As she spoke, a couple of tourists were finding this out for themselves. They’d strayed off the path, and were kicking up the dark drifts like snow. It clumped oddly as it drifted back to the ground, not behaving like snow or dust. One of the tourists plunged ahead and abruptly sank up to his neck. He’d stepped into a hidden crevice.
“Careful!” the tour guide trilled. “We don’t want to lose anyone!”
That was their first stop. The bus proceeded along a route marked with radar beacons, from one group of illuminated spires to the next. Each spire deemed worthy of illumination had a name: the Koala, the Dolphin (it really did look like one), Big Ben. After a couple of hours of this, everyone was ready for lunch.
The bus pulled into a brightly lit rest area. A single small ice spire stood in the middle of the bulldozed gravel. People crowded around it to vid it up close and plant their gloves on the ice. “No carving your names!” the tour guide said, but she didn’t stop them. It was like the tour company knew that people needed to get up close to an ice spire at least once, so they’d designated a sacrificial victim. They’d otherwise been quite strict about ‘Look but don’t touch.’ Kiyoshi could see why. The minimal heat and friction from people’s gloves had scooped out the base of the spire all the way round. These eternal-looking monuments were fragile.
Facilities surrounded the rest area on three sides. A fuel depot for the buses, a food court. Kiyoshi went into the food court, although he wasn’t hungry. He topped up his suit’s fluid and oxygen reservoirs, and bought a pouch of coffee, just to blend in.
Both long walls of the food court were screens, so it seemed like they were sitting outside.
Another bus drew up in the rest area.
Kiyoshi tossed his coffee in the recycling. He went into the men’s room and waited for a count of one hundred. When he came back out, the passengers from the other bus were filing into the food court. He recognized faces from the South Spires group.
This was what he’d been counting on. There was only one rest area. All the tours lasted about the same length of time. It made sense that they’d overlap out here.
But where was the boss-man?
On the wall-screen, silver flashed. There he was … walking towards the edge of the rest area.
Kiyoshi waited impatiently for the airlock to cycle. Outside, he walked in the same direction. The boss-man had gone behind the fuel depot. Rounding the row of tanks, Kiyoshi saw him trudging away across the cratered terrain.
He was still carrying that mysterious long-handled case. Well, guns didn’t come that shape, so whatever it was, it wasn’t a problem.
Kiyoshi lingered until the boss-man was almost out of sight, and then followed him. Being spaceborn, he was comfortable in Callisto’s gravity. He didn’t bother walking, but pushed off at each stride, a gait that might look funny, but resulted in fast progress. Without stopping, he reached back to his rucksack and took out the needlegun. He powered it on and held it down by his side. He’d taped over the status lights so they wouldn’t catch anyone’s eye in the dark.
The boss-man was taking no such precautions. His helmet lamp sparkled ahead, and vanished among the nearest group of ice spires.
Starlit, the spires loomed like crystal stalagmites in the black cave of the night. These were some of the smaller ones, which probably explained why they hadn’t got the illumination-and-cutesy-name treatment. But even a small ice spire was still the size of a skyscraper.
Ridges and humps of ice broke the ground, relics of even smaller spires that had sublimed to nothing over the millennia. Kiyoshi’s boots skidded on them, despite the gecko grips on his soles.
He looked back. Dandelion-seeds of light seemed to float on the horizon. The lights of the rest area. They’d already come a long way. Good; privacy.
He advanced cautiously. The boss-man’s helmet lamp flashed out. Kiyoshi froze.
The boss-man stood with his legs braced apart, facing the curved base of an ice spire. He held his mysterious case under one arm, and moved the end of the long handle across the ice in arcs. It looked like he was washing a window.
Kiyoshi frowned in bemusement. The simplest explanation for this bizarre behavior was that the boss-man had lost his marbles.
Well, it didn’t matter.
He advanced. The boss-man kept moving crabwise around the spire, intent on whatever he was doing, never looking around.
There was a lot of the dark, clumpy dust on the ground in this area. It billowed up from Kiyoshi’s boots, and a largish clot drifted into the light of the boss-man’s helmet lamp. The boss-man spun around. Kiyoshi stood four meters from him, aiming the needle-gun at his center of mass.
“Drop the … the whatever-it-is.”
“It’s a metal detector,” the boss-man said.
“Drop it.”
The boss-man put it down on the ground. The knee-deep dust swallowed it.
“Hands up!”
“I knew you were the persistent type. Guess I didn’t know how persistent. Come to get your revenge?” The boss-man managed to make this sound like a childish and futile goal.
To spite him by pretending to have a different objective, Kiyoshi said, “Why the metal detector?”
“If you need to ask, you don’t need to know.”
“What are you looking for?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“Gone,” the boss-man repeated. Kiyoshi couldn’t see his face. His rental suit’s faceplate was a dark mask below the glare of his helmet lamp. But he sounded … despairing. “Gone! They blew it up! Blew it up and built a spaceport on top of the place where it used to be! If you ever want to hide an inconvenient truth, Yonezawa, take a leaf out of the UN’s book: Bury it under modern so-called fucking civilization.”
Despite himself, Kiyoshi was moved to curiosity. “What are you babbling about?”
The boss-man’s helmet moved from side to side, a shake of the head. “These ice spires,” he said. “Pretty, aren’t they?”
“Sensawunda overload.”
“Where do you think they came from?”
“Um …” Kiyoshi recalled what the tour guide had said. “Ejecta from an impact. Millions of years ago.”
“Oh yeah? Then why are they made of pure ice? Ejecta rings are a mixture of rock and ice. They don’t come shaped like koalas, either.”
“All right, what do you think they are?”
“Pieces of an alien spaceship,” the boss-man said, with perfect confidence. “The first expedition to Callisto failed in mysterious circumstances. They all died. Their base was pulverized, the remains scattered across the floor of Doh Crater, where Asgard Spaceport now stands. The conventional explanation is they were hit by a meteorite. A one-in-a-million stroke of bad luck. But what really happened in 2143? They discovered an alien spaceship, or some other type of alien artifact. And being human, they poked it. And it blew up.”
Kiyoshi felt a thrill of unease. Not because this tall tale had an ounce of credibility, but because he now had to confront the possibility that the boss really had gone stark raving mad.
As gently as possible, he said, “Boss? That doesn’t work. If you’re saying the spires are pieces of this blown-up alien ship—”
“They aren’t the pieces, the pieces are inside, buried in the ice. The shrapnel was so hot that it liquefied the sub-surface ice and triggered geysers, which instantly froze around the shards. The dark material is molecular-scale debris—”
“—that doesn’t work, because the spires have been here for billions of years. And the American expedition vanished in 2143. So.”
“That was a different alien ship,” the boss-man said condescendingly.
Kiyoshi sighed. “Honestly, I don’t give a shit. And my arms are getting tired.” He lowered the needlegun a few degrees. The boss started to stoop, his right glove sliding towards his thigh. In the same motion, Kiyoshi brought the needlegun up again and fired at a spot ten centimeter
s to the left of the boss-man’s helmet. The boss-man jumped like a rabbit, his hands flashing back up and away from his sides.
“Heh,” Kiyoshi said.
White dust spurted from the spire behind the boss-man. The dart had bored into the frangible ice.
“That weapon in your concealed holster? Take it out. Slowly. Throw it over to me.”
The boss did. Kiyoshi quickly stooped and picked it up. A laser pistol. He pocketed it.
“So where’d you come up with this alien spaceship concept?” What he wanted to know was: Was this what it was all about? I worked my ass off for you for sixteen years. You encouraged me to bring my people to 99984 Ravilious. You DESTROYED 99984 Ravilious. You stole my people away. You said it was all for your vision of a human community where purebloods could be safe, where unique cultures could be preserved. And NOW you admit that it was all about freaking UFOs?
“Aha,” the boss-man said. His voice was a bit shaky. He hadn’t enjoyed that close call. “Remember the second failed expedition to Callisto, in 2265?”
“Sure. That wacko group of radicals, CyberDestiny, took the UNSA base hostage. Half of everyone died. Star Force rescued the rest.”
“That was me.”
“That was … you?”
“CyberDestiny wasn’t a wacko group of radicals. It was me and half a dozen weaponized sexbots.”
“You’re joking.”
“I was pretty reckless in those days.”
“You’re pretty reckless now. You’re Konstantin X. That was your alias in the old days, when we first met. Konstantin X was the leader of CyberDestiny? You killed all those people? And you’re still walking around? No wonder you’re scared of the ISA.”
“It was a risk coming back here. But I had to have one more look. I was hoping to find some more parts.”
“Parts of what?”
“Of the alien spaceship!” the boss shouted, sounding like any wingnut on the internet ranting about government cover-ups.
Kiyoshi glimpsed a flicker of light in his peripheral vision. He risked a lightning-quick look around. Small lights were moving towards them from the direction of the rest area. Shit. Their disappearance had been noticed. People were out searching for them.
The boss-man said, “Star Force agreed to give me a ship in exchange for the hostages, but they welshed on the deal. Tried to kill me. I got away in the rover UNSA was using to explore Asgard Crater. They were searching for clues about the disappearance of the American base. Now do you get it?”
Yeah. Kiyoshi got it. The boss-man had seen the search party, too. He was just talking to run out the clock, hoping to distract Kiyoshi until he could be rescued.
“I don’t know if they found anything, or not. But I did. I took that rover back to Asgard Crater. I went for a walk, just to see if there might be any consumables lying around. And I literally stumbled over a part of an alien spaceship!”
Kiyoshi couldn’t resist asking one more question. “How did you know it was a part of an alien spaceship?”
“Because it had writing on it.”
“What kind of writing?”
“The same glyphs as the ones reproduced on the surface of Mars by the PLAN!”
Kiyoshi now saw the tragic mistake the boss-man had made. Just to tie up the last loose end, he said, “One more question. How did you get away?”
“Huh?”
“From Callisto. You were stuck in a stolen rover with Star Force hunting for you.”
“Oh. I hid out for a while. Then Abdullah came and picked me up.”
“That’s what I call brotherly love.” Kiyoshi thought of Jun. “Well, I’ll be sure to give Abdullah my condolences.”
He fired the needlegun, holding down the trigger for a sustained burst.
The boss staggered backwards. He reached into his other concealed holster and whipped out a second laser pistol.
Of course, the bastard never carried just one weapon.
Kiyoshi threw himself to one side, falling in slow motion. The laser beam slashed blue through the vacuum overhead as the pulse scattered off the dark dust his fall had kicked up.
On the slope above him, the boss-man levelled his pistol for another shot. Kiyoshi couldn’t understand why the boss was still alive, and then it clicked. Body armor under his EVA suit.
Kiyoshi rolled onto his back, kicking up more dust to chaff the laser. He shot another burst at the boss-man’s legs.
That worked.
The boss-man went down as if his feet had been cut out from under him.
The laser pistol spun out of his hand, and sank into the blanket of dust.
Some sixth sense told Kiyoshi to look around.
The sky was falling towards him.
No, it was the ice spire that had stood behind him.
Top-heavy, hooked at the top, falling like a building.
Without thinking, Kiyoshi seized the boss-man under the arms. He squatted and dragged him onto his own back, so he was carrying him piggyback. Then he ran. The dead weight on his back made him nightmarishly slow.
The ice spire crashed to the ground behind them. It just missed the spire the boss had been metal-detecting. The falling spire shattered into a thousand million pieces.
Shards of ice flew around Kiyoshi. He felt a sharp blow in the back of his left calf. He ran on for a few meters, limping, and then stopped. He let the boss-man slide off his back.
Spears of ice stuck out of the back of the boss-man’s suit. He looked like an ice porcupine.
Kiyoshi collapsed beside him and assessed his own wound. His suit told him it was just a shallow puncture. His suit had already sealed itself. Not serious, but it was going to hurt like a motherfucker to walk on it.
Presumably, the search party from the rest area would have seen the collapse of the ice spire. They’d be here soon.
That was going to be fun.
Kiyoshi stood up, testing his weight on his injured leg. Shit! OW. He glanced down at the boss-man. His decision to save the bastard had been purely instinctive. Ironically, it might have saved his own life. The boss-man’s body had shielded him from those ice splinters, as sharp and lethal as knives.
The boss-man reached behind himself and patted weakly at the shards, as if trying to pull them out.
“Holy crap,” Kiyoshi said. “That’s some kick-ass body armor.”
“Military surplus,” the boss-man rasped. “They’re selling everything off.”
“Uh huh.”
“Help me. Pull these out. Don’t touch the big one.”
“The one sticking out of your ass?”
“Fuck you, Yonezawa.”
Kiyoshi pointed the laser pistol at the boss-man’s faceplate. Then he reconsidered.
When the search party arrived, he would have a tough time talking his way out of this. He might be able to pass off the boss’s death as an accident. But the destruction of an ice spire? That probably carried an automatic penalty of life in jail.
Solution: steal the boss’s getaway car.
He said to the boss, “You came out here by yourself. But you weren’t planning to go back by yourself, were you?”
“Fuck you.”
“I figure the Angel’s somewhere around here.” That ship was smart enough to fly itself. “Call it, now.”
xiv.
The Angel’s radio emitted a cheery tone. An email appeared on the comms screen. It consisted of a single word.
From: Elwin Ransom [ID string attached]
To: Captain@Angel
SOS
1 attachment [coordinates]
Michael shouted into the intercom, “That was him! He’s in trouble!”
The Hasselblatters flew up the keel tube and strapped into their seats. Dr. Hasselblatter peered at the coordinates that Michael had already mapped onto their topological map of Callisto. “Right in the middle of the ice spires.”
“What could’ve happened?” Michael fretted, hurrying through the pre-launch checks.
“Found
something too big to carry? Or maybe his metal detector’s battery blew up. Anyway, we can’t take the Angel in there.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Dr. Hasselblatter said patiently, “he’s in the middle of the ice spires. It’s a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value. There’s nowhere to land.”
“There will be,” Michael said.
The Angel’s drive spun up. A mighty blast of plasma blossomed from her drive, re-melting the ice she had melted when she landed. The little ship took off vertically. Gravity glued Michael into his couch, which automatically rotated to align his body with the gees. This was going to be the shortest ballistic hop ever, moving the ship barely fifty kilometers to the north.
Unless …
“Michael,” the Angel said, “would you like me to try something possibly less destructive?”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” Michael said, wriggling against his straps.
“All right. Let’s see if I remember how to do this.”
The Angel’s main drive cut out. Simultaneously, the auxiliary engine nacelles under her wings fired. These electrical engines vaporized hydrogen propellant into reaction mass, just like the main drive, but did so with considerably less heat and violence.
The Angel tipped over on her nose. As she fell back towards the surface, the auxiliary engines roared, flattening out the angle of her dive, until she was flying down towards the surface like an airplane … without the atmospheric lift that kept actual airplanes in the air. Because there was, y’know, no air.
The auxiliary thrusters compensated. Jets of plasma stabbed down towards the surface, and met the ground safely outside the field of ice spires.
The Angel glided on skinny stilts of fire in among the ice spires, skimming the surface, still moving at 400 kilometers per hour. You didn’t dump orbital velocity that easily.
“Yee-haaaah!” Michael screamed. On the optical feed, ice spires loomed and darted away almost too fast for the eye to follow. It looked like they were dodging over—and through—a forest of giant, deformed ivory chess pieces. “Can I try?”
“Well, Michael, I’m not sure—”
“I’ll be careful!” He grabbed the yoke.
The Callisto Gambit Page 15
