He smiled. Wolfishly. “Didn’t you know?”

  v.

  “I hope you make better coffee than Subramaniam did,” Mike Vlajkovic said.

  “Um, don’t you have a bot for that?”

  “No. Budget cuts. Now here’s the printer. See, it’s got the wrong tank in there. People from R&D are always using it for components. So if you need to print out something like spare uniforms, make sure you’ve got the right tank in there, or the peacekeepers could end up wearing uniforms made of carbon-reinforced plastic. Boo hoo, right? Here’s the supply closet. The tanks for the printer are on the bottom shelf.”