The Callisto Gambit (54 page)

“I’ve been left at the altar. I don’t freaking believe it.”

Just in time before he said something harsh, Kiyoshi realized Mendoza genuinely did think it possible that Elfrida had dumped him on the day of their wedding. He said as gently as he could, “Dude, she loves you.”

Mendoza turned a haunted look on him. “Does she? You don’t understand, I’ve found the perfect woman. This is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, OK? And she’s marrying me? No, no. It’s too good to be true. My life does
not
work out like this. I
knew
something would go wrong …”

He resumed pacing. He stopped at the one-way window in the wall of the sacristy and lifted the curtain to peek into the church.

“Oh,
God …”

Kiyoshi took a peek. With ten minutes to go until noon, the church was already full.

He subvocalized to Jun,
~Is she going to make it?

“Um. Actually, she might be a few minutes late,” Jun said. He spoke to Kiyoshi, as always, through Kiyoshi’s crucifix earring, which spoofed the SSSA secure comms unit he wore around his neck. Strangely enough, no one at the SSSA had ever noticed that Kiyoshi used the unit for unauthorized communications. Jun’s security was more secure than theirs was.

At this moment Jun was parked on the floor of the Olympus Mons caldera, in the region the CEF used as a spaceport. Kiyoshi knew he was watching everything that happened in the caldera through the CEF’s satellites and surveillance drones. This was all aboveboard, nothing secret about it. Jun got along better with the CEF than he did with the SSSA, thanks to the junta’s obligatory partnership with the Society of Jesus.

That partnership also explained why there was a church here.

The nave, where the congregation sat, was octagonal, with recesses in the walls that had been the workstations of NASA scientists, and were now Stations of the Cross. A flower-shaped skylight filled the church with hazy Mars light filtered through the dome high above. An ornate altar had been set up against one wall. A crucifix carved of Martian stone hung behind it. Those were new. The building was not. It had ‘human’ proportions, unlike most Martian buildings. It had started life two hundred years ago as a NASA hab block.

The PLAN, for its own perverse reasons, had preserved this former NASA base and built a town around it. This was where it had begun its own life, as the AI running the Mars colony. It had slaughtered the humans who once tended it, but kept their stuff. According to the Martians Jun had interviewed, while the PLAN ruled Mars, this had been a sort of religious center. Martians had come on hate-pilgrimages to watch sacrifices in this very building, in a reenactment of the PLAN’s founding slaughter. When the CEF occupied the town, they’d had to use high-powered steam hoses to get all the dried blood off the walls.

Kiyoshi felt distinctly ambivalent about the Jesuits’ decision to turn this building into a church. Had it been up to him, he’d have slagged it.

“It’s the best way of reclaiming the past,” Father Lynch had assured him, “and at the same time, making sure it never happens again.”

“Five minutes to noon!” Mendoza moaned. He was not speaking to Kiyoshi now, but to Father Lynch himself. The Afro-Irish priest had just come into the sacristy with Michael and a couple of other altar servers. The boys helped him put on his vestments for the wedding Mass. Mendoza said, “Father, she’s not coming, I know it!”

“I’m sure she is,” Father Lynch said, texting Kiyoshi at the same time:
“You don’t think she HAS run off, do you?”

~Jun?

“This isn’t going as well as I hoped it would,” Jun said after a moment.

★

“You could have at least let me know you were alive!”

“I was in JAIL, Colden!”

“What about after you got out of jail?”

“They said you were on Thisbe!”

“The Thisbe refuge was cancelled in favor of Ceres. And then Ceres got cancelled, too. I’ve been here all along.”

“Well, why didn’t you call ME?”

“I’m a Martian now, if you hadn’t noticed. We’re not allowed to have any such thing as modern technology!”

★

Magnus Kristiansen stepped between the two women. He waited until they stopped yelling at each other. Then he solemnly wrapped one arm around Colden’s shoulders, and the other around Elfrida’s, and pulled them into a hug.

Elfrida tensed, and then sagged. She wouldn’t catch nanites from a hug. Not with her suit on.

“I missed you,” Colden said in a small voice. She was actually subvocalizing. The technology restrictions allowed the Martians to use their nanites for local comms.

Colden was a Martian.

“I missed
you,”
Elfrida said. Tears filled her eyes. She’d found her best friend again, and lost her forever, at the same time.

It just felt so wrong.

Kristiansen was a Martian, too. He said, “Thanks, Jun.”

“I hope this was the right thing to do,” Jun said. “You travelled a long way to get here. Thank
you.”

“A long way?” Elfrida said.

“Yeah,” Colden said. When she spoke, her lips stayed sealed in that tight Martian smile. It made her look alien, even though Elfrida knew the Martians had to keep their mouths closed when they were outside, so they didn’t overdose on CO2. “We live down in the Sulci Gordii.”

“How did you get here?” This was such a stupid conversation to be having. As if they hardly knew each other.

“We walked,” Kristiansen said. “No modern technology for us, remember?”

“We came through the caverns,” Colden said, gesturing back the way they’d come. “Goto, it is freaking amazing down there. Underground waterfalls. Underground lakes. Stalactites—”

“Stalag
mites,”
Kristiansen corrected her in that pedantic way he’d always had.

“I can never remember which is which.”

“The tights go down,” Elfrida sang.

“And the mites go up!” Colden finished. They both laughed, and for a second it felt like Colden hadn’t changed a bit.

“There’s a whole world down there,” Colden went on. “Yes, the PLAN built it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. Unfortunately, the locals have forgotten everything they knew about infrastructure maintenance. They’re clueless without the PLAN feeding them instructions. So we’ve been busy, busy, busy.”

Colden
hadn’t
changed. Inside that cold-resistant, radproof dermis, behind that alien smile, she was still the same old Colden.

“Are you … OK?” Elfrida asked hesitantly.

“Better than fine,” Colden said. She wrapped her hand around Kristiansen’s.

Kristiansen said, “The nanites have changed our DNA. The changes are irreversible. Right now, we feel healthy. In ten or twenty years? Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“It’s actually really cool having neuroware,” Colden said. “Now that the PLAN isn’t around to control us through the nanites, we can use it for local comms, all kinds of stuff. It’s like a BCI
plus.”

“Jun wrote a new operating system for the neuroware,” Kristiansen grinned. “The St. Stephen Oratorio, version 2.0.” He tapped his head. “Best security in the solar system. The GUI could stand to be a bit less gothic, though.”

“I’m working on it,” Jun said.

Elfrida cleared her throat, “Well, I really want to talk more about this. But guys? This is awful, but I’m supposed to be getting married in—” She checked the time. “Oh, help. Two minutes!”

“They’ll wait for you,” Jun said.

“Goto, you’re getting
married?
Oh my God!”

The third Martian who’d come with Colden and Kristiansen stepped forward. He was a born Martian. Like all of them, he was a youngish male of indeterminate race. He said, “I am Stephen One. There are many Stephen Ones now, but I was Stephen One while they were still mindless client nodes, so I am keeping it. First come, first served. I am honored to make your acquaintance, and I congratulate you on your upcoming nuptials.”

“Cut to the chase, Stephen,” Jun said. “She has to go.”

“Yes, O Great Liberator,” Stephen One said sarcastically. Jun and Stephen One clearly knew each other well, and were friends. “We, the people of Mars, humbly implore you, Miss Goto, to use your influence with the CEF. All we have left is our planet. Please don’t take it away from us.”

“But I thought you were going to stay here,” Elfrida said. “Isn’t it a done deal?”

Hawker, who’d kept a tactful distance during her reunion with Colden, said, “Remember I mentioned terraforming?”

Jun said, “There are plans … there’s a lot of pressure on me to develop version 3.0 of my oratorio. The SSSA wants Mars for human colonization. The nanites are a fatal obstacle to that goal. They want me to disable them altogether.”

“Without our nanites, we would probably die,” Kristiansen said. “We’re symbiotic with them.”

“I won’t do it, obviously,” Jun said. “And I’m fairly sure they can’t do it without me. But … I’d rather not be the only person opposing them.”

Elfrida heard a tiny catch in Jun’s voice. She realized how tired he must be.

“Oh, I’m exaggerating,” he quickly added. “My Order is on my side. So is the Church in Rome. So is the Order of St. Stephen—that’s the new Martian monastic order …”

“What about the CEF?” Elfrida said.

“Could go either way,” Jun said. “And that’s where we need your help.”

“I don’t have any influence.”

“Yes, you do,” Colden snapped. “Stop underestimating yourself. You were classified as a statistical outlier.”

“A lucky mascot.”

“A person with a peculiar gift for survival. Goto, they will listen to you. If you didn’t have a special classification, they wouldn’t be letting you get married on Mars in the first place!”

“I’ll try,” Elfrida said. She shared Jun’s weariness at the thought that she wasn’t done with her responsibilities yet. Then she told herself not to be so self-pitying. “I’ll annoy them until they say OK just to get rid of me.” She smiled. “How’s that sound?”

“Good,” Colden said. “And now, back to more important topics. Goto, you’re getting
married!?”

★

Kiyoshi slipped out of the sacristy and hurried around the back of the church to where Molly was waiting with Cydney Blaisze and Miss Mercury 2291.

“She’s coming,” he muttered.

It was twenty past noon. The congregation had swelled to standing room only at the back, as off-duty CEF personnel dropped in for the entertainment value of the first wedding ever to be held on Mars.

“What on earth happened?” Molly said, her eyes round.

Kiyoshi quickly explained how Jun had arranged a reunion between Elfrida and her friends from the Space Corps. “So they’re coming, too.” He told her what she had to do—if she would.

“Sure,” Molly said, heading for the door. “I didn’t want to be a bridesmaid, anyway.”

★

Half an hour later, the organ struck up a distinctly untraditional wedding march. It was the instrumental overture of the St. Stephen Oratorio.

Father Lynch, as the officiant, entered first from the sacristy. Mendoza—looking haggard, but relieved—followed him, and Kiyoshi followed him. As best man, he wore his SSSA uniform. He might’ve been imagining the hostile stares from the back of the church, but he didn’t think so. Mars was the junta’s private playpen. The average CEF guy or gal had a kneejerk dislike for the ‘political types’ in the SSSA. So, for that matter, did the average civilian.

The crowd of casual spectators at the back parted. Elfrida’s mother, Ingrid Haller, entered the church in a modest mother-of-the-bride outfit.

After her came Cydney and Miss Mercury 2291, holding hands, waving to people they knew, and generally hogging the spotlight. In Kiyoshi’s non-expert opinion, their bridesmaids’ dresses were extremely unflattering, so that was something.

They stopped to pose for photographs. Kiyoshi inwardly rolled his eyes.

After a couple of minutes, he realized they were deliberately stalling for time.

★

Outside, in what had been the airlock of the NASA hab block and was now the vestibule of the church, Elfrida wept with frustration and stress. “It’s too
long!
I can’t walk in it, Dad, I’ll
trip!”

“Just give me one second,” said Molly. She was crawling around Elfrida, turning up the hem of her dress and securing it with splart.

“You’re not shortening it
enough!”

“Why are you so terrified of tripping?” Molly said.

“Let’s just say I have a history of embarrassing myself in public. Plus, low gravity.” Elfrida wiped her eyes, and smeared her eye make-up all over her cheeks. “Turn it up more, please!”

“I already started,” Molly said. “It’ll be uneven.”

Colden said, “Should I go in first? They’ll be so busy staring at me, they won’t notice if you do trip.”

“No!” Elfrida said. “Wait for me!”

“You really should’ve worn heels,” Colden said. “If you’re gonna faceplant, do it in style.”

“Um. I might have something that would help,” said a soft voice from behind them.

Elfrida twisted around.

In the doorway of the church stood Alicia Petruzzelli.

Elfrida hadn’t invited
her!

After she found out that Petruzzelli had spilled the beans about Kiyoshi’s jailbreak on Pallas, and got thirty-six escaping prisoners killed, she’d resolved never to talk to her again. She got the impression that most people on Pallas felt the same way. Petruzzelli was an angry outsider, barely tolerated by her own colleagues in the SSSA—tolerated by the SSSA itself only because angry outsiders were their preferred type of recruit.

Molly sat back on her heels, practically hissing like a cat. After all, Petruzzelli had almost gotten
her
killed, too.

But now Petruzzelli looked unsure of herself. Shy. Miserable.

“I was just going to kind of watch the wedding and then leave,” she said. “Hopefully you would never have known I was here.”

“I guess you still have contacts in the military,” Elfrida said stiffly.

“Yeah.”

Right there in the doorway, Petruzzelli knelt and took off her left boot, then her right.