The Callisto Gambit (33 page)

“Would you care for dessert, sir?” the bot asked.

“No.” These serving bots were not to Kiyoshi’s liking at all. Fine if Adnan Kharbage wanted to have an entirely automated home. Lots of people did. But was there any reason the serving bots had to look like preteen boys, with smooth golden limbs, clad in neat little navy-blue uniforms? Intentionally or not, this weird whimsy came across as a criticism of Kharbage’s actual human son, or perhaps an attempt to replace him after he’d gone missing—with a troop of obedient, helpful robot clones.

Disliking the recycling mogul more than ever, Kiyoshi cupped his wineglass in both hands and watched him get up to speak.

“My friends and colleagues! For weeks we have known we
must
act. We’ve been discussing various plans, all of them flawed in different ways. But today, fate has provided the solution to our dilemma. Take a bow, Kiyoshi Yonezawa!”

Kiyoshi didn’t move. “Fate? More like your son.”

Michael was sitting at the edge of the group, playing with a tablet. He seemed to have disassociated himself from the meeting. Not a good sign.

“Of course that is what I meant,” Kharbage said. Since Kiyoshi hadn’t moved, he hauled him to his feet. His hand left a clammy imprint on Kiyoshi’s arm. “Here is the man who will help us save Ceres!”

There was a patter of applause.

“Whoa,” Kiyoshi said quietly, turning his head to speak into Adnan Kharbage’s fat, sweating face. “That’s not the kind of job offer I was expecting.”

“It’s just leverage,” Kharbage said.

“You’ve got all the leverage you need. You’ve got my family down on the surface. What do you want?”

“My friends have access to corporate DNA databases. Wherever you go in the solar system, you leave traces on their scanners. Based on those records, you’ve been everywhere, including places that
no
ship should’ve been able to reach. Luna, Mercury, Tiangong Erhao …”

“That’s over now.”

“My friend, don’t be modest! You’re one of the best pilots in the solar system. Statistical analysis proves it. Anyone else would be dead by now!”

The truth was everywhere he’d been, he’d been with Jun. It was
Jun
who was the kick-ass pilot. Jun who’d kept Kiyoshi alive in one dicey situation after another. All he’d done on his own was crash-land a Startractor on Callisto.

He twitched his arm out of Kharbage’s grasp. “Sure,” he said with a half-smile. “Sure I’m good.”

“OK. Then here is your mission, should you choose to accept it! Ha, ha.”

The sun-tube went dark. Night fell in the garden. All in an instant, the birds quieted. The only sound was the burble of water brimming over the swimming pool’s edge into the stream.

The water lit up, reflecting flashes of light overhead. Kiyoshi jerked his head back. “Christ.”

A fleet of Star Force warships burned out of the dark, toppling towards them like metal mountains, engines screaming. You’d never hear anything like that in real life—there was no sound in the vacuum—but the eerie shrieking of fusion drives shook Kiyoshi’s heart in his chest. He involuntarily cringed as the spaceships swept overhead.

Watching them vanish into the distance, he counted two Heavycruisers, a penumbra of smaller ships, and a Flattop belching plasma from its terawatt-class thrusters.

“Do you like my home theater?” Adnan Kharbage shouted. There were cries of approval.

A distant sun rose. The swimming pool and deck, complete with loungers and wet bar, now appeared to be floating in space. Kharbage’s guests clapped.

“It’s all piped into your BCI,” Kharbage confided.

The stars rolled, and the sun illuminated the face of Ceres. This was what they would really see if they looked outside of the orbital. A mother-of-pearl globe, its dayside hardly marred by the tiny diggings of humanity.

“What was that Star Force fleet?” Kiyoshi asked.

“It left Mars orbit yesterday,” Kharbage said.

“And where’s it going?”

“It’s coming here.”

“Ah; they’re coming to squash your little palace coup.”

“No. They are coming to destroy us.”

Kiyoshi felt in his pockets. He found his cigarette, stuck it between his teeth, and inhaled a calming dose of nicotine. He was very, very upset about this. Being forced to experience a sim against your will was one definition of torture. It meant Adnan Kharbage had stolen his log-in credentials—slipped a password-scraper into his BCI the minute it connected to the wifi in the hab. How bad was the damage? It depended how bad this was going to get.

Kharbage pointed to a location a few degrees north of Ceres’s equator. His finger extruded a laser-pointer-style beam, which made Kiyoshi smile a bit. The red dot jiggled over a depression stippled with spaceport facilities. “That is Nawish Crater.”

“And?” Kiyoshi was busy changing his passwords. He still couldn’t exit the sim. This was what you got for tangling with the big players.

“The UN wants us to evacuate the crater. They want to turn it into a refuge for the ‘free’ Martians!”

“Whuh? I heard about them.” And he’d instantly connected it with Jun’s jarring confession in the minutes before the ISA snatched him. “A few Martians have escaped the PLAN’s control …”

“A few? A few thousand. A few
million.”

“It said on the news they were building a refuge for them in the Belt.”

“Ceres is in the Belt.”

“I’m sure they said it was going to be on Thisbe or something.”

“That may have been the original plan. Or maybe it was just the original lie. The money isn’t there. The UN is completely broke.”

“So they’re bringing them here?” Kiyoshi shook his head, genuinely wowed by the UN’s chutzpah. However low his opinion of the United Nations, there always turned out to be room for it to sink lower. “I guess they figure you won’t object.
Can’t
object. Being mere colonists and all.”

“But they’re wrong,” Adnan Kharbage said. “We object. The day that fleet arrives is the day we all die.”

Kiyoshi scratched his ear. He took a drag on his cigarette. “So it’s true about the nanites?
”

One of Kharbage’s other guests stood up, a slender, dark man in a joke t-shirt (‘Always Use Protection’ with a picture of a pair of goggles). “I work for Ad Astra,” he said. “It’s worse than anything you may have heard. The nanites are unlike any technology we know. They rewire the limbic system and alter genetic expression markers. They are extremely hardy, and reproduce on a diet of CO2. If they get inside your hab …” He pulled the side of his hand across his throat.

“Well, OK,” Kiyoshi said, “but Ceres isn’t an asteroid. It’s a dwarf planet. From Nawish to Kirnis is a 700-kilometer trek through vacuum … and I mean
vacuum
. No atmosphere here. No CO2 for these nanobeasties to snack on. That looks like a pretty good buffer zone.”

“We’re keeping our samples in a biohazard containment facility on a research ship in Neptune orbit,” the Ad Astra man said. “
That’s
a pretty good buffer zone.”

“Seven hundred kilometers …”

“An eight-hour drive.”

“No one’s going to be giving the Martian refugees cars.”

“I would not fucking count on that,” Adnan Kharbage said. “But it doesn’t matter, anyway. Have you forgotten that the Martians are vacuum-adapted? That they don’t need to breathe? That they can tolerate extreme cold? And they can
run?”

After a few moments, Kiyoshi drawled, “So drop a nuke on Nawish after they get settled in. Problem solved.”

The Ad Astra scientist shook his head despairingly. “What the UN is proposing is genocide in slow motion.”

“The Martians are resistant to radiation,” Kharbage said. “Suppose we did nuke them. The UN would look the other way while they escaped. While they infected us. We’re being set up as guinea pigs. Victims of a new era in genetic experimentation!”

Kiyoshi saw the legit terror in Adnan Kharbage’s eyes. He remembered how Kharbage had stoked his people’s fear of the nanites. A bit more of that would have all 230 million inhabitants of Ceres screaming bloody murder against the UN.

And of course that was exactly what this gang of pirates wanted.

He also reflected, for a split second, on the unthinkable possibility that everything they said was true—and pushed those thoughts away. Even if it was true to the last detail, he couldn’t do anything about it.

“What are you going to do about it?” he said. His apparent bluntness masked a wild inspiration that he was keeping to himself, for now.

Adnan Kharbage relaxed and beamed.
Uh oh.

“That’s my ship, over there,” the Ad Astra scientist said, pointing. A Starcruiser heaved out of the void, sim-style, larger and more glilttery than it would have looked in real life.

The other guests pointed into the dark.

“There’s my ship.”

“And mine.”

“Those are mine.”

The home theater filled up with spacecraft. Kiyoshi recognized pretty much everything he’d logged in Ceres orbit on the way in. Four ITN haulers, a bunch of tugs and privately owned small transports, three corporate Starcruisers, and a handful of Startractors belonging to Kharbage, LLC.

“This is your fleet? Star Force is gonna
atomize
you,” Wetherall said with a silly laugh.

“Fusion drives make pretty good weapons.”

“Not from halfway around the solar system. They’ll slag you with their long-range kinetics before you even pick them up on radar.”

“You’re right,” said the former director of Customs & Excise. “That’s why we’re not going to fight them.”

“Good to know,” Molly murmured.

“This is a refugee fleet.”

“A—huh?” Wetherall said. “You’re just going to leave and let the Martians have your planet?”

Adnan Kharbage chuckled. “No. We are going to make the UN
think
we left.”

“You’ve already started laying the groundwork,” Kiyoshi said, understanding that they must have been planning this for a while. “Getting people scared about the nanites. Ramping up the forum mentions and the email chatter. The ISA’ll pick it up, so they’ll be more likely to buy your bug-out move.”

“Precisely!” Kharbage said, looking disgustingly pleased with himself. It was people’s lives he was jerking around. Kiyoshi’s nieces and nephews he was giving nightmares.

But if this were all true—and Kiyoshi was starting to think it
was—
the coming reality would be worse than any nightmare.

“So what’s the plan? You make them think the elites have bugged out. Those ships wouldn’t hold everyone. You’ll have to make like you abandoned all the poor suckers in the Belows. It’s plausible, I’ll give you that. But where does that get you?”

“Earth!” hissed the CEO of LGM Industries.

“Earth?”

“Oh, man,” Molly said, pulling her dreads over her face like a child hiding from a scary movie.

The LGM man grinned. He was a freakish-looking individual. An obvious cyborg, he had two extra arms, as small as the arms of a T-Rex, which met in front of his chest for fine work. He had a tail sheathed in feathery black hair, and a bony ridge covered with the same hair atop his head, like a dinosaur’s crest. LGM Industries was the only supermajor corporation headquartered off Earth. By flaunting his augments, this exec was declaring solidarity with the off-the-wall culture of Midway, where LGM was based, and by extension, with the colonies in general.

Kiyoshi personally considered it an offense against God’s creation to mutilate yourself like that. But the LGM exec was still human. Human, as the Martians—surely—were not,
whatever
Jun had done to them.

“We’re going to hold Earth hostage,” the LGM exec hissed.

Kiyoshi blinked. “Oh.”

“We’ll return to Earth … as if fleeing the threat of nanites. They’ll let us approach. After all, we’re their own kind. The rich and selfish, who would happily allow their inferiors to be genocided.” The exec’s mouth twisted into a sneer. He raised his arms to the sky.

The Ceres fleet vanished, and was replaced by Earth’s familiar cloud-garlanded orb.

A spark flared somewhere in North America.

Another one, in Europe.

A third spark, in Africa, triggered a bloom of smoke and magma.

“Straight down the throat of Nyamuragira,” the LGM exec said with satisfaction. “As you noted,” he added to Wetherall, “fusion drives make excellent weapons.”

Molly said, “You’re not really going to do that.”

“Of course we’re not. It’s the threat that counts.”

“Either the UN diverts their fleet from Ceres, and recognizes us as a sovereign nation,” Kharbage said, “or they lose a carefully selected list of major metropolises!”

It made Kiyoshi furious to see Adnan Kharbage posturing like he had any fucking idea what a ship-sized impactor would do to Shanghai or London or Rome. Practically bursting with self-satisfaction to be included with the really big players.

He said roughly, “I guess you want me to fly the ships?”

“Any one of them,” Kharbage nodded. “The others will be slaved to your hub. Take your pick!” The Ceres fleet reappeared on the screen.

“No, thanks. I’ve already got a ship. It’s called the
Unsaved Changes.
It’s parked in Occator Crater.”

The LGM man made a face. “Well, why not? It could be refitted with a more powerful drive.”

“I would appreciate that. But I’m not flying your ships to Earth.”

Blank faces. Only Adnan Kharbage, a comparative newbie at high-stakes corporate poker, betrayed emotion. His brows knitted threateningly.

“It’s
crazy,”
Kiyoshi explained, wondering if he were the crazy one, since they all seemed to take it seriously. The world had changed in the months while he wasn’t paying attention, and he hadn’t completely caught up yet. “It’s just, I mean,
Earth!
You can’t threaten Earth!”

“Thank you,” Wetherall said. “Thank you very much for saying that.
Ooof.”
He suddenly doubled over as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.

Kiyoshi gazed desperately around at the big players. “Anyway, I’ve got a better idea.”
Now or never.

“A better idea,” the LGM man said. “A better idea. Go on.”