The Callisto Gambit (29 page)

“Still?”

“Yep. They’ve abandoned the outer solar system. I guess they figure they can stomp on the pirates anytime, when they’ve mopped up the Martians. But it’s not going to be easy.” Wetherall slurped coffee, and stared bleakly out of the shop window. “People are sick of the UN micromanaging everything. Always saying can’t, mustn’t, don’t touch that, it’s part of our cultural heritage, that isn’t allowed, this isn’t allowed, obey the regulations or pay a fine … they made us wait eighty years to settle Callisto! Why? Who the hell knows? Bureaucracy.”

Kiyoshi nodded, understanding. “We’ve only got one solar system. There’s only so much stuff to go around. It’s a zero-sum game, and people want their piece of the action.”

“But I preferred UNSA to this gang,” Wetherall said. “I didn’t even tell you: Nemesis stole my business!”

“He bought you out,” Tong said.

“Yeah, for a whopping fifty K, with a gun literally pointed at my head.”

“Future Galaxy Enterprises?” Kiyoshi said.

“Now known as—wait for it—
Nemesystems.”

“Sorry; can’t not laugh.”

“I’m laughing,” Wetherall said, “but I’m also crying, because
we
identified the biggest investment opportunity in the history of Callisto.
We
built the steam drills and paid for the radar surveys.
We
were digging the holes.
We
lined up the buyers. And those bastards bought us out for fifty K apiece before we saw a penny of ROI! My business partners already got the hell out …”

“Haddock?”

“Who?”

“Namsadang.”

“Oh, Park. No, he’s still here, working for Nemesystems. Him and his whole family. Some people just fall on their feet.”

“And some people,” Tong said pointedly, “spend the entire fifty K on drugs.”

“Did you?” Kiyoshi said neutrally, being in no position to point fingers.

Wetherall flushed, and lifted his coffee cup to hide his face. “I was depressed as fuck.”

Wetherall was a different kind of junkie from him, Kiyoshi reflected. He was the kind that could go on a bender one day, and bounce back the next day … otherwise known as having it all.

He’d been going to ask Wetherall if he had any anti-addiction meds. Now pride intervened. He didn’t need that crutch. He’d just white-knuckle through. The decision gave him a burst of confidence.

However, the news that Wetherall had spent his payoff on drugs dismayed Kiyoshi for another reason. He’d been hoping Wetherall could front him a couple of fares.

He drank his coffee and asked casually, “What’s next for you?”

“Did it occur to you to wonder why I’m hiding from the patrols? Nemesis told me to get off Callisto yesterday. Either I find a ship, or I can leave through the nearest airlock. His words.”

“And you don’t have a ship.”

“I was kind of hoping you did.”

Wetherall grinned, ready to laugh at this latest stroke of ill-fortune. But Kiyoshi was in no mood to laugh anymore. “My ship’s gone,” he said flatly.

The
Monster…
the ISA had taken the
Monster.
They’d taken
Jun.

Common sense said Kiyoshi didn’t have a hope in hell of rescuing him. It was the ISA. As long as there was a UN, the ISA would remain mysteriously potent, unbeatable, everywhere.

Then again, that’s what they used to say about the PLAN, too.

“I need transport.” He picked up his dagger and shaved a rind off hs thumbnail. His nails had grown long and jagged.

“Yeah? Where to?”

“Ceres.”

“What’s on Ceres?”

“My family.”

“Naw, man, really.”

“OK, you know that kid who’s been staying with me?”

“Oh, Mikey. Yeah, he’s a good kid. He used to come around to the office, before the whole Nemesis thing went down. The Parks would feed him kimchi and bibimbap. What about him?”

“He’s from Ceres. I have to take him home.”

“But you don’t have a ship.”

“And fifty grams of iridium won’t buy you one,” Tong put in. “Although it might get you on board, if any ships were leaving.
Ceres,
though … that’s a long haul. Whoof.”

Wetherall pinched his bottom lip. “You know who does have a ship? She already said no to me. But she might say yes to you.”

“Who?”

“Molly. She totally has a crush on you, brother.”

The Belter pirates hadn’t dared to assault Ceres—or, if they had, they’d ended up as orbital debris, swept out of the sky by the dwarf planet’s fleet of laser brooms.

For that reason, Ceres had become the destination of choice for Belters fleeing the disorder in the asteroid belt, which had now spread even to the Galilean moons.

Ships and orbitals swarmed the dwarf planet’s sphere of influence so thickly, it graphed like an atom with a ridiculously high atomic number.

Kiyoshi skimmed the list of ship profiles the
Unsaved Changes’s
radar had picked up. Lots of haulers. Smaller cargo ships. Shuttles. A few Starcruisers—identical in configuration if not offensive capability to the Star Force Heavycruiser. But not a single actual Star Force ship.

Ceres, too, had been abandoned by the UN.

Its people were looking out for themselves.

Molly looked up from the comms desk. “I’ve been forwarded to something called Customs and Resources; sounds ominous.”

“It’s fine,” Michael said, from the astrogation desk. “The resources industry used to hate Customs. But now they’ve joined forces to keep the pirates out.”

“So what should I tell them?”

Kiyoshi smiled down at the flight controls. He was piloting, taking it easy. “How about the truth?”

Molly raised her eyebrows. She said into her headset, “This is Molly Kent, owner-operator of the
Unsaved Changes,
from Callisto.”

“You’ve had a long trip,
Unsaved Changes.”

That was an understatement. Ceres was on the other side of the sun from Callisto this year, and the
Unsaved Changes
was just a Steelmule … a rock-jumper with a wimpy thrust-to-mass ratio. They’d done a very brief burn and then coasted all the way.
Ninety-three days.
Should’ve been more than long enough for this ill-assorted crew to start getting on each other’s nerves. It still amazed Kiyoshi that they hadn’t.

“We sure have had a long trip,” Molly said, “and we’d like to request a landing slot at Occator Spaceport, if that’s at all possible.”

“Processing your request now,” said Customs & Resources. Forty seconds later: “OK, you’re good to land. See you at Occator.”

“That was easy,” Molly said, with a puzzled frown. She’d spent her life on Callisto, where nothing was easy.

“That delay was them scanning us,” Kiyoshi said. “They saw we weren’t a threat, and cleared us to land.”

“Even an unarmed beater is a threat, if you turn it around and point its drive at a target. I just would have expected them to be more cautious … especially since we’re coming from Callisto, pirate capital of the outer solar system.”

Michael broke in, “Ceres welcomes everybody. That’s who we
are.
That’s why we’ve got a population of two hundred and thirty million—as much as the whole rest of the Belt put together!—and that’s why
Ceres
hasn’t been taken over by pirates.”

Kiyoshi smiled at the boy’s tone of pride. The closer they got to Ceres, the more Michael’s spirits had risen. Seated at the astrogation workstation, feet dangling, he hardly looked like the same boy Kiyoshi had nursed back to health during the first weeks of their voyage. His eyes were bright, his skin clear, and he bantered with the hub as it guided the ship through orbital traffic. For Michael, this had been the right choice.

For Kiyoshi himself? He didn’t know yet.

Occator Spaceport … wasn’t a spaceport. It was just a flat place in the bottom of a crater. Kiyoshi had known this, and yet it took him off guard, as he’d always landed at the much larger settlement of Kirnis on his previous visits to Ceres. Kirnis had a proper spaceport, complete with a fancy domed terminal.
This
was the boondocks. Spacecraft stood randomly dotted across an area tens of kilometers wide fringed with warehouses and fuel depots.

“And also car rental offices, I hope,” Kiyoshi muttered, getting ready for a long walk to the nearest buildings.

“We don’t need a car,” Michael said, bouncing ahead of them. “We could just walk all the way to Occator Lake! It’s right over there!”

This was not to be. They had only walked half a klick from the
Unsaved Changes
when a bright yellow rover jounced up to them.

“Ground shuttle service?” Wetherall speculated hopefully.

Several figures wearing bunny-suits over their EVA suits jumped out. The bunny-suits were white with yellow circles on the back and chest. “Hey,” a voice hailed them. “Is that yours?”

They all looked back at the fireplug silhouette of the
Unsaved Changes.
“Yes,” Molly said.

“Great. Is there anyone else on board?”

“No.”

“We’ll have to inspect the ship anyway, ma’am, if you wouldn’t mind authorizing access … Thanks.” Half the bunny suits headed for the ship, which left room in the rover for the crew of the
Unsaved Changes.
“Hop in and we’ll take you to processing.”

“Processing?” Wetherall said edgily. “Is this where you steal our ship and kill us for our proteins?”

“Ha, ha; this isn’t Callisto.”

Kiyoshi opened up a private channel to Michael. “Do customs officials on Ceres usually wear biohazard suits?”

“It’s Customs and
Resources
now,” Michael said. “I guess things have changed. I dunno.”

Kiyoshi knew that
I dunno
was an uncomfortable state for Michael to be in. He slung his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Let’s play ‘spot the geyser,” he suggested.

“Dumbass,” Michael said, more cheerfully. “The geysers are just wisps of water vapor outgassing from the crust. You can’t
see
them, except at night, and you need a special filter.”

At present the sun hung low in the sky, as Ceres whirled towards the end of its 9-hour day. The sun was almost as small as it had looked from Jupiter. The wall of Occator Crater rose jaggedly over the horizon. In the sunlight, the five-kilometer icy peaks looked two-dimensional.

The rover stopped outside a cluster of windowless cryocrete buildings.

“In there,” said the driver. “Decontamination.” He and his cohorts casually produced PEPguns.

Having to go through decon was not unusual. All better-organized space colonies had some form of it, to exclude micro-organisms that might not play well with their own particular set of diseases and immunities. But Kiyoshi had never before had to go through electrostatic scrubbing, while still in his EVA suit, and then strip naked and stand in a salt-water shower for ten minutes, followed by an airjet shower … and
then
be told that he would have to remain in quarantine for another 48 hours.

“We’re not radioactive,” he complained to the medibot that examined him after his shower.

The process actually reminded him of something more sinister than radioactivity. It reminded him of the clean room on the space station where Luna’s captains of industry had built the Dust plague.

“Your toxicology panel shows significant levels of nicotine and caffeine,” the medibot quacked.

So he hadn’t stayed entirely clean during their journey.

He’d bought anti-addiction meds … and given them to Michael.

But Wetherall’s stash of the hard stuff had run out on Day 61, and now he and Colin both were as clean as anyone needed to be.

“Are you quarantining me for having a cigarette habit?!”

“All
arrivals on Ceres are being quarantined,” the medibot assured him.

The medibot ushered him into a large, overheated room crowded with bunks. Disconsolate trekkies and refugees sat shooting the breeze.

“At least we’re clean,” Wetherall sniggered.

“Yeah,” Michael said, oblivious to the double entendre. “It’s almost weird to be around this many people who don’t stink!”

Kiyoshi delved in his rucksack—which had been separately decontaminated—making sure everything was there. He crooked a finger at Wetherall, who squatted down beside him. “This is weird,” Kiyoshi said in a low voice.

“Yeah. But I have an idea what they’re scared of.”

“What?”

“Nanites.”

Kiyoshi touched the sheath of his dagger. His fingers moved on, and closed on a cigarette. He pulled it out and bit on the end without vaping it. “Nanites,” he said in his normal voice. “C’mon, Colin; that’s just the Gray Goo scare all over again.”

“Well, a lot of our buyers at Future Galaxy Enterprises believed it. That’s why they were in such a hurry to leave Earth.”

While the
Unsaved Changes
was in transit from Callisto, the solar system had been officially informed for the first time that Mars had a population of 40 million, give or take a few million. These Martians were the survivors of the PLAN’s captive human population, brainwashed and fanatically loyal to their AI ‘god.’ Star Force’s ground troops were going through them like lasers through cardboard. There would soon be a lot fewer Martians. Like zero.

It had
also
been announced that Mars was absolutely crawling with nanites: micron-scale biomechanical organisms that infested the Martians’ brains, enslaving them to the PLAN.

The Martians were biologically human, so it stood to reason that these nanites could do the same to anyone else, if they got the chance.

Colin Wetherall’s customers, being rich, had got wind of this looming threat a long time ago. And now it seemed like Customs & Resources on Ceres had, too.

Kiyoshi restlessly endured their 48-hour quarantine. He played math games with Michael, always losing. Wetherall worked the room, picking up information from the other detainees. Molly, as was her wont when there was nothing else to do, slept.

At last they were cleared to leave. The C&R officials became friendly to the point of jollity, and pointed them to the car rental place handily located near the quarantine building.