The Callisto Gambit (34 page)

“Pallas.”

“Pallas?”

“Yes. Pallas. You don’t have to go all the way to Earth to point a gun at the UN’s head! Pallas is at least as important to them as London or Rome.”

“It’s the headquarters of the ISA.”

“Yes! Exactly!” Kiyoshi said.

“It is the headquarters of the ISA,” the LGM man repeated, as if he didn’t think Kiyoshi had heard the first time. “Equipped with in-depth defenses that can, and have, stood up to PLAN attacks. We would have
no
chance of getting anywhere near Pallas … and no media coverage to boost our signal. That’s important. Out there, no one’s watching … except the ISA. They would not hesitate to slag us.”

“Me. It won’t be you flying those ships, remember. It’ll be me. The risk’s on me.”

“Oh, no, it isn’t,” said someone else. “That’s not
your
multi-billion-spider hardware.”

“Either you want this done, or you don’t. If you want to try threatening Earth, good luck to you. Hire a different pilot, and see how far they get. I’m betting they would get slagged in
full view
of the media. But if you actually want to succeed … Pallas.”

They exchanged glances. Mouths moved, sub-vocalizing. He saw to his relief that they didn’t suspect his self-interest. They were completely blinded by their own self-interest.

The LGM man spoke. “How do you figure you can threaten Pallas without
getting slagged?”

Kiyoshi managed half a smile. He brushed a hand over his hair in a preening gesture, as if checking his appearance in a mirror. “All the best pilots are smugglers.”

“The
Unsaved Changes
is
my
ship,” Molly said to Michael. “It’s not his.”

“I guess it’s his now,” Michael mumbled. He was sitting on the floor of Molly’s guest room on the Kharbage orbital. Filmy white curtains blew over the hardwood floor, across rectangles of morning sunlight. The orbital had a ring of rooms all the way around its circumference at one end, each with its own leafy patio. Molly lay face-down across her bed, face buried in the real linen sheets.

“I was going to sell it for seed capital,” she said. “I was going to start a new business. Now everything’s messed up.”

“You still have your skills,” Michael said, trying to find a hopeful angle for her.

“You need money to make money.”

“My dad might give you some money.”

“Your dad is a grade-A shithead. And I don’t care if he’s listening. He’s probably going to sell me into slavery!”

Colin stumbled in from the patio in time to hear this.

“He won’t sell
you
into slavery,” Molly said. “We’re both superfluous to requirements. But at least I’m hot. No one would want to bang your ugly ass. He’ll probably whack you and sell your organs.”

“Jeez, Moll; the kid.” Colin shot a glance at Michael.

“The kid’s gonna be
juuuust
like his father in another few years.”

This stung unbearably. Although Michael was aware that everything had gone wrong from Molly’s point of view, her point of view wasn’t the only point of view. “I was just trying to help!” he protested. “I
did
help!”

Colin sat down in one of the basket chairs by the window. Half a gee of gravity was starting to tell on his spaceborn frame. His shoulders slumped, and his face looked haggard. He fumbled in the pockets of his duster and brought out a couple of cigarettes, a scarf, half of a bread roll, and a tablet. He pointed up at the ceiling with a quizzical expression.

Michael immediately knew what was being asked. He nodded—
yes, there’s a camera—
and pointed out to the patio.

Molly followed them out, complaining that her bones hurt.

Colin moved under the lemon tree that grew on the patio. Michael gave him the thumbs-up—the cameras couldn’t see him under there. Colin wrote with his finger on his tablet.

“Can you get this freaking behavioral modification program off my BCI?”

Colin’s handwriting was so bad Michael could hardly read it. He himself had perfect cursive, thanks to school. He wrote,
“Sure! That’s easy! I would just need you to give me your admin log-in.”

Colin snatched the tablet back and read what Michael had written. Molly read it over his shoulder. She made a face. “I don’t know if I want to do that.”

“I won’t look at your stuff, I promise,”
Michael wrote. He’d been planning to do this for them anyway. It would have been safer to wait until they were down on the surface, but he’d do it right now, if that was what they wanted. Screw what his father would say when he noticed.

Inside Molly’s room, the door opened. “Hey, Molly,” said Kiyoshi’s voice. “Is Michael … huh? Where is she?”

“Out here,” Molly said coldly.

Kiyoshi came out, squinting in the bright morning light. He wore a new pair of jeans, sewn, not printed, and a white t-shirt. He was getting the best of everything, now that the future of Ceres depended on him. It delighted Michael to see that Kiyoshi was taking advantage of the Kharbages’ hospitality while they waited for the
Unsaved Changes
to be refitted. Kiyoshi had even got himself a new silver pendant on a chain, the same religious symbol as he used to wear. The others could have taken advantage, too, if they wanted. Instead, Colin was just eating his own weight in food, and Molly was sulking.

She gave Kiyoshi the full weight of her sulky stare. “What’ve
you
been doing?”

“Flight simulator,” Kiyoshi said.

“Practice for your flight to Pallas.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re so pleased with yourself,” Molly said. “This refugee fleet ruse; it’s bullshit. People like Adnan Kharbage and his friends have backup plans out the wazoo. You’re their Plan B. Maybe Plan C or Plan fucking Z. You’re going to get killed.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Oh, you’re
definitely
going to get killed.”

Kiyoshi hunched his shoulders, disengaging from Molly’s warnings. “Mikey, do you have a minute?”

“Sure!” Michael said.

Kiyoshi lowered his voice to a whisper. “Could you get this behavioral modification program off my BCI?”

Colin laughed. “That’s what I asked him. What is it, anyway? All I know is I can’t uninstall it, and it keeps flashing warnings on my retinal implants.”

“When you do what?” Molly said.

“Oh …” Colin reached into his pocket for one of his cigarettes. He lifted it towards his lips. His whole body jerked. He dropped the cigarette. “Yowch! When I do
that,
for example. It just shocked me, and flashed up a screen saying that vaping is hazardous to my health, which is bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit if you’re vaping straight amphetamines,” Molly said. “But that’s just a low-level intervention. It gets a lot worse.”

“How do you know?”

“I used to run a business in Hel’s Kitchen, if you recall. The main users of nanny-ware are pimps, who install it on their whores’ BCIs to keep them in line. That’s why you haven’t heard of it. Human prostitution is very niche. The other big users would be torture fetishists. Of course, it’s totally illegal. But I guess nothing’s illegal now. This is what the post-UN world looks like.”

Michael cringed. Molly’s angry voice would definitely have been captured by the listening devices. He grabbed Colin’s tablet.
“I used to have a Nanny, too,”
he wrote.
“When I was really little, after my mom left, before Dad married Stepmom No. 1. I used to have to wear these interface glasses. I couldn’t take them off—they were bonded to my head. My Nanny was on the glasses and it basically didn’t let me do ANYTHING.”

“Oh, Mikey,” Molly said. Her voice was soft now. “You poor little guy.”

“And I had to do sims. Not anything disgusting, but just learning games, and a lot of dumb family scenarios. It was supposed to teach me empathy and social skills.”

“Mikey, that’s child abuse.”

“But I broke my Nanny! I uninstalled it! And when Dad saw I did that, he was impressed. After that I didn’t have a Nanny again, and I didn’t have to wear those glasses, either.”

Molly smiled the first smile he’d seen from her today. “I keep forgetting you have a genius-level IQ.”

Kiyoshi took the tablet and wrote a string of numbers and letters on it. He showed them to Michael for long enough for Michael to memorize them, then blanked the screen. He unfastened his pendant. The chain was actually a slender silver cable. He plugged it into the jack above his left ear, and plugged the other end into Colin’s tablet. “Go.”

Michael hunkered down under the lemon tree with the tablet on his knees. Kiyoshi knelt beside him, connected to the tablet by the interface cable. With Kiyoshi looking at the screen, Michael didn’t dare to peek at any of Kiyoshi’s personal stuff. He ignored the folders tantalizingly entitled
Monster,
Home,
and even the one labelled
Petruzzelli,
and dived straight into the backend. He found the Nanny program hiding among the BCI’s thousands of executable scripts, and viewed the code.

Five increasingly tense minutes later, he said haltingly, “This … um, isn’t the version I had when I was four. It’s a more advanced version.”

“How about just deleting it?” Kiyoshi said.

“Um, no. See what it’s done here? It’s copied itself into every executable file on your BCI. You would have to wipe everything.”

Kiyoshi took the tablet. He flipped back to the top-level menu and stared at his folders.
Monster. Home. Petruzzelli. Family. Recipes. Music. Random Shit.
St. Francis.
“No,” he said at last. “Can’t do that. But how bad can it get? What’s it
for,
Michael? What did your dad put it on here for?”

“Uh, I think probably to stop you … from doing drugs.”

Kiyoshi laughed. He shut down the tablet and refastened the cable chain around his neck. He and Colin both laughed until they doubled over, punching each other and wiping their eyes. Junkie humor. Michael didn’t get it.

Neither did Molly, apparently. She sat on the roots of the lemon tree, staring blankly at the ground.

After a moment she looked up—straight at Michael. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

“Did I know he would put nanny-ware on your BCIs? No!”

“No, Mikey. Did you know your dad was going to force Kiyoshi into a suicide mission?”

“Isn’t,” Kiyoshi protested. “Suicide? I’m Catholic. See this cross? I believe in God. Suicide is a mortal sin. Me? Nope.”

“That’s the spirit, my brother,” Colin said, thumping him on the back.

“Just shut the hell up, both of you,” Molly said. “Michael, did you set us up on purpose? To punish us or something? I just want to know.”

Put on the spot, Michael twisted his fingers in the hem of his sweater. He wanted to disclaim responsibility. But he also wanted credit for being clever.

Kiyoshi saved him, swooping on him and lifting him off the ground. His face folded into lines of strain—Michael was not so easy to lift in 0.5 gees. But he did it, balancing Michael on his shoulder so Michael’s head brushed the leaves of the lemon tree. “This kid? Bet you anything he had it all gamed out from square one. He’s smarter than anyone else in this orbital, including all those overpaid corporate cyborgs.” He grinned up at Michael. Overjoyed that Kiyoshi understood what he’d done, Michael plucked a lemon and bounced it off Kiyoshi’s head. Kiyoshi pretended to stagger. “Ow!”

I’ll keep your secret,
Michael silently promised him.

He’d known Kiyoshi wanted to get to Pallas and rescue his brother. So he’d told his father that Kiyoshi was the best pilot in the whole
galaxy
and it would be a really good idea to hire him.

He’d been thinking more along the lines of a recycling barge.

But a fake refugee fleet loaded with nukes … yeah, that would do.

“I was a bit worried in the middle,” he admitted, whispering into Kiyoshi’s ear. “But you completely played them!”

“I’m gonna owe you as long as I live,” Kiyoshi whispered, setting him down, and Michael felt a pang of anxiety, because he hadn’t yet quite figured out how he was going to stow away on board the
Unsaved Changes.

Kiyoshi and Colin went away to look for food. Michael listened to them going away down the circumferential corridor, deliberately testing their Nannies out by walking into walls.

Molly said, “They have no idea.” She knitted her fingers together in front of her mouth. “Mikey, I don’t think you understand what you’ve done.”

“I got him a ship. I got him a
fleet!”

“It’s a bit different from bringing him a cooler full of Korean food.”

“I said I’m sorry about the
Unsaved Changes!”

Molly shook her dreads dismissively. “It wasn’t my ship. Not really. A friend left it to me in his will.”

“Oh.”

“Not even a friend. Just someone who died at my place. It worked out well that time, but usually people would die owing me money.”

“Oh.”

“When I was running my business, I got used to seeing people die. I convinced myself it wasn’t my problem. But Kiyoshi … kind of called me on it. That’s why I decided to leave Callisto. I’ve
changed,
Mikey.”

“Yes.” He thought back to how nice she’d been to him on board the
Unsaved Changes.
“Yes, you have.”

“I was going to start a completely different business here. I got the idea for it when I went to see Kiyoshi’s family with him. I thought I might open a halfway house.”

“What’s a halfway house?”

“Oh, never mind. I just don’t want to see anyone else die. Especially not Kiyoshi.”

“He
said
he wouldn’t—”

“Oh, so he can predict the future? He’s fucking invulnerable or something? He’s not even that great of a pilot!”

Michael sat down beside her. His eyes stung. He was terribly afraid, in his heart, that she was right. That he’d screwed up. That Kiyoshi was going to die, and he, Michael, would be responsible.

“You have to stop helping him do stupid things,” she said.

Michael gave the tiniest nod. Any more and tears would spill out.

“When those ISA dickshits came to my bar, they told me I’d never heard of … those two women they took away. See, I can’t even remember what they looked like, much less their names. Because I did what the ISA said. I deleted my vid and audio captures of the whole day. And I certainly never heard of a ship in orbit that was apparently piloted by Kiyoshi’s brother. They took it; it’s gone, and so is he. Kiyoshi should have deleted all that data.”