The Callisto Gambit (10 page)

The ship rolled over and lay with its rotator arm horizontal to the ground, like a person making a snow angel.

Kiyoshi unstrapped from the captain’s couch. He’d never moved so fast in his life. The bridge was tipped sideways. He scaled the now-vertical floor to the elevator. It no longer functioned. He sprinted along the elevator shaft, leapt across the transfer point, and ran for the passenger module, shouting for his people,
knowing
he’d find them all dead.

They’d all been strapped in, wearing their suits. A few had broken bones. Everyone else was fine.

The Startractor would never fly again.

Kiyoshi and Sister Terauchi got everyone outside and moving. Kiyoshi had shut down the reactor a few seconds before impact, and it was out of fuel anyway, so it wasn’t going to blow up, but there was still the risk of a containment breach that would spew hot neutron flux all over the area. Look what had happened to the drive shield.

“It was an accident waiting to happen!” He looked back at the fragments of ablative nanocomposite lying around the titanium skeleton of the shield. “Completely embrittled. We burned all the way to Jupiter with shit for a drive shield!”

“We’re safe, that’s what counts. Praise Him,” Sister Terauchi said. “And thank you, Yonezawa-san. You got us here.”

Ahead of them, Galapajin ran in family groups, strung out, making for the nearest lights.

“I’m going back,” Kiyoshi said.

“No!” Sister Terauchi grabbed his arm.

“The piglets.”

He ran back to the Startractor. It was shock making him act this way. He knew it, didn’t question it. He scrambled up to the passenger module’s emergency airlock. The Galapagjin had closed it behind them, conserving the atmosphere—so tidy, so thrifty, even in a life-or-death situation. He scuffed through thermal tiles jarred clean off the walls by the impact, and the wreckage of the hydroponic farm. Everything was sideways. He jumped from one tank to the next, each as dry and clean as a bone.

The piglets huddled on the side of their pen that was now the floor, trembling. He scooped them into the pressurized travel cage. His suit’s radiation counter said the reactor hadn’t sprung a crack yet.

He caught up with the others out on the plain. They had slowed down to a shuffle. Fear had given them a burst of energy, but they were still starving and dehydrated. So was he.

They’d landed on a flat plain, although
flat
was relative. Every step, your boot landed on a lump of rock or in a snow-filled hole. Kiyoshi had never seen terrain like it.

Stars filled the crystalline night sky. On this side of the tidally locked moon, Jupiter was forever invisible.

Brighter, manmade lights shone atop a range of serrated hills, or mountains—hard to judge their height, or how far away they were—marching away towards the south pole.

They walked. The hills did not seem to come any closer.

After half an hour, they passed the wreckage of a small spacecraft. It looked recent, scattered across the snow, although how could you tell? This snow did not fall from the sky; it had been here for billions of years. The Galapajin stopped to scrounge for consumables. Kiyoshi told them to get moving, and received a few sullen grunts of
“Hai, sencho”
; otherwise, silence. But they got moving.

A little while later, a boy told his mother that he was going to eat snow. Before she could stop him, he took off his helmet and died.

Order dissolved. Everyone gathered around the dead boy in silence—a silence that Kiyoshi, knowing these people, knew to be as explosive as TNT with a fuse in it.

A Flyingsaucer burst out of the night sky, hosing them with light. It settled onto the snow. Unlike the Startractor, the Flyingsaucer had jackstands.

An airlock in its side spat out a foldaway staircase. Spurning the stairs, six UN peacekeepers jumped to the ground and bounded towards the Galapajin.

Kiyoshi had no love for the blue berets, but right now they looked like angels of mercy. He plunged through his people and met the peacekeepers between their ship and the crowd. There were some moments of comedy as they all attempted, with gestures, to find a shared comms frequency. Finally Kiyoshi heard a hoarse voice say, “—fucking tourists.”

He jumped in. “Thank God you’re here. We need water, food, air. We can pay.” The Flyingsaucer wasn’t big enough for all of them. They could travel in shifts.

“You’re on the wrong moon,” said the same voice. All six of the squat, Earthborn peacekeepers were standing still, so Kiyoshi couldn’t tell which one had spoken.

“I received landing permission from Asgard Traffic Control,” Kiyoshi lied. “We lost comms on our final approach, but—”

“Son, I don’t know where you’re from, but Traffic Control talks to twenty ships a day. And strangely enough, a lot of them lose comms on their final approach. You passed one of them back there. It is
hard
to land a bus that isn’t designed to land,
at all,
in the dark, on this shit.” One of the peacekeepers kicked the uneven ground, so Kiyoshi now knew who he was talking to. “Without remote guidance, it’s next door to impossible. You did it. Congratulations. But the fact remains, you did not obtain permission to land on Callisto.”

Kiyoshi got angry. “Well, we’re here now. What are you gonna do, leave us to die?”

“Give me a reason not to,” the man said, cool as steel.

Kiyoshi clenched his jaw. He spoke through gritted teeth. “Saskatchewan.”

“Eh?”

“Thirty thousand hectares of farmland. Already worth twice what I paid for it.”

The peacekeeper laughed.
“Laugh!”
he said, to underline it. “I’m
from
Canada. You were ripped off, trekkie. Land up there isn’t worth shit.”

“If it’s full of people like you, I can see why not,” Kiyoshi said.

Sister Terauchi stepped forward. Next to the peacekeepers, she looked painfully frail in her spacesuit, like some alien creature that lived here in the snow and the bleakness. “Give them whatever they want,” she said in Japanese.

“All right,” Kiyoshi took a deep breath. “A Jupiter trojan asteroid. M-type, masses nine gigakilos.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“Yup, and I’ll throw in another one, bit smaller, if you get us through immigration.”

“Done,” the peacekeeper said. “I’m Greg.”

“Kay,” Kiyoshi said. He never advertised to strangers that he was Japanese. Although, when the locals saw the Galapajin en masse, they were bound to guess. Hopefully they had worse things to worry about than half a thousand purebloods.

“Nice to make your acquaintance.” Greg held out his glove, Earth style, so they could shake on it.

The Flyingsaucer had to make four trips. Kiyoshi went with the last group. He joined the peacekeepers in the cockpit, in the center of the discus-shaped ship. The floor was transparent, this Flyingsaucer being primarily a sightseeing craft. The plain fell away. Kiyoshi counted five crashed spaceships just in this one small area, their wreckage starkly visible by Jupiter-light.

“You weren’t kidding,” he commented.

They’d all taken their helmets off. The cockpit stank of farts and fresh paint.

“That yours? The twin-module Startractor?”

“Yeah.”

“Not too bad at all,” Greg said, meaning that the Startractor was still basically in one piece. “Salvage that for parts, you’ll be able to buy food for five hundred … for at least a week.” The peacekeepers all laughed, but not cruelly. They were well-disposed to Kiyoshi, now that they had taken two Jupiter trojans off him.

The Flyingsaucer’s rim-mounted ion thrusters kept the ship level as they skipped over the hills.
No, mountains,
Kiyoshi corrected himself when he saw the scale of the colony on the other side.

The mountains ringed the inner region of Asgard Crater, the second-largest on Callisto. The crater was formed of concentric rings of frozen splashback from a primordial impact. Within the inmost ring of mountains, another impact had raised a dome 65 kilometers wide, once known as Doh, and now known as Asgard Spaceport.

Hundreds of ships littered the bulge, rivalling the spaceport of Shackleton City in its heyday. This put the throng in orbit into perspective. Unlike Luna’s spaceports, though, the ships were not parked in neatly gridded-off launch zones. Looked like they’d come down willy-nilly and squeezed in anywhere. Their lights glinted on puddles of refrozen slag where their drives had melted the ice, and rock as well.

Kiyoshi searched urgently for the
Salvation.
It should have been easy to spot an ITN hauler with an 800-meter torus mounted on its nose. Maybe the boss-man had opted to stay in orbit. ITN haulers
were
surface-capable in micro-gravity: they landed on their tails and took off again the same way. But they required the help of tugs to get off the surface, once they were full of water or liquid hydrogen or whatever. The
Salvation
would need no such assistance—and if tug operators started crawling over the hull, they’d have questions about the
Salvation’s
drive. Lots of questions. Kiyoshi regretfully concluded that the boss-man must have stayed in orbit to avoid letting the cat out of the bag.

He was about to ask the peacekeepers if they happened to have seen a weird-looking ship with an antimatter drive, when Greg spoke. “That’s the welcome center.” He drew a circle on the see-through floor with the toe of his boot, and laughed. “We oughta call it the NOT welcome center, nowadays. But you’re fine.”

“Looks pretty crowded down there.”

“There’s a war on. Dunno where you came from, and I’m not gonna ask, but wherever it was, I assume you didn’t feel safe there. Same story with all of them. The population of this moon has quadrupled in the last month.” Greg grimaced. “Sucks about Seoul, huh?”

Kiyoshi had been following the war news in every spare moment, hoping to detect echoes of Jun’s activities. So far, nothing. He’d been focusing on events in Mars orbit, where the gallant group of Luna Union pilots marooned on Stickney—a PLAN orbital fortress—had just been relieved by Star Force. He hadn’t heard about Seoul. “You mean Seoul, Earth?”

“Of course, Seoul, Earth. It got fragged. Orbital strike. The capital of Korea no longer freaking exists, dude.”

“Whoa. That’s terrible.”

“Fifteen million dead. That’s on top of Hyderabad, which got fragged last month. Eleven million dead there.”

“Unbelievable.”

“Yeah, they don’t want you finding out about that.”

Discussing Earth like this, it didn’t feel like 630 million kilometers separated them from humanity’s home planet. The welcome center underlined the intimate connection between Earth and its colonies. Located on the rounded central dome of the crater, flexible transit tubes stretched out to every point of the compass, ending in vehicle airlocks. The terminal—the body of this metal octopus—had giant observation windows shaped like the continents of Earth, which glowed from within. Viewed from above, they formed an illuminated map of the world.

And, Kiyoshi thought, a damn good target.

It scared him a bit how vulnerable the Asgard colony seemed. All it would take was one spaceship landing in the wrong place. And that was without considering the risk of orbital strikes like those that had obliterated Seoul and Hyderabad. The PLAN might be hard pressed in Mars orbit, but its stealth fighters still roamed abroad, as the destruction of 6 Hebe proved.

“What you have to understand is this,” Greg said, as if he sensed what Kiyoshi was thinking. “We’re under siege.”

“Yeah,” Kiyoshi murmured. “I can see that.”

“We’re being overrun by ‘tourists,’” another peacekeeper said, making air quotes. “We had to put up some barriers to entry, or we’d have a life-support crisis on our hands.”

That sounded like a semi-apology for extorting bribes from Kiyoshi. He squinted at the peacekeepers’ faces. They didn’t have the well-laundered, self-righteously correct manner he associated with blue berets. They didn’t smell deodorized. Even the women in the crew looked unshaven.

He’d also noticed that the Flyingsaucer smelled as if its UN-blue paint job were very recent.

“You aren’t peacekeepers, are you?” he said.

They laughed out loud. When he could speak without busting a gut, the leader said, “You aren’t the first to come to that conclusion. But it’s worse than that, trekkie. We
are
peacekeepers.”

“My bad.”

“Wanna see our IDs? Wanna see our bank accounts, where we haven’t been paid in three months?”

They landed and docked the Flyingsaucer with a transit tube. Inside, the air smelt oxygen-rich and sterile. Kiyoshi’s weary people had already organized themselves into queues. The peacekeepers, as promised, whisked them through immigration—it was a refugee camp, people sleeping on the floor of the spaceport. Kiyoshi decided that his Jupiter trojans had been well spent.

Anyway, he still had two asteroids left, as well as his stocks.

By the end of the day, he’d spent everything on food and lodgings.

“Any news of the
Salvation?”
Sister Terauchi asked.

“No,” Kiyoshi said. “I asked the peacekeepers. They’d never heard of it. Searched the local bulletin boards and forums. I guess you’ve done the same. Nothing.”

“I thought the boss might have emailed you.”

“Nope.” Kiyoshi didn’t let on how worried he was. “There are two possibilities. They may not have made it here. Antimatter propulsion isn’t a very well-tested technology. Or else they got here before us, refueled, and took off again. But no one admits to even having heard of them. So they may have landed out on the ice. Traffic Control is overwhelmed; they aren’t keeping track. The
Salvation
could be parked somewhere out there, quietly helping itself to ice. OK, I guess that’s three possibilities.”

Sister Terauchi smiled faintly. “There’s another possibility,” she said. “They never planned to come here at all.”

“You’re accusing Father Tom of lying?”

She shook her head. It took him a moment to get it. She wasn’t accusing Father Tom of lying. She was accusing
him.