Michael stared, open-mouthed. After a second he hazarded a guess. “Barnard’s Star?”
The boss laughed. “Nope. The Chinese are already planning a mission there. Too far, anyway.”
“Pluto. Eris. Somewhere in the Kuiper Belt.”
The boss floated over to an ancient orrery—a clockwork representation of the solar system. “I know my people very well. I trust them all. But look at Yonezawa. I trusted him, too.”
“I’m totally trustworthy,” Michael said. He scrambled out of his mecha, as if to prove it. He floated over to the orrery, leaving his mecha sagging, marooned in the middle of the art gallery.
The boss flicked the outermost sphere of the orrery—Neptune. It sailed, ringing, around its track. “When this was made, they thought the solar system only had eight planets. It had just been decided by bureaucratic fiat that Pluto wasn’t one.”
Michael gasped. The speculation that popped into his mind seemed too audacious. He said it anyway. “Planet X?”
A grin pulled at the boss’s lips, betraying boyish enthusiasm. “You got it.”
Planet X had been discovered in 2042. It was a watery gas giant orbiting 17,000 AUs from the sun. It had two icy moons, visited several times by unmanned probes, but human beings had never set foot on it. Correction: they hadn’t … yet.
“This isn’t a spaceship. It’s an arkship!”
“Yeah.” The boss swiped the orrery with the side of his hand, sending all the planets spinning wildly. “When humanity falls, at least one remnant will survive. The Salvation.” He glared at Michael. “This is not a leisure cruise.”
But the boss was obviously struggling to keep a stern face. When Michael laughed out loud, the boss laughed with him. “Oh, damn you. Yes, I love space, I love ships, and I’m stoked about going where no one has ever gone before. And I hope you’ll come, too.”
“Count me in!” Michael cried, in an ecstasy of excitement. He pointed at his mecha. “I don’t need that anymore. You can have it for your collection.”
“That’s very kind of you,” the boss said solemnly. “C’mon, let’s go eat.”
iii.
In their first couple of weeks aboard the Startractor, the Galapajin turned the passenger module and half of the command module into a hydroponic farm, replicating and expanding the food production set-up they’d had on the Monster, minus the soil.
Kiyoshi had never taken much interest in gardening. That was Jun’s thing. Now he suffered endless lectures from his people on just how much care—and chemistry—went into the successful cultivation of crops in space.
And how easily it could all go wrong.
By week four, it was going wrong. Even the experts couldn’t pretend otherwise.
It wasn’t that they were slacking off. They were Japanese. They thinned soy, barley, and squash seedlings by hand, with tweezers. They split-tested nutrient solutions with a few parts per million more or less of dissolved oxygen, one or two percent more salinity. They built, by hand, spiral towers of hydroponic buckets that shared a single air pump, so each assembly could be powered by one person riding a stationary bicycle—look, Ma, no batteries! Shades of 11073 Galapagos.
But it remained the case that the LED lights in the passenger module didn’t have the right spectral distribution for plants, and the metal halide lamps Jun had left them could not be used without shorting out the wiring in the passenger module, and rewiring the whole module would require more cable than they had, unless they ripped it out of some other part of the ship. One problem led to another, like a string of dominoes.
To top it all, the dwarf pigs were dying.
Kiyoshi couldn’t understand it. He’d started out with eight of the potbellied porkers. Now he only had four. They’d thriven in the Monster’s garden, rooting happily in their runs. On board the Startractor, they’d grown listless and thin. One had gone lame from walking on the hard decks, and had to be put down. The other three fatalities had all been sudden, inexplicable. The Galapagjin had done post-mortems on the animals before eating them. Their internal organs looked healthy. “Twisted gut,” said the pig experts. “Maybe?”
“Stress,” said Sister Terauchi, the capable young nun who’d taken on a leadership role since their move.
One of the surviving pigs was pregnant. Kiyoshi took to keeping her on the bridge with him. He sat on the floor with her warm bulk across his legs, scratching behind her ears, in the hope that this would make her feel less stressed. She weighed about as much as a human baby, even though her actual mass was close to 70 kilograms.
He’d re-initialized the Startractor’s spin gravity, reluctantly, after the hydroponics experts said a few tenths of a gee would help the plants. Anything to support food production. But it was using reactor power he really couldn’t spare. The ship’s dwindling fuel reserves haunted him. Jun had given them all the He3 pellets he could spare before leaving. Even so, life support power requirements were drawing down the ship’s reserves faster than Kiyoshi would’ve thought possible. 568 people breathed a lot of air, drank a lot of water, and generated a lot of heat that needed dumping. The reactor itself generated heat that also needed dumping, and this crappy truck didn’t have a Ghost to help with that.
He ran some delta-V calculations.
Propellant / fuel reserves, as a percentage of requirements to reach:
Ceres: 67%
Jupiter: 108%
The slow orbit of 99984 Ravilious, relative to the planets, had brought it closer to Jupiter than it had been for decades. Kiyoshi had been to Ganymede a couple of times, picking up tech for the boss-man (such as antimatter generators). Never visited the other Jovian moons. Didn’t want to. He’d been born inside the orbit of Venus, where the sun loomed big in the sky, showering you with free energy. Out here it was too cold and dark.
6 Hebe: 139%
The stupid hub of the Startractor couldn’t grasp that 6 Hebe had been destroyed by the PLAN. The entrepot asteroid was now dust, but it kept popping up in Kiyoshi’s calculations, like the ghost of the carefree life he used to live, when his biggest worry was where to score drugs, rather than keeping 568 people alive.
39 Laetitia: 151%
That was a possibility. 39 Laetitia was a mining industry hub. Big precious metals market. Good Chinese restaurants. But Kiyoshi had been hearing a lot of radio chatter about how refugees from smaller rocks were flooding in, scared of PLAN strikes, eager to shelter behind 39 Laetitia’s Star Force garrison, and the locals were not best pleased by the influx.
The comms screen beeped, letting him know that the Monster had responded to his ping.
Finally! Kiyoshi rolled the pregnant pig off his lap. He confirmed that the hatches and doors were all locked from the inside. He usually surrounded himself with people when he talked to Jun. It did Jun good to see the children’s smiles, and it did the adults good to see Jun’s face on the screen, to know he hadn’t abandoned them. But not tonight. He couldn’t allow anyone else to hear the request he had to make.
He checked himself out in the mirrored cladding of the elevator shaft. His cheekbones stuck out like doorknobs. Was that a gray hair? It was. In fact, it was a whole gang of them. Fortunately, the dim lighting—nighttime settings everywhere except the farm decks, keeping the temps down—made it less obvious. He switched on the comms screen. “Hey! About time. We’re doing fine. See this pig?” He moved aside so the camera could pick up the lazing animal. “She’s about to drop a litter. The children are fighting over who gets to name the piglets! Top suggestion so far: Startrotter.”
He was doing good, he thought. Keeping it casual. Not mentioning the issues they were having with the hydroponics.
“What else? Lemme see, I’ve talked to Father Tom a few times. They’re busy, busy over there. Deliveries keep arriving. Can’t tell of what. Maybe components for atmospheric scoopers to mine hydrogen out of the atmosphere of Planet X. How can he actually believe they’ll make it there alive? Well, maybe he doesn’t believe it. Maybe he’s
got a death wish, wants to take a few thousand people with him.”
The boss had confided the Salvation’s true destination to Kiyoshi a few months back. He must have thought it would impress him. Instead, it had confirmed Kiyoshi’s adamant opposition to the whole project. Maybe the boss had forgotten that Kiyoshi had access to an artificial super-intelligence. Jun had modelled the Salvation’s journey, and even using the most generous parameters, even assuming the antimatter drive worked as advertised, there was no way the giant ship would reach Planet X with anyone on board alive. Not even 0.001% of a chance.
“Maybe it’s a double bluff,” Kiyoshi speculated out loud. “Maybe he’s actually going to Pluto. That would be a lot more doable. Or, another possibility: he really is going to Planet X, because he’s that scared of the ISA. I wonder what he actually did? Sure, he’s got a rap sheet as long as your arm—ship theft, fraud, throw murder in there—but is there something worse, something we don’t know about? What would be bad enough that he’s got to run seventeen thousand AUs? Christ, I hope they do catch up with him.” Kiyoshi envisioned ISA ships bellying up to the Salvation, arresting the boss-man before his epic escape could even start. The thought gave him his first chuckle in a week. Unfortunately, it wasn’t likely to happen. Amidst humanity’s life-or-death struggle with the PLAN, the ISA had more important things to do. “Well, it’s amusing to speculate, but at the end of the day, who gives a shit? We’re here. Where are you?”
He hit send. He expected to have to wait 38 minutes. The time it took for a signal to make the round-trip journey to Earth … plus a bit.
The screen lit up again only 11 minutes later. For a delirious second he thought Jun must have changed his mind, was coming home. But no. They were just out of synch. Jun had started talking before he received Kiyoshi’s burst.
“Sorry. I’ve been busy,” Jun said. “We’re there. Have a look!”
The screen showed darkness. A spotlight illuminated bots fussing with a fiberoptic cable at the foot of a cliff of machinery. Kiyoshi knew what he was looking at because he’d seen it before, in real life.
One of the docking bays of Tiangong Erhao.
“You made it,” Kiyoshi whispered. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and took a drag of nicotine.
Tiangong Erhao was the pride of the Imperial Chinese Republic, a fifty-kilometer space station orbiting at the L5 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. Jun planned to steal it and load it up with malware, a poisoned present for the PLAN. Kiyoshi didn’t underestimate his brother’s skills, but this part of the plan had always worried him.
“Those bots are putting in my hardwired comms link,” Jun said in voiceover. “I’ll need that when we enter Ghost mode. But basically, it’s all over bar the shouting. Keep an eye on the news in the next couple of days. I don’t know how they’ll spin it. ‘Tiangong Erhao vanishes’? Anyway, you can bet they won’t admit Tiangong Erhao was hijacked by a person or persons unknown.” The picture changed to Jun himself. He was sitting—or rather, he portrayed his projection sitting—at the astrogator’s workstation on the bridge of the Monster. Kiyoshi felt a sharp pang of homesickness at the sight of his ship’s familiar wooden panelling and checkerboard floor.
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.
The Callisto Gambit Page 5
