The Callisto Gambit (17 page)

Oleg Threadley’s eyes glittered with hate. “On second thoughts, keep your bearer’s certificates. Your purchases are on the house.”

“I appreciate it,” Kiyoshi said. He walked away, leaving Threadley standing with narrowed eyes in the door of his shop.

He was pretty sure the old man wouldn’t report Kiyoshi’s visit to anyone. He had no evidence, no proof, no probable cause, nothing. And so what if Threadley did file a report with Earth? What, exactly, were they going to do about it, in the middle of a war?

Kiyoshi’s next stop was several levels further down, closer to the stinking bedlam of Hel’s Kitchen.

In a corner of Westhab 6, dishevelled refugees sprawled on a bench in front of Hammer & Tong’s. This shop’s name was not bad grammar. It was—as Kiyoshi had had explained to him last night—a play on the name of Lewis Tong, the sword geek he’d met at Molly’s. Kiyoshi’s first question, of course, had been, “Is there a Hammer, too?”

Tong had cackled. “There sure is! You’ll have to stop by and meet him.”

Now, even before he entered the shop, Kiyoshi got the joke. At the end of the bench in front of the shop stood a dalek-class robot. Multicolored lights ran peacefully around its dome. Its right gripper held a large—in fact, comically oversized—hammer.

Kiyoshi squeezed past the refugees, into the cramped shop. It was just a hole in the wall with a counter running down its length. Behind the counter stood Lewis Tong. “Security?” Kiyoshi said, jerking a thumb at the robot outside.

“Oh, Hammer? Heh, heh. Yeah. Can’t be too careful, considering the nature of the goods.”

The counter doubled as a display case full of knives. On the wall behind Tong hung swords and daggers that Hardware Engineer Asada would have dismissed with a wordless eye-roll. But even fakes could still kill.

“Lookin’ good,” Tong said with a cackle, running his eye over Kiyoshi. “Got yourself some fancy duds.”

“Think these will impress Molly?”

“You could try wearing the price tags on the outside. Can’t think of anything else that would interest her in your skinny ass.”

“Unfortunately, I didn’t spend that much on them. Not real leather.”

“Heh, heh. Let’s hear it for convincing fakes.”

Small talk out of the way, they got down to business. Kiyoshi laid Hardware Engineer Asada’s dagger on the counter.

Tong’s eyes lit up. “Changed your mind?”

“Nope. Still not selling. But I was wondering if you’d accept this as a surety.”

“For what? You need a loan?”

“Something a bit heavier.”

Tong flicked a glance at the door. “Hammer!” he shouted. “Come in here and mind the shop for a minute.”

The dalek-class bot rolled into the shop. “Yes, master,” it said. It squeezed behind the counter and came to a halt, resting its hammer on the counter-top.

Kiyoshi followed Tong into a back room piled with manufacturer’s samples and polyfoam crates. A lathe stood in the middle of the room, proving that Tong made some of his fakes himself. He shut the door. “Cameras in the shop. City requires ‘em. Prob’ly isn’t anyone watching anymore. But better safe than sorry.”

Kiyoshi idly spun the dagger around his fingers—a trick he’d spent a ridiculous amount of time mastering, years ago. “So what have you got?”

Tong opened a crate. Gunmetal gleamed. “Zero.5s. Lightly used.”

“Even Star Force doesn’t use those crappy-ass rifles anymore.”

“I wouldn’t call them
crappy-ass.
But I guess you’re lookin’ for something smaller.”

“Yep. Can’t stuff an assault rifle down my pants.”

“OK.” Tong moved crates around, looked in the wrong place, tried again. “How about this?”

He held up a pistol as long as Kiyoshi’s forearm. It had a chunky barrel and a banana clip.

“Flechette gun?”

“The darts aren’t big enough to qualify as flechettes. Don’t get me wrong, this baby is dangerous. 800 meters per second muzzle velocity. Zero recoil. The darts are armor-piercin’. They’d go through an EVA suit, for example. But they aren’t smart. Not like the darts Star Force is orderin’ these days. You gotta wonder why the
Farce
needs smart darts to fight AI-controlled spaceships … Anyway. This needlegun might be just what you’re lookin’ for. Depending on what you’re lookin’ to do with it.”

Tong’s gaze was suddenly as sharp as Threadley’s.

“I was kind of hoping for an energy weapon,” Kiyoshi said, avoiding the question.

“Then you’ll hafta go somewhere else. I don’t sell lasers.”

“I’ll take this.”

Tong held the needlegun out of his reach. “Ain’t you forgetting something?”

“You don’t need to know what I want it for. You don’t
want
to know.”

“Son, I could care less. But you gotta give me the dagger. You’re tradin’ it in. Right?”

“Not trading it in,” Kiyoshi said. “Just leaving it here for a while.” He handed it over.

Tong stroked and even sniffed the blade, as if making sure Kiyoshi hadn’t swapped it for a fake overnight. He looked up with a mischievous smile. “Don’t be mad, but I kinda hope they frag
you,
so you never come back to pick this up. Naw, naw. Just kidding, son.”

“Got any extra clips for the needlegun?”

Two hours later, Kiyoshi was sitting on the southbound Ice Spires Express. As Colin Wetherall had predicted, it was three-quarters empty. Kiyoshi had a carriage pretty much to himself. He sat in the darkness of Callisto’s night, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor.

His new rucksack, wedged between his feet, held his EVA suit and the needlegun.

No way he’d have got away with this in normal times. But everything was falling apart. He’d scored a deep discount on the holiday package tour he purchased at the spaceport. No security scans, no searches—the peacekeepers who would have performed those functions were busy elsewhere, screwing bribes out of refugees and scavenging parts from crashed spaceships. The tour company didn’t care. Just gimme your money.

One thing he hadn’t had time to do was buy that course of anti-addiction meds he needed. His hangover—what non-junkies called withdrawal symptoms: a combination of dry mouth, twitchiness, headache, and the desire for more drugs—was back, mild but insistent. He caught himself wondering if he could score some stim when they got there. He pushed the thought out of his mind. He needed to be sober to do this.

He cued up some music on his BCI. Didn’t matter what. Just something with a beat. The bleak landscape whipped past.

Michael sat in the pilot’s couch of the
Angel,
hungry and cold.

“I wonder what Junior is doing,” Dr. Hasselblatter said.

They could hear crashes and bumps from the direction of the keel tube, which opened directly out of the back of the cockpit.

Michael shrugged. Junior had said he wanted to explore the
Angel
—he’d never been on board before. That’s probably what he was doing now. If he broke something, it would be the boss’s fault for allowing him to come.

Michael had other things to worry about, such as:
Where’s the boss?

They were supposed to meet him right here, right
now
.

The optical feed screen displayed the
Angel’s
present location, 500 kilometers south of Asgard Spaceport. Starlight gleamed on a cluster of luminous knobs to the north, so far away they looked thumb-sized. These were the famous ice spires. Michael wasn’t impressed. In every other direction, a rocky, icy wasteland extended to the horizon. To Michael, the terrain looked like frozen granola. A thick blanket of dust, untouched since the birth of the solar system, had puffed up around the
Angel
when she touched down. Her drive had actually ignited the dust, surrounding the ship with a fireball of plasma for a instant, until the thrusters cut out. That had been scary—but not dangerous, the
Angel
had assured him.

Otherwise, their landing had been hitch-free. Michael couldn’t take much credit. All he’d done was say yes whenever the
Angel
asked him for permission to do something. She was one smart ship.

He punched his couch lightly, trying to align it with Callisto’s gravity. Because the terrain was so uneven, the
Angel
had come to rest at a tilt, 6 degrees off the vertical. It was annoying, like being back on the
Kharbage Collector
when the rotator arm stuck halfway down.

“That sounds ominous,” Dr. Hasselblatter said.

“What? I don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly.” Dr. Hasselblatter popped his harness and plunged down the keel tube. Michael followed. Callisto’s 0.126 gees of gravity pulled him gently down. He held onto the grab handles to break his fall.

Below him, Dr. Hasselblatter vanished into the museum.

An instant passed, and then: “JUNIOR! Were you or were you not TOLD
not to touch the EXHIBITS!”

Uh oh,
Michael thought. A dreadful premonition took hold of him.

As he arrowed into the museum, he already knew what he was going to see.

Junior, in
Michael’s
mecha, which he’d given the boss for his collection.

Actually, it was even worse than that.

Junior had apparently tried to make the mecha do yoga. He’d got its grippers locked behind its back, and two of its legs behind its head, with the other two bent around the other way to meet them, so that all four feet formed a knot. The mecha lay on its side on the floor of the museum, with Junior inside. There were sear marks on the floor, and several display cases had cracks in them. Junior had evidently tried out the mecha’s thrusters before he got himself tied into a knot.

Dr. Hasselblatter leaned against the wall and laughed himself silly.

“I’m stuck,” Junior said in a small voice.

Dr. Hasselblatter wiped his eyes and turned to Michael. “This used to be yours, didn’t it? Can you get him out?”

Michael inhaled shakily. He felt himself to be balanced on a razor’s edge between a screaming, shaking meltdown … and the knowledge that the boss would expect better of him.

In the most normal voice he could manage, he said, “I had this mecha for years, but I never made it do
that.”

He pulled at the mecha’s feet. Junior worked the levers and pedals from inside the cage. Servo motors whirred. There was a smell of burning.

“It’s broken,” Michael said. “You broke it.”

Biting his lip, he yanked his multi-tool off his belt. Half-blind with anger—deaf to Dr. Hasselblatter’s nervous offers to do it for him—he hacked the mecha’s two front legs off at the first joint with his cutter laser.

Junior scrambled out of the cradle.

“What do you say?” Dr. Hasselblatter growled.

“Sorry,” Junior pouted.

Michael tasted blood. He’d bitten his lip so hard, he’d torn the skin. “That’s all right,” he said in a monotone. “I didn’t need it anymore, anyway.”

“I wanted to try that one,” Junior said, pointing at one of the display cases. “I was just going to use yours to break the glass.”

Behind the cracked glass, Michael saw the old gundam he’d admired on his first visit to the
Angel,
with its painted fins and stylishly curved legs, like something out of
Knights of the Milky Way.
He didn’t blame Junior for wanting to try it out.

“Absolutely not!” Dr. Hasselblatter said. He hustled both boys out of the museum. “Snack time. Let’s see what the cook can rustle up for us.”

The cook was a Meal Wizard set into the wall of the elegant little dining-room above the museum.

“Ice-cream? Chocolate-chip cookies?”

Michael resented the transparent attempt to cheer him up. It worked on Junior, though. The younger boy was soon engrossed in a vid on his contacts, while eating chocolate ice-cream with candy sprinkles. He wore headphones for the audio, since children couldn’t get cochlear implants.

Michael perched on a hard chair, arms wrapped around his knees. “Where’s the boss?” he said.

“He’s clearly been delayed,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “You should have something to eat. I’m going to.”

“How could he be delayed? He went down to the surface with Father Lynch. That means he reached Asgard Spaceport yesterday morning. Those tours leave every day. It can’t take more than one day to look at a few stupid ice spires.”

“You wouldn’t think so, would you?”

“But we’re ten klicks from the end of the tour route. That’s a long walk.”

“I think he’ll get in touch when he’s ready to be picked up.”

“Maybe we should move the ship closer to the ice spires.”

“Don’t worry, we’re in the right place. He entered the coordinates into the ship himself.”

Michael sighed. “He could have just let the
Angel
come by herself. She’s smart enough to fly solo.” He ducked his head, abashed by what he’d just said. You were not supposed to have a ship this smart, under the law. The
Angel
was so smart, she skirted close to being an AI, although with her limited sphere of competence, she’d never be an A
G
I—a true AI, equivalent in intelligence to a human.

“He doesn’t trust her,” Dr. Hasselblatter said, packing nutriblocks into the Meal Wizard’s hopper.

“Doesn’t
trust
her?”

“Not in the slightest,” the voice of the
Angel
said. “You see, I used to be a sexbot. He uploaded me into this ship when my physical presence was no longer required. That’s my old body in the museum.”

Michael gasped, remembering the elegant phavatar he’d admired previously. He’d
thought
it looked out of place among the antique collectibles.

“He believes I hold a grudge. However, I don’t. I far prefer being a ship. It’s less work.”

Michael giggled, blushing so hard that he could feel his ears turning red.

“That’s how Qusantin made his money,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “Sexbot software patents. But it hardly fits with his image now, does it? So, exit Angel the sexbot, enter the
Angel,
a ship. Well, he’s had the ship for decades, but it didn’t always have a personality.”

The Meal Wizard beeped, indicating that it was ready to make something. “A quinoa and arugula salad with goat cheese, prosciutto, and walnuts,” Dr. Hasselblatter said to it.