The Callisto Gambit

by Felix R. Savage

  “Good.” She flipped something else at him. He reflexively reached to catch it with his left hand.

  A snake.

  Green, as thick as his thumb.

  It slithered through his fingers, twisted its tail around his left wrist, and lashed out to wrap its head around his other wrist. Shortening itself, it dragged his wrists together. He was handcuffed.

  “We use those a lot on the job,” Andrea Miller said. “The doers aren’t sure if they’re alive or not. They aren’t. They’re programmed—”

  Kiyoshi lunged sideways at her, dagger gripped in his bound hands. The snake tightened, crushing the bones in his wrists. A grunt of agony tore from his throat. He sagged back into his seat, fresh sweat chilling his upper lip. The rearview screen on the dashboard gave him a glimpse of Michael’s face. The boy sat frozen.

  “As I was saying, they’re programmed to react to sudden movements,” Andrea Miller said wryly.

  “You gonna turn me in?”

  “Yes. Don’t worry! It’s not going to be for real! We just have to make it look good.”

  “Jesus, lady. You ask for a lot of trust.”

  “It’s the only way!” Andrea Miller pitched her voice to Michael in the rear seat. “Honey, look in the cup holder beside you. Those are transponder tags. We usually put them on our exterior maintenance bots. Each of you should stick one in your webbing somewhere, so the PORMS doesn’t frag you when you exit the vehicle.” To Kiyoshi, she added: “You do not understand how much security there is on this asteroid!”

  “I’m starting to get the picture, I think,” Kiyoshi said flatly.

  Michael leaned forward between the seats. His cupped hands brimmed with flat green discs. “Were you expecting this many people to make it out?”

  “Yes,” Andrea Miller said.

  “And then what?”

  Her voice wobbled a bit. “Total chaos, basically. There would have been more vehicles waiting. The escapees would have scattered across the surface.”

  “And we’d have pretended to let you recapture us and take us to InSec Center.”

  “Yes.”

  “But that’s what we’re doing.”

  “Yes, but there were going to be more of us.”

  “Where are your friends?”

  “Back there,” Andrea Miller said, “sorting through the bloody wreckage. Oh, kid, I hope you never have to see what someone looks like when they’ve been hanging out in forty gees for a while!”

  Michael was quiet after that. Andrea Miller drove. She seemed to be taking her emotions out on the terrain. The speedometer needle trembled around two hundred. “Nice driving,” Kiyoshi said.

  “I’m from Luna. We used to get up to five hundred klicks per hour on the Mare Tranquillitatis.”

  Presently a familiar manmade object reared over the horizon.

  Michael squealed, “That’s the Salvation!”

  “That’s the graveyard,” Andrea Miller said.

  “The graveyard?”

  “Yeah, a lot of doers—um, a lot of people were brought here in their own ships. Those kinds of ships tend to be no use to the ISA. But you can still salvage parts out of them.”

  “Go that way,” Kiyoshi said.

  “No. I can’t deviate from my route. The satellites would see.”

  Screw the satellites, Kiyoshi thought. He caught Michael’s eye in the rearview screen. He was still holding his dagger loosely in his bound hands. He tossed it back and up, over the seats. The snake crushed his wrists. Too late. Michael grabbed the dagger off the seat. As if he’d been born to this life of violence, he lunged forward and wrapped one puffy-suited arm around Andrea Miller’s head-rest and her throat. The dagger rested on her collarbone, inside the rigid collar of her spacesuit. Even Kiyoshi could hardly stand to look.

  “Go that way,” Michael said.

  Andrea Miller flinched. The rover skidded.

  “Bloody hell! I thought …” She trailed off, fighting to straighten the rover out.

  “You thought I was just a kid,” Michael said, clinging to the back of her seat as the rover wobbled. The dagger’s blade threw reflections of sunlight around the inside of the vehicle. “Well, I am just a kid. But you don’t know whose kid I am.”

  Hmm. Kiyoshi had thought Michael was taking the news of his father’s murder a bit too calmly. Sounded like there was a lot going on under the surface there.

  “I suggest doing as Michael says,” he interrupted.

  “OK. OK!”

  “And call off your snake while you’re at it, huh?”

  “SNAKE COMMAND: Off,” Andrea said, bitterly.

  The snake fell lifelessly from Kiyoshi’s wrists. He rubbed them, wincing. Bruises crisscrossed his inner arms like matched suicide attempts.

  “Just so you’re aware,” Andrea said, “the Star Force fleet carrying the Martians is now entering Ceres orbit. We have about two hours to cancel the landing, including signal delay time.”

  The rover bounced off a rise and soared down into a valley full of junkers. This had to be what Kiyoshi had seen from space and mistaken for a spaceport. The ships were parked in neat lines, but every one had something wrong with it, such as missing radiator vanes, or something horrendously wrong with it, such as a hole in the side.

  Kiyoshi eyed the Salvation with a mixture of resentment and lust. It towered above all the small haulers and barges. Parked on its tail, it resembled a skyscraper with a giant hula hoop suspended above the roof. The framework of wires and struts that would have supported the Bussard ramscoop drooped in Pallas’s meager gravity.

  “That ship,” Andrea Miller said, pointing at the Salvation. “Most of the people we get are no-hopers, you know? But that group was different. They had a freaking anti-matter drive.”

  “I helped to build it,” Michael whispered.

  Kiyoshi interrupted. “There! That one! Go that way, that way!”

  “OK, OK, don’t bloody yell at me.”

  He scarcely heard her.

  He was staring, transfixed, at the Monster.

  ★

  “Stop the rover. I’ll be getting out here.”

  “You’re crazy,” Andrea Miller said.

  “How long did it take you to figure that out?”

  “I’m coming with you!” Michael squeaked. He hastily fitted his helmet on.

  Kiyoshi had given up on telling Michael no a while back. Besides, he owed him for that stunt with the knife. He shrugged. “Thanks for the ride,” he said to Andrea Miller.

  “What am I supposed to tell them when I get there?”

  “You’ll be short two dangerous criminals—”

  “With important information, don’t forget that part! That was going to be my excuse for bringing you in!”

  “So make something up.”

  “I raise chickens. I’m not the creative type.”

  “You are now. Go save Ceres. We’ll be with you shortly.” He nudged her to put her helmet on.

  She moved her lips soundlessly, subvocalizing to someone not present. “OK, to hell with it,” she said a moment later. “Do whatever you bloody like.”

  Helmets sealed, they waited in mutually annoyed silence for the atmosphere to cycle out of the rover’s interior. A powerful compressor sucked the air into a storage tank, equalizing the interior pressure with the vacuum outside. When the pressure indicator hit zero, the gullwing door hinged open. Kiyoshi jumped out without a backwards glance. He ran towards the Monster.

  The rover drove off.

  Michael caught up with Kiyoshi and grabbed his arm, as if trying to slow him down.

  As suddenly as a power cut, the sunlight went away. They’d travelled 300 kilometers south. Down here, Pallas had 14-hour days and nights.

  Darkness swallowed the valley of dead ships.

  But not before Kiyoshi saw the gaping hole in the Monster’s operations module.

  Shaking Michael off, he ran faster and launched into a leap. He landed on all fours on the side of the ops module
. He gecko-gripped on with gloves and boots and crawled up the overhang, shining his helmet lamp across the pitted old Japanese steel of the hull, until he reached the hole.

  Ragged edges of hull plates bowed outwards, sharp enough to rip his suit if he wasn’t careful.

  An explosion had made this hole, ripping through layers of decking and hull, from the inside.

  He jumped into the hole. Down, down through a shaft lined with wreckage. He found the controls of this crappy old suit’s mobility pack just in time to land lightly—instead of fatally—in the cavern that used to be the bridge.

  Wooden panelling gone, checkerboard floor shattered. A confusion of plastic sheeting tangled with the wreckage. He stood on the wall near the cupboard that used to be the ship’s tabernacle, where they kept the Host.

  The Monster was not a surface-capable ship, and yet here it was on the surface, so everything was the wrong way up. This wall was the floor.

  He shone his helmet lamp back up the shaft.

  Yep. He’d fallen straight through the data center.

  He flew back up there.

  Nothing left but a few globs of melted plastic. The blast zone of total destruction also took in the toilet, the galley, and the refrigerator where the Ghost used to live.

  Michael fell down the shaft, mobility pack puffing. Kiyoshi caught him.

  “What Mendoza saw,” he said on their suit-to-suit link, “was an explosion. He was right about that. But he was wrong about them blowing up the whole ship. They just blew up the data center.”

  Michael’s faceplate automatically darkened in the glare of Kiyoshi’s headlamp, so Kiyoshi couldn’t see his face. “Don’t wanna stay in here,” he said. “It’s spooky.”

  “Go on back out, then. Wait for me. I won’t be long.”

  Michael’s helmet lamp receded up the shaft.

  Kiyoshi knelt on the wall where he’d first landed. He gripped the empty tabernacle and crashed his helmet against it, again and again. The suit’s alarms shrilled piteously. The noise annoyed him back to some semblance of awareness.

  He sat back on his heels, grinding his teeth, tears flooding down his cheeks.

  In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit … In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit …

  Is there a place for AIs in Heaven?

  That eternal seed of doubt made it all the worse. Had Jun ever been alive? Or had he just been a smart machine?

  Kiyoshi threw himself face down. The Vatican had not yet reached a decision regarding Jun’s status, and now they never could. He would never know if Jun had really been alive or not.

  This was the end. Jun gone. The Monster, gone. All Jun’s sub-personalities, gone. Molly and Colin, gone. The Galapajin, as good as gone—they no longer trusted him, and they were right. The entire fucking solar system, on the edge of being lost to the nanites. Nothing left.

  A light wobbled over the wall, turning ice-coated splinters of wood into miniature mountains. “Kiyoshi,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.” His collar seal, sodden with tears, chafed his neck as he sat up. Something hard pricked his collarbone. His cross, trapped in the seal.

  “I really think you ought to eat and drink.” Michael landed beside him. “You’ve been doing intravenous stim. That means you’re probably dehydrated. You haven’t eaten anything in ages, and I didn’t see you drink anything, either. Have you got any fluids in that suit?”

  He checked. “No.”

  “Well, there’s water in mine. It’s good to drink. I tasted it. Here, you can take some via the umbilical.”

  Michael squatted in front of him, offering his suit’s life-support backpack. The fluid reservoir on his suit was in there. Kiyoshi’s was in front. He hooked up the umbilical supply tube, careful not to take too much of Michael’s water. Shame steadied his thoughts.

  Why was he wasting time grieving, when a far more important task lay ahead?

  He disconnected the valve. His hydration nipple puffed stale air into his mouth, and then equally stale water.

  “I’m going to find the boss-man,” he told Michael.

  “Wh-what are you going to do to him?”

  “Kill him. I was going to do that anyway. But now I’m going to do it slowly.”

  “Can I help?”

  “No. This is one thing you cannot help me with. But listen, Mikey, you can help with something else.”

  They flew back out of the hole in the side of the Monster.

  “See all these ships?”

  “I can’t see them. It’s dark.”

  “Well, I know, but that’s good. Anyway, you’re an expert on ships. So have a look around and find something that flies, or that can be made to fly with a bit of work.”

  “Why?”

  “Because after this, you’re going to need to get out of here. Start by looking at the big ships. If I know Brian O’Shaughnessy, he’ll get as many of our people out of that prison as there are suits, so you’ll need something that can carry hundreds, maybe thousands.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  “… I mean us. We will need to get out of here. That’s what I meant,.”

  “Oh. All right. I guess.”

  Michael sounded terrified. But a cluster of dull red lights on the plain, beyond the dead ships, monopolized Kiyoshi’s attention. That had to be InSec Center.

  “See you soon.” He squeezed Michael’s shoulder, and started walking.

  xxix.

  Long before Kiyoshi reached InSec Center, a voice demanded his ID. He said that he was in trouble and needed help. The voice grudgingly ordered him to proceed to Personnel Entrance B, as if he should know where that was.

  It wasn’t hard to find, as it turned out, because Andrea Miller’s rover stood outside it.

  InSec Center was a geodesic dome, probably a kilometer in diameter, like half of a giant golf ball. Heat rejection plates jutted up from the vertices of its reflective panels. Red status lights lit them up like clusters of geometric petals. Andrea Miller’s rover stood plugged into a charging station outside a hooded airlock.

  “Knock, knock,” Kiyoshi said.

  “It’s not frigging locked.”

  Shrugging, he tossed a pebble against the action plate. The airlock valved. He walked into the chamber.

  Andrea Miller was already in there, sitting with her back against one curved wall. “They saw me deviating from my course,” she said bitterly.

  Apparently, they’d been waiting for him to get here. The chamber filled with air. The pressurization light turned green. But the valve at the other end of the chamber didn’t open.

  “Suits off,” said the voice.

  Kiyoshi stripped to his jeans and t-shirt. Standing on one foot to put his gecko boots back on, he stepped on something that wasn’t there. He glanced at Andrea. She averted her gaze, although that might have been plain old embarrassment. A high-tech spacesuit liner was not the most modest of garments.

  “Security scan in progress,” the voice said—now speaking normally, rather than over the radio. Its owner stepped out of a hidden compartment in the wall. It resembled a metal flamingo with its neck growing out of its chest, and a camera for a head. “This won’t hurt a bit.”

  It flicked out a metal tongue and nipped Kiyoshi’s arm, like a mosquito bite. Andrea rolled her spacesuit liner down from one shoulder to give it access to her skin.

  “Place all weapons in the drawer,” the metal flamingo said. A drawer slid out from the wall of the chamber. “That includes your service weapon,” it said to Andrea, “and the knife you’ve attempted to hide under your spacesuit,” it added to Kiyoshi. “It was really very helpful of you to turn yourself in. Don’t go and spoil it now, will you?”

  ★

  In his fifth-storey office, the man now known as Oliver Legacy sipped a cappuccino and admired the view from the floor-to-ceiling window behind his desk.

  InSec Center was hollow. The central cavity had been landscaped into a pa
rk. Raddled story sculptors and fashion-victim data artists chatted on wrought iron benches beneath a really good fake sky. From ground level, you seemed to look up into an empyrean dotted with clouds. From Legacy’s viewpoint, however, the wall on the opposite side of the park offered a trompe l’oeil view of the Paris skyline.

  Legacy reflected briefly, as he often did, on the pointlessness of all this fakery, and remembered, as usual, that it had been scientifically proven to improve the mental health of employees. He himself was the exception who proved the rule. He’d rather have looked at an honest wall. But he had never been a perfect fit for the ISA. His fall from grace and exile to Callisto proved it.

  Now he was back on the executive treadmill. The capture of Konstantin X had pole-vaulted him out of field office purgatory. He’d been rewarded with this office and the perks and responsibilities that went with it—everything he’d have expected to achieve by the age of 58, if his career hadn’t been bushwhacked by that wretched 4 Vesta business. That was now forgotten. The past was prologue. The future was his to create … in every sense.

  So why did it all feel so hollow?

  He reminded himself that he was one of the most powerful people in the entire ISA. The decisions he took here in this office shaped the information environment of billions.

  But lately it felt like pushing on a string. Narratives resisted the touch of the ISA’s story sculptors. The internet refused to sit up and beg. Search trends emerged, not from the ISA’s network of tame feed curators, but from nowhere. To many in the ISA, that was terrifying.

  Not to Oliver Legacy. Things fluctuated, and pretty soon, he figured, they’d fluctuate back to nomal.

  He set down his cappuccino and returned his attention to the problem he was meant to be considering at this particular moment.

  Kiyoshi Yonezawa.

  A DNA scrape had confirmed Yonezawa’s identity when he was arrested on board the Unsaved Changes. Another DNA scrape, administered four minutes ago in Personnel Airlock B, had confirmed it again.

  0089327 Miller, one of the wardens of the Worldhouse Project, claimed to have caught Yonezawa trying to escape. If so, it was interesting that she had not bothered to restrain him. Interesting, but not a complete surprise. Miller’s family connections had dragged her loyalty rating—one of the ISA’s most important employee evaluation metrics—into negative territory as much as a year ago.