The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  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 …

  The sow butted against Kiyoshi’s leg. He petted her. Sister Terauchi and Isobe-san smiled patiently, waiting.

  “I was thinking about running to 39 Laetitia,” Kiyoshi confessed. Red lines, possible trajectories for the Salvation, sprang across the starmap. None of them led to 39 Laetitia. The boss-man was heading away from the sun, not towards it. “If we follow the Salvation, that option’ll be gone.”

  Isobe-san said suddenly, “I vote for staying here.”

  “You do?” Kiyoshi said.

  “Yes. Qusantin Hasselblatter is a dangerous criminal. Follow him, we’d be putting our own people in danger.”

  “Agreed,” Kiyoshi said.

  Sister Terauchi started, “But—”

  “But,” Kiyoshi nodded, “you’re right, Sister.”

  Staring at that insouciant spark, h
e felt a surge of rage. After everything they’d been through together, after everything he’d done for the boss-man, the bastard had just—left. Knowing full well how marginal their situation was, he’d left them to die.

  “Isobe-san, take some people down to the engineering deck and disconnect all those power lines. Sister, warn everyone we’ll be accelerating in thirty minutes.”

  The nun’s face crumpled in relief. “Thank you, Yonezawa-sencho. You’re making the right decision.”

  “Yup,” Kiyoshi said, not meeting her eye. He hadn’t made exactly the decision that she thought he had. “We’re going after them.”

  ★

  Kiyoshi flew the ship by himself. He’d given several of his childhood friends officer positions, which entitled them to hang out on the bridge, but none of them knew much about astrodynamics. That was OK. Kiyoshi preferred to fly solo. He’d been doing it half his life.

  Never, though, had he flown a ship as dumb as this one. The hub was a real dog. He had to check its key computations by hand, with a calculator.

  Nestled in freezeblankets at the captain’s workstation, living on cigarettes and stim pills, he coddled the Startractor along in the Salvation’s wake. He kept a prudent distance of a few tens of thousand klicks, until one night, his comms officer woke him from a doze.

  ★

  “Callisto.”

  The room was no more than a closet with a window. It contained nothing except a bowl of water, on the floor, a crucifix, on the wall ...

  … and a VHF radio with quantum encryption, issued to Thomas Lynch by the Society of Jesus, so that he could communicate with the Order no matter where in the solar system he might be.

  Now he was using it to communicate with the Startractor wallowing along in the Salvation’s wake.

  “Callisto. That’s where we’re going. I had it from Brian, and you can be sure he knows.”

  80,000 kilometers away, Kiyoshi Yonezawa said, “Makes sense. Makes sense. I knew he couldn’t be running for Planet goddamn X. Even an antimatter drive needs propellant, and I know how much liquid hydrogen he’s got. Not enough to reach the orbit of Neptune, let alone the heliopause. So he’s making a fuel stop.”

  The VHF radio’s antenna was mounted on one of the sensor bumps of the Salvation’s Caledonia/Hibernia module. The officers in the Salvation’s comms section knew it was there—Father Lynch had made it a condition of his presence on board. They might have noticed the antenna reorienting itself towards the smaller ship astern. But they had no hope of breaking his encryption.

  “Can you make it?” he asked.

  There was a long pause. Father Lynch assumed Kiyoshi was crunching the numbers. “Yes. Just.”

  “Good. Good, then we’ll see you there.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m hoping we won’t see you any sooner than that, Yonezawa. You wouldn’t get a warm reception.” Father Lynch hunched over his radio, head bowed, one finger depressing the encryption key, the other hand curled into a white-knuckled fist around his pectoral cross. The priest knew Kiyoshi Yonezawa rather well, and he suspected that Kiyoshi was planning something stupid.

  There was a long, long pause. Then Kiyoshi began to laugh. In between hoots of mirth, he gasped, “Damn you, Father.”

  “I’m hoping we can fix this situation without either one of you murdering the other,” Father Lynch said. A smile floated to his lips, but it was uncertain. He seemed to hear a dark edge to Yonezawa’s laughter.

  “I would hope so, too,” Kiyoshi said, sobering. “But if the boss’s intention wasn’t to murder my people by leaving us behind, what the hell was it?”

  “Maybe you can ask him yourself.”

  “Maybe I will, on Callisto.” Kiyoshi cut the connection.

  “The peace of the Lord be with you,” Father Lynch said into the dead radio.

  Sighing, he cut the little unit’s power and stowed it in the safe in the corner of the room. But he made no move to rise. For several minutes he stayed where he was, on his knees.

  All the room held was the bowl of holy water and the crucifix on the wall.

  It was all he needed.

  Water and God.

  His burden seemed to lighten for a minute, as he remembered that he wasn’t alone, that Jesus was always with him. And for that moment, even the impending destruction of the solar system seemed a bearable thing.

  At last he rose, genuflected, and left the little room. He walked along the upstairs balcony of his apartment building, which was open to the gentle breezes of Deck 2, and went down the stairs to the ‘village square.’

  This open area was one of many on the residential deck of Hibernia/Caledonia. Saplings and rustic benches stood around a shared tap. The idea had been to encourage neighborhood solidarity—and save water—by putting in only one spigot for every twenty families. It had worked: young mothers sat chatting on the benches, while their toddlers splashed in the spigot’s overflow gutter, and made mud pies from the soil underfoot. The breeze from the air recirculation units, concealed in the blue-sky smartpaper on the ceiling, dried the washing on lines stretched from window to window. The Irish community had adjusted to an eighteenth-century lifestyle with remarkably little fuss.

  Father Lynch’s eye fell on the one person who didn’t belong in this wholesome scene: a brown-skinned, curly-headed boy scuttling away with a rucksack on his shoulders.

  He strode after Michael Kharbage and caught him by the arm. “What are you doing here?”

  The boy defiantly jerked away. His eyes held so much fear that Father Lynch regretted his harsh tone.

  “Sure you can go wherever you like. Were you coming to see me?” He smiled.

  “No,” Michael said. “Anyway, I’m going now. I have to get back to work.”

  The boss had put the child to work in the propulsion section, according to Captain Haddock and his family (who were themselves unhappily moored in Construction). If there were castes on the Salvation—and there were, oh yes, unofficial though they be—the Propulsion lads were the Brahmins, the tippy-top dogs on whom the whole mission depended. Michael’s pride showed in the way he wore his new printed-to-fit uniform, even though it made him stick out down here more than his coloring did. His skin after all, was not darker than Father Lynch’s own. Lots of the Irish had some African in their lineages. So Michael had no real reason to feel shy or out of place. Yet there was the fear in his eyes.

  Too fast for the boy to react, Father Lynch seized his rucksack. He opened its suspiciously lumpy main compartment. It held a directional microphone.

  The boy would have just sat there, pretending to read a book or something, while the microphone soaked up everything being said inside the thin-walled apartment building.

  That was one way around encryption, Father Lynch admitted ruefully to himself.

  “What did you hear?” he asked.

  “Everything you said!” Michael snatched the rucksack back. “The boss is going to be pretty cross when he finds out you were talking to Kiyoshi Yonezawa!” He almost spat the name. Such hatred was a sad thing to see in a child so young.

  Father Lynch’s smile faded. “Actually, I don’t think the boss will be cross at all. And if he is, he’s welcome to take it up with me. He knows I’ll do whatever it takes to keep the colony intact … and I’ve not given up on the Galapajin, either. We need them, and they need us.”

  ★

  On the bridge of the Startractor, Kiyoshi stabbed the disconnect button, boiling with rage.

  He faced his childhood friends. They had stood around the captain’s workstation, listening in on his conversation with Father Tom. Now they looked confused. Some of the smarter ones looked disappointed. Not many of them were smart. They were the 11073 Galapagos junior high goof-off gang, now in their mid to late thirties. Mouth-breathers. Alcoholics, several of them. Kiyoshi loved them, but he didn’t have any illusions about their IQs.

  He pushed through them. At the far side of the bridge, the pregnant sow reclined on
a bed of rags. Kiyoshi eased her aside and opened the emergency life-support locker. With a clatter, ten Kalashnikovs and twice as many HabSafe™ laser rifles tumbled out. His friends automatically went to pick up the weapons. Kiyoshi gestured for them to stop. “He guessed. That damn Jesuit guessed.”

  “No way,” exclaimed Miyazaki-kun. “How? No one would ever guess we were gonna board them!”

  “You wouldn’t. But Father Tom is crazy smart. He definitely had our number.” With a sour smile, Kiyoshi waved at the guns. “You might as well put these back where they belong. Safer not to have ‘em all in one place. Make sure the kids can’t get at them.”

  When they’d scattered, he collapsed at the captain’s workstation. His plan to overhaul the Salvation and board her had not yet been finalized. It had been more of a Plan Z, to be implemented if they had another cascade of failures in the hydroponic farm. It had given him and his friends hours of fun as they plotted out how they could fake a drive failure, trick the boss-man into letting them dock with the Salvation, and then mount a surprise assault on the fuselage.

  Now Kiyoshi abandoned the whole idea. He didn’t put it past Father Tom to warn the boss-man, all in the name of preventing violence.

  Twenty days to Callisto, he thought. We can make it.

  We’ll just eat less.

  As his angry reaction faded, he felt a bit relieved. His old school friends versus Brian’s boys? Kalashnikovs versus flechette cannons? It probably wouldn’t have gone well at all. There was only so much the element of surprise could do for you.

  He probably owed Father Tom for warning him off.

  All the same, he’d kept his own rifle back. He touched it from time to time as he monitored the ship’s stats, like a better Catholic than him might touch a favorite religious totem.

  iv.

  The solar system was big.

  When Kiyoshi was a second-grader on 11073 Galapagos, their science teacher had organized a game to help them understand just how big it was. Sensei had given one child a kabocha squash. That was the sun. She had stood at one end of the hollowed-out asteroid. The other children had got washers, or vitamin pills, or grains of rice. They’d walked down the unfinished canyon of Cathedral End, counting off paces. Venus had stopped 19 paces from the sun. Earth had stopped 26 paces away. Kiyoshi had been given the B12 pill that represented Jupiter. He’d walked all the way out of Cathedral End, into the tightly-knit streets, almost back to school, before he’d counted off his alloted 135 paces.