The Callisto Gambit (22 page)

“Keep an eye on the pigs,” he said in farewell. “If the manager complains again, tell him I’ll be taking them away soon.”

He tied a twang cord through the collar of the smallest piglet. In 48 hours on Callisto they all seemed to have doubled in size. The one he’d selected was as big as a terrier, and a lot fatter. Leading it like a dog, he left the hotel and walked uphill through Northhab.

People stared. Even in a port city bursting with refugees of all descriptions, a man walking a pig on a leash was bizarre enough to stare at.

But as he crossed the underground spaceport concourse, no one stared at him anymore.

In fact, everyone was staring at …
nothing.
Standing and gaping. They were all looking at something on their contacts or retinal implants.

Within seconds, the few people still moving slowed their steps, as if struck with the same disease.

Kiyoshi stopped, too, and frantically dragged his tablet out of his back pocket. He uncrumpled it and tapped up the official Callisto news feed.

Mars.

Red, ugly, larger than ever.

“This is the optical feed from the UNSF
Badfinger,”
gabbled a tinny voice in his ears—he’d synced the tablet with his cochlear implants. “The
Badfinger
is currently ten hours out from Mars.”

Ah yes, the Star Force Flattop carrying all those luckless infantry to their deaths.

“We’re getting a pretty good view, but let’s zoom in even further.”

Black flecks floated on Mars’s equator. Kiyoshi gazed at the PLAN earthworks that scarred the Amazonis and Arcadia Planitias. Big enough to be seen from space, the PLAN’s trademark berms and ziggurats formed shapes …
glyphs …
that looked tantalizingly like Chinese characters, but had no meaning known to humans. Kiyoshi remembered the boss’s claim that he’d found a ship fragment with similar glyphs on it. Obviously, that had been a fragment of a PLAN ship that crashed on Callisto. Sad.

“Those are the PLAN’s orbital fortresses,” the commentator jabbered, drawing Kiyoshi’s attention back to the black flecks orbiting Mars. “They are pieces of Mars’s former second moon, Phobos. Each one bristles with energy weapons and railguns. For decades they’ve made Mars orbital space a kill zone where nothing survives. But that era is over.
Look
at that!”

The picture zoomed in so far that the orbital fortresses became clumps of pixels. Kiyoshi’s heart seemed to stop as he watched two clumps meet and then ricochet apart, breaking up into individual pixels. Slowed down for viewers around the solar system, the clip clearly showed an event of mind-boggling violence.

“That was the orbital fortress Reldresal colliding with its neighbor! The PLAN has suffered a deadly blow today …”

Kiyoshi heard cheering. The sound wasn’t on the feed. All around him, people were shouting hurrahs, jumping up and down, hugging strangers. Two women near him wept for joy. The noise drowned out the commentator’s explanation of how this had happened: some death-or-glory exploit by an intrepid gang of pilots from Luna.

Kiyoshi felt cold.

Can’t trust the media,
he reminded himself. There’s no proof this actually happened.

But would they dare to put out a lie on this scale? A lie that promised an end to the war?

He knew the answer in his heart: they wouldn’t dare.

So this had really happened.

When?

At least seventeen minutes ago, based on the signal delay from Mars, and maybe longer, if they’d held the news back for a while.

And Jun had been there—in Mars orbital space—caught amidst what promised to be a lethal cascade of collisions. Basic physics guaranteed the outcome. The fragments of Phobos would bombard the surface, and eventually grind themselves down into a ring around Mars. A ring of rock dust … and ship parts.

So
that
was what had gone wrong.

Of all the known unknowns in the solar system, Jun hadn’t expected a demolition spree by a bunch of military pilots.

Oh, little brother,
Kiyoshi thought.
You really did suck at predicting human behavior.

Hot tears stung his eyes. He stuffed the tablet back in his pocket and wandered on through the rejoicing crowd.

The piglet brought him back to reality by stopping to piddle on the floor.

He walked on faster, his sense of purpose restored, now with a deadly edge.

When he left the hotel, he’d been pretty sure he had nothing left to lose.

Now he
knew
it.

★

Kiyoshi didn’t pause outside Legacy’s Leather Goods this time. He walked straight in.

There were no customers in the shop. In fact, most of the shops in Westhab were closed—except for those that sold alcohol or other mind-altering substances. Everyone had congregated in the public plazas to celebrate.

Except Oleg Threadley.

The gray-haired, patrician man sat on a stool behind the counter of his shop, one ankle hooked over the other knee, apparently staring into space. No need to ask what he was watching. Wrinkles of concern furrowed his forehead. When he saw Kiyoshi his expression hardened into hostility.

“Back again? What do you want this time?”

Kiyoshi had gotten splattered with champagne on his way through Westhab. He smoothed his wet hair back. Holding up the end of the twang cord leash, he said, “Want to buy a pig?”

Threadley stood up and looked over the counter. “Is that real?”

“Sure it’s real. I’ve got eight of them.”

“Get it out of here before it eats the merchandise.”

The pig set its pearly little teeth into the corner of a suitcase.

“What did I tell you?!”

Kiyoshi bent down to distract the piglet by scratching it behind the ears. “That’s the good thing about pigs. They’ll eat anything. Fatten them on scraps, stems, and husks, and pretty soon you’ve got yourself a freezer full of pork. And pigskin.” He shrugged. “Real leather; I thought you’d be interested.”

“I might have been interested,” Threadley said, “before today. I was wondering where I’d get my next shipment, now that exports from Earth to the Belt have basically quit. But I expect they’ll be resuming regular shipping schedules, now that the war is over.”

“You don’t sound overjoyed.”

Threadley nodded at the happy mob outside the shop. Through the open door they could hear the noise of a band playing Luna pop. “Idiots.”

“Which idiots?”

“All of them, but especially the pilots who smashed up Reldresal. When those fragments of Phobos hit the surface, a good deal of Mars will be scoured clean. And the answers to history’s greatest riddle will be obliterated. We may never find out what the PLAN was, or why it tried to destroy us.”

Unwillingly, Kiyoshi saw Threadley’s point. Jun had also emphasized the necessity of a quest for answers. Indiscriminate planetary-scale destruction wasn’t the hallmark of an advanced civilization. Then again, Kiyoshi increasingly questioned if humanity really was one.

“They’re calling it the Big Breakup,” Threadley said, screwing up his eyes in distaste. “There’s no event so historically significant that Earth’s media can’t give it a cutesy nickname.”

“Funny,” Kiyoshi said. “I don’t recall you being this bitter.”

“It’s been a while since we first met.”

“You were in command of the cruiser
Imagine Dragons.”
The ISA ship had arrived too late to sort out the mess on 4 Vesta three years ago. By the time Threadley’s crew got there, Kiyoshi had already done that.

“The
Imagine Dragons
was the last command of my career,” Threadley said. “I was fired shortly afterwards.”

“Fired? Why?”

“Thousands of people died on 4 Vesta. The survivors were rescued, not by us, but by the Chinese. Even at the ISA, someone has to be hung out to dry after a screwup of that magnitude.” Threadley referred to the Intelligence Security Agency casually, as if he’d moved on. But his eyes were like chisels, chipping away at Kiyoshi, trying to find a way in.

“So you retired to Callisto and opened a leather goods shop,” Kiyoshi said.

“Yes.”

“Quit bullshitting me, Threadley.”

“It’s not Threadley any longer. It’s Legacy. Oliver Legacy. We get new identities when we leave the Agency.”

“And you chose to call yourself Legacy. Interesting.” Kiyoshi leaned on the counter. Threadley, or Legacy, rocked back a pace. Kiyoshi pushed it. “You make a pretty good shopkeeper. I might believe your cover story, if I didn’t have this.”

He held his tablet up in front of Legacy’s face. It displayed the transmission log from the Startractor’s illegal transponder.

“This comes from a stealth transmitter I found on my ship. It points to you.”

Legacy grabbed the tablet and scanned the transmission log. “Well, shit. So that was
your
ship.”

An invisible mask had slipped away. The genteel shopkeeper reverted back to the civilized brute Kiyoshi remembered. He suddenly remembered that when he was stuck on the
Imagine Dragons
three years ago, he’d been scared stiff of Legacy.

“Yup,” he said.
“Was
my ship. Crashed outside the spaceport.”

“But you survived. Congratulations, Kiyoshi Yonezawa. I always knew you were a survivor.”

Kiyoshi shrugged.

“I remember we offered you a job,” Legacy reminisced. “And you turned us down, because you’d found Jesus, or some shit.”

Kiyoshi felt a sharp, almost unbearable pang of sadness. He wanted to walk out of the shop and find a dark quiet corner where he could sit and think of nothing. But he’d come too far to turn back now.

“Have you reconsidered?”

“No,” Kiyoshi said. “I just wondered why you were tracking my ship.”

“Oh, that was no big deal. Lemme see that log again … yeah. That ship formerly belonged to Kharbarge, LLC. Adnan Kharbage is a crook. Everyone on Ceres is a crook. But Kharbage is a
big
crook. So, we keep tabs on his ships. Or ships that used to belong to him. Ha!”

Kiyoshi shook his head. Was there no end to the lies? “I don’t think so. The transmissions only began when the ship was clearly on course for 99984 Ravilious.”

“Ah,” Legacy said.
“That
gang of pirates.”

“You’ve been watching them for years.”

“Yes.”

“You were looking for dirt on Qusantin Hasselblatter.”

“Y … es.”

“He used to have protection in the ISA itself. His past was a blank, because someone powerful wanted it that way.”

“How do you know that?”

“I even know
who
was protecting him.”

“Yes?”

“His brother, Abdullah Hasselblatter. Used to be the director of the Space Corps.”

“Yes.”

“A year back, a bit more, Abdullah lost his job. And Qusantin lost his protection.”

“Yes,” Legacy said. “But that doesn’t bring those deleted records back. Eh, the Agency has given up on the Hasselblatters. Bigger fish to fry.”

Kiyoshi didn’t believe that. The ISA never gave up on anything. That was just a pathetic attempt to lower the perceived value of Kiyoshi’s information. “What if I told you Qusantin Hasselblatter and his brother were here? In Callisto orbit, at this very minute?”

Legacy snorted. “Right, that enormous flying steering wheel.
Where
are they going? Pluto?”

“I don’t think they’ve made up their minds yet.” Kiyoshi wasn’t surprised that the ISA knew the boss-man was here. The
Salvation
was way too big to hide. What the ISA lacked was a plausible cause to move in on the boss-man. They lacked evidence.

“It’s a mess,” Legacy said. “Everyone and his cousin is building an arkship. A couple of groups that got an early start have already reached Pluto. It’s like they think the PLAN couldn’t get them there. I wonder if they’ll turn around and come back, now that the war’s won?”

“Nah,” Kiyoshi said. “Not now they’ve got that much invested in it. They’ll invent a new reason to flee the solar system. Some of them might even make it. But I would not want humanity’s first interstellar pioneer to be Qusantin Hasselblatter.”

“Me either.”

Kiyoshi made a production out of twisting around to unzip one of the pockets of his pants. It was not entirely a performance, as his fractured ribs made it painful to bend.

“You got something for me?” Legacy said.

“Hang on a minute.”

“What do you want? Money?”

“No.” Kiyoshi found what he was looking for. He opened his hand to show it to Legacy.

On his palm lay a medallion-style memory crystal. It contained a single sound file, downloaded from the comms unit of his EVA suit, which had a handy recording function.

“Yours for free. All I want is to see that bastard fry.”

“You got something on Hasselblatter?” Legacy’s eyes were glued to the memory medallion.

“Hasselblatter?” Kiyoshi purred. “You mean Konstantin X.”

“What?”

“It’s all on here. He confessed it himself.”

Forty days later, the
Monster
coasted into orbit around Jupiter.

Elfrida Goto floated on the old ship’s bridge, fretting. The spectacular orb of the gas giant, replicated on the optical feed screen at every workstation, did not hold her attention. She’d seen Jupiter before, on her graduation trip to Ganymede, when she was fresh out of the Space Corps Academy.

Now she was fresh out of the Space Corps. She hadn’t officially quit. She’d just sort of … left.

Her departure had been dramatic. She’d been flung off one of the PLAN’s orbital fortresses during the Big Breakup, and Jun had picked her up in the nick of time. She had no intention of going back to the Space Corps. Star Force had used her hard during her spell as a combat robot operator. She was done with risking her life for the UN’s ever-shifting war aims. But all her friends in the Space Corps thought she was dead, and so did her family. That was one reason she was fretting. She hoped she’d be able to call her mother and father from Callisto, and let them know she was OK.

The other reasons for her nervousness … well, pick one.

Two of them floated on the bridge with her. Jun Yonezawa sat at the astrogation workstation, calling out cues to Alicia Petruzzelli.