The Callisto Gambit (48 page)

“Kiyoshi, it was trivially easy,” Jun said flatly. “Remember who I am. I’ve fought the Heidegger program and beaten it. I designed a virus that knocked out the PLAN’s distributed processing network.
And
victimized millions of innocent Martians, but never mind that. Basically, if not for those goofballs who smashed up Phobos, I would have defeated the PLAN on my own. Sneaking on board an ISA cruiser was not a problem for me.”

~Heh, heh. Gotcha.

The chaos in the park died down. The InSec employees squeezed into a weeping, docile crowd. One by one, outdoorsy-looking individuals appeared out of thin air, aiming bows and arrows at them. Kiyoshi remembered that he too was still wearing an invisible coverall. He clenched his cigarette in his teeth and stripped it off.

“Oh yeah, I was going to do something here,” Jun said. “OK. It’ll take one minute … So when we reached Pallas, I hopped from the
Creed
to InSec Center. There’s a supercomputer in the basement with yottabytes of memory. That’s where the bodies are buried: all the stuff they’ve covered up and twisted to fit the UN’s needs, going back to the twentieth century. I scootched right in there among all the other lost stories. But then I was stuck.”

~So what have you been doing all this time? Reading the ISA’s secret archives?

“That only took about five minutes. It was mostly political shit. Not very interesting. I’ve been bored out of my mind, actually,” Jun said. “Rattling around in the secondary systems. Messing with their heads.”

~If you weren’t in there, what was?
Kiyoshi jerked his chin at the Faraday cage.

“Oh, it really is the Heidegger program. I used the snake to borrow its audio speaker from time to time. But that reminds me.”

~What?

“Stand back.”

Inside the Faraday cage, something shorted out with a loud
crack.
Legacy jumped violently. Smoke dribbled from the cage. Kiyoshi smelled burning plastic.

“I’ve wanted to do that for a long time,” Jun said in satisfaction.

Suddenly, the light dimmed. Legacy flinched back from the window. Outside, Paris had vanished from the smart wallpaper. In its place floated Ceres.

The dwarf planet appeared to hover right outside the park, a bright hole in a black cliff of sky. The people in the park cowered. That was understandable. It looked like Ceres was about to fall on them.

Kiyoshi smirked. “Why Ceres?” he said, forgetting to subvocalize.

“Oh, I just thought it would be good for them to reflect on what they’ve done.”

Legacy, unable to hear Jun, assumed Kiyoshi had been speaking to him. He raised an eyebrow. “Why Ceres? Why not? It could have been anywhere. The fall of the Roman Empire started in Germania. The fall of the American empire started in Iraq. A hundred years from now, people will look back on the collapse of the UN and wonder what we were smoking. We had the stars in our grasp, and we threw it all away.”

“I dunno about that.” Kiyoshi took a last drag on his cigarette and moved towards the door. “My advice to you: Get out of here. Call it a hunch, but I have a feeling things’ll start blowing up soon.”

“Why did you say that?” Jun said, outside the office. “I’m in control. Nothing’s going to blow up.”

“Those people down there? The prison wardens? You’re not in control of them. And if they’re not in a destructive mood, there are forty thousand people up north who are. Brian O’Shaughnessy once told me how to make a fertilizer bomb. Low tech, Jun. It kills people just as dead as high tech, and even you can’t switch it off.”

All the employees from this sector had been rounded up. The corridor was empty. Kiyoshi hesitated, wondering which way to go.

“What are you waiting for?” Jun said.

“Just wondering if I should go back and look for Michael.”

“Don’t you have something else to do?”

Oh, yeah.
It came back like a dream.
The boss-man.
He grinned into the empty corridor. “But he’s on 5222 Ioffe,” he recalled, energy fading.

“I can get us a ship.”

“A ship? Now you’re talking.”

“Go downstairs.”

Kiyoshi ran down the stairs. At the exit to the park, he spotted Michael. He was standing with Father Lynch, hopping around in excitement as he talked. That was a relief. Kiyoshi edged back into the corridor. He didn’t want them to see him. Didn’t want to waste time on explanations.

The six-storey representation of Ceres, which wrapped around the ceiling and most of one wall, vanished, suddenly plunging the park into darkness. Frightened people yelped aloud.

A fleet of buses stood at an apparent distance of fifty meters from the park. Kiyoshi realized the smart wallpaper now displayed an ordinary optical feed. They were looking at the landscape outside the dome.

A blaze of light splashed the terrain. A ship descended to the ground, backthrusting profligately. Twin energy weapons jutted from its forward radome like tusks. Point defense turrets warted its narrow, radar-stealthed fuselage. Streamlined wings identified it as a dual-use ship, capable of flying in-atmosphere. But Pallas didn’t have an atmosphere, so the ship landed butt-first. White-hot plasma baked the rock inside a filigree cone of jackstands, and faded.

The ship looked to be nearly as big as InSec Center itself.

Kiyoshi whistled. “When you said a ship, I thought you meant a Superlifter or something.”

“It’s a decommissioned Star Force destroyer,” Jun said. “The flagship of the ISA fleet. It’s not supposed to be here, but when the Ceres story started to go bad, Legacy and his buddies squirrelled it away on the other side of Pallas. It’s fully fueled.”

“For a quick getaway.” Kiyoshi chortled. “Let’s go.”

The destroyer informed him in a sweet voice that it was called the
Velvet Revolver.
That was the first and last thing it said before Jun lobotomized its hub and took over.

“Let’s rename it,” Kiyoshi said, exploring the bridge. “Dragon? Leviathan? Beast?“

“I don’t want to name it anything,” Jun said. “It’s just a ship. Do you mind flying? I’ve got some other stuff to do.”

“My pleasure.” Kiyoshi babied the ship into orbit under secondary thrust, aware of the vulnerable dome below. At apoapsis, he engaged the main drive. Blue-hot plasma stabbed into the vacuum like a ghostly middle finger. The ship screamed away from Pallas at 0.3 gees of acceleration.

Kiyoshi unstrapped from his couch. With a reactor capacity of 2.3 terawatts, the destroyer could kick out Star Force levels of thrust. Unfortunately, you’d need Star Force augments to cope with the resulting gees. Kiyoshi had had enough of heavy gravity for a while, anyway. Constant acceleration / deceleration would get them there soon enough. It was ‘only’ three million kilometers.

Thinking of 3,000,000 klicks as a short distance was a luxury he hadn’t had since he last flew on the
Monster,
and as the destroyer tore through space, he wandered its decks, imagining how it might look if the functional steel-lattice walls were replaced with wood.

He ended up sitting in the mess, nodding over a pouch of coffee, alone with fifty unused chairs and a scattering of ISA motivational posters.

Jun’s voice startled him out of a doze. “We’re almost there.”

“What? Shit.”

His eyes hurt to open, his jaw ached from grinding his teeth, the tip of his tongue was raw, and he wanted to sleep forever.

“Wrong time to crash,” Jun said.

“I know. I know.”

“Have some coffee.”

“I already did. Medibot!” Kiyoshi yelled, trusting that Jun would respect his wishes.

After a longer time than he would’ve liked, a medibot trundled into the mess. One gripper offered him an IV, the other a pre-filled syringe. “I’d recommend taking both,” Jun said sullenly. “The IV’s a saline solution spiked with a mild depressant to smooth out the rush.”

Kiyoshi pawed at the syringe. The medibot tourniqueted his arm for him with robotic efficiency, while inserting the IV into his cubital port. Head resting on the table, he prodded his right arm until he found a vein that didn’t already have too many scabbed, red marks on it.

“You don’t really need that stuff,” Jun said. “You just think you do.”

Again, he got that nagging sense that something was wrong. Then the rush hit, and his concerns vanished like leaves whirled away in a breeze.

Filled with energy again, he stalked back to the cockpit and watched 5222 Ioffe grow from a blip on the long-distance radar, to a lump in the optical feed, to a full-sized asteroid.

All of 22 kilometers long, it showed no exterior signs of habitation. Everything important was inside. It rotated lazily; it had not been spun up. Presumably the solar system’s worst criminals were not thought to deserve gravity.

Jun pointed out a QRF fuel depot, a grove of gigantic propellant tanks.

“What’ve you done with the QRF, actually?” Kiyoshi said. He’d brought his coffee from the mess, and he sucked on it, cold now.

“Sent them away,” Jun said, vaguely.

A workstation on the far side of the bridge lit up and trilled. Kiyoshi ran over to inspect the flashing screens. The destroyer’s sensor array reported weapons locks from defensive systems. 5222 Ioffe had three laser batteries, spaced out around the asteroid to give 360° coverage. There was also a large-caliber railgun on a turntable. Kiyoshi followed its line of fire to an unassuming bump of rock.

“Hey!
Velvet Revolver,
great to see you.” The voice from the comms station sounded more than a little sarcastic. “What the hell is happening on Pallas?”

“Say something,” Jun muttered in Kiyoshi’s ears.

“Y’know, friends usually say hello first, and paint crosshairs on you later,” Kiyoshi said.

“That’ll do,” Jun said. “I’m packaging your transmission with a stand-down order enabled by Pallas executive-level consensus.”

“But I understand your paranoid overreaction,” Kiyoshi went on chatting. “Weird shit
has
been happening.”

“Aaaand we’re in.”

“Like this.” Kiyoshi commanded the destroyer’s primary kinetic weapon, a hypervelocity coil gun similar to the one he had on the
Monster,
to take out laser battery number one. “And this.” Push button, watch pretty, pretty blossoms of atomized matter float away into the vacuum. “And this.” There went number three.

“What are you doing?” the 5222 Ioffe comms officer screamed hysterically.

“Just saying hello,” Kiyoshi crooned. He chose a different type of shell from the mouthwatering selection available. 5222 Ioffe’s railgun dematerialized into a cloud of shrapnel. A crater gaped in its place. “Did I miss anything?”

“Nope, that’s pretty much it,” Jun said. “The rest of the defences are inside. You may want this.”

A headless figure walked across the bridge to him. It was a spacesuit with the cheesy lightning-bolt logo of the ISA on the chest, carrying its own helmet under its arm. Jun made it wiggle its free hand in a limp-wristed wave of greeting.

“Meet the Powersuit. It’s a Marine combat suit for normal people. It does the Marine combat part for you.”

“I’ll take it,” Kiyoshi said, walking around the suit. He frowned when he saw LEGACY written on the back. “Can that change?”

“Sure. What do you want it to be?”

“I’m kind of tired of sneaking around the solar system, pretending to be someone else. Let’s just have it say YONEZAWA.”

The suit snugged itself around him like an old friend. It plugged itself into his cubital port and interfaced with his BCI, spraying sinister-looking icons into his HUD area. He hardly had to walk; he just
thought
about walking, and the suit carried him to the command airlock. There, he had a choice between a carbine that shot explosive flechettes, and a high-powered laser rifle. He took both.

The destroyer had been sidling closer to the maimed asteroid all this time, and when Kiyoshi opened the airlock, he looked down at barren rock gliding past, just a few meters subjectively below.

“Blowing the door now,” Jun said.

Shadows leapt across the rock from an explosion.

The destroyer crept over the bump Kiyoshi had previously identified as the entrance. It was now a bump with a large hole in it.

Kiyoshi timed his jump to miss the hole’s slagged, glowing sides.

He drifted down through smoke and wildly strobing alarms, and landed on a steel walkway. Ahead of him, another airlock obligingly opened.

“Jun, are you into their systems?”

“Deep, deep inside.”

“How many people in here?”

“Counting prisoners, not counting the ones you fragged when you hit the batteries? Two thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight.”

Holy crap.

The airlock irised, and he flew into a city of glass and steel. Spindly zero-gee towers shook hands across a pressurized gulf easily a kilometer wide. Ziplines crisscrossed the void. 5222 Ioffe’s artificial equivalent of the sun was at the far end, shining into his eyes. The Powersuit darkened his faceplate and started acquiring person-shaped targets. He shot quite a few of them before realizing they weren’t trying to shoot him. They were screaming and running away. Odd how often that had been happening lately. Heh.

“Who are these people, Jun?”

“Researchers. Scientists. That’s what their job descriptions say, anyway. Ever heard of Unit 731?”

“No.”

“Good.” Jun highlighted one of the pencil-thin towers on his faceplate. “The boss is in there.”

Kiyoshi flew that way. Before he got there, laser pulses started blipping around him. The Powersuit returned fire with blistering speed and agility. Foil chaff pumped from reservoirs on his elbows and knees, surrounding him with a cloud of glittering snow. Kinetic rounds sprayed wide. High-tension ziplines parted like rubber bands. People caught in the crossfire came apart. Kiyoshi fired a final burst of flechettes at the security goons on his tail and dived at the top of the tower. It had been severed from its mate on the opposite side of the void, and swayed under him like a blade of grass. There was no obvious way in. He backed off and sawed a hole in the wall with his laser rifle.