The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  Like the Belowsers of Ceres, the inhabitants of Asgard had expanded sideways as well as down. Also like the Belows, this extension would appear to have been built without official sanction, much less prettification. Scattered lamps on the street’s low ceiling resembled streetlights, rather than attempting to look like the sun. Brighter illumination came from flashing LED signs. Waifs in aprons languidly swept debris out of club doorways.

  Elfrida would have loved this place when she was twenty. Now she just thought about how unsanitary it was to live next door to a sewer, and how everyone down here must have vitamin D deficiencies. The air was very bad, too. Fans futilely circulated the stale smells of cooking and antifungal spray.

  “This is Hel’s Kitchen,” Jun said in her ear.

  “For once, something on Callisto is appropriately named.”

  “Careful!”

  Elfrida had instinctively started hurrying faster, and now they were almost stepping on Michael’s heels. She pulled Petruzzelli back.

  Ding … ding … a bicycle bell sounded behind them. “Sell your wastewater,” a recorded voice intoned. “Ten cents per. Get paid to relieve yourself …” A man cycled slowly past them on a tricycle with a tank on the back. The sign on the front of his trike said Pay Toilet. Down here, of course, there were no public toilets, so there were pay toilets, with a twist: whereas on Earth you’d have to pay for the privilege, here human waste was valuable enough for someone to cycle around collecting it.

  Elfrida and Petruzzelli shuffled along behind the toilet, breathing through their mouths.

  Ahead, Michael walked slowly, as if tired out by his energetic dash through the hab … or reluctant to reach his destination.

  He turned into an alley.

  Elfrida and Petruzzelli came level with the alley mouth in time to see him vanish into a door.

  They peered up a flight of well-lit stairs. Michael was no longer in sight. Elfrida’s heart pounded. She allowed Petruzzelli to climb the stairs ahead of her.

  There was only one door at the top.

  Petruzzelli pushed through it.

  Elfrida followed her … into a bar.

  Michael wasn’t there.

  Electrofolk played quietly. As it was the middle of the afternoon, local time, there were no drinkers. A tall woman with blue dreadlocks drifted around, wiping tables. She seemed to be dancing to the music—alone, serene, contented. She saluted them with her wadded drywipe. “Take a seat anywhere you like.”

  “Where’s that kid gone?” Petruzzelli said. “He just came in here. About this high. Dark hair. Where is he?”

  The woman tilted her head on one side. “What kid?”

  Elfrida dragged Petruzzelli over to a table. “He has to come back this way,” she whispered. “We’ll just wait.” In truth, there might be another way out, for all she knew. But the fact that the bartender had denied Michael’s existence, when they’d seen him come in here with their own eyes, proved to Elfrida’s mind that the woman was in on it … whatever it was.

  Anyway, Elfrida really needed to sit down. Her heart was racing, and her breath came short.

  The woman brought them a menu and a pair of oxygen canisters with attached mouthpieces. “The air’s bad down here,” she explained matter-of-factly.

  “Jesus,” Petruzzelli said. “I’ll have a margarita.” Elfrida ordered a soda. When the woman brought their drinks, Petruzzelli tasted hers and said loudly, “Well, the drinks are better than the atmosphere, but not by much.”

  She seemed to have taken an instant dislike to the bartender. Elfrida had no idea why, unless it was because she envied the bartender’s hair.

  “Your hair used to be that color,” she commented.

  “Mine was turquoise. Hers is more like aquamarine.”

  “It’s nice, though.”

  “In my opinion, white girls should never attempt dreadlocks.” Petruzzelli took a pull on her oxygen canister. Then she lowered her voice. “There’s a door behind the bar. I can see it from here.” She cracked her knuckles, eyeing the bartender. “If I distract her, you could check it out.”

  “Distract her how, Petruzzelli, by holding a gun to her head?”

  Mercifully, at that moment a pair of customers entered the bar, and the opportunity was lost.

  The new customers seemed to be regulars. They sat at the bar and talked in low voices with the bartender.

  Jun said, “Molly Kent. There isn’t much public information available on her. Callisto native …”

  “Jun, I’m wondering—you said Colin Wetherall was also a Callisto native, but how can there be any Callisto natives over twenty? This moon wasn’t settled until 2267.”

  “But there was an orbital called Callisto,” Jun said. “It orbited Jupiter, not Callisto itself. It was a kind of permanent protest camp, inhabited by all the people who wanted to colonize Callisto, but weren’t allowed to until the UN opened it up for settlement in 2267. So when that happened, all two hundred thousand of them moved in at once. They dismantled the orbital and used its parts to start construction on the spaceports at Asgard and Valhalla.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember hearing something about that. That’s where all Jupiter’s micro-moons went.”

  The bartender—Molly Kent—came over to their table, followed by one of her customers. “This gentleman says you two were followed here.”

  “Followed? Why would anyone have followed us?” Elfrida said. Then she remembered that Petruzzelli had said the same thing back on Westhab 4. “Unless they wanted to mug us,” she said wryly.

  “Yeah, could’ve been,” Molly said. “Those are nice glasses.”

  “Sarcasm intended?” Elfrida joked nervously.

  “Did you see who was following us? What did they look like?” Petruzzelli said.

  Molly turned to her customer. He shrugged. “One dark, one not. They were Earthborn, like you.”

  “We don’t get many Earthborn people down here. But that’s changing,” Molly acknowledged. “More people are arriving from Earth every day. I’d rather have Earthlings than Belters, anyway.”

  Jun said in Elfrida’s ear, “She’s connected with Future Galaxy Enterprises. Not a shareholder, but she’s defended the company on the internet.”

  Concentrating on two conversations at once, Elfrida barely noticed the sound of a door opening.

  Petruzzelli started upright, knocking their drinks over.

  “Michael!” she cried.

  Elfrida got to her feet.

  Michael stood at the end of the bar, his mouth open in shock.

  Petruzzelli blundered towards him. Molly Kent reached for her. Petruzzelli pushed past the bartender and caught Michael in her arms. Elfrida heard tearful fragments of speech: “Missed you so much … thought you were dead … sorry … I’m so sorry …”

  Michael struggled. “Let me go!”

  Molly and her two customers pulled Petruzzelli off him. Petruzzelli had nanotic skeletal reinforcements. She took a lot of pulling off.

  Michael rubbed his thin arms as if Petruzzelli had hurt him. “You left me behind!” he shouted. “You abandoned me to go fight your stupid war. Well, why don’t you just go get killed, because I don’t need you anymore!”

  He darted back behind the bar. His light footsteps rattled on stairs.

  Petruzzelli started after him, but Molly and the two customers caught her. It took all three of them to hold her down. Chairs and tables toppled.

  Elfrida slipped around the melee and ran after Michael.

  Upstairs, this time, not down.

  Fetid hot air engulfed her as she climbed. It carried a scent like incense, but less pleasant.

  Head spinning, she pushed through the door at the top of the stairs. She seemed to have stepped into a dimly lit cubicle farm. The walls of the cubicles were too high for her to see over. Oh, she thought in relief, it’s just an immersion café.

  But as she hurried down the aisle, and glanced into cubicles on either side, she did not see gamers plugged into i
mmersion kits. She saw homeless-looking people lying on cots.

  This was the cheapest cheap hotel that ever was.

  But why were all these people sleeping, in the middle of the afternoon? And why did so many of them have IVs plugged into their cubital ports?

  Dread dried her throat. She reached the last cubicle and saw Michael sitting on the foot of a cot. Kiyoshi Yonezawa lay on it.

  Kiyoshi was a tall man, even by spaceborn standards, but he seemed to have shrunk since Elfrida saw him last. He was naked except for a silver cross around his neck and a pair of cut-off sweatpants. His ribs stuck out so much there were shadows between them. His bare chest rose and fell, just perceptibly.

  The IV line leading to his cubital port gleamed in the low light.

  Elfrida heard a quiet snuffling sound in her earpiece. “What?” she muttered.

  No answer. She realized it was the sound of Jun crying. AIs could cry. If they needed to. If it was the only way to stay human.

  Elfrida’s own reaction was quite different.

  She squeezed into the cubicle beside the cot. The cooler Michael had been carrying earlier was on the floor. She lifted it out of the way.

  “You’ve come to take me away, haven’t you?” Michael said. “Has my dad sent you to take me back to Ceres? I won’t go.”

  Elfrida opened the cooler. It contained several foilpacks. She sniffed them. Korean food. “Have you been feeding him?”

  “He needs me. I’m the only one who can make him eat.”

  “You know what that’s called?” Elfrida said. “That’s called enabling a drug addict.”

  She reached the medical unit splarted to the wall at the head of the cot, and hit the power switch. Then she yanked the IV line out of Kiyoshi’s arm. He twitched and let out a long snore. Bubbles burst on his lips.

  “The IV is just a hydration solution,” Michael said.

  “What’s he on?”

  “Peace.”

  “Piece of what?”

  “Peace. That’s what Molly calls it. I dunno what’s in it.”

  “Is it an inhalant? It smells awful.”

  “Yeah, someone probably just smoked up.”

  Elfrida noticed the boy’s eyes were hollow and his nostrils crusty, as if he had a cold. He’d probably been exposed to second-hand levels of the filthy stuff, just hanging out in here.

  She set down her rucksack, took out the preloaded syringe she’d brought from the Monster, and ripped off the sterile wrapping. Straining to see in the dim light, she inserted the syringe into Kiyoshi’s cubital port until it clicked, and then pushed the plunger.

  They waited for a couple of minutes. From below came the rumble of angry voices. Elfrida hadn’t heard a gunshot yet, so it was all good.

  Kiyoshi sat up. Wild-eyed, he focused first on Michael, and then on Elfrida.

  “Hello,” Elfrida said, waving her hand in front of his face. “Remember me?”

  Kiyoshi started to speak. The words broke into a deep, phlegmy cough. Finding the empty syringe in his cubital port, he yanked it out and tossed it on the floor. “What did you just inject me with?”

  “Jun called it a hangover cure. He said it was your own recipe.”

  “Jun? He’s here? Where is he?” Kiyoshi glanced around as if he expected to see Jun standing behind her.

  “He’s in orbit. In the Monster. Which is where I’ve just come from.” Elfrida raised her voice. “Jun, I could use a little help here!”

  Kiyoshi sat up straighter. He’d clearly grasped that there was an open transmitter somewhere on her person. That seemed to Elfrida to be a positive sign that he hadn’t entirely fried his brain. “I told you not to come here!” he yelled.

  Jun spoke in Elfrida’s ear. His voice was shaky, but clear. “‘Don’t come!’ That’s what he wrote to me in his last message from Callisto. That was all he wrote. Don’t come! Now I understand. He didn’t want me to see him like this.”

  Elfrida nodded briskly.

  “Jun figured you were hiding out in some disgusting drug den,” she said to Kiyoshi. “Apparently you’ve got a history of this kind of thing. That’s why he had me mix that cure. I’ve also got a pack of anti-addiction meds for you. I think you’d better take the first dose right now. No, first put on some proper clothes. You look homeless.”

  Kiyoshi did not comply. He just sat on the bed staring at her. Elfrida started to get frightened, and her fear made her speak sharply. “We didn’t come all this way just to intervene in your drug binge! We came to find the Salvation. But it’s not here. Nor are any of your people. Where are they, and where’s the ship? What happened?”

  “I did a terrible thing,” Kiyoshi said. He seemed to be not so much speaking to her, as speaking through her.

  Jun said, “I did a terrible thing!”

  “He says he did a terrible thing,” Elfrida reluctantly relayed. She could have just given Kiyoshi the glasses, but they felt like her lifeline out of Hel’s Kitchen, and she didn’t want to relinquish them.

  “I attacked the PLAN with a cyberweapon,” Jun said, “loaded inside the hulk of Tiangong Erhao.”

  “He attacked the PLAN with a cyberweapon, loaded inside the hulk of Tiangong Erhao.”

  “I know about that.”

  “So do I,” Elfrida said, puzzled. “That wasn’t terrible, Jun! It was awesome. You’re the one who really won this war, not Petruzzelli and her insane friends from Luna.”

  “Petruzzelli’s here? Shit.” Kiyoshi pressed his back against the wall of the cubicle, looking furtive.

  Jun said in Elfrida’s ear, “But the war isn’t won. Millions of Martians are still alive.”

  “So there are a few more of them than we thought,” Elfrida said, uncomfortably.

  “They’re the real victims!” Jun exclaimed. It sounded like he’d been holding this inside for a long time. Now it flooded out. “I had no idea they existed. Star Force made sure that information didn’t leak to the public. But that doesn’t let me off the hook. I assumed the PLAN was a souless machine. I had no basis for that assumption. It was just what everyone believed. And it was what I wanted to believe. So I designed my weapon … my virus … to knock out the PLAN’s control interfaces. I wanted to crash its distributed processing network, disable its energy infrastructure … all the stuff you’d do to take down a machine. But I ended up taking down humans. I don’t know how many of them my virus reached. Thousands? Millions? And how many of those are dead already? How many will be killed by Star Force in the coming months, and how many have already been slaughtered by the PLAN itself, as traitors to its sick ideology? Their blood is on my hands!”

  Elfrida struggled to understand. “I don’t think you did anything that bad,” she said lamely.

  “No? If you give slaves their freedom, and then turn away and leave them to die, that’s not that bad?”

  Kiyoshi couldn’t have heard any of this, of course. He didn’t seem interested. He sat up straight, staring at Elfrida. Again, he seemed to speak through her instead of to her. “Get out of here, Jun! Now, before it’s too late!”

  Elfrida heard a staticky clunk in her ear. A half-second snatch of what sounded like Mendoza’s voice. And then nothing.

  She pulled her glasses off, switched the transmitter off and on again, tried the earbud in her other ear. Nothing.

  “What happened to the Salvation?” Fear spiked her voice high. “What did you do, Kiyoshi?”

  He rolled off the cot and grabbed her glasses. “I sold the boss-man out to the ISA.” He dropped the glasses on the floor, trod on them barefoot, then picked up the cooler and thumped the glasses, using the cooler like an unwieldy hammer. “I’m a snitch, Elfrida.”

  Thump.

  “They took the boss-man.”

  Thump.

  “They also took the Salvation.”

  Thump-thump.

  That wasn’t Kiyoshi smashing her glasses, that was someone coming upstairs.

  “They also took everyone on board.” Kiyoshi look
ed up from the scatter of components that used to be her glasses.

  “Mendoza made those for me!” Elfrida cried. She was having trouble processing what Kiyoshi had said. “If they took everyone, why didn’t they take you?”

  Behind her, a door crashed open. Blinding light bathed the cubicles. Junkies bawled in panic, their ‘peace’-ful sleep broken.

  “They left me here,” Kiyoshi said, “just in case Jun would be stupid and selfless enough to come looking for me.” He sat on the edge of the cot, head hanging, as if he was going to throw up. “He’s an artificial super-intelligence, but he can be so stupid sometimes. I was bait.”

  Gloved hands gripped Elfrida’s arms from behind. “You’re under arrest. Resistance will be interpreted as consciousness of guilt. You have the right to remain silent …”

  xvii.

  “Their blood is on my hands!” Jun exclaimed passionately. He needed someone to understand the burden of guilt he’d been carrying. Maybe he should have waited until they brought Kiyoshi back to the Monster. But it had all just spilled out.

  “I don’t think you did anything that bad,” said Elfrida’s distant voice.

  “No? If you give slaves their freedom, and then run away and leave them to die, that’s not that bad?”

  The feed from Elfrida’s glasses cut out.

  “Something’s blocking it,” Mendoza said. He was on the bridge, monitoring the comms workstation.

  By the time these words left Mendoza’s lips, Jun had already diagnosed the interruption. All his comms were being blocked. He was no longer receiving radio-frequency signals of any kind. He had no doubt his transmissions were being blocked, too. Jamming technology that powerful pointed to one source: the ISA.

  Even the ISA couldn’t jam radar and LiDAR. Jun rapidly analyzed the traffic in Callisto orbit and found a ship speeding towards the Monster. It was stealthed, to the maximum extent that humanity’s pathetically lame stealthing technologies permitted. It hailed him as it came—the effect like a shout in church, amidst the silence on every other channel:

  “XX MONSTER. STAND BY FOR BOARDING. RESISTANCE WILL BE INTERPRETED AS CONSCIOUSNESS OF GUILT ...”