The Callisto Gambit (50 page)

“That’s enough!” he yelled.

“Just take what you want,” Jun said.

Kiyoshi took a Redeye and floated over to the window. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass. The dull red artificial light outside made the whole habitat look as if it were filled with blood. It was brighter in the security office, so he could see his own reflection. He looked like a skull.

Shadows wrestled behind him, triggering his fight-or-flight reflex. He spun around with a yell.

The room was empty.

“Jesus Christ, Jun, you’re creeping me the fuck out!”

“I’m not doing anything.”

Kiyoshi pressed the knuckles of his thumbs into his eyes. Sparks of light shot across the insides of his eyelids. Dull pain crept through the anesthetic. He opened his eyes again.

Shadows filled the room, misshapen goliaths striving against each other, surging, running together like black water.

He thumbed the tears out of his eyes, and the shadows fled with them.

Too many drugs.

Too many cosmic rays to the brain.

Not enough sleep.

“Why don’t you catch a few?” Jun said, as if reading his thoughts. “I can handle this.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Kiyoshi said.

He floated to the nearest desk. Stared at the unfamiliar setup.

“Get me comms.”

“Comms?”

“Yes.”

“Who do you want to talk to?”

“Michael.”

“Why?”

“What about if you just do this one fucking thing for me?” Kiyoshi looked around for some kind of weapon. This was a
security
office, for Christ’s sake. His eye fell on the medibot; he hadn’t told it to go away, because he’d been thinking it might have drugs. “I’ll find some way to kill myself, Jun. I’ll break that window and slash my wrists with the pieces, or I’ll break the medibot and commit
harakiri
with the scalpel attachment, if you don’t do this for me!”

★

Michael sprinted across the park. He leapt over casualties lying on the grass. There’d been a half-assed riot when the wardens informed the entire staff of InSec Center that they were going to be bussed up north to their own prison. A few people had gotten hurt. The rest had gotten on the buses.

“Father!
Father!”
Michael hollered, spotting Father Lynch.

The Jesuit stood in the doorway of Room Seven, where a team of ISA writers used to compose news stories. Now, an overflow crowd filled the room, because it had a big screen.

“What is it, Michael?”

“Kiyoshi just called me,” Michael panted.

“What? Where is he?”

“Someplace called 5222 Ioffe. He said he needs you to do something. It sounds kind of impossible, but maybe you can help …”

★

Inside Room Seven, Elfrida Goto stood with her hand in Mendoza’s, watching the fallout from the ISA’s destruction of four Star Force capital ships. The UN clearly would not be resettling any Martians on Ceres now. What
would
happen seemed very much up in the air. She had a strong awareness of being in at the death of something. The excitement on people’s faces dismayed her. The ship kills had touched something dark in every human heart—even hers, if she were honest. They were spectators in a solar system-sized arena, waiting to watch the blood fly.

Mendoza nudged her.

“What?”

“Father Lynch is calling you.”

Reluctantly, she tore herself away from the screen. She squeezed through the crowd. It was colder out in the park.

“What’s happening now? Ha, ha.”

“Elfrida, have you called your parents?”

“Oh, God. No. I was going to do that as soon as I got a minute.”

“You need to do it now.” Father Lynch walked quickly away. She hurried after him. Her questions bounced off his black-clad back. He led her upstairs and into the first empty office they found. He was carrying an old rucksack. He set this down and took out a clunky radio set. It looked low-tech but she suspected it had some very high-tech parts inside. He connected it to a hardwired LAN port. “Call your mother.”

★

Elfrida’s mother, Ingrid Haller, worked for the New Holy Roman Empire, a UN member state that functioned as a dumping ground for religious nuts and other oddballs.

At the moment, she was not working.

Almost no one on Earth was working.

They were watching the news.

Drawn from their offices, from their beds if they were on the other side of the world, from their schools and homes and even from their GBI-funded immersion games—people instinctively sought the company of others when they saw the magnitude of what was happening. They clustered around screens, reacting to the news with vlogs and off-the-cuff memes that fed into the rising tide of resentment and fear.

The ISA’s destruction of the Martian resettlement fleet had already been forgotten. Breaking news right here on Earth supplanted its importance in the minds of 12.2 billion viewers.

Ingrid Haller, standing in a crowd below one of the big screens in St. Peter’s Square, gripped her elbows as the UNSSCHQ building in Geneva collapsed gracefully into Parc Moynier. Screams rippled through the crowd.

Screams—or cheers?

Here came the replay. In slow motion, a missile could be seen striking the building. Its trajectory indicated it came from orbit.

Again the collapse, in slow motion.

A commentator needlessly reminded everyone that the UNSSCHQ building housed the United Nations Select Security Council.

Ingrid Haller happened to know that the United Nations Select Security Council did not really run the UN. All the important decisions came from the President’s Advisory Council.

That had been the first thing to blow up, three-quarters of an hour ago.

The screen looped back to the scene in Paris. Rescue workers swarmed futilely around a crater on the Champs-Élysées. The Élysée Palace had been slagged from orbit with such precision that the buildings around it suffered little damage.

Jump cut to New York, where the starscraper housing the Coalition for the Americas, an important sub-federation of the UN, had exploded twenty minutes ago, killing thousands.

Ingrid Haller’s cochlear implants trilled. It was her husband, Tomoki Goto, stuck at his office on the other side of Rome—Traffic Control had shut down every mode of transport. “They just hit Beijing,” he said.

“Thank God.”

“Thank God?”
He forwarded her a clip of the Imperial Hall of the People disintegrating into a mushroom cloud.

“Thank God, Tommy, because if the Chinese leadership has also been wiped out, at least we can’t blame it on them!”

“Who’s doing this?”

“Nobody knows,” Ingrid Haller said. “Maybe it is God punishing us.”

But all over Earth, a different theory was emerging spontaneously from a population traumatized by the recent war.

“It’s the PLAN. The PLAN … it isn’t dead! It’s taking revenge on us! It’s the PLAN!”

“I don’t think so,” said Tomoki Goto. “I can’t be the only one to have noticed that ISA headquarters in Geneva has mysteriously escaped any damage. Their satellite offices in Berlin, San Francisco, Moscow, and Lagos also seem to be unscathed.”

The idea that the ISA was doing this sounded plausible to Ingrid Haller, who’d formerly worked for the New Holy Roman Empire’s own intelligence agency.

Her call waiting icon flashed. “Tommy, I’ll call you back! It’s Elfrida!”

★

Across Earth, de-orbited satellites and hijacked spaceplanes continued to pulverize important organs of government. Street parties sprang up in many of the UN’s less restrained member countries. In China, where no one was allowed to see the news, it leaked out all the same, and citizens joyfully abandoned caution. Millions flooded out of arcologies to celebrate the fall of the Imperial Republic, and make sure it
stayed
fallen.

In St. Peter’s Square, however, no one was cheering. The people of Rome—conscious of the NHRE’s unique status as a cultural reservation within the UN—dreaded what might come next.

Ingrid Haller ran across the square, blindly knocking people out of her way.

She was sixty-five and a bit too fond of her own cooking, so
running
maybe wasn’t the word for it.

But she would gladly have burst her heart on that afternoon if it got her to the Apostolic Apartments any faster.

★

Pope Stephen XII, born Luc-Auguste Sidibe in Mali, turned with unhurried calm when the door of the papal library crashed open. It did not surprise him that on a day like this, someone should burst in. He hadn’t expected it to be the Superior General of the Society of Jesus—the solar system’s top Jesuit—
and
the Abbot Superior of the far less exalted Order of St. Benedict of Passau, cringing nervously. Even more unexpected was the middle-aged laywoman who accompanied the two monks. He believed he’d seen her around the Vatican before. She hadn’t been red in the face and panting then.

But a pope is never surprised. “Good evening, Fathers. Welcome, my daughter.” He spoke in English, his fourth language after French, Italian, and his native Bambara.

Swiss Guards lurked in the corridor behind the trio. The Superior General of the Society of Jesus had not darkened the doorstep of the Apostolic Palace in a long time, despite the Jesuits’ official acceptance of Church authority.

“Holy Father,” the Superior General said. He swiftly knelt and kissed Stephen’s ring—a piece of outdated protocol that showed just how out of step the Jesuits were. “We would beg you to resolve with the greatest possible speed a case that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has been considering for some months.”

“Oh, is it the AI?” Stephen said. “I’ve been praying over that myself. Tell me more about it.”

He listened to them. While the Abbot Superior was explaining the background of the case, they felt the room shake. It was not the sustained juddering of an earthquake, but a sudden jolt, followed by a boom that shook the building. Ingrid Haller rushed to the nearest window and opened it to look out. The Superior General looked at his wrist tablet. “That was the UNESCO building on the Quirinal.”

None of them came any closer than that to mentioning the destruction sweeping across Earth.

Scattered, animalistic cries drifted through the open window. After a few minutes, soot started to come in. Ingrid Haller got up again and shut the window.

When he’d heard all three of them out, Stephen XII asked them to leave him for a few minutes. He crossed the library and faced the Black Madonna of Częstochowa on the wall. He bowed his head and prayed silently that She extend the mantle of her mercy to Pallas. Then he went to his desk and requested a secure satellite connection.

★

“Jun? You’ve got a call.”

“Tell them to frag off,” Jun said thickly from the shadows.

“Tell him your goddamn self. It’s the Pope.”

★

Stephen’s conversation with Jun Yonezawa went very slowly. In between exchanges, he prayed.

The one-way signal delay to Pallas was 16 minutes. Jun had numerous assets in Earth orbit by now, so it need not have taken so long for each exchange to be completed. But Stephen insisted that Jun use his full processing capacity to respond, rather than lashing out with whatever happened to be above Rome at the moment.

At four in the morning, Stephen finally shut down his satellite connection. He was ninety-one years old and needed little sleep. In the papal bedroom, he stood at the window, looking out at the stars.

★

Kiyoshi jolted into consciousness. A sticky crust glued his eyelids together.

The security office was dark and silent. He had no idea how much time had passed.

In the light pollution from the hab, he saw a shadow curled on the wall. His pulse tripped. He wobbled off his couch and floated closer to it.

It didn’t vanish.

He braced one hand on the wall and reached towards the shadow. His fingers seemed to touch cheap printable fabric.

Warm skin.

A shock of thick hair.

Warm breath sighed onto his wrist.

Overcome by a wave of exhaustion, Kiyoshi curled around the warm spine of the sleeper and drifted off again. It came naturally, just like when he was a kid and had to share his bed with the youngest in the family.

★

He woke up in the air, very stiff. Realistic sunshine poured into the office. He stretched, feeling refreshed—and famished. He grabbed one of the pouches from the vending machine and squeezed lukewarm coffee into his mouth. He chased that with a yogurt-based nutrient drink, and then tore open a packaged bagel. Chewing, he floated over to the window. The winged security bots were cleaning up the carnage.

“You slept for nineteen hours!” Jun said. “How are you feeling?”

“Better. What did the Pope say?”

“A lot of stuff.” Jun sounded completely different this morning. Cheerful, excited, the way he used to be when he’d found something new to be interested in. “Every nuance matters. Every data point has to be taken into account. There are 2,300 years of doctrinal precedents to examine. But the Holy Father has this amazing way of putting everything in human terms. He’s big on mercy. You can feel his compassion straight through the screen … Anyway, in the end he said that he would transfer my case from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to the Commission for the Causes of Saints, and they’ll declare my resurrection a miracle.”

Kiyoshi’s shoulders relaxed. An unconscious smile spread across his face. He ate another big bite of bagel. “Attributed to who?”

“St. Francis.”

“That sounds right,” Kiyoshi murmured, remembering how Jun used to venerate St. Francis on board the
Monster.

“So my baptism is still valid. But the Holy Father was very clear that this
isn’t
an endorsement of technologically enabled immortality. They’re making an exception for me.”

“An exception to the rule is kind of the definition of a miracle.”

“Yeah. So there are conditions.”