The Callisto Gambit (6 page)

“This set-up must have cost a fortune,” he said frankly.

“Several fortunes,” the boss said. “The biggest obstacle to antimatter propulsion, as you pointed out, is price. That wasn’t an obstacle for me.” He grimaced. “I’m a lot poorer now than I used to be. But money’s not gonna be worth shit soon. Spend it while you’ve got it. So I spent it on a drive that can take the
Salvation
to 6% of lightspeed … with all our kit and caboodle intact.”

He peeled his gecko grips off the deck with a sound like ripping velcro.

“Come on.”

Michael ran to his mecha, putting his helmet back on along the way, and climbed into its cradle. The boss was heading for an airlock. Engineering decks always had large airlocks, to move equipment in and out. Michael crab-walked after him into the chamber.

They emerged onto the curving plane of the old hauler’s hull. The distant sun shone on aged, pitted iron. The drive shield sloped up to nowhere. Maintenance bots toddled here and there, fixing dings from micro-impacts. A few tens of meters from the engineering airlock, a small spaceship balanced on the hull like a steel butterfly.

“Sometimes I just want to get away from everyone,” the boss said.

Michael understood that. He’d run away from home, after all. But the terrifying experience of being thrown off the
Kharbage Collector
had planted a sharper need in him: the need for a protector. His father had failed him. Petruzzelli had failed him. He wasn’t sure he’d sealed the deal with the boss yet.

He climbed into the little ship’s airlock, mecha and all.

“This is the
Angel,”
the boss said. “I’ve had her forever. Couldn’t leave the old girl behind.”

Soft light and ambient music filled a shipshape vestibule. The smell of cooking drifted down the keel tube—a tight squeeze, compared to the hauler’s keel tube. Michael crabbed up it after the boss. His mecha’s feet scratched the polished walls.

The little ship had several stacked decks, none of them wider than the
Kharbage Collector’s
bridge. The décor reminded Michael of home—meaning his father’s orbital villa at Ceres. Smart furniture, wallpaper that gave the illusion of scenic views, expensive organic upholstery, and holographic libraries of books and music. To Kelp, or any other spaceborn kid, this would have been unimaginable luxury. To Michael it was old hat. The only thing that piqued his curiosity was the art gallery. The boss’s taste in art ran to collectible antique tech, including an elegant first-generation phavatar, and a gundam, an exosuit decades older than Michael’s mecha. It hung on the wall like a suit of medieval armor.

Burgers and fries,
Michael thought. That was what he could smell …

“Food soon,” the boss said, reading his thoughts. “But the reason we’re here? Privacy. No one must know what I’m about to tell you.”

That
caught Michael’s attention.

“The
Salvation
is my ship. I have access to all the monitoring and surveillance systems. But you never know who else does, too. And I can’t risk the ISA finding out …”

“What?” He’d
known
the boss had something to hide. Something bigger than owning a lot of antimatter generators.

“Where we’re going.”

Michael stared, open-mouthed. After a second he hazarded a guess. “Barnard’s Star?”

The boss laughed. “Nope. The Chinese are already planning a mission there. Too far, anyway.”

“Pluto. Eris. Somewhere in the Kuiper Belt.”

The boss floated over to an ancient orrery—a clockwork representation of the solar system. “I know my people very well. I trust them all. But look at Yonezawa. I trusted him, too.”

“I’m totally trustworthy,” Michael said. He scrambled out of his mecha, as if to prove it. He floated over to the orrery, leaving his mecha sagging, marooned in the middle of the art gallery.

The boss flicked the outermost sphere of the orrery—Neptune. It sailed, ringing, around its track. “When this was made, they thought the solar system only had eight planets. It had just been decided by bureaucratic fiat that Pluto wasn’t one.”

Michael gasped. The speculation that popped into his mind seemed too audacious. He said it anyway. “Planet X?”

A grin pulled at the boss’s lips, betraying boyish enthusiasm. “You got it.”

Planet X had been discovered in 2042. It was a watery gas giant orbiting 17,000 AUs from the sun. It had two icy moons, visited several times by unmanned probes, but human beings had never set foot on it. Correction: they hadn’t …
yet.

“This isn’t a spaceship. It’s an
arkship!
”

“Yeah.” The boss swiped the orrery with the side of his hand, sending all the planets spinning wildly. “When humanity falls, at least one remnant will survive. The
Salvation.”
He glared at Michael. “This is
not
a leisure cruise.”

But the boss was obviously struggling to keep a stern face. When Michael laughed out loud, the boss laughed with him. “Oh, damn you. Yes, I love space, I love ships, and I’m stoked about going where no one has ever gone before. And I hope you’ll come, too.”

“Count me in!” Michael cried, in an ecstasy of excitement. He pointed at his mecha. “I don’t need that anymore. You can have it for your collection.”

“That’s very kind of you,” the boss said solemnly. “C’mon, let’s go eat.”

In their first couple of weeks aboard the Startractor, the Galapajin turned the passenger module and half of the command module into a hydroponic farm, replicating and expanding the food production set-up they’d had on the
Monster,
minus the soil.

Kiyoshi had never taken much interest in gardening. That was Jun’s thing. Now he suffered endless lectures from his people on just how much care—and
chemistry
—went into the successful cultivation of crops in space.

And how easily it could all go wrong.

By week four, it
was
going wrong. Even the experts couldn’t pretend otherwise.

It wasn’t that they were slacking off. They were Japanese. They thinned soy, barley, and squash seedlings by hand, with tweezers. They split-tested nutrient solutions with a few parts per million more or less of dissolved oxygen, one or two percent more salinity. They built, by hand, spiral towers of hydroponic buckets that shared a single air pump, so each assembly could be powered by one person riding a stationary bicycle—look, Ma, no batteries! Shades of 11073 Galapagos.

But it remained the case that the LED lights in the passenger module didn’t have the right spectral distribution for plants, and the metal halide lamps Jun had left them could not be used without shorting out the wiring in the passenger module, and rewiring the whole module would require more cable than they had, unless they ripped it out of some other part of the ship. One problem led to another, like a string of dominoes.

To top it all, the dwarf pigs were dying.

Kiyoshi couldn’t understand it. He’d started out with eight of the potbellied porkers. Now he only had four. They’d thriven in the
Monster’s
garden, rooting happily in their runs. On board the Startractor, they’d grown listless and thin. One had gone lame from walking on the hard decks, and had to be put down. The other three fatalities had all been sudden, inexplicable. The Galapagjin had done post-mortems on the animals before eating them. Their internal organs looked healthy. “Twisted gut,” said the pig experts. “Maybe?”

“Stress,” said Sister Terauchi, the capable young nun who’d taken on a leadership role since their move.

One of the surviving pigs was pregnant. Kiyoshi took to keeping her on the bridge with him. He sat on the floor with her warm bulk across his legs, scratching behind her ears, in the hope that this would make her feel less stressed. She weighed about as much as a human baby, even though her actual mass was close to 70 kilograms.

He’d re-initialized the Startractor’s spin gravity, reluctantly, after the hydroponics experts said a few tenths of a gee would help the plants. Anything to support food production. But it was using reactor power he really couldn’t spare. The ship’s dwindling fuel reserves haunted him. Jun had given them all the He3 pellets he could spare before leaving. Even so, life support power requirements were drawing down the ship’s reserves faster than Kiyoshi would’ve thought possible. 568 people breathed a lot of air, drank a lot of water, and generated a lot of heat that needed dumping. The reactor itself generated heat that also needed dumping, and this crappy truck didn’t have a Ghost to help with that.

He ran some delta-V calculations.

Propellant / fuel reserves, as a percentage of requirements to reach:

Ceres: 67%

Jupiter: 108%

The slow orbit of 99984 Ravilious, relative to the planets, had brought it closer to Jupiter than it had been for decades. Kiyoshi had been to Ganymede a couple of times, picking up tech for the boss-man (such as antimatter generators). Never visited the other Jovian moons. Didn’t want to. He’d been born inside the orbit of Venus, where the sun loomed big in the sky, showering you with free energy. Out here it was too cold and dark.

6 Hebe: 139%

The stupid hub of the Startractor couldn’t grasp that 6 Hebe had been destroyed by the PLAN. The entrepot asteroid was now dust, but it kept popping up in Kiyoshi’s calculations, like the ghost of the carefree life he used to live, when his biggest worry was where to score drugs, rather than keeping 568 people alive.

39 Laetitia: 151%

That was a possibility. 39 Laetitia was a mining industry hub. Big precious metals market. Good Chinese restaurants. But Kiyoshi had been hearing a lot of radio chatter about how refugees from smaller rocks were flooding in, scared of PLAN strikes, eager to shelter behind 39 Laetitia’s Star Force garrison, and the locals were not best pleased by the influx.

The comms screen beeped, letting him know that the
Monster
had responded to his ping.

Finally!
Kiyoshi rolled the pregnant pig off his lap. He confirmed that the hatches and doors were all locked from the inside. He usually surrounded himself with people when he talked to Jun. It did Jun good to see the children’s smiles, and it did the adults good to see Jun’s face on the screen, to know he hadn’t abandoned them. But not tonight. He couldn’t allow anyone else to hear the request he had to make.

He checked himself out in the mirrored cladding of the elevator shaft. His cheekbones stuck out like doorknobs. Was that a gray hair? It was. In fact, it was a whole gang of them. Fortunately, the dim lighting—nighttime settings everywhere except the farm decks, keeping the temps down—made it less obvious. He switched on the comms screen. “Hey! About time. We’re doing fine. See this pig?” He moved aside so the camera could pick up the lazing animal. “She’s about to drop a litter. The children are fighting over who gets to name the piglets! Top suggestion so far: Startrotter.”

He was doing good, he thought. Keeping it casual.
Not
mentioning the issues they were having with the hydroponics.

“What else? Lemme see, I’ve talked to Father Tom a few times. They’re busy, busy over there. Deliveries keep arriving. Can’t tell of what. Maybe components for atmospheric scoopers to mine hydrogen out of the atmosphere of Planet X. How can he actually believe they’ll make it there alive? Well, maybe he doesn’t believe it. Maybe he’s got a death wish, wants to take a few thousand people with him.”

The boss had confided the
Salvation’s
true destination to Kiyoshi a few months back. He must have thought it would impress him. Instead, it had confirmed Kiyoshi’s adamant opposition to the whole project. Maybe the boss had forgotten that Kiyoshi had access to an artificial super-intelligence. Jun had modelled the
Salvation’s
journey, and even using the most generous parameters, even assuming the antimatter drive worked as advertised, there was no way the giant ship would reach Planet X with anyone on board alive. Not even 0.001% of a chance.

“Maybe it’s a double bluff,” Kiyoshi speculated out loud. “Maybe he’s actually going to Pluto. That would be a lot more doable. Or, another possibility: he really is going to Planet X, because he’s
that
scared of the ISA. I wonder what he actually did? Sure, he’s got a rap sheet as long as your arm—ship theft, fraud, throw murder in there—but is there something worse, something we don’t know about? What would be bad enough that he’s got to run seventeen
thousand
AUs? Christ, I hope they do catch up with him.” Kiyoshi envisioned ISA ships bellying up to the
Salvation,
arresting the boss-man before his epic escape could even start. The thought gave him his first chuckle in a week. Unfortunately, it wasn’t likely to happen. Amidst humanity’s life-or-death struggle with the PLAN, the ISA had more important things to do. “Well, it’s amusing to speculate, but at the end of the day, who gives a shit? We’re here. Where are you?”

He hit send. He expected to have to wait 38 minutes. The time it took for a signal to make the round-trip journey to Earth … plus a bit.

The screen lit up again only 11 minutes later. For a delirious second he thought Jun must have changed his mind, was coming home. But no. They were just out of synch. Jun had started talking before he received Kiyoshi’s burst.

“Sorry. I’ve been busy,” Jun said. “We’re there. Have a look!”

The screen showed darkness. A spotlight illuminated bots fussing with a fiberoptic cable at the foot of a cliff of machinery. Kiyoshi knew what he was looking at because he’d seen it before, in real life.

One of the docking bays of Tiangong Erhao.

“You made it,” Kiyoshi whispered. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and took a drag of nicotine.

Tiangong Erhao was the pride of the Imperial Chinese Republic, a fifty-kilometer space station orbiting at the L5 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. Jun planned to steal it and load it up with malware, a poisoned present for the PLAN. Kiyoshi didn’t underestimate his brother’s skills, but this part of the plan had always worried him.

“Those bots are putting in my hardwired comms link,” Jun said in voiceover. “I’ll need that when we enter Ghost mode. But basically, it’s all over bar the shouting. Keep an eye on the news in the next couple of days. I don’t know how they’ll spin it. ‘Tiangong Erhao vanishes’? Anyway, you can bet they
won’t
admit Tiangong Erhao was hijacked by a person or persons unknown.” The picture changed to Jun himself. He was sitting—or rather, he portrayed his projection sitting—at the astrogator’s workstation on the bridge of the
Monster.
Kiyoshi felt a sharp pang of homesickness at the sight of his ship’s familiar wooden panelling and checkerboard floor.