The Callisto Gambit (9 page)

“All right. Serve up the freaking fertilizer.”

“Want some?”

“No. I’ll have a piglet.”

Against the odds, six piglets survived. All the adult pigs had been eaten, but Kiyoshi had laid down the law regarding the infants. He’d even locked up the pig kibble so no one would eat that. He was not going to roast and eat a piglet now, no matter what he said. They were just too cute. Besides, he believed their survival gave people hope.

Sister Terauchi sat on the astrogator’s couch. Her split-skirted habit outlined stick-thin legs. “Bad memories,” she said.

Kiyoshi nodded. Back on 11073 Galapagos, they’d had a few brushes with colony failure. The rice blight. The nanorot. Worst of all had been the water crisis that had forced Kiyoshi to put into space for the first time, on a desperate mission to buy, borrow, or steal H2O. All the Galapajin remembered what it was like to starve. It haunted their nightmares, a deeply imprinted trauma, and now they were facing it again.
They’d have mutinied if anyone else could fly the ship,
Sister Terauchi had said. It was a shock to hear that, but Kiyoshi understood. You’d do anything rather than watch your children die of hunger.

The Startractor groaned. Callisto peeked from behind Jupiter’s limb, a stone pimple on the jewel of the solar system.

Jupiter had once had 67 moons, but most of the rocky and metallic tiddlers had been dismantled by human beings, their raw materials shipped to the four most massive moons. Collectively known as the Galileans, these were Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Io lurked deep in Jupiter’s lethal radiation belt, subject to tidal stresses, pocked with active volcanoes.

Europa also soaked up killing doses of radiation. It had a liquid water ocean under its crust, which was nice, but that crust
moved,
slip-sliding at the whim of Callisto’s plate tectonics. Living there would be like living inside an iceberg that could shatter at any moment. At present the only people on Europa were a handful of highly paid bot operators, who controlled robotic ice-mining rigs. There were plans to set up underground farms and export nutriblocks to …

Ganymede; the biggie. Ganymede had its own magnetosphere. Far beneath the icy bulges of its dead cryovolcanoes, humans had hollowed out domes the size of cities. A near-infinite supply of water was right there. Just lick the walls. Jupiter’s radiation provided free energy to their electromagnetic generators. At a depth of about 70 kilometers, the ice naturally contained atmospheric pressures up to one full Earth-alike atmosphere. They had factory farms down there, livestock, rivers and lakes … not to mention black tech manufacturers, gengineers, nightclubs, illegal gene-therapy clinics, drug labs, start-ups developing crazy new immersion experiences, chop shops that could give you the full cyborg treatment, and the biggest casino in the solar system.

Kiyoshi really wished the boss-man would have chosen to make his pit stop at Ganymede.

But he knew why the boss hadn’t taken that option. Ganymede’s deeply buried colonies had de-facto unbreakable security. If the boys downstairs didn’t like the look of you? They wouldn’t let you in. You’d be stuck on the surface, unable to leave your ship on account of the radiation, in the crosshairs of Ganymede’s newly beefed-up Star Force garrison.

Attractive as Ganymede was, it was a dead end for anyone hoping to fuel up and make a run out of the solar system.

Which left Callisto.

Callisto, for some reason, had been the last Jovian moon colonized, although it was the best-qualified. Safely outside Jupiter’s radiation belt, it sucked up fewer rems even than Earth’s Moon. No need to burrow down into the ice here. The darker terrain of layered impact craters made Callisto significantly warmer than its Galilean siblings. Its ‘dirty snowball’ regolith was mixed with useful minerals. A real Goldilocks destination …

… if he could make it there.

He
had
to get this freaking astrogation computer back online.

Of all the times it could have chosen to crap out!

“I really,
really
do not want to math a three-burn approach to Callisto using a calculator,” he muttered aloud, tense with frustration.

“Jun could have done it,” Sister Terauchi said.

“Are you still here?”

“I was wondering if you’d heard from him recently.”

Kiyoshi backed out from under the astrogation workstation. Squatting on his haunches, he said, “If I had, you’d know.”

“I suppose he’s … all right.”

“Yes, he’s all right. I’m sure of it. He’s in Ghost mode, Sister. I’ve been keeping him updated, but he can’t respond. Emitting radio signals would break his stealth.”

The truth was Kiyoshi’s updates had grown steadily less informative. By now it would be more accurate to describe them as fairy-tales. But having made the decision not to worry Jun, he couldn’t start whining about food shortages and flaky computers now.

Sister Terauchi went so silent and still that Kiyoshi stood up and peered closely at her, thinking for an instant that she’d died. She did look like a starved corpse. Her lips moved slightly—she was praying. Her eyes focused on him.

“Where is he, Yonezawa-san?”

“It’s supposed to be a secret.” Kiyoshi shrugged. “Somewhere near Mars.”

“He’s doing it again, isn’t he?” Her eyes flashed with anger.

“What?”

“Trying to be a saint. Sacrificing himself for the greater good of humanity. Sacrificing
us!”

“I kicked that nonsense out of him,” Kiyoshi snapped back. “I told him, if he didn’t have at least a 90% chance of surviving, I wouldn’t allow him to go.”

“Allow him? Yonezawa-san,” at some point she’d quit calling him
Captain,
“you don’t allow or not allow him anything. He’s an ASI. And if he wanted to martyr himself, he’s perfectly capable of lying to you about it.”

Kiyoshi stared down at her, holding eye contact until she looked away. “Jun doesn’t lie.”

A faint flush crept up her neck. “What’s wrong with that workstation?” she said.

“I don’t know. It’s been lagging, which is unacceptable when I’ll need to make split-second calculations. I’d appreciate it if you would leave me alone so I can figure it out.”

She got the message, and left.

Kiyoshi crawled back under the workstation.

His flashlight shone on the transponder—not the one the Startractor had come with, but a white-label box the size of a phone, splarted in to thwart corporate tracking. Maybe that was the problem. There could be some kind of virus in there. Kiyoshi should’ve looked under here before now.
If Jun was here …

He blinked up his BCI’s connection to the PA system. “Hardware Engineer Asada. Asada-san to the bridge please.”

Splarted
in. The superglue of the space age, splart was invulnerable to anything short of high explosive. The transponder was not coming out of there. Kiyoshi flattened an ergoform, dragged it under the workstation, and lay on his back. With his handheld cutter laser on the lowest setting, he burnt through the seams of the transponder’s aluminum-alloy housing.

Five minutes later, a voice from the comms workstation said,
“Paladin,
this is Asgard traffic control. You ceased transmitting course updates at 07:21:32 Jupiter time. You OK out there?”

Kiyoshi took a deep breath. “Fine,” he said. “Thanks for asking, Asgard. Just a slight problem with our transponder.”

“Sorry,” said Hardware Engineer Asada. “I guess I broke it.”

Hardware Engineer;
ha.
Asada was a master swordsmith. He hadn’t had much opportunity to practise his craft in the last few years, but he was quite good at general-purpose tinkering. Now his gecko-slippered feet stuck out from under the astrogator’s workstation. “I’m removing this bit here,” he said. “I can try to put it back together again after …”

“Don’t worry about putting it back together.” Kiyoshi copied and dumped the Startractor’s thrust logs and estimated angle of orbital entry down the comms link to Callisto, doing the transponder’s job manually. “Just tell me what that bit is.”

Asada wriggled out from under the astrogator’s workstation. He’d removed a foreign object from the transponder: a crystal in a connector sleeve, which obviously did not belong there. He plugged it into a portable sandbox, a tablet that wasn’t hooked up to anything else.

Air gap,
Kiyoshi thought with a chill, remembering past close calls with PLAN malware. Everyone was aware of those risks now.

But Asada shook his head. “It’s a transmitter. Nifty! It’s been borrowing the ship’s bandwidth, and stealing processing capacity to mask its transmissions, going back as far as … somewhere near Ceres.”

“Well, crap,” Kiyoshi said.
“Captain Haddock must have installed it. What’s it been transmitting?”

“Oh, positional and velocity information. Your basic transponder dataset.”

“Comms logs?”

“Um … No.”

“Thank Christ for that.”

Kiyoshi sucked on his cigarette. He saw Asada watching him. The younger man’s expression held an odd mixture of respect and repugnance. Kiyoshi realized with crushing immediacy that Asada did not like him. And how many of the others felt the same way?

He reached for the tablet. “I’ll handle it from here,” he said. “Thanks, Hardware Engineer.”

“At your service, cap’n.” Asada bowed from the waist and shuffled into the elevator backwards, a posture indicating profound respect. Sometimes, these Japanese formulas conveyed the exact opposite of what they purported.

Kiyoshi put the tablet away to examine later. The astrogation computer was now responding normally. Normally, that is, considering the huge demands he was placing on it.

Nineteen minutes to Callisto orbital capture (anticipated).

That was TOO freaking close.

And the trickiest bit was still to come.

He’d decided on a three-burn approach to Callisto because he didn’t have enough fuel for the standard continuous-burn approach. It had taken an extra couple of days, increasing tensions on board, and forcing them to cut rations even further. But since the alternative was crashing into Jupiter’s gravity well, everyone had sucked it up.

So: Adjust approach so that Callisto passed through the periapsis of the Startractor’s orbit around Jupiter.
Done.

At Jupiter periapsis, perform retrograde burn, so that the Startractor wasn’t falling into Jupiter’s gravity well at quite such a mindblowing speed.
Done.

At Jupiter apoapsis, perform prograde burn, lowering periapsis to coincide with Callisto’s orbital radius of 1.8 million klicks, and thank God he’d timed that right, or they’d have missed Callisto and gone sailing back towards Jupiter again, like a pinball circling a funnel.

Now the Startractor was inside Callisto’s sphere of influence. He made minor course adjustments, concentrating so hard he almost forgot to breathe, shedding excess velocity, lowering periapsis to just 20 klicks above Callisto’s surface. Drive status was in the red. Asgard traffic control was yelling at him to provide transponder data. He ignored them. At periapsis he initiated a final prograde burn, dropping the ship into a circular orbit.

Teeth gritted, soaked with sweat, he heard clapping. He muzzily looked up. The bridge was full of people. They were applauding him, cheering his name, and smiling at the starmap.

Kiyoshi got his first good look at Callisto. It now filled the starmap, with only a thin rind of darkness around it. A dirty snowball. Unlike many objects described that way, which were whitish or grey, Callisto really looked dirty, as if it had been rolling in the mud. The mottled look came from the color variations between old and new impact craters. The two largest craters on the moon were Valhalla and Asgard—and it was Asgard where Kiyoshi planned to land, because it offered spaceport amenities and refuelling facilities for the biggest of big ships. If the boss-man was anywhere, he was there.

He shrugged off the Galapajin’s applause. “Go and get strapped in! I want everyone in their spacesuits and in their couches, NOW!”
Before these outer-system asswipes start shooting at us.

Traffic Control said, “Is that your intended parking orbit,
Paladin?
Because you’re too low. We don’t allow ships to park in orbit thirty freaking klicks up.”

“That’s OK,” Kiyoshi said. “I’m not planning to park.”

“What are you planning to do, then?” Traffic Control was starting to sound scared.

Kiyoshi watched the surveillance screens for a couple of minutes. Over in the passenger module, the Galapajin were suiting up and strapping in. Despite their hunger and fear, everyone moved fast, without panicking. He was so proud of them.

He breathed deeply. The bridge, lived in continously for months, stank of dirty bodies, pigshit, and burnt splart. He answered Traffic Control’s question. “I’m going to land.”

“Land?
” Traffic Control squealed. “You are a twin-module Startractor, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Startractors can’t do surface landings!”

“Your gravity’s what, 0.12 gees?”

“Don’t you have a landing craft?!”

“Nope. And I don’t have any fuel left, either.”

As Kiyoshi spoke, he stabbed the propulsion console, initiating the Startractor’s last burn of all. It shaved their orbital velocity down to 800 meters per second—as low as you could go without falling out of the sky—and tipped the ship into a different orbit.

One with a periapsis of precisely zero meters.

Jesus Lord, let me not have screwed up this calculation.

Because there was very, very little difference between this … and an impact trajectory.

The Startractor’s main drive had died in action, but Kiyoshi still had the electrically powered attitude boosters. He burned them at maximum thrust all the way down, decelerating as hard as possible, and soft-landed on Callisto at 60 meters per second.

Too fast.

The drive shield shattered like hard candy. The tokamak held. The Startractor tipped over sideways. The fragile radiator vanes crumpled. The passenger module slammed into the snow, and bounced. Hit again, bounced again.