The Callisto Gambit (35 page)

“I think it’s great that he didn’t,” Michael said in a small voice. “I really admire him for not giving up on his family.”

“OK, but if you really want to help him, you should be helping
smart,
not helping stupid. That’s my point.”

“I know. You’re right. So I’m going to go with him,” Michael confided in a voice so small, Molly had to lean close to him to hear. “They’re mustering the fake refugee fleet in orbit tomorrow. I’m going to take our skiff and sneak over there. I’ll get one of the serving bots to cover for me; dress it in my clothes …”

“And stow away on a hauler bound for Pallas.”

“Y-yes.”

“Pallas.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not helping smart, Michael. That’s
galactically
stupid. I can’t let you do that. You’re only ten.”

Michael stuck out his chin. “Maybe Pallas is just a regular old asteroid, and we’ve all been tricked into believing the ISA’s propaganda that it’s like some kind of Death Star!”

“But it is some kind of Death Star,” she said. “I know, because I’ve been there.”

★

That night in the Kharbage orbital, in the corridor between the tradesmen’s airlock and the cold storage cellar, where there were no cameras, Molly struggled into one of the new Customs & Resources spacesuits. “Oof! It’s
tight.”

“It’s supposed to be tight,” Michael said impatiently. “I guess you’ve never worn a skinsuit. It’s made of shape-memory alloy that conforms to your body.”

“What’s this for?” Colin said, holding up a slender nozzle attached to the crotch of his inside-out suit.

“Um, that goes in your, um. In case you have to go number two.”

“I think I’ll skip that. We’re not going to be in these suits for long.”

“Don’t skip it,” Michael said. His own hygiene system in place, his seals done up to his collar, he danced from one foot to the other. They were so slow and clumsy. The spaceborn could be really ignorant about the technology that kept them alive. To be fair to them, neither Colin nor Molly had probably ever worn such expensive suits before.

The flipside of their ignorance was their blasé attitude to going outside.

Outside.

Michael was still scared stiff of it.

He had convinced himself that with Kiyoshi’s life at stake, not to mention the fate of Ceres, he would be able to cope.

But as the three of them hustled out of the maintenance airlock, he flashed back on the day Kiyoshi had thrown him off the
Kharbage Collector.
The vivid memory paralyzed him. That time, he’d been spaced. This time, he’d spaced
himself.
How stupid could he be?

The great steel curve of the orbital rolled overhead, and all he wanted for a moment was to scramble back inside. Back to safety.

Back to his father?

No.

Molly caught his left hand. Colin caught his right. “Where’s this skiff?” Colin said in Michael’s helmet.

“C-c-coming.” Michael sent out a radio call for the Rolls Royce. It soared around the hab to them.

A pressurized, streamlined four-man skiff with the Kharbage, LLC logo on the side, the Rolls came in handy for visiting between orbital habs. Michael had signed it out to his stepmother for the whole night. The orbital was too dumb to realize that that made no sense, seeing as his stepmother wasn’t here. She was down at Occator Lake having beauty treatments and waiting for the world to end.

We will STOP that Martian fleet,
Michael vowed. He’d come to feel strongly about this mission. After all, it was
his
homeworld at stake.

Ceres turned below them, half-lit. Colin took the controls and piloted the Rolls Royce through orbital space, sticking to the pre-programmed trajectory for 11,000 kilometers. Eleven to thirteen K was the parking orbit for large craft, and that’s where the Ceres fleet was assembling now.

The four ITN haulers appeared on the skiff’s radar screen first, lozenges of green, like the
Salvation
without the torus.

Empty.

Just hulks now, stripped down to improve their mass ratios.

A little higher, and the smaller ships of the fleet appeared. Landing craft were still taking people and valuable equipment off the Starcruisers. None of their crews would be going to Pallas. The Customs & Resources gang were prepared to risk hardware on this gambit, but not their employees’ lives.

This afternoon, the LGM man had told Michael that Customs & Resources was positioning itself to be the dominant power in the outer solar system. The supermajors were rebalancing into space, now that the threat of the PLAN was gone. Ceres would become the capital of the solar system in the 24th century.

If
it could be saved from nanite contamination.

All those small ships zipping around masked the Rolls Royce’s drive signature. An insect among mammoths, it puffed past the Starcruisers. Colin cut the drive.

Michael said, “There’s the
Unsaved Changes.
”
He’d hardly recognized its radar profile. It had been stealthed with a coat of carbon nanotube paint—paint with nanotube particles suspended in it—to absorb microwave radiation. Nose on, its radar cross-section was practically invisible.

The point on the radar plot turned slowly and became a ghostly fan. The old Steelmule’s reactor had been swapped out for one so powerful, it required a new drive shield twice the diameter of the fuselage.

“Oh, my poor old ship,” Molly sighed.

“Are you sure this is it, Mikey?” Colin said.

He nodded. “Check the wifi.” Kiyoshi was listening to music.

Some made-in-Ceres mix of soupy bass and electronic squawks. Vocals in Chinese. It was fine. It had a beat.

He squatted under the Steelmule’s comms desk, removing the transponder. He remembered how the ISA had tracked the Startractor’s movements from 99984 Ravilious to Callisto.
Not gonna get caught out that way twice.

“Hey!” Adnan Kharbage said over the radio. “You just stopped sending transponder data.”

“Correct,” Kiyoshi said. “If this was a real refugee fleet, we wouldn’t be broadcasting our location to the whole solar system. I’m also going to disable the transponders in the other ships once we’re underway. Yes, I know you’re worried that I might steal your ships. Honestly: don’t worry. I won’t.”

“Ha ha, of course we trust you,” Kharbage said, making clear how much they didn’t.

“Anyway, how can I put a foot out of line, with twenty of the most bad-ass security contractors on Ceres in the back seat?”

The contractors were down in the crew quarters at the moment, trying to figure out how twenty guys could live in there for two weeks. The Steelmule was roomier than its spartan cousin, the Superlifter, but not by much. It had a galley, a mess, and two cabins. On the way to Ceres, Kiyoshi and Colin had bunked together, and Michael had shared with Molly.

Kiyoshi didn’t care what kind of arrangement the security contractors came up with. He was planning to sleep on the bridge, anyway.

★

Colin cursed under his breath, jinking around twisted-carbon tethers that stretched away into the dark. Workbots crawled along the tethers towards the
Unsaved Changes
, untroubled by the pre-launch wisps of hot plasma drifting from the Steelmule’s business end.

Each of these tethers terminated at one of the haulers they’d just passed. The huge, empty ships drifted a kilometer away, their underpowered engines keeping station in synch with the
Unsaved Changes.
The tethers drew taut lines across the limb of Ceres. The Steelmule, with its musclebound new drive, was going to tow them all the way to Pallas.

“Those tethers are made of the same stuff they were going to use for the space elevator,” Michael said. “They started building it in 2210. And then the PLAN happened. That was the end of the Ceres space elevator. It would’ve been way too easy for the PLAN to take it out. I wonder if we’ll build it now? If we don’t get invaded by Martians, I mean.”

“Mikey,” Molly said, “be quiet.”

“I was just …”

“Put your helmet on.”

The Rolls Royce nosed around the cluster of spare propellant tanks that had been bolted onto the spine of the
Unsaved Changes,
above its petticoat of radiator vanes.

“Hey, they gave him a buggy,” Michael said.

A skiff twice the size of their own perched on the bottom of the fuselage, anchored by its own magnetic clamps.

“I guess he would need some way of getting around, if there were maintenance issues with the other ships,” Michael said.

“It’s a big job for one guy,” Molly agreed. She put her helmet on.

Colin locked the Rolls Royce onto the fuselage.
Thunk, thunk.
He sealed his own helmet and then grabbed the rucksack that had been strapped into the back seat next to Michael.

It wasn’t actually Colin’s rucksack. It was Kiyoshi’s. He’d left it behind on the Kharbage orbital. Colin had said it would be nice to take it to him.

Michael took a couple of seconds longer to get out of the skiff than the other two, because he was scared.

Colin strode across the fuselage to the crew airlock, opening Kiyoshi’s rucksack as he went.

Michael floundered out of the skiff. His gecko boots sealed to the fuselage.

Molly threw the airlock hatch open.

Colin jumped in, vanishing feet first.

Molly went in headfirst, and Michael dived after her. His helmet bumped into her legs. The airlock chamber was a tight squeeze for three. Air hissed in, white where it came out of the jets, vanishing as the pressure rose. The cycle light turned green. Michael started to take his helmet off, but Molly slapped his gloves away from his seals.

The flanges at the inner end of the chamber started to iris.

Colin crouched behind the flanges, head tucked down. He held something in his right glove. It looked like a ripe red apple.

The gap in the inner seal grew from a point of light to an eight-pointed star. Colin peeked through. Then he forced his right glove through the opening, jerked it back, and curled up in a ball.

Molly pushed Michael against the wall of the chamber. She spreadeagled herself on top of him.

“What’s happening?” Michael screamed, forgetting about radio silence.

“It’s OK,” Molly said breathlessly.

He fought out from under her. The inner seal had now opened fully. He plunged towards it—and stopped dead.

The crew airlock opened directly onto the Steelmule’s mess, which was also the living room, and also the gym, with a treadmill and a weight-lifting machine in one corner.

Now it was an abbatoir.

The first impression Michael got was that the entire room, screens and furniture and exercise machines and all, had been painted bright red.

Then he saw the pieces of people drifting gently towards the floor.

A boot with a foot in it.

An arm with ragged white bones sticking out.

A head, sufficiently intact that Michael recognized one of the men his father used to hire when someone hadn’t paid for their recycling to be taken away.

Colin stepped gingerly through this gruesome litter, using his gecko grips to stick to the floor. He skidded, because the floor was very wet. He had blood on his spacesuit. His faceplate was also splattered with the stuff, smeared where he’d wiped it with his gloves. He said, “I
think
there were twenty of them. Not … quite sure.”

Molly brushed past Michael. “Holy crap, Colin ….” She let out a shaky laugh. “Well, the place needed redecorating, anyway.”

“This year’s hottest shade, blood red,” Colin intoned. “Courtesy of the infamous Kiloeraser.”

Michael heard their voices only as faint noises. He was trying to draw breath. When he finally succeeded in filling his lungs, he started screaming.

Molly floundered to him. “Mikey, go back in the airlock until we clean up.”

“That might take a while,” Colin said.

Michael kept screaming. Distantly, he felt a rumble through the hull. The Steelmule’s main drive had come online.

Kiyoshi appeared in the doorway of the mess. He stopped dead, just as Michael had done. From the shape of his mouth, Michael guessed he was yelling
Holy fuck.
He leaned against the wall.

Colin and Molly took their helmets off. Michael fumbled his off, too, to hear what they were saying. The minute he breathed the air, he smelled it.

He crumpled up and vomited. Thrust gravity tugged him very gently towards the floor. He fell faster than his puke, so it splatted on his face, still warm.

Molly slapped the blobs of vomit away from him with her gloves.

Kiyoshi moved away from the wall. He twisted his head to see the back of his own t-shirt. It wasn’t white anymore.

“You killed them all,” he said.

“Sure did, brother,” Colin said.

“
I
was going to do that.”

“No, you weren’t,” Molly said.

“OK, you’re right. I wasn’t.” Kiyoshi pushed his hair back. Now he had blood on his face, too. They all did.

Michael retched again. His eyes watered.

“I haven’t even asked yet what the hell you’re doing here,” Kiyoshi said. “With
Mikey?”

“Well, brother, you forgot to take that toy you bought from Lewis Tong on Callisto,” Colin said. “So we figured we’d bring it to you. Unfortunately, now we don’t have it anymore.”

“The Kiloeraser,” Kiyoshi snarled.
“How’d you like a room full of flechettes?
he said. Guess he wasn’t exaggerating. You know what? These guys were security contractors working for Kharbage, LLC. They were going to be reporting back all the way. When they don’t check in, Customs and Resources are going to get a little bit suspicious, wouldn’t you say?”

“No they won’t,” Molly said. “Because you’ll find their BCIs. They’re all in here … somewhere. Then you’ll hook them up to a power supply so they can deliver false reports. That’s the beauty of nanny-ware. It’s all automated.”

“Or how about you just get off this ship.”

Kiyoshi was
really
mad. Michael stopped puking. Cold dread replaced the sick feeling in his stomach.