The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  And sat bolt upright.

  The microimpact sensors on the hull of Trailer No.4 were registering a hail of small shocks.

  He generated a real-time report. The shocks weren’t strong enough to be actual microimpacts.

  It looked like someone or something was on the hull of Trailer No. 4, hammering on it.

  Leaving the ISA officer talking to the air, he ran for the locker containing their EVA suits. It was possible to run on the bridge now, because the Unsaved Changes had reached 0.4 gees of acceleration—still much less than what its souped-up drive could produce, but close to maxing out the tension rating of the tow tethers. He shouted down the keel tube, “Colin, take the bridge for a few minutes.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Going for a spacewalk.”

  Out the command airlock. Thrust gravity pulled him aft. Moving towards the ship’s nose was like climbing a wall. On all fours, he squeezed between the anchor struts, and clambered into the ex-space elevator basket of trusses. The tow tethers sang overhead. The shiny black cables were as thick as his arm. He reached up to grab one, and jerked his glove back—the freaking things were vibrating.

  Or maybe starting to oscillate, which would not be good, but he didn’t have time to worry about that now. He attached his personal tether to the No.4 tow tether and sailed down its 1.5 kilometer length like it was a zip line.

  “Hey,” Wetherall said, from the bridge. “This guy gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m afraid he’ll catch me out no matter what I say. I’m patching him through to you.”

  “Where’re you going, captain?” the ISA officer said in his helmet.

  Kiyoshi scanned space. Nothing but nothing in every direction. But somewhere out there was an ISA ship. Couldn’t pick it up on radar or infrared. Radio signal location explained why: the ISA ship was directly behind them, lined up with the Steelmule’s drive, so their own hot exhaust hid its waste heat emissions, and its own drive was pointing away from them. As for the radar thing, they’d be using rounded surfaces, carbon nanotube paint, yadda yadda. There was no mystery to the ISA ship’s invisibility—just old tricks.

  How close was the ISA ship, exactly? Couldn’t say.

  “Got you in my crosshairs,” the ISA officer said softly. “Was wondering when one of you guys would pop your head out.”

  Still gliding down the tether, Kiyoshi started to shake. It was his complete helplessness that got to him. Couldn’t see the asshole. No way to threaten him back.

  Trailer No.4 rushed towards him like a cliff. He pulsed his mobility pack to break his fall and landed lightly on the hauler’s pitted steel nose. He unclipped and ran aft. He had the microimpact sensor data mirrored in his HUD. It told him he would have to travel 500 meters over the hull. Coming back would be harder.

  “Don’t you have anyone else you could send out on a job like that?” the ISA officer wondered aloud.

  Kiyoshi used his mobility pack to push himself along in bounding strides. This was risky. If he lost contact with the hull for too long, he’d be a goner. Then again, the ISA ship would probably pick him up.

  “Five thousand people in that hulk? Plus some bots, I assume? Funny that someone has to fast-rope down from the tractor ship to check out a hull integrity issue.”

  Kiyoshi unslung his shoulder-mounted projectile cannon as he ran. The Kharbage, LLC security contractors had brought some sweet gear on board.

  “Huh,” the ISA officer said, pretending to be puzzled. “That’s not what I would use to fix a hull breach.”

  A hull breach?!?

  Kiyoshi ran faster.

  Laser light flickered over the horizon of the hull. A six-legged D&S bot squatted on the hull, hacking into it.

  Kiyoshi snarled aloud and shot at the bot. Its cutter laser beam raked towards him. He threw himself sideways, catching the hull only with the gecko-grip glove on one hand.

  Instead of scuttling in for the kill, the bot threw itself into space. Ion thrusters farted light. It flew off—doubtlessly heading back to its mothership … the very same ship that was tailing them.

  Kiyoshi trudged to the place where the D&S bot had been working. He did not see atmosphere venting into space. But he wouldn’t expect to see it, because there actually wasn’t any atmosphere in the hauler. If the ISA had confirmed that, they knew he was lying about the 20,000 refugees. He shone his helmet lamp into the gouge the bot had made.

  “Thank God,” he whispered.

  The bot had not gotten all the way through the hull.

  “Just kidding,” said the ISA officer. “We’re not monsters. We wouldn’t really breach a tin can holding 5,000 people.”

  The hull was 3 centimeters thick. The bot had cut, looked like 2.5 centimeters deep.

  “You know what would’ve happened if you breached the hull?” Kiyoshi said, looking up into the blackness.

  “What?”

  “Automatic detonation, buddy. Nominal yield, 250 Hiroshimas.”

  By now they had to be 99.9% convinced he was lying. So, give them something else to wonder about.

  “Don’t alter course unless otherwise instructed, captain,” the ISA officer said, abruptly reverting to his old script. He went off the air.

  Kiyoshi’s energy was gone. He dragged himself back to the tether and used his mobility pack to fly up it. He stumbled into the airlock and shambled onto the bridge.

  Wetherall rose from the pilot’s couch. “Everything OK?”

  “Looks like there’s an oscillation in Tether No. 4. Nothing we can do about that. But if it gets any worse, we might have to ditch the haulers ahead of schedule. What’s Molly doing?”

  “Playing chess with Michael. Trying to distract him from freaking out because you took a spacewalk without warning.”

  Kiyoshi went to the sickbay. He knelt on the table and pulled some stuff out of the overhead locker where the medibot’s spares were kept. Then he grabbed the back-up first aid kit from under the life-support workstation. “Need a hand, here,” he said to Wetherall.

  Pharmaceuticals in the spares. Portable syringes in the first-aid kit. This was really old tech, for people without cubital ports. Kiyoshi set the stuff out on the sickbay table.

  “What are you doing?” Molly said, appearing at his shoulder.

  “My energy’s gone,” Kiyoshi said. “I can’t keep this up.”

  “You could try sleeping.”

  “No. I just need a little help.”

  “I’m not cooking anything for you.”

  “That’s OK. Got something here that’ll work.”

  Wetherall gently moved her aside. Seeing what Kiyoshi had laid out, he said, “OK! You’re gonna try banging the shit. The nanny-ware won’t get what you’re doing! Brilliant idea, my brother. But that, no, that’ll just make you sick.” He reached into the back of the pharma locker. “This is the shizzit. It’s basically pure crank. And to think I’ve been wasting the stuff by vaping it … I just don’t like needles, personally.” He mixed the granules with water and filled the syringe expertly, belying his own words.

  “Is this everything I need?” Kiyoshi had never done this before.

  “You gotta tie off your vein. You can use your belt. Like this.”

  “Crap, that’s tight.”

  “That’s how it’s gotta be.”

  Wetherall picked up the syringe. Kiyoshi grabbed it. “Lemme just check …” He moved it towards his cubital port, as if to inject himself.

  Wham. The shock practically laid him on his back. Nanny-ware still on the job, as expected.

  Wetherall hooted. “It isn’t gonna wear off, you know!”

  Kiyoshi didn’t laugh. He was sweating with nerves. He switched hands and moved the syringe towards his other arm. “This better work...”

  Nothing.

  The point touched his skin.

  Nothing.

  Wetherall pissed himself laughing. “Stupid freaking Nanny doesn’t have a clue, huh?”

  “No one bangs their junk anymore,” Molly s
aid. “It’s disgusting and risky. But if you’re going to do it, do it right.” She did it for him. Her hands were cool. Her eyes, full of disappointment.

  ★

  ETA -0d 2h 42m

  “OK, Unsaved Changes, listen up. On your present trajectory, you’re about to enter the exclusion zone that extends for point five million kilometers around Pallas. Alter your course accordingly.”

  “Acknowledged,” Kiyoshi said, just to keep the asshole quiet.

  ETA -0d 2h 36m

  “Unsaved Changes, what the hell are you doing?”

  Kiyoshi didn’t answer. He was out on the hull with Wetherall.

  “You got a problem with your trailers?”

  “One and a two and go,” Kiyoshi chanted. His cutter laser and Wetherall’s flashed at the same time.

  “Ready when you are,” Molly said from the bridge.

  “One and a two and go.”

  “Unsaved Changes, I need you to make that course correction.”

  “One and a two and go.”

  They sliced through two more of the bolts anchoring the cradle to the Unsaved Changes’s nose plate. The cradle itself was made of space elevator stuff. No cutter laser would get through that. But every system had a weak point. Or twenty-six of them.

  “OK, Unsaved Changes, this just in,” the ISA officer said. “I have a green light to implement area exclusion protocols. Otherwise known as fragging your ass. You can alter your course, or you can take the consequences. What’s it gonna be?”

  “One and a two and done.”

  The last bolts snapped. Now, nothing held the cradle on except 0.4 gees of thrust gravity. Kiyoshi and Wetherall scrambled back to the command airlock. On the bridge, Kiyoshi tossed his helmet aside and darted to the pilot’s couch. Molly had pre-programmed their next maneuver. “SHIP COMMAND: Execute skew-flip.”

  The hub knew how to do this, even if it wasn’t in the mission profile Customs and Resources had given it. The attitude boosters fired, pushing the Steelmule’s tail around.

  “Unsaved Changes? Whatever are you up to now?”

  “There was an oscillation in Tether No.4.”

  “You’re altering course?”

  “Yes.

  “Good. You have seventy-nine seconds to complete your maneuvers, starting now.”

  Wetherall, at the astrogation desk, entered that into a timer they could all see.

  As the boosters reoriented the ship, the noseplate moved inside the cradle. It butted against the cradle’s side. The whole ship juddered. Kiyoshi knew it was chaos out there—the noseplate pushing against the lattice of space elevator struts, sensors being pulverized, the boosters still trying to swing the ship around …

  67 … 66 … 65 …

  The ship’s nose popped out of the cradle. The Unsaved Changes shot off in its new, more-or-less random direction. It missed Tether No.2 by a few centimeters. That was fortunate, as the tether would have sliced the ship in half. Kiyoshi wasn’t sure anyone else had thought of that risk. He caught Michael’s eye. Yeah, the kid had thought of it. His mouth was an O: am I still alive?

  They were, and it was done. Tens of kilometers, rapidly increasing to hundreds, separated them from the trailers. Kiyoshi completed the skew-flip maneuver by lining the Steelmule’s thrust axis up on Pallas. He could see Pallas on the optical feed now. It was a lopsided lump, not a perfect sphere like Ceres. He cranked up the optical telescope’s magnification and overlaid the spectrometry feed. Water vapor puffed from Emerson Basin, the asteroid’s biggest feature, and from the north pole. Those plumes pinpointed the locations of heat sources, which meant habs. There was some kind of structure in Emerson Basin, too. A spaceport? A shipyard?

  “Twenty,” Wetherall said loudly. “Nineteen …”

  Oh yeah. That.

  BOOM.

  “Hey, they cheated!” Wetherall said. “The countdown wasn’t finished!”

  16 … 15 …

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

  The sound effects rattled the bridge. Red lights strobed. Kiyoshi frowned. He’d programmed the sounds effects in himself so he would know when it happened, but it was distracting. “Everyone strapped in?” he shouted over the noise. “Commencing deceleration burn.”

  For the first time, he gave the Unsaved Changes its head. This was achieved by redirecting the drive’s entire output from electricity generation into propulsion. The propellant refrigerator circuits stopped working. The lights went out.

  Gravity settled on their chests like a ton of sandbags.

  1.7 gees, 1.8. None of them except Michael could take this for more than a few seconds.

  5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1.

  “Hello there, Unsaved Changes.”

  “Yuh,” Kiyoshi mouthed through the gees.

  “We just blew up all four of your trailers.”

  “I know.”

  “Wasn’t anyone in there. Wasn’t anything, except nukes.”

  “Know.” He struggled to breathe. OK, he’d had enough of this. He moved his eyes—the only thing he could move—and gaze-clicked on SHIP COMMAND: Reduce thrust to previously established parameters.

  The hideous gravity climbed up off them. They all lay limp, gasping.

  “Let me ask you a question, Unsaved Changes. Is this prank of yours related in any way to the other fleet of refugees from Ceres, which is on schedule to enter Earth orbit six days from now?”

  “It might have something to do with that.”

  “For your information, you are now deep inside the exclusion zone. As previously explained, that places you in violation of United Nations information security restrictions, and renders you subject to elimination.”

  Molly crammed her hands over her face. Wetherall groaned quietly to himself. Michael just stared at Kiyoshi, trusting him to handle this.

  Kiyoshi smiled a rictus smile. “The truth is, I wasn’t going to what’s-it-called Kennedy.”

  “No kidding. What is your actual destination?”

  “Here.”

  “Why?”

  “I was given a cargo of nukes to threaten you with. But … I couldn’t do that. It would be wrong, you know?”

  “It would be wrong,” the ISA officer echoed, as if he didn’t believe Kiyoshi had any morals.

  “I mean, I’m looking at those vapor plumes, that spaceport you’ve got, and what’s that high-albedo thing at the north pole? Anyway, there’ve got to be thousands of people down there. And I’m a Christian. I don’t believe in killing innocent people. So … I’m turning myself in.”

  The bridge was silent. Kiyoshi gripped his new cross, praying.

  “You will be boarded in ten,” the ISA officer said grumpily. “Any resistance, any games, and you will be atomized. Stand by.” He ended the call.

  Molly leapt to her feet. “Yes! Yes!” She and Wetherall danced around, hugging. Michael rushed over to Kiyoshi and pulled him out of his couch—“Yay! We did it!”

  “The hard part starts now,” Kiyoshi reminded them.

  Molly shushed him. She was grinning. “It’s gonna be fine, Kiyoshi. It’s gonna be easy.”

  xxvi.

  Kiyoshi awoke in a hole.

  It wasn’t a metaphorical hole … although when he felt the aches all over his body, and remembered that the ISA agents had tased him, he figured he was in that kind of hole, too.

  But this was a real hole. He stretched out his hands—his bare hands—in the darkness, and touched stone. Slick C-type asteroid stone, like lumpy glass, so cold it almost burned.

  How long had he been in here? Long enough for his ass and back to go numb, anyway.

  He was in light gravity, less than a tenth of a gee. He felt around the floor. His fingers encountered a tiny oblong object. It seemed familiar. He put it in his mouth and cracked it between his teeth.

  Yup. A grain of unhusked barley.

  He pushed at the stone above his head. It moved. It wasn’t a wall, just a lid.

  He got his shoulders under the lid and shifted it aside,
stone scraping on stone.

  He clambered out of the hole, into a storeroom with empty sacks piled against one wall. Dim as it was, the light made his eyes stream. The door stood ajar. He glanced down at himself before venturing out. He was wearing the t-shirt and jeans he’d got from Adnan Kharbage. On his feet, his gecko boots. Around his neck—thank God—his cross, with the contents of Molly and Wetherall’s BCIs inside it.

  Relaxed crowd noise drew him down the corridor. It opened into a wider corridor. People ambled in both directions. Every color humans came in, here it was: yellow, white, brown, black, and yes, purple with green spots—the last individual a member of the Dinosaur Tendency, a group that surgically remade themselves into approximations of people wearing dinosaur suits. Kiyoshi had never seen a Dinosaur in the flesh before. Wow. The only thing these people had in common was they all wore ugly clothes that looked like sacks.

  On a stepladder, at the corner of a wide and brightly lit turnoff, sat a man with a tablet.

  It was Hardware Engineer Asada.

  Kiyoshi cut across the crowd, unable to keep a huge stupid grin off his face.

  “Uwaah!” Asada blinked, speechless.

  “Good to see you, too, Asada-san. Where is everyone?”

  “Around,” Asada said, gesturing weakly.

  Kiyoshi peered up the turnoff that Asada seemed to be guarding. It ran uphill, empty and brightly lit, to a distant wall—or door—or airlock. “What’s that?”

  “The way out,” Asada said. He shook his head in amazement. “When did you get here?”

  “Not sure. I woke up in a empty grain bin, freezing my butt off.” Kiyoshi kept staring at ‘the way out.’

  “Oh. Yeah, they often dump newbies in the storerooms around here. They just can’t be bothered to carry them any further.”

  “In a grain bin?”

  “Their little joke.”

  “There should’ve been three people with me. A man, a woman, and a kid. Have you seen them?”

  Asada’s rueful expression said: So you’ve gotten even MORE people caught? Or maybe that was just Kiyoshi’s guilt talking.

  “Hey, listen, Asada-san,” Kiyoshi said in a rush. “I’m sorry about this. It was my fault you all got caught. Sorry.”