The Callisto Gambit (30 page)

Ceres had the closest thing to a car culture outside of Earth. The dwarf planet’s huge population and network of settlements, located in craters hundreds—but not thousands—of kilometers apart, encouraged surface travel.

They were offered a pressurized camper van for 500 spiders a day, or a much faster Grasshopper for 1000.

“We’ll take the Grasshopper,” Kiyoshi said, glancing at Molly. She silently provided her credit details. She was the only one of them with any money left.

Michael fidgeted in his seat, jabbering about this and that, wrought up. “I can’t wait to get home!”

Kiyoshi smiled at him, a bit sadly. “Almost there.”

A short hop across the crater took them to Lake Occator. A giant water-splitting facility stood guard over a shining dome of triple-layer, water-sandwiched, radproof glass. This exclusive habitat measured three kilometers in diameter. It was conspicuous consumption at its most blatant. And it was Michael’s home.

Kiyoshi went in with him.

“Whew, it’s cold,” Kiyoshi said when he removed his helmet.

“The whole idea is to be close to nature,” Michael said.

They stood on a real wooden deck flanked with souvenir shops. Downhill, pine trees ringed a salt lake carpeted with cold-adapted CO2-sink algae. Birds cried. Bright-colored dots glided down the snowy hills: skiers. The air smelled of sea-breeze air freshener, except this wasn’t an artificial scent, it was the real thing.

“Come on,” Michael said, catching Kiyoshi’s hand. “Our house is over there.”

Kiyoshi didn’t know which of the quaint lakeside chalets Michael was pointing at. He did know that Michael had got some long looks from the valets at the airlock. If the kid hadn’t been recognized yet, he would be any minute.

“You have to meet my dad.”

Kiyoshi resisted the tug on his hand. “Mikey, I don’t think so.”

Michael’s face fell. His autism spectrum disorder made his emotions transparently visible. Kiyoshi felt terrible. He knew the boy had a phobia of abandonment, and here was Kiyoshi apparently about to abandon him, like everyone else in his life.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking I’m just like the boss-man—leaving you behind. But I’m not. I just brought you home.”

“Are you worried my dad might give you a reward or something?” Michael said.

Kiyoshi smiled at the direct question. It was true that he didn’t want to plant any suspicion in Michael’s mind that he saw him as a walking payday. He’d decided to forgo the off-chance of a reward, because it was so important to him to stay whole in the boy’s eyes. “It’s more like I don’t want to get involved …”

“He
won’t
give you a reward,” Michael said. “He’s so incredibly tight with his money, he makes Nemesis look generous.”

Kiyoshi had to laugh. “Understood. But Mikey, it’s just not right for me to be here.”

“Why?”

“Look at me. I’m a mess.”

“You look all right to me.”

“I … I have stuff to do.”

“What stuff? Why can’t I do it with you?”

Kiyoshi threw up his hands, turned to leave—this was the difficult side of Michael’s personality: he never quit pushing at you. Rather like Jun, in fact.

Michael scuttled after him and caught up in front of a free-standing map of Lake Occator’s nature trails. “Are you going to go and bust your brother out of jail?”

Kiyoshi had explained the situation to him after the ISA’s visit. He wished he hadn’t. “Ssssh! No, of course not. It’s impossible.”

“Is he really on Pallas?”

“I assume so.”

“Do you think the boss is there, too?”

“I don’t
know,
Mikey! Maybe. Or he might be dead.”

“I hope he’s dead,” Michael said, his face hardening with hate beyond his years. “Pallas is too good for him.”

In his peripheral vision, Kiyoshi saw the valets drifting closer. These valets were phavatars, with expressionless sub-geminoid faces. They were charmingly retro—and probably lethal.

Kiyoshi bent and gave Michael a hug. When he straightened up, Michael held onto his neck. Michael’s feet came off the deck. “I want to stay with you!”

“They’re
coming,
Mikey, get down.”

He set the boy down and hurried to the airlock, not looking back.

Outside, Wetherall and Molly were watching the sun set behind the rim of the crater, exclaiming at the majestic scale of the landscape. Kiyoshi hustled them to the Grasshopper and buckled himself into the driver’s seat. He felt like he’d already made one wrong choice, and he hadn’t even left the spaceport yet.

Each burst of energy from the Grasshopper’s compact ion thrusters carried the little car several kilometers. It was a cross between flying and driving, with an element of chicken-game: the direct route between Occator and Kirnis craters was quite heavily trafficked, and there were no lanes 1000 meters up. Fortunately the Grasshopper had a reliable collision-avoidance system.

On their regular descents to the ground, the headlights lit snapshots of a landscape sculpted by impacts. Because Ceres’s crust was mostly made of saline ice, with a low melting point, all craters tended to collapse over time. Scarps were landslides in slow motion.

Kiyoshi chain-vaped a nicotine-THC mixture and tried not to think about Michael.

Soon, with their arrival at Kirnis, he had a lot more things to not think about.

Planning would lead to disaster, he was certain of it. The only way to get through this was just to do it. His hand kept stealing to the place on his chest where his cross should’ve hung, if he hadn’t sold it to Lewis Tong for a quarter-kilogram of He3 and a Kiloeraser.

Ah yes, the Kiloeraser. An invention of the Nemesis gang (you could kinda tell by the name). “Do you like flechettes?” Tong had said. “How about a
room full
of flechettes? Heh, heh.”

Bloodthirsty old bastard. But Kiyoshi had taken the Kiloeraser. It was in his rucksack. The customs guys at Occator Spaceport apparently hadn’t known what it was.

He docked the Grasshopper with the modular sprawl of buildings on the floor of Kirnis Crater, safely away from the spaceport. This was the top level of the Kirnis Belows. Water geysers wisped up in the headlights. There were so many of them here, you didn’t even need a filter to see them, like vaporous ghosts in the night.

The Grasshopper trundled away to return itself to the local branch of its agency. Kiyoshi, Wetherall, and Molly went into the pressurized topside market where people sold spaceship parts.

“Catch you later,” Wetherall said. “Gonna see if I can hook up with some friends. I’ll ping you when the party starts, Kay.” He winked and bopped off. Wetherall was the kind of guy who had friends all over the solar system, most of whom he’d never even met.

“What about you?” Kiyoshi said to Molly. He expected her to head off, too. Their relationship had never recovered since the day Kiyoshi accused her of not caring whether her customers lived or died.

She’d helped him get Michael clean. And she was a good shipmate, keeping to herself and performing her tasks without grumbling.

The trouble was, he couldn’t reconcile his attraction to her with his first-hand experience of her Hel’s Kitchen ethics. Lust warred with righteous judgement, and that made him grumpy. It was just as well the
Unsaved Changes
was such a cramped ship, they’d never had a chance to be alone at close quarters.

“I’d like to come with you, if you don’t mind,” she said.

His surprise must have shown.

“I don’t know anyone here,” she explained.

Oh, so that’s all it was.

“Fine with me,” he said.

The Belows
was
confusing for first-timers. Hell, it was confusing for people who lived here. Over successive generations, settlements built on the surface of Ceres had gradually sunk into the crust. Due to the low density of this icy sludge, anything hotter than the surrounding atmosphere literally melted its way down at a rate of a few meters a year. Rather than fight the inevitable, people had built new habs on top—and continued to live in the ones below, while also digging sideways. 160 years after the first colonists set foot on Ceres, the Belows had expanded into underground labyrinths. There were cave-ins sometimes. The Belowsers maintained pressurization with a combination of interior walls and cryocrete—a material patented on Ceres, made of ice mixed with minuscule bamboo chips. It dripped in the corridors, and refroze, making the floors very slick.

Kiyoshi knew where he was going. With Molly trailing behind him, he navigated the maze of public and semi-private caverns. They cut through market gardens ablaze with UV light, dark fabberies churning out printed goods, and tunnels packed with inflatable homes stacked three deep. They heard languages other than English. Ceres hosted countless minority communities—emigrants from Earth, who’d tried and failed to make it on their own in the Belt. Here, they all tended to blend together, united by their common purpose of staying alive in the Belows.

Kiyoshi noticed an unusual number of people openly carrying weapons. He also noticed a new logo on people’s coats and on holographic displays: a yellow circle on a white background. It was the same logo the customs officials at Occator had worn.

At last they entered a long corridor that struck out sideways from the central Belows. This one did not have puddles on the floor. It had tidy duckboards, and signs saying
Please watch your feet!
Clean air blew into their faces.

After 100 meters, the corridor ended in a star-shaped crossroads with a high ceiling. Each of the other tunnels forking off from the crossroads was brightly lit by UV tubes, and featured a central divider of saplings in planters.

Sakura
cherry trees would not grow in these near-freezing temperatures, so the Galapajin had fallen back on dwarf cryptomeria, a cash crop.

Directly across the crossroads from the entrance, people streamed out of double doors sculpted from Cerean clay and fixed with splart.

Molly looked at Kiyoshi.

She looked at the people coming out of church.

She looked back at Kiyoshi.

“Yep.”

“I didn’t know you were Chinese.”

Sigh.
“It’s a common mistake.”

He waited until it seemed like everyone had come out. He was so tense, he could hardly breathe. Even with his gaze averted from the church-goers, he could sense their glances. He prayed no one recognized him. They were looking at Molly. Few non-Japanese people ever ventured in here.

“Should I stay here?” she said as he started towards the doors.

“No, come with me.”

They stepped through the double doors, into a sensorial whammy of space and ethereal light. The church was an ice cavern soaring 60 meters high at its apex. That was why the Galapajin had tunneled so far away from the central shaft of the Belows. Apart from their natural desire for independence, they’d needed room to dig
up,
to build this.

Freestanding ice pillars supported the arched roof of the nave. Far away, a blue-tinged spotlight illuminated the giant crucifix behind the altar. It was silent, and the smell of incense lingered in the air. The pews were just made of aerogel, but all the ornamentation was sculpted from cryocrete—you could work it like stone—and fixed with splart.

The Galapajin
loved
splart.

To ensure that none of the fine detail melted, the church was not heated inside at all. Their breath misted in the sub-zero air, and Molly’s nose turned pink.

“It’s beautiful,” she said in a hushed voice.

Kiyoshi smirked with undeserved pride.
He
hadn’t helped to build this. “Yeah.”

After another moment, he led her around the back of the pews, to a small door. The corridor beyond measured the thickness of the church wall—a full three meters.

They stepped into a room full of warmth, cigarette vapor, and Japanese-language chatter.

Which ceased right on cue as they walked in.

About 28,000 Galapajin lived here in the Kirnis Belows. Kiyoshi didn’t know all of them by sight. But somehow, they all seemed to know
him.

A priest walked quickly towards them.
“Ara, o-hisashiburi. Yoku kimashita.”

“What?” Molly said.

“Father …” shit, what was his name? Quick BCI check— “Father Matsuda, this is Molly Kent from Callisto,” Kiyoshi said reluctantly. “She doesn’t speak Japanese.”

“Aha. It is a pleasure to meet you, Molly-san. I hope you will find help and comfort here at Yasuragi-no-Ie.”

“What
is
this place?”

Kiyoshi sighed. “It’s a halfway house.”

★

Kiyoshi knelt in the confessional, on a polyfoam kneeler. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been, um, seven months since my last confession.”

The treatment program at the halfway house hinged on the sacrament of confession.

“I, um, I need anti-addiction meds.”

The urge to get fucked up was sapping too much of his mental energy. Just walking through the Belows, he’d felt that tingle, knowing he could easily score here. He didn’t
need
this shit. He needed to focus singlemindedly on … other things.

“Just ask Sister Fujimori,” the priest on the other side of the grille said. “She’ll calculate the right dosage for your needs. But I’m afraid we can only issue one day’s dose at a time. It’s important for you to come here every day, for fellowship and support.”

“Understood, Father.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Is there anything else you want to confess, my son?”

It wasn’t a loaded question. The priest definitely knew who Kiyoshi was. But inside the confessional, he was just another flawed human being. Kiyoshi had heard from other priests—from Father Lynch, actually—that after hearing confessions, the details seemed to be mysteriously wiped from their memories, as if by the hand of God.

And a priest would never record a confession on his BCI.

Absolutely never, under any circumstances.

Still, the habit of paranoia would not go away. He shook his head, gazing down at his locked hands. “That’s all, Father.”