The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  —and saw Michael lying next to his cot, squeezed into the narrow space like a corpse in a coffin.

  On the boy’s chest, one limp hand covered Kiyoshi’s gear.

  Kiyoshi snatched the cigarette and vial. He stuffed them in the pocket of his sweats and hauled Michael off the floor. The effort made his head spin.

  Michael slumped bonelessly in his hands, breathing, but unresponsive. Sleeping peacefully, as the junkies put it.

  Gritting his teeth, Kiyoshi picked the boy up. He was so weak and stiff that even in Callisto’s gravity, the ten-year-old felt like a burden. He staggered out of the den and downstairs to the bar.

  Fortunately, it appeared to be early in the day. Molly was the only person in the bar. She sat at one of her own spotlessly clean tables, reading something on a screen and eating an omelette.

  “Give him something to bring him around. Stim, or whatever you’ve got.”

  “What? Oh, it’s Mikey. What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s taken your shit.”

  Molly sighed. “People are always leaving their gear lying around.” Unhurriedly, she went behind the bar and foraged in drawers.

  Kiyoshi sat down with Michael sprawled across his lap. He cupped the boy’s head in his right elbow—the one without the cubital port—and held his fingers under Michael’s nose to make sure he was still breathing. Molly faffed around behind the bar.

  “What’s today?” Kiyoshi said.

  “Tuesday.”

  “No, the date.”

  “Oh, I get what you mean. It’s the twelfth of March, 2290.”

  March. Holy crap. It had been a whole month since they took Jun away.

  A wave of rage swept over Kiyoshi. He breathed out hard through his nose and gritted his teeth. The action triggered the familiar hangover ache in his head.

  “I’ve been here for two months plus. Did you keep on supplying me out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “Well, those pigs went a long way,” Molly said. “I think you pretty much have smoked everything I made from selling them. But I like you, so …” She shrugged. “Here, give him this.”

  Kiyoshi took the glass of lemon-colored liquid and tried unsuccessfully to make Michael wake up and drink it.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Molly said. “I’ll do it.”

  Kneeling beside the chair, Molly delivered two ringing slaps to Michael’s cheeks and spoke to him sharply. When his eyes fluttered open, she pinched his nose. His mouth opened. She tipped the drink down his throat with professional deftness.

  “There.”

  Michael’s eyes closed again.

  “It’ll take a while to work. Do you want some?”

  “Sure,” Kiyoshi forced himself to say. She went back behind the bar.

  Kiyoshi snuggled Michael to his chest, listening for any change in the rhythm of his breathing. The boy’s elbows were chapped and scabbed. His hair had been hacked off with scissors. He’d probably done it himself, to get it out of his eyes. That had been the limit of his self-care. Tidemarks of grime ringed his neck. He smelled like his underwear was very, very dirty.

  A louse crawled out of Michael’s hair, and Kiyoshi squashed it between finger and thumb. “Wake up,” he whispered. “Wake up, wake up.”

  Michael’s eyes popped open. He looked up at Kiyoshi expressionlessly. Unsure if Michael was really seeing him, Kiyoshi forced a smile. “I should whip your ass. That shit could have killed you.”

  “I want to go home,” Michael said.

  “Huh?”

  “Home, I want to go home.” He closed his eyes again and turned his face into Kiyoshi’s chest.

  Molly, expressionless, brought over a second glass of her hangover cure. Kiyoshi set it on the table and glared up at her. She was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever met. Her air of serenity and self-possession still intrigued him. But he now believed that her fascinating exterior concealed a cold, hard soul.

  “What if he’d died?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I said. You run a drug den. What if this child had died from smoking the shit you gave me?”

  “If that happened, I would feel really bad about that. But he’s going to be OK. I don’t think he’s been doing this regularly.”

  “But you don’t know, because you never go upstairs, except when someone dies.” Kiyoshi swallowed the drink. It tasted like bitter lemon soda. It didn’t work as fast as the hangover cure he used to mix himself. His head continued to pound. “Seriously. You know who this kid is?”

  “Isn’t he yours?”

  The assumption stunned Kiyoshi. She really thought he’d been on a drug binge with his own son for a nurse. He looked down at Michael. The boy was dark-haired, and sallow … especially now that he’d been living in Hel’s Kitchen for two and a half months. He could plausibly be half-Japanese. And Kiyoshi could easily have a ten-year-old son, if he’d married and been fruitful like a Catholic should, instead of knocking around the solar system, doing drugs and chasing a quick buck, until everyone he knew got arrested by the ISA.

  “I have to get off this freaking moon,” he muttered.

  Molly laughed. “Good luck with that.”

  “Did I miss something while I was out?”

  “Oh, not really. Things have gotten worse. Same old, same old.” Molly pushed back her blue dreadlocks. Holding them in a bunch behind her head, she said, “You want to know how I can live with myself? I see it as basically the same as providing a GBI.”

  “A what?”

  “On Earth, you know how they have a Guaranteed Basic Income?”

  “Oh, right; that.”

  “Yeah. The UN issues a certain amount of cash to everyone who doesn’t have a job or other means of support. It’s not ideal, sure, but it’s the only solution that doesn’t lead to social instability.”

  “A solution in search of a problem,” Kiyoshi grumbled.

  “A problem that’s as old as the information age. The problem of too many people. Specifically, too many stupid, genetically unfit people. What do we need them all for? Nothing. But we can’t get rid of them, since murder is illegal,” she ticked off on her fingers, “abortion is illegal, involuntary sterilization is illegal, and herding them into giant prisons, excuse me, arcologies, like the Chinese do, is also illegal. So sometime last century, the great and good of the UN decided to just pay them a GBI and let them spend their lives consuming entertainment. Maybe it even works out economically. But we can’t do that out here. We live in an environment so dangerous, we can’t let stupid people roam around doing whatever they want. Besides, who’s gonna pay them a GBI? No one. So what I provide is an alternative to that service.”

  Kiyoshi shook his head. The hangover cure was starting to work: the action didn’t make his head hurt. “Back home where I’m from, we had thirty thousand people and full employment.”

  “Doing what?”

  “We built a cathedral.”

  “Well, there’s no market for cathedrals here,” Molly said.

  “No, I figured that.”

  Kiyoshi went back upstairs and changed into the clothes he’d bought at Legacy’s Leather Goods. It felt like a lifetime ago. The clothes were crumpled and musty. The trousers hung off his hips, he’d lost so much weight. When he returned to the bar, Molly wolf-whistled. “Going out?”

  “Yeah. Can you keep an eye on Michael?”

  The boy was still sleeping with his head on the table. Molly sat across from him, her screen propped in front of her. “Sure,” she said, reaching over the screen to ruffle Michael’s hair.

  “I’ll pay you,” Kiyoshi said, just to make sure she didn’t forget Michael’s existence again.

  “It would be appreciated.” She raised her head. Her eyes were green, and haunted. “I haven’t even been covering my costs recently.”

  “So why not space some of those stupid, unfit junkies upstairs? Cut your expenses.”

  “That would be unethical,” she said, biting the
word off, and went back to her screen.

  “What’re you reading?”

  “A romance novel.”

  Kiyoshi ventured out into Hel’s Kitchen for the first time in two months. The place seemed unchanged. Maybe the air was a bit better. He enabled his BCI’s wireless connection, and experienced the same old gauntlet of music and sales pitches.

  But as soon as he crossed the bridge into Westhab, he saw changes. The crowds of refugees and their temporary encampments had gone. The plazas stood empty, except where the raised floors had been torn up. It looked like there was some plan to install midstream water processing units in the river under the floor. Maybe they were going to use all this wasted space for food production. It seemed like a good idea. But people hurried along with their heads down, avoiding eye contact, and it reminded Kiyoshi of the empty streets of 11073 Galapagos the year they’d had the nanorot.

  Location-targeted wifi announcements had taken the place of the old pop-ups, warning him not to smoke, drink, do drugs, urinate, or litter in public.

  Hammer and Tong’s, the knife shop run by Lewis Tong, was still there. But the dalek-class security bot outside reflected the changes in the hab. Instead of a jokey hammer, it now held a PEPgun.

  Kiyoshi bypassed the bot cautiously and entered the shop with both hands in sight. “There been some kind of a crackdown?”

  “Well, hey! Look who came back from the dead.”

  “I’ve been staying at Molly’s.”

  “Same frigging difference.”

  “I noticed the refugees are gone.”

  “Ain’t gone,” Lewis Tong said. “Just been moved. There’s a brand-new hab opened north of here. That’s where they are, buildin’ farms and shit. If you want to eat, you gotta work, that’s what Nemesis says, and I don’t disagree.”

  “Who’s Nemesis?”

  Tong’s gaze tracked to the window. A group of eight people crossed the plaza in a formation that Kiyoshi identified as a patrol. They wore stark black uniforms, carried carbines, and stared hard at Hammer, as if daring the security bot to open fire.

  “That’s one of Nemesis’s patrols,” Tong said. “They keep order, that’s for sure.”

  “I guess I have a lot of catching up to do,” Kiyoshi said. “But first, I need my knife back. You know, the tantō I left with you.”

  Tong’s eyes gleamed. “Maybe I sold it.”

  “I know you didn’t sell it.”

  “You’re right. But it was a trade, as I recall. I gave you a needlegun. You got that?”

  Kiyoshi shook his head. The needlegun was lying somewhere out in the ice spires, far from here. “Nope. But I got this.”

  He unfastened the chain and lifted his cross over his head. It was the last thing of any value he possessed.

  “Jewellery? Uh uh.”

  “Take a closer look,” Kiyoshi said, turning the cross over so Tong could see the stamp on the back.

  “Holy cow.”

  “Yup; 80% pure physical iridium.”

  “Son, for that you can have your knife back and … take your pick of the shit in the back room.”

  The door chimed. Colin Wetherall staggered into the shop, panting as if he’d been running. He stared at Kiyoshi with comical astonishment. “Wow! What a surprise meeting you here!”

  “Long time no see,” Kiyoshi said. He guessed that Tong had texted Wetherall the minute Kiyoshi entered the shop. He’d counted on it, actually.

  He turned to watch Tong fetch his dagger. He was playing it casual until he got a better sense of the changes in Asgard, which Molly had described as changes for the worse.

  Wetherall leaned against the counter, catching his breath. He wore the same old baggy black outfit. It looked a bit more tattered than formerly. His pockmarked face was pink from running. He dragged out a cigarette and puffed candy-scented vapor. “Man, I almost ran into a patrol out there!”

  “Saw them go past,” Tong said from the back room.

  “What’s the deal with these patrols?” Kiyoshi said.

  “What’s the deal?” Wetherall echoed. “It’s fucked. Brother, it’s just totally fucked. Lewis, you got anything to drink?”

  “Sure,” Tong said. “Kay, you want a coffee?”

  It took Kiyoshi a second to remember that they knew him as Kay@Paladin. “Please.” Coffee might help with his hangover headache, which had started to get worse again.

  “He’s cool with Nemesis,” Wetherall muttered. “He pays his protection, keeps his head down. Plus, it’s been good for his business.”

  “Who’s Nemesis?”

  “Oh, brother. I guess I’d better start from the beginning. First off, UNSA is gone, OK? What we have now is rule by Nemesis. And who is Nemesis? He is the biggest, baddest pirate in the asteroid belt. Him and his guys arrived with the refugees. First they occupied Valhalla. I guess that was right around New Year’s. The peacekeepers declined to do anything about that, such as kicking them out, so the predictable thing predictably happened: Nemesis moved in on Asgard City, and kicked them out.”

  At this point Kiyoshi started to laugh. Wetherall looked offended. Kiyoshi slapped the counter. “Nemesis? Biggest, baddest pirate in the asteroid belt? Guy calls himself Nemesis?”

  Wetherall sniggered, seeing the joke. “Yeah, that’s the trouble. He takes himself way too seriously.”

  “True,” Kiyoshi said, thinking of the boss-man. Wondering where he was now, alive or dead. “It’s the ones who take themselves seriously you have to watch out for.”

  “Here. Just so you know who to watch out for.” Wetherall flipped Kiyoshi an image file labelled Nemesis_press pack. Kiyoshi opened it. He half-expected Nemesis to be the boss-man. Instead he saw a rat-faced, thirty-ish man of Southeast Asian extraction. “What a dork.”

  “Oh, he’s a complete dork. Didn’t you hear all those announcements about hygiene and littering? It’s like Life Support 101.”

  Tong came back with Kiyoshi’s dagger, and three cups of coffee. The aroma turned Kiyoshi’s stomach. “Are we discussing the King of Callisto?”

  “Shit,” Kiyoshi said, “please don’t tell me he calls himself a king.”

  “Not only that, he acts like one,” Wetherall said.

  “As you would,” Tong pointed out, “if you’d gambled that you could get away with stealing a whole moon—and won.”

  “Star Force?” Kiyoshi said.

  “Who?” Wetherall responded. “Everything they have, every ship, every asset is in the Martian theater.”

  “Still?”

  “Yep. They’ve abandoned the outer solar system. I guess they figure they can stomp on the pirates anytime, when they’ve mopped up the Martians. But it’s not going to be easy.” Wetherall slurped coffee, and stared bleakly out of the shop window. “People are sick of the UN micromanaging everything. Always saying can’t, mustn’t, don’t touch that, it’s part of our cultural heritage, that isn’t allowed, this isn’t allowed, obey the regulations or pay a fine … they made us wait eighty years to settle Callisto! Why? Who the hell knows? Bureaucracy.”

  Kiyoshi nodded, understanding. “We’ve only got one solar system. There’s only so much stuff to go around. It’s a zero-sum game, and people want their piece of the action.”

  “But I preferred UNSA to this gang,” Wetherall said. “I didn’t even tell you: Nemesis stole my business!”

  “He bought you out,” Tong said.

  “Yeah, for a whopping fifty K, with a gun literally pointed at my head.”

  “Future Galaxy Enterprises?” Kiyoshi said.

  “Now known as—wait for it—Nemesystems.”

  “Sorry; can’t not laugh.”

  “I’m laughing,” Wetherall said, “but I’m also crying, because we identified the biggest investment opportunity in the history of Callisto. We built the steam drills and paid for the radar surveys. We were digging the holes. We lined up the buyers. And those bastards bought us out for fifty K apiece before we saw a penny of ROI! My business partners already
got the hell out …”

  “Haddock?”

  “Who?”

  “Namsadang.”

  “Oh, Park. No, he’s still here, working for Nemesystems. Him and his whole family. Some people just fall on their feet.”

  “And some people,” Tong said pointedly, “spend the entire fifty K on drugs.”

  “Did you?” Kiyoshi said neutrally, being in no position to point fingers.

  Wetherall flushed, and lifted his coffee cup to hide his face. “I was depressed as fuck.”

  Wetherall was a different kind of junkie from him, Kiyoshi reflected. He was the kind that could go on a bender one day, and bounce back the next day … otherwise known as having it all.

  He’d been going to ask Wetherall if he had any anti-addiction meds. Now pride intervened. He didn’t need that crutch. He’d just white-knuckle through. The decision gave him a burst of confidence.

  However, the news that Wetherall had spent his payoff on drugs dismayed Kiyoshi for another reason. He’d been hoping Wetherall could front him a couple of fares.

  He drank his coffee and asked casually, “What’s next for you?”

  “Did it occur to you to wonder why I’m hiding from the patrols? Nemesis told me to get off Callisto yesterday. Either I find a ship, or I can leave through the nearest airlock. His words.”

  “And you don’t have a ship.”

  “I was kind of hoping you did.”

  Wetherall grinned, ready to laugh at this latest stroke of ill-fortune. But Kiyoshi was in no mood to laugh anymore. “My ship’s gone,” he said flatly.

  The Monster… the ISA had taken the Monster. They’d taken Jun.

  Common sense said Kiyoshi didn’t have a hope in hell of rescuing him. It was the ISA. As long as there was a UN, the ISA would remain mysteriously potent, unbeatable, everywhere.

  Then again, that’s what they used to say about the PLAN, too.

  “I need transport.” He picked up his dagger and shaved a rind off hs thumbnail. His nails had grown long and jagged.

  “Yeah? Where to?”

  “Ceres.”

  “What’s on Ceres?”

  “My family.”

  “Naw, man, really.”

  “OK, you know that kid who’s been staying with me?”