“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 si
p. 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.”
“You seem pretty sure of that?”
“I’ve worked with spaceship propulsion systems for forty years. I would not put my family on that ship, and I would not ride it myself.” Zulu gave a shrug that made his whole body wobble. “I told them they should buy a reactor to power the lasers, at least. They told me to frag off.”
“Of course they did,” Kiyoshi muttered. “You’re an actual professional.”
The boss had no real, credentialed propulsion technicians on his team. No matter how smart they might be, everyone in his inner circle was some kind of misfit or maverick, and half of them had criminal records. What’s more, they were clannish as all hell. Jacob Zulu would have been the first outsider to ever clap eyes on the Salvation.
So of course they hadn’t listened to him … any more than they listened to Jun, who—without access to information about the Salvation’s drive—had offered a pure-math critique of its life support sustainability.
“Crazy,” Kiyoshi muttered. Was there any way he could convince Father Tom and the other Catholics to get off here?
“Crazy,” Zulu agreed.
“But you sold them the propellant anyway?”
“I sold them the propellant anyway.” Zulu’s gaze didn’t flinch. “This is my business, man.”
“And business is booming,” Colin Wetherall sang. He did a little dance step.
The likely fate of the Salvation was nothing to them, of course. Ten ships a day were crashing on Callisto. They couldn’t be expected to care about one more.
Jacob Zulu sighed. “Yeah. It’s a great time to be in hydrogen … or real estate. But Colin, you listen to me for a moment. You know what’s the most explosive substance in the universe? Panic. The concentration of panic on this moon is already way too high. So don’t go around spreading fear, you hear me?”
That was definitely a warning meant for Kiyoshi, too. Zulu paused to make sure he’d understood. Kiyoshi nodded. Zulu meant: don’t involve the peacekeepers. Having already met the peacekeepers of Callisto, Kiyoshi had no intention of doing so.
“Good,” Zulu said. “Now drink that and get out of my hair. I’ve got work to do.”
Kiyoshi stalled, pretending to finish his coffee. “What do you do with the oxygen?” he asked.
Zulu’s eyes flashed surprise. “The oxygen?”
“Yeah, the oxygen you pump out into the atmosphere.”
“You just answered your own question. We pump it into the atmosphere. Now scoot.”
vii.
On board the Salvation, the boss-man was examining maps of Callisto. He walked around and around a holo projection of Callisto a little taller than himself, frowning at the icy topology. A red hula hoop around the moon indicated an orbit. The boss kept pulling on this, changing its plane, lowering or raising its apogee. Michael couldn’t work out what orbit it was supposed to be. It wasn’t the Salvation’s current orbit, anyway. They were in a sedate equatorial parking orbit 19,000 kilometers up.
From time to time, the boss swept a hand out from the surface, or down towards it, at the same time making a brrr noise with his lips, as if he were pretending to be a spaceplane. Michael found this disturbing.
He was trying to concentrate on optimizing the mass distribution of the propellant. They’d already received one delivery and two more were on their way. He’d had the hub do it first, but the hub of the Salvation was quirky and mistake-prone—a sure sign that it had been fiddled with too much by people trying to improve its performance. Having learned its quirks, Michael was now checking its calculations. They didn’t want a propellant tank falling off in the middle of the Kuiper Belt, and potentially taking a chunk of the fuselage with it.
In space, there were so many ways to die, it could be exhausting to think of them all. But it was also fun thinking of them all, and trying to find a solution for each one.
The holographic sphere of Callisto glowed in the dusk beneath the apple trees. When the boss walked in front of it, his shadow leapt across the fish-pond.
The pond was real. Real water, real koi. Equally real were the apple trees dropping the last of their brown-edged petals into the pond. The air was warm, dry, sweet-scented.
Michael had the honor of living in the boss’s own personal module now. The Salvation’s torus consisted of eight modules—seven for the communities of 99984 Ravilious, plus this one, for the team that did the actual work of flying the ship.
The boss’s brother, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, had done the landscaping in here. He described it as a Southern California ecosystem, not that Michael would know.
Having grown up on the wintry surface of Ceres, or else on ships, Michael found the resolute pastorality of the Salvation crew both puzzling and fascinating. But he’d got used to it quickly. He’d even got used to the minimal information environment, where the only news you could access was life-support updates, harvest festival announcements, educational articles penned by somebody or other about their unique culture, and stuff like that.
After all, he had his work to keep him busy. And he could find out anything he wanted, just by asking the boss.
The boss always answered Michael’s questions.
At least, he had … until today.
When Michael asked what the giant map of Callisto was for, the boss had told him to shut up and get on with his work.
So he was trying. But the reproof stung. On top of that, uneasiness nagged him. Why was the boss so interested in Callisto’s surface? This was just a pit stop. Right?
Suddenly, the boss stopped pacing. He spoke into the air. Someone must have pinged him. “Ransom here.”
Michael smirked to himself. ‘Elwin Ransom’ was the alias the boss had used to order the propellant. It was neat: this imaginary ship-owner Ransom had a whole life history, built on the genuine DNA record of someone who’d died. It would stand up to any amount of checking, even if the ISA took an interest in their purchases.
He was also relieved that the call was only about the propellant.
“Good to hear from you, Lopez,” the boss said. “Yeah? No kidding? Did you get his name? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU DIDN’T GET HIS NAME? … Oh, you got his internet profile. Good for you. Anyone can fake those … Wait a minute. Kay, did you say? At the Paladin?”
A smile split the boss-man’s beard.
“OK. He’s not trying very hard not to be noticed.”
Michael jumped up, letting his tablet slide off his knees.
The boss strode around the pond. “That was Ricky Lopez. He works for Jacob Zulu at the hydrogen refinery. Someone’s been there, asking questions about us.”
“Was it Yonezawa?”
“I think so.”
“When did he get here?” Michael yelped. “What’s he done with my ship?”
Ever since the Salvation reached Callisto, Michael had been monitoring the public arrival and departure an
nouncements. According to that list, the Paladin wasn’t here.
The boss-man set his hands on Michael’s shoulders and looked into his eyes. “Mikey … something that looked like a twin-module Startractor crashed outside Doh Crater yesterday. I didn’t say anything. Wasn’t sure it was your ship. But I guess it was.”
Michael saw in the boss-man’s face that he was wondering if Michael was going to melt down at this news.
The implied doubt offended him. In his few weeks aboard the Salvation, his confidence had bounced back from the blow of losing the Kharbage Collector. Having the right meds helped, but more importantly, his work on the propulsion systems had given him back his belief in himself.
So the news that Kiyoshi Yonezawa had smashed up the Kharbage Collector didn’t send him into an emotional tailspin.
It just made him angry.
“Let’s go get him,” he said.
The boss smiled that mysterious, magical smile of his. “Oh, we’ll get him. We’ll get him good. But there’s something else we need to take care of first.”
Michael tensed. He hoped he wasn’t going to be sent on another weird errand, like the time he’d had to lurk outside the Irish priest’s apartment with a microphone.
To his relief, the boss straightened up and shouted, “Junior! JUNIOR!”
A couple of minutes later, the apple trees shook. A boy jumped down, bringing young foliage with him—which provoked a shout of rage from the boss. Junior Hasselblatter shrugged that off, whereas Michael would have been devastated if the boss yelled at him like that. But Junior Hasselblatter had a special status of his own on the Salvation. He was the boss’s nephew. Two years younger than Michael, he was just an ordinary kid. A fake tiger-skin loincloth graced his skinny pelvis. He’d probably been playing Tarzan or something. What a waste of oxygen he is, Michael thought.
But the boss spoke warmly to his nephew. “Put some clothes on. I need you to run and fetch Tom Lynch. He’s not responding to my pings. Probably meditating or some damn thing. Tell him I want to see him here, ASAP.”
Junior stuck his tongue out at Michael before he darted away.
The Callisto Gambit Page 9