The ship looked to be nearly as big as InSec Center itself.
Kiyoshi whistled. “When you said a ship, I thought you meant a Superlifter or something.”
“It’s a decommissioned Star Force destroyer,” Jun said. “The flagship of the ISA fleet. It’s not supposed to be here, but when the Ceres story started to go bad, Legacy and his buddies squirrelled it away on the other side of Pallas. It’s fully fueled.”
“For a quick getaway.” Kiyoshi chortled. “Let’s go.”
xxxii.
The destroyer informed him in a sweet voice that it was called the Velvet Revolver. That was the first and last thing it said before Jun lobotomized its hub and took over.
“Let’s rename it,” Kiyoshi said, exploring the bridge. “Dragon? Leviathan? Beast?“
“I don’t want to name it anything,” Jun said. “It’s just a ship. Do you mind flying? I’ve got some other stuff to do.”
“My pleasure.” Kiyoshi babied the ship into orbit under secondary thrust, aware of the vulnerable dome below. At apoapsis, he engaged the main drive. Blue-hot plasma stabbed into the vacuum like a ghostly middle finger. The ship screamed away from Pallas at 0.3 gees of acceleration.
Kiyoshi unstrapped from his couch. With a reactor capacity of 2.3 terawatts, the destroyer could kick out Star Force levels of thrust. Unfortunately, you’d need Star Force augments to cope with the resulting gees. Kiyoshi had had enough of heavy gravity for a while, anyway. Constant acceleration / deceleration would get them there soon enough. It was ‘only’ three million kilometers.
Thinking of 3,000,000 klicks as a short distance was a luxury he hadn’t had since he last flew on the Monster, and as the destroyer tore through space, he wandered its decks, imagining how it might look if the functional steel-lattice walls were replaced with wood.
He ended up sitting in the mess, nodding over a pouch of coffee, alone with fifty unused chairs and a scattering of ISA motivational posters.
Jun’s voice startled him out of a doze. “We’re almost there.”
“What? Shit.”
His eyes hurt to open, his jaw ached from grinding his teeth, the tip of his tongue was raw, and he wanted to sleep forever.
“Wrong time to crash,” Jun said.
“I know. I know.”
“Have some coffee.”
“I already did. Medibot!” Kiyoshi yelled, trusting that Jun would respect his wishes.
After a longer time than he would’ve liked, a medibot trundled into the mess. One gripper offered him an IV, the other a pre-filled syringe. “I’d recommend taking both,” Jun said sullenly. “The IV’s a saline solution spiked with a mild depressant to smooth out the rush.”
Kiyoshi pawed at the syringe. The medibot tourniqueted his arm for him with robotic efficiency, while inserting the IV into his cubital port. Head resting on the table, he prodded his right arm until he found a vein that didn’t already have too many scabbed, red marks on it.
“You don’t really need that stuff,” Jun said. “You just think you do.”
Again, he got that nagging sense that something was wrong. Then the rush hit, and his concerns vanished like leaves whirled away in a breeze.
Filled with energy again, he stalked back to the cockpit and watched 5222 Ioffe grow from a blip on the long-distance radar, to a lump in the optical feed, to a full-sized asteroid.
All of 22 kilometers long, it showed no exterior signs of habitation. Everything important was inside. It rotated lazily; it had not been spun up. Presumably the solar system’s worst criminals were not thought to deserve gravity.
Jun pointed out a QRF fuel depot, a grove of gigantic propellant tanks.
“What’ve you done with the QRF, actually?” Kiyoshi said. He’d brought his coffee from the mess, and he sucked on it, cold now.
“Sent them away,” Jun said, vaguely.
A workstation on the far side of the bridge lit up and trilled. Kiyoshi ran over to inspect the flashing screens. The destroyer’s sensor array reported weapons locks from defensive systems. 5222 Ioffe had three laser batteries, spaced out around the asteroid to give 360° coverage. There was also a large-caliber railgun on a turntable. Kiyoshi followed its line of fire to an unassuming bump of rock.
“Hey! Velvet Revolver, great to see you.” The voice from the comms station sounded more than a little sarcastic. “What the hell is happening on Pallas?”
“Say something,” Jun muttered in Kiyoshi’s ears.
“Y’know, friends usually say hello first, and paint crosshairs on you later,” Kiyoshi said.
“That’ll do,” Jun said. “I’m packaging your transmission with a stand-down order enabled by Pallas executive-level consensus.”
“But I understand your paranoid overreaction,” Kiyoshi went on chatting. “Weird shit has been happening.”
“Aaaand we’re in.”
“Like this.” Kiyoshi commanded the destroyer’s primary kinetic weapon, a hypervelocity coil gun similar to the one he had on the Monster, to take out laser battery number one. “And this.” Push button, watch pretty, pretty blossoms of atomized matter float away into the vacuum. “And this.” There went number three.
“What are you doing?” the 5222 Ioffe comms officer screamed hysterically.
“Just saying hello,” Kiyoshi crooned. He chose a different type of shell from the mouthwatering selection available. 5222 Ioffe’s railgun dematerialized into a cloud of shrapnel. A crater gaped in its place. “Did I miss anything?”
“Nope, that’s pretty much it,” Jun said. “The rest of the defences are inside. You may want this.”
A headless figure walked across the bridge to him. It was a spacesuit with the cheesy lightning-bolt logo of the ISA on the chest, carrying its own helmet under its arm. Jun made it wiggle its free hand in a limp-wristed wave of greeting.
“Meet the Powersuit. It’s a Marine combat suit for normal people. It does the Marine combat part for you.”
“I’ll take it,” Kiyoshi said, walking around the suit. He frowned when he saw LEGACY written on the back. “Can that change?”
“Sure. What do you want it to be?”
“I’m kind of tired of sneaking around the solar system, pretending to be someone else. Let’s just have it say YONEZAWA.”
The suit snugged itself around him like an old friend. It plugged itself into his cubital port and interfaced with his BCI, spraying sinister-looking icons into his HUD area. He hardly had to walk; he just thought about walking, and the suit carried him to the command airlock. There, he had a choice between a carbine that shot explosive flechettes, and a high-powered laser rifle. He took both.
The destroyer had been sidling closer to the maimed asteroid all this time, and when Kiyoshi opened the airlock, he looked down at barren rock gliding past, just a few meters subjectively below.
“Blowing the door now,” Jun said.
Shadows leapt across the rock from an explosion.
The destroyer crept over the bump Kiyoshi had previously identified as the entrance. It was now a bump with a large hole in it.
Kiyoshi timed his jump to miss the hole’s slagged, glowing sides.
He drifted down through smoke and wildly strobing alarms, and landed on a steel walkway. Ahead of him, another airlock obligingly opened.
“Jun, are you into their systems?”
“Deep, deep inside.”
“How many people in here?”
“Counting prisoners, not counting the ones you fragged when you hit the batteries? Two thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight.”
Holy crap.
The airlock irised, and he flew into a city of glass and steel. Spindly zero-gee towers shook hands across a pressurized gulf easily a kilometer wide. Ziplines crisscrossed the void. 5222 Ioffe’s artificial equivalent of the sun was at the far end, shining into his eyes. The Powersuit darkened his faceplate and started acquiring person-shaped targets. He shot quite a few of them before realizing they weren’t trying to shoot him. The
y were screaming and running away. Odd how often that had been happening lately. Heh.
“Who are these people, Jun?”
“Researchers. Scientists. That’s what their job descriptions say, anyway. Ever heard of Unit 731?”
“No.”
“Good.” Jun highlighted one of the pencil-thin towers on his faceplate. “The boss is in there.”
Kiyoshi flew that way. Before he got there, laser pulses started blipping around him. The Powersuit returned fire with blistering speed and agility. Foil chaff pumped from reservoirs on his elbows and knees, surrounding him with a cloud of glittering snow. Kinetic rounds sprayed wide. High-tension ziplines parted like rubber bands. People caught in the crossfire came apart. Kiyoshi fired a final burst of flechettes at the security goons on his tail and dived at the top of the tower. It had been severed from its mate on the opposite side of the void, and swayed under him like a blade of grass. There was no obvious way in. He backed off and sawed a hole in the wall with his laser rifle.
Slugs chased him inside, ricocheting off desks, eviscerating ergoforms..
“This is just an office!”
No answer from Jun. Kiyoshi found a hatch in the floor. It led to a zip tube—a common alternative to stairs in zero-gee environments.
A powered grab handle carried him ‘down’ at an agonizingly slow pace. The zip tube had portholes set into the sides. He saw:
A woman who seemed to be pregnant with a cube
A man with two heads, one in the normal place, one growing out of the side of his neck
A teenage girl who looked ordinary except that she had smooth skin where her eyes should be
A man so old that Kiyoshi couldn’t tell if he was dead or not
All of them lay motionless, strapped to cots, except for the girl, who was solving math problems on a whiteboard.
“Jun? Jun, this is sick. These are experiments.”
“I know,” Jun said, sounding a bit distant. “It’s worse than the human breeding program the Chinese were running on Tiangong Erhao, and that’s saying something.”
Kiyoshi wanted to shoot out the portholes and put these poor souls out of their misery. He twisted around on the grab handle and aimed his carbine at the top of the zip-tube. He expected the security guards to appear there at any second.
“What else have you found?” he asked Jun, to take his mind off the portholes.
“Oh. Just computers.”
“Boooring.”
“If you thought Pallas had a lot of capacity? Double that. Triple that. I’ve got as much power now as … oh, say, Switzerland.”
Kiyoshi frowned. Then his suit squealed an alarm, and his left arm went numb. He bounced off the wall. The suit reported damage to its armor on his left elbow. He’d let the bastards get the jump on him.
He shot back with the carbine—the suit did the work his left arm couldn’t do. The tower was swaying more than ever now, so he couldn’t see his opponents and they couldn’t see him around the curvature of the zip tube, but both sides had smart munitions that could self-guide to their targets. The suit pelted him with damage reports.
“Cell six-three-eight,” Jun said. “You’re almost there.”
“Can you get these assholes off my back?”
He shot out the porthole of cell 638, dived through the gap, and glanced fearfully at the human form on the bed.
It took him a minute to recognize the boss without his hair and beard.
Like all the other prisoners, Qusantin Hasselblatter, a.k.a. Konstantin X, lay strapped down on a bare cot.
Fiberoptic wires sprouted out of a translucent turban on his head. Kiyoshi looked closer. The translucent stuff was in fact some kind of medical wrapping. The top of the boss’s skull had been removed. The wires went through the wrapping, into the boss’s brain.
“Heh,” Kiyoshi said. “So this is what they meant by helping with their research.”
The boss’s eyes opened. Misty, their gaze wavered, reinforcing the impression that the boss had aged thirty years overnight.
On an impulse, Kiyoshi took off his helmet.
He smelled virulent antiseptic, and the odor of burning from the firefight. Distant klaxons sounded outside the tower. No ruckus from the security goons. Jun must’ve dispatched them.
“Hey, you mad bastard,” he said roughly. “It’s me.”
The boss-man stared at him without apparent recognition. “I’ll never tell you anything,” he grunted.
“Then I guess there’s no point asking why you ruined my life.”
For his entire adult life, Kiyoshi had orbited around the maw of the boss-man’s sociopathy. So had thousands of others. He could not get those years back, or change any of the decisions that had snared him deeper in the boss-man’s madness. The consequences of breaking free had almost killed him—might kill him yet … but there was nothing the boss-man might say that could change that now. Konstantin X was what he was. A human black hole.
That epic realization, coming on top of the terrible spectacle of wires in the boss’s head, drained Kiyoshi’s rage. He wondered what he’d come all this way for.
“Aren’t you going to do it?” Jun said.
Kiyoshi scratched his scalp with gloved fingers. “They’ve tortured him.”
“Ask him why.”
“I never told them anything,” the boss-man whispered hoarsely. “They couldn’t even dig it out of my brain with direct neural stimulation! Ha!” The misty eyes glinted. With mirth. As so often before, the boss-man was inviting Kiyoshi to share the joke. “Ha! Even the fucking ISA can’t always get what it wants …”
They laughed together.
“Kill me,” the boss-man whispered.
“Well, that’s why I came,” Kiyoshi said. “But now I’m thinking I should help you to escape.”
“No.” Weak fingers clawed at his armored arm. “I’m in pain like you can’t even imagine. Kill me. Let me go free.”
“What are you going to do?” Jun said.
“I don’t know!” Kiyoshi yelled. The certainty that uppers habitually gave him had fled.
“Do it,” the boss-man grated, reaching for Kiyoshi’s rifle as if he’d do it himself.
Kiyoshi let out a loud cry of frustration and anguish. He jerked the laser rifle up and shot the boss-man in the head.
Qusantin Hasselblatter died with a smile on his face.
“Bastard,” Kiyoshi said, licking his dry lips. “He almost had me there! Almost persuaded me to help him escape …” Or was it the other way round? Had he done the boss’s bidding, even at the last?
Staring down at the shrunken corpse, he knew with awful clarity that this had been a test of his conscience. He should have shown the boss mercy. And no, killing him did not count. He’d fallen short of what Christ required of him, yet again.
The corpse’s bowels released a gush of foul liquid into its diaper. Kiyoshi put his helmet back on to escape the stench.
“Jun! Jun? Did you take care of those guys on the roof?”
No answer came. Kiyoshi flew into the ziptube, kicking frantically in his haste to get out of the cell. The security guys could’ve plugged him if they were still there, but they weren’t.
He flew out of the tower the way he’d come. The artificial sunlight had dimmed to a sullen orange. Bodies drifted among the curved needles of towers like floating rubbish.
“JUN!”
The answer came faintly, after a moment’s delay. “Right here.”
A corpse fell past Kiyoshi. Its guts trailed behind it like a bloody kite string.
“Jun, is there anyone left alive in here?”
“Sure there is,” Jun said, after another split-second delay. “They’re just hiding.”
“I’m getting a signal delay. Where are you?”
“Mostly on Pallas. I’m in orbit around Ceres, too …”
Fear gripped Kiyoshi. He sweated coldly into his suit’s wicking layer. “What’re you doing there?”
“Hey, look,�
� Jun said, his tone suddenly brighter. Kiyoshi’s faceplate suddenly went to split-screen. Ceres filled the darkness of one half. “There is an easy solution to the Martian problem, after all.”
The Star Force fleet rolled into view around the dwarf planet’s limb. Kiyoshi was reminded of Adnan Kharbage’s home theater, except this was real, live-streaming from a camera on another ship.
The UNSF Badfinger exploded into a spectacular fireball. A spark darted out of the expanding shell of flame. The QRF fighter that had slagged it.
“The crew of that fighter can now claim to be the only living human beings to have destroyed a Flattop,” Jun said.
Kiyoshi could not believe what he was seeing. “The QRF slagged the Star Force fleet …! But they didn’t do it, did they? You did.”
“Oh, the QRF crews are still on board. Some of them are drinking themselves into a coma. The braver ones are fighting with their ships’ hubs, trying to figure out why they won’t talk to them anymore.”
The QRF ship Jun was riding flashed around Ceres, through a storm of radiation that momentarily pixellated the camera feed.
“Looks like the Heavycruisers cooked off nicely,” Jun said. “OK, I’m done here. Wanna see the media reaction?”
“No.”
“OK.” The split screen went away.
Kiyoshi flew slowly back among the swaying grass-blade towers. His mind reeled from what he’d just seen. “You killed thousands of people.”
“You did it first.”
“Quality versus quantity, bro.”
“See, that is just like you,” Jun said, suddenly angry. “Always ready with a cheap remark that doesn’t get anywhere near the heart of the issue. But it works for you, doesn’t it?”
“Jun, it does not work for me. I’m a junkie. I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. I’ve betrayed my faith.”
“Life is messy,” Jun said after a moment.
“I dunno,” Kiyoshi said. “I feel like everything is upside-down.”
The Callisto Gambit Page 38
