The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  “It’s not too late for you to join us,” Father Tom said. “It turns out that we need several types of algae and seeds that aren’t on board. Your people have probably saved us from a catastrophic ecosystem failure down the road! So we’ll be staying here until that stuff can be procured. We’re also waiting for our last delivery of hydrogen.”

  “The propulsion system is still a disaster waiting to happen. You’ll end up drifting somewhere in the Kuiper Belt.”

  “No, we won’t,” Father Tom said. “We’re going to Eris.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “When the boss got back on board.”

  “No more Planet X? And he’s cool with that?”

  “Sure he is. He defers to the will of the community.”

  Kiyoshi heard a familiar chuckle. He recoiled at the knowledge that he was literally looking through the boss’s eyes.

  And he knew in his gut that Father Tom was wrong. The boss-man had never deferred to anyone in his life. He wasn’t about to start now.

  “He’s deceiving you,” he said, refusing to speak to the boss-man directly.

  “Kiyoshi, he is a changed man.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Whatever you did, it worked.”

  “I shot him in the leg with a needlegun.”

  “Perhaps that did the trick,” Father Tom said, grinning.

  “I was aiming for his heart, but the bastard was wearing body armor.”

  “My point is, he’s repentant.” As a priest, Father Tom used the word unselfconsciously. And as a priest, Father Tom was naïve—no, not exactly naïve, but gullible in the way priests had to be. He was professionally required to give everyone a second chance, and a third, and a fourth. Even if their name used to be Konstantin X.

  Kiyoshi was not required to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, least of all the boss. “I’ll believe he’s repentant when he admits it was bullshit about finding an alien spaceship.”

  Father Tom’s voice sharpened. “What about an alien spaceship?”

  “Heh, heh.” That had clearly planted a seed of doubt. Kiyoshi decided not to say any more. Let it fester. “Ask him yourself.” He reached out to turn the camera off. “Sayonara, Father.”

  Father Tom said quickly, “Wait! Kiyoshi. What about the child?”

  “Oh, you finally remembered about him?”

  “I assumed you’d rescued him. Now, seeing the state of you, I’m not so sure.”

  “He’s fine,” Kiyoshi said, and ended the call.

  ★

  Kiyoshi got dressed. His ribs still hurt. He glanced over at Michael. “You gonna be OK here?”

  “Sure,” Michael said. He huddled in an armchair by the window of the hotel room, staring at a tablet. Kiyoshi had bought a two-pack of burner tablets registered to a dodgy local front company. Safer than connecting with their own IDs. Of course, Michael could connect to the local network with his interface contacts any time he liked. He could shout in public that he was Michael Kharbage. If he wanted to do that, fine. Maybe his recycling-mogul dad would come and pick him up, take him off Kiyoshi’s hands. But for now, he seemed to be sticking to the tablet.

  The room reeked like a pigsty, having been occupied for 24 hours by two humans and eight pigs. The bed and chairs were islands in a sea of droppings. Kiyoshi’s sole attempt to maintain hygiene had been to put the feed in an open suitcase, instead of on the floor. The pigs had promptly decided that that suitcase made a good bed, and squabbled over which one got to sleep with the kibble. They currently lay in a drowsy pile on top of it.

  “What’re you looking at?” Kiyoshi stepped over a pile of pigshit, peered over Michael’s shoulder.

  “News.”

  “What’s the latest?” Kiyoshi said, as if he hadn’t been watching developments in the Martian theater obsessively.

  “We’re losing.”

  “Apart from that.”

  “No, we really are losing.” Michael looked up. Kiyoshi had never seen eyes so full of fear. “The PLAN is kicking our asses. This new thing about putting ground troops on Mars? That proves we’re losing. It’s a desperate PR stunt to improve morale on Earth. I guess they’re also trying to shame the Chinese into getting in, but it won’t work. A four-thousand-year-old empire cannot be embarrassed.”

  Jun had had the same thing in mind, but his plan to force China’s hand had been more ambitious.

  Too ambitious?

  According to the schedule Jun had given Kiyoshi, the Monster was supposed to have reached Mars today, with Tiangong Erhao in tow, and the best cyberweapon in history loaded on board.

  But Kiyoshi hadn’t heard from Jun. His casual, but increasingly frequent, pings hadn’t raised a whisper in response.

  That could mean Jun was still in stealth mode.

  But Kiyoshi was starting to believe something had gone wrong.

  He offered, “Don’t be scared. Even if Earth falls, we’ll be safe on Callisto.”

  “About that,” Michael said, suddenly looking less frightened. “I’ve been thinking about that excavation project you mentioned. I come from Ceres, so I know a lot about underground habs. Millions of people live in the Belows on Ceres. It obviously works. And the biggest structural issues—insulation and atmospheric containment—would actually be easier to address here, because of the silicates mixed in with the ice. You could do standaway walls anchored in the rockier areas ...”

  Kiyoshi smiled, understanding that the kid was calmer when he had some interesting problem to think about. But he cut him off. “Keep thinking about that. I’ll take you to meet my friends later.”

  He made this promise recklessly, not knowing if he’d be able to keep it. In his mind there was no ‘later.’ There was just a bright line, like a horizon, a little way ahead. He had no idea what lay on the far side of it.

  “Keep an eye on the pigs,” he said in farewell. “If the manager complains again, tell him I’ll be taking them away soon.”

  He tied a twang cord through the collar of the smallest piglet. In 48 hours on Callisto they all seemed to have doubled in size. The one he’d selected was as big as a terrier, and a lot fatter. Leading it like a dog, he left the hotel and walked uphill through Northhab.

  People stared. Even in a port city bursting with refugees of all descriptions, a man walking a pig on a leash was bizarre enough to stare at.

  But as he crossed the underground spaceport concourse, no one stared at him anymore.

  In fact, everyone was staring at … nothing. Standing and gaping. They were all looking at something on their contacts or retinal implants.

  Within seconds, the few people still moving slowed their steps, as if struck with the same disease.

  Kiyoshi stopped, too, and frantically dragged his tablet out of his back pocket. He uncrumpled it and tapped up the official Callisto news feed.

  Mars.

  Red, ugly, larger than ever.

  “This is the optical feed from the UNSF Badfinger,” gabbled a tinny voice in his ears—he’d synced the tablet with his cochlear implants. “The Badfinger is currently ten hours out from Mars.”

  Ah yes, the Star Force Flattop carrying all those luckless infantry to their deaths.

  “We’re getting a pretty good view, but let’s zoom in even further.”

  Black flecks floated on Mars’s equator. Kiyoshi gazed at the PLAN earthworks that scarred the Amazonis and Arcadia Planitias. Big enough to be seen from space, the PLAN’s trademark berms and ziggurats formed shapes … glyphs … that looked tantalizingly like Chinese characters, but had no meaning known to humans. Kiyoshi remembered the boss’s claim that he’d found a ship fragment with similar glyphs on it. Obviously, that had been a fragment of a PLAN ship that crashed on Callisto. Sad.

  “Those are the PLAN’s orbital fortresses,” the commentator jabbered, drawing Kiyoshi’s attention back to the black flecks orbiting Mars. “They are pieces of Mars’s former second moon, Phobos. Each one bristles with energy weapons and railguns. Fo
r decades they’ve made Mars orbital space a kill zone where nothing survives. But that era is over. Look at that!”

  The picture zoomed in so far that the orbital fortresses became clumps of pixels. Kiyoshi’s heart seemed to stop as he watched two clumps meet and then ricochet apart, breaking up into individual pixels. Slowed down for viewers around the solar system, the clip clearly showed an event of mind-boggling violence.

  “That was the orbital fortress Reldresal colliding with its neighbor! The PLAN has suffered a deadly blow today …”

  Kiyoshi heard cheering. The sound wasn’t on the feed. All around him, people were shouting hurrahs, jumping up and down, hugging strangers. Two women near him wept for joy. The noise drowned out the commentator’s explanation of how this had happened: some death-or-glory exploit by an intrepid gang of pilots from Luna.

  Kiyoshi felt cold.

  Can’t trust the media, he reminded himself. There’s no proof this actually happened.

  But would they dare to put out a lie on this scale? A lie that promised an end to the war?

  He knew the answer in his heart: they wouldn’t dare.

  So this had really happened.

  When?

  At least seventeen minutes ago, based on the signal delay from Mars, and maybe longer, if they’d held the news back for a while.

  And Jun had been there—in Mars orbital space—caught amidst what promised to be a lethal cascade of collisions. Basic physics guaranteed the outcome. The fragments of Phobos would bombard the surface, and eventually grind themselves down into a ring around Mars. A ring of rock dust … and ship parts.

  So that was what had gone wrong.

  Of all the known unknowns in the solar system, Jun hadn’t expected a demolition spree by a bunch of military pilots.

  Oh, little brother, Kiyoshi thought. You really did suck at predicting human behavior.

  Hot tears stung his eyes. He stuffed the tablet back in his pocket and wandered on through the rejoicing crowd.

  The piglet brought him back to reality by stopping to piddle on the floor.

  He walked on faster, his sense of purpose restored, now with a deadly edge.

  When he left the hotel, he’d been pretty sure he had nothing left to lose.

  Now he knew it.

  ★

  Kiyoshi didn’t pause outside Legacy’s Leather Goods this time. He walked straight in.

  There were no customers in the shop. In fact, most of the shops in Westhab were closed—except for those that sold alcohol or other mind-altering substances. Everyone had congregated in the public plazas to celebrate.

  Except Oleg Threadley.

  The gray-haired, patrician man sat on a stool behind the counter of his shop, one ankle hooked over the other knee, apparently staring into space. No need to ask what he was watching. Wrinkles of concern furrowed his forehead. When he saw Kiyoshi his expression hardened into hostility.

  “Back again? What do you want this time?”

  Kiyoshi had gotten splattered with champagne on his way through Westhab. He smoothed his wet hair back. Holding up the end of the twang cord leash, he said, “Want to buy a pig?”

  Threadley stood up and looked over the counter. “Is that real?”

  “Sure it’s real. I’ve got eight of them.”

  “Get it out of here before it eats the merchandise.”

  The pig set its pearly little teeth into the corner of a suitcase.

  “What did I tell you?!”

  Kiyoshi bent down to distract the piglet by scratching it behind the ears. “That’s the good thing about pigs. They’ll eat anything. Fatten them on scraps, stems, and husks, and pretty soon you’ve got yourself a freezer full of pork. And pigskin.” He shrugged. “Real leather; I thought you’d be interested.”

  “I might have been interested,” Threadley said, “before today. I was wondering where I’d get my next shipment, now that exports from Earth to the Belt have basically quit. But I expect they’ll be resuming regular shipping schedules, now that the war is over.”

  “You don’t sound overjoyed.”

  Threadley nodded at the happy mob outside the shop. Through the open door they could hear the noise of a band playing Luna pop. “Idiots.”

  “Which idiots?”

  “All of them, but especially the pilots who smashed up Reldresal. When those fragments of Phobos hit the surface, a good deal of Mars will be scoured clean. And the answers to history’s greatest riddle will be obliterated. We may never find out what the PLAN was, or why it tried to destroy us.”

  Unwillingly, Kiyoshi saw Threadley’s point. Jun had also emphasized the necessity of a quest for answers. Indiscriminate planetary-scale destruction wasn’t the hallmark of an advanced civilization. Then again, Kiyoshi increasingly questioned if humanity really was one.

  “They’re calling it the Big Breakup,” Threadley said, screwing up his eyes in distaste. “There’s no event so historically significant that Earth’s media can’t give it a cutesy nickname.”

  “Funny,” Kiyoshi said. “I don’t recall you being this bitter.”

  “It’s been a while since we first met.”

  “You were in command of the cruiser Imagine Dragons.” The ISA ship had arrived too late to sort out the mess on 4 Vesta three years ago. By the time Threadley’s crew got there, Kiyoshi had already done that.

  “The Imagine Dragons was the last command of my career,” Threadley said. “I was fired shortly afterwards.”

  “Fired? Why?”

  “Thousands of people died on 4 Vesta. The survivors were rescued, not by us, but by the Chinese. Even at the ISA, someone has to be hung out to dry after a screwup of that magnitude.” Threadley referred to the Intelligence Security Agency casually, as if he’d moved on. But his eyes were like chisels, chipping away at Kiyoshi, trying to find a way in.

  “So you retired to Callisto and opened a leather goods shop,” Kiyoshi said.

  “Yes.”

  “Quit bullshitting me, Threadley.”

  “It’s not Threadley any longer. It’s Legacy. Oliver Legacy. We get new identities when we leave the Agency.”

  “And you chose to call yourself Legacy. Interesting.” Kiyoshi leaned on the counter. Threadley, or Legacy, rocked back a pace. Kiyoshi pushed it. “You make a pretty good shopkeeper. I might believe your cover story, if I didn’t have this.”

  He held his tablet up in front of Legacy’s face. It displayed the transmission log from the Startractor’s illegal transponder.

  “This comes from a stealth transmitter I found on my ship. It points to you.”

  Legacy grabbed the tablet and scanned the transmission log. “Well, shit. So that was your ship.”

  An invisible mask had slipped away. The genteel shopkeeper reverted back to the civilized brute Kiyoshi remembered. He suddenly remembered that when he was stuck on the Imagine Dragons three years ago, he’d been scared stiff of Legacy.

  “Yup,” he said. “Was my ship. Crashed outside the spaceport.”

  “But you survived. Congratulations, Kiyoshi Yonezawa. I always knew you were a survivor.”

  Kiyoshi shrugged.

  “I remember we offered you a job,” Legacy reminisced. “And you turned us down, because you’d found Jesus, or some shit.”

  Kiyoshi felt a sharp, almost unbearable pang of sadness. He wanted to walk out of the shop and find a dark quiet corner where he could sit and think of nothing. But he’d come too far to turn back now.

  “Have you reconsidered?”

  “No,” Kiyoshi said. “I just wondered why you were tracking my ship.”

  “Oh, that was no big deal. Lemme see that log again … yeah. That ship formerly belonged to Kharbarge, LLC. Adnan Kharbage is a crook. Everyone on Ceres is a crook. But Kharbage is a big crook. So, we keep tabs on his ships. Or ships that used to belong to him. Ha!”

  Kiyoshi shook his head. Was there no end to the lies? “I don’t think so. The transmissions only began when the ship was clearly on course f
or 99984 Ravilious.”

  “Ah,” Legacy said. “That gang of pirates.”

  “You’ve been watching them for years.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were looking for dirt on Qusantin Hasselblatter.”

  “Y … es.”

  “He used to have protection in the ISA itself. His past was a blank, because someone powerful wanted it that way.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I even know who was protecting him.”

  “Yes?”

  “His brother, Abdullah Hasselblatter. Used to be the director of the Space Corps.”

  “Yes.”

  “A year back, a bit more, Abdullah lost his job. And Qusantin lost his protection.”

  “Yes,” Legacy said. “But that doesn’t bring those deleted records back. Eh, the Agency has given up on the Hasselblatters. Bigger fish to fry.”

  Kiyoshi didn’t believe that. The ISA never gave up on anything. That was just a pathetic attempt to lower the perceived value of Kiyoshi’s information. “What if I told you Qusantin Hasselblatter and his brother were here? In Callisto orbit, at this very minute?”

  Legacy snorted. “Right, that enormous flying steering wheel. Where are they going? Pluto?”

  “I don’t think they’ve made up their minds yet.” Kiyoshi wasn’t surprised that the ISA knew the boss-man was here. The Salvation was way too big to hide. What the ISA lacked was a plausible cause to move in on the boss-man. They lacked evidence.

  “It’s a mess,” Legacy said. “Everyone and his cousin is building an arkship. A couple of groups that got an early start have already reached Pluto. It’s like they think the PLAN couldn’t get them there. I wonder if they’ll turn around and come back, now that the war’s won?”

  “Nah,” Kiyoshi said. “Not now they’ve got that much invested in it. They’ll invent a new reason to flee the solar system. Some of them might even make it. But I would not want humanity’s first interstellar pioneer to be Qusantin Hasselblatter.”

  “Me either.”

  Kiyoshi made a production out of twisting around to unzip one of the pockets of his pants. It was not entirely a performance, as his fractured ribs made it painful to bend.