The Callisto Gambit (43 page)

“They’re dead, huh?” Michael said.

“I guess so.”

Kiyoshi pushed Michael ahead of him. Around then he realized that Molly’s friend had been shouting in his ear all this time, wanting to know his status.

“Did you just fucking burn us?” he hissed at her.

Emergency strip lighting at ground level illuminated an inmate processing area. Computers, scanners, medibots, a vehicle-sized valve marked AIRLOCK, several closed doors. Michael yanked them open.

“Someone in the prison raised the alarm,” Molly’s friend said. “The MI that monitors the surveillance feeds in real time deemed the threat credible, and went into emergency shutdown mode. There is no human in that loop. You should’ve been more careful who you told.”

“Your MI just killed Molly.”

“Oh, God.”

“And another friend of mine. And maybe, oh, another twenty, thirty people.”

“Oh,
God.
In the gravity corridor? Where are you?”

Michael backed out of a door, dragging two EVA suits. “I can’t find our suits. But these have oxygen in the tanks.”

“Good work.”

The suits Michael had found were older than dirt, and smelled like fungus. They’d probably been taken off prisoners years ago. Not worth recycling. When Michael got his on, he looked like a walking quilt.

“I’m right here,” Molly’s friend said. “Hurry up.”

Kiyoshi slapped the airlock action plate.

Inside the vehicle-sized chamber sat a four-wheeler, its tyres splayed out on extended axles, gullwing doors hinged up. A woman in an EVA suit waved at them from the driver’s seat.

“It’s gone wrong,” she said, not bothering with hello.

“Are you Molly’s friend?” Kiyoshi dropped into the passenger seat.

“Andrea Miller. Nice to meet you.”

“Any relation to …?”

“Bob Miller was my uncle.” Blonde, attractive, she conveyed more resolve in the set of her jaw than most people could manage with a cocked fist. “Just the two of you made it?”

“Yup.”

“Well, isn’t that lovely.”

The airlock’s other end opened. Andrea Miller put the rover in gear and zoomed out into a bright Pallas day, jolting them back in their seats.

“We were expecting a full-scale jailbreak,” she explained. “At the moment, we haven’t got that. All we’ve got is you. But I think we can still make this work.”

“Good,” Kiyoshi said. “I think so, too.” His knee jiggled. It was hard to sit still, after what had just happened. He ran his tongue around the inside of his teeth.

Andrea Miller slanted a doubtful look at him. “Are you tweaking?”

“No, no.”

After a pause, she said, as if to herself, or someone else listening in, “Well, you work with what you’ve got.”

The rover bounced over serrations of glittering quartz. Unlike most asteroids, Pallas had colors. Its hills sparkled with outcroppings of amethyst and tourmaline. Pitch-black shadows made these features look higher than they were—an artifact of Pallas’s tight curvature. Andrea Miller drove at 180 kilometers per hour, accustomed to the terrain. “Do you trust me?” she said.

“Not really,” Kiyoshi said.

Andrea reached down beside her seat. She flipped an oblong bundle into Kiyoshi’s lap. “I think that’s yours.”

Shrinkfoam encased Asada’s
tant
ō
, the one he’d tried to sneak into his rucksack, before he got tased.

“Do you trust me
now?”

“Yes.” Kiyoshi picked off the shrinkfoam and drew the dagger from its plastic holster. Pallas sunlight ignited the colors in the folded steel.

“Good.” She flipped something else at him. He reflexively reached to catch it with his left hand.

A snake.

Green, as thick as his thumb.

It slithered through his fingers, twisted its tail around his left wrist, and lashed out to wrap its head around his other wrist. Shortening itself, it dragged his wrists together. He was handcuffed.

“We use those a lot on the job,” Andrea Miller said. “The doers aren’t sure if they’re alive or not. They aren’t. They’re programmed—”

Kiyoshi lunged sideways at her, dagger gripped in his bound hands. The snake tightened, crushing the bones in his wrists. A grunt of agony tore from his throat. He sagged back into his seat, fresh sweat chilling his upper lip. The rearview screen on the dashboard gave him a glimpse of Michael’s face. The boy sat frozen.

“As I was saying, they’re programmed to react to sudden movements,” Andrea Miller said wryly.

“You gonna turn me in?”

“Yes. Don’t worry! It’s not going to be for real! We just have to make it look good.”

“Jesus, lady. You ask for a lot of trust.”

“It’s the only way!” Andrea Miller pitched her voice to Michael in the rear seat. “Honey, look in the cup holder beside you. Those are transponder tags. We usually put them on our exterior maintenance bots. Each of you should stick one in your webbing somewhere, so the PORMS doesn’t frag you when you exit the vehicle.” To Kiyoshi, she added: “You do not understand how much security there is on this asteroid!”

“I’m starting to get the picture, I think,” Kiyoshi said flatly.

Michael leaned forward between the seats. His cupped hands brimmed with flat green discs. “Were you expecting
this
many people to make it out?”

“Yes,” Andrea Miller said.

“And then what?”

Her voice wobbled a bit. “Total chaos, basically. There would have been more vehicles waiting. The escapees would have scattered across the surface.”

“And we’d have pretended to let you recapture us and take us to InSec Center.”

“Yes.”

“But that’s what we’re doing.”

“Yes, but there were going to be more of us.”

“Where are your friends?”

“Back there,” Andrea Miller said, “sorting through the bloody wreckage. Oh, kid, I hope you never have to see what someone looks like when they’ve been hanging out in forty gees for a while!”

Michael was quiet after that. Andrea Miller drove. She seemed to be taking her emotions out on the terrain. The speedometer needle trembled around two hundred. “Nice driving,” Kiyoshi said.

“I’m from Luna. We used to get up to five hundred klicks per hour on the Mare Tranquillitatis.”

Presently a familiar manmade object reared over the horizon.

Michael squealed, “That’s the
Salvation!”

“That’s the graveyard,” Andrea Miller said.

“The graveyard?”

“Yeah, a lot of doers—um, a lot of people were brought here in their own ships. Those kinds of ships tend to be no use to the ISA. But you can still salvage parts out of them.”

“Go that way,” Kiyoshi said.

“No. I can’t deviate from my route. The satellites would see.”

Screw the satellites,
Kiyoshi thought. He caught Michael’s eye in the rearview screen. He was still holding his dagger loosely in his bound hands. He tossed it back and up, over the seats. The snake crushed his wrists. Too late. Michael grabbed the dagger off the seat. As if he’d been born to this life of violence, he lunged forward and wrapped one puffy-suited arm around Andrea Miller’s head-rest and her throat. The dagger rested on her collarbone, inside the rigid collar of her spacesuit. Even Kiyoshi could hardly stand to look.

“Go that way,” Michael said.

Andrea Miller flinched. The rover skidded.

“Bloody hell! I thought …” She trailed off, fighting to straighten the rover out.

“You thought I was just a kid,” Michael said, clinging to the back of her seat as the rover wobbled. The dagger’s blade threw reflections of sunlight around the inside of the vehicle. “Well, I am just a kid. But you don’t know whose kid I am.”

Hmm.
Kiyoshi had thought Michael was taking the news of his father’s murder a bit too calmly. Sounded like there was a lot going on under the surface there.

“I suggest doing as Michael says,” he interrupted.

“OK. OK!”

“And call off your snake while you’re at it, huh?”

“SNAKE COMMAND: Off,” Andrea said, bitterly.

The snake fell lifelessly from Kiyoshi’s wrists. He rubbed them, wincing. Bruises crisscrossed his inner arms like matched suicide attempts.

“Just so you’re aware,” Andrea said, “the Star Force fleet carrying the Martians is now entering Ceres orbit. We have about two hours to cancel the landing, including signal delay time.”

The rover bounced off a rise and soared down into a valley full of junkers. This had to be what Kiyoshi had seen from space and mistaken for a spaceport. The ships were parked in neat lines, but every one had something wrong with it, such as missing radiator vanes, or something horrendously wrong with it, such as a hole in the side.

Kiyoshi eyed the
Salvation
with
a mixture of resentment and lust. It towered above all the small haulers and barges. Parked on its tail, it resembled a skyscraper with a giant hula hoop suspended above the roof. The framework of wires and struts that would have supported the Bussard ramscoop drooped in Pallas’s meager gravity.

“That ship,” Andrea Miller said, pointing at the
Salvation
. “Most of the people we get are no-hopers, you know? But that group was different. They had a freaking anti-matter drive.”

“I helped to build it,” Michael whispered.

Kiyoshi interrupted. “There! That one! Go that way,
that way!”

“OK, OK, don’t bloody yell at me.”

He scarcely heard her.

He was staring, transfixed, at the
Monster.

★

“Stop the rover. I’ll be getting out here.”

“You’re crazy,” Andrea Miller said.

“How long did it take you to figure that out?”

“I’m coming with you!” Michael squeaked. He hastily fitted his helmet on.

Kiyoshi had given up on telling Michael no a while back. Besides, he owed him for that stunt with the knife. He shrugged. “Thanks for the ride,” he said to Andrea Miller.

“What am I supposed to tell them when I get there?”

“You’ll be short two dangerous criminals—”

“With important information, don’t forget that part! That was going to be my excuse for bringing you in!”

“So make something up.”

“I raise chickens. I’m not the creative type.”

“You are now. Go save Ceres. We’ll be with you shortly.” He nudged her to put her helmet on.

She moved her lips soundlessly, subvocalizing to someone not present. “OK, to hell with it,” she said a moment later. “Do whatever you bloody like.”

Helmets sealed, they waited in mutually annoyed silence for the atmosphere to cycle out of the rover’s interior. A powerful compressor sucked the air into a storage tank, equalizing the interior pressure with the vacuum outside. When the pressure indicator hit zero, the gullwing door hinged open. Kiyoshi jumped out without a backwards glance. He ran towards the
Monster.

The rover drove off.

Michael caught up with Kiyoshi and grabbed his arm, as if trying to slow him down.

As suddenly as a power cut, the sunlight went away. They’d travelled 300 kilometers south. Down here, Pallas had 14-hour days and nights.

Darkness swallowed the valley of dead ships.

But not before Kiyoshi saw the gaping hole in the
Monster’s
operations module.

Shaking Michael off, he ran faster and launched into a leap. He landed on all fours on the side of the ops module. He gecko-gripped on with gloves and boots and crawled up the overhang, shining his helmet lamp across the pitted old Japanese steel of the hull, until he reached the hole.

Ragged edges of hull plates bowed outwards, sharp enough to rip his suit if he wasn’t careful.

An explosion had made this hole, ripping through layers of decking and hull,
from the inside.

He jumped into the hole. Down, down through a shaft lined with wreckage. He found the controls of this crappy old suit’s mobility pack just in time to land lightly—instead of fatally—in the cavern that used to be the bridge.

Wooden panelling gone, checkerboard floor shattered. A confusion of plastic sheeting tangled with the wreckage. He stood on the wall near the cupboard that used to be the ship’s tabernacle, where they kept the Host.

The
Monster
was not a surface-capable ship, and yet here it was on the surface, so everything was the wrong way up. This wall was the floor.

He shone his helmet lamp back up the shaft.

Yep. He’d fallen straight through the data center.

He flew back up there.

Nothing left but a few globs of melted plastic. The blast zone of total destruction also took in the toilet, the galley, and the refrigerator where the Ghost used to live.

Michael fell down the shaft, mobility pack puffing. Kiyoshi caught him.

“What Mendoza saw,” he said on their suit-to-suit link, “was an explosion. He was right about that. But he was wrong about them blowing up the whole ship. They just blew up the data center.”

Michael’s faceplate automatically darkened in the glare of Kiyoshi’s headlamp, so Kiyoshi couldn’t see his face. “Don’t wanna stay in here,” he said. “It’s spooky.”

“Go on back out, then. Wait for me. I won’t be long.”

Michael’s helmet lamp receded up the shaft.

Kiyoshi knelt on the wall where he’d first landed. He gripped the empty tabernacle and crashed his helmet against it, again and again. The suit’s alarms shrilled piteously. The noise annoyed him back to some semblance of awareness.

He sat back on his heels, grinding his teeth, tears flooding down his cheeks.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
…
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit …

Is there a place for AIs in Heaven?

That eternal seed of doubt made it all the worse. Had Jun ever been alive? Or had he just been a smart machine?

Kiyoshi threw himself face down. The Vatican had not yet reached a decision regarding Jun’s status, and now they never could. He would never know if Jun had really been alive or not.

This was the end. Jun gone. The
Monster,
gone. All Jun’s sub-personalities, gone. Molly and Colin, gone. The Galapajin, as good as gone—they no longer trusted him, and they were right. The entire fucking solar system, on the edge of being lost to the nanites. Nothing left.