The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  Asada wrinkled his nose. “Was it your fault? The ISA showed up out of nowhere.”

  “Not exactly out of nowhere. I snitched on the boss.” He waited for Asada’s anger to break like a branch over his head.

  “Hey, good for you,” Asada said. “Someone had to.”

  Kiyoshi’s eyes widened. That was a welcome change.

  “That idiot had no freaking clue about ecosystem sustainability,” Asada sighed. “Every day we were on board, we kept finding more problems. Metabolic issues. Sustainability gaps. It would’ve been whack-a-mole all the way to Planet X. At least here, the nitrogen and water cycles work.”

  Kiyoshi rubbed the back of his neck. He smiled, hesitantly.

  “Oh yeah, you asked about some people you came with?” Asada continued. “I guess I could’ve seen them without knowing it. It’s crazy down here.” He gestured at the traffic in the corridor, without sarcasm. “And actually, I’m supposed to be on duty, so …”

  “On duty, doing what? Guarding the way out?”

  “Oh, no. It guards itself.”

  “How?”

  “Why don’t you find out?”

  Kiyoshi hesitated.

  Asada grinned. “Everyone does it, sooner or later. You might as well get it over with.”

  Kiyoshi started up the broad, inviting corridor. “If this turns out to be lethal,” he called over his shoulder, “I’m gonna come back and haunt you.”

  He walked twenty meters. His boots made soft ripping noises on the stone floor. It got colder. The sounds from the throughfare corridor faded fast, and when he looked back, the air was strangely blurred.

  Thirty-five meters from the junction, his legs started to feel heavy.

  Another couple of strides, and he was having trouble picking up his feet.

  His organs settled lower in his abdomen.

  His head swam. Floaters splotched his vision. His legs buckled.

  He swayed dizzily, caught himself on the wall, and heard people laughing behind him.

  Sheer pride staved off a dead faint. He stalked back down the corridor, getting blessedly lighter at each step. The rubberneckers went on their way, disappointed.

  “Welcome to Pallas,” said Asada.

  “What the hell was that? Artificial gravity?”

  “Nope, they haven’t invented that yet. Gravitational attractors behind the walls. Big old lumps of ultra-dense deuterium mounted on rails. Move ‘em closer to the walls, the gravity increases; move ‘em away, it decreases. It’s nifty.”

  “Does it get stronger all the way up the corridor?”

  “Dunno. No one ever gets that far. When they need to go in and out, like when they bring newbies in, they turn it down to one gee.”

  “So, theoretically, you could jump them while the gravity is down, and …”

  “Any funny business like that would trigger an emergency shutdown. That means no power. And that would allow the attractors to fall towards each other, creating a gravitational field so intense it would instantly kill anyone who entered the corridor.”

  “That’s what they told you, huh?”

  “No. I worked it out. Inverse square law. I’ve got lots of time to observe the system, sitting up here; I’m supposed to be watching these plebs, making sure they don’t break any rules. But … it’s kind of a pointless job.”

  Kiyoshi gazed up at the man on his high stool. “Asada-san, you’re the best swordsmith in the solar system—”

  “Nah, I’m not as good as my dad—”

  “—and they’ve got you working as a hall monitor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Gomennasai.” Kiyoshi inclined his head. Sorry. Sorry I got you into this. Sorry we’re all screwed.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad of a gig,” Asada said. “At least I dodged the soil factory.”

  “Soil factory?” Kiyoshi pictured convicts quarrying the rock of Pallas, smashing it to gravel for soil substrate.

  “Yeah. Sister Terauchi’s got quite the operation going.”

  “Which way?”

  “Out on the surface. Hey, wait,” Asada called after Kiyoshi.

  “What?”

  “Did you bring anything with you?”

  Kiyoshi frowned. Before the ISA officers tased the crew of the Unsaved Changes, they’d told them to pack their rucksacks. His memories quit at around the time he’d started wondering if he could get away with taking a weapon. “Is my stuff here?”

  “Yeah, if you had anything, they would have dumped it in the baggage room. Right over there. You should go and get it before these plebs steal it all.”

  Kiyoshi didn’t wait to hear any more. He found several children in the act of picking through his rucksack. They squealed and scattered, clutching Kiyoshi’s spare clothes.

  There were no other packs in the room: not Molly’s, not Wetherall’s, not Michael’s.

  He sorted through the rucksack’s contents. Apart from the clothes, everything he remembered packing was there.”

  “You haven’t got my tantō there, by any chance?” Asada said, when he returned to the crossroads, carrying his rucksack.

  Kiyoshi shook his head.

  “Figures,” Asada sighed.

  The answer to the question: could he get away with packing with a weapon—as he’d already guessed—had been no.

  ★

  It took him a while to find his way to the surface. There were no signs, and he was too proud to ask directions. Twice he blundered into gravity trap corridors—superficially inviting, suspiciously empty.

  This place was freaking huge.

  A huge jail, where there seemed to be no wardens, only thousands upon thousands of prisoners rattling around unsupervised.

  Kiyoshi couldn’t spot any surveillance cameras. His BCI found no network to connect to. However, there were probably tiny drone cameras flying around. Maybe tiny weaponized drone cameras. Several times he heard a whir or a slithering sound that came from no visible source, or saw movement in the corner of his eye, where there was nothing except stone.

  Coming out on the surface felt like he imagined going outdoors on Earth must be. Warmer, moist air kissed his face.

  Overhead, the sun shone tiny in a black sky.

  It was so frightening, and glorious, his knees shook.

  Of course, there was a dome up there. He just couldn’t see it. It was too high for the lights to reflect off it. Pylons strode to the horizon, holding up banks of cool whites. The landscape was a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of fields, waste ground, and slummy hamlets.

  One large cultivated area stood out for its neatness. Irrigation pipes rainbowed the air above tidy green squares of vegetation.

  Kiyoshi smiled to himself and went that way.

  “So they caught you, too,” Sister Terauchi said.

  She was directing a troop of Galapajin teenagers in the smelly task of making soil from gravel, rock dust, vegetable waste, and human feces. She had reusable plastic gloves on, and the sleeves of her habit were rolled up to the elbow. She looked healthier than the last time Kiyoshi had seen her on Callisto.

  He slid his rucksack off his shoulders and set it down. Adjacent to the soil factory, dwarf barley grew thigh-high, ready to be harvested in another few days. The Galapajin had arranged their food production operation around one of the light pylons. The cultivated area reached out into the channels of waste ground between other, neighboring fields. They clearly had designs on the light pylon 100 meters away, and probably the one after that. “Where’s the water come from?” Kiyoshi asked.

  Sister Terauchi pointed. “The falls.”

  “The what?”

  “Like a silver thread dangling from the roof. See?”

  He whistled. The dome was even higher than he’d thought. The glittering thread plunged into a jumble of roofs half a kilometer away.

  “It’s a solar still,” she said. “The dome is actually not a dome. It has straight sides and a slightly concave roof. It’s made of transparent, impact-resistant
plastic that holds in the heat. Condensation collects at the lowest point of the roof and falls down. There’s a collection pit. The water is free for everyone to use … but we have to go fetch it in jerrycans!”

  That inefficiency offended Kiyoshi’s Galapajin soul, as much as it did hers. He gestured at the PVC sprinkler pipes above a nearby field of lettuces. “What if you extended those irrigation pipes all the way to the collection pit? Set up a system of aqueducts ...”

  “Yes, that’s our plan. The trouble is we have to make the pipes out of something. Those are made from tent groundsheets stiffened with splart. If everyone sacrificed their tents, we could run irrigation lines throughout the dome, but everyone else is just … ah.” She went to break up a play fight among the teenagers, and came back.

  “Everyone else is what, Sister?”

  “Unmotivated and quite ignorant.” He smiled at her choice of words. She was trying to be honest without being un-Christian. “They don’t understand the carbon or nitrogen cycles, despite the availability of books on the subject. We can only conclude they don’t wish to learn. If you say to them, ‘This vegetable plot is lacking in nitrifying bacteria,” they just say ‘Huuhhh?’”

  Sister Terauchi let her jaw go slack and crossed her eyes in a mischievous parody of ignorance. Kiyoshi laughed out loud.

  “Can you believe,” she added, “that until we arrived, the only thing anyone grew here was … potatoes?!”

  Father Tanabe and Father Thomas Lynch walked towards them, a double clerical threat in their billowing, dusty cassocks. Father Tom surprised Kiyoshi with a hug. “It’s good to see you again.” His eyes searched Kiyoshi’s face. Kiyoshi looked down, uncomfortable with the scrutiny.

  “Fathers—” he switched into English out of respect for Father Tom— “where is everyone else from the Salvation?”

  “We agreed to spread out,” Father Tanabe said. “The Amazonians are over there, the Mormons over there, the Pashtuns over that way … I believe it’s called an encirclement strategy.”

  Kiyoshi grinned. “Or maybe divide and conquer.”

  Sister Terauchi fluttered her eyelashes. “Already we have grain and vegetables to share. They like that. And when we build the aqueduct system, they will like that, too.” Kiyoshi had no doubt that with Sister Terauchi in charge, they’d like it … or else.

  “They are already divided,” Father Tanabe said gently. “Their communities are small and weak. They have no gumption.” From him it was a statement of compassion, not condescension.

  Father Tom nodded, agreeing. “They are in desperate need of the Good News. They’ll take a brighter view of life when we’ve brought the Gospel to them. The trick will be getting in ahead of the Mormons,” he added wryly.

  They all stopped to watch a group of non-Japanese convicts walk in single file along the strip of broken stone that the Galapajin had left as a path between their barley fields. Two men and three women, talking loudly in some barely-comprehensible English pidgin. The women carried empty polythene bags. Looked like they were going to fetch water.

  Kiyoshi said delicately, “For the most desperate convicts in the solar system, they’re kind of … ah … underwhelming?” He’d thought the same of everyone he saw underground.

  Father Tanabe smiled sadly. “No one here is a desperate convict. That was a lie, a scare story. We all believed it.” He raised his hand to bless the receding backs of the pidgin-speakers. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit … They’re just unfortunates like us. Perhaps they colonized a rock belonging to someone else—that’s a crime. Do you remember the United Nations Venus Remediation Project? Many, many asteroid colonists were evicted from their homes while that was running. We thought they were all resettled on Ceres, like our own people. But it turns out that the ISA cherry-picked certain groups, and brought them here.”

  Kiyoshi shook his head. “What groups? Why?”

  “The most interesting ones, from an anthropological perspective,” Father Tom said. “There are a lot of weird ideologies floating around in here. As I said, they are in dire need of the Gospel.”

  “The most pathetically incompetent ones,” Sister Terauchi muttered.

  “This is a jail,” Father Tom said, “insofar as no one ever gets out. But it’s also an experimental colony. ” He looked up at the blurry sun in the invisible roof, and mockingly shook his fist. “Hello up there!”

  “An experiment in what?”

  “Whether twenty-third-century human beings can survive without technology.”

  Kiyoshi walked with Father Tom between the barley fields to a cairn of stones. “Father, is Jun here?”

  “This is the insect house,” Father Tom said. “I’m actually staying with the Irish. I just came to bring some preying mantis larvae I found. They were in a storeroom, cryogenically frozen. Push a button and thaw as many as you need.”

  “Father.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Jun here?”

  Father Tom was on his hands and knees, moving stones. “Ah, you bugger … Kiyoshi, did they catch him, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence. Out of sight, a pedal-powered pump whirred. Children shouted answers to a quiz.

  Kiyoshi sat down on his rucksack. Suddenly exhausted, he rested his forehead on the back of one hand, staring at the flecks of translucent green olivine and clear quartz in the stones of the insect house. He didn’t need Father Tom to tell him Jun was not here. The most advanced information technology he’d seen in the whole complex was the tablet they’d given Asada to write his traffic reports on.

  “They might have taken Jun to the research center,” Father Tom said, offering a crumb of hope.

  “The research center?”

  “Yes, in Emerson Basin.”

  Kiyoshi remembered seeing a cluster of facilities from space. “How do I get there?”

  “Well, first you find a way past the gravitational attractors, without triggering an emergency shutdown. Alternatively, you could cut a hole in the dome, without a cutter laser, and hopefully without killing us all. Then you’ll have a nice short walk of 300 kilometers to the research center. It shouldn’t be very hard to evade the orbital gun platforms. And of course, no one ever died from going outside without an EVA suit.”

  Kiyoshi laced his hands over the back of his neck and cursed.

  “It makes me very happy that you’re alive, Kiyoshi,” Father Tom said quietly. “I know it will be a shot in the arm for everyone when the news gets around.”

  Bad choice of words, Father, Kiyoshi thought.

  “Surely the Lord brought you here for a reason. Would you join me now in a prayer for divine guidance?”

  Kiyoshi rubbed his hands over his face. He stood up and looked around. The cairn stood in the middle of a vegetable patch. Hakusai cabbages and carrots formed straight rows. Beyond that rose a modular structure made of tents stuck together—a jury-rigged church. There were people on the roof of the church. Old people sitting outside, gossiping. Children climbing on the insect house. It was just like at home on 11073 Galapagos. People, people everywhere. Nowhere to be alone.

  He hooked his rucksack over one shoulder. “Can I take a rain check on that, Father? I’m gonna go … I’m gonna do some asking around.”

  Father Tom admirably managed not to say how futile that would be. His face said it for him.

  As if it were an afterthought, Kiyoshi added, “Oh, by the way, where would I find the boss?”

  The Jesuit’s mouth hardened into a grim line. His dark eyes turned to pebbles. “He’s at the research center.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. The fella that picked us up—older fella with a neat little gray beard, looked like he should be selling Italian shoes—“

  “Handbags. Legacy.”

  “Is that what he’s called? He shook the boss’s hand like they knew each other. I got the impression they were old friends. Abdullah, too. ‘I’m very excited about getting your help with our res
earch,’ he says to the boss, and they go away together, leaving us to rot in here.”

  ★

  Kiyoshi walked towards the falls, between potato patches and shacks made from tent material. The cluster of larger buildings he’d seen from afar climbed over the tight Pallas horizon. A hand-painted sign said: Welcome to Pallas Falls!

  Guess they couldn’t resist that one.

  One- and two-storey houses lined a gravel street. The houses were just boxes made from prefab carbon composite panels, with no front walls. People sat in the shadows within, or on crude porches. Some were working at hand looms or other antiquated machines. A lathe; a potter’s wheel; even a forge. Why couldn’t the Asada clan practice their trade here? Duh. Like the ISA would allow them to make swords.

  The sound of falling water drowned out everything else.

  Kiyoshi came out on a spray-wetted expanse of rock around a lake the size of a baseball field. The waterfall plunged into it, a rough white curtain, as if that silver thread had frayed at the bottom. Frothy blossoms of splashback towered high in the low gravity, and fell to the surface of the lake, sending ripples towards the shore. People waded in the shallows, filling their jerrycans. Children paddled and splashed each other, goosepimples on their limbs.

  It was beautiful, but Kiyoshi didn’t stop to stare. The town, such as it was, straggled away in every direction. He chose a street at random. Weeds grew in the gravel underfoot.

  The shacks got smaller and crummier. The next light pylon was out. Only darkness lay ahead.

  “Kiyoshi!”

  He swung around, and nearly bumped into Elfrida Goto.

  Her arms—open to hug him—sank to her sides when she saw his face. But her smile didn’t fade. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t be happy to see anyone here, but wow!”

  “Wow, yourself.” He admired her outfit. It was a sack, but it was an embroidered and appliquéd sack. A sparkly hair clip held back her dark bob. “Is anyone else here?”

  “Did you meet up with your people?”

  “Yes, they’re busy plotting to take over the hab.”

  Elfrida laughed. “They are, aren’t they? I think it’s great. Nobody can make lemons into lemonade like the Galapajin. The Pashtuns are also doing pretty well, and so are those other, um, Christians. But your people are just kicking ass. Well, come on, if you only just got here you must be exhausted. Come and sit down!”