The Callisto Gambit (21 page)

“Let’s go,” the boss coughed.
“Angel,
I authorize you to restore my command permissions.”

“Wait for me!” Michael shouted. The exosuit blundered onwards, towards the ice spire that Yonezawa was standing on top of. He was a captive of his own momentum.
“Angel!
Wait! You have to do what I say!”

“Sorry, darling,” the
Angel
said. “I lied to you. I’m a one-man ship.”

Michael crashed into the bottom of the ice spire. He beat on it with his hydraulically powered fists. Chips of ice flew. He’d wanted to smash one of these things. Now he would. He’d smash it into a million billion pieces, and Yonezawa with it.

“Hey, don’t mess with our cultural heritage,” Yonezawa said in his helmet. Pain edged his voice. But his aim remained accurate.

Michael didn’t even see the flash. He just felt the exosuit go dead. Its fists drooped. It lost its balance and toppled over backwards. Yonezawa had shot out its battery.

Lying on the ground, he saw the
Angel’s
stairs retract into the command airlock chamber.

The ship launched in a flare of light.

A moment later, dawn broke over Callisto. The ice spires sparkled like colossal gems. It would have been a fantastic sight, but Michael was crying too hard to appreciate it.

He left me. Left me left me left me. Left me behind …

Beside the fishpond in Module 8 of the
Salvation,
Sister Terauchi knelt with her habit tucked under her. She dipped her hand into the water up to her wrist, and closed her eyes for a moment, luxuriating in the sensation. Then she resumed her work. She filled a test-tube with water and held it up to the light. She imagined she could see diatoms and one-celled algae in the cloudy water—although really they were too small to see—living, moving, eating CO2 and providing sustenance for the fish in the pond.

She placed the test-tube in a rack. “The water in the pond comes straight from the graywater processing plant, yes?” she said in English to the man standing behind her.

“Correct, Sister.”

“You use the wet oxidation purification process? And each module has its own graywater processing?”

“Yes.”

Multiple redundancy. She nodded in approval. “How is the plumbing?”

“The plumbing?”

“Intermittent spin gravity can cause air bubbles. Pipes can back up. Have you had any problems of that kind?”

“Sister, our spin gravity is not intermittent. The modules have one full gee, all the time.”

She smiled at the confirmation. One full gee. The next generation would grow up as strong as Earthborn children.

A fish swam to the surface, attracted to the fingers she was still dabbling in the water. She shook her head regretfully. “Ornamental koi?”

“They
can
be eaten, Sister.”

“I know that, but tilapia and white amur mature much faster and provide more protein for the same weight of feed.” She stood up and turned to face him. She was tiny and frail in comparison to him, The unaccustomed gravity stooped her shoulders. But he moved a deferential pace back. She liked that. Authoritatively, she said, “These fish will be removed. We’ll replace them with the species I mentioned. We will also introduce dense algae blooms for additional feed volume. Do you have any stocks of
Wolffia globosa
or duckweed?”

The boss-man laughed ruefully. “I’ll have to check with my people. Sister, I think no one on this ship knows more about ecosystem maintenance than you do.”

She smiled—it was probably true—but caught herself in the sin of pride, and demurred, “My knowledge is superficial. Our experts know far more than me. Speaking of them, I must take these samples to Water Engineer Nakamura.”

She walked, and Qusantin Hasselblatter followed her, across a lawn which was being dug up by teams of Galapajin. They were going to flood the whole lawn and plant rice, which could coexist not only with the fish but also with edible insects. They expected to get five crops a year, including fallow cycles. The experts were in seventh heaven. So much room to spread out. So much
stuff.

The boss-man sighed playfully. “Farewell to my brother’s vision of a southern California health resort.”

“It was a very wasteful design,” Sister Terauchi said.

The boss-man stepped over a pile of uprooted turf. “What will you do with the extra soil?”

“Oh, you can have it for the lower decks, where you and your crew will be living from now on,” Sister Terauchi said carelessly. She jumped. “Excuse me, someone is pinging me.”

She answered the call from Callisto with a sinking heart.

“Come back,” Kiyoshi Yonezawa said.

“Muri o yamete kudasai,”
she said in Japanese.

The boss-man stepped back. He circled around to face her and held up his thumb and forefinger in a C in front of his face, the universal ‘shutter-click’ gesture for a camera. Did she want him to supply vid for her call?

She nodded. Kiyoshi should see the inside of this ship.

“Look,” she said, still speaking Japanese. “Are you getting the vid feed?” The boss-man’s vid feed from his retinal implants would be multiplexed with the signal carrying her voice.

“Yes,” he said.

“This is our new home. We’ve been given an entire module, even though we’re only half as numerous as some of the other communities. Plenty of room for babies,” she said exultantly, signalling the boss-man to pan so Kiyoshi could see the trees, the torn-up lawn, and the sun-tube in the high, high ceiling. “Look at all this space.” Pan again, and there was the sprawling villa that the boss-man and his crew had formerly occupied. Galapajin scrambled around a scaffolding, adding a steeple to the steeply pitched roof. “We are converting that building into a church.”

“He gave you his own module?”

“It was intended all along for us.”

“Sonna, uso desho.”
[Bullshit.]

“He’s moving down to the bottom deck with the rest of the crew. There’s room enough for us all.”

“I’m not joining you.”

Sister Terauchi folded one arm over her breasts and bowed her head, pinching her eyes closed with her other hand. “Listen,” she said, giving in to the sin of anger. “After the destruction of 11073 Galapagos, nearly all the Galapajin moved to Ceres. They went where the UN sent them, like good little sheeple. We five hundred came with you and Jun to 99984 Ravilious. I don’t regret it for a moment. We have preserved our Faith, and we’ll go on preserving it. But the truth of the matter is that as soon as the
Monster
left us, things began to go wrong. We trusted you to make the right decisions, Yonezawa-san, and you did not. I know it wasn’t all your fault. But I don’t trust you anymore. So if you don’t want to join us, I don’t mind at all, and nor does anyone else. Stay on Callisto and wait for the PLAN to get you!”

There was a delay long enough for her to regret her words. Then a vid feed notification popped up in her HUD. She gaze-clicked on it, and shook her head sorrowfully. “Still at that nasty, dirty hotel?”

“Still at that nasty, dirty hotel,” Kiyoshi confirmed.

He was propped against a polyfoam headboard, clearly holding a tablet on his lap and using its camera. A flexible cast encased his ribs. He was naked to the waist. Mercifully, she couldn’t see any lower. His hair lay in greasy tangles on his shoulders. He always kept it too long—vanity, that was.

His eyes wavered around before fixing on her. “Can I speak to Father Tom?”

Sister Terauchi threw her head back, scanning the busy teams of people at work. She spotted the broad-shouldered Earthborn figure of Father Tom, sawing boards near the future church, and waved him over.

Kiyoshi brought the tablet nearer, so his face filled half of her split screen. Stubble framed his mouth, and his nostrils looked crusty, as if he had a cold. But there was a wild glint in his eyes. “Come back,” he said. “Please.
Please.
I’ll do anything.”

Sister Terauchi dropped into English. The last thing she had to say to Kiyoshi Yonezawa could only be said in that language. “You,” she told him in disgust, “are as high as a fucking kite.”

Father Tom came up beside her. He wore work gloves, and smelled of healthy sweat.

“You talk to him, Father,” she said, forwarding Kiyoshi’s call. “He is on drugs again.”

★

Kiyoshi gripped his tablet in both hands, staring into Father Tom’s face, wishing he
was
on board the
Salvation
, just so he could punch the Jesuit’s teeth out.

“It’s not too late for you to join us,” Father Tom said. “It turns out that we need several types of algae and seeds that aren’t on board. Your people have probably saved us from a catastrophic ecosystem failure down the road! So we’ll be staying here until that stuff can be procured. We’re also waiting for our last delivery of hydrogen.”

“The propulsion system is still a disaster waiting to happen. You’ll end up drifting somewhere in the Kuiper Belt.”

“No, we won’t,” Father Tom said. “We’re going to Eris.”

“When did that happen?”

“When the boss got back on board.”

“No more Planet X? And he’s cool with that?”

“Sure he is. He defers to the will of the community.”

Kiyoshi heard a familiar chuckle. He recoiled at the knowledge that he was literally looking through the boss’s eyes.

And he knew in his gut that Father Tom was wrong. The boss-man had never deferred to anyone in his life. He wasn’t about to start now.

“He’s deceiving you,” he said, refusing to speak to the boss-man directly.

“Kiyoshi, he is a changed man.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Whatever you did, it worked.”

“I shot him in the leg with a needlegun.”

“Perhaps that did the trick,” Father Tom said, grinning.

“I was aiming for his heart, but the bastard was wearing body armor.”

“My point is, he’s repentant.” As a priest, Father Tom used the word unselfconsciously. And as a priest, Father Tom was naïve—no, not exactly naïve, but
gullible
in the way priests had to be. He was professionally required to give everyone a second chance, and a third, and a fourth. Even if their name used to be Konstantin X.

Kiyoshi was not required to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, least of all the boss. “I’ll believe he’s repentant when he admits it was bullshit about finding an alien spaceship.”

Father Tom’s voice sharpened.
“What
about an alien spaceship?”

“Heh, heh.”
That
had clearly planted a seed of doubt. Kiyoshi decided not to say any more. Let it fester. “Ask him yourself.” He reached out to turn the camera off. “Sayonara, Father.”

Father Tom said quickly, “Wait! Kiyoshi. What about the child?”

“Oh, you finally remembered about him?”

“I assumed you’d rescued him. Now, seeing the state of you, I’m not so sure.”

“He’s fine,” Kiyoshi said, and ended the call.

★

Kiyoshi got dressed. His ribs still hurt. He glanced over at Michael. “You gonna be OK here?”

“Sure,” Michael said. He huddled in an armchair by the window of the hotel room, staring at a tablet. Kiyoshi had bought a two-pack of burner tablets registered to a dodgy local front company. Safer than connecting with their own IDs. Of course, Michael
could
connect to the local network with his interface contacts any time he liked. He could shout in public that he was Michael Kharbage. If he wanted to do that, fine. Maybe his recycling-mogul dad would come and pick him up, take him off Kiyoshi’s hands. But for now, he seemed to be sticking to the tablet.

The room reeked like a pigsty, having been occupied for 24 hours by two humans and eight pigs. The bed and chairs were islands in a sea of droppings. Kiyoshi’s sole attempt to maintain hygiene had been to put the feed in an open suitcase, instead of on the floor. The pigs had promptly decided that that suitcase made a good bed, and squabbled over which one got to sleep with the kibble. They currently lay in a drowsy pile on top of it.

“What’re you looking at?” Kiyoshi stepped over a pile of pigshit, peered over Michael’s shoulder.

“News.”

“What’s the latest?” Kiyoshi said, as if he hadn’t been watching developments in the Martian theater obsessively.

“We’re losing.”

“Apart from that.”

“No, we really are losing.” Michael looked up. Kiyoshi had never seen eyes so full of fear. “The PLAN is kicking our asses. This new thing about putting ground troops on Mars? That
proves
we’re losing. It’s a desperate PR stunt to improve morale on Earth. I guess they’re also trying to shame the Chinese into getting in, but it won’t work. A four-thousand-year-old empire cannot be embarrassed.”

Jun had had the same thing in mind, but his plan to force China’s hand had been more ambitious.

Too
ambitious?

According to the schedule Jun had given Kiyoshi, the
Monster
was supposed to have reached Mars today, with Tiangong Erhao in tow, and the best cyberweapon in history loaded on board.

But Kiyoshi hadn’t heard from Jun. His casual, but increasingly frequent, pings hadn’t raised a whisper in response.

That could mean Jun was still in stealth mode.

But Kiyoshi was starting to believe something had gone wrong.

He offered, “Don’t be scared. Even if Earth falls, we’ll be safe on Callisto.”

“About that,” Michael said, suddenly looking less frightened. “I’ve been thinking about that excavation project you mentioned. I come from Ceres, so I know a lot about underground habs.
Millions
of people live in the Belows on Ceres. It obviously works. And the biggest structural issues—insulation and atmospheric containment—would actually be easier to address here, because of the silicates mixed in with the ice. You could do standaway walls anchored in the rockier areas ...”

Kiyoshi smiled, understanding that the kid was calmer when he had some interesting problem to think about. But he cut him off. “Keep thinking about that. I’ll take you to meet my friends later.”

He made this promise recklessly, not knowing if he’d be able to keep it. In his mind there was no ‘later.’ There was just a bright line, like a horizon, a little way ahead. He had no idea what lay on the far side of it.