“Oh, Mikey. Yeah, he’s a good kid. He used to come around to the office, before the whole Nemesis thing went down. The Parks would feed him kimchi and bibimbap. What about him?”
“He’s from Ceres. I have to take him home.”
“But you don’t have a ship.”
“And fifty grams of iridium won’t buy you one,” Tong put in. “Although it might get you on board, if any ships were leaving. Ceres, though … that’s a long haul. Whoof.”
Wetherall pinched his bottom lip. “You know who does have a ship? She already said no to me. But she might say yes to you.”
“Who?”
“Molly. She totally has a crush on you, brother.”
xix.
The Belter pirates hadn’t dared to assault Ceres—or, if they had, they’d ended up as orbital debris, swept out of the sky by the dwarf planet’s fleet of laser brooms.
For that reason, Ceres had become the destination of choice for Belters fleeing the disorder in the asteroid belt, which had now spread even to the Galilean moons.
Ships and orbitals swarmed the dwarf planet’s sphere of influence so thickly, it graphed like an atom with a ridiculously high atomic number.
Kiyoshi skimmed the list of ship profiles the Unsaved Changes’s radar had picked up. Lots of haulers. Smaller cargo ships. Shuttles. A few Starcruisers—identical in configuration if not offensive capability to the Star Force Heavycruiser. But not a single actual Star Force ship.
Ceres, too, had been abandoned by the UN.
Its people were looking out for themselves.
Molly looked up from the comms desk. “I’ve been forwarded to something called Customs and Resources; sounds ominous.”
“It’s fine,” Michael said, from the astrogation desk. “The resources industry used to hate Customs. But now they’ve joined forces to keep the pirates out.”
“So what should I tell them?”
Kiyoshi smiled down at the flight controls. He was piloting, taking it easy. “How about the truth?”
Molly raised her eyebrows. She said into her headset, “This is Molly Kent, owner-operator of the Unsaved Changes, from Callisto.”
“You’ve had a long trip, Unsaved Changes.”
That was an understatement. Ceres was on the other side of the sun from Callisto this year, and the Unsaved Changes was just a Steelmule … a rock-jumper with a wimpy thrust-to-mass ratio. They’d done a very brief burn and then coasted all the way. Ninety-three days. Should’ve been more than long enough for this ill-assorted crew to start getting on each other’s nerves. It still amazed Kiyoshi that they hadn’t.
“We sure have had a long trip,” Molly said, “and we’d like to request a landing slot at Occator Spaceport, if that’s at all possible.”
“Processing your request now,” said Customs & Resources. Forty seconds later: “OK, you’re good to land. See you at Occator.”
“That was easy,” Molly said, with a puzzled frown. She’d spent her life on Callisto, where nothing was easy.
“That delay was them scanning us,” Kiyoshi said. “They saw we weren’t a threat, and cleared us to land.”
“Even an unarmed beater is a threat, if you turn it around and point its drive at a target. I just would have expected them to be more cautious … especially since we’re coming from Callisto, pirate capital of the outer solar system.”
Michael broke in, “Ceres welcomes everybody. That’s who we are. That’s why we’ve got a population of two hundred and thirty million—as much as the whole rest of the Belt put together!—and that’s why Ceres hasn’t been taken over by pirates.”
Kiyoshi smiled at the boy’s tone of pride. The closer they got to Ceres, the more Michael’s spirits had risen. Seated at the astrogation workstation, feet dangling, he hardly looked like the same boy Kiyoshi had nursed back to health during the first weeks of their voyage. His eyes were bright, his skin clear, and he bantered with the hub as it guided the ship through orbital traffic. For Michael, this had been the right choice.
For Kiyoshi himself? He didn’t know yet.
Occator Spaceport … wasn’t a spaceport. It was just a flat place in the bottom of a crater. Kiyoshi had known this, and yet it took him off guard, as he’d always landed at the much larger settlement of Kirnis on his previous visits to Ceres. Kirnis had a proper spaceport, complete with a fancy domed terminal. This was the boondocks. Spacecraft stood randomly dotted across an area tens of kilometers wide fringed with warehouses and fuel depots.
“And also car rental offices, I hope,” Kiyoshi muttered, getting ready for a long walk to the nearest buildings.
“We don’t need a car,” Michael said, bouncing ahead of them. “We could just walk all the way to Occator Lake! It’s right over there!”
This was not to be. They had only walked half a klick from the Unsaved Changes when a bright yellow rover jounced up to them.
“Ground shuttle service?” Wetherall speculated hopefully.
Several figures wearing bunny-suits over their EVA suits jumped out. The bunny-suits were white with yellow circles on the back and chest. “Hey,” a voice hailed them. “Is that yours?”
They all looked back at the fireplug silhouette of the Unsaved Changes. “Yes,” Molly said.
“Great. Is there anyone else on board?”
“No.”
“We’ll have to inspect the ship anyway, ma’am, if you wouldn’t mind authorizing access … Thanks.” Half the bunny suits headed for the ship, which left room in the rover for the crew of the Unsaved Changes. “Hop in and we’ll take you to processing.”
“Processing?” Wetherall said edgily. “Is this where you steal our ship and kill us for our proteins?”
“Ha, ha; this isn’t Callisto.”
Kiyoshi opened up a private channel to Michael. “Do customs officials on Ceres usually wear biohazard suits?”
“It’s Customs and Resources now,” Michael said. “I guess things have changed. I dunno.”
Kiyoshi knew that I dunno was an uncomfortable state for Michael to be in. He slung his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Let’s play ‘spot the geyser,” he suggested.
“Dumbass,” Michael said, more cheerfully. “The geysers are just wisps of water vapor outgassing from the crust. You can’t see them, except at night, and you need a special filter.”
At present the sun hung low in the sky, as Ceres whirled towards the end of its 9-hour day. The sun was almost as small as it had looked from Jupiter. The wall of Occator Crater rose jaggedly over the horizon. In the sunlight, the five-kilometer icy peaks looked two-dimensional.
The rover stopped outside a cluster of windowless cryocrete buildings.
“In there,” said the driver. “Decontamination.” He and his cohorts casually produced PEPguns.
Having to go through decon was not unusual. All better-organized space colonies had some form of it, to exclude micro-organisms that might not play well with their own particular set of diseases and immunities. But Kiyoshi had never before had to go through electrostatic scrubbing, while still in his EVA suit, and then strip naked and stand in a salt-water shower for ten minutes, followed by an airjet shower … and then be told that he would have to remain in quarantine for another 48 hours.
“We’re not radioactive,” he complained to the medibot that examined him after his shower.
The process actually reminded him of something more sinister than radioactivity. It reminded him of the clean room on the space station where Luna’s captains of industry had built the Dust plague.
“Your toxicology panel shows significant levels of nicotine and caffeine,” the medibot quacked.
So he hadn’t stayed entirely clean during their journey.
He’d bought anti-addiction meds … and given them to Michael.
But Wetherall’s stash of the hard stuff had run out on Day 61, and now he and Colin both were as clean as anyone needed to be.
“Are you quarantining me for having a cigarette habit?!”
>
“All arrivals on Ceres are being quarantined,” the medibot assured him.
The medibot ushered him into a large, overheated room crowded with bunks. Disconsolate trekkies and refugees sat shooting the breeze.
“At least we’re clean,” Wetherall sniggered.
“Yeah,” Michael said, oblivious to the double entendre. “It’s almost weird to be around this many people who don’t stink!”
Kiyoshi delved in his rucksack—which had been separately decontaminated—making sure everything was there. He crooked a finger at Wetherall, who squatted down beside him. “This is weird,” Kiyoshi said in a low voice.
“Yeah. But I have an idea what they’re scared of.”
“What?”
“Nanites.”
Kiyoshi touched the sheath of his dagger. His fingers moved on, and closed on a cigarette. He pulled it out and bit on the end without vaping it. “Nanites,” he said in his normal voice. “C’mon, Colin; that’s just the Gray Goo scare all over again.”
“Well, a lot of our buyers at Future Galaxy Enterprises believed it. That’s why they were in such a hurry to leave Earth.”
While the Unsaved Changes was in transit from Callisto, the solar system had been officially informed for the first time that Mars had a population of 40 million, give or take a few million. These Martians were the survivors of the PLAN’s captive human population, brainwashed and fanatically loyal to their AI ‘god.’ Star Force’s ground troops were going through them like lasers through cardboard. There would soon be a lot fewer Martians. Like zero.
It had also been announced that Mars was absolutely crawling with nanites: micron-scale biomechanical organisms that infested the Martians’ brains, enslaving them to the PLAN.
The Martians were biologically human, so it stood to reason that these nanites could do the same to anyone else, if they got the chance.
Colin Wetherall’s customers, being rich, had got wind of this looming threat a long time ago. And now it seemed like Customs & Resources on Ceres had, too.
Kiyoshi restlessly endured their 48-hour quarantine. He played math games with Michael, always losing. Wetherall worked the room, picking up information from the other detainees. Molly, as was her wont when there was nothing else to do, slept.
At last they were cleared to leave. The C&R officials became friendly to the point of jollity, and pointed them to the car rental place handily located near the quarantine building.
Ceres had the closest thing to a car culture outside of Earth. The dwarf planet’s huge population and network of settlements, located in craters hundreds—but not thousands—of kilometers apart, encouraged surface travel.
They were offered a pressurized camper van for 500 spiders a day, or a much faster Grasshopper for 1000.
“We’ll take the Grasshopper,” Kiyoshi said, glancing at Molly. She silently provided her credit details. She was the only one of them with any money left.
Michael fidgeted in his seat, jabbering about this and that, wrought up. “I can’t wait to get home!”
Kiyoshi smiled at him, a bit sadly. “Almost there.”
A short hop across the crater took them to Lake Occator. A giant water-splitting facility stood guard over a shining dome of triple-layer, water-sandwiched, radproof glass. This exclusive habitat measured three kilometers in diameter. It was conspicuous consumption at its most blatant. And it was Michael’s home.
Kiyoshi went in with him.
“Whew, it’s cold,” Kiyoshi said when he removed his helmet.
“The whole idea is to be close to nature,” Michael said.
They stood on a real wooden deck flanked with souvenir shops. Downhill, pine trees ringed a salt lake carpeted with cold-adapted CO2-sink algae. Birds cried. Bright-colored dots glided down the snowy hills: skiers. The air smelled of sea-breeze air freshener, except this wasn’t an artificial scent, it was the real thing.
“Come on,” Michael said, catching Kiyoshi’s hand. “Our house is over there.”
Kiyoshi didn’t know which of the quaint lakeside chalets Michael was pointing at. He did know that Michael had got some long looks from the valets at the airlock. If the kid hadn’t been recognized yet, he would be any minute.
“You have to meet my dad.”
Kiyoshi resisted the tug on his hand. “Mikey, I don’t think so.”
Michael’s face fell. His autism spectrum disorder made his emotions transparently visible. Kiyoshi felt terrible. He knew the boy had a phobia of abandonment, and here was Kiyoshi apparently about to abandon him, like everyone else in his life.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking I’m just like the boss-man—leaving you behind. But I’m not. I just brought you home.”
“Are you worried my dad might give you a reward or something?” Michael said.
Kiyoshi smiled at the direct question. It was true that he didn’t want to plant any suspicion in Michael’s mind that he saw him as a walking payday. He’d decided to forgo the off-chance of a reward, because it was so important to him to stay whole in the boy’s eyes. “It’s more like I don’t want to get involved …”
“He won’t give you a reward,” Michael said. “He’s so incredibly tight with his money, he makes Nemesis look generous.”
Kiyoshi had to laugh. “Understood. But Mikey, it’s just not right for me to be here.”
“Why?”
“Look at me. I’m a mess.”
“You look all right to me.”
“I … I have stuff to do.”
“What stuff? Why can’t I do it with you?”
Kiyoshi threw up his hands, turned to leave—this was the difficult side of Michael’s personality: he never quit pushing at you. Rather like Jun, in fact.
Michael scuttled after him and caught up in front of a free-standing map of Lake Occator’s nature trails. “Are you going to go and bust your brother out of jail?”
Kiyoshi had explained the situation to him after the ISA’s visit. He wished he hadn’t. “Ssssh! No, of course not. It’s impossible.”
“Is he really on Pallas?”
“I assume so.”
“Do you think the boss is there, too?”
“I don’t know, Mikey! Maybe. Or he might be dead.”
“I hope he’s dead,” Michael said, his face hardening with hate beyond his years. “Pallas is too good for him.”
In his peripheral vision, Kiyoshi saw the valets drifting closer. These valets were phavatars, with expressionless sub-geminoid faces. They were charmingly retro—and probably lethal.
Kiyoshi bent and gave Michael a hug. When he straightened up, Michael held onto his neck. Michael’s feet came off the deck. “I want to stay with you!”
“They’re coming, Mikey, get down.”
He set the boy down and hurried to the airlock, not looking back.
Outside, Wetherall and Molly were watching the sun set behind the rim of the crater, exclaiming at the majestic scale of the landscape. Kiyoshi hustled them to the Grasshopper and buckled himself into the driver’s seat. He felt like he’d already made one wrong choice, and he hadn’t even left the spaceport yet.
xx.
Each burst of energy from the Grasshopper’s compact ion thrusters carried the little car several kilometers. It was a cross between flying and driving, with an element of chicken-game: the direct route between Occator and Kirnis craters was quite heavily trafficked, and there were no lanes 1000 meters up. Fortunately the Grasshopper had a reliable collision-avoidance system.
On their regular descents to the ground, the headlights lit snapshots of a landscape sculpted by impacts. Because Ceres’s crust was mostly made of saline ice, with a low melting point, all craters tended to collapse over time. Scarps were landslides in slow motion.
Kiyoshi chain-vaped a nicotine-THC mixture and tried not to think about Michael.
Soon, with their arrival at Kirnis, he had a lot more things to not think about.
Planning would lead to
disaster, he was certain of it. The only way to get through this was just to do it. His hand kept stealing to the place on his chest where his cross should’ve hung, if he hadn’t sold it to Lewis Tong for a quarter-kilogram of He3 and a Kiloeraser.
Ah yes, the Kiloeraser. An invention of the Nemesis gang (you could kinda tell by the name). “Do you like flechettes?” Tong had said. “How about a room full of flechettes? Heh, heh.”
Bloodthirsty old bastard. But Kiyoshi had taken the Kiloeraser. It was in his rucksack. The customs guys at Occator Spaceport apparently hadn’t known what it was.
He docked the Grasshopper with the modular sprawl of buildings on the floor of Kirnis Crater, safely away from the spaceport. This was the top level of the Kirnis Belows. Water geysers wisped up in the headlights. There were so many of them here, you didn’t even need a filter to see them, like vaporous ghosts in the night.
The Grasshopper trundled away to return itself to the local branch of its agency. Kiyoshi, Wetherall, and Molly went into the pressurized topside market where people sold spaceship parts.
“Catch you later,” Wetherall said. “Gonna see if I can hook up with some friends. I’ll ping you when the party starts, Kay.” He winked and bopped off. Wetherall was the kind of guy who had friends all over the solar system, most of whom he’d never even met.
“What about you?” Kiyoshi said to Molly. He expected her to head off, too. Their relationship had never recovered since the day Kiyoshi accused her of not caring whether her customers lived or died.
She’d helped him get Michael clean. And she was a good shipmate, keeping to herself and performing her tasks without grumbling.
The trouble was, he couldn’t reconcile his attraction to her with his first-hand experience of her Hel’s Kitchen ethics. Lust warred with righteous judgement, and that made him grumpy. It was just as well the Unsaved Changes was such a cramped ship, they’d never had a chance to be alone at close quarters.
“I’d like to come with you, if you don’t mind,” she said.
His surprise must have shown.
“I don’t know anyone here,” she explained.
The Callisto Gambit Page 23