The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  “Flight simulator,” Kiyoshi said.

  “Practice for your flight to Pallas.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re so pleased with yourself,” Molly said. “This refugee fleet ruse; it’s bullshit. People like Adnan Kharbage and his friends have backup plans out the wazoo. You’re their Plan B. Maybe Plan C or Plan fucking Z. You’re going to get killed.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Oh, you’re definitely going to get killed.”

  Kiyoshi hunched his shoulders, disengaging from Molly’s warnings. “Mikey, do you have a minute?”

  “Sure!” Michael said.

  Kiyoshi lowered his voice to a whisper. “Could you get this behavioral modification program off my BCI?”

  Colin laughed. “That’s what I asked him. What is it, anyway? All I know is I can’t uninstall it, and it keeps flashing warnings on my retinal implants.”

  “When you do what?” Molly said.

  “Oh …” Colin reached into his pocket for one of his cigarettes. He lifted it towards his lips. His whole body jerked. He dropped the cigarette. “Yowch! When I do that, for example. It just shocked me, and flashed up a screen saying that vaping is hazardous to my health, which is bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit if you’re vaping straight amphetamines,” Molly said. “But that’s just a low-level intervention. It gets a lot worse.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I used to run a business in Hel’s Kitchen, if you recall. The main users of nanny-ware are pimps, who install it on their whores’ BCIs to keep them in line. That’s why you haven’t heard of it. Human prostitution is very niche. The other big users would be torture fetishists. Of course, it’s totally illegal. But I guess nothing’s illegal now. This is what the post-UN world looks like.”

  Michael cringed. Molly’s angry voice would definitely have been captured by the listening devices. He grabbed Colin’s tablet. “I used to have a Nanny, too,” he wrote. “When I was really little, after my mom left, before Dad married Stepmom No. 1. I used to have to wear these interface glasses. I couldn’t take them off—they were bonded to my head. My Nanny was on the glasses and it basically didn’t let me do ANYTHING.”

  “Oh, Mikey,” Molly said. Her voice was soft now. “You poor little guy.”

  “And I had to do sims. Not anything disgusting, but just learning games, and a lot of dumb family scenarios. It was supposed to teach me empathy and social skills.”

  “Mikey, that’s child abuse.”

  “But I broke my Nanny! I uninstalled it! And when Dad saw I did that, he was impressed. After that I didn’t have a Nanny again, and I didn’t have to wear those glasses, either.”

  Molly smiled the first smile he’d seen from her today. “I keep forgetting you have a genius-level IQ.”

  Kiyoshi took the tablet and wrote a string of numbers and letters on it. He showed them to Michael for long enough for Michael to memorize them, then blanked the screen. He unfastened his pendant. The chain was actually a slender silver cable. He plugged it into the jack above his left ear, and plugged the other end into Colin’s tablet. “Go.”

  Michael hunkered down under the lemon tree with the tablet on his knees. Kiyoshi knelt beside him, connected to the tablet by the interface cable. With Kiyoshi looking at the screen, Michael didn’t dare to peek at any of Kiyoshi’s personal stuff. He ignored the folders tantalizingly entitled Monster, Home, and even the one labelled Petruzzelli, and dived straight into the backend. He found the Nanny program hiding among the BCI’s thousands of executable scripts, and viewed the code.

  Five increasingly tense minutes later, he said haltingly, “This … um, isn’t the version I had when I was four. It’s a more advanced version.”

  “How about just deleting it?” Kiyoshi said.

  “Um, no. See what it’s done here? It’s copied itself into every executable file on your BCI. You would have to wipe everything.”

  Kiyoshi took the tablet. He flipped back to the top-level menu and stared at his folders. Monster. Home. Petruzzelli. Family. Recipes. Music. Random Shit. St. Francis. “No,” he said at last. “Can’t do that. But how bad can it get? What’s it for, Michael? What did your dad put it on here for?”

  “Uh, I think probably to stop you … from doing drugs.”

  Kiyoshi laughed. He shut down the tablet and refastened the cable chain around his neck. He and Colin both laughed until they doubled over, punching each other and wiping their eyes. Junkie humor. Michael didn’t get it.

  Neither did Molly, apparently. She sat on the roots of the lemon tree, staring blankly at the ground.

  After a moment she looked up—straight at Michael. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

  “Did I know he would put nanny-ware on your BCIs? No!”

  “No, Mikey. Did you know your dad was going to force Kiyoshi into a suicide mission?”

  “Isn’t,” Kiyoshi protested. “Suicide? I’m Catholic. See this cross? I believe in God. Suicide is a mortal sin. Me? Nope.”

  “That’s the spirit, my brother,” Colin said, thumping him on the back.

  “Just shut the hell up, both of you,” Molly said. “Michael, did you set us up on purpose? To punish us or something? I just want to know.”

  Put on the spot, Michael twisted his fingers in the hem of his sweater. He wanted to disclaim responsibility. But he also wanted credit for being clever.

  Kiyoshi saved him, swooping on him and lifting him off the ground. His face folded into lines of strain—Michael was not so easy to lift in 0.5 gees. But he did it, balancing Michael on his shoulder so Michael’s head brushed the leaves of the lemon tree. “This kid? Bet you anything he had it all gamed out from square one. He’s smarter than anyone else in this orbital, including all those overpaid corporate cyborgs.” He grinned up at Michael. Overjoyed that Kiyoshi understood what he’d done, Michael plucked a lemon and bounced it off Kiyoshi’s head. Kiyoshi pretended to stagger. “Ow!”

  I’ll keep your secret, Michael silently promised him.

  He’d known Kiyoshi wanted to get to Pallas and rescue his brother. So he’d told his father that Kiyoshi was the best pilot in the whole galaxy and it would be a really good idea to hire him.

  He’d been thinking more along the lines of a recycling barge.

  But a fake refugee fleet loaded with nukes … yeah, that would do.

  “I was a bit worried in the middle,” he admitted, whispering into Kiyoshi’s ear. “But you completely played them!”

  “I’m gonna owe you as long as I live,” Kiyoshi whispered, setting him down, and Michael felt a pang of anxiety, because he hadn’t yet quite figured out how he was going to stow away on board the Unsaved Changes.

  Kiyoshi and Colin went away to look for food. Michael listened to them going away down the circumferential corridor, deliberately testing their Nannies out by walking into walls.

  Molly said, “They have no idea.” She knitted her fingers together in front of her mouth. “Mikey, I don’t think you understand what you’ve done.”

  “I got him a ship. I got him a fleet!”

  “It’s a bit different from bringing him a cooler full of Korean food.”

  “I said I’m sorry about the Unsaved Changes!”

  Molly shook her dreads dismissively. “It wasn’t my ship. Not really. A friend left it to me in his will.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not even a friend. Just someone who died at my place. It worked out well that time, but usually people would die owing me money.”

  “Oh.”

  “When I was running my business, I got used to seeing people die. I convinced myself it wasn’t my problem. But Kiyoshi … kind of called me on it. That’s why I decided to leave Callisto. I’ve changed, Mikey.”

  “Yes.” He thought back to how nice she’d been to him on board the Unsaved Changes. “Yes, you have.”

  “I was going to start a completely different business here. I got the idea for it when I
went to see Kiyoshi’s family with him. I thought I might open a halfway house.”

  “What’s a halfway house?”

  “Oh, never mind. I just don’t want to see anyone else die. Especially not Kiyoshi.”

  “He said he wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, so he can predict the future? He’s fucking invulnerable or something? He’s not even that great of a pilot!”

  Michael sat down beside her. His eyes stung. He was terribly afraid, in his heart, that she was right. That he’d screwed up. That Kiyoshi was going to die, and he, Michael, would be responsible.

  “You have to stop helping him do stupid things,” she said.

  Michael gave the tiniest nod. Any more and tears would spill out.

  “When those ISA dickshits came to my bar, they told me I’d never heard of … those two women they took away. See, I can’t even remember what they looked like, much less their names. Because I did what the ISA said. I deleted my vid and audio captures of the whole day. And I certainly never heard of a ship in orbit that was apparently piloted by Kiyoshi’s brother. They took it; it’s gone, and so is he. Kiyoshi should have deleted all that data.”

  “I think it’s great that he didn’t,” Michael said in a small voice. “I really admire him for not giving up on his family.”

  “OK, but if you really want to help him, you should be helping smart, not helping stupid. That’s my point.”

  “I know. You’re right. So I’m going to go with him,” Michael confided in a voice so small, Molly had to lean close to him to hear. “They’re mustering the fake refugee fleet in orbit tomorrow. I’m going to take our skiff and sneak over there. I’ll get one of the serving bots to cover for me; dress it in my clothes …”

  “And stow away on a hauler bound for Pallas.”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Pallas.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not helping smart, Michael. That’s galactically stupid. I can’t let you do that. You’re only ten.”

  Michael stuck out his chin. “Maybe Pallas is just a regular old asteroid, and we’ve all been tricked into believing the ISA’s propaganda that it’s like some kind of Death Star!”

  “But it is some kind of Death Star,” she said. “I know, because I’ve been there.”

  ★

  That night in the Kharbage orbital, in the corridor between the tradesmen’s airlock and the cold storage cellar, where there were no cameras, Molly struggled into one of the new Customs & Resources spacesuits. “Oof! It’s tight.”

  “It’s supposed to be tight,” Michael said impatiently. “I guess you’ve never worn a skinsuit. It’s made of shape-memory alloy that conforms to your body.”

  “What’s this for?” Colin said, holding up a slender nozzle attached to the crotch of his inside-out suit.

  “Um, that goes in your, um. In case you have to go number two.”

  “I think I’ll skip that. We’re not going to be in these suits for long.”

  “Don’t skip it,” Michael said. His own hygiene system in place, his seals done up to his collar, he danced from one foot to the other. They were so slow and clumsy. The spaceborn could be really ignorant about the technology that kept them alive. To be fair to them, neither Colin nor Molly had probably ever worn such expensive suits before.

  The flipside of their ignorance was their blasé attitude to going outside.

  Outside.

  Michael was still scared stiff of it.

  He had convinced himself that with Kiyoshi’s life at stake, not to mention the fate of Ceres, he would be able to cope.

  But as the three of them hustled out of the maintenance airlock, he flashed back on the day Kiyoshi had thrown him off the Kharbage Collector. The vivid memory paralyzed him. That time, he’d been spaced. This time, he’d spaced himself. How stupid could he be?

  The great steel curve of the orbital rolled overhead, and all he wanted for a moment was to scramble back inside. Back to safety.

  Back to his father?

  No.

  Molly caught his left hand. Colin caught his right. “Where’s this skiff?” Colin said in Michael’s helmet.

  “C-c-coming.” Michael sent out a radio call for the Rolls Royce. It soared around the hab to them.

  A pressurized, streamlined four-man skiff with the Kharbage, LLC logo on the side, the Rolls came in handy for visiting between orbital habs. Michael had signed it out to his stepmother for the whole night. The orbital was too dumb to realize that that made no sense, seeing as his stepmother wasn’t here. She was down at Occator Lake having beauty treatments and waiting for the world to end.

  We will STOP that Martian fleet, Michael vowed. He’d come to feel strongly about this mission. After all, it was his homeworld at stake.

  Ceres turned below them, half-lit. Colin took the controls and piloted the Rolls Royce through orbital space, sticking to the pre-programmed trajectory for 11,000 kilometers. Eleven to thirteen K was the parking orbit for large craft, and that’s where the Ceres fleet was assembling now.

  The four ITN haulers appeared on the skiff’s radar screen first, lozenges of green, like the Salvation without the torus.

  Empty.

  Just hulks now, stripped down to improve their mass ratios.

  A little higher, and the smaller ships of the fleet appeared. Landing craft were still taking people and valuable equipment off the Starcruisers. None of their crews would be going to Pallas. The Customs & Resources gang were prepared to risk hardware on this gambit, but not their employees’ lives.

  This afternoon, the LGM man had told Michael that Customs & Resources was positioning itself to be the dominant power in the outer solar system. The supermajors were rebalancing into space, now that the threat of the PLAN was gone. Ceres would become the capital of the solar system in the 24th century.

  If it could be saved from nanite contamination.

  All those small ships zipping around masked the Rolls Royce’s drive signature. An insect among mammoths, it puffed past the Starcruisers. Colin cut the drive.

  Michael said, “There’s the Unsaved Changes.” He’d hardly recognized its radar profile. It had been stealthed with a coat of carbon nanotube paint—paint with nanotube particles suspended in it—to absorb microwave radiation. Nose on, its radar cross-section was practically invisible.

  The point on the radar plot turned slowly and became a ghostly fan. The old Steelmule’s reactor had been swapped out for one so powerful, it required a new drive shield twice the diameter of the fuselage.

  “Oh, my poor old ship,” Molly sighed.

  “Are you sure this is it, Mikey?” Colin said.

  He nodded. “Check the wifi.” Kiyoshi was listening to music.

  xxiv.

  Some made-in-Ceres mix of soupy bass and electronic squawks. Vocals in Chinese. It was fine. It had a beat.

  He squatted under the Steelmule’s comms desk, removing the transponder. He remembered how the ISA had tracked the Startractor’s movements from 99984 Ravilious to Callisto. Not gonna get caught out that way twice.

  “Hey!” Adnan Kharbage said over the radio. “You just stopped sending transponder data.”

  “Correct,” Kiyoshi said. “If this was a real refugee fleet, we wouldn’t be broadcasting our location to the whole solar system. I’m also going to disable the transponders in the other ships once we’re underway. Yes, I know you’re worried that I might steal your ships. Honestly: don’t worry. I won’t.”

  “Ha ha, of course we trust you,” Kharbage said, making clear how much they didn’t.

  “Anyway, how can I put a foot out of line, with twenty of the most bad-ass security contractors on Ceres in the back seat?”

  The contractors were down in the crew quarters at the moment, trying to figure out how twenty guys could live in there for two weeks. The Steelmule was roomier than its spartan cousin, the Superlifter, but not by much. It had a galley, a mess, and two cabins. On the way to Ceres, Kiyoshi and Colin had bunked together, a
nd Michael had shared with Molly.

  Kiyoshi didn’t care what kind of arrangement the security contractors came up with. He was planning to sleep on the bridge, anyway.

  ★

  Colin cursed under his breath, jinking around twisted-carbon tethers that stretched away into the dark. Workbots crawled along the tethers towards the Unsaved Changes, untroubled by the pre-launch wisps of hot plasma drifting from the Steelmule’s business end.

  Each of these tethers terminated at one of the haulers they’d just passed. The huge, empty ships drifted a kilometer away, their underpowered engines keeping station in synch with the Unsaved Changes. The tethers drew taut lines across the limb of Ceres. The Steelmule, with its musclebound new drive, was going to tow them all the way to Pallas.

  “Those tethers are made of the same stuff they were going to use for the space elevator,” Michael said. “They started building it in 2210. And then the PLAN happened. That was the end of the Ceres space elevator. It would’ve been way too easy for the PLAN to take it out. I wonder if we’ll build it now? If we don’t get invaded by Martians, I mean.”

  “Mikey,” Molly said, “be quiet.”

  “I was just …”

  “Put your helmet on.”

  The Rolls Royce nosed around the cluster of spare propellant tanks that had been bolted onto the spine of the Unsaved Changes, above its petticoat of radiator vanes.

  “Hey, they gave him a buggy,” Michael said.

  A skiff twice the size of their own perched on the bottom of the fuselage, anchored by its own magnetic clamps.

  “I guess he would need some way of getting around, if there were maintenance issues with the other ships,” Michael said.

  “It’s a big job for one guy,” Molly agreed. She put her helmet on.

  Colin locked the Rolls Royce onto the fuselage. Thunk, thunk. He sealed his own helmet and then grabbed the rucksack that had been strapped into the back seat next to Michael.

  It wasn’t actually Colin’s rucksack. It was Kiyoshi’s. He’d left it behind on the Kharbage orbital. Colin had said it would be nice to take it to him.