The Callisto Gambit (31 page)

“Then say an act of contrition.”

Kiyoshi said it.

“By the power vested in me by our Lord Jesus Christ, I absolve you of your sins. Go and sin no more.”

★

Later, with a first dose of methatrexone inside him, he led Molly into one of the residential districts behind the church. The Galapajin had taken apart the rigid modular habs they were first issued as refugees. They had trucked the pieces underground—this was what everyone did—and then used them to shore up their newly dug caves, creating thousands of family homes in groups of four. These compounds lined the cedar avenues. Pressure doors, capable of sealing off the homes in an emergency, opened off courtyards packed with hydroponic tanks.

Children wriggled out from under the tanks of Morishita 14-2 to gape at Kiyoshi and Molly. Kiyoshi smiled tentatively at them..

A man came out— “Hey kids, chow’s up!” Seeing Kiyoshi, he froze. “Oh my God.”

The man was a lot shorter than Kiyoshi. He was younger: thirty-three. He had heavy black eyebrows and a deep-chested, scrawny-legged build.

He looked so much like Jun that Kiyoshi’s lips shook and his voice came out unsteady.

“Hey, bro. Just got in. Are Mom and Dad around?”

Teita, Kiyoshi’s middle brother, glared. He took a quick step forward. His fists balled. Kiyoshi held his ground.

Two of the children rushed to Teita and clung to his waist.

Teita rested his hands on his children’s heads. He probably still wanted to punch Kiyoshi. But he was Japanese. He forced a smile. “Sure. We were just about to eat. C’mon in. Bring your … friend,” he added, with a distrustful glance at Molly.

★

Shizuka Yonezawa, Kiyoshi’s mother, had been uprooted four years ago from the asteroid colony where she’d been born. She’d arrived on Ceres with the clothes on her back, just like the other 28,000 Galapajin who’d made the voyage. Her beautiful stone house was dust. All her mementoes of old Japan had been lost. She now lived in a glorified cargo container 500 meters beneath the surface of Ceres.

But she still cooked perfect tempura, without resorting to the use of a Meal Wizard.

And the extended family was still together.

Twenty-two people sat around low tables on bamboo-fibre imitation tatami mats. The children had a table to themselves. Teita’s wife, Haruka, and Kiyoshi’s middle sister, Miho, sat with the kids, helping the youngest ones get their food into their mouths. Teita himself, and Kiyoshi’s younger sister, Saori, sat at the adults’ table with Kiyoshi, their parents, Molly, and Saori’s new husband, Paul. Obviously
not
a Galapajin, this ebony-skinned seven-footer came from a Nigerian background. Kiyoshi was assured that he’d converted to Catholicism. The guy presumably had a Japanese translation program running on his retinal implants. Hard to tell, because he wasn’t saying anything.

Nor was anyone else.

Kiyoshi felt pretty sure that his family did not usually eat supper in complete silence.

He helped himself to another piece of sweet potato tempura and dunked it in the sauce. His chopsticks clinked against the bowl, loud in the silence. He was Japanese, too. He could deal with this.

Molly was not, and could not.

“So,” she said, “what’s the story behind the new logo?”

“The new logo?” Teita said eventually.

“Yes, the yellow circle on a white background that everyone’s wearing. I wonder if it represents the sun, or something else?”

“It’s the Customs and Resources logo.”

“Oh,” Molly said. “Silly me. I thought maybe Ceres was rebranding. Incorporating as the solar system’s biggest holding company? Declaring independence from Earth? Something like that?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Teita said. “I’m just an engineer.”

“You don’t work for Customs and Resources?”

“Nope.”

Kiyoshi’s mother rose to clear away the plates. Saori got up to help her. To Kiyoshi’s surprise, Molly did, too.

Paul escaped to the children’s table.

That left the Yonezawa men staring at each other across the cups and the
shochu
decanter.

Teita, as he’d said, worked as a freelance spaceship engineer. Most of the Galapajin who worked outside the community were engineers. Like their cousins who’d stayed with the
Monster
, they could fix anything, troubleshoot anything, build life-support machinery with a printer and a bag of splart. Those skills were increasingly valuable, as the UN had commandeered all the advanced robots in the solar system for the war effort. So, on the whole, the Galapajin had prospered on Ceres.

There were exceptions.

One of them was Kiyoshi’s father.

On 11073 Galapagos, Hiroshi Yonezawa had worked as a watchman. A simple job, but he’d had an indefinably high status in the community. Everyone knew him. Everyone had trusted him to sort out quarrels—a crucial job, since their lives had literally depended on community cohesion. On 11073 Galapagos, Hiroshi Yonezawa had been
somebody.

Now he was just a drunk.

Slumped on his cushion, he reached out and tapped on the table in front of Kiyoshi. “So what’ve you done with them?”

Kiyoshi’s back stiffened. “Who?” he said, knowing full well who.

“That gang. The extremists. Father Tanabe
and his lot. The ones who left with you.”

“They’re safe.” It could’ve been true, could’ve been a lie, could’ve been wishful thinking. He didn’t know. Had to find them. Had to save them.

“They’re with that mad bastard, I suppose. The Shogun.”

The Shogun
was what the Galapajin used to call the boss-man, in the days when the boss sold them consumables in exchange for Kiyoshi’s labor.
That mad bastard
was what Hiroshi Yonezawa had always called him, from the very beginning, and it irritated Kiyoshi beyond bearing that his father’s judgment turned out to have been correct.

“Why don’t you ask me where Jun is?” he suddenly roared, twisting on his knees to face his father.

The children, who’d been giggling, fell silent.

In the doorway, Kiyoshi’s mother dropped a plate of strawberries.

“Yeah! I said Jun! Your youngest son! Why don’t you ask me about
him?”

Strawberries bounced through the room, falling as slowly as cherry blossoms in Ceres’s low gravity.

Hiroshi Yonezawa propped himself against the wall. He growled: “Jun is dead.”

That’s what the family thought. They
knew
Jun had died during their escape from 11073 Galapagos. They also knew he’d come back to life in the
Monster.
Jun used to talk to them occasionally. Vid calls. They had no way of knowing his projection wasn’t a flesh-and-blood human being, although neither Jun nor Kiyoshi had ever claimed it was. So they knew the truth, and didn’t know it, and the whole situation was fraught with ambiguity, and complicated by Hiroshi and Shizuka’s undying love for Jun. He’d been their youngest son. Pious, passionate, a born leader. Out of all five siblings, he’d been the one who was going to go on to great things. Instead he’d died saving their people. His picture stood on the shrine in the corner, flanked by electric votive candles and watched over by a two-foot statue of the Virgin Mary.

Their father
wanted
Jun to be dead, Kiyoshi thought, so he could go on wallowing in his loss forever.

“Jun is not dead.” This time it wasn’t wishful thinking. It was a fervent prayer to Mary in the corner. “He’s in trouble. But don’t worry. I’m going to rescue him, and I don’t need your help to do it!”

For the first time in their lives, Hiroshi Yonezawa flinched from his eldest son’s rage. Teita saw it, and made a disgusted face.

“Very fucking likely,” the old man muttered. There were no four-letter words in Japanese, but his tone made his contempt clear.
“You,
save our Jun? You aren’t even saved yourself.” In Japanese the words for ‘rescue’ and ‘save’ were the same. “May the Lord have mercy on you.” He grabbed the neck of Kiyoshi’s t-shirt and pulled it down. “Just as I thought. The cross your mother gave you; gone. Did you sell it to buy drugs?”

Kiyoshi’s brain was a buzzing white blank. He jerked his t-shirt out of Hiroshi Yonezawa’s hand so savagely that it tore. He knew he’d be sorry for the rest of his life if he struck his father. He picked up a strawberry that had fallen on the table, just to do something else with his hands. The family’s stares weighed on him like gee-forces.

He ate the strawberry, and faked a smile. “Delicious.” He looked across the room at his sister Miho, who’d always been an ally. “Did you grow them yourselves?”

Miho nodded silently.

Teita interjected, “You’d better go.”

Poor old Teita. It wasn’t easy being the middle son, stuck between an AI and a lowlife loser. All he could do was defend his territory, so that’s what he was doing.

“I’m going, I’m going.” Kiyoshi got up.

An alarm trilled, shattering the tension. Hiroshi Yonezawa pushed back his sleeve. The alarm came from a wrist tablet he wore halfway up his scrawny arm. “Just work,” he grunted.

“Papa, please set that thing to vibrate,” Miho said with a nervous laugh.

Hiroshi Yonezawa drank a last swig of
shochu
and
stood up. He clipped a plastic nametag onto his shirt pocket. “It’s an automated system,” he explained to Kiyoshi, with more energy in his voice than before. “Backscatter X-ray scanner at the entrance to town.”

“What, so I went through it, too?”

“Yup. Someone monitors it. Faces’re mosaiced out. If they find anything suspicious, they call us.”

“Guess they didn’t find this,” Kiyoshi said. He lifted his dagger halfway out of the quick-release shoulder holster he’d made on board the
Unsaved Changes.
A project to pass the time.

“Hey, that’s one of the Asada family’s blades. They would have seen that, thought you lived here. That’s why you
didn’t
get flagged.”

And obviously their system hadn’t recognized the Kiloeraser in Kiyoshi’s rucksack, either.

“So you’re still working as a watchman, Dad?”

Hiroshi Yonezawa glared. “Back home, I worked as a watchman. Here, I’m just the backup for a stupid goddamn machine. It’s probably a false alarm.”

He grumbled under his breath when Kiyoshi followed him to the door.

“I was leaving anyway,” Kiyoshi reminded him. He stood on one foot and then the other to put his boots on.

Molly put her head out of the kitchen, holding a plate and a wet wipe. Seeing Kiyoshi getting ready to go, she ducked back around the folding door.

Kiyoshi’s mother came out of the kitchen. She seized his sleeve. Her hair was streaked with gray, her body fragile. “Where is he?” she whispered.

He couldn’t lie to his mother. “On Pallas.”

“Bring him home,” she whispered.

She
believed Jun was alive. She had faith. He nodded, too choked up to speak.

Molly hurried into her boots and coat. Everyone crowded to the door to chorus goodbyes. It was the Japanese formula.

Kiyoshi and Molly walked behind Hiroshi Yonezawa as he stomped towards the crossroads. At the first cross-street, other men joined him. This ‘false alarm’ was bringing the entire old coot brigade out of doors.

There was already a small crowd at the crossroads.

Kiyoshi jumped—easy, in less than 3% of one gee—for a better view.

A portcullis had descended to close off the mouth of the entrance tunnel. It was a mesh screen reinforced with solid steel bars. A group of outsiders stood behind the portcullis, yelling angrily in English.

Kiyoshi gathered from their shouts that another portcullis had descended from the tunnel roof behind them, so they could neither advance nor retreat.

He smiled—it was good to see the Galapajin still took security seriously. All this set-up needed was boiling oil.

The smile dropped off his face when a high voice cut through the noise. “We’re just here to visit someone!”

Hiroshi Yonezawa shuffled up to the portcullis. “Why do you need six armed bodyguards?”

“Listen, this is
minimal
security for the Belows,” said another voice. “Don’t you know who I am?”

The portcullis rattled. “Kiyoshi! It’s me!” yelled Michael.

Michael had endured his father’s fury and forgiveness. He’d even let Stepmom No.5 kiss him. It was weird to see her crying. It was good to be back home … but he hadn’t come home to stay. He made that clear to them both.

He’d come up with a plan. He just needed to beg or bully his father into going along with it.

As it turned out, that had been much, much easier than he expected.

Adnan Kharbage had jumped on Michael’s idea. “You are a genius, my son, a genius!”

Now he repeated to the leaders of the Japanese community—that’s who Michael figured they were, anyway—what he’d told Michael at home, and on their way here in the Voidstream.

“Customs and Resources is a self-defense organization. With backing from more than five supermajor corporations, whose names you all know, though I am not at liberty to reveal them, we have absorbed the organization formerly known as Customs & Excise, and taken over its security duties, while eliminating most tariffs on commerce in the local volume. Funding and operational assets are supplied by the aforementioned entities, and by the recycling sector.” Adnan touched his own chest modestly. “Our mission is to defend Ceres against any threats from Mars.”

One of the Japanese men said, “Mars is 190 million kilometers away.”

“Yes, but—”

“And the war is over.”

Adnan backtracked. “To you, this looks like a grab for power. But that is far from the truth. Since we’re all friends, I would like to share something with you …”

Adnan was wearing one of the new Customs & Resources spacesuits. Its skintight external garment bore the now-familiar logo of a yellow circle on a white background, plastered across his chest—actually, across his paunch, since Adnan was so fat.

He gave a command to the suit, and words appeared across the yellow circle:
CUSTOMS & RESOURCES.

“So what, you say? Now watch this!”