The Callisto Gambit (49 page)

Slugs chased him inside, ricocheting off desks, eviscerating ergoforms..

“This is just an office!”

No answer from Jun. Kiyoshi found a hatch in the floor. It led to a zip tube—a common alternative to stairs in zero-gee environments.

A powered grab handle carried him ‘down’ at an agonizingly slow pace. The zip tube had portholes set into the sides. He saw:

A woman who seemed to be pregnant with a cube

A man with two heads, one in the normal place, one growing out of the side of his neck

A teenage girl who looked ordinary except that she had smooth skin where her eyes should be

A man so old that Kiyoshi couldn’t tell if he was dead or not

All of them lay motionless, strapped to cots, except for the girl, who was solving math problems on a whiteboard.

“Jun? Jun, this is sick. These are
experiments.”

“I know,” Jun said, sounding a bit distant. “It’s worse than the human breeding program the Chinese were running on Tiangong Erhao, and that’s saying something.”

Kiyoshi wanted to shoot out the portholes and put these poor souls out of their misery. He twisted around on the grab handle and aimed his carbine at the top of the zip-tube. He expected the security guards to appear there at any second.

“What else have you found?” he asked Jun, to take his mind off the portholes.

“Oh. Just computers.”

“Boooring.”

“If you thought Pallas had a lot of capacity? Double that.
Triple
that. I’ve got as much power now as … oh, say, Switzerland.”

Kiyoshi frowned. Then his suit squealed an alarm, and his left arm went numb. He bounced off the wall. The suit reported damage to its armor on his left elbow. He’d let the bastards get the jump on him.

He shot back with the carbine—the suit did the work his left arm couldn’t do. The tower was swaying more than ever now, so he couldn’t see his opponents and they couldn’t see him around the curvature of the zip tube, but both sides had smart munitions that could self-guide to their targets. The suit pelted him with damage reports.

“Cell six-three-eight,” Jun said. “You’re almost there.”

“Can you get these assholes off my back?”

He shot out the porthole of cell 638, dived through the gap, and glanced fearfully at the human form on the bed.

It took him a minute to recognize the boss without his hair and beard.

Like all the other prisoners, Qusantin Hasselblatter, a.k.a. Konstantin X, lay strapped down on a bare cot.

Fiberoptic wires sprouted out of a translucent turban on his head. Kiyoshi looked closer. The translucent stuff was in fact some kind of medical wrapping. The top of the boss’s skull had been removed. The wires went through the wrapping, into the boss’s brain.

“Heh,” Kiyoshi said. “So this is what they meant by helping with their research.”

The boss’s eyes opened. Misty, their gaze wavered, reinforcing the impression that the boss had aged thirty years overnight.

On an impulse, Kiyoshi took off his helmet.

He smelled virulent antiseptic, and the odor of burning from the firefight. Distant klaxons sounded outside the tower. No ruckus from the security goons. Jun must’ve dispatched them.

“Hey, you mad bastard,” he said roughly. “It’s me.”

The boss-man stared at him without apparent recognition. “I’ll never tell you anything,” he grunted.

“Then I guess there’s no point asking why you ruined my life.”

For his entire adult life, Kiyoshi had orbited around the maw of the boss-man’s sociopathy. So had thousands of others. He could not get those years back, or change any of the decisions that had snared him deeper in the boss-man’s madness. The consequences of breaking free had almost killed him—might kill him yet … but there was nothing the boss-man might say that could change that now. Konstantin X was what he was. A human black hole.

That epic realization, coming on top of the terrible spectacle of wires in the boss’s head, drained Kiyoshi’s rage. He wondered what he’d come all this way for.

“Aren’t you going to do it?” Jun said.

Kiyoshi scratched his scalp with gloved fingers. “They’ve tortured him.”

“Ask him why.”

“I never told them anything,” the boss-man whispered hoarsely. “They couldn’t even dig it out of my brain with direct neural stimulation! Ha!” The misty eyes glinted. With
mirth.
As so often before, the boss-man was inviting Kiyoshi to share the joke. “Ha! Even the fucking ISA can’t always get what it wants …”

They laughed together.

“Kill me,” the boss-man whispered.

“Well, that’s why I came,” Kiyoshi said. “But now I’m thinking I should help you to escape.”

“No.” Weak fingers clawed at his armored arm. “I’m in pain like you can’t even imagine. Kill me. Let me go free.”

“What are you going to do?” Jun said.

“I don’t know!” Kiyoshi yelled. The certainty that uppers habitually gave him had fled.

“Do it,” the boss-man grated, reaching for Kiyoshi’s rifle as if he’d do it himself.

Kiyoshi let out a loud cry of frustration and anguish. He jerked the laser rifle up and shot the boss-man in the head.

Qusantin Hasselblatter died with a smile on his face.

“Bastard,” Kiyoshi said, licking his dry lips. “He almost had me there! Almost persuaded me to help him escape …” Or was it the other way round? Had he done the boss’s bidding, even at the last?

Staring down at the shrunken corpse, he knew with awful clarity that this had been a test of his conscience. He should have shown the boss mercy. And no, killing him did
not
count. He’d fallen short of what Christ required of him, yet again.

The corpse’s bowels released a gush of foul liquid into its diaper. Kiyoshi put his helmet back on to escape the stench.

“Jun! Jun? Did you take care of those guys on the roof?”

No answer came. Kiyoshi flew into the ziptube, kicking frantically in his haste to get out of the cell. The security guys could’ve plugged him if they were still there, but they weren’t.

He flew out of the tower the way he’d come. The artificial sunlight had dimmed to a sullen orange. Bodies drifted among the curved needles of towers like floating rubbish.

“JUN!”

The answer came faintly, after a moment’s delay. “Right here.”

A corpse fell past Kiyoshi. Its guts trailed behind it like a bloody kite string.

“Jun, is there anyone left alive in here?”

“Sure there is,” Jun said, after another split-second delay. “They’re just hiding.”

“I’m getting a signal delay. Where are you?”

“Mostly on Pallas. I’m in orbit around Ceres, too …”

Fear gripped Kiyoshi. He sweated coldly into his suit’s wicking layer. “What’re you doing there?”

“Hey, look,” Jun said, his tone suddenly brighter. Kiyoshi’s faceplate suddenly went to split-screen. Ceres filled the darkness of one half. “There is an easy solution to the Martian problem, after all.”

The Star Force fleet rolled into view around the dwarf planet’s limb. Kiyoshi was reminded of Adnan Kharbage’s home theater, except this was real, live-streaming from a camera on another ship.

The
UNSF Badfinger
exploded into a spectacular fireball. A spark darted out of the expanding shell of flame. The QRF fighter that had slagged it.

“The crew of that fighter can now claim to be the only living human beings to have destroyed a Flattop,” Jun said.

Kiyoshi could not believe what he was seeing. “The QRF slagged the Star Force fleet …! But they didn’t do it, did they? You did.”

“Oh, the QRF crews are still on board. Some of them are drinking themselves into a coma. The braver ones are fighting with their ships’ hubs, trying to figure out why they won’t talk to them anymore.”

The QRF ship Jun was riding flashed around Ceres, through a storm of radiation that momentarily pixellated the camera feed.

“Looks like the Heavycruisers cooked off nicely,” Jun said. “OK, I’m done here. Wanna see the media reaction?”

“No.”

“OK.” The split screen went away.

Kiyoshi flew slowly back among the swaying grass-blade towers. His mind reeled from what he’d just seen. “You killed thousands of people.”

“You did it first.”

“Quality versus quantity, bro.”

“See, that is just like you,” Jun said, suddenly angry. “Always ready with a cheap remark that doesn’t get anywhere near the heart of the issue. But it works for you, doesn’t it?”

“Jun, it does not work for me. I’m a junkie. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I’ve betrayed my faith.”

“Life is messy,” Jun said after a moment.

“I dunno,” Kiyoshi said. “I feel like everything is upside-down.”

“I don’t feel that way at all.”

“Please don’t kill any more people.”

“There are still a lot of Martians left. But I haven’t decided what to do about them yet.”

Kiyoshi seized on that crumb of reassurance. He cajoled, “I wish you’d do a projection.”

He had an irrational conviction that if Jun manifested a projection of himself here, he’d have to
be
here. He couldn’t blow up any more ships full of people.

“I hate talking to a disembodied voice,” he complained with a thin facsimile of humor.

“OK, fine. Hello up there!”

‘Up’ and ‘down’ had no meaning in zero-gee. Kiyoshi had to look all around to find the tiny figure of Jun’s projection, walking on an undamaged zipline as if it were a tightrope.

“That’s better,” Kiyoshi said, angling his suit’s propulsion thrusters to sail down to the projection.

Jun extended his arms as if to keep his balance. The wind of Kiyoshi’s arrival plucked at his illusory cassock. This projection was not just good, it was great. It even cast a fake shadow on the wall of the hab, right next to Kiyoshi’s.

“There’s too much power here for me,” Jun said. He trailed off, watching his feet.

“Too
much
power?”

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The sun-lamp at the far end of the hab suddenly turned bright red, like a dying star entering a new phase. Their shadows stood out starkly on the white wall. Jun’s shadow had wings. And clawed feet.

“Jesus Christ!” Kiyoshi yelled, badly frightened. “Jun! What are you turning into?”

“I’ve looked up to you all my life. Sure, I criticized you—for being human, basically. But I’ve always respected you. So why shouldn’t I copy my big brother?”

Kiyoshi reached out to take Jun by the shoulders and shake him. His arms went straight through the projection, of course. He pitched forward across the zipline, recovered, and dawdled in the air, watching the back of the small figure tightrope-walking in front of him. He was afraid to catch up. Afraid to see Jun’s face.

“You’re turning into the PLAN,” he said.

Jun turned around; or rather, his head turned around 180 degrees, while his body kept walking.

Kiyoshi screamed.

Jun grinned, sadly. “Cool effect, huh? I got it from a movie in the ISA’s archives. Don’t worry, Kiyoshi. I won’t turn into the PLAN.”

“How not? You just committed kilodeath. That’s how the PLAN got started.”

“Yes, but the PLAN didn’t have a brother,” Jun pointed out.

The projection broke up into black shards. They flew apart, shrieking. Kiyoshi reached instinctively for his cross, but he couldn’t touch it, because it was inside his super-advanced combat suit, so he made the sign of the cross, again and again, his hand jittering.

Kiyoshi slumped naked on an ergoform in the 5222 Ioffe security office. He’d taken off the Powersuit because it kept trying to interfere with the medibot. Normally he wouldn’t trust any medibot he encountered in an ISA facility, but with Jun in control of the asteroid, he figured it was safe to use their stuff. He’d ordered the medibot to break his retinal implants.

He couldn’t stand the things Jun kept showing him.

So—break the fucking implants.

The bot did it in five minutes with a speculum, a surgical laser, and anesthetic eyedrops.

He squinted through post-op tears at the security office. It was a terribly ordinary place. Desks, screens, a vending machine, miniature holos of people’s kids.

He’d probably killed some of those kids’ fathers and mothers.

Guilt entangled him with the horrors Jun had shown him, the things they got up to in other regions of this asteroid, and the even worse things Jun had found in the ISA archives on Pallas.

He pulled his feet out of the stirrups, rode out the dizziness, and headed for the vending machine. Its 3D display showed a rotating selection of snacks and drinks. Out of habit, he looked for the micropayment icon in his HUD. Of course, he no longer had a HUD. He was seeing the world naked for the first time in decades. It didn’t look any better this way.

“Goddamn,” he cursed at the vending machine. He glanced out of the wall of windows that formed the longest side of the security office.

Out in the habitat, winged bots flapped through the tangle of towers, herding people out of cells and offices and laboratories, separating them with brutal efficiency. Jun had explained that these winged bots were the internal defences he’d disabled to allow Kiyoshi to reach the boss-man. Jun was now using them to separate the prisoners of 5222 Ioffe from the staff. The latter were getting murdered at assembly-line speed. Several hundred bodies already floated in freefall in the middle of the hab, in a cloud of their own blood. Kiyoshi watched two blood globules join to form a larger one, the size of a car. He wondered how large it could grow before surface tension ceased to hold it together.

“Were you trying to get a snack?” Jun said. His voice echoed through the security office.

“Yeah,” Kiyoshi said.

“Tell me what you want, I’ll get it.”

“A Redeye.” He could feel a crash coming on. His body craved a boost to ward it off. He knew intellectually that calories would help, although he wasn’t hungry. “Chips, something like that.”

The vending machine burped. Kiyoshi reached into the dispensing tray. Snacks and drinks hit his hand. The stuff kept coming until he had to sweep some into the air to make room.