The Callisto Gambit (11 page)

He could have showed her the recording of his conversation with Father Tom, if the Startractor hadn’t been totaled.

But it had been, and so here they were in the Heinlein Hotel, a space hostel—
hotel
was stretching it—buried under Asgard Spaceport, intended for spaceship crew on layovers, now bursting at the seams with refugees from the Belt.

Kiyoshi turned away from Sister Terauchi, thinking that her gratitude sure hadn’t lasted long. Then he turned back. “Don’t forget to feed the pigs.”

“I’ll get the children to do it. Where are you going?”

“We can’t stay here,” Kiyoshi said. “I’ve paid for a week. After that, we’ll be out on our asses.”

Kicking people out, in space, presented an interesting conundrum. If you kicked someone out of your hab, you’d literally be murdering them. That was why each independent colony had more than its share of ne’er-do-wells and freeloaders—there was no way to get rid of them,
and they knew it
. But the minute a hab scaled up to the point where multiple people owned different bits of it, those owners seemed to feel comfortable ejecting people onto whatever passed for the street.

In the depths of Asgard City, the street was a raised floor of metal mesh. The sounds coming from underneath it suggested a stream. The
smells
coming from underneath it suggested a sewer. Stepping out of the Heinlein Hotel, Kiyoshi nearly collided with a man taking a piss in the street. It made sense, he guessed. All the graywater would run downhill and get recycled.

The raised floor was stair-stepped, so that the buildings on either side lined a broad, multi-level street. On each level, unhealthy, bored-looking people sat on blankets, trading tablets back and forth. Kiyoshi circled a man lying on his back, out cold, his chest barely rising and falling. The stink of vomit overlaid the sewer smell. It was unbearable to think of the Galapajin camping out here. Who was even
feeding
these people? At least the Heinlein Hotel offered privacy—even if they were squeezed in ten to a room—and a communal kitchen, and a breakfast buffet, which the starving Galapajin had picked clean this morning. He glanced back and saw white flags at the windows. His indomitable people were doing their laundry.

Kiyoshi’s first instinct would have been to seek help from the Church. As this was an UNSA colony, any religious communities here would have to keep a low profile. But the Church
did
get everywhere—the Galapajin themselves proved it. But that was something others could do better than him, so he’d asked Father Tanabe to pursue that angle.

What Kiyoshi could do, that none of the others could, was get hold of more money.

He had several possibilities in mind, but first—

He whirled around, his gecko grips squeaking on the mesh flooor. “Why are you following me?”

In front of him, too close for it to be accidental, stood the guy who’d been taking a piss outside the Heinlein Hotel. He raised his hands, though all Kiyoshi had done was glower at him. “Jumpy, much?”

“It does make me jumpy when people follow me around.”

“I wasn’t—”

“If you want to stake someone out, pro tip: don’t just stand outside their hotel.”

“I was about to go in and look for you, when you came out.”

The guy was spaceborn. He might have been a couple of years younger than Kiyoshi, but that was a guess based on his puppyish smile, not his looks. Everyone got pale in space, but those who started out with melanin-challenged complexions got sickly pale, ghostly pale, and this guy had damage to go with that. A rash of micro-craters covered his left cheek and forehead, as if something long ago had blown up in his face. His baggy black clothes, soiled with chalky smears, confirmed that he could not afford cosmetic surgery to fix his disfigurement.

“OK. I’ll bite,” Kiyoshi said. “Why were you looking for me?”

“You the one asking around about a big, weird-ass ship with an antimatter drive?”

“Yup.” Kiyoshi’s pulse quickened. “You know anything about that?”

“Naw, not me. But I saw your post on infodumps.callisto.cloud, and I know someone who
would
know. If that ship has been through here in the last decade, they’ll know.”

“It wasn’t last decade. More like last week. Who’s your source?”

“I’ll take you there.”

For a tip, of course,
Kiyoshi figured. “Where?”

“Aw, man. I’m not trying to scam you. Just want to help a brother out.”

Brother …
that was a funny word to use. For sure, this guy didn’t mean it in the sense of ‘brother in Christ.’ Kiyoshi glanced at the refugees sitting and lying at the sides of the street, out of the way of foot traffic. Remote Earth-accented voices trickled from their improvised camps. At least the refugees had something to do. They were all watching the war news. The fate of Callisto hinged on that distant conflict. As did the fate of the Galapajin.

Jun, Jun, where are you?
Thoughts of the peril Jun must be facing right now cast a black shadow over Kiyoshi’s mood.

“Frag off,” he told the pockmarked guy.

“Fine! Fine. Jacob Zulu at the hydrogen refinery.”

Startled, Kiyoshi laughed. “Believe it or not, that’s where I was going, anyway.”

“Well, now you know who to ask for,” the guy said, falling into step beside him. “I’m Colin Wetherall.”

“If you saw my post, you already know my name. Kay.” He’d hacked his internet profile to display the name of Kay@
Paladin.
Sticking to the same policy, he’d booked the Galapajin into the Heinlein Hotel as a tour group from Ceres. It was scarcely plausible, but at a time like this, no one cared, as long as you didn’t rub it in their faces. He wasn’t so much concerned that they might be identified as purebloods—Callisto was obviously crawling with purebloods, Wetherall yet another—as that they might be identified, period.

“Know how to get there?” Wetherall said. “The train’s cheapest. Well, walking is cheapest, but it’s a hundred klicks!”

“Think I’ll splurge on the train.”

The Callisto Interrail embodied the young colony’s ambitions to grow far beyond its current scale. It started at the welcome center and ran through a tunnel beneath the spaceport, under the mountains ringing Doh Crater. This portion of the trip took about twenty minutes. Emerging onto the surface, the maglev rail speared across the frozen-porridge terrain, from one sparkling new dome to the next. Most of these domes were farms. Callisto’s big players had invested heavily in the food industry, taking advantage of the moon’s micro-gravity and abundant water. In these pressurized domes, they grew fast-maturing legumes and grains that could be planted, raised, and harvested all within a single sixteen-day sol.

“This is what Shackleton City looked like eighty years ago,” Wetherall said. “Callisto is the new Luna!”

“And the old Luna is now a militaristic monarchy,” Kiyoshi said. “And Shackleton city is now a wasteland.”

“Are you always such a ray of sunshine? Or did someone shit in your cornflakes this morning?”

“I was pointing out that the time is right, actually, for a new Luna. But it won’t be Callisto, unless you’ve got He3 deposits.”

“Well, maybe we have,” Wetherall grinned. “Nah. We haven’t. But you can always make He3 with tritium breeder reactors.”

“Carve out market share now, and you’ll be sitting pretty when the war ends.”

“Yeah. One way or the other.”

They disembarked from the train at the final stop: the Asgard hydrogen refinery.

This gigantic plant sprawled for kilometers. Endless rows of pipes belched oxygen into Callisto’s almost non-existent atmosphere. An aurora hung above the refinery, green and blue clouds glowing as the oxygen interacted with Jupiter’s enfolding magnetic field. Oxygen was one part of what you got when you split a H2O molecule. The other two parts were hydrogen.

Kiyoshi had speculated aloud to Sister Terauchi that the boss-man might be parked out on the ice, helping himself to Callisto’s water. But he didn’t actually think that was likely. Much as the boss might want to avoid scrutiny of his ship, the
Salvation’s
on-board water splitting equipment could not produce the volumes of hydrogen they would need to reach the edge of the Oort Cloud. Compressing the hydrogen into portable liquid form would also cost a lot of energy. So Kiyoshi thought the likeliest scenario was that the boss-man
had
parked on the ice—and then purchased hydrogen from the refinery, and had it trucked overland.

There were plenty of trucks trundling around. Giant tractors, pulling articulated trains of water tanks, docked with the splitting equipment and returned the way they’d come. There was another refinery nearby, the glow of its smelter visible above the horizon. That was where they processed raw regolith into metal ores, rubbish, and water.

Kiyoshi tried to see if any of the trucks were liquid
hydrogen
tankers.

“Come on!” Wetherall bounced down from the railway platform. They headed towards the stacked pipes, each one taller than a man, which fed hydrogen gas from the splitting tanks to the purification and compression units on the far side of the refinery. Kiyoshi’s EVA suit registered a rise in ambient temperature, from -101° C to -87° C. The splitting equipment ran
hot,
and a lot of that heat was whooshing out of the exhaust pipes. It was funny to think of oxygen—so essential to life—as a waste gas. But here, they had that much of it.

A rigid-sided hab came into view. Fat data cables snaked from its sides. They went in with the other passengers who’d got off the Callisto Interrail at the last stop. Kiyoshi eyed these men, careful not to let them catch him looking, as they took off their helmets in the airlock. Grubby, stubbled trekkies. They jabbered to each other in a language that Kiyoshi’s BCI identified as Russian. His retinal interface provided a good-enough translation. They were going farther out, farther away from the PLAN. The boss-man was not alone in his thinking.

Inside the hab was an office populated by refinery technicians. A waist-height desk corraled the visitors into a reception area. Colin Wetherall strolled around the end of the reception desk and headed for the office coffee-maker. Seeing him greet the technicians, Kiyoshi frowned. Was Wetherall really just a spaceport fixer who knew everyone? Or … something more sinister?

Jacob Zulu, anyway, was easy to identify. A mountainous, jet-black man sat on a mobility chair behind the reception desk, selling the Russians several thousand tons of liquid hydrogen.

Kiyoshi waited until the Russians left. Then he ambled up to the desk. “Do you deliver?”

“Depends what you need, where you need it,
when
you need it.”

“Yesterday.”

“Sorry, you are out of luck. You’re looking at an estimated delivery timeframe of one to two weeks, depending on what kind of truck you’ve got.”

“A big one.”

“How big?”

“600,000 tons dry mass.”

“Shit,” Zulu said. His lilting African accent made the curse word sound funny. “There is no ship like that on Callisto.” But his eyes did a tell-tale flicker: he was checking something on his retinal implants.

“Maybe it isn’t on Callisto,” Kiyoshi said. “Maybe it’s in orbit.”

“In that case, you would also require the use of a Superlifter, or more than one Superlifter, to tote your propellant up there.”

“Has anyone rented a couple of Superlifters recently? Say in the last week?”

“I wouldn’t know. We don’t handle that. You want one of the ship rental companies at the spaceport.”

“OK. Have you filled an order for a large volume of propellant—let’s say a hundred kilotons—recently?”

“Why do you want to know?”

To Kiyoshi, that was as good as a
yes.
“Where’d you deliver it to?”

Zulu glanced past him, checking that the Russians were gone. “Who are you, man? The ISA?”

Kiyoshi laughed out loud. It was genuinely hilarious that anyone could take
him
for an ISA agent. Then his amusement faded.

Wetherall sauntered back to the reception desk, carrying two cups of coffee with steam seeping through their lids. He handed one across the desk to Kiyoshi.

Not taking the coffee, Kiyoshi said to Zulu, “Why would you think I’m with the ISA? Would it be because
he
is?”

It was Zulu’s turn to laugh. All his rolls of fat shook. “You are one paranoid trekkie.”

“Oh, sure,” Wetherall said sarcastically. “The ISA pays me
so
well, I’m living a life of luxury. Just look at these spendy threads. And note my surgically perfected complexion.”

Kiyoshi smiled. It wasn’t a denial, and even a denial wouldn’t be proof.

“Colin, an ISA agent?” Zulu wiped his eyes. “He is just a real estate guy.”

“Here’s my card,” Wetherall said. He flipped a virtual business card into Kiyoshi’s inbox. Well,
that
was proof. ISA agents did not have BCIs.

The card just said:
Colin Wetherall, Future Galaxy Enterprises Inc.

Kiyoshi picked up the cup of coffee and took a sip. Burnt and tarry. Well, it was caffeine. “So what can you tell me about the ship that recently ordered a hundred kilotons of liquid hydrogen?”

“That ship?” Zulu’s eyes darkened. “That ship is a death trap. Everyone on board will die before they reach Pluto.”

Kiyoshi stiffened. This was exactly what Jun had said about the
Salvation,
except he’d given them a 50% chance of making it into the Oort Cloud before they all died. “How do you figure, big man?”

“I took the first delivery of hydrogen up myself. I like to check on the customers, to make sure they’re loading their propellant correctly. You know what they’ve got: it’s a Bussard ramjet splarted to an ITN hauler. I give them points for creativity. But they don’t have enough power to run the ionizing lasers.”

“Even though they’ve got an antimatter drive?” Kiyoshi said.

Zulu snorted. “That’s another problem. The ramscoop collects interstellar hydrogen, OK? When UNSA tested this concept, they used the hydrogen in a fusion reactor. But these guys haven’t got a fusion reactor. They want to use the hydrogen as reaction mass. No, no. It’s impossible.”