The Callisto Gambit (44 page)

A light wobbled over the wall, turning ice-coated splinters of wood into miniature mountains. “Kiyoshi,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” His collar seal, sodden with tears, chafed his neck as he sat up. Something hard pricked his collarbone. His cross, trapped in the seal.

“I really think you ought to eat and drink.” Michael landed beside him. “You’ve been doing intravenous stim. That means you’re probably dehydrated. You haven’t eaten anything in ages, and I didn’t see you drink anything, either. Have you got any fluids in that suit?”

He checked. “No.”

“Well, there’s water in mine. It’s good to drink. I tasted it. Here, you can take some via the umbilical.”

Michael squatted in front of him, offering his suit’s life-support backpack. The fluid reservoir on his suit was in there. Kiyoshi’s was in front. He hooked up the umbilical supply tube, careful not to take too much of Michael’s water. Shame steadied his thoughts.

Why was he wasting time grieving, when a far more important task lay ahead?

He disconnected the valve. His hydration nipple puffed stale air into his mouth, and then equally stale water.

“I’m going to find the boss-man,” he told Michael.

“Wh-what are you going to do to him?”

“Kill him. I was going to do that anyway. But now I’m going to do it slowly.”

“Can I help?”

“No. This is one thing you can
not
help me with. But listen, Mikey, you can help with something else.”

They flew back out of the hole in the side of the
Monster.

“See all these ships?”

“I can’t see them. It’s dark.”

“Well, I know, but that’s good. Anyway, you’re an expert on ships. So have a look around and find something that flies, or that can be made to fly with a bit of work.”

“Why?”

“Because after this, you’re going to need to get out of here. Start by looking at the big ships. If I know Brian O’Shaughnessy, he’ll get as many of our people out of that prison as there are suits, so you’ll need something that can carry hundreds, maybe thousands.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“… I mean us.
We
will need to get out of here. That’s what I meant,.”

“Oh. All right. I guess.”

Michael sounded terrified. But a cluster of dull red lights on the plain, beyond the dead ships, monopolized Kiyoshi’s attention. That had to be InSec Center.

“See you soon.” He squeezed Michael’s shoulder, and started walking.

Long before Kiyoshi reached InSec Center, a voice demanded his ID. He said that he was in trouble and needed help. The voice grudgingly ordered him to proceed to Personnel Entrance B, as if he should know where that was.

It wasn’t hard to find, as it turned out, because Andrea Miller’s rover stood outside it.

InSec Center was a geodesic dome, probably a kilometer in diameter, like half of a giant golf ball. Heat rejection plates jutted up from the vertices of its reflective panels. Red status lights lit them up like clusters of geometric petals. Andrea Miller’s rover stood plugged into a charging station outside a hooded airlock.

“Knock, knock,” Kiyoshi said.

“It’s not frigging locked.”

Shrugging, he tossed a pebble against the action plate. The airlock valved. He walked into the chamber.

Andrea Miller was already in there, sitting with her back against one curved wall. “They saw me deviating from my course,” she said bitterly.

Apparently, they’d been waiting for him to get here. The chamber filled with air. The pressurization light turned green. But the valve at the other end of the chamber didn’t open.

“Suits off,” said the voice.

Kiyoshi stripped to his jeans and t-shirt. Standing on one foot to put his gecko boots back on, he stepped on something that wasn’t there. He glanced at Andrea. She averted her gaze, although that might have been plain old embarrassment. A high-tech spacesuit liner was not the most modest of garments.

“Security scan in progress,” the voice said—now speaking normally, rather than over the radio. Its owner stepped out of a hidden compartment in the wall. It resembled a metal flamingo with its neck growing out of its chest, and a camera for a head. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

It flicked out a metal tongue and nipped Kiyoshi’s arm, like a mosquito bite. Andrea rolled her spacesuit liner down from one shoulder to give it access to her skin.

“Place all weapons in the drawer,” the metal flamingo said. A drawer slid out from the wall of the chamber. “That includes your service weapon,” it said to Andrea, “and the knife you’ve attempted to hide under your spacesuit,” it added to Kiyoshi. “It was really very helpful of you to turn yourself in. Don’t go and spoil it now, will you?”

★

In his fifth-storey office, the man now known as Oliver Legacy sipped a cappuccino and admired the view from the floor-to-ceiling window behind his desk.

InSec Center was hollow. The central cavity had been landscaped into a park. Raddled story sculptors and fashion-victim data artists chatted on wrought iron benches beneath a really good fake sky. From ground level, you seemed to look up into an empyrean dotted with clouds. From Legacy’s viewpoint, however, the wall on the opposite side of the park offered a trompe l’oeil view of the Paris skyline.

Legacy reflected briefly, as he often did, on the pointlessness of all this fakery, and remembered, as usual, that it had been scientifically proven to improve the mental health of employees. He himself was the exception who proved the rule. He’d rather have looked at an honest wall. But he had never been a perfect fit for the ISA. His fall from grace and exile to Callisto proved it.

Now he was back on the executive treadmill. The capture of Konstantin X had pole-vaulted him out of field office purgatory. He’d been rewarded with this office and the perks and responsibilities that went with it—everything he’d have expected to achieve by the age of 58, if his career hadn’t been bushwhacked by that wretched 4 Vesta business. That was now forgotten. The past was prologue. The future was his to create … in every sense.

So why did it all feel so hollow?

He reminded himself that he was one of the most powerful people in the entire ISA. The decisions he took here in this office shaped the information environment of billions.

But lately it felt like pushing on a string. Narratives resisted the touch of the ISA’s story sculptors. The internet refused to sit up and beg. Search trends emerged, not from the ISA’s network of tame feed curators, but from nowhere. To many in the ISA, that was terrifying.

Not to Oliver Legacy. Things fluctuated, and pretty soon, he figured, they’d fluctuate back to nomal.

He set down his cappuccino and returned his attention to the problem he was meant to be considering at this particular moment.

Kiyoshi Yonezawa.

A DNA scrape had confirmed Yonezawa’s identity when he was arrested on board the
Unsaved Changes.
Another DNA scrape, administered four minutes ago in Personnel Airlock B, had confirmed it again.

0089327 Miller, one of the wardens of the Worldhouse Project, claimed to have caught Yonezawa trying to escape. If so, it was interesting that she had not bothered to restrain him. Interesting, but not a complete surprise. Miller’s family connections had dragged her loyalty rating—one of the ISA’s most important employee evaluation metrics—into negative territory as much as a year ago.

Legacy weighed the potential value of any information that could be obtained from Yonezawa and Miller against the security risk of admitting them to InSec Center. He knew that Miller, whatever her motivation, would have engineered the situation to produce the maximum Inf-P—information potential. That usually
was
a good way of gaming the system.

But today, in these ticklish circumstances—no. It didn’t outweigh the tiny, but non-zero, risk of allowing Kiyoshi Yonezawa to go on living.

He tapped the fingerprint reader that enabled his secure comms channel. “Space them.”

“Sir? Both of them?” said the human security guard controlling the the airlock.

“Affirmative,” Legacy said. He leaned back with a sigh. His gaze returned to the view. “Have you ever been to Paris?” he asked the thing in the sandpit.

★

The metal flamingo scooped up their spacesuits. The old one Kiyoshi had been wearing was so bulky that the bot now looked like a walking laundry basket. “I’ll just look after these for you,” it said, muffled.

Kiyoshi stooped and grabbed his dagger, which had fallen to the floor when the bot picked up his spacesuit.

The airlock opened.

At the wrong end.

Explosively, the atmosphere rushed out.

The metal flamingo tumbled out into the night with a forlorn squawk, taking their spacesuits with it.

Kiyoshi lost his footing. Hurled head over heels by the sheer force of the decompression blast, he drove his dagger into the floor. The Japanese steel sheared through the insulation tiles and scraped on regocrete, slowing him down.

He thrust out his left hand and seized Andrea Miller’s leg as she hurtled past him.

Shoulders screaming in pain, he hung on, sliding little by little towards the exit.

Abruptly, the gale stopped battering them. There hadn’t been very much air in the chamber in the first place, after all.

And now there was none.

When the vacuum enfolded you, it felt like nothing. Vacuum was a good insulator. You didn’t even feel cold. At first.

Spaceborn reflexes drove the air out of Kiyoshi’s lungs in a controlled exhalation. He pried at the flanges of the chamber’s inner valve with his dagger. He knew that he had about thirty seconds before he blacked out from lack of oxygen. Twice that long before he incurred fatal brain damage.

Andrea’s breath clouded out, proving that she was well-trained. She hammered on the valve with her bare fists.

As abruptly as it had opened—but soundlessly, now that there was no air to carry sound—the outer end of the airlock slammed shut.

Life-giving air jetted from the nozzles overhead.

The chamber hadn’t taken long to empty. Fortunately for them, it didn’t take much longer than that to restore a survivable atmosphere.

Kiyoshi gulped a huge breath. The smell of the vacuum lingered in his nostroils. It was an utterly unique scent, like welding fumes, but meatier.

“What the hell … was that?”

He spoke the last words into the face of a young man in a purple uniform, revealed by the parting of the inner flanges.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” the security guard stuttered, astonishment giving way to terror.

“Yeah, I got that part.”

Kiyoshi reversed his grip and drove the hilt of his dagger into the security guard’s nose. The man fell backwards, blood spraying from his face.

“Here!” Andrea Miller said. “Yonezawa! Take this!”

Kiyoshi somersaulted through the valve, into a corridor now spattered with the security guard’s blood.

Andrea hopped after him. “Take it!”

Her arm appeared to end at the elbow. He grabbed the invisible coverall she was holding out. It felt like a stretchy terrycloth towel.

“How do you put on something that’s freaking invisible?”

“Practice.”

By the time he’d struggled into the coverall, Andrea had already vanished. He located her by the behavior of the security guard. The man rolled across the corridor, crying, exactly as if someone were kicking him in the ribs.

No klaxon sounded. No super-advanced security tech materialized. Maybe it was malfunctioning. And maybe the airlock had malfunctioned, too.

“Miller?”

“What?” she gasped.

“Don’t waste your time on this clown.”

“You’re right.”

A bow materialized in a blur of air. An arrow fletched with silver foil sprouted from the security guard’s chest. Kiyoshi had seen Andea surrender her bow. She must’ve had a collapsible one hidden up her sleeve.

“Go away,” she said. “We don’t have network connections. You have no way of telling where I am, or if you’re in my shot. It’s dangerous for you to be near me.”

She was talking to an empty corridor.

★

Three minutes after he’d given the order to space Yonezawa and Miller, Oliver Legacy saved his work and clicked over to a schematic security view of Sector B. Three minutes was more than long enough for people to die of vacuum exposure. He’d make sure they were dead, then dispatch a recycling bot to pick up their remains.

Personnel Airlock B was closed.

Closed?!

On the exterior surveillance feed, a servitor bot was feebly trying to reach the action plate. Infrared confirmed that there were no corpses lying on the ground.

There was, however, one corpse lying
inside
the dome, just this side of the Sector B airlock.

It belonged to an InSec Center security guard.

Legacy stabbed his comms. “Code White,” he said, meaning
Perimeter breach.
Code White had not been used once in InSec Center’s sixty years of existence. “Check the Sector B feed. I recommend activating Butterfly Net.”

Within two seconds, a plurality of the seventeen people who shared Legacy’s security clearance level—the highest at InSec Center—confirmed his recommendation.

Pulse racing, Legacy waited for drones to buzz from their hidden ports in each and every room and corridor. They would home in on anything that profiled as human, and envelope it in a quick-hardening net of plastic string. The twenty-odd employees presently at work within Sector B would have to be netted, too. Alerted by text messages, they sat motionless at their desks. They had all endured Butterfly Net in training.

After a minute or so, some of them began to glance quizzically at the ceiling.

Legacy brought his fist down on his screen, bruising the schematic view of Sector B. “It’s the gremlins again.”

“Activate Militia,” quacked someone else in the executive-level network.

Consensus only took 1.3 seconds this time.

★