The Callisto Gambit (2 page)

He wasn’t the only one. Kiyoshi had agreed to their plan, but now that the moment had come, anxious forebodings gripped him. He dragged on his cigarette, inhaling a calming mix of nicotine and synthetic THC.

Father Tom gave Mendoza a last-minute lecture about his responsibilities. Mendoza had recently been ordained a deacon, which gave him a special role to play in Masses as a minister of the Precious Blood. From the rucksack he wore over his EVA suit, the Jesuit took a pyx hand-forged from asteroid iron. “The Holy Eucharist,” he said, holding it up. He gave it to Mendoza, and took out a bulb-shaped bottle made of opaque, two-inch-thick Moon glass. “The Precious Blood.”

Mendoza fell to his knees, clutching the vessels. In zero-gee, this came out as bending his knees in the air. “I’ll guard it with my life, Father.” He looked up, his brow wrinkling. “But what if I drop it?”

“You won’t drop it,” Father Tom said, with just a hint of menace.

“No, but just in case. I mean, if it’s the Host, I pick it up and consume it, but what if it’s the Precious Blood?”

“It used to be illegal to reserve the Precious Blood at all,” Father Tom said. “The Vatican changed canon law to allow it in space, when the priest may be millions of kilometers from his congregation. But it does present new dilemmas in zero-gee. If the Precious Blood is spilled on the
floor,
you wash the area with water, then pour the water into the sacrarium and drink that. But what if it never reaches the floor? What if there is no floor? I suppose you would have to scramble around catching all the drops. It’s never happened to me.”

Kiyoshi kicked off from his throne. “Well, I’m going.”

“Wait,” said Mendoza. He caught up with Kiyoshi at the door and hugged him. “Be careful, dude.”

“You
be careful. Don’t spill the Precious Blood, or Jun will space you.”

Kiyoshi made a circuit of the ship, chivvying the last of the Galapajin out. He also made sure they hadn’t taken any of the booty from the Startractor. The Gravimetric Upcycler they’d liberated from the Startractor’s engineering module now occupied pride of place in the
Monster’s
fabrication lab. Kiyoshi had not asked Jun what he wanted that for. Even he didn’t know every detail of Jun’s plan to win humanity’s war singlehandedly.

Jun said
he
didn’t know every detail, either. He was going to leave it up to the Holy Spirit, a.k.a. winging it.

In the garden, Kiyoshi found some dwarf pigs that had been left behind. They were hiding amidst the stalks of the vegetables harvested in haste by the departing Galapajin. He chased them, sweating in the garden’s 0.4 gees and sticky heat. Jun deployed a pair of gardening bots to help, but the pigs were quicker. Adapted to micro-gee, they leapt in sailing bounds right over Kiyoshi’s head.

“I give up,” Kiyoshi growled.

“I’ve almost got this one. Just stay where you are. Hold the cage open.”

The bots edged slowly towards the nearest pig. Kiyoshi squatted, holding the travel cage open.

“I can’t understand why you’re taking Mendoza instead of me,” he said.

They’d had this argument before, and Kiyoshi had lost. Of course he’d lost. You couldn’t win an argument with an artificial super-intelligence. But now his forebodings were back, telling him loud and clear that Jun was making a mistake.

“I know you need someone on board, to pretend to be flying the ship. But Mendoza? He doesn’t have a freaking clue. He actually believes you’re going to kidnap his girlfriend from Star Force, so she and he can join the rest of the nutjobs on
Salvation.
The guy is … I mean, he’s a good guy, but he’s Earthborn.” To Kiyoshi, this was a synonym for
clueless.

“He’s pious,” Jun answered, which was inarguable.

“Oh, so it’s because I’m a bad Catholic.”

“I didn’t say that. Anyway, you’ll have Father Tom to keep you on the straight and narrow.”

“I’m not absolutely sure where Father Tom’s loyalties lie.”

“Never even question that! He’s loyal to his Order.”

“Yeah, that’s the trouble,” Kiyoshi muttered under his breath.

But of course Jun heard him. The bots pounced, waving their trowel attachments. Startled, the pig bounded into the air. Kiyoshi stood up and held the travel cage in front of it. The pig sailed straight in. Jun said, “Jesuits make history, while other people stand and watch.”

Kiyoshi sealed the hutch before the pig could escape. “Jun, you’re not a Jesuit.”

Jun belonged to the Order of St. Benedict of Passau, a more humble monastic order than the Society of Jesus. He said now, “Did I tell you I ran my plan past the Abbot Primate?”

“No!” Kiyoshi was stunned. The Abbot Primate was the supervisor of all the scattered monasteries of St. Benedict of Passau, a holy man who lived in Rome and published monographs on the mercy of Christ. Kiyoshi literally could not imagine his reaction to Jun’s plan to win the war singlehandedly. “What did he say?”

“He said Christ will have mercy on me. I took that as a green light.” But Jun didn’t sound entirely happy about it.

Kiyoshi set down the pig cage. “Does he know what you are? Did you tell him?”

“Yes.” Before Kiyoshi had the chance to react with four-letter words, Jun said hurriedly, “If I hadn’t, someone else would have, sooner or later.” He meant the other monks and nuns among their people. The Order of St. Benedict of Passau had taken root strongly among the Galapajin during their years of isolation, and they had forty-six brothers and sisters among their number here, including five priests. The other religious tended to be wary of Jun. Kiyoshi was the only one who understood him. It seemed highly unlikely that an abbot on faraway Earth would.

“How did he take it?”

“It was a lot of ‘on the one hand,’ and ‘then again, on the other.’ He did mention that holy orders are technically for people, not artificial intelligences.”

“You. Are. A. Person.”

“Yes, but he’s never met me. In the end he said he was going to consult with the Vatican, bearing in mind that it’s a unique situation.”

The Abbot Primate was right about that, Kiyoshi reflected. Jun was the only true artificial intelligence in the solar system … except for the PLAN. He felt sorry for the Vatican theologians who would have to wrap their heads around the problem. To Kiyoshi himself, it was simple: Jun was the same person he’d always been. He was Kiyoshi’s little brother.

“Come out where I can see you,” he ordered.

Jun’s projection emerged from behind a bush, carrying one of the pigs. In reality a gardening bot was carrying it, and Jun had cleverly overlaid his projection on the bot. Kiyoshi opened the hutch so he could stuff the pig in. The illusion of interactivity was painful. He wanted to hug Jun and tell him it would be OK, and he knew that all he’d get would be an armful of metal attachments.

“So are you in or out?”

“Still in, I think,” Jun answered. “The Abbot Primate raised the point that I can’t take Communion. Which is obviously a problem. But I think the real sticking point is that I’m still claiming to be Jun Yonezawa, who they think is dead. And obviously, no one can come back from the dead except our Lord.”

“Yeah,” Kiyoshi said. “But Jesus raised Lazarus, and Jairus’s daughter, so why couldn’t He have raised you?
I
need to talk to them.”

Jun laughed. “Yeah, that would help. It’s not a lost cause. They’re discussing it. But it’ll probably take years before they come to a decision, and that’s my point: the Jesuits aren’t like that. They’re open to everything and everyone. New frontiers are their way of life. See it, go for it.”

“I know you’ve been discussing Jesuit spirituality with Father Tom.”

“Yup. So many of the great saints have been Jesuits. It’s incredibly inspiring.”

Now
Jun sounded happy, the way he always did when he got onto a favorite topic. But for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, this made Kiyoshi uneasier than ever.

“I’d better go.” He picked up the rabbit hutch and trudged towards the airlock. His eyes told him he was walking up a hill clothed in bushes and saplings. His feet told him he was walking on level ground. With the garden unaccustomedly empty, he could hear the throb of the massive motors that rotated the module on the ship’s axis.

Halfway to the airlock, he halted.

“Are you
sure
you want to do this?”

Jun stood in the vegetable garden, small and alone. His voice was also small, a mere whisper in Kiyoshi’s cochlear implants. “We have to.”

We,
but all Kiyoshi would be doing was staying here.

“I’m the only person in the solar system who’s ever taken on the PLAN and won.”

“On Mercury? That wasn’t the PLAN. It was a copy of the Heidegger program running on a portable.”

The Heidegger program had been a PLAN virus that targeted human BCIs (brain-computer interfaces).

“It was still educational,” Jun said. “Let’s just say I know more about
how
to fight the PLAN than anyone else. Star Force is trying to defeat it with nukes and charged particle beams! As for the Chinese, they’re not fighting at all. They’re sitting back and waiting to see who wins. But the writing is on the wall. We’ve already lost 6 Hebe. The population of Luna was decimated last year. What’s next? Ceres?
Earth?
Yesterday we had a system-wide civilization. Tomorrow there might be nothing left except the PLAN’s automated resource extraction facilities. Believe me, I know how an artificial super-intelligence thinks. I understand the drive to grow—and grow—and grow.” Jun’s voice shook with intensity.

Kiyoshi’s fingers tightened on the handle of the rabbit hutch. He knew that Jun deliberately denied himself the opportunity to grow much bigger, by refusing to move out of the
Monster.
He’d relocated from the ship’s hub into a custom data processing center next door to the bridge, but that was as far as he’d go. Kiyoshi admired him for it, and now felt a shiver of dread as he remembered the temptations Jun resisted, every day. Instead of succumbing to the destructive internal logic of AI, he was instead spending his time on discussions with a bunch of elderly Earth-based theologians, and humbly abiding by their decisions. Viewed that way, his preoccupation with theological hairsplitting was not drivelling. It was noble.

“So do you get it?” Jun said. “This is my responsibility. What am I
for,
if not to do this?”

“Yeah, I get it. You’re bored out here, and this war came along at just the right time to give you something to do.”

Jun laughed. “Something like that.”

“So,” Kiyoshi drawled, “just to recap, you’re going to steal a Chinese space station; eject whoever’s on board; fly it to Mars; and use it as a Trojan horse to deliver a cyberattack that’ll demolish the PLAN from the inside out, while somehow squaring it with the UN, and not getting murdered by the China Territorial Defense Force.”

“Like I said, it’ll be easy.”

“Goddamn it, I wish I was going.”

“But you have to stay here. Look after our people. Keep them safe.”

“Leave it to me.”

“And
please
don’t kill the boss.”

“No promises.”

“Come on. He’s got the best beard in the asteroid belt. You can’t kill the beard.”

Kiyoshi didn’t want to make light of the boss-man’s sins. “He believes the human race is doomed,” he grunted.

“He might not,” Jun said delicately, “be wrong.”

“If you screw up—”

“If I screw up, the
Salvation
might, um, be necessary.”

Kiyoshi took a moment, hugging the pig cage. Jun thought the danger to the solar system was so great that a sociopathic inventor and his Bussard ramjet might be humanity’s last best hope.

He asked reluctantly, “What probability are you assigning to—ah—the utter destruction of Earth?”

“Oh, only two percent.”

Two percent. That was further from zero than Kiyoshi would’ve liked to hear. “Eh, well, what can I say? Don’t screw up.”

Jun said rapidly, “I’ve also modelled various ways the situation here might play out after I leave. A ridiculously high fraction of the models end up with the boss killing
you.
Please, please be careful. Don’t piss him off. Don’t pick fights about his stupid Bussard ramjet, or the moons of Planet X, or whatever he fixates on next week.”

“Didn’t I tell you once before,” Kiyoshi roared, “never try to predict my behavior?”

Jun shrank away. “Maybe I shouldn’t have shared that.”

“No, you shouldn’t have fucking done it. You
cannot
predict me. You get it wrong every time. You’re just wasting processing power.”

“Sorry. I just want to make sure you’re going to be careful.”

Kiyoshi stomped to the airlock. “I will be living in a broken-down old Startractor with five hundred and sixty-eight of our people, totally reliant on a hydroponic garden, a jugaaded water reclamation system, and the boss’s goodwill … and by the way, he
still
owes me money. And now 6 Hebe is gone, there’s nowhere to run to if the situation goes to shit.” He pulled his helmet off its velcro patch, fitted it over his head, and inflated it, shutting out the smell of growing things. “You bet your ass I’m going to be careful.”

But he couldn’t leave it at that.

As he flew towards the Startractor, towing the pigs in their airtight cage, he pinged Jun again. “Don't worry about me, OK? Just watch your back out there." Jun might be an ASI, but Kiyoshi was the elder brother. It was his job to sound reassuring.

Many of the Galapajin were still buzzing around outside the Startractor. That little airlock in the quarterdeck was a real bottleneck. 

They all stopped and turned to watch when the
Monster’s
drive spun up. 1.5 kilometers away, the powerful, fifth-hand fusion drive, originally made for a Hyperpony courier, blazed brighter than the sun. The plasma plume seared a violet after-image on their eyeballs. The old ship arrowed away, accelerating at a pace that would take it to the L5 Earth-Moon LaGrange point in … oh, about a month and a half.

When the
Monster
got closer to Earth, Jun would enable the Ghost, the stealth system he and Kiyoshi had stolen from the PLAN. It would prevent Earth’s ships and IR telescopes from detecting his approach. At that point they would no longer be able to communicate. For now they could still talk by radio. But as the
Monster’s
drive plume shrank to a speck, and then to nothing, Kiyoshi felt a keen sense of abandonment.