The Callisto Gambit (3 page)

Guessing the others felt the same way, he said cheerfully, “Well, let’s get moved in.”

“Yonezawa-
sencho.”
A senior nun, Sister Terauchi, addressed him as captain. “Does this ship have a name?”

Kiyoshi scowled at the ugly length of the Startractor. Its conical drive shield sprouted heat radiator vanes. The small engineering module nestled atop the radiators. Forward of that, the Galapajin were busily tethering their Bigelows to the ship’s spine, in between the circular plates where cargo would have been anchored. The propellor arm that rotated around the ship’s nose was aleady slowing down. He was going to halt it. Spin gravity? The Galapajin didn’t need no stinking spin gravity. Waste of power. One of those modules was for passengers, the other for crew, but it was a good bet they’d be using both of them for food production.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was a recycling barge, as I understand. Fomerly known as the
Kharbage Collector.”

Michael Kharbage crouched in his mecha, trying not to cry. Kiyoshi Yonezawa had let him keep his mecha when he threw him off the
Kharbage Collector
. That was a crumb of comfort amidst his shock and despair. Nothing like this had ever happened to him. Would this be the
last
thing that ever happened to him?

He floated helplessly into space, together with the other people Yonezawa had tossed off the
Kharbage Collector
: Captain Haddock—a self-styled pirate—and Haddock’s family. The
Collector
and the
Monster
shrank to tinker-toys adorned with LEDs. Captain Haddock uttered a monotonous string of piratical swears. Michael used to think Captain Haddock was a real pirate. That was why he’d hired him when he needed an adult to help him steal the
Kharbage Collector
from his dad. But compared to Kiyoshi Yonezawa, Haddock was a piker. And now he was as helpless as Michael himself.

Fear yammered in Michael’s head. They drifted closer to the fragments of the asteroid 99984 Ravilious. The free-floating iron mountains blocked out the sun.

Back in the inner system, humanity was embroiled in a life-or-death war against the PLAN, the voracious AI that had occupied Mars and wanted the rest of the solar system, too. Ships were battling. Carriers and orbitals were exchanging barrages of unthinkable destructive power. But it was all so far away. Out here, in this black void sprinkled with stars, the rest of humanity might as well not have existed.

Nothing moved except the asteroid fragments. In slow motion, two of the massive rocks crashed together. Splinters flew. Michael cowered in his mecha’s cradle.

“Have you not got thrusters on that thing, Michael?” Captain Haddock demanded.

“Yes,” Michael said, swallowing tears. “But I can’t tow all of you.” There were six of them: Haddock, his brother Codfish, Codfish’s wife Coral, Haddock’s wife Anemone, and their son Kelp, who was twelve years old to Michael’s ten. “Anyway, where would we go? What are we going to
do?”

Kelp said calmly, “It’s OK. Someone’s coming.”

A Dumptruck shot out from among the fragments. Michael had seen this type of spacecraft before, on his travels with Alicia Petruzzelli, the previous captain of the
Kharbage Collector.
It was a dumpster with rocket jets on the bottom and a railed cage at the prow for the operator. Powered by hydrogen and a few grains of uranium, Dumptrucks were commonly used by asteroid miners to shift rubble.

This one glided past the stranded group, slowly enough that they all had time to grab onto Michael, who pulsed his mecha’s thrusters to heave them aboard. The bottom of the Dumptruck was dusted with what looked like soil.

“Hi,” said the spacesuited figure on the prow, raising a hand in greeting without looking around. “I’m Brian. What happened?”

Captain Haddock erupted. “That accursed pirate Yonezawa happened! Did he not steal our ship from under us? He did that!”

“MY ship!” Michael piped up.

“Are yez going to let him get away wi’ it?” Haddock demanded.

“Hmm,” Brian said, distractedly. He was piloting the Dumptruck between the asteroid fragments. Flame belched from its rockets. Although monstrously fuel-inefficient, these old-fashioned chemical drives could really pour on the thrust. The Dumptruck squirted through a gap so narrow, Michael instinctively shut his eyes in anticipation of a collision that didn’t happen. “The thing is,” Brian said, “that Startractor is not your ship anymore. It now belongs to the boss. Call it a fine levied on you for coming here without an invitation. We’ll see what he decides to do about it.”

Anemone said indignantly, “No one needs an invitation to travel in the asteroid belt! Space belongs to everyone.”

“You’re
namsadang,
aren’t you? I understand that’s how you see it.” Michael digested the information that the Haddock gang’s identities were already known. They were
namsadang,
offshoots of a loose criminal network with origins in the old Earth State of North Korea. That was where they got their definition of private property (‘it belongs to everyone, until I want it, and then it’s mine’). “But the fact is,” Brian said, “you do need an invitation to join the
Salvation.
We’re quite selective. Well, we’ll see.”

The Dumptruck glided out of the rubble cloud. Michael caught a glimpse of flashing lights. He worked the pedals under his feet to flip the mecha upright. It was four-legged, with a pair of powerful grippers that he operated with his hands. He made it grab the lip of the skip and pull itself up to look out.

They were rushing towards another spaceship. Right now, it appeared the size of a mushroom, but Michael’s high-end suit allowed him to zoom in. Judging by the size of the ant-like human figures moving around on various regions of its hull, the ship was perfectly enormous. Its shape resembled the steering column of a car. The slab-sided fuselage—easily 1,500 meters long, six times the size of the
Kharbage Collector—
was crowned by a modular torus. This consisted of eight spheres joined by trusses, like an octagonal steering wheel. The torus rotated slowly. But centripetal acceleration was relative to radius as well as velocity, and that torus had to be a kilometer across, so they probably had as much as one gee of spin gravity at the rim.

Forward of the torus, a weird structure wobbled in the vacuum, half as long again as the ship. Had Michael come from Earth—rather than Ceres, where
rain
meant drippings from the ceiling—he would have mentally compared it to an umbrella blown inside-out. Even without an apt comparison, the sheer scale of the rib-and-spoke arrangement impressed him. He took it for an advanced heat exchanger, like the Hail Cycle systems utilized by Star Force carriers, although it was funny that it should be at the opposite end of the ship from the drive.

“Whaddaya think?” Brian said. “That’s the
Salvation.”

“Wow.”

“Wow?”

“I mean, the fuselage looks like an ITN hauler, but they don’t put toruses on those, ‘cos haulers only have four-man crews. Actually, I’ve never seen a spinning torus on a spaceship at all. They only use them for space stations, orbitals, things that don’t have to move. The structual resilience just isn’t there. But I can see how the modular structure would help with that.”

“You know a lot about ships,” Brian said, amused. “How old are you?”

“Ten.” Raised in spin gravity, Michael was small for his age, so he couldn’t get away with pretending to be older. “But I’ve been around ships my entire life. And I’ve never seen one like this. Who built it for you? The Centiless shipyard at Midway? LGM Technologies on Mercury? Adastra at the Earth-Moon L1 point? They do some nice customizations.”

“We built it ourselves.”

“You’ve got to be kidding!”

“The fuselage
is
an ITN hauler. In its former life, it hauled liquid hydrogen from Titan to the inner system. It’s basically a big tin can with a drive, but it does the job. We fabbed the torus ourselves, using the nickel iron from those fragments back there.”

“How?”

“Vapor deposition. Sounds like a bloody joke, eh? But it worked. It was the boss’s idea. And now you’ll have the pleasure of meeting him.”

The Dumptruck dived towards the
Salvation
.

“Show-off,” Coral muttered, clearly meaning Michael. But he didn’t care. He’d proved to Brian that he wasn’t just any castaway.

They landed on a donut-shaped docking pad in the center of the torus, which rotated around a dorsal column the size of a skyscraper. The column ended in a blocky module, high overhead. The spokes sprayed outwards from there like an upside-down Christmas tree. Warning lights affixed to their tips twinkled blue against the darkness of space. Michael craned up. He was so preoccupied with trying to work out what that
was,
that he barely noticed the other craft parked on the docking pad until he heard Anemone and Coral giggling.

“That’s the
Now You See It,”
Brian said. “They had an invitation.”

“I know what ship it is.” Michael recognized the tubby hauler. “We followed them here.”

He’d thought the
Now You See It
was just a delivery truck, lugging consumables from Ceres to 99984 Ravilious. But
people
were filing out of the fat little ship’s belly, clinging to the rails of the steps as if this were their first time in space. That was what Coral and Anemone were laughing at. Their relatively short stature categorized the passengers as Earthborn, so maybe they really were noobs.

Brian strode forward. “This way!” he shouted on the FM public channel. He stooped and spun a wheel set flush with the pad’s steel-alloy surface. It popped up a few centimeters. He heaved at an awkward angle. Captain Haddock and Codfish helpfully set their shoulders under the hatch, too. All three men strained until inertia took over. The hatch rose upright, revealing an airlock chamber large enough for the entire group from the
Now You See It
.

They all piled in. Brian got the hatch closed, and white jets of air hissed into the chamber. Michael noticed brown crumbs blowing around. “That looks like soil,” he said.

“Yes,” Brian said. “The
Now You See It
brought the soil for Amazonia. That’s the last module we have to fit out. It was in shrinkfoam packages, but they must have leaked.”

“Soil? Why do you want soil on a spaceship?”

An indicator on the wall of the chamber went green. Brian took his helmet off. Michael stared. Even Captain Haddock stared.

“Never seen a redhead before?” Brian said cheerfully. His hair was closer to orange. Freckles splotched his friendly face, and his eyes gleamed blue. “Oh yes, I’m a pureblood. Marked for death anywhere in the solar system.”

He was referring to the PLAN’s notorious policy of targeting ‘purebloods,’ human beings with distinctive ethnic lineages.

“We’re safe here, however.” He turned to address the noobs from the
Now You See It.
“Safe at last!”

They all took off their helmets. To Michael’s astonishment, all sixty-odd noobs turned out to be as white or whiter than Brian. They asked Brian if they should change now. “Sure, sure,” Brian said expansively. “We’re ready whenever you are!”

“Where are you from?”
Coral said.

“I’m Irish,” Brian said. Staring at the newcomers, he lowered his voice. “Your man’s ignoring centuries of sectarian rivalry, bringing this lot on board.”

“Where are
they
from, then?”

The newcomers opened the duffel bags they had brought with them. Swaths of red and black tartan cloth drifted in the microgee environment, falling slowly towards the outer wall of the chamber. Everyone in the chamber was also falling slowly in the same direction, except for Brian, Michael, and the Haddock gang, old hands at this, who’d already planted their gecko boots (or mecha feet, in Michael’s case) on what was now the floor. From the slow-motion hurricane of tartan emerged a forest of naked legs, which descended towards them and around them, until Michael in his mecha towered above a clan of Highlanders—men and women, old and young, fat and fit—in full regalia.

A warm-up blast of pipes split the air.

“They’re Scottish,” Brian said. “In my own opinion, no one should ever wear a kilt in micro-gee.”

The floor abruptly sank beneath them. Michael understood that the airlock chamber was actually an elevator. The spokes of the torus were elevator shafts. It was similar to the arrangement they had on the
Kharbage Collector—
on a far more ambitious scale
.

Down, down, down they went, out to the torus, experiencing stronger spin gravity every second.

The elevator stopped. A horizontal slit of light appeared at the far end of the chamber, and widened, spilling radiance into the dusty air. The Highlanders arranged themselves in two files. Visibly nervous, they straightened their backs and struck up the worst din Michael had ever heard. They trooped out of the chamber.

Michael, the Haddock gang, and Brian tagged along at the end of the procession, tripping on the discarded spacesuits the Highlanders had left behind. In their own worn and torn suits, grubby from months in space, they made a sorry contrast to the fluttering pennants and swinging sporrans that preceded them.

Cheers filtered through the racket of the bagpipes. Michael stumbled out into a grassy avenue lined with fruit trees and people—lots of people, of all colors, in all kinds of weird costumes. The Highlanders, marching in time, were just disappearing from the end of the avenue into a large building that appeared to be built of stone. (Stone, on a spaceship? No way. Had to be fake.) The roof was very high overhead and glowed like the sun, too bright to look at.

Michael pedaled urgently, commanding his mecha to follow Captain Haddock and his family, who were attempting without much success to blend into the crowd.

Brian reached up from behind, into the cradle of the mecha, and released Michael’s leg straps, then his waist belt. The comforting pressure of the restraints vanished. Michael tried to whirl around and throw the Irishman off, but other men came out of the crowd and jumped on the mecha. Whooping, they clung to his grippers. He rampaged for a bit, and knocked down one of the trees—they were not very deeply rooted—before they dragged him out of the mecha’s cradle.