The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  She gave him the ghost of a wink. “That’s what it felt like, too. Evidently, you’re not allowed to take books out of this library.”

  The book she’d been carrying had vanished. “What book was it?”

  “Oh, just some boring fiction thing,” Michael interrupted. “Listen, this is really cool!”

  “Mikey, be quiet,” said Wetherall, emerging from behind a column. “You never know who might be listening.”

  Kiyoshi traded fist bumps with Wetherall. “Been checking out the local scene?”

  “I was going to do that next,” Wetherall said.

  “Later,” Molly said. “Let’s go back to the dayside. I like to be able to see what I’m eating and drinking.”

  Kiyoshi introduced all three of them to Elfrida and Mendoza. It wasn’t as awkward as he’d feared. Elfrida said, “Oh, you’re the chick who was tending bar at that dive on Callisto,” and Molly said, “You’re the chick the ISA dragged out in handcuffs. I forgot what you looked like for a while; but I remember now. Where’s the other woman who was with you?”

  There was a contemplative pause.

  “I love that hairclip,” Molly said, smoothly.

  They ate potato salad Elfrida had made, sitting out by the lake. Spray got in the communal container, which didn’t make it taste any worse. Kiyoshi didn’t care—he had no appetite. He forced himself to drink more tea.

  “Sorry about the lack of seasoning,” Elfrida said. “You can get spices out of storage, too, but I keep using up my tries on olive oil. The pouches are ridiculously tiny. Someone needs to start growing avocadoes.”

  “Can I talk about my theory now?” Michael said. “It’s safe here, isn’t it? The waterfall is so noisy that even drones couldn’t hear us, if we whisper. That’s why we’re out here, right?”

  “Yes,” Wetherall said. “But let Molly go first.”

  “Do you know what she was doing in the library, Colin?” Michael said.

  “Nope, but I think we’re about to find out.”

  “I know you want to hear about the security,” Molly said quietly. They all leaned forward to hear better. Molly said to Elfrida and Mendoza, “You guys have been here for months. How much have you figured out?”

  “Pretty much nothing,” Mendoza said in the same low voice. “There have to be drones. If someone breaks the rules, which basically means if they hurt someone else, they get zapped. But zapped can mean anything from shot, to electroshocked, to an arrow, yes an actual medieval arrow, through their heart. How do you mount a freaking bow and arrow onto a drone too small to see? Plus, there’s often a delay between breaking the rules and getting zapped. Minutes or hours. Why?” He spread his hands. “Basically, all we’ve got is questions.”

  “I can answer them,” Molly said. “There are drones, yeah. We used to call them nanocopters. They fly by taking in air and puffing it out. There are also fixed cameras in the storage areas.” She ate a mouthful of potato salad. “Boy, this is good, Elfrida. So that’s your surveillance. But as you correctly point out, John, drones can’t do much in the way of enforcement. That’s handled by humans. The reason we can’t see them is because they’re invisible.”

  Kiyoshi’s jaw sagged, mirroring the expressions of the others.

  “The wardens wear hooded coveralls made of a metamaterial that’s invisible to radar and visible light.”

  Kiyoshi remembered the slithering sounds he’d heard in the corridors. The way Molly had seemed to blur as she stood on the library steps. Because an invisible person had been rushing towards her.

  “Invisibility cloaks suck,” Michael said. “They don’t really work. I had one when I was little. Everyone saw me.”

  Molly ruffled his hair. “These ones work. Those guys down at InSec Center get up to some amazing shit. But anyway, the wardens. There are four hundred of them, working three shifts, and they circulate on routes that change daily, so the chances are good that there is one near you at any time …”

  They all looked over their shoulders.

  “… except here,” Molly said. “Water screws with the invisibilty suits. They get wet, you see them. So anyway, that’s the system. It may sound pretty secure, especially when you figure in the gravity traps and all that, but trust me, there are loopholes. The question is, are we smart enough to exploit them?”

  Kiyoshi said. “Did you find all this out in the library?”

  “No,” Molly said. “Remember I told you I’d been here before?”

  “Yeah,” Wetherall said. “I thought you did time for drug dealing.”

  “Well, now we’re here, you probably appreciate that this is not the kind of place they send drug dealers.” Molly wiped her lips on her sleeve. “I actually used to work here.”

  Kiyoshi let out a whoop. He gathered her in and kissed her on the mouth.

  Breaking away, he saw Petruzzelli standing on the far side of the lake. Staring at them. Bedraggled. Her face angry and yet strangely empty.

  xxvii.

  Andrea Miller, ISA employee number 0089327, sat in her chicken coop, reading All Creatures Great And Small by James Herriot.

  Lined with perches and nesting boxes, the chicken coop stood at one end of a fenced-in run. Through the door she could see her Rhode Island Reds scratching in the dirt. She’d built the coop herself from the wood of hybrid poplars grown right here on Pallas..

  Andrea had been born on Luna, but now Pallas was home, and for all its remoteness, she loved it.

  This hab, Worldhouse 1, stood right next door to Worldhouse 2, the prison where Andrea and her colleagues worked. Worldhouse 1 was older than Worldhouse 2, and a tenth the size, and the roof had a habit of raining on your head … but there was more than enough room for the staff to spread out and work on their free-time projects.

  Anyone who took a job on Pallas, by definition, had a keen interest in doing cool shit in space. On their days off, some of the staff tended scientific experiments, some worked on ways to improve the lives of the prisoners, some cared for their livestock, and some pottered in their gardens.

  Andrea raised chickens.

  Today, however, the clucking of her gengineered Rhode Island Reds did not comfort her. Reading by the sunlight from the open door, she turned the pages of All Creatures Great And Small.

  The very same book she’d snatched from Molly Kent at the end of her last shift.

  Man, it had been crazy seeing Molly again!

  Actually, it had shocked the pants off her.

  Molly had joined the ISA the year before Andrea. They’d clicked straight away. Neither of them had any interest in the secret-squirrel stuff that the ISA was famous for. That wasn’t what they’d been hired for, anyway. The security of the human race was a puzzle with many parts … and one of those parts was the Worldhouse Project.

  Andrea drifted into nostalgia for a minute, remembering how Molly had worked on a scheme to add mood-improving drugs to the water in Worldhouse 2. It had been disapproved in the end—too heavy-handed. Molly’s enthusiasm for the job had dwindled after that, and when her three-year contract was up, she’d left Pallas.

  They’d stayed in touch for a while. But eventually Molly’s emails had petered out. She’d gone back home to Callisto, got in with a bad crowd, was Andrea’s impression, and she’d always felt guilty that she hadn’t tried harder to convince Molly to stay.

  Now Molly was back.

  In freaking Worldhouse 2.

  On the wrong side of the line that divided the staff from their subjects, who you were not supposed to refer to as prisoners, but c’mon, that’s what they were. Everyone knew it. They were doers. Hardened criminals.

  What on earth had Molly done to end up over there?

  The answer was not accessible to Andrea through official channels.

  She hoped she might find it in the pages of James Herriot.

  This afternoon, Molly had sat in a carrel in the library, reading—or pretending to read—this book for ages. Andrea had spotted her on a random feed tr
awl and drifted into the library in a stupor of amazement. She’d itched to poke Molly, or brush against her, but she’d be out of a job if she did anything like that. So she’d just circulated, wrapped in her invisibility cloak, a ghost in the deserted stacks … watching the feed from the fixed camera over Molly’s head.

  Molly had brushed a loose fist over the pages as she read, and from time to time that fist had paused.

  Andrea didn’t need to see too much of that before she understood what Molly was up to.

  When Molly left the library, with the book in her hand, Andrea had made sure she was in position to respond to the theft alarm. And what a coincidence, she’d decided to borrow the same book tonight.

  It wouldn’t raise any flags. This was basically her favorite book ever. As Molly knew.

  Now she decoded Molly’s message, stringing together the letters Molly had marked by pressing a sharp pebble into the pages, leaving nearly-invisible dents.

  The picture came together.

  Andrea stood up abruptly. One of her roosters, Garfield, strutted into the chicken coop, sensing her alarm.

  “It’s OK, it’s OK,” Andrea murmured.

  But it wasn’t.

  Feeling deeply uneasy, Andrea ducked out of the chicken coop. She took her bow, an action as automatic as zipping her coat. The bow was her service weapon, befitting the low-tech guidelines of the Worldhouse project. She wore it over her shoulder like a rifle on a sling. She rarely had to shoot anyone with it, and she always aimed to immobilize, rather than kill … but that could change.

  That might have to change.

  If what Molly told her was true.

  She walked through the trees, thinking hard. The forest was dense and drippy. It had been growing for decades. When two years of light gave way to two years of darkness, they just turned on the growlights. They didn’t do that in Worldhouse 2. Everyone over there had to pick up and move. That was supposed to be more realistic. Worldhouse 1 was just the prototype …

  But right now, Andrea’s world felt realer to her than ever before. Painfully real.

  Blackberry brambles plucked at her legs, like ISA conditioning trying to hold her back. Trying to change her mind about what she knew was right.

  Screw that.

  The conditioning had worked for a long time, she freely admitted. Subtle censorship and propaganda techniques had allowed the ISA to control the narrative throughout UN space for the better part of a century. But now the narrative was breaking down, breaking up, as storylines not approved by the ISA bubbled through the English-language mediasphere.

  Andrea reached the community hall and went in. A log fire roared in the hearth. Low-tech heating, with a high-tech twist: the smoke went straight into a filter, and ash particles were extracted for use as fertilizer. Win-win.

  Looked like pretty much everyone not on shift was gathered around the fire. Or to be exact, around the big screen in the chimney nook.

  Andrea left her bow in the weapons rack by the door. She joined the crowd and worked her way towards the screen, saying hello to this person and that.

  “The stand-off in Earth orbit continues,” said a news curator’s voice from the screen, in somber but urgent tones. “Live from the Kharbage In, Kharbage Out, here’s Ceres spokesman Adnan Kharbage.”

  The recycling mogul—who had become famous all over the solar system in the last couple of days—appeared not to have slept. He stared into the camera with furious, hollow eyes. “I did not wish to be a spokesman for our cause. I accept this role with reluctance and sorrow. Sorrow, because my friends and colleagues are dead! Murdered! We came to discuss the future of the asteroid belt, as equals, as statesmen, as businessmen—and we were met with nukes! This is a betrayal of everything the UN stands for!”

  “Whoa,” Andrea said. “How many of them are left now?” She meant, how many ships out of the sixteen-strong Ceres fleet that had arrived in Earth orbit two days ago.

  “Only that one,” the person next to her said. “Earth’s PORMSnet blew all the others away. They’ll probably replay the footage soon.”

  “How’d they get any footage at all?”

  “This feed is broadcasting from Luna.”

  Andrea smiled. She came from Luna. The newly independent Luna Union had played a major role in undermining the ISA’s information management, and she was proud of that.

  “Furthermore,” Adnan Kharbage went on, “I am reluctant to say this, but the times call for truth. If the UN thinks that, because we are gone—we, who only sought to protect our homeworld—if you think that with us out of the way, you can settle millions of Martians on Ceres without resistance, the truth is you are wrong! There will be an uprising. There will be a revolution. Ceres has two hundred and thirty million inhabitants, and every one of them will rise up against you, rather than accept this death sentence!”

  Kharbage was yelling into the camera now. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. His combover sat awry. He was a repellent crook, one step up from a mafioso, but in that moment he struck Andrea as noble. That hooked nose, those fleshy Levantine features—it was like seeing a statue of some Roman emperor come to life, channeling the granite willpower of those men who founded human civilization.

  “Don’t you know that God sees every migrant bird, fighting through the wind and the rain, alone in the dark?” Adnan Kharbage screamed. “We too are alone in the dark, but He sees us. Do you think He doesn’t see YOU? He sees you and He will judge you for this act of genocide. Genocide! This is GENOCIDE! Did we or did we not WIN the fucking war?”

  The feed from the Kharbage In, Kharbage Out went dark.

  The news studio on Luna briefly reappeared— “Whoa shit,” said someone off-camera—and then the picture changed to a long-distance shot from an optical telescope. It looked like a burst of bright pixels against Earth’s nightside.

  The news curator on Luna came back, her eyes too wide. “Welp, that’s all we’ll be hearing from Adnan Kharbage,” she said. “They just nuked him, too.”

  The ISA employees on Pallas erupted in disbelief and outrage. Andrea stayed quiet. She knew what her colleagues were going through. The ISA’s narrative was finally losing its hold on their minds. She’d gone through the same thing a few days ago, when the UN’s plan to resettle Martians on Ceres leaked to the media. For some it took more than others. But no one could watch the destruction of an unarmed civilian fleet, on the very doorstep of Earth, without severe disillusionment.

  Andrea edged to the front of the group. Her manager, Josh Slade, was fiddling with the screen. “Let’s see if any other telescopes picked that up,” he said. “Midway should’ve been able to see it …”

  “Josh, it wasn’t faked.”

  He rubbed his ginger beard. “I know.”

  “And Josh, that’s not all …”

  A woman spoke loudly behind them. Cheraline Ngu, a Belter. She’d been one of the first to openly question the narrative. “They’ll land the Martians on Ceres now. They have to. If they don’t? It sets a precedent that colonists in recycling barges can back the UN down.”

  “Yeah,” Josh said. “This pretty much ends in tears either way. Thank God I don’t have any family on Ceres.”

  But other people did. They were swearing and emailing. Their personal communications off-rock were limited, and monitored, but no one cared about losing loyalty points anymore.

  Andrea pulled All Creatures Great And Small out of her coat pocket. She rapidly explained to Josh that she’d seen Molly.

  Josh had been here as long as she had. He remembered Molly, too. “That woman who wanted to sedate the doers?”

  “Yes, but Josh, they’re not doers.”

  “The subjects.”

  “Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them aren’t guilty of anything. You know that, I know it, we all know it. We listen to them yakking every day. All they ever talk about is sex and drugs and he-said-she-said and freaking potatoes. Pathetic specimens of humanity they may be, hardened criminals they
are not.”

  “So?”

  “So Josh, listen to what Molly told me …”

  She whispered into his ear, which had ginger tufts growing out of it. When he had heard what she had to say, he climbed on a chair and whirled his arms. “OK, everyone, listen up. Andrea’s just reported a potential leak in the containment pit. Let’s go check that out.”

  Those that didn’t get the unspoken message tagged along behind those that did. They left the community hall and walked between the barn and the piggery to their own version of the falls. The roof of Worldhouse 1 was lower. The gravity-driven flow of condensation more resembled a dripping tap than a waterfall. However, even a dripping tap could make a lot of noise, when it fell onto a waterwheel that drove a generator.

  Josh said, “If anyone wants to wimp out, now’s your chance. This will empty our loyalty accounts for life.”

  No one wimped out. The waterwheel’s drive shaft whirred and dripped on their heads. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The answer on Pallas was a censorbot that sifted through the surveillance logs from Worldhouse 1, as well as Worldhouse 2. But they’d experimented with meetings at the waterwheel before. The audio take was garbage. Nothing there to censor.

  “I’ve just learned,” Josh said, looking at Andrea, “that there were two refugee fleets from Ceres. One went to Earth, the other came here. It got blown up three days ago, with 20,000 refugees on board. Anyone surprised? No, me neither. But one ship from that fleet survived. Our QRF took its crew into custody, and dumped them in Worldhouse 2. Among them was an individual some of you may remember: Molly Kent, who used to work with us. She found a way to communicate safely with Andrea, and that’s where this intelligence comes from.”

  Andrea cleared her throat. Her mouth felt dry, and her stomach knotted. She knew this feeling because she’d lived with it all her life. But she’d never before called it by its name. Now she did. Fear. She was afraid of the ISA, her own employer. Afraid of the United Nations itself.

  That had to end.

  “Guys, I want to say something,” she spoke up. “A few of you already know this, but my uncle was Bob Miller. He died to defeat the PLAN. Thanks to him and the pilots under his command, Earth was saved, and Mars is now a wasteland. I know some people think the Big Breakup was overkill. But I call it victory. And I have to think Uncle Bob would be turning in his grave today … if he had a grave.”