The Callisto Gambit (14 page)

Kiyoshi pretended to examine the drugs menu for a minute longer, then put it down. He met Wetherall’s eyes. He felt bad that he’d strung the man along this far, and also—let’s face it—more than a little chagrined that he
couldn’t
buy into the project.

Wetherall believed he had capital. Why wouldn’t he think that? Kiyoshi had paid up front for hotel rooms for 564 people. He had—until recently—had a Startractor. He bought and sold Jupiter trojan asteroids. Were their positions switched, Kiyoshi would also conclude without hesitation that this man must be a colony boss, loaded with money that was looking for a new, safe home.

Regretfully, he said, “Colin, I’m gonna tell you the honest truth. Your project sounds like a winner. Like it? I freaking love it. But I can’t buy in. I’m so broke, I can’t even afford ...” His finger landed on a menu item. “Can’t even afford a toke of XTC. This sparkling water is going on your tab.”

Wetherall’s face fell for a second. Then he chuckled. “XTC? Good choice. Molly’s the best cook in Niflheim. Molls …? Coupla tokes of X. It’s on me, Kay.”

“I appreciate it. But I am telling you the truth. I got no capital.”

Wetherall folded his arms. His expression darkened. The puppyish enthusiasm vanished. “So what
have
you got?”

Kiyoshi’s situational awareness kicked in. People were looking at them now. This could go badly.

Molly the bartender came over to their table with two preloaded cigarettes. She put them down, but instead of going back behind the bar, she stood nearby, legs crossed, arms folded. Her lovely face was expressionless.

Kiyoshi took a pull of oxygen, reassuring them with his calm, measured movements. Then, lightning-quick, he drew his dagger. He held it point down over the table, in a grip that could convert in a heartbeat to an overhand thrust. He could reach Wetherall without even leaving his chair. “This is what I got.”

Wetherall scooted backwards in his chair. “OK. OK, dude.” He glanced up at Molly. “Dude said don’t fuck with me. Guess he meant it. Ha, ha.”

Kiyoshi stood up, glad he’d kept his back to a wall. “I’m just gonna leave. Nobody gets hurt.”

He edged along the wall, towards the door. An old guy was in his way, seated by himself. Skinny, sporting a gray handlebar mustache, he looked up at Kiyoshi as if too stoned to realize what was going on.

“Move.”

The old guy’s eyes came alive. They focused on Kiyoshi’s dagger. “Is that a
tant
ō
?”

Surprised, Kiyoshi said, “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Brother, I
know
this shit. I got two
tant
ō
s
and a
wakizashi
. But that ain’t like any
nihont
ō
I’ve seen.
Look
at that blade.” He reached for it. Kiyoshi jerked it away. The old guy turned to the others in the bar, seemingly unaware of the tension. “Would you check it out! This guy’s got a genuine Japanese knife! How much did you pay for that, son?”

“Nothing,” Kiyoshi said. “It belongs to a friend of mine.”

The old guy moved. Kiyoshi got out of the door. The old guy followed him into the stairwell, and down to the street. “C’mon, lemme just have a look,” he pleaded.

They were out in the street now. Kiyoshi had a choice of escape routes, even if Wetherall called in backup. “OK. Look.”

The old guy kept a respectful distance. “Jeepers creepers,” he moaned, using his retinal implants to zoom in on the blade.
“Kissaki-moroha.
Double-edged at the point.
Never
seen one like that before.”

“That’s probably because you’ve only seen machined replicas. This’s the real thing. My friend forged it.”

Wetherall came out of the street doorway. “Can I see?”

“Look, but don’t touch,” Kiyoshi said, exasperated.

Wetherall ignored this advice. He reached out with one finger, as if to pet a small animal. Kiyoshi decided to let him learn the hard way.

“OW!” Wetherall yelled.

“I barely touched you,” Kiyoshi said. It was true—a few grams more force, and he’d have taken Wetherall’s finger off.

“Oh, it’s the real thing,” crooned the old guy, who was obviously the local sword nut.

Wetherall sucked his bleeding finger. “I’d like to meet this friend of yours.”

“You interested in blades?”

“Everyone’s interested in blades. They never need charging.”

“True.” The glimmerings of an idea came to Kiyoshi. “What about fish? You interested in them? Mixed-use intensive hydroponics: fish, rice, and insects, all in the same tanks.”

“That’s
hard
to pull off.”

“Yeah, but my people can do it.”

“What else can they do?”

Kiyoshi shrugged. “Carpentry. Bookbinding. Splartwork. Metalwork—casting, plating, lathing, with or without CNC. Drystone masonry. Electronics—I’m talking hand-soldered repairs. Life-support. We can do more with less than you can even imagine. Pigs?”

Wetherall’s eyes gleamed. “I’m interested in all of that. Except the pigs.”

“I figured that might be the case.”

“You have no idea how hard it is to find skilled people,” Wetherall complained. “We’re building habs from scratch, OK? And these habs need to be luxe. They need to be good enough for celebrities. Prefab modules printed from templates aren’t gonna cut it. I need custom shit, handmade shit. You would think, with a million Belters running around, there’d be some with the right skills. But noooo. You know what asteroid farmers are like these days? They let their MI run everything. All they know is how to push buttons. Can’t fix a freaking CO2 scrubber without a bot to hold their hands.”

“My people are different.”

Wetherall spread his arms. “Introduce me.”

“I will.”

Kiyoshi woke in bright sunlight. The artificial glare spilled in through the curtain-less windows of Colin Wetherall’s apartment.

Kiyoshi was lying flat on his back. He tried to curl up, and felt a weight on his legs. It was Wetherall. He was snuffling and grinding his teeth in his sleep. And drooling.

Kiyoshi grimaced and pushed Wetherall off. He stood up, taking each movement carefully. He was still in his EVA suit, but it was rucked down to his waist, liner and all. He had a crick in his neck and a sour stomach. His head felt muzzy, full of shadows.

He remembered doing XTC at the bar. Then moving on to someplace with live music. He remembered kissing Molly the bartender. He remembered eating a kebab. He remembered Wetherall daring him to try the ‘Electric Lemonade’ they sold in Hel’s Kitchen. He remembered how it had tasted on the way back up, mixed with chunks of kebab.

Stupid, boring memories of the stupid, boring things junkies did.

Kiyoshi hadn’t fallen off the wagon in a long time. Maybe that was why he’d fallen so hard.

But he
wasn’t
a junkie. No one had to be a junkie, when normal functionality was just one injection away.

In the middle of the floor lay Wetherall’s rucksack and coat, and Kiyoshi’s waistpack. Squinting against the too-bright light, Kiyoshi reached for his waistpack, and then noticed a bulge in the right pocket of Wetherall’s coat. He remembered Molly giving them some more cartridges of XTC, and Wetherall putting them in his pocket for later. Half those cartridges belonged to Kiyoshi. He might as well reclaim them—for later …

On the bed, Wetherall let out a bubbling snore and turned over.

Kiyoshi shook his head angrily. What was he
doing?
He emptied his waistpack onto the floor. There was the rig he always carried, like a holy medal to ward off evil. One disposable syringe, preloaded with one ampoule of his favorite hangover cure. He ripped off the sterile wrapping, and pried open the cubital port in his left forearm. This was a standard trekkie implant, for plugging in an IV during maneuvers. It also came in handy for dosing yourself. The syringe clicked home. He pushed down on the plunger, and immediately felt a hundred times better.

He would have to follow that up with a course of anti-addiction meds, which were easy to get. But for now, the insistent, sobbing rhythm of need was faint enough to ignore.

He stuffed his belongings back into his waistpack, scrupulously not taking any of Wetherall’s crap.

The sunlight glinted off a lidless chrome box the size of a phone. The electronics inside were already starting to rust from the humidity down here.

The transponder from the Startractor.

In the deluge of events following their crash landing on Callisto, Kiyoshi had clean forgotten about that.

But
before
they landed, he’d emailed the transponder’s log of unauthorized databursts to himself … and yup, there it was in his inbox, buried under a pile of news alerts.

Christ! The PLAN had got 39 Laetitia!

We could’ve BEEN there.
Thank God he’d made the right decision, even if it was for the wrong reasons. Callisto might have its raw side, but it was clearly the best place for the Galapajin to be right now.

He needed to get back to the Heinlein Hotel as soon as possible. On the other hand, the mystery of the transponder bugged him, and it would only take a minute to clear it up …

Wetherall had a fancy computing set-up on a desk pushed against the wall. Kiyoshi perched on the ergoform and flipped the screen open. Most of the app icons had a password-required symbol next to them. But the internet search utility, thankfully, was unsecured.

He ran a search for the ID string that the mysterious transmitter in the transponder had addressed its last
databursts to.

It had been broadcasting the Startractor’s location ever since the ship was in the neighborhood of Ceres, six months ago. It had sent its data to nineteen different IDs during that time, not simultaneously, but switching from one to the next after a period of weeks or months. Hardware Engineer Asada had guessed that it pulled the Startractor’s deep-space positioning data to find out where it was, and automatically chose the
nearest
ID from an internal list.

If that was true, the last transmissions should have gone to someplace near Callisto.

Therefore, Kiyoshi set his search parameters to exclude any queries that took longer than fifteen seconds to execute.

Even for a beast of a computer like this one—almost as fast as a ship’s hub—searching the entire internet would take days.

Searching the volume around Jupiter would only take a few minutes.

While he waited, he read the top stories on the local news feeds. More pictures of atomized ships and habs. More heartbreaking last words from colonists who knew they were doomed. The impact on the rare earth supply chain. Breaking news from the Mars theater: Star Force was dispatching another Flattop to this rock called Stickney. That didn’t sound like it had anything to do with Jun, and Kiyoshi got up, unable to sit still for worrying about his brother.

He looked out the window to drive away the images of death and destruction. Wetherall’s apartment was on the top floor. That’s why the sun was so bright: it was right
there,
a tube attached by brackets to the ceiling, so close he could almost reach out and touch it. The plaza below looked less grotty than the one outside the Heinlein Hotel. There were even a couple of trees in planters. Refugees were camping out, but these seemed to be a better class of refugee, with their own medibots and inflatable tents. Many of them stood watching the 39 Laetitia story on a municipal big screen. Vendors wound through the crowd selling baked goods.

Wetherall’s voice startled him. “Jeez. Close the goddamn shades.” The windows darkened, shutting out the view. Dim, yellow-shifted lights came up in the corners, creating the impression that night had fallen in the room. “That’s better.”

“They got 39 Laetitia,” Kiyoshi said, gesturing at the computer.

“Aw, shit. Still, that’s good advertising for us.” Wetherall crawled across the room to his coat. He shook its pockets out and seized a disposable cigarette. “Want some of this?”

“What’s in it?”

A cloud of raspberry-scented vapor billowed from Wetherall’s mouth. Seconds later, he sprang upright and scratched his balls. “Another of Molly’s secret recipes.”

Wetherall ambled over to the wall and pushed a button, exposing a previously hidden kitchenette. The old gleam was back in his eyes, the energy back in his step. Looking back, Kiyoshi realized that he’d known Wetherall was a junkie the minute he set eyes on him yesterday. He laughed to himself.
Takes one to know one.

“What?” Wetherall said.

“Is that stim?”

“Stim
plus,
Molly calls it. Goes great with coffee.”

“How do you know you’re a junkie? When stim and coffee is your idea of breakfast.”

“There’s magnesium in coffee, brother, all kinds of good shit! Anyway, I’m not a junkie.”

“No?”

“I don’t shoot up.” Wetherall glanced significantly at Kiyoshi’s cubital port.

“Hangover cure.”

“Hangover cure my ass.” Wetherall took a pouch of coffee from the microwave. “Anyway, who says you can’t
parrrtay!
and still get shit done? I’m living proof.”

At that moment, Wetherall’s computer pinged. Kiyoshi wheeled back to the screen.

SEARCH COMPLETE.

Wetherall looked over his shoulder. “Brother, ask me if you want to use my computer.”

“Can I use your computer?”

“Ha, ha … Legacy’s Leather Goods? What the hell, you wanna buy luggage?”

The single search result puzzled Kiyoshi as much as it did Wetherall. He clicked through to the leather goods shop’s internet profile, photographed the information with his retinal implants, and closed the utility. “OK, I gotta go. Catch you later.” He pushed his arms into the sleeves of his suit liner. It stank to high heaven, and had white tidemarks under the arms. He really needed some actual clothes. Everything he had had gone down with the Startractor.

“You gonna go talk to your people?” Wetherall said.

“Yep.”

“Sweet. I’ll talk to my people, we can set up a meet.” Wetherall followed Kiyoshi to the door, sipping from his pouch of coffee. His expression was somewhat troubled. “Before you go, I just want to ask …”