She led him to one of the crummy little shacks he’d passed without noticing. It had a curtain for a front wall, tucked up.
John Mendoza came out and gave him a one-armed hug—refusing, unlike Elfrida, to take an unspoken ‘no’ for an answer.
“I wish we weren’t here, but I’m glad you’re here, if that makes any sense.” Mendoza rocked back awkwardly. He was balancing on a crutch. His right leg ended at the knee.
“Holy crap, Mendoza. Where did you leave your leg?”
“Somewhere between the L5 Earth-Moon Lagrange point and Mars.”
Mendoza had accompanied Jun on his fateful voyage to Mars. Kiyoshi felt an acute desire to know what Jun had done. What the ISA had arrested him for. But there might be—scratch that, there definitely were listening devices around, so he swallowed his questions.
Mendoza seemed to be conscious of the same risk. He said, “Well, we don’t have coffee. The Pashtuns are expecting to harvest their first crop in a month or so. Then there’ll be a new currency in this jail, you can bet on it. For now, tea? It tastes like ass-flavored socks, but it’s caffeinated. Some supposedly good-for-you thing Ellie found in storage.”
“It’s called yerba mate, and it is good for you,” Elfrida squealed.
Kiyoshi laughed. He followed them into their shack. Elfrida swept aside the clutter on the floor. “Sorry it’s such a mess!”
Kiyoshi sat down, crossing his long legs, trying not to knock anything over. He sat on a hair clip like the one Elfrida was wearing. Pliers, wire, the smell of glue … “Did you make this?”
“Yeah.” Elfrida blushed. “I know, making jewellery, right? On Pallas? It’s like writing poetry at the south pole, or something. But people seem to like it. I’m using the stones that you can actually find in the big rocks near the perimeter of the dome. This is olivine, that’s tourmaline … we’re walking on semiprecious gemstones!” She waved her hands. She hadn’t lost her child-like sense of wonder. “People are grinding them up for soil substrate! The streets are paved with them.”
Mendoza moved some more clutter. A steel bowl, a heating element, a timer, a battery— “Mendoza, you’re either building a bomb, or a rice cooker.”
“Heh. The latter,” Mendoza said, mouthing: Unfortunately. “Before there was the Meal Wizard, there was the humble rice cooker. I got the idea from your people. I’m selling quite a lot of them.”
“For money? Or dope, or tea?”
“Batteries,” Mendoza sighed. He settled himself awkwardly on the floor. “The whole low-tech gimmick—it’s bullshit. Everything runs on batteries in here.” He pointed at a flashlight, his rice cooker, the hot plate on which Elfrida was boiling water for tea. “You can get whatever you need out of storage, including fully charged batteries. The people who live downstairs, the Storage clans, they can be pretty unpleasant, but they aren’t allowed to actually hurt you. So it’s just a matter of ignoring them, figuring out the labelling system, finding what you want, and pushing a button. But you only get one try a day. It’s gamified. So dumb. Anyway, who wants to waste a whole day going downstairs every time you run out of charge? Hence, freshly charged batteries equal units of value. But that might change. Brian O’Shaughnessy—remember him?—he’s got twenty people using up their tries every day, looking for parts to build a hydroelectric generator.”
“Install a turbine in the lake? Gravity-driven?”
“Yup. Buuut my guess is they won’t be allowed to do it.”
Kiyoshi wanted to know more about the security set-up. He tried to think of a way to ask about those blurs in the air, the slithering noises he’d heard downstairs.
Elfrida poured the tea. “Sorry it’s not very hot,” she said. “The atmospheric pressure is lower than Earth normal, so water boils at like ninety degrees Celsuis.”
“It’s fine,” Kiyoshi said. He took a sip. “Actually, it tastes like ass-flavored socks.”
Elfrida and Mendoza laughed too loudly. They were both on edge, that was obvious.
Screw it. Kiyoshi’s concerns about listening devices fluttered away. He dropped his voice. “Mendoza? You were with Jun when … when it happened. What happened?”
Mendoza put his mug down. Distress creased his stoic, honest face. “This is so tough to say.”
“Tell him!” Elfrida said. She glared fearfully at the entrance of the shack. “He has a right to know!”
Mendoza reached out. His callused grip crushed Kiyoshi’s fingers. “Jun told them everything,” he whispered.
“Who? What did he tell who?”
“The ISA, Star Force, the President of the UN, I don’t even know. We were on our way to Mars. We were stealthed, using the Ghost, but we had Tiangong Erhao. A fifty-kilometer spaceship is a fifty-kilometer spaceship. They picked us up on radar. So it was either defy them or deal with them. The Chinese ships that were with us defied them. They got fragged. Jun decided to deal.”
Mendoza let go of Kiyoshi’s hand. He stared into his tea mug.
“He gave them the specs for the Ghost, explained who he was, what he was, what he was planning, everything. I thought he was crazy. He said sometimes you just have to trust people.”
“That sounds like him,” Kiyoshi said.
“Well, it worked: they gave us safe passage to Mars. It was pretty hairy, even so. I lost my leg. There was a fire on the bridge of the Monster. But we got there and launched Jun’s cyberweapon. As far as that goes, it was too successful. Jun didn’t know about the Martians. No one did, at that point. He didn’t know we would end up freeing millions of them from the PLAN’s control. Anyway. As you might imagine, Jun didn’t want to stick around to answer questions. So we made our getaway in stealth mode.” Mendoza took a breath. “But when we got to Callisto, they were there waiting for us.”
Elfrida broke in. “It’s so unfair! Jun won the freaking war for them, and they arrested him for his trouble!”
Kiyoshi said emptily, “I can see it from their point of view. He told them he was an ASI? And then he proved it by blowing a hole in the PLAN? Yeah, they would want to take that out of circulation.”
The research center. Father Tom had said Jun might be there. It was possible, Kiyoshi guessed.
“I’m sorry,” Mendoza said. “I’m so goddamn sorry. They boarded the Monster; I tried to stop them, but there were too many of them …”
Kiyoshi managed a smile. “It wasn’t your fault.” He put down his mug. “Guys, I really appreciate this. If I could ask another favor, can I borrow your couch? I need to grab some sack time.”
He had to figure out how he was going to get to the research center, and right now shame and rage were clouding his thoughts. He needed a performance boost.
“Absolutely!” Mendoza said. “Well …”
“We don’t actually have a couch,” Elfrida said.
“Your floor, your hammock, whatever.”
They exchanged anxious looks. Kiyoshi felt a stab of irritability. What could be the problem with this simple favor? It wasn’t like he’d asked them to help him rescue Jun from the research center. He was going to do that on his own. Somehow.
“Well, OK,” Elfrida said. She beckoned Kiyoshi to another curtain at the back of the shack. “Don’t freak, OK? We’ve got another houseguest. But I think she’s asleep ...”
“I’ll be quiet,” Kiyoshi promised. He slipped through the curtain.
The bedroom smelled of goats. Working by touch, he found his gear in his rucksack. It still amazed him that the ISA had not confiscated eight syringes pre-filled with a solution of water and medical-grade methamphetamine. Well, if your thing was keeping humans like rats, you’d want to observe every sordid quirk of their behavior … Screw you, he thought at Oliver Legacy, who’d become the face of the ISA in his mind. You don’t get to observe THIS.
He tied a twang cord (better than a belt) around his right arm, tightening it with his teeth. The action made him think of Wetherall. He had to find him, and Molly and Michael. They must be somewhere around, l
earning the lay of this strange new land. Maybe Wetherall had already figured out where, in that maze of underground storerooms, they kept the drugs …
He injected himself. The rush seemed to transform his body from tired flesh into a machine made of pure energy. Riding it out, he flexed his legs—
--and kicked someone sleeping on the other side of the bedroom.
The person jack-knifed, threw off their blanket, and shone a flashlight into his eyes.
“Shit. I’m having a flashback,” said the hoarse voice of Alicia Petruzzelli.
Kiyoshi shaded his eyes with one hand while reaching for her flashlight with his other hand. The needle fell out of his arm, onto the floor.
Petruzzelli grabbed it first. “Oh ho. Now you’re bangin’ it like a Marine, space boy.”
“C’mon, Petruzzelli, gimme that, what the hell?”
She made the syringe vanish. That was OK. He had spares. “At least you still remember my name,” she said. She set the flashlight on the floor, pointing up, so it lit her face from below. She smiled, devilishly. The turquoise mop of hair he remembered was gone. Short brown curls framed a thinner, older face. The bags under her eyes looked like rotten plums. “Elfrida!” she yelled. “Jo-ohn! There’s a—” she dropped her voice to a whisper: “a junkie …” Shouting again, “A rapist in my bedroom …”
Scuffling noises outside. Mendoza: “She’s just messing with you, Ellie. Don’t react.”
Right on, Mendoza.
Elfrida: “I should have warned him. I just didn’t know what to say ...”
Their movements retreated.
“So you made it through the war alive, Petruzzelli,” Kiyoshi said. “Congrats.”
The shadows swallowed her face. “Define alive.”
“Breathing. Bitching. Lying here feeling sorry for yourself, while other people carry on like heroes. Eh, I’ve seen it before.”
With energy coursing through his veins, he returned his gear to his rucksack. He had no time or sympathy for her. Plus, she’d called him a rapist. Their one carnal encounter, three years ago, had been 100% consensual. If that was a joke, it wasn’t funny.
He lifted the curtain. Indirect light leaked into the bedroom, revealing piles of handwoven blankets. That explained the smell of goat hair.
Petruzzelli grabbed his ankle. She pulled him back into the bedroom, and for some reason, maybe because her grip was so weak, he let her do it. The curtain fell.
She knelt up and hugged him. “I thought I was invulnerable,” she whispered into his ear. “Maybe that’s the trouble. I survived the war, I survived the Big Breakup, I flew your brother’s ship all the way to Jupiter … I’m really sorry about what happened to him. I liked him a lot and I think maybe he even liked me. It was great flying with him. It was healing me.”
Kiyoshi’s hands clenched on her shoulders. He lowered his head to breathe in the scent of her skin. His hands slipped down to her waist.
“But when the ISA destroyed the Monster, it was like .. I dunno. Something just kind of broke inside me.”
She felt bony, like she hadn’t been eating, but she still had that amazing flare to her hips and ass. Without consciously planning it, he cupped her buttocks. He kissed her sweaty neck.
“Ohhh … Kiyoshi. Don’t.”
“Why not?” He gently laid her back on the blankets. Star Force might’ve chopped her up and put her back together, reinforced her skeleton and replaced her heart and lungs, but she was still soft where it counted. He spooned her, grinding against her ass. In the back of his head, he knew he was high, and his judgement wasn’t the best right now, but he felt an incredible tenderness for her. He wanted to help her heal from all that had happened to her. Also, he was as hard as hell. He reached for the drawstring of her trousers.
“I don’t want a pity fuck.”
“How about just a regular fuck?”
“I mean it. Don’t feel sorry for me.”
“I don’t feel sorry for you. You were a hero. I actually stalked you online for a while. You were one of the pilots who crashed that Flattop into Reldresal? That’s hardcore.”
“That’s right,” she whispered, twisting to face him. “And now I’m in jail on Pallas, sleeping all day, eating Elfrida and John’s food, when I remember to. Basically just abusing their generosity.”
She set her palms against his chest and gave a sudden, strong push. In micro-gee, that was enough to throw him across the room. He crashed into the opposite wall. The whole shack creaked.
“I may be a screw-up,” Petruzzelli said, loudly, her voice shaking, “but at least I’m not shooting junk into my arm.”
The curtain flapped open. She crawled out.
Kiyoshi cursed himself for being a sucker. He picked up his rucksack and went out.
Petruzzelli stood in the street outside, talking to Elfrida and Mendoza with angry gesticulations. There was a lot of white noise from the falls, so he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He caught his own name. She glared at him and stomped away.
“Jeez,” Kiyoshi muttered. This was beyond embarrassing. “Did she say I raped her or something? I didn’t. Ha, ha.”
“You didn’t have time,” Mendoza said dryly.
Elfrida pushed her hands through her hair, dislodging her sparkly hair clip. “I should’ve warned you. Sorry.”
“It’s not important.”
“It is important. She’s our friend, and she’s hurting, and I don’t know how to help her.”
“All we can do is pray for her,” Mendoza said.
They watched Petruzzelli vanish beyond the reach of the last light pylon. The houses continued into the dark, but the division between brightness and dark was so stark that it felt like being on an asteroid, looking across the terminator.
“What’s over there?” Kiyoshi asked.
“The nightside,” Mendoza said.
Made sense. He was on an asteroid, looking across the terminator. But in the whole time he’d been here, the terminator hadn’t moved. Nor had the distant sun moved in the black sky.
“Did they spin this rock down?”
“No, it’s rotating,” Elfrida said. “But Pallas has an unusual axial tilt. This is information no one in the solar system knows, because I guess it’s top secret.” She rolled her eyes. “But it’s all in the books which you can access in the library. Anyway, we’re near the north pole here. This dome straddles the boundary of a region that gets two years of continuous sunlight. So now it’s day here, and night over there, but next year it will be the opposite, and then we’ll all pick up and migrate.” She sounded tired just thinking about it. “Continuous sunlight isn’t good for your body. And they never switch the light pylons off, either. That’s why we made a black-out room to sleep in. I think the Galapajin are considering building a bedroom community—literally, a bedroom community, oooh I’m funny—on the nightside.”
Kiyoshi jigged from foot to foot. “Is anyone over there now?”
Mendoza looked at Elfrida, as if to shush her, and said, “Not really. You can get down to the storage area from over there, too, so sometimes people go that way.” He shrugged.
“And the library,” Elfrida said. “The library’s over there. But don’t get your hopes up. It’s all hard copies.”
That was enough of an excuse for Kiyoshi. “I’m gonna check that out. I’ll catch you when I come back this way.”
★
Of course he wasn’t going to the freaking library. He wanted to catch up with Petruzzelli and apologize to her.
Or at the very least, make contact with some of these people from Storage.
Riding a wave of brittle optimism, he believed there had to be a way out of here, if he could only find it.
He walked past the library—it was only a hundred meters beyond the terminator. Spotlights alternated with soaring columns along a grandiose facade. It was the biggest free-standing building he’d ever seen. Statues on the pediment brandished maps, globes, scales, and other symbols of knowledge, wis
dom, and justice.
He kicked the steps. Not stone. Just printed composite, like the other houses.
As Sister Terauchi had implied, the library did not seem to be a popular destination. No one was going in and out of the big doors. A few people sat on the steps.
On the other side of the street, weak electric light shone from the usual crude shacks. Probably, by daylight, this half of Pallas Falls would look just like the other half. But darkness lent it a seedy allure.
He heard hoarse, drunken singing. Smelled fried food.
He angled towards the smell.
He genuinely needed to hydrate. Mostly he was just lying to himself. But it did seem possible that a bar would be the best place to find information …
He cast a last, sour glance at the library—and did a double-take.
Molly had just walked out through the big doors with Michael at her side.
Kiyoshi’s heart leapt, but something kept him lurking in the darkness.
Molly carried a book.
As she reached the top of the steps, an alarm yipped. Molly looked around in fright.
Her figure blurred, the colors of her dreadlocks and her coverall smearing.
She reeled back, clasping her shoulder as if she’d been struck. Michael cowered.
Kiyoshi bounded up the library steps. They were both solid, real—a sight for sore eyes. He curved an arm protectively around Molly’s shoulders. “What the hell was that?”
“Hello, you,” she said, smiling up at him.
“Yeah, hello and everything.” He saw the hurt on her face at his brusque greeting. But he didn’t trust himself to give her anything more. Quarter of an hour ago, he’d put the moves on Petruzzelli because he was high and feeling stupid. He still felt stupid. Didn’t want to subject Molly to his poor judgement, so it was best to just play it cool.
He stooped to hug Michael. “Are you OK, little guy?”
Michael’s face glowed with excitement. “I’ve figured it all out! Do you want to hear my theory?”
“In a second. Molly, what just happened? Looked like someone crashed into you.”
The Callisto Gambit Page 31
