The Callisto Gambit (26 page)

Kiyoshi was a tall man, even by spaceborn standards, but he seemed to have shrunk since Elfrida saw him last. He was naked except for a silver cross around his neck and a pair of cut-off sweatpants. His ribs stuck out so much there were shadows between them. His bare chest rose and fell, just perceptibly.

The IV line leading to his cubital port gleamed in the low light.

Elfrida heard a quiet snuffling sound in her earpiece. “What?” she muttered.

No answer. She realized it was the sound of Jun crying. AIs
could
cry. If they needed to. If it was the only way to stay human.

Elfrida’s own reaction was quite different.

She squeezed into the cubicle beside the cot. The cooler Michael had been carrying earlier was on the floor. She lifted it out of the way.

“You’ve come to take me away, haven’t you?” Michael said. “Has my dad sent you to take me back to Ceres? I won’t go.”

Elfrida opened the cooler. It contained several foilpacks. She sniffed them. Korean food. “Have you been feeding him?”

“He needs me. I’m the only one who can make him eat.”

“You know what that’s called?” Elfrida said. “That’s called enabling a drug addict.”

She reached the medical unit splarted to the wall at the head of the cot, and hit the power switch. Then she yanked the IV line out of Kiyoshi’s arm. He twitched and let out a long snore. Bubbles burst on his lips.

“The IV is just a hydration solution,” Michael said.

“What’s he on?”

“Peace.”

“Piece of what?”

“Peace.
That’s what Molly calls it. I dunno what’s in it.”

“Is it an inhalant? It smells awful.”

“Yeah, someone probably just smoked up.”

Elfrida noticed the boy’s eyes were hollow and his nostrils crusty, as if he had a cold. He’d probably been exposed to second-hand levels of the filthy stuff, just hanging out in here.

She set down her rucksack, took out the preloaded syringe she’d brought from the
Monster,
and ripped off the sterile wrapping. Straining to see in the dim light, she inserted the syringe into Kiyoshi’s cubital port until it clicked, and then pushed the plunger.

They waited for a couple of minutes. From below came the rumble of angry voices. Elfrida hadn’t heard a gunshot yet, so it was all good.

Kiyoshi sat up. Wild-eyed, he focused first on Michael, and then on Elfrida.

“Hello,” Elfrida said, waving her hand in front of his face. “Remember me?”

Kiyoshi started to speak. The words broke into a deep, phlegmy cough. Finding the empty syringe in his cubital port, he yanked it out and tossed it on the floor. “What did you just inject me with?”

“Jun called it a hangover cure. He said it was your own recipe.”

“Jun? He’s here? Where is he?” Kiyoshi glanced around as if he expected to see Jun standing behind her.

“He’s in orbit. In the
Monster.
Which is where I’ve just come from.” Elfrida raised her voice. “Jun, I could use a little help here!”

Kiyoshi sat up straighter. He’d clearly grasped that there was an open transmitter somewhere on her person. That seemed to Elfrida to be a positive sign that he hadn’t entirely fried his brain. “I told you not to come here!” he yelled.

Jun spoke in Elfrida’s ear. His voice was shaky, but clear. “‘Don’t come!’ That’s what he wrote to me in his last message from Callisto. That was
all
he wrote.
Don’t come!
Now I understand. He didn’t want me to see him like this.”

Elfrida nodded briskly.

“Jun figured you were hiding out in some disgusting drug den,” she said to Kiyoshi. “Apparently you’ve got a history of this kind of thing. That’s why he had me mix that cure. I’ve also got a pack of anti-addiction meds for you. I think you’d better take the first dose right now. No,
first
put on some proper clothes. You look homeless.”

Kiyoshi did not comply. He just sat on the bed staring at her. Elfrida started to get frightened, and her fear made her speak sharply. “We didn’t come all this way just to intervene in your drug binge! We came to find the
Salvation.
But it’s not here. Nor are any of your people. Where are they, and where’s the ship? What happened?”

“I did a terrible thing,” Kiyoshi said. He seemed to be not so much speaking to her, as speaking
through
her.

Jun said,
“I
did a terrible thing!”

“He says
he
did a terrible thing,” Elfrida reluctantly relayed. She could have just given Kiyoshi the glasses, but they felt like her lifeline out of Hel’s Kitchen, and she didn’t want to relinquish them.

“I attacked the PLAN with a cyberweapon,” Jun said, “loaded inside the hulk of Tiangong Erhao.”

“He attacked the PLAN with a cyberweapon, loaded inside the hulk of Tiangong Erhao.”

“I know about that.”

“So do I,” Elfrida said, puzzled. “That wasn’t terrible, Jun! It was awesome.
You’re
the one who really won this war, not Petruzzelli and her insane friends from Luna.”

“Petruzzelli’s here? Shit.” Kiyoshi pressed his back against the wall of the cubicle, looking furtive.

Jun said in Elfrida’s ear, “But the war isn’t won. Millions of Martians are still alive.”

“So there are a few more of them than we thought,” Elfrida said, uncomfortably.

“They’re the real victims!” Jun exclaimed. It sounded like he’d been holding this inside for a long time. Now it flooded out. “I had no idea they existed. Star Force made sure that information didn’t leak to the public. But that doesn’t let me off the hook. I assumed the PLAN was a souless machine. I had no basis for that assumption. It was just what everyone believed. And it was what I
wanted
to believe. So I designed my weapon … my virus … to knock out the PLAN’s control interfaces. I wanted to crash its distributed processing network, disable its energy infrastructure … all the stuff you’d do to take down a machine. But I ended up taking down
humans.
I don’t know how many of them my virus reached. Thousands? Millions? And how many of those are dead already? How many will be killed by Star Force in the coming months, and how many have already been slaughtered by the PLAN itself, as traitors to its sick ideology? Their blood is on my hands!”

Elfrida struggled to understand. “I don’t think you did anything
that
bad,” she said lamely.

“No? If you give slaves their freedom, and then turn away and leave them to die, that’s not that bad?”

Kiyoshi couldn’t have heard any of this, of course. He didn’t seem interested. He sat up straight, staring at Elfrida. Again, he seemed to speak through her instead of to her. “Get out of here, Jun!
Now,
before it’s too late!”

Elfrida heard a staticky clunk in her ear. A half-second snatch of what sounded like Mendoza’s voice. And then nothing.

She pulled her glasses off, switched the transmitter off and on again, tried the earbud in her other ear. Nothing.

“What happened to the
Salvation?”
Fear spiked her voice high. “What did you do, Kiyoshi?”

He rolled off the cot and grabbed her glasses. “I sold the boss-man out to the ISA.” He dropped the glasses on the floor, trod on them barefoot, then picked up the cooler and thumped the glasses, using the cooler like an unwieldy hammer. “I’m a snitch, Elfrida.”

Thump.

“They took the boss-man.”

Thump.

“They also took the
Salvation.”

Thump-thump.

That wasn’t Kiyoshi smashing her glasses, that was someone coming upstairs.

“They
also
took everyone on board.” Kiyoshi looked up from the scatter of components that used to be her glasses.

“Mendoza made those for me!” Elfrida cried. She was having trouble processing what Kiyoshi had said. “If they took everyone, why didn’t they take
you?”

Behind her, a door crashed open. Blinding light bathed the cubicles. Junkies bawled in panic, their ‘peace’-ful sleep broken.

“They left me here,” Kiyoshi said, “just in case Jun would be stupid and selfless enough to come looking for me.” He sat on the edge of the cot, head hanging, as if he was going to throw up. “He’s an artificial super-intelligence, but he can be so
stupid
sometimes. I was bait.”

Gloved hands gripped Elfrida’s arms from behind. “You’re under arrest. Resistance will be interpreted as consciousness of guilt. You have the right to remain silent …”

“Their blood is on my hands!” Jun exclaimed passionately. He needed someone to understand the burden of guilt he’d been carrying. Maybe he should have waited until they brought Kiyoshi back to the
Monster.
But it had all just spilled out.

“I don’t think you did anything
that
bad,” said Elfrida’s distant voice.

“No? If you give slaves their freedom, and then run away and leave them to die, that’s not that bad?”

The feed from Elfrida’s glasses cut out.

“Something’s blocking it,” Mendoza said. He was on the bridge, monitoring the comms workstation.

By the time these words left Mendoza’s lips, Jun had already diagnosed the interruption.
All
his comms were being blocked. He was no longer receiving radio-frequency signals of any kind. He had no doubt his transmissions were being blocked, too. Jamming technology that powerful pointed to one source: the ISA.

Even the ISA couldn’t jam radar and LiDAR. Jun rapidly analyzed the traffic in Callisto orbit and found a ship speeding towards the
Monster.
It was stealthed, to the maximum extent that humanity’s pathetically lame stealthing technologies permitted. It hailed him as it came—the effect like a shout in church, amidst the silence on every other channel:

“XX
MONSTER.
STAND BY FOR BOARDING. RESISTANCE WILL BE INTERPRETED AS CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT ...”

“It’s the ISA. They’re going to board us,” Jun said to Mendoza.

“No, they goddamn aren’t,” Mendoza said. He floated off the bridge. In freefall, his missing leg was less of a disability. He headed for the command airlock. Along the way, he sealed his EVA suit and put on his helmet. He picked up his carbine—a Star Force weapon that Petruzzelli had brought on board. Those smart darts could chew through body armor.

With a thought, Jun accessed the carbine’s controls and disabled it. He would have let Mendoza use it if they were about to be boarded by pirates. The ISA was a whole different story. Shooting at
them
would only get Mendoza dead.

The ISA ship, descending from a higher orbit, seemed to shoot straight out of the face of Jupiter.

Jun multitasked. He told Mendoza to hold on, and threw the ship into a series of quick wriggles, making it harder for the ISA craft to match the
Monster’s
torque and yaw. He didn’t expect this would hold them off for long, and it didn’t. It took fifty-five seconds for the ISA cruiser to work out what he was doing, give up on docking with the
Monster,
and instead deploy a quartet of two-man mobility sleds. These darted up to the
Monster
and grappled onto all four of its airlocks—the ones in the cargo module and the engineering module, and the two in the ops module.

Three of these boarding parties entered unopposed, slagging the airlocks en route.

The last boarding party—the one at the command airlock—encountered a very angry Mendoza. As the atmosphere rushed out of the ops module
,
it blew Mendoza and the ISA boarders into space. With one camera, Jun watched them tumble, wrestling and punching, across the gap between the two ships. Mendoza had already discovered that his carbine didn’t work. That only made him angrier.

Jun terminated the
Monster’s
evasive micro-maneuvers, reducing the risk that Mendoza and his captors would get swiped by 90,000 tons of spaceship.

Then he waited.

While the
Monster
was dodging, he’d executed a long-considered, never-before-attempted precautionary measure.

He’d zipped himself—his source code, his personal algorithms, his library, his memories, his intrusion tools, his beliefs and dreams—into a single file. With the advanced compression method he’d developed over the years, based on the principle of St. Augustine’s memory palace, everything fit into a file a mere 2 terabytes in size. He would have liked to disguise it as a vid of a choir singing the
Te Deum,
maybe. Or one of his old vids from 11073 Galapagos. But in the end, common sense had prevailed, and he’d used a trending cute-kitten video.

He had sent this file to Mendoza’s contacts.

With Mendoza’s summary ejection into space, Jun had already—in theory—broken his own rule that he would never leave the
Monster
.

Too late to do anything about that now.

He watched Mendoza being hauled into the airlock of the ISA ship. At the same time, using his internal surveillance cameras, he watched the boarding parties rampage through his modules. He didn’t resist them. With what? A maidbot? It would have been pointless. Worse, counter-productive. He wanted them to think there was nothing in here. Just a dead hub, and a data center quietly ticking over.

The four ISA agents who had entered the ops module rendezvoused on the bridge. Their suit-to-suit comms were securely encrypted, of course. But Jun had beaten the Heideigger program, owned a Chinese space station, and cracked the information security of the PLAN itself. He had no difficulty whatsoever decrypting the wireless signals he picked up.

“It’s in the fridge, apparently,” said the leader of the boarding party.

His voice sounded like he was older, maybe in his sixties. His signals were tagged with the call sign Legacy.

“OK, we’ll take the fridge,” said someone else.

“Make sure you do
not
connect it to anything,” Legacy said. “It needs to be securely air-gapped. Put it in the Faraday cage until we get back to base.”

“It’ll defrost, sir.”

“Stick some towels under it.”

Two of the agents picked up the refrigerator that had sat in the corner of the bridge for the last two years, and floated away with it.

That refrigerator contained the Ghost—Jun’s captive copy of the Heidegger program. The Ghost enabled him to travel throughout the solar system under a cloak of stealth as good as the PLAN’s. It was a simulated quantum computer more advanced than anything humanity could build.