The Angel yawed sharply. Her nose clipped an ice spire, shearing its top off in a shower of ice shards.
Dr. Hasselblatter covered his eyes, groaning, “Please let the ship do it.”
Michael sat back. He itched to do more, as if this were an immersion game. He wanted to crash into the spires. So what if they were a World Heritage site?
The astrogation screen pinged urgently. They were almost on top of the boss’s coordinates.
“Preparing to land,” the Angel said. “Backthrusting …” The plasma jets dug into the ground, like a skiier digging in her heels. “Normalizing orientation.” The jets emitted one last burst, rocking the Angel back to the vertical. She settled onto her jackstands.
“Never do that again,” Dr. Hasselblatter said. “I’m too old for it.”
“Only if Michael doesn’t want me to,” the ship said sweetly.
Michael glanced at Junior. Glaze-eyed with excitement, the younger boy gave him a thumbs-up.
“Well, where’s the boss?” Michael said edgily. He scanned the optical feed. All he could see was the cloud of dust stirred up by their landing.
“Over here!” the boss’s voice suddenly erupted from the comms screen. “I’m injured! Suit’s damaged. Can’t walk …”
“I’ll go,” Dr. Hasselblatter said, jumping up.
Michael sat paralyzed. He wanted to go, wanted to help the boss … but that would mean leaving the ship. And Junior had broken his mecha.
Dr. Hasselblatter clamped his helmet on and swung into the airlock.
Michael leaned towards the optical feed screen. The slowly settling dust still obscured the ground. “Angel, can you see him?”
“Yes,” the ship said. “I’m picking him up on infrared. I’ll overlay it on the optical feed.”
A tiny green figure materialized, crawling through the black snowstorm. Then a larger figure appeared at the lower edge of the screen and ran towards the first one. That would be Dr. Hasselblatter.
“Is the boss saying anything? Is he badly hurt?”
“He doesn’t like me to eavesdrop.”
“I’m in command,” Michael reminded the ship.
“All right. Only because you asked, darling.”
Dr. Hasselblatter’s voice suddenly crackled into the cockpit. “—shot? Who did it?” On the screen, he ran faster towards the boss-man.
“Yonezawa,” the boss-man grunted.
“Yonezawa? He’s here?”
“Don’t say anything. Not one word.”
Dr. Hasselblatter reached the boss. At the same time, the dust settled enough for Michael to see what was actually going on outside. The Angel’s external lights bathed a circle of dusty regolith. Ice shards glinted on the ground at the furthest reach of the light. The boss crouched on his hands and knees. Dr. Hasselblatter stood near him.
“I hate to kick a man when he’s down,” Dr. Hasselblatter said, “but are you convinced now, Qusantin, that your management policy needs a rethink?”
The boss raised his helmet slightly. “Screw you, Abdullah. I was right all along.”
“That’s non-obvious at the moment.”
“I know what you’re going to tell me. Brian is gunning for me. Zygmunt, the whole goddamn Eris faction—they’re all traitors.”
“They need you. They need Qusantin Hasselblatter, the visionary. They don’t need a paranoid conspiracy theorist! You’re endangering the mission, this crucial mission—let me tell you something, Qusantin: I don’t want to die. I don’t want my son to die because you can’t get your goddamn act together!”
Michael snuck a glance at Junior. The younger boy’s chocolate-smeared mouth hung open.
“Let me tell you something, Abdullah,” the boss said. “There is no problem. Yonezawa is the problem. He started it. Him and his fucking computer models. ‘Actually, I don’t think I’ll go.’ He says this based on a computer model. Complete bullshit, but that got Brian and the other sheep thinking. ‘If Yonezawa isn’t going, maybe there’s a problem with the mission.’ That’s where it all started. See? The problem was him all along. And I solved that problem. I got his people on board. They’re happy to be with us. They’re home. That’s a terrific result. So it doesn’t matter about him anymore. He does not matter. He is nothing.”
Michael had never heard the boss like this, ranting and swearing, contradicting himself left and right.
“So where is he?” Dr. Hasselblatter said.
“Right here,” said a new voice. “Move away from the spaceship.”
“Oh, dear,” the Angel said. “He’s behind that ice spire.”
“I said move,” Kiyoshi Yonezawa repeated. “I’m taking the Angel. You’ll be all right. There’s a search party on their way right now. By the way, they’ll want to know who destroyed that spire. It was him. Laser pistol plus ice equals look out below. I figure that probably carries an automatic sentence of life in jail.” Kiyoshi chuckled. “World Heritage and all.”
Dr. Hasselblatter shouted, “Go! Michael, go! Take Junior back to the Salvation. Tell Brian to launch. Eris, wherever, it doesn’t matter, just go! Get out of here! Save the human race!”
Michael sat paralyzed.
“Don’t leave my dad,” Junior said.
“I’m not gonna,” Michael muttered. He liked Junior’s dad, but more importantly, he couldn’t leave the boss.
A figure in a black spacesuit dashed towards the Hasselblatters, a gun in either hand.
“Shoot him, Angel!” Michael yelped, but by the time the words left his mouth, Kiyoshi Yonezawa had closed the distance. He jammed his right-hand gun against Dr. Hasselblatter’s helmet and kicked the boss in the back, sending him to his knees again. “Give me the ship,” he panted. “I know how you set it up. You can reassign command permissions verbally.”
“No can do,” the boss rasped. “Already gave command to the kid.” His helmet swung. Michael could almost feel him staring at him across the vacuum. “Whatcha gonna do, Michael?”
Michael pushed out of his couch. “Where are you going?” Junior cried. Ignoring him, Michael hurtled down the keel tube. He plucked his helmet off his shoulder patch, inflated it, and put it on as he flew. In the museum, he punched the broken glass out of the display case that held the old exosuit.
It toppled towards him. He caught it—stumbling over the pieces of his mecha—and reached for its power switch.
Wonder of wonders, the status panel lit up.
Those old batteries sure held a charge.
Michael climbed into the cradle. It was designed like his own mecha, with joystick controls, but had no pedals. He had to adjust the stirrups upwards. Whoever last used it had had longer legs.
He strode awkwardly around the museum, getting the hang of the controls. Then he pulled himself hand-over-hand down the keel tube to the rear airlock.
He looked out at the underside of the stairs descending from the cockpit airlock. He was on the opposite side of the ship from the boss and the others.
It was only about five meters down.
He jumped, feeling invulnerable, no longer a little boy but a nine-foot metal gorilla.
The hydraulic shocks in his legs took the impact. The old gundam’s joints were a bit sticky. Needed lube. But he was moving.
He pounded around the Angel, towards the three men. They seemed further away from the ship, now that he wasn’t seeing them through a camera. He couldn’t hear them, either. He instructed his suit to scan the FM spectrum.
“Holy crap.” Yonezawa actually let his gun drift down. “That’s mine!”
“Just like my ship was MINE!” Michael screamed. “And you took it!” His right foot came down in a hole. He stumbled, and instinctively reached for the exosuit’s thruster controls. Different interface from his mecha, same functionality. A weak sputter of gas lofted him off the ground. “You don’t get to take anything else! Just go away, go AWAY!”
“That exosuit belonged to my grandfather,” Yonezawa said. “So I kind of hate to do this
. But, screw nostalgia.” The muzzle of his laser pistol flashed. Michael felt, rather than heard, a loud whoof. Hydrogen gas explosively decompressed from a hole in the exosuit’s propellant tank. Michael corkscrewed forward like a bullet out of a gun, and plowed headfirst into the ground. It was a good thing the exosuit’s cradle had gel impact cushions.
“Oh, kid.” Yonezawa nudged the exosuit with one foot, while keeping his gun pointed in the general direction of the Hasselblatters. “Just tell the ship you relinquish command. Tell it you’re handing over to me. I want all permissions slaved to my voiceprint.”
Woozy, Michael blinked to clear his head. He was lying in fetal position on his side, still in the exosuit’s cradle. A little way away, the boss crouched on his knees, too done in even to talk. Dr. Hasselblatter dragged him in the direction of the Angel, defying Yonezawa to shoot.
“You’re going the wrong way!” Yonezawa shouted.
Michael saw that the man was momentarily distracted. He yanked the joystick back. The exosuit exploded off the ground. Michael pistoned a metal fist into Yonezawa’s ribs. The blow knocked Yonezawa off his feet and up into the vacuum. Michael charged after him, anticipating where he would come down.
“Run, Dad!” Junior screamed in Michael’s helmet. “Run run run!”
Everyone was running, in clumsy micro-gee bounds.
Michael swiped up at Yonezawa, caught a wispy cloud of gas. Yonezawa had a mobility pack on his suit. He wasn’t coming down.
Dr. Hasselblatter, dragging his brother, reached the Angel’s stairs. Junior scuttled out of the airlock in his spacesuit and helped him haul the boss to the hatch.
Yonezawa flew up, and up. He landed on the top of the nearest ice spire. He was a black dot against a sky ever so slightly less black.
“Let’s go,” the boss coughed. “Angel, I authorize you to restore my command permissions.”
“Wait for me!” Michael shouted. The exosuit blundered onwards, towards the ice spire that Yonezawa was standing on top of. He was a captive of his own momentum. “Angel! Wait! You have to do what I say!”
“Sorry, darling,” the Angel said. “I lied to you. I’m a one-man ship.”
Michael crashed into the bottom of the ice spire. He beat on it with his hydraulically powered fists. Chips of ice flew. He’d wanted to smash one of these things. Now he would. He’d smash it into a million billion pieces, and Yonezawa with it.
“Hey, don’t mess with our cultural heritage,” Yonezawa said in his helmet. Pain edged his voice. But his aim remained accurate.
Michael didn’t even see the flash. He just felt the exosuit go dead. Its fists drooped. It lost its balance and toppled over backwards. Yonezawa had shot out its battery.
Lying on the ground, he saw the Angel’s stairs retract into the command airlock chamber.
The ship launched in a flare of light.
A moment later, dawn broke over Callisto. The ice spires sparkled like colossal gems. It would have been a fantastic sight, but Michael was crying too hard to appreciate it.
He left me. Left me left me left me. Left me behind …
xv.
Beside the fishpond in Module 8 of the Salvation, Sister Terauchi knelt with her habit tucked under her. She dipped her hand into the water up to her wrist, and closed her eyes for a moment, luxuriating in the sensation. Then she resumed her work. She filled a test-tube with water and held it up to the light. She imagined she could see diatoms and one-celled algae in the cloudy water—although really they were too small to see—living, moving, eating CO2 and providing sustenance for the fish in the pond.
She placed the test-tube in a rack. “The water in the pond comes straight from the graywater processing plant, yes?” she said in English to the man standing behind her.
“Correct, Sister.”
“You use the wet oxidation purification process? And each module has its own graywater processing?”
“Yes.”
Multiple redundancy. She nodded in approval. “How is the plumbing?”
“The plumbing?”
“Intermittent spin gravity can cause air bubbles. Pipes can back up. Have you had any problems of that kind?”
“Sister, our spin gravity is not intermittent. The modules have one full gee, all the time.”
She smiled at the confirmation. One full gee. The next generation would grow up as strong as Earthborn children.
A fish swam to the surface, attracted to the fingers she was still dabbling in the water. She shook her head regretfully. “Ornamental koi?”
“They can be eaten, Sister.”
“I know that, but tilapia and white amur mature much faster and provide more protein for the same weight of feed.” She stood up and turned to face him. She was tiny and frail in comparison to him, The unaccustomed gravity stooped her shoulders. But he moved a deferential pace back. She liked that. Authoritatively, she said, “These fish will be removed. We’ll replace them with the species I mentioned. We will also introduce dense algae blooms for additional feed volume. Do you have any stocks of Wolffia globosa or duckweed?”
The boss-man laughed ruefully. “I’ll have to check with my people. Sister, I think no one on this ship knows more about ecosystem maintenance than you do.”
She smiled—it was probably true—but caught herself in the sin of pride, and demurred, “My knowledge is superficial. Our experts know far more than me. Speaking of them, I must take these samples to Water Engineer Nakamura.”
She walked, and Qusantin Hasselblatter followed her, across a lawn which was being dug up by teams of Galapajin. They were going to flood the whole lawn and plant rice, which could coexist not only with the fish but also with edible insects. They expected to get five crops a year, including fallow cycles. The experts were in seventh heaven. So much room to spread out. So much stuff.
The boss-man sighed playfully. “Farewell to my brother’s vision of a southern California health resort.”
“It was a very wasteful design,” Sister Terauchi said.
The boss-man stepped over a pile of uprooted turf. “What will you do with the extra soil?”
“Oh, you can have it for the lower decks, where you and your crew will be living from now on,” Sister Terauchi said carelessly. She jumped. “Excuse me, someone is pinging me.”
She answered the call from Callisto with a sinking heart.
“Come back,” Kiyoshi Yonezawa said.
“Muri o yamete kudasai,” she said in Japanese.
The boss-man stepped back. He circled around to face her and held up his thumb and forefinger in a C in front of his face, the universal ‘shutter-click’ gesture for a camera. Did she want him to supply vid for her call?
She nodded. Kiyoshi should see the inside of this ship.
“Look,” she said, still speaking Japanese. “Are you getting the vid feed?” The boss-man’s vid feed from his retinal implants would be multiplexed with the signal carrying her voice.
“Yes,” he said.
“This is our new home. We’ve been given an entire module, even though we’re only half as numerous as some of the other communities. Plenty of room for babies,” she said exultantly, signalling the boss-man to pan so Kiyoshi could see the trees, the torn-up lawn, and the sun-tube in the high, high ceiling. “Look at all this space.” Pan again, and there was the sprawling villa that the boss-man and his crew had formerly occupied. Galapajin scrambled around a scaffolding, adding a steeple to the steeply pitched roof. “We are converting that building into a church.”
“He gave you his own module?”
“It was intended all along for us.”
“Sonna, uso desho.” [Bullshit.]
“He’s moving down to the bottom deck with the rest of the crew. There’s room enough for us all.”
“I’m not joining you.”
Sister Terauchi folded one arm over her breasts and bowed her head, pinching her eyes closed with her other hand. “Listen,” she said, giving in to the sin of anger. “After the des
truction of 11073 Galapagos, nearly all the Galapajin moved to Ceres. They went where the UN sent them, like good little sheeple. We five hundred came with you and Jun to 99984 Ravilious. I don’t regret it for a moment. We have preserved our Faith, and we’ll go on preserving it. But the truth of the matter is that as soon as the Monster left us, things began to go wrong. We trusted you to make the right decisions, Yonezawa-san, and you did not. I know it wasn’t all your fault. But I don’t trust you anymore. So if you don’t want to join us, I don’t mind at all, and nor does anyone else. Stay on Callisto and wait for the PLAN to get you!”
There was a delay long enough for her to regret her words. Then a vid feed notification popped up in her HUD. She gaze-clicked on it, and shook her head sorrowfully. “Still at that nasty, dirty hotel?”
“Still at that nasty, dirty hotel,” Kiyoshi confirmed.
He was propped against a polyfoam headboard, clearly holding a tablet on his lap and using its camera. A flexible cast encased his ribs. He was naked to the waist. Mercifully, she couldn’t see any lower. His hair lay in greasy tangles on his shoulders. He always kept it too long—vanity, that was.
His eyes wavered around before fixing on her. “Can I speak to Father Tom?”
Sister Terauchi threw her head back, scanning the busy teams of people at work. She spotted the broad-shouldered Earthborn figure of Father Tom, sawing boards near the future church, and waved him over.
Kiyoshi brought the tablet nearer, so his face filled half of her split screen. Stubble framed his mouth, and his nostrils looked crusty, as if he had a cold. But there was a wild glint in his eyes. “Come back,” he said. “Please. Please. I’ll do anything.”
Sister Terauchi dropped into English. The last thing she had to say to Kiyoshi Yonezawa could only be said in that language. “You,” she told him in disgust, “are as high as a fucking kite.”
Father Tom came up beside her. He wore work gloves, and smelled of healthy sweat.
“You talk to him, Father,” she said, forwarding Kiyoshi’s call. “He is on drugs again.”
★
Kiyoshi gripped his tablet in both hands, staring into Father Tom’s face, wishing he was on board the Salvation, just so he could punch the Jesuit’s teeth out.
The Callisto Gambit Page 16