The Callisto Gambit (5 page)

“Your ship?” Yonezawa said. “It belongs to your father. Oh yeah, I did a search on your name. You’re missing, presumed dead. I bet Adnan Kharbage would pay well to find out where you are.”

“No!” Michael screamed. “I’m not going back! No no no no!”

The boss laid a calming hand on Michael’s arm. The hand was so large it swallowed Michael’s forearm. It exerted gentle pressure. Normally, Michael hated to be touched, but it was different when he was having a meltdown, or was at risk of one. At these times, touch helped. It seemed as if the boss knew that. “Don’t worry.” The boss spoke for them all to hear. “Yonezawa won’t go anywhere near Ceres. He’s a known smuggler; his name’s on corporate watchlists from here to Luna. He won’t risk getting in touch with the authorities,
or
Adnan Kharbage, who I have heard of. Not the forgive-and-forget type, is he?”

“Still keeping the ship,” Yonezawa said.

Brian cleared his throat. His men pulsed their personal mobility thrusters, spreading out into a semicircle. Their flechette cannons pointed inwards at Yonezawa’s group.

Part of Michael wanted to see these pirates mown down. At the same time, he was terrified. He sensed something in Yonezawa, something dark and unpredictable, that seemed to promise ten-fold retribution if you screwed with him. He might have a dead-man’s trigger set to blow the
Kharbage Collector
’
s
reactor!

Perhaps the same thing occurred to the boss. His hand tightened on Michael’s arm. In a too-calm voice, he said to his followers, “They’re all going to die in there. We’ll take the ship back when they’re bones.”

With a jerk of his chin, he summoned them to the Dumptruck. The men got in backwards, keeping their flechette cannons trained on Yonezawa. Brian cast off the clamps and retracted the grapples. Michael looked back at the small group of Japanese floating outside the quarterdeck, watching them go.

He was shaking from head to foot.

All the way back to the
Salvation,
the boss cursed Kiyoshi Yonezawa out, calling him every filthy name Michael had ever heard, and more besides. He definitely was not a devout Muslim. They didn’t call people cocksuckers.

“He’s crazy, boss,” Brian said. “Crazy as a shipboard rat. I’m sorry for the rest of them.”

“I’m not giving up hope,” the boss said, calming down. “They’ll change their minds when they begin to starve. They’ll come to me, begging for refuge, and I’ll welcome them with open arms.”

They landed on the docking pad. This time Michael noticed how the docking pad rotated in the opposite direction from the torus, providing a static landing surface. After the Dumptruck touched down, the docking pad slowed to a stop. This ship did have some nice touches, regardless of Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s criticisms.

The Haddocks were waiting for them on the landing pad. Kelp’s faceplate turned to Michael and his hands moved questioningly. Michael shook his head:
no. No ship.

“I’ll show you the construction zone,” the boss said to the Haddocks, his rage of a few moments ago sloughed off, or stored deep inside. He touched Michael on the shoulder. “You too, Mikey.”

They climbed into a hatch in the side of the dorsal column. Now that Michael knew the
Salvation
was built on the hulk of an old ITN hauler, he understood that the dorsal column was the hauler’s keel. It stuck out from the end of the hauler’s fuselage, which had originally been longer. It was not solid, but hollow—a mighty steel tube.

They sailed ‘down’ a sheer drop of half a kilometer, kicking off from grab handles.

Lightening holes cut into the sides of the keel tube showed glimpses of a busy manufacturing area. About 400 meters down from where they’d entered the fuselage, the boss led them out of one of these holes. They floated into a 360° panorama of machinery—all operating in the silence of the vacuum, in the dazzle of UV floodlights affixed to the keel tube.

The fab equipment bolted to the inside of the old hauler’s fuselage would not have looked out of place in a factory on Ceres. Hundreds of people in mismatched EVA suits tended the machines.

“This is where we fab components and standardized parts for the hab modules,” the boss said. “We can build pretty much anything here! We’ve even got a cleanroom where we grow memory crystals for the hub’s supercomputer.”

The boss pointed further ‘down’ the fuselage.

“Down there, see those Bigelows? That’s where the construction crew live.”

He hailed a factory worker, who kicked off and flew proficiently towards them.

“This is Arsalan. He’ll find you space in a Bigelow, and show you the showers, the kitchens, and so forth. Arsalan, this is Captain Haddock, his son Kelp, and the rest of his family.”

“Who?” said Arsalan, whose faceplate was mostly filled with the gray curls of his beard.

“Space construction experts, and my personal guests. I guess they’re also our first Koreans.”

“We’re not pureblooded Koreans,” Captain Haddock said. He didn’t sound entirely happy with the way things were shaking out, and no wonder. As far as Michael knew, Captain Haddock had originally intended to sell the
Kharbage Collector’s
recycling equipment to the boss-man, and then move on. Instead, he and his family were stuck working construction again.
Serve them right,
Michael thought.

He followed the boss back to the keel tube, hoping against hope that something better was in store for him.

“I want to show you the drive,” the boss said. “That sleb Yonezawa was running his mouth about our thrust capacity and wet mass ratio. But he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. So I want to show you just how much power we’re packing under the hood.”

“Is it true you’ve got a Bussard ramjet?”

“We sure have,” the boss said as they flew on down the keel tube. “Do you know what a Bussard ramjet is?”

“Of course.” Michael seized the chance to show off. He knew this was one of the things that most people found annoying about him. But he had a feeling the boss was different. “It’s a ship that harvests hydrogen out of the interstellar medium, using a magnetic scoop. There’ve been prototypes tested. I recognized your field support structure as
something
, even though it didn’t click immediately. It’s a really exciting concept … but there are a bunch of problems. You need to get out to the heliopause before it’ll even work. And where do you get the power to generate a magnetic field 6,000 kilometers across? The prototypes, as far as I remember, diverted reactor power to their scoops and ionizing lasers. But they were all engine. They had to be, to get up to the threshold velocity for the ramjet to start working. I think it’s seventy million kilometers per hour. It took them years, and they didn’t have, um,
towns
attached. So what Yonezawa was saying about your wet mass ratio kind of made sense to me.”

The boss glanced over his shoulder at Michael. He chuckled. “That prebirth procedure you had? Obviously worked.
What’s
your IQ?”

“178, last time I was tested.”

“Holy cow. I wonder if it’s illegal to hire a ten-year-old as a propulsion technician?”

Michael wanted that more than he had ever wanted anything. But he was terrified of being lied to. He said, “If you’re being nice to me because my dad is Adnan Kharbage, stop it. Please. Don’t. Everybody does it, until they can’t cope with me anymore, and then it’s ‘Bye-bye.’”

The boss grabbed a handle to break his descent. He waited until Michael came level with him and then snagged him with an arm around his shoulders. He knew just the right moment to do that. It was comforting. “Kid, I don’t know how to say this nicely, so I’ll just say it: Your dad is the biggest asshole in the asteroid belt. Be nice to you on
his
account? I’d be more inclined to space you on his account.”

Michael gulped. “That’s what Petruzzelli used to say.”

“Who’s Petruzzelli?”

“Alicia Petruzzelli. She used to work for my dad. She was the captain of the
Kharbage Collector.
I was her second-in-command.”

“Sounds like quite a lady.”

“Maybe. But when the war started, she quit to join Star Force … I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don’t know where she went. I … thought maybe she came here.” Ashamed, he confessed the original motivation for his journey.

“Did she know about the
Salvation?”
the boss asked, a sharp note in his voice. His alarm was understandable. No one knew about 99984 Ravilious. Michael wouldn’t have known about it had he not met Captain Haddock and company. And not even they had known, before they got here, that 99984 Ravilious had been smashed up to build a Bussard ramjet.

Michael shook his head. “She knew Scuzzy the Smuggler. Uh, I mean—”

“Kiyoshi goddamn Yonezawa!” The boss laughed out loud. “Did you know it was me that gave him that nickname? Because he is scuzzy as hell. I used to love the guy. It’s a damn shame.” He was silent for a moment. “Well, there’s no one by the name of Petruzzelli here. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care,” Michael said. “She probably did join Star Force. She might be dead by now. I don’t care! If she was stupid enough to sign up for Star
Farce,
she deserves it.”

“It’s hard to accept that this war is unwinnable.”

Michael shrugged. “If you live on Ceres, like I did, you’re already halfway to accepting it. We’re used to living on the edge. So what you said to Yonezawa makes complete sense to me.” A thrill of sadness and excitement ran through him. “We’re monkeys in space. We can’t beat an artificial super-intelligence. It’s not logically possible. So … yeah.”

The boss gave his shoulders a squeeze and released him. “You keep on proving you’re the kind of person I need, I may have to put you on my personal team.”

Michael said earnestly, “Oh no, I’d rather have the propulsion job. I mean, please.”

“Ha! Sure, sure. But don’t you want to see the drive before you make up your mind?”

A little further down the keel, the tube ended in a blast door of rust-flecked steel, with an electronic security lock. The boss entered a code and enunciated: “Qusantin Hasselblatter.” So that was his name. It didn’t ring any bells. “I’ll set up access for you later, Mikey, if you’re a good match for the job.”

They floated into a slice of the hull walled off from the manufacturing zone by one of the hauler’s original partitions. Michael stared at the unfamiliar equipment. A skinny torus ran around the perimeter of the 130-meter-diameter deck. Large assemblies intersected it at intervals, each tended by technicians so intent on their work, they hadn’t even looked up to see who’d come in. Stacks of metal plates were anchored beside them. Zero-gee lab tables—clear boxes whose contents you could manipulate with robotic instruments—stood around, filled with bits and pieces. Michael saw a couple of fancy printers, and an Upcycler. He also saw his mecha. The boss must have had it brought down here for him. That was reassuring.

But there was something missing. Something big.

If this was the engineering and maintenance deck, he would have expected to see a fusion reactor.

The tokamak—the giant donut where the plasma was confined in magnetic fields, prior to propellant injection—would be located outside the hull. But the centerpiece of the engineering deck should have been the reactor where helium-3 and deuterium, or some dirtier combination of elements, were fused into plasma hotter than the sun. Without a reactor, the
Salvation
wasn’t going anywhere.

“Where’s your drive?”

The boss had taken his helmet off. The engineering deck was pressurized. Michael followed suit. He smelled dust, machine oil, and the familiar tang of hot metal.

“Come see.” The boss goosed his suit’s mobility thrusters and flew ‘down’ to the hull. They landed near the skinny ring.

Michael stared at the nearest of the assemblies on the ring. “That’s a laser.”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of laser?” He moved closer to it. This was a test. He had to pass it to get the job—which he now wanted more than he’d ever wanted anything. He squatted down and fingered the stack of metal plates beside the assembly. A technician frowned at him. “Boss, this isn’t a daycare center.” Michael paid no attention. He watched the technician—wearing black goggles—float up to the top of the assembly and insert the plate into a robotic handler tray. He touched the plates again.

“These are gold.”

“Yeah,” the boss said. Then, a clue: “We’re going through about thirty troy ounces a day right now.”

That was a
lot
of gold. Sure, gold was one of the cheaper precious metals, thanks to its abundance on M-type asteroids, but industry devoured as much as the Belt could supply—and since the beginning of the war, the price had shot up. You needed gold to make ICs, other computer parts, thin films for insulation and lubrication—and …

“Don’t tell me, don’t tell me!”

Michael rocketed to his feet. His gecko grips moored him to the deck.

“Antimatter! You’re making antimatter!”

The boss nodded, obviously pleased that he’d guessed right.

“Anti-protons? No, it’s got to be positrons. Shine a powerful laser on the gold plates and they pour out. Wow.” He glanced around the deck and counted sixteen identical laser assemblies.
Antimatter generators.
All pumping positrons into the storage ring. “Storing them is really difficult. You need lab-quality electromagnets in industrial quantities. And perfect calibration. But if you’ve got a stable source of positrons, you could inject them into the magnetic nozzle you’ve already got, mix them with matter, and boom!
Huge
specific impulse. You could use the existing propellant injection system … ”

The technicians gawped at Michael. “Boss,” one of them said, “where did you find him?”

The boss smiled. “That doesn’t matter.”

Michael hesitated. “Antimatter propulsion gives you orders of magnitude more thrust than fusion, for much less mass. But antimatter generation and storage is insanely freaking expensive. Well, of course, the price of He3 has shot up since the war started. So the differential’s not as huge as it used to be. But still …”

Sixteen
antimatter generators, and the biggest positron storage ring in the solar system … not to mention all that gold …