The Callisto Gambit (51 page)

“What conditions?”

“The Order of St. Benedict of Passau doesn’t want me anymore. They say I can’t meet the requirement for stability. But the Jesuits said they would have me as a novice.”

“His will be done,” Kiyoshi said. “Although, I see Father Tom’s fingerprints all over this. What else?”

“I have to go back to an appropriate abode. That’s how the Holy Father put it. And I can’t keep any worldly assets. I’ve already let go of UNLEOSS, Midway, Earth’s PORMSnet, Eureka Station …”

“Jesus, Jun, did you get in
everywhere?!”

“Pretty much. But I’ve returned all those systems to their rightful owners now. Some of their data may have gotten wiped in the process. Whoops.”

“Whoops,” Kiyoshi echoed, smirking.

“I’m letting go of 5222 Ioffe right now. I’ve set up an ad hoc committee of political prisoners to run the life support systems. They should be able to handle it until Star Force gets here.”

The sunlight reflected off dead screens and caught dust motes in the air. Near Kiyoshi, the dust coalesced into a human form. Jun smiled, squinting.

Kiyoshi’s mouth hung open. He rubbed his eyes. Pain assured him that he hadn’t imagined yesterday’s eye surgery. “I can see you.”

He suddenly remembered his dream from last night. Waking in the dark, finding Jun stuck to the wall. Curling up with him and going back to sleep.

He reached out. His hand went straight through Jun’s shoulder.

“Your retinal implants aren’t really broken,” Jun said. “I hacked the medibot.”

“Oh.”

“I was going to tell you. I was just waiting for you to wake up.”

Kiyoshi tested out his HUD. It worked. He still had a lingering sense that something inexplicable had happened. But before he could think more about it, icons popped into his vision, including about a thousand email notifications. “Pallas?”

“I thought I’d hold onto Pallas for a while,” Jun said.

“Nope. Nope, nope. Too big.”

“I knew you’d say that,” Jun sighed in mock disappointment.

“The Holy Father wants you to reside somewhere that
isn’t
immortal, if I understand correctly. An appropriate abode …” Kiyoshi thought of the obvious answer, waiting outside the asteroid. It was ridiculously overpowered, yes, and deadly. But what ship wasn’t deadly? Besides, come on: a
Star Force destroyer.
Even a saintly kid like Jun had once been must have dreamed that dream. Kiyoshi sure had.

“I know just the place,” he said, and pulled on Jun’s arm. As his hand passed through the projection, he felt the faintest prickling sensation.

★

Kiyoshi spent most of their journey back to Pallas emailing Michael, Father Tom, Elfrida, Mendoza, Brian O’Shaughnessy, and even Alicia Petruzzelli. He learned that Andrea Miller and her colleagues had taken control of Pallas. Furious censure had poured out from Earth, but the ISA had other problems at the moment, such as the entire solar system blaming them for the decapitation of the UN and the Imperial Republic of China.

Jun smirked; he had framed the ISA on purpose.

“Didn’t the Holy Father give you any penance?” Kiyoshi said.

“Yes.” Jun’s smile faded. “I have to take responsibility for the Martians.”

Kiyoshi sat back in his couch. “Oh, God,” he said, after thinking that over for a minute.

“Yup,” Jun said. “It’s going to be a big job. Of course, I’ll have to work with Star Force, which means
they’ll
have to work with the Jesuits.” He brightened. “I do see a lot of potential in that collaboration. The re-sanctification of military power …”

“Your old crusading thing,” Kiyoshi said. “Well, maybe it’ll go better this time, if it’s a real collaboration. But still. Shit. There are
how
many millions of them?”

“A hundred and ten million is the latest estimate, counting those already freed, in Star Force’s transit camp on Deimos, and those soon to be freed, if the final destruction of Olympus Mons doesn’t throw up any more unknowns.”

“Crap.”

“Yeah. I’ve been talking to the generals, and we’ve basically got two options—leave them on Mars, which means
we
can’t have Mars. That’s a big sacrifice. Several factions on Earth have already set their hearts on it. The other option is to resetlle all the Martians on Eris or someplace.”

“Eris?
I
was thinking of Eris …”

“Everyone thinks of Eris,” Jun joked. “For what?”

“Not sure yet.” Kiyoshi bit the end of his cigarette.

His biggest surprise had been a vid call from Colin Wetherall. Colin wasn’t dead, after all. He’d been close enough to the end of the gravity field when the power went out for the rescue bots to pull him to safety, using Elfrida Goto’s rope. Molly had been pulled out, too. She was in intensive care in the prison hospital, getting a full skeletal transplant.

Kiyoshi hadn’t been able to talk to Molly—she was still out of it—so he couldn’t make any definite plans, but he had a lot of vague ones. All of them involved the destroyer, and going someplace in it. None of them involved 110 million Martians.

Maybe I have to do penance, too,
he thought.
That would suck.

They approached Pallas on a slow burn, and settled into orbit. Kiyoshi’s secondary comms screen lit up. Michael waved at him.

“Hello!” Michael pointed down at his own newly printed t-shirt. It said
Independent Republic of Pallas.
“I’m Traffic Control! Would you like to land here, or over there, or somewhere else?” He crossed his arms to point in different directions, giggling. Kiyoshi felt a surge of fondness for the boy. Hell with 110,000,000 Martians. Here was someone
he
had to take responsibility for.

Then Michael vanished from the screen, and the sensor array shrieked. “Oh, shit,” Jun whispered.

Startled out of a light sleep, Stephen XII raised his head. A light dazzled him. It flashed around the papal bedroom, and passed over the corpse of a Swiss guard in the doorway.

“In the name of God, who is there?” Stephen said.

Bulky figures surrounded him. He glimpsed camouflage in a pattern commonly used by the
polizia,
but he did not imagine for a moment that these were Italian police officers.

“Get up,” said a distorted voice. Their faces were distorted, too. They wore snouted, demonic masks.

He raised his right hand. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, may you be forgiven—”

The nearest figure seized his wrist and jerked it. “I said get the fuck up, old man.”

They handcuffed him and half-dragged, half-carried him out of the Apostolic Palace.

★

“Come out with your hands up,” drawled a voice from the comms screen. “We’ve got you surrounded. Heh. I’ve always wanted to say that.”

Kiyoshi recognized the voice, and the snarky tone. It was the same ISA officer who’d taunted him all the way to Pallas.

“Tried to call 5222 Ioffe lately?” Kiyoshi responded, just to find out how far away they were.

The answer came immediately. “That was you, huh?” They were
close,
and didn’t care if Kiyoshi knew it.

He muttered to Jun, “Please don’t tell me you let these guys go with a slap on the wrist.”

“After I used their ships to destroy the Star Force fleet,” Jun said in a brittle voice, “I programmed a course for Earth into their hubs. A very indirect course. The last time I checked—fifty seconds ago—they were 125 million klicks from here.”

“So they altered your program.”

“They could not possibly have altered my program,” Jun said, touchily. Kiyoshi got it. Jun was relearning what it felt like to be surprised. “These are different ships. I can’t even
see
them.”

Kiyoshi cudgeled the sensor feeds for information. Nothing on radar. Nothing on infrared. The destroyer continued to insist shrilly that targeting lasers had locked onto its hull in several places, including its weak spot, the magnetic shield of its enormous drive.

Jun let out a sigh. “Got them.”

“Where?”

“Right on top of us. Check the optical feed. I’ve enhanced it.”

Kiyoshi blinked up the captain’s 360° virtual starmap. The bridge vanished, as if his eyes were now nailed to the outside of the hull. He gaze-panned. Three false-color ships floated subjectively above him, silhouetted against Pallas. They resembled ghostly bullets. Kinda like Superlifters, without the flaring heat radiator vanes that made most ships so easy to find in space.

Kinda like toilet rolls.

“Jun, do those ships remind you of anything?”

“Yes,” Jun said. “They remind me that the boss-man repeatedly tried to patent the Ghost technology we stole from the PLAN, but his applications were rejected. Or so we thought.”

“They remind
me
that I never actually saw the ship that picked us up.”

“QRF?”

“Yeah. Also, Legacy said the Heidegger program was old news.”

“Actually, it gets worse. I gave Star Force a complete set of specs for the Ghost in exchange for safe passage to Mars. I assumed they’d never be able to develop the technology. I thought they’d need an actual copy to reverse engineer.”

“They must have found one somewhere.”

“Yes, such as in our fridge.” Jun threw his illusory weight back in his couch, letting his head hang over the back, and clapped his hands over his face. It was one of the most human gestures Kiyoshi had ever seen from the projection. “I screwed up so bad.”

“Don’t sweat it, Jun. You won the war. These assholes just want revenge.” Kiyoshi spoke absently. He was interrogating the destroyer’s weapons systems. “We can take them out with a 60.1% probability of disabling all three ships before we, um, disintegrate. That’s assuming they only have kilowatt-class energy weapons. Those ships are
small;
I don’t see them packing any serious firepower …”

“That’s also assuming there are only three of them,” Jun said.

The ISA officer’s voice broke in. “By the way, the rest of my fleet is targeting those cute little plastic domes at the north pole. I always
did
think those were a bit exposed.”

“You know how many people are in there?” Kiyoshi said quietly to the ISA officer.

“Eh, a few more or less; we’ve got billions of them knocking around.”

“OK, you answered my question. You
are
a homicidal psycho.”

“We’re targeting InSec Center, too.”

Fear seemed to encase Kiyoshi’s joints in ice, freezing him to his couch. He stared at the optical feed. Everyone he cared about was down there on that lousy, rotten protoplanet.

“It doesn’t have to happen,” said a different voice.

“Legacy! You fucking turd.”

“Thanks for the advice. I got out, stole a rover, and drove to the south pole, where we happen to have a small scientific installation. Nothing there but a telescope or two, some supplies—and now, me. Naturally, when I saw that you were on your way back, I called in our dark patrols.”

“What do you want? Pallas? You can have it. Just give me time to get my people off.”

“No,” Legacy said. Listening on on the same channel, the other ISA officer laughed bleakly. “We want Konstantin X.”

Kiyoshi closed his eyes in despair. “I don’t have him.”

“Bullshit. He was on 5222 Ioffe.”

“And now he’s dead.” Kiyoshi remembered the last thing the boss had said to him.
I never told them anything …
What secret had the boss kept, that the ISA wanted so badly?

“I still think you’re lying,” the first ISA officer said after a moment. “But don’t worry, we’ll find out the truth.”

“In the meantime,” Legacy said, “surrender to my friends, and no one else will be harmed.”

★

“Jun.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think they’d do it?”

“Don’t ask me. My predictive abilities are for shit.”

“So I have to make this decision?”

“No, Kiyoshi. Flip a coin. Yes, you have to make it.”

★

Four minutes later, Kiyoshi floated out of the destroyer’s command airlock, alone.

The Dark Patrol did not target him as he crossed the void. Perhaps they knew the ship he’d just left was intelligent, angry, and poised to vaporize them at the first sign of dirty dealing.

One of the Dark Patrol ships sidled closer. Its airlock opened. Kiyoshi went in.

A ceremonial ribbon stretched across the main airlock of SSSA Pallas, formerly known as InSec Center. In the seven months since the fall of the UN, extensive new facilities had been built on Pallas. The dome still looked like a kilometer-wide tussock of red moss. But now it overlooked a brand-new spaceport. Down in the valley where the ship graveyard used to be, a glitzy passenger terminal cycled through illuminations provided by various corporate and national sponsors. Ground transfer vehicles shuttled VIPs up to the dome for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The chief of SSSA Pallas, Oliver Legacy, made a speech emphasizing that the re-opening of the dome also inaugurated a new era of openness and transparency.

“Our decades of struggle and sacrifice are at an end. Humanity has won back our birthright. Once again, the solar system is
ours!
And now it belongs to all of us. With gratitude and joy, we turn our backs on petty national and cultural divisions. Now that humanity is united, there is no longer any need for secrecy. We look forward to working openly, transparently, with all of you, to build a better future.”

SSSA stood for Solar System Security Agency. This newly formed, still-shambolic organization was a Frankenstein’s monster of a bureaucracy, incorporating the former ISA as well as its Chinese counterpart, and several other organs of the former UN’s deep state. It nominally answered to the Global Council, a collection of third-tier diplomats who’d happened to survive the massacre of their superiors in April. It probably did answer to the Combined Earth Forces (Star Force plus the Chinese Territorial Defense Force, now officially integrated with each other), but no one was sure who really held the whip hand there. Legacy’s talk of openness and transparency was thus pure make-believe. It might even have been a deliberate middle finger to the assembled VIPs. But they sucked it up and applauded with their expensively gloved hands. They’d made the trek out here for this ceremony precisely because they knew who really ran the solar system now.