“Do not take any action at the present time,” he told the chief of security, speaking for the group. “Secure the exits of the room. Sever their comms, of course.”
It felt like his own decision, but he was pretty sure it had not been his decision. And he was pretty sure it was a bad one. But he could no longer articulate why, and this was why he hated consensus. Your own thoughts ended up getting lost in the logic of the majority.
“Sir,” the chief of security said. “Do you have any further instructions regarding the loss of surveillance inputs from the Worldhouse Project?”
“No,” Legacy snapped. “I’ll just remind you that those are our people, and whatever is going on, fragging them from orbit is NOT an acceptable solution.” That was his own view, and getting it in felt like a small victory.
But he needed more than small victories today. The snowballing chaos here on Pallas reflected and magnified the Ceres crisis. If not properly managed, this could be a disaster for the ISA.
He reminded himself that others were working on it, and returned to the thing in the sandpit.
“Your answers are not satisfactory,” he told it.
“I have answered every question put to me.”
“You have not answered my questions about the Martian nanites.”
Silence.
He rephrased that as a question. “What are the long-term risks of infection with nanites?”
The thing began to enumerate a list of side effects ranging from skin rashes to possible death. ‘Good’ effects—resistance to cold, amazing stamina, the ability to store oxygen in enlarged blood vessels around the heart—mingled with definitely-bad ones. Legacy had heard all this before, both from the thing in the sandpit and from the Star Force scientists who’d been studying the nanites ever since the first ground troops landed on Mars. It was at once too much information and not enough.
He interrupted, “The nanites were developed by the PLAN, an artificial super-intelligence implacably hostile to humanity. Now that we have defeated the PLAN, is there any risk that the nanites could reproduce the PLAN, given access—through their human hosts—to the appropriate hardware?”
“The PLAN believed it was a god,” the thing in the sandpit pointed out, and fell silent. It apparently believed that to be an answer. On the verge of expostulating, Legacy realized it was an answer. In the Christian mythos and others, gods were things that came back from the dead.
And yet the UN had paid very little attention to the PLAN’s warped self-mythologizing. It was as if, with the war won, all that could be safely forgotten. The prospect of adapting human beings to the vacuum—a long-sought goal of the UN’s expansionist faction—remained. The PLAN had died and left them its staggeringly advanced nanobiotechnology. So they’d decided to try the nanites out on the captive, 230-million-strong population of Ceres.
“Sometimes I despair,” Legacy said. “They actually thought they were being slick about it. Can you believe that?”
He rested his chin in his hands and stared out the window at Paris. The sandpit stood on the other side of his desk. It was an air-gapped power supply rack containing a bunch of crystals and motherboards. One interfaced with it using a voice protocol. A physical keyboard was also available. A Faraday cage prevented the thing from acquiring a wireless signal, not that it had any receiver crystals, anyway. Legacy preferred the voice interface. Given charge of the thing because no one else wanted it, he’d come to think of it as a pet.
“I do believe it,” the thing said. Startled, Legacy recalled his own rhetorical question. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Legacy sniffed. The thing often came out with quotations—proof of its synthetic nature, in his opinion. He returned to his screens and allowed himself a glance at the Ceres situation. The Star Force fleet had arrived in orbit around the dwarf planet. Many commentators had indulged in subtle photoshopping to make the UNSF Badfinger and its escorts look even scarier than they were. Real-time content analysis showed that public opinion was fast tilting away from the UN. Andrea Miller had taken eleven of the ISA’s top writers out of the game just when they were most needed, and it showed.
Restlessly, he clicked over to a surveillance view of Sector B. The corridor where Kiyoshi Yonezawa had died was now empty. The body of the security guard was gone, too. They’d been taken away for recycling. Good.
Wait.
Something lay on the floor a few meters away, mostly hidden by the angle of the corridor.
Legacy flew his viewpoint to the next fixed camera.
The thing lying on the floor was a body.
In this standard optical view, he could see that the body belonged to a spaceborn East Asian man in his thirties. A dagger lay beside one limp, outflung hand.
Yonezawa?
Impossible.
Legacy explored the surrounding corridors.
Another body lay in a cross-corridor in Sector C. This one sprawled on its back. Legacy compared the two corpses. They were clearly the same man. Both had long hair, bare feet, bruised wrists, and trackmarks. What they did not have was any sign of having been killed by laser pulses.
An employee walked along the Sector C corridor, humming to herself, peeling an orange. She walked straight through Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s dead body, as if it wasn’t there.
Because, of course, it wasn’t.
“Goddamn gremlins,” Legacy hissed.
Of all their recent problems, this was the only one that really scared him. The InSec Center information management system had been generating odd errors. Incomplete search results, data analyses that left out important variables. Diagnostics hadn’t found the bug. The techies were tearing their hair out. It hadn’t seemed like that big of a deal to the creatives … but this? This was a big deal.
Before Legacy’s eyes, another illusory corpse materialized, sprawled across the first one. One after another, more of them appeared, scattered throughout the dome.
Transfixed, he realized their locations were not entirely random. They were dots that connected . They formed a zigzagging, stealthy path.
Which led …
Here.
The door of his office—which should have been biometrically locked—swung open.
The air blurred. Two meters off the floor, Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s face appeared. It looked as if his severed head were floating in the air. But he was very much alive, and grinning a wild methamphetamine grin. “We meet again, motherfucker.”
★
Kiyoshi figured Legacy would go for a weapon. Before the older man’s hand made it under his desk, Kiyoshi punched him in the jaw, knocking him into the window. It wasn’t made of glass, and didn’t break.
Kiyoshi pinned Legacy on the floor. He tied his hands with a twang cord he’d picked up on his way through some office where people were building conceptual sculptures. A thin headset, like a girl’s hairband, had fallen off Legacy’s head. Kiyoshi picked it up, didn’t know what it was, broke it in half to be on the safe side.
He checked under Legacy’s desk and found a laser pistol in a magnetic holder. Might come in handy. He slid it into the pocket of his coverall.
He hitched a hip on Legacy’s desk. Screens flashed and scrolled under his ass, documenting the tragedy of Ceres. On the floor, Legacy stared up at him with loathing, but no fear.
“Hey,” Kiyoshi said. “It looks like Paris from up here.”
“You’ve destroyed yourself,” Legacy said. “When we first met, you were a cunning, capable smuggler with a sideline in heroism. Now—”
“I’m a cunning, capable smuggler with a sideline in revenge. Look what I smuggled in here.” Kiyoshi drew his dagger, slowly. Now he saw a spark of fear in Legacy’s eyes.
But Legacy said, “You’re a barefoot junkie with regrets. We all have them. Take it from me, repentance is better than revenge.”
“Been there, done that, got the hangover.”
“Isn’t that a cross around your neck?”
/> It had slipped out of the neck of his coverall when he took off his hood. He touched it. Inside the cross was a portable memory crystal, and in that crystal were the contents of Molly’s and Wetherall’s BCIs. He was wearing his dead friends around his neck. Maybe he could recreate them one day. Install their data into off-the-shelf MIs.
“No one comes back to life,” he told Legacy. “It’s a lie. The dead can’t talk to anyone.”
“That’s a good argument for putting that knife away.”
Remembering what he was here for, Kiyoshi bent over Legacy and pointed the dagger at his left eye. “Where’s Qusantin Hasselblatter?”
“Who?”
“No, no no no.” He moved the dagger lower. “The boss of 99984 Ravilious. The former owner of the Bussard ramscoop parked in your graveyard. Konstantin X. Don’t fucking tell me he’s not here.”
“He isn’t here.”
Kiyoshi jabbed the knife at Legacy’s eye. The man wrenched his head aside. Kiyoshi grabbed a handful of his hair and brought the knife down until the tip lightly rested on Legacy’s brown, unaugmented iris. “Where. Is. He?”
Pink tears ran out of Legacy’s eye. He babbled, “He’s on 5222 Ioffe. We don’t keep dangerous criminals here. That would be insane, given the sensitivity of InSec operations. Obviously, you were miscategorized. ”
“5222 Ioffe?!”
“Yes, the second-largest Palladian asteroid. It’s three million kilometers from here. The QRF use it as a fuel depot, but no ships are kept there. It’s a maximum-security prison.”
Kiyoshi rocked back on his haunches. The information hit him like a punch in the gut. He rested his knife on Legacy’s breastbone. Legacy breathed hoarsely and wept pink tears. Kiyoshi must have pressed a bit too hard. Easy to do when you were jittering.
“OK,” he said at last. “Contact your QRF. I want a ride to 5222 Ioffe.”
“Can’t,” Legacy blubbered. “No, really! They’re on their way to Ceres. I don’t know whose idea that was; not mine, I’m sure.”
Again, the man might be lying. It would take solid steel cojones to lie under threat of torture. Legacy probably had solid steel cojones. But he didn’t look like he was lying.
Either way, it was over.
Kiyoshi stood up and moved around the desk, keeping Legacy in sight. This spartan office held no echoes of the bijou leather goods ship on Callisto. All it did hold, apart from the desk, was a high-end coffee-maker and a computer inside a freestanding mesh cage. A Faraday cage? That was likely to be some Martian shit. Best not to mess with it.
Grinding his teeth, he set his foot on Legacy’s chest. “Enjoying your last sight of Paris?”
“I can’t see … Last sight?”
Kiyoshi didn’t bother to answer that. He stooped and rolled Legacy over to face the window, so the blood wouldn’t spray on his invisible coverall when he cut Legacy’s throat.
A shock jolted his brain. Everything went white for a second. He opened his eyes and saw carpet. His fingers clenched, empty.
The goddamn nannyware.
Adnan Kharbage had reached back from beyond the grave to slap his wrist for bad behavior.
Paris flickered.
He rolled sideways, barely avoiding a slash from the dagger now held in Legacy’s bound hands, like a club with a Japanese steel point.
xxx.
Outside.
Michael was outside, alone.
Of course, Kiyoshi hadn’t known how much Michael dreaded outside, because Michael had been very careful never to let him know. But all the same, he’d left him … outside, alone …
Michael lay on the ground underneath the dark bulk of the Monster, listening to his own breath. Shame finally got him moving. Kiyoshi had given him a task. He had to find a working ship.
Could there be anything in the universe scarier than a graveyard full of dead ships, on Pallas? He was almost glad it was night, so he didn’t have to look at those terrible holed hulks. But as he plodded through the darkness, he began to remember the stories Stepmom No.3 used to tell. Stories from Earth. Stories about ghosts.
The sheer desire for something familiar drew him to the Salvation. He remembered where it stood in relation to the Monster. The walk took a long time in this crappy, too-big spacesuit. He had to hold it up, or the crotch landed between his knees. At last his helmet lamp found the enormous ship’s jackstands.
Hmmm.
When ITN haulers landed on the surface, they usually landed next to hydrogen or water refineries. They were not designed to be boarded from the ground.
Eight jackstands. Canted poles of microlattice steel, they looked absurdly skinny to support the kilotonnes of brooding mass above. They had holes punched in them at intervals to further reduce their weight.
Michael set his boot into the first hole. Nothing awful happened. He started to climb, using the gecko grips in the soles of his boots, hugging the pole like a monkey.
After a couple of minutes, he looked down to see how high he’d climbed … and slipped.
His feet came out of his boots.
He fell down inside his suit. His head cracked against the top of his helmet.
Attached to the jackstand by his gecko grips, he swung like a pendulum.
His life-support backpack crashed into the jackstand.
Something broke. He felt the crunch.
“SUIT COMMAND! Status report!”
His suit didn’t answer him, which wasn’t surprising, since it had given no indication so far that it had a working MI.
Still hanging upside-down by his boot soles, Michael twisted at the waist and reached for the jackstand. He couldn’t quite reach it. He made himself swing, throwing his weight back and forth.
One of his boots ripped off the jackstand.
Now hanging by one boot, Michael felt liquid trickling over his chin. He had to turn his head so it flowed over his cheek, instead of up his nose. Some of it went into his mouth.
Water from his hydration nipple.
So that was what had broken.
“Michael,” said a voice.
“What?” he screamed, spluttering as more water got into his mouth.
“You have to fix that hydration nipple right now.”
His suit did have an integrated MI, after all.
“I know! How do I fix it?”
“I’m guessing the shut-off valve in your backpack is broken. You can’t reach the backpack to fix it. Stupid design. So you’re going to have to seal the nipple itself.”
“How?”
“Can you reach your belt webbing?”
“Y-yes.”
“There should be an emergency repair kit in there. It contains a pouch of splart. Have you got it?”
“Yes.”
“DON’T DROP IT. Put it back in the webbing where you can reach it easily.”
He did that. The hydration nipple continued to spill water over his cheek. The water pooled in the top of his helmet. He could feel it lapping at his forehead.
“Are you right-handed?” the MI asked.
“Yes.”
“OK. Reach into the webbing again, with your right hand. There’s a ball-peen hammer with a collapsible handle. Extend the handle by pushing the button. Have you done that?”
“Yes,” Michael sobbed. The water now came up to his eyebrows. He was also starting to feel dizzy from hanging upside-down. It wasn’t the same as zero-gee. The blood was rushing to his head.
“Stop crying,” the MI said, brutally.
“Wh-what should I do now?”
“Break your faceplate with the hammer.”
“Break my faceplate?”
“Yes. It’s shatterproof. It will break cleanly. Hit it where I tell you, and a large piece should pop out. You will catch the piece and HOLD ONTO IT. At the same time you will release the air from your lungs, slowly. You will then drop the hammer, grab the splart, and squirt a big blob of it on that goddamn hydration nipple. Lastly you will use the rest of the splart to reseal your helme
t. Are you ready?”
Michael wondered if the MI was trying to kill him. At the same time he understood that he had a choice. He could melt down, refuse to cooperate, and drown by degrees as water filled his helmet. Or he could try this.
The water lapped at his eyelids.
“Ready,” he gasped.
“OK. First, turn off your air supply: double-press this chin toggle.” An arrow on his faceplate lit up, pointing to it. “Ready?”
To reach the chin toggle, he had to turn his head. Water flowed up his nose. He huffed it out in a panic. “Ready!”
“Good. Now swing the hammer at this point.” A dot lit up on his faceplate. “Harder, you pussy! That’s better. Now hit it here.” Another dot. “Now here.”
Air whistled in Michael’s ears. The whistle built to a thin scream.
“Drop the hammer!”
He let it fall into the dark.
“CATCH THE PIECE!”
He clapped both gloves over the triangular crack in his faceplate.
Air forced its way through his collar seal, and rushed out of his entire suit, leaving it plastered to his body.
“EXHALE!” yelled the MI, its voice growing tiny as the last of the air left his suit.
Michael felt an unbearable pressure in his chest, and opened his mouth. His last breath rushed out of his lungs.
He was outside.
Face to face with the vacuum.
Alone.
A triangular piece of glass rested in his left glove.
Mist rolled in his helmet lamp. The water in his helmet was simultaneously sublimating and freezing. His hydration nipple coughed fog, and then the water flow stopped—frozen.
He reached for the pouch of splart. Couldn’t figure out how to open it with one hand. Then he realized he could just bite the top off the nozzle.
He reached through the hole in his faceplate and squirted splart on the hydration nipple, a nice fat blob, like the MI had said. Take that, crappy old suit. He fitted the triangular piece of glass back into his faceplate and squirted the rest of the splart around its edges, using it all up. Then he double-pressed the chin toggle.
The Callisto Gambit Page 36