The Callisto Gambit (20 page)

Kiyoshi stood up, testing his weight on his injured leg.
Shit! OW.
He glanced down at the boss-man. His decision to save the bastard had been purely instinctive. Ironically, it might have saved his own life. The boss-man’s body had shielded him from those ice splinters, as sharp and lethal as knives.

The boss-man reached behind himself and patted weakly at the shards, as if trying to pull them out.

“Holy crap,” Kiyoshi said. “That’s some kick-ass body armor.”

“Military surplus,” the boss-man rasped. “They’re selling everything off.”

“Uh huh.”

“Help me. Pull these out. Don’t touch the big one.”

“The one sticking out of your ass?”

“Fuck you, Yonezawa.”

Kiyoshi pointed the laser pistol at the boss-man’s faceplate. Then he reconsidered.

When the search party arrived, he would have a tough time talking his way out of this. He might be able to pass off the boss’s death as an accident. But the destruction of an ice spire?
That
probably carried an automatic penalty of life in jail.

Solution: steal the boss’s getaway car.

He said to the boss, “You came out here by yourself. But you weren’t planning to go back by yourself, were you?”

“Fuck you.”

“I figure the
Angel’s
somewhere around here.” That ship was smart enough to fly itself. “Call it,
now.”

The
Angel’s
radio emitted a cheery tone. An email appeared on the comms screen. It consisted of a single word.

From: Elwin Ransom [ID string attached]

To: Captain@
Angel

SOS

1 attachment [coordinates]

Michael shouted into the intercom, “That was him! He’s in trouble!”

The Hasselblatters flew up the keel tube and strapped into their seats. Dr. Hasselblatter peered at the coordinates that Michael had already mapped onto their topological map of Callisto. “Right in the middle of the ice spires.”

“What could’ve happened?” Michael fretted, hurrying through the pre-launch checks.

“Found something too big to carry? Or maybe his metal detector’s battery blew up. Anyway, we can’t take the
Angel
in there.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Dr. Hasselblatter said patiently, “he’s in the middle of the ice spires. It’s a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value. There’s nowhere to land.”

“There will be,” Michael said.

The
Angel’s
drive spun up. A mighty blast of plasma blossomed from her drive, re-melting the ice she had melted when she landed. The little ship took off vertically. Gravity glued Michael into his couch, which automatically rotated to align his body with the gees. This was going to be the shortest ballistic hop ever, moving the ship barely fifty kilometers to the north.

Unless …

“Michael,” the
Angel
said, “would you like me to try something possibly less destructive?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” Michael said, wriggling against his straps.

“All right. Let’s see if I remember how to do this.”

The
Angel’s
main drive cut out. Simultaneously, the auxiliary engine nacelles under her wings fired. These electrical engines vaporized hydrogen propellant into reaction mass, just like the main drive, but did so with considerably less heat and violence.

The
Angel
tipped over on her nose. As she fell back towards the surface, the auxiliary engines roared, flattening out the angle of her dive, until she was flying down towards the surface like an airplane … without the atmospheric lift that kept actual airplanes in the air. Because there was, y’know, no
air.

The auxiliary thrusters compensated. Jets of plasma stabbed down towards the surface, and met the ground safely outside the field of ice spires.

The
Angel
glided on skinny stilts of fire in among the ice spires, skimming the surface, still moving at 400 kilometers per hour. You didn’t dump orbital velocity that easily.

“Yee-haaaah!” Michael screamed. On the optical feed, ice spires loomed and darted away almost too fast for the eye to follow. It looked like they were dodging over—and
through
—a forest of giant, deformed ivory chess pieces. “Can I try?”

“Well, Michael, I’m not sure—”

“I’ll be careful!” He grabbed the yoke.

The
Angel
yawed sharply. Her nose clipped an ice spire, shearing its top off in a shower of ice shards.

Dr. Hasselblatter covered his eyes, groaning, “Please let the ship do it.”

Michael sat back. He itched to do more, as if this were an immersion game. He
wanted
to crash into the spires. So what if they were a World Heritage site?

The astrogation screen pinged urgently. They were almost on top of the boss’s coordinates.

“Preparing to land,” the
Angel
said. “Backthrusting …” The plasma jets dug into the ground, like a skiier digging in her heels. “Normalizing orientation.” The jets emitted one last burst, rocking the
Angel
back to the vertical. She settled onto her jackstands.

“Never
do that again,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “I’m too old for it.”

“Only if Michael doesn’t want me to,” the ship said sweetly.

Michael glanced at Junior. Glaze-eyed with excitement, the younger boy gave him a thumbs-up.

“Well, where’s the boss?” Michael said edgily. He scanned the optical feed. All he could see was the cloud of dust stirred up by their landing.

“Over here!” the boss’s voice suddenly erupted from the comms screen. “I’m injured! Suit’s damaged. Can’t walk …”

“I’ll go,” Dr. Hasselblatter said, jumping up.

Michael sat paralyzed. He wanted to go, wanted to help the boss … but that would mean leaving the ship. And Junior had broken his mecha.

Dr. Hasselblatter clamped his helmet on and swung into the airlock.

Michael leaned towards the optical feed screen. The slowly settling dust still obscured the ground.
“Angel,
can you see him?”

“Yes,” the ship said. “I’m picking him up on infrared. I’ll overlay it on the optical feed.”

A tiny green figure materialized, crawling through the black snowstorm. Then a larger figure appeared at the lower edge of the screen and ran towards the first one. That would be Dr. Hasselblatter.

“Is the boss saying anything? Is he badly hurt?”

“He doesn’t like me to eavesdrop.”

“I’m in command,” Michael reminded the ship.

“All right. Only because
you
asked, darling.”

Dr. Hasselblatter’s voice suddenly crackled into the cockpit. “—
shot?
Who did it?” On the screen, he ran faster towards the boss-man.

“Yonezawa,” the boss-man grunted.

“Yonezawa?
He’s here?”

“Don’t say anything. Not one word.”

Dr. Hasselblatter reached the boss. At the same time, the dust settled enough for Michael to see what was actually going on outside. The
Angel’s
external lights bathed a circle of dusty regolith. Ice shards glinted on the ground at the furthest reach of the light. The boss crouched on his hands and knees. Dr. Hasselblatter stood near him.

“I hate to kick a man when he’s down,” Dr. Hasselblatter said, “but are you convinced
now,
Qusantin, that your management policy needs a rethink?”

The boss raised his helmet slightly. “Screw you, Abdullah. I was right all along.”

“That’s non-obvious at the moment.”

“I know what you’re going to tell me. Brian is gunning for me. Zygmunt, the whole goddamn Eris faction—they’re all traitors.”

“They need you. They need Qusantin Hasselblatter, the visionary. They don’t need a paranoid conspiracy theorist! You’re endangering the mission, this
crucial
mission—let me tell you something, Qusantin: I don’t want to die. I don’t want my
son
to die because you can’t get your goddamn act together!”

Michael snuck a glance at Junior. The younger boy’s chocolate-smeared mouth hung open.

“Let me tell
you
something, Abdullah,” the boss said. “There is no problem. Yonezawa is the problem. He started it. Him and his fucking computer models. ‘Actually, I don’t think I’ll go.’ He says this based on a computer model. Complete bullshit, but that got Brian and the other sheep thinking. ‘If
Yonezawa
isn’t going, maybe there’s a problem with the mission.’ That’s where it all started. See? The problem was him all along. And I solved that problem. I got his people on board. They’re happy to be with us. They’re
home.
That’s a terrific result. So it doesn’t matter about him anymore. He does not matter. He is nothing.”

Michael had never heard the boss like this, ranting and swearing, contradicting himself left and right.

“So where is he?” Dr. Hasselblatter said.

“Right here,” said a new voice. “Move away from the spaceship.”

“Oh, dear,” the
Angel
said. “He’s behind that ice spire.”

“I said move,” Kiyoshi Yonezawa repeated. “I’m taking the
Angel.
You’ll be all right. There’s a search party on their way right now. By the way, they’ll want to know who destroyed that spire. It was him. Laser pistol plus ice equals look out below. I figure that probably carries an automatic sentence of life in jail.” Kiyoshi chuckled. “World Heritage and all.”

Dr. Hasselblatter shouted, “Go! Michael, go! Take Junior back to the
Salvation.
Tell Brian to launch. Eris, wherever, it doesn’t matter, just go! Get out of here! Save the human race!”

Michael sat paralyzed.

“Don’t leave my dad,” Junior said.

“I’m not gonna,” Michael muttered. He liked Junior’s dad, but more importantly, he couldn’t leave the boss.

A figure in a black spacesuit dashed towards the Hasselblatters, a gun in either hand.

“Shoot him,
Angel!”
Michael yelped, but by the time the words left his mouth, Kiyoshi Yonezawa had closed the distance. He jammed his right-hand gun against Dr. Hasselblatter’s helmet and kicked the boss in the back, sending him to his knees again. “Give me the ship,” he panted. “I know how you set it up. You can reassign command permissions verbally.”

“No can do,” the boss rasped. “Already gave command to the kid.” His helmet swung. Michael could almost feel him staring at him across the vacuum. “Whatcha gonna do, Michael?”

Michael pushed out of his couch. “Where are you going?” Junior cried. Ignoring him, Michael hurtled down the keel tube. He plucked his helmet off his shoulder patch, inflated it, and put it on as he flew. In the museum, he punched the broken glass out of the display case that held the old exosuit.

It toppled towards him. He caught it—stumbling over the pieces of his mecha—and reached for its power switch.

Wonder of wonders, the status panel lit up.

Those old batteries sure held a charge.

Michael climbed into the cradle. It was designed like his own mecha, with joystick controls, but had no pedals. He had to adjust the stirrups upwards. Whoever last used it had had longer legs.

He strode awkwardly around the museum, getting the hang of the controls. Then he pulled himself hand-over-hand down the keel tube to the rear airlock.

He looked out at the underside of the stairs descending from the cockpit airlock. He was on the opposite side of the ship from the boss and the others.

It was only about five meters down.

He jumped, feeling invulnerable, no longer a little boy but a nine-foot metal gorilla.

The hydraulic shocks in his legs took the impact. The old gundam’s joints were a bit sticky. Needed lube. But he was moving.

He pounded around the
Angel,
towards the three men. They seemed further away from the ship, now that he wasn’t seeing them through a camera. He couldn’t hear them, either. He instructed his suit to scan the FM spectrum.

“Holy crap.” Yonezawa actually let his gun drift down. “That’s mine!”

“Just like my ship was MINE!” Michael screamed. “And you took it!” His right foot came down in a hole. He stumbled, and instinctively reached for the exosuit’s thruster controls. Different interface from his mecha, same functionality. A weak sputter of gas lofted him off the ground. “You don’t get to take anything else! Just go away, go AWAY!”

“That exosuit belonged to my grandfather,”
Yonezawa said. “So I kind of hate to do this. But, screw nostalgia.” The muzzle of his laser pistol flashed. Michael felt, rather than heard, a loud
whoof.
Hydrogen gas explosively decompressed from a hole in the exosuit’s propellant tank. Michael corkscrewed forward like a bullet out of a gun, and plowed headfirst into the ground. It was a good thing the exosuit’s cradle had gel impact cushions.

“Oh, kid.” Yonezawa nudged the exosuit with one foot, while keeping his gun pointed in the general direction of the Hasselblatters. “Just tell the ship you relinquish command. Tell it you’re handing over to me. I want all permissions slaved to my voiceprint.”

Woozy, Michael blinked to clear his head. He was lying in fetal position on his side, still in the exosuit’s cradle. A little way away, the boss crouched on his knees, too done in even to talk. Dr. Hasselblatter dragged him in the direction of the
Angel,
defying Yonezawa to shoot.

“You’re going the wrong way!” Yonezawa shouted.

Michael saw that the man was momentarily distracted. He yanked the joystick back. The exosuit exploded off the ground. Michael pistoned a metal fist into Yonezawa’s ribs. The blow knocked Yonezawa off his feet and up
into the vacuum. Michael charged after him, anticipating where he would come down.

“Run, Dad!” Junior screamed in Michael’s helmet. “Run run run!”

Everyone was running, in clumsy micro-gee bounds.

Michael swiped up at Yonezawa, caught a wispy cloud of gas. Yonezawa had a mobility pack on his suit. He wasn’t coming down.

Dr. Hasselblatter, dragging his brother, reached the
Angel’s
stairs. Junior scuttled out of the airlock in his spacesuit and helped him haul the boss to the hatch.

Yonezawa flew up, and up. He landed on the top of the nearest ice spire. He was a black dot against a sky ever so slightly less black.