The Callisto Gambit (7 page)

Jun steepled his hands under his chin. His eyes danced with elation. “It was so
easy,
Kiyoshi! Of course, winning the trust of the CTDF was the tricky part. But once I got them on board, the rest was a spacewalk.”

“Yeah, the CTDF,” Kiyoshi muttered. Tiangong Erhao, of course, had a guard of Chinese Territorial Defense Force ships. He wondered how, exactly, Jun had talked them into cooperating—and how hijacking a mammoth space station could be described as
easy.

“I appealed to their honor,” Jun said. “They’re as keen to attack the PLAN as we are; very frustrated with their government’s official wait-and-see stance. With their help, I infiltrated Tiangong Erhao’s hub and captured its AI. Credit where it’s due: the current resident, Prince Jian-Er, gave me his passwords for the command-and-control interface.”

Kiyoshi laughed out loud. “That’s awesome! Lemme guess. You sedated the dork and lifted his passwords out of his BCI.
Sweet.
And of course, Chinese ships are programmed to obey anyone with an Imperial Family ID.”

Although Jun wouldn’t hear this for another 19 minutes, he nodded on the screen. “Now I’m effectively the captain of Tiangong Erhao. We’re gonna enter stealth mode as soon as possible. Mendoza’s over there now, installing my Ghosts in Tiangong Erhao’s distributed processing centers. Um, yeah, I made some more Ghosts. Gave some to the CTDF ships, too.” A chunk of black hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it back with a work-toughened hand, and looked straight at the camera. “Once we enter Ghost mode, I’ll be able to receive your signals, but I won’t be able to respond. So if there’s anything we need to discuss, we should do it now.”

Kiyoshi sucked on his cigarette. He was torn. He felt proud of Jun’s exploits, and didn’t want to sour Jun’s moment of triumph. He also knew that the situation had to be a lot more precarious than Jun was describing. Owning a Chinese AI was a freaking
huge
computing challenge … second only to the challenge of owning the PLAN. This had been a practice run for the big fight. Jun now had to devote every erg of power to maintaining his mastery of Tiangong Erhao, and preparing for the battle to come. Worrying about the folks at home would only distract him. ASI or not, Jun was very human in that way.

Through a cloud of nicotine-laced vapor, Kiyoshi glanced at the exterior optical feed. A gaggle of children in spacesuits were towing hydrogen fuel cells down to Engineering & Maintenance. That was their hack for the metal halide lamps. Run them on rechargeable fuel cells. But they didn’t have enough fuel cells. They didn’t have enough
anything.
Meanwhile, a near-infinite supply of stuff resided over there, on the other side of the rubble cloud …

Kiyoshi spoke. “Jun, I need money. Can you deposit some into my account? A hundred thousand spiders would do. The more the better, obviously.”

The boss-man wouldn’t
give
him fuel cells, but he’d
sell
them to him, Kiyoshi was sure. Water, too. Pig feed. The boss might harp on about the death of fiat currency, but if he was offered it, he’d take it. The problem was Kiyoshi’s capital was all tied up in illiquid assets.

This time he had to wait the full 38 minutes for a response. He spent the time tinkering with his home distillery. The Galapajin considered liquor a life-support essential. Their Catholic faith did not prevent them from appreciating the finer things in life. Homebrewed potato liquor was not what Kiyoshi considered a fine drink, but he’d never been big on alcohol, anyway. He was trying to get this working for the others. Morale.

Jun came back on the screen. “I’m glad to hear everything’s going well. But in that case, what do you need money for? Anyway, I haven’t got any. What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is yours … and it’s all tied up in Canadian farmland and Jupiter trojan asteroids. You could sell some of those.”

Kiyoshi groaned, “I can’t sell now! There’s plenty of upside left in real estate and TEOTWAWKI assets.” His belief that the war panic had a long way left to run meshed with his belief that Jun was going to bring the war to an end singlehandedly in a couple of weeks. It was the ultimate insider trading opportunity. He’d plowed all his capital into real estate and space tourism stocks, which had already tripled in value. “C’mon, Jun … what do you mean you haven’t got any money? You stole a Chinese prince’s passwords. Can’t you steal a few thousand out of his bank account? I’m not asking for a couple of million, though it would be nice.”

Another 38 minutes. He fixed the leaky seal in the reflux condenser. The pig woke up. He fed her a bowlful of kibble. Still hungry, she rooted in the rubbish around the captain’s workstation.

“Dame
[That’s wrong],” Jun said, the single Japanese word conveying the depth of his disapproval. “I’m not stealing anything, Kiyoshi. We’re in this to save humanity … not to turn a profit.”

“You’re stealing a fifty-kilometer, multi-mega-billion SPACE STATION!” Kiyoshi howled.

He got so fed up with Jun’s strict morality sometimes. In a rage, he dug into the surveillance camera logs. Unlike the Startractor’s previous owners, Kiyoshi didn’t care to keep tabs on everyone around the clock, but the cameras were automated. He clicked and pasted stills. The hydroponic farm. Yellow, spindly seedlings. The rat’s nest of power lines around the reactor. The dead pigs. A recent Mass, held in the crew mess. You could see how skinny everyone had gotten. Zoom in on Father Tanabe’s hands, elevating the Host. A moon of see-through-thin wheaten wafer, which would be portioned into nano-sized crumbs.

This is why we need money … this … and THIS.

On the verge of hitting send, he growled, “Goddammit.”

Jun was trying to save the human race. But Kiyoshi knew he would have much preferred to stay here, gardening, praying, and teaching kindergarten. It had been an agonizing decision for him to leave them all behind. What if Kiyoshi’s complaints pushed him to drop the whole scheme and come home? And what if, as a result, humanity lost the war?

It would be on me,
Kiyoshi thought, and he erased the pictures.

“OK,” he said. “You’re right. Of course you’re right. Stealing is wrong.”
We’ll get by somehow.
“I was just throwing the idea out there. Heh. You know me.”

As he spoke, he idly flicked through the surveillance logs on an adjacent screen, going further and further back. Suddenly, a new figure caught his eye. A lean Earthborn woman with a sunburst of yellow and orange hair. She was doing yoga on the bridge, in the very place where Kiyoshi now sat. He leaned closer to the screen. Watched her flow through her poses. “Still plenty flexible, aren’t you, Alicia?” he murmured wistfully.

Alicia Petruzzelli had been the last official captain of this ship, before it embarked on its illegal journey to 99984 Ravilious. Kiyoshi checked the timestamp of the surveillance vid—six months ago—and bookmarked it, planning to have another trawl through the logs later. Hopefully, she had also let the cameras catch her changing
out
of that very fetching yoga outfit.

Sighing, he turned back to the comms screen. “I found some old vids of Alicia Petruzzelli,” he told Jun. “You know, I never have gotten her out of my mind.” They’d met briefly, years back, before the war. “I didn’t know her that well, of course.” They’d spent most of their time together in bed. “But there was something about her … I dunno, something kind of fragile … as well as, y’know, the fact that she was
hot.
It feels almost necrophiliac to look at these vids now. Because she’s probably dead. She quit Kharbage, LLC to join Star Force. And they’re chewing through pilots like my pig here chews through kibble. It’s fucking criminal, and if I think about it too much, I’ll probably break down and cry. So, Jun? Get this right.
SLAG
that goddamn AI. Do it for Alicia Petruzzelli. Do it for me. Do it for all of us.” He gave a crisp nod. “Yonezawa out.”

That over with, he laid his head down on his folded arms. Sucked on his cigarette.

They had to make it.

Another three weeks until Jun reached Mars. Assuming all went well, it would be another month after that until he could get home.

So they just had to hold out for another two months. It wasn’t forever.

But Kiyoshi had a dreadful decision to make, and he had to make it now.

Should they stay at 99984 Ravilious? Or run to 39 Laetitia?

If they didn’t leave
now,
life-support requirements would drain their fuel reserves to the point where they couldn’t
go anywhere.

But which option would offer them a better chance of survival?

And what about those 6,000 souls in the
Salvation?
Was abandoning them really an option? Kiyoshi felt a personal connection only with Father Tom and his motley flock of Catholics. But in a sense, they were all his responsibility, non-believers included, because only he knew the truth about the boss-man’s insane plan for them.

Two sounds interrupted his agonized reverie. A chime from the astrogation workstation, and a ping from Sister Terauchi.

“News from the other side,” the nun said.
Mukou—
over there, the other side; that was how they’d begun referriing to the
Salvation
.

“Lay it on me,” Kiyoshi said. He ambled over to the astrogation workstation. The radar detector was flashing. He requested velocity and position data. While he waited for the stupid, slow hub to compute them, he speculated, “Another delivery of goodies?”

The stream of ships bringing supplies to the
Salvation
had slowed to one or two a week, just when Kiyoshi was getting desperate enough to consider raiding the next one.

“Holy Mother of God!” He stared at the radar plot. It was now clear that the ship his sensors had picked up was moving
away
.

“Yeah,” Sister Terauchi said. “They’re leaving.”

He heard her saying the same thing in real life, from inside the elevator. And then a thump.

“This stupid elevator is stuck.”

Kiyoshi unlocked the elevator. Sister Terauchi sailed onto the bridge, the split skirt of her habit flapping. A dozen other people followed her. Nothing ever happened on the Startractor but a crowd turned up to gawp and make ‘helpful’ remarks.

“The
Salvation’s
leaving,” Sister Terauchi repeated.

“Did they warn you?” Kiyoshi said. “They didn’t warn me.” He kept glancing back at the radar plot, as if his eyes might be lying to him. The fact that the
Salvation
was moving at all meant the boss’s antimatter drive worked. Kiyoshi hadn’t expected that. Nor had Jun. The boss-man didn’t have anyone smart enough to DIY an antimatter drive, and have it freaking
work.
Except, he apparently did.

“No,” Sister Terauchi said. “No one was warned. Father Tom texted me a minute ago. An announcement was made to everyone on board. But no one was given a chance to get off.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Kiyoshi muttered under his breath, too quietly for the nun to hear his foul language. He sucked on his cigarette, wishing it contained something stronger than nicotine. Then a thought came to him. “This wasn’t scheduled. The boss must have received new information that convinced him to clear out immediately. Maybe the ISA’s coming. About time—all those deliveries to the middle of nowhere …”

Sister Terauchi swatted him on the head with an open hand. He flinched. She said, “If the ISA comes here, and finds only us, do you think that’ll go well for our people? We’d be dragged away for resettlement. Our faith would be suppressed, our identity destroyed! We
must
follow the
Salvation.
It’s our only chance.”

Kiyoshi refused to be rushed into a decision. He moved to the captain’s workstation in the center of the bridge. The Startractor had one cutesy piece of kit: a holographic starmap. He switched it on. A beachball of starry darkness materialized overhead like a black moon. He cued it to display 99984 Ravilious and the
Salvation—
a moving spark. Not moving very
fast,
yet. Radar returns put the ship’s velocity at 50 meters per second, acceleration at 0.09 gees. Antimatter drive or no antimatter drive, they’d have to take their time geeing up that monstrosity, lest it pull itself apart.

“SHIP COMMAND: Extrapolate possible trajectories.”

Everyone stared at the starmap.

“We have to follow them,” someone muttered.

“Father Tom’s on board!”

“All our friends …”

“You have friends on the
Salvation?”
Kiyoshi asked the woman who’d spoken.

She flinched, but responded, “Sure. We all do.”

“What are we going to
do?”
cried a little girl, her voice a needle of fear.

“Yousu miru
[We’ll see how things develop],” Kiyoshi said evenly. There was no language like Japanese for deferring decisions. “Get out of here, honey. You’re upsetting the pig.”

Though he spoke to the child, the dismissal was meant for all of them.

“Get back to work,” growled an older man, backing Kiyoshi up—for which Kiyoshi was extremely grateful.

In a few moments, only Kiyoshi, Sister Terauchi, and old Isobe-san were left on the bridge. They stared at the starmap.

“Well,
we’ve got the place to ourselves at last,” Kiyoshi said.

Sister Terauchi shook her head. “Until the ISA arrives.”

“That’s just your guess. Long-range scans haven’t picked anything up.”

“If the ISA
isn’t
coming, our outlook is even worse. Yonezawa-
sencho,”
she pointedly addressed him as captain. “There are five hundred and sixty-eight of us. Packed into one small ship. Without properly working growlights. With one printer, and a water reclamation rate of seventy-two percent. We have to follow the
Salvation …
or die.”

There was no question but that she believed it. “How long do we have, Sister? I want your best estimate.”

“Forty days, assuming no new failures in the hydroponic systems.”

He’d been guessing thirty. “Jun’ll be back by then.”

“But what if he’s not?”

“I just talked to him a few minutes ago,” Kiyoshi said. But he knew Sister Terauchi’s fears were not irrational. For whatever reason, Jun might not come back. There was no telling what might happen when the
Monster
reached Mars. No telling what was happening in the inner system. The news feeds were lies, wall to wall …