The Callisto Gambit (23 page)

Jun was not really there, of course. He lived in the data center next door to the bridge. The slight, black-cassocked monk in the astrogator’s couch was merely a projection on Elfrida’s contacts. But it was flawlessly realistic, right down to the shine of sweat on Jun’s forehead. The sock-clad foot hooked around the pedestal of his couch fidgeted restlessly. Elfrida would have found it impossible at this stage
not
to treat Jun as a human being, even though she knew he was an artificial super-intelligence.

A very worried artificial super-intelligence, at the moment.

He’d been trying to get hold of Kiyoshi, his brother, all the way from Mars, but had not got a single response from him since Kiyoshi’s last cryptic email on the day of the Big Breakup itself.

“He’s probably not even on Callisto anymore,” Alicia Petruzzelli muttered, proving that her thoughts were also running on the subject of Kiyoshi’s disappearance. “He’s probably fragged off to Titan or something.” She raised her hands from her jury-rigged consoles and let them fall in her lap. “On course for insertion into Callisto orbit,” she called out to Jun. “Watch out for traffic.” Subtle thrust gravity pulled Elfrida to the floor. The plastic sheeting under her feet vibrated.

An electrical fire had ravaged the bridge of the
Monster
shortly before Elfrida came aboard. They’d cleaned up the worst of the mess, but the bridge still smelt of woodsmoke. Sheets of plastic covered the damage to the antique cedar panelling. Bunches of cables stretched from the data center to the workstations, taped to the floor. The ship’s hub was a write-off. As a result, Jun could not fly the ship, pending repairs on Callisto. Petruzzelli had to do it, using inputs that Jun piped to her DIY collection of tablets.

She sat strapped into a hard chair borrowed from the crew quarters of the operations module, her shapely legs asprawl. Elfrida watched her with concern and affection. A battered captain for a battered ship. Petruzzelli had flown a Gravesfighter for Star Force until she burned out. It happened to everybody. Petruzzelli, at least, had left her mark on history. She’d been one of the pilots who smashed up Reldresal.

An inch of auburn regrowth covered Petruzzelli’s skull. As if sensing Elfrida’s gaze, she self-consciously scratched her head. “I hope they have hair dye on Callisto.”

“I’d settle for a shower,” Elfrida said wryly. “With, you know, water.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Hey,” Jun said. “This ship dates from an era when real astronauts didn’t take showers. Don’t be wusses.”

“I wouldn’t care if we hadn’t
also
run out of wet wipes,” Petruzzelli said, examining her grimy fingernails. “And deodorant.”

Petruzzelli had had a thing with Kiyoshi Yonezawa, a long time ago. She was probably as nervous about meeting him again, as she was nervous that they
wouldn’t
find him on Callisto. Elfrida wanted to say something reassuring … but what could she say? Her own impression was that Kiyoshi Yonezawa was a loose cannon. He might come through for you when you needed him, but then again, he might not. Step on his toes and you never knew if he’d laugh or blow your head off. He might have got himself into trouble, was her feeling.

The Belt was one big boiling ring of trouble these days, and the Galilean moons were soaking up the splashback.

The Big Breakup had not ended the war, as everyone had hoped. The fall of all those Phobos fragments had destroyed pretty much everything on the surface of Mars, but the PLAN was still bunkered up in Olympus Mons, fighting back. Star Force and the CTDF (China Territorial Defense Force) had both landed troops on the surface. It looked like being a long slog. Which meant that Star Force was still tied down on Mars, leaving the outer system to fend for itself …

… and surprise, surprise, as soon as the threat of PLAN attacks went away, a thousand small-time pirates had popped out of their holes in the Belt, eager to grab what loot they could while Star Force’s back was turned. Result: the inflows of refugees to the Galilean moons, perceived as safe havens, had not gone into reverse, but increased.

Elfrida’s gloomy thoughts dispersed as the third member of the
Monster’s
crew floated onto the bridge. John Mendoza had accompanied Jun all the way from 99984 Ravilious to Mars. Along the way, he’d lost his right leg below the knee. His dingy EVA suit was folded over and stitched into a pad. Elfrida was sad about that, of course, but it didn’t change the fact that John Mendoza was the love of her life. A stocky mixed-race Filipino, he had an open, boyish expression that made him look younger than his thirty-three years. There was something in Mendoza, Elfrida thought, that could not be sullied even by the horrors of war.

She kicked off from the ceiling and flew to him. He caught her with one arm. They kissed.

“I want to get married on Callisto,” she said in his ear.

“I was thinking we’d wait until we could do it properly.”

“What’s
properly,
John? Do you want me to wear a poufy white dress, and carry flowers?” The thought made her giggle.

“I was just thinking it would be nice if Father Lynch could officiate.”

“Father Lynch is on the
Salvation,
right?”

“I assume.”

“And the
Salvation’s
here at Callisto, right?” Underlying worry gave her voice a shrill edge. Petruzzelli heard, and looked around.

“We’re approaching Callisto now. There’s a lot of traffic in orbit.”

Elfrida flew to the nearest screen, which happened to be Jun’s. She automatically took care not to invade the projection’s personal space. Callisto floated on the screen, partially illuminated by the sun. On the nightside, about 20° north of the equator, a fuzzy cluster of lights shone. The sight of human habitations far from home was always welcome.

“That’s Valhalla,” Jun said. “You’ll be landing at Asgard.”

Mendoza came up behind her. “The Superlifter’s ready. I’ve completed the pre-launch checks and launched the reactor bootstrap sequence.” He patted Elfrida’s waist. “We’ll be ready to go as soon as this one gets suited up.”

The Superlifter was the
Monster’s
surface-capable auxiliary craft, parked at present on the keel clamps between the ops module and the cargo module. The plan was for Elfrida and Mendoza to take it down to the surface to look for Kiyoshi.

“Are you going to come, Jun?” Elfrida said.

Jun shook his head without looking around. “Mendoza can fly the Superlifter. You’ll be in safe hands.”

“I’ll just have to remember to re-route the foot controls,” Mendoza joked. But he gently pinched Elfrida’s hip. She flushed, realizing that she’d asked a dumb question, if not an offensive one. Jun never left the
Monster.
He
was
the
Monster,
or rather, the
Monster
was him. He had secondary personalities which occasionally left the ship. But on the whole, Jun and his sub-personalities acted like cloistered monks, as if this beat-up old ship were a monastery hurtling through space. The human crew were confined to the physical dimension of the ship, analogous to a visitors’ garden, outside the realm of pure information where Jun lived.

Mendoza showed Elfrida what he had in his other hand. He’d been holding something when he came onto the bridge; she just hadn’t focused on it. Now she saw it was a pair of glasses. The frames were printed from black plastic. They looked like they should have a joke nose and moustache attached. The right earpiece supported a matchbox-sized electronic unit with an earbud trailing from it.

“Did you lose your contacts?” Elfrida said. Like her, Mendoza used interface contacts rather than a BCI. “Those are the ugliest glasses I’ve ever seen.”

He pretended to be hurt. “Thanks a lot. I made them.”

“You’re getting to be a really good engineer, but I dunno about your fashion sense.”

“C’mon, think of it as retro chic,” Mendoza grinned. “Anyway, I thought you liked black?”

“I …
am going to wear those? Think again, buster.”

“They’re for me,” Jun said. “So I can ride along with you. Your contacts don’t have enough bandwidth for vid-streaming, and they also don’t have native signal encryption. That transmitter on the earpiece is set up with a symmetric encryption key; I’ve got the other half.”

“… Oh.” Elfrida took the glasses and tried them on. They were heavy. “Actually, they’ll go great with my new earrings!” she said brightly.

During their forty-day voyage, Elfrida had dusted off the jewellery-making skills she’d acquired during therapy sessions on Earth. There really was nothing to do on a spaceship in transit. They’d spent the trip in Ghost mode, fully stealthed, so they couldn’t use the internet, and you could only play so many games of backgammon and gin rummy—especially since Petruzzelli was a sore loser who spoiled it for everyone. So Elfrida had gravitated to the printers on the engineering deck and begun making bits and bobs to pass the time.

She’d taken special trouble over a belt buckle for Mendoza. Crafted in the form of a Maltese cross, it depicted his baptismal saint, St. John the Baptist, in minute relief. She was pleased to see him placing it in his rucksack as they packed for the surface.

Petruzzelli’s voice came over the intercom. “OK, we are in a parking orbit 25K klicks above Callisto. You may applaud now. Ahem. The bad news is I don’t see the
Salvation
anywhere.”

Mendoza’s head jerked up. “It looks like a gigantic flying steering wheel,” he said.

“You told me what it looks like. I still don’t see it.”

“Maybe it’s on the other side of the planet?” Elfrida said. “Moon, I mean moon.”

“A lot of people have misconceptions about that. You actually can’t hide behind planets. Or moons.”

“Did you check Asgard Spaceport’s arrival and departure logs?” Mendoza broke in.

“Yes, dork, I checked the arrival and departure logs. The
Salvation
is on record as having arrived in orbit on December nineteenth, which was 47 days ago, but there’s no record of its departure. I also asked Traffic Control. They were incredibly rude. Traffic Control is operated by UNSA, so you would expect a minimum level of professionalism, but these guys sounded like thugs. I think the inmates have taken over the asylum down there.”

Elfrida couldn’t get past the absence of the
Salvation.
The massive colony ship was supposed to be their ultimate destination. Jun had promised them it was here. He’d had emails from his people, the other Japanese colonists on board, saying they were still in orbit around Callisto, taking on shipments of vital items.

She didn’t dare to look at Mendoza. He, even more than she, was invested in the idea of the
Salvation.
The journey to Planet X promised an escape from the mess that the war had left behind. He’d built it up as the start of their new life, together.

“Could they have landed on the surface?” she said.

Jun answered through the intercom. “Not likely, but possible. Since Callisto’s escape velocity is so low, even ITN haulers land here sometimes, and the
Salvation
used to be a hauler. I’ll have to radar-map the whole moon to find out if it’s there.”

Mendoza broke in. “They’ve left us. I knew this would happen. They’ve gone—gone to Planet X—and left us behind.”

Jun said, “But I’ve had emails from Sister Terauchi, from Father Lynch, from other people I know on board.
Yesterday,
Sister T said they were still here, waiting for a shipment of nitrogen-binding bacteria. Apparently, the boss-man cut a lot of corners, but no one noticed until the Galapajin came on board.” His voice was carefully neutral. “I was really hoping to get here in time to talk them out of it.”

Jun believed the Planet X mission was doomed to failure. They’d spent many hours on board arguing about it. But if the
Salvation
had left them behind, it was a moot question.

Mendoza yanked the toggles of his rucksack closed, and pressed his thumb on the button to expel air from the contents. “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out what happened. We’ve got to locate Kiyoshi.”

Elfrida pulled off her clothes, dragged a spacesuit liner on, smoothed out the wrinkles, and stepped into her suit. It was far better than Mendoza’s fifth-hand rag. Its last owner had been a Marine. She’d applied a lot of decals to the outer garment to hide its provenance, but nothing could disguise the distinctive dog’s-head profile of a Marine helmet. She’d just have to hide it in her rucksack as soon as they got down.

“I want to go,” Petruzzelli said.

She hovered at the end of the room, frowning at the mess. The room was a tunnel shaped like a piece of macaroni, following the curve of the ops module. It had slept twenty, in the days when the
Monster
had a crew of a hundred, not just three. Elfrida and Mendoza’s belongings had expanded to fill up the available space. Now that they were back in freefall, everything floated in mid-air.

“I want to go,” Petruzzelli repeated.

Elfrida stammered, “Um, I think someone’s got to stay here to fly the ship.”

“There isn’t going to be any more flying. Just station-keeping. Jun can do that from the astrogation desk.”

Mendoza said, “You’re talking to the wrong person, Petruzzelli. Ask
Jun
if it’s OK for you to go.”

“Why does he get to decide?”

The lights suddenly went out. The air circulation powered down with a hiss. The silence was so total that Elfrida’s ears rang, and then she heard a squelchy thumping noise.

Petruzzelli let out a scream.

The lights came back up. The air exchangers rattled on again. Petruzzelli kicked at a maidbot that stood in the doorway, reaching up to poke her ankles with its mop attachment.

“That’s why,” Jun said over the speakers.

“Don’t
do
that. I have PTSD,” Petruzzelli yelled. “I get the point. You’re an AI. You have power over us.”

“That’s not the point. What you just experienced is what someone else would experience if they boarded the
Monster
, and there was nobody here. A maidbot? I’m gonna hold off boarders with a
maidbot?”

“Ah,” Petruzzelli said. “I get it. You need someone on board to defend you.” She sounded happier about that.