“Trust the fucking UN to fuck up the simplest things,” she muttered in anger, turning away from the view.

  “Actually, that’s a great epitaph,” said a voice in her helmet. “We could use it for all these funerals.”

  Elfrida jumped. “Dos Santos!”

  The manager stood at the back of the cargo bay, in the shadow of the overhanging roof. It was funny, Elfrida thought, the way you could recognize someone even in the sexless Lego-man silhouette of a standard-issue UN spacesuit. If you knew them really well.

  Did she know dos Santos really well?

  Did she know her at all?

  The truth was that Elfrida had been avoiding dos Santos. Not only was she embarrassed about her inappropriate nympho confession, she was uncomfortably aware that she’d seen dos Santos break several regulations and probably a law or three, as well. The older woman had to be concerned about that. Elfrida had been trying for two days to think of a tactful way to let her know she wasn’t going to say anything.

  “I didn’t realize my comms were on,” she said lamely.

  “Oh yeah. You transmitted the whole funeral over the public channel. People were cracking up in the mess. Smile.”

  Elfrida cursed and fumbled with the controls on her wrist panel. She was used to manipulating suit functions with a blink or two and a whispered command. On Botticelli Station, everything had been connected to everything. But on the Kharbage Can, nothing was connected to anything. It was a very private-sector way of doing things, betokening a low level of trust among shipmates. Captain Okoli certainly did not trust the refugees from Botticelli Station. He had politely declined to let them access his hub at all. Elfrida was isolated in her suit like some 21st-century astronaut. She pawed at what looked like the right dial and switched to an unoccupied frequency. “Hello, hello?”

  Dos Santos picked up the conversation without skipping a beat. “You missed your thirteen-hundred medical appointment.”

  “I wanted to do this.”

  “You need to take this treatment seriously, Goto. We each absorbed a dose of maybe a hundred rem. You feel better now, but that’s because we’re into the latent period. In a few days, you’ll start vomiting again. You’ll experience diarrhea, bleeding, cardiovascular collapse, and maybe death … if you don’t take those stem-cell transfusions.”

  “OK, OK. You’ve scared me,” Elfrida said. “Smile.”

  “Have I, Goto? Have I scared you?”

  Dos Santos walked out of the crisp shadow of the roof and into Venus-light. She was not wearing a tether. Elfrida automatically felt for her own tether and tugged it to make sure it was properly secured to the stanchion. These tethers were safety-tested up to 2 tonnes. You had to enter a Morse-like sequence of button pushes to release them.

  “If you’re not scared,” dos Santos said, “maybe you should be. Give it some thought.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t understand.”

  Far below, specks of light winked on the nightside of Venus’s terminator. Botticelli Station had drifted around to the dark side of the planet, and the Superlifters had followed it. The Kharbage Can was trailing after them, maintaining line-of-sight comms with the engineers laboring on the stricken station. Soon the barge, too, would cross into Venus’s shadow. The cryosphere smouldered against the blackness of space, Venus’s molten ground illuminating the clouds.

  “Think they’ll manage to save the station?” dos Santos said. It seemed like a step back into small talk.

  “I hope so,” Elfrida said. “I mean, it would be awful if they couldn’t. It would set the Project back years. And the cost!”

  “You really are the perfect little space cadet, aren’t you? Unfailingly brave, loyal, and cost-conscious.”

  No one had ever called Elfrida brave or loyal before. Nor did the words feel much like praise now. In fact, they sounded sarcastic. Unhappily, she fiddled with her tether.

  Dos Santos walked past her to the very edge of the mooring plate. Terror blossoming, Elfrida lunged for her, then bobbed back upright on the dry-grip treads of her suit, feeling foolish.

  “Weren’t going to push me over, were you?” dos Santos said. “Laugh.”

  “Ma’am, you ought to be wearing a tether! That’s not safe.”

  “This ship isn’t safe,” was dos Santos’s quelling response.

  That was certainly true. The Can was a twin-module Startractor, serially refurbished but showing its age. Not that it had been a very luxurious ride in the first place. Cargo Bay No. 1, like Nos. 2 and 3, was simply an open space between circular mooring plates threaded on the keel like slices of carrot on a skewer, behind the forward radar dome. Elfrida and dos Santos shared it with assorted shipping containers. Below their feet was the auxiliary craft dock, but it was empty, since both of the Superlifters were far away on Venus’s nightside. If either dos Santos or Elfrida fell overboard, their chances of rescue would be poor.

  “In a way, it would be better if the station couldn’t be saved,” dos Santos said, as if to herself. But she was not the type to accidentally leave her transmitter on. She must have meant Elfrida to hear that.

  “Ma’am, because …?”

  “In strict confidence, you’d be surprised to know how many people—highly placed people—think the Venus Project is a colossal boondoggle. If you were a fly on the wall in certain important places when the news broke, you would have heard the sound of champagne corks popping. Ironic, isn’t it? But it wouldn’t be the first time our enemies have done for us what we should have done for ourselves.”

  “I know the Project’s got enemies,” Elfrida said in confusion. “But we can’t let them win!”

  “The question is, what do we mean by victory? Sometimes we’re our own worst enemies,” dos Santos said, her voice soft, almost sad.

  “Speaking of being your own worst enemy,” Elfrida said grimly. She punched in the code to release her tether. It came loose from the stanchion and retracted to her belt. She edged forward to stand beside dos Santos. Their toes were over the lip of the mooring plate. Two-foot fluorescent yellow script around the edge of the plate read:

  SECURE ALL CARGO BEHIND THIS LINE

  Dos Santos’s faceplate swiveled. “Goto, get back behind that yellow line.”

  “Ma’am, you’re not my mother.”

  “Ha! Feisty.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to tell you … Back on the station, I did something really stupid.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I’d better start from the end. Before he died, Hardy filed a complaint against me.”

  “He did what?”

  “Yeah. He went to all the trouble of requesting a form, while we were crammed in there without any air. It got queued, and I only found out about it this morning. He accused me of—” it made her stomach hurt even to say the word, “racism.”

  “Are you kidding?” This was the old dos Santos, righteously riled up. “What on earth did you say to him?”

  “I said—Oh God, I know I shouldn’t have. But I said that maybe the PLAN attacked us because he was on board.”

  “Oh, Goto. That’s just silly. They wouldn’t send a ninepack after one pureblood.”

  “I know. But they aren’t even supposed to be active in this volume. There has to be some reason …”

  Up went the monitory finger, a plump pale blue sausage. “Goto, think. What asteroid in this volume did we recently find out about? With what kind of an unusual population? My guess, if you want it: that’s where the ninepack is going. We just happened to be on their way.”

  Elfrida reeled. “I haven’t breached security. I’ve been using quantum encryption protocols.”

  “Yeah, but where did our information about 11073 Galapagos come from in the first place?”

  Chapter 12

  Elfrida scrambled up the keel tube to the transfer point under the forward radome. The transfer point was a small cylinder that rotated around the ship’s spine at 4 rpm. From here, two 100-meter gimbaled arms extended perpendicular to the Can’s keel, also rotating. A speed of 4 rpm in the transfer point was pretty much freefall, so that Elfrida had to flap and flail her way to one of the elevator doors in the cylinder’s sides. It irised, after some minutes, to reveal another cylinder, this one lying on its side and full of annoyed bodybuilders. Four rotations per minute delivered a very livable 0.8 gees to the hab modules halfway along the propeller arms. But at the ends of the arms, where the ballast tanks would be relocated to balance the ship in the event of uneven loads, that went up to an organ-crushing 1.7 gees. Perfect for weight-training, if you were a blue beret or otherwise masochistic. The bodybuilders liked to keep the elevators out at the ends of the arms so they could use them as gyms, and got irritated when anyone insisted on using them as elevators.

  Elfrida apologetically swam in between them. The elevator fell into gravity, she fell to the floor, and—slow to regain her sense of balance—fell out of the elevator door, head over heels.

  She tumbled into the vestibule of the command module and sat up with her head spinning, blood rushing back towards her extremities. She wiped someone else’s sweat off her face and set off at a run. No NO RUNNING signs on the graffitied walls of the Can.

  It felt odd to be physically present in this ship she’d travelled in so often as a phavatar. She knew the trick of throwing your weight anti-spinwards when you went up and down the ladders, the smell of nutriblocks and adrenaline, and the aquarium echo of noise. She was not used to seeing the Can stuffed with her traumatized colleagues from Botticelli Station. Considering themselves a cut above mere evacuees, they refused to stay in the passenger module. They mooched around the bridge and congregated in the crew mess, looking for consolation and companionship.

  Blue berets, driven out of their usual seats by the B-Station cuckoos, lounged against the walls of the mess. Elfrida said hello to Captain Roy. The refugees were monopolizing the big screen to make up for their lack of net access. It was showing, once again, the Kharbage Can’s own footage of the battle. A red circle highlighted a black dot: Botticelli Station plunging towards Venus. Elfrida swallowed, not yet desensitized to the sight.

  A flamingo-crested announcer updated the audience, once again, on the struggle to save the station. Thus Elfrida learned for the first time that the engineers were attaching a mass driver to the station, as if it were an asteroid. Their attempt to power up the attitude boosters must have failed.

  Dos Santos will be happy to hear that, she thought.

  “This is ridiculous,” Captain Roy said, shaking his head.

  “No shit,” said the woman from Human Resources who had apologetically served Elfrida with Jim Hardy’s dying complaint. “We’re right here, we’re the story, and we’re having to learn this stuff from freaking NewYorkTimes.com instead of our own captain.”

  “You know what gets me?” said someone from Life Support. “The whole system is watching us. But no one is lifting a finger to help us. Two weeks!” He was referring to the projected wait they faced before they could be evacuated. “The Kharbage Dump’s got to come all the way from Luna orbit. There’s gotta be something closer than that. Where are our ships, huh?”

  “You get what you pay for,” Captain Roy murmured. “And UNVRP doesn’t like paying for ships. Planetocentrism.”

  A trekkie, one of Okoli’s officers, joined the argument. “Sure, there are plenty of ships around here. And they’re all hauling ass in the opposite direction. The only captain this crazy is Martin Okoli.”

  Elfrida coughed. “I was actually looking for the captain. Do you know where he is?”

  Captain Roy and the trekkie woman exchanged a look: here’s another one wants to complain about the food, the accommodations, the comms—pick one or all of the above. The influx of refugees had brought the trekkies and their onboard peacekeeping detail together like never before.

  “Captain? He’d be on the bridge.”

  “You’re not authorized to go down there,” Captain Roy reminded her pre-emptively. She knew him, had coordinated a dozen missions with him, but he did not know her, never before having seen her in the flesh. It was a funny feeling.

  “Oh, stop covering up for the captain,” she said. “I know he’s not on the bridge. He’s either messing around with the guns in hopes that the PLAN come back, or watching dirty vids in his cabin.”

  The trekkie let out a guffaw. She spoke into the air—she must have a comms implant. “Cap’n, a chick from the station wants to talk to you. Shall I tell her you’re too busy jerking off?”

  Elfrida was used to the way the trekkies talked, but several of her colleagues stared in shock at the woman’s lack of obsequiousness. This was ironic, since they had all been complaining mercilessly about Captain Sikorsky—behind his back, to be sure.

  “Yeah, all right. What’s your name, hon?”

  “Goto,” Elfrida said. “Tell him it’s Agent Goto.”

  The trekkie relayed this. Up went her magenta eyebrows. “He says he’ll see you. In his cabin. Know where it is?” She added, shouting after Elfrida’s departing figure, “Hope you’re qualified to handle hazardous toxins!”

  The woman had been referring, as it turned out, not to Captain Okoli’s choice of viewing matter, but to the hazardous state of his cabin. In contrast to the captain’s spick-and-span personal demeanor, his cabin was ankle-deep in gadgets, bits and pieces of weaponry, souvenirs, and forgotten food and drink containers. An array of screens splarted to the wall displayed camera feeds from all over the ship. Elfrida saw herself falling out of the elevator on her ass and tumbling against the vestibule wall. Okoli was replaying this footage and shaking his head at it. “Agent Goto. So that’s who you are. I was expecting someone taller.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just a quote,” Okoli said. He waved a hand to close the door behind her, then replayed the clip again. “Klutzy but cute. That ought to be a ship name. Maybe it’ll be my next command, the one I get as a reward for saving Botticelli Station: the Klutzy But Cute. Named after Agent Goto.” He finally looked at the real her. “How can I help you?”

  “The PLAN.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I know where they’re going next.”

  “Yeah?”

  “11073 Galapagos. You know, the asteroid that we—”

  “I was wondering how long it would take you to work that out.” Okoli swung his legs up onto the heap of oddments that occupied the foot of his bed, settled his head against the polyfoam headrest, and took a pull from a pouch labeled CLAM CHOWDER. His eyes were red-veined. “We can’t help them, Goto. We’re too far away, even if we started to burn yesterday. And there’s nothing else in this volume that can face down a PLAN ninepack.”

  “There’s the Cheap Trick.”

  “I know Captain Kim. He’s a good guy. And those Heavypickets are pretty scary, even if they do look like flying fridges. But Kim works for Star Force. You know what that means? He does what he’s told. And his commanders aren’t gonna tell him to go and defend an asteroid that belongs to someone else.”

  Elfrida sat limply on an ergoform, first moving the guts of a plasma effector to the floor. She saw now the trap that her own rotten luck, the PLAN, and—it seemed—the universe had conspired to set for her. It wasn’t fair.

  “The UN exists to defend humanity,” she argued weakly.

  “The UN’s just a corporation like any other. Difference is, it’s the biggest one.” Okoli took another pull on his pouch.

  “That’s not clam chowder,” Elfrida said, catching a whiff.

  “Wine spritzer. Want one? We get ’em through UNVRP procurement. Hence the mislabeling. One advantage of having peacekeepers on board.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Loosen up a little, Goto.”

  “What is the PLAN?”

  Okoli tilted his head one way and then the other, pooching his lips out. “A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

  “Are they better than us?”

  “Define better.”

  “Are they … aliens?”

  Okoli laughed. The abandoned ring of his laughter told her that he was drunk, or on his way there. “You know, I’ve heard that before. Never from a UN employee. You usually hear that kind of thing in the wet bars on Ceres where they also believe the President is actually a robot.”

  “I’m just trying to keep an open mind,” Elfrida said primly.

  “No, they’re not aliens. After the Mars Incident, no one went near that planet for decades. We just watched through our telescopes. Watched the AIs, or their descendants, crawl out of the volcanic inferno they had made. They rose like the phoenix and started to rebuild. But this time they weren’t building domes and factories. They built strange, geometrical towers like Le Corbusier on peyote. Some said these constructions were weapons aimed at Earth. Some said they were beautiful. Some said it wasn’t suicide the Heidegger Club of Mars had committed. They said it was a war, and the post-modernists had come out the victors. And all the time, of course, people wondered: Was there, could there be, anything still alive out there? Could anything recognizably human survive in that weird, jazzy pueblo the size of a continent and still growing, lapped by a freshly melted sea?”

  Okoli paused to suck his wine spritzer pouch flat. Elfrida took the opportunity to ask, “Le Corbusier?”

  He tossed the empty pouch at her. “Third evilest man of the twentieth century after Hitler and Stalin. And if you ask me who they were, I’m gonna have you shot.”

  “They were nationalists.”

  “Least you didn’t say individualists. Now, do you want to hear this or not?”

  “Yes.” Elfrida was in fact captivated by Okoli’s storytelling style. He made the old tale of Mars glimmer with mysteries often overlooked through sheer familiarity. She caught herself wondering if he owed it to his African ancestry, not that it mattered.

  “All right. So we watched and we wondered, and the more time passed, the more people started to think we might’ve got it all wrong. Maybe those weren’t weapons blossoming on the face of Mars. Maybe they were presents for us, gifts of new and unimaginably good technology … some shit like that. Governments argued, corporations speculated, and everyone agreed it was a pain in the ass to keep avoiding Mars en route to the new colonies in the Belt and beyond. It was unacceptable that we should be banned from a vast volume in the middle of our solar system. Above all, we felt hurt. Mars was supposed to be our second home. The first planet we terraformed, the destination of our spacefaring dreams. We wanted that planet back.”