The Callisto Gambit (36 page)

“Aw, c’mon,” Colin said. “You seriously expect me to stay on Ceres? With a Martian invasion on the way? And nanny-ware in my head, so I can’t even get a fix? What kind of a fucking life is that?”

Molly gave Michael a pat on the back. She moved past Kiyoshi to the locker where the housekeeping bot lived. Her gecko grips made kissing noises on the wet deck. “We’re already underway,” she said. “You can’t space us now.”

“Try me.”

Molly dragged the housekeeping bot out and turned it on. It wiggled its mop attachment as if unsure where to start. She said, “What are you planning to do when you get to Pallas?”

“Announce that we’re a refugee fleet from Ceres,” Kiyoshi drawled. “Play the recordings the suits faked up. Tug on the ISA’s heartstrings, if they have any. Stall, stall, stall, until we get within effective blast range. Then drop the act. Sorry guys, these aren’t really refugee ships. Every one of them is a flying nuclear bomb, average nominal yield 250 Hiroshimas, spiked for maximum neutron production. Call the Martian invasion off, or … bombs away.”

“No,” Colin said. “That’s what Customs and Resources told you to do. That’s not what you’re actually planning to do.”

“Why do you say that?”

“According to Molly, hundreds of your people are being held on Pallas, including your brother,” Colin said. “You’re not gonna nuke them.”

Kiyoshi threw a furious glare at Molly. “That’s right,” he said. He went over to the housekeeping bot and kicked it in an attempt to get it moving. It fell on its side. “Useless goddamn bot …”

“BOT COMMAND,” Molly said, righting the machine. “Sterilization protocol, wet version.” It squelched into the kitchen to hook itself up to the water faucet. Softly, she said, “So whatcha going to do, Kiyoshi?”

Kiyoshi sighed. Suddenly, he looked older. Or maybe just tired. “Surrender,” he said. “I’m gonna surrender to the ISA.”

Molly grinned. “Fantastic. That’s just what I was planning.”

★

Back on the bridge, Kiyoshi checked the tow tethers. They were holding nicely. A framework of curved trusses—also part of the never-built Ceres space elevator—elevated them away from the Steelmule’s drive shield, so that the
Unsaved Changes
didn’t crisp them with its own hot plasma. The five haulers trailed behind the Steelmule like giant fish on a line in a black, endless pond.

The reason people didn’t usually do this was because it worked fine while you were accelerating, but what about when you wanted to stop? Yeah. Any skew-flip maneuver would result in a nasty tangle of tethers, and also pose a risk of ship-to-ship collisions, as the trailer ships suddenly shot
past
the tractor ship, before being hauled up short by their tethers—if the shock didn’t
break
their tethers.

These complications did not figure into the plan Customs & Resources had devised, because their plan didn’t include stopping. Kiyoshi was supposed to approach Pallas on a constant acceleration trajectory, and threaten to cut the haulers loose, if the demands of Customs & Resources were not met, just in time for them to hit Pallas.

His own plan required mid-flight deceleration, and he’d been wondering how he was going to get that past the security contractors.

Well, now it looked like that wouldn’t be a problem.

Maybe it was just as well Colin and Molly had come on board.

But what had they been thinking, to bring
Michael?

Kiyoshi would never forget Michael’s face as he floated in the airlock, screaming in horror.

Gritting his teeth, he increased thrust, a few newtons at a time. Corresponding spikes of strain on the tethers stayed comfortably beneath their tensile strength ratings. This was a tedious job, but he didn’t want to entrust it to the hub, which still understood the Steelmule to be a small hauler, not the tractor of a five-trailer space juggernaut.

On the optical feed, Ceres shrank to a blurry dot. The emptiness of the asteroid belt embraced the convoy. Recirculated air blew steadily on the back of Kiyoshi’s neck, smelling a bit like bleach, and a bit like copper.

He rattled his fingernails on the edge of the propulsion console, wanting a cigarette, knowing the goddamn nanny-ware would make it not worth it by shocking him every time he took a drag.

Molly entered the bridge without knocking, the way she used to when this was her ship. Wetherall floated in behind her.

“The cleanup is progressing,” Molly said. “We might be able to use the mess in another couple of days.”

Wetherall peered at the 360° radar feed. It showed only the five haulers. “Where’re the other ships? The Starcruisers? The small fry?”

“Didn’t you know?” Kiyoshi answered. “They’re sending them to Earth. Two ruses for the price of one.”

“Translation: they don’t trust you.” Wetherall bounced off the ceiling and flipped in the air.

“Where’s Michael?” Kiyoshi said.

“He’s asleep,” Molly said. “I had to give him a tranquillizer.”

“Just don’t give him anything else.” Kiyoshi meant it as a joke, but it came out wrong, and Molly winced.

Wetherall was literally bouncing off the walls. “Cool it,” Kiyoshi said irritably.

“Where’s the medibot?”

“Usual place. Feeling sick?”

“Nope.” Wetherall floated over to the door that led to the
Unsaved Changes’s
tiny sickbay. He took off his duster and crawled in. His shirt came flying out.

Kiyoshi pushed off and caught the door of the sickbay. It was a closet with a table in it. The table sloped slightly, and gutters ran down both sides. The injuries sustained by asteroid miners—the usual operators of Steelmules—could be quite bloody.

Wetherall sat on the sterile sheet that covered the table. He tapped on the screen of the medibot, which crouched at the top of the table with its attachments retracted inside its headpart.

“Yes! It’ll work.” Wetherall lay down on the table and wriggled into its restraints. The medibot snugged a blood pressure cuff around his arm. It inserted an IV into his other arm.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m gonna have it remove my BCI.” Wetherall’s voice slurred. His eyelids sank. He’d selected a general anesthetic. “I need my fucking fix, man.”

Molly pulled Kiyoshi backwards. “Let it close the door. That’s brain surgery. The environment should be sterile.”

The door sealed. Kiyoshi and Molly stared at each other.

“He’s removing his BCI, just to get rid of the nanny-ware?”

“Yes, and I’m going next.”

“You don’t even have any bad habits.”

Molly looked down. “Not that you know of, maybe.”

“Tell me the truth, Molls.” Kiyoshi realized they were alone for the first time in months. He reached out and cupped her face in one hand. She tossed her head away.

“It’s pimp-ware, OK? Adnan Kharbage gave me the whore’s version. I am
not
a whore.”

“I know you’re not.” He wanted to kiss her. She’d just murdered twenty people, with Colin’s help. But if this went right, Kiyoshi was probably going to murder hundreds. They were made for each other.

She let his lips touch hers. Then she pushed him away. “OW!” she cried.

“I hardly touched you!”

“It was the nannyware.” She clutched her head, tears in her eyes. “You haven’t paid for me, so you can’t have me. That’s what it’s flashing up at me. God, I feel so ashamed.”

Kiyoshi was silent. Truth was, it made him happy to know she was capable of feeling shame.

“I have to get this shit out of my head,” she said frantically.

“You’ll lose all your data.”

“I’ll copy it onto a portable memory crystal. That’s what Colin’s going to do. Actually, shit, I hope we have some memory crystals around.”

Kiyoshi’s fingers closed around his new cross. “Yeah, I have a memory crystal.”

“Why don’t you remove your BCI, too, Kay?”

A rasping whine came from the sickbay. Kiyoshi knew what that was: a bone-saw cutting into Wetherall’s skull.

“Nah,” he said. “I’m kinda getting used to the nanny-ware. It’s one way to go cold turkey.”

“But—”

“But nothing! Have you tried flying a spaceship without a BCI? Not just any spaceship. A five-ship space juggernaut, which has to be manually monitored?
Without
a BCI?”

“Um,” Molly said. “Right. I was forgetting about that. So, I guess I’ll keep mine for a while, so I can spell you.” Tears glittered in her eyes. “I’ll just have to get used to the nannyware calling me a whore every time I even look at you.”

Kiyoshi reached out to her again. Remembered just in time not to. “No. Go ahead. Remove it. I was planning to do this on my own, anyway.”

He went back to the pilot’s couch, blocking her out with the screens.

A few more newtons of thrust …

ETA -13 d 12 h 47 minutes

Hang in there, Jun. I’m coming.

Pallas was not just one asteroid. It was a whole family of them. From 22-kilometer 5222 Ioffe, to tiddlers designated only with numbers, the Palladians formed a loose honor guard for their parent.

(Very
loose, as in spread out over millions of kilometers. Belters thought in terms of delta-V, not raw distance.)

The Palladians’ orbit was eccentric, as well as being tilted queasily out of the plane of the ecliptic …

… but in one of those weird cosmic coincidences, it was in a near-1:1 orbital resonance with Ceres. The Palladians and Ceres glided around the sun in unison, as if linked by a stretchy invisible string.

At the moment, Pallas had just passed through the main belt, so that imaginary string was at its shortest.

The
Unsaved Changes
had to cover a mere 90 million kilometers—a fraction of the 2.9 AU gulf between Ceres and Earth.

On the day when the Steelmule and its train of haulers got in amongst the Palladians, the other half of the Ceres fleet was still toddling towards Earth, while the Star Force fleet carrying the Martian refugees had just passed it going in the other direction.

ETA -6d 14h 21m

“XX unidentified tractor ship and four ITN-class trailers. Identify yourselves immediately.”

“XX unidentified ship, this is the
Unsaved Changes,
a converted Steelmule, towing four evacuation barges out of Ceres. I have twenty thousand refugees on board, plus consumables.”

Air circulation units had been put into the haulers and spoofed to expel the right levels of waste gas for that many people. RTGs inside the hulks simulated the right amount of waste heat. The ISA might calculate the convoy’s total mass, and come up short, but Kiyoshi was dicking around with the Steelmule’s propellant injection rate to blur the third parameter of F=ma. They could be 99% sure he was lying, and it wouldn’t matter, as long as he could hold onto that 1% of doubt.

“
Unsaved Changes,
state your destination.”

“890661 Kennedy.”

A main-belt asteroid plucked from the starmap because it was water-rich, and just beyond Pallas at the moment (in delta-V terms).

A long silence.

“Unsaved Changes,
we will get back to you. Do not alter course unless otherwise instructed.”

ETA -6d 3h 1m

“XX
Unsaved Changes.
You have permission to proceed to 890661 Kennedy, if you’re sure that’s where you want to go. There’s nothing there.”

“There will be.”

“Gotta love that colonial spirit.”

ETA -3d 2h 36m

“XX
Unsaved Changes.
You know, I’ve always wondered. What is it that drives you people? Why strike out for an uninhabited asteroid with twenty thousand people packed into tin cans?”

“Well, that’s a deep one,” Kiyoshi said. He was kicking back on the bridge, chewing a strip of nutriblock jerky—an unsatisfactory cigarette substitute. Wetherall, Molly, and Michael had gone down to the crew quarters. They couldn’t stand to listen to Kiyoshi’s conversations with the ISA picket tailing them at zero effective latency distance. These conversations had become quite frequent—as in hourly, around the clock—and could get rambly, depending on which ISA officer he was talking to. “What drives us?” Kiyoshi repeated. “Well, it could be a strong wish not to be infected by lethal Martian nanites. That’s the obvious answer.”

“The nanites are not lethal,” the ISA officer droned, like a PR flack repeating the same lie for the hundredth time. “Y’all are overreacting.”

“I doubt that. But on a deeper level—let’s say a spiritual level—I guess we want to find someplace of our own. A place to call home.”

“I get what you’re saying,” the ISA officer said. “You know, we live out here, too. I haven’t been back to Earth in so long, I’ve forgotten what the sky looks like. But I still think of Earth as my home.”

Half-listening, Kiyoshi cast his gaze over the screens monitoring the tow tether tension and the status of his four trailer ships.

And sat bolt upright.

The microimpact sensors on the hull of Trailer No.4 were registering a hail of small shocks.

He generated a real-time report. The shocks weren’t strong enough to be actual microimpacts.

It looked like someone or something was on the hull of Trailer No. 4, hammering on it.

Leaving the ISA officer talking to the air, he ran for the locker containing their EVA suits. It was possible to run on the bridge now, because the
Unsaved Changes
had reached 0.4 gees of acceleration—still much less than what its souped-up drive could produce, but close to maxing out the tension rating of the tow tethers. He shouted down the keel tube, “Colin, take the bridge for a few minutes.”

“What? Why?”

“Going for a spacewalk.”

Out the command airlock. Thrust gravity pulled him aft. Moving towards the ship’s nose was like climbing a wall. On all fours, he squeezed between the anchor struts, and clambered into the ex-space elevator basket of trusses. The tow tethers sang overhead. The shiny black cables were as thick as his arm. He reached up to grab one, and jerked his glove back—the freaking things were
vibrating.

Or maybe starting to oscillate, which would
not
be good, but he didn’t have time to worry about that now. He attached his personal tether to the No.4 tow tether and sailed down its 1.5 kilometer length like it was a zip line.