The Callisto Gambit Read online

  “How did he take it?”

  “It was a lot of ‘on the one hand,’ and ‘then again, on the other.’ He did mention that holy orders are technically for people, not artificial intelligences.”

  “You. Are. A. Person.”

  “Yes, but he’s never met me. In the end he said he was going to consult with the Vatican, bearing in mind that it’s a unique situation.”

  The Abbot Primate was right about that, Kiyoshi reflected. Jun was the only true artificial intelligence in the solar system … except for the PLAN. He felt sorry for the Vatican theologians who would have to wrap their heads around the problem. To Kiyoshi himself, it was simple: Jun was the same person he’d always been. He was Kiyoshi’s little brother.

  “Come out where I can see you,” he ordered.

  Jun’s projection emerged from behind a bush, carrying one of the pigs. In reality a gardening bot was carrying it, and Jun had cleverly overlaid his projection on the bot. Kiyoshi opened the hutch so he could stuff the pig in. The illusion of interactivity was painful. He wanted to hug Jun and tell him it would be OK, and he knew that all he’d get would be an armful of metal attachments.

  “So are you in or out?”

  “Still in, I think,” Jun answered. “The Abbot Primate raised the point that I can’t take Communion. Which is obviously a problem. But I think the real sticking point is that I’m still claiming to be Jun Yonezawa, who they think is dead. And obviously, no one can come back from the dead except our Lord.”

  “Yeah,” Kiyoshi said. “But Jesus raised Lazarus, and Jairus’s daughter, so why couldn’t He have raised you? I need to talk to them.”

  Jun laughed. “Yeah, that would help. It’s not a lost cause. They’re discussing it. But it’ll probably take years before they come to a decision, and that’s my point: the Jesuits aren’t like that. They’re open to everything and everyone. New frontiers are their way of life. See it, go for it.”

  “I know you’ve been discussing Jesuit spirituality with Father Tom.”

  “Yup. So many of the great saints have been Jesuits. It’s incredibly inspiring.”

  Now Jun sounded happy, the way he always did when he got onto a favorite topic. But for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, this made Kiyoshi uneasier than ever.

  “I’d better go.” He picked up the rabbit hutch and trudged towards the airlock. His eyes told him he was walking up a hill clothed in bushes and saplings. His feet told him he was walking on level ground. With the garden unaccustomedly empty, he could hear the throb of the massive motors that rotated the module on the ship’s axis.

  Halfway to the airlock, he halted.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Jun stood in the vegetable garden, small and alone. His voice was also small, a mere whisper in Kiyoshi’s cochlear implants. “We have to.”

  We, but all Kiyoshi would be doing was staying here.

  “I’m the only person in the solar system who’s ever taken on the PLAN and won.”

  “On Mercury? That wasn’t the PLAN. It was a copy of the Heidegger program running on a portable.”

  The Heidegger program had been a PLAN virus that targeted human BCIs (brain-computer interfaces).

  “It was still educational,” Jun said. “Let’s just say I know more about how to fight the PLAN than anyone else. Star Force is trying to defeat it with nukes and charged particle beams! As for the Chinese, they’re not fighting at all. They’re sitting back and waiting to see who wins. But the writing is on the wall. We’ve already lost 6 Hebe. The population of Luna was decimated last year. What’s next? Ceres? Earth? Yesterday we had a system-wide civilization. Tomorrow there might be nothing left except the PLAN’s automated resource extraction facilities. Believe me, I know how an artificial super-intelligence thinks. I understand the drive to grow—and grow—and grow.” Jun’s voice shook with intensity.

  Kiyoshi’s fingers tightened on the handle of the rabbit hutch. He knew that Jun deliberately denied himself the opportunity to grow much bigger, by refusing to move out of the Monster. He’d relocated from the ship’s hub into a custom data processing center next door to the bridge, but that was as far as he’d go. Kiyoshi admired him for it, and now felt a shiver of dread as he remembered the temptations Jun resisted, every day. Instead of succumbing to the destructive internal logic of AI, he was instead spending his time on discussions with a bunch of elderly Earth-based theologians, and humbly abiding by their decisions. Viewed that way, his preoccupation with theological hairsplitting was not drivelling. It was noble.

  “So do you get it?” Jun said. “This is my responsibility. What am I for, if not to do this?”

  “Yeah, I get it. You’re bored out here, and this war came along at just the right time to give you something to do.”

  Jun laughed. “Something like that.”

  “So,” Kiyoshi drawled, “just to recap, you’re going to steal a Chinese space station; eject whoever’s on board; fly it to Mars; and use it as a Trojan horse to deliver a cyberattack that’ll demolish the PLAN from the inside out, while somehow squaring it with the UN, and not getting murdered by the China Territorial Defense Force.”

  “Like I said, it’ll be easy.”

  “Goddamn it, I wish I was going.”

  “But you have to stay here. Look after our people. Keep them safe.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  “And please don’t kill the boss.”

  “No promises.”

  “Come on. He’s got the best beard in the asteroid belt. You can’t kill the beard.”

  Kiyoshi didn’t want to make light of the boss-man’s sins. “He believes the human race is doomed,” he grunted.

  “He might not,” Jun said delicately, “be wrong.”

  “If you screw up—”

  “If I screw up, the Salvation might, um, be necessary.”

  Kiyoshi took a moment, hugging the pig cage. Jun thought the danger to the solar system was so great that a sociopathic inventor and his Bussard ramjet might be humanity’s last best hope.

  He asked reluctantly, “What probability are you assigning to—ah—the utter destruction of Earth?”

  “Oh, only two percent.”

  Two percent. That was further from zero than Kiyoshi would’ve liked to hear. “Eh, well, what can I say? Don’t screw up.”

  Jun said rapidly, “I’ve also modelled various ways the situation here might play out after I leave. A ridiculously high fraction of the models end up with the boss killing you. Please, please be careful. Don’t piss him off. Don’t pick fights about his stupid Bussard ramjet, or the moons of Planet X, or whatever he fixates on next week.”

  “Didn’t I tell you once before,” Kiyoshi roared, “never try to predict my behavior?”

  Jun shrank away. “Maybe I shouldn’t have shared that.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have fucking done it. You cannot predict me. You get it wrong every time. You’re just wasting processing power.”

  “Sorry. I just want to make sure you’re going to be careful.”

  Kiyoshi stomped to the airlock. “I will be living in a broken-down old Startractor with five hundred and sixty-eight of our people, totally reliant on a hydroponic garden, a jugaaded water reclamation system, and the boss’s goodwill … and by the way, he still owes me money. And now 6 Hebe is gone, there’s nowhere to run to if the situation goes to shit.” He pulled his helmet off its velcro patch, fitted it over his head, and inflated it, shutting out the smell of growing things. “You bet your ass I’m going to be careful.”

  But he couldn’t leave it at that.

  As he flew towards the Startractor, towing the pigs in their airtight cage, he pinged Jun again. “Don't worry about me, OK? Just watch your back out there." Jun might be an ASI, but Kiyoshi was the elder brother. It was his job to sound reassuring.

  Many of the Galapajin were still buzzing around outside the Startractor. That little airlock in the quarterdeck was a real bottleneck.
r />   They all stopped and turned to watch when the Monster’s drive spun up. 1.5 kilometers away, the powerful, fifth-hand fusion drive, originally made for a Hyperpony courier, blazed brighter than the sun. The plasma plume seared a violet after-image on their eyeballs. The old ship arrowed away, accelerating at a pace that would take it to the L5 Earth-Moon LaGrange point in … oh, about a month and a half.

  When the Monster got closer to Earth, Jun would enable the Ghost, the stealth system he and Kiyoshi had stolen from the PLAN. It would prevent Earth’s ships and IR telescopes from detecting his approach. At that point they would no longer be able to communicate. For now they could still talk by radio. But as the Monster’s drive plume shrank to a speck, and then to nothing, Kiyoshi felt a keen sense of abandonment.

  Guessing the others felt the same way, he said cheerfully, “Well, let’s get moved in.”

  “Yonezawa-sencho.” A senior nun, Sister Terauchi, addressed him as captain. “Does this ship have a name?”

  Kiyoshi scowled at the ugly length of the Startractor. Its conical drive shield sprouted heat radiator vanes. The small engineering module nestled atop the radiators. Forward of that, the Galapajin were busily tethering their Bigelows to the ship’s spine, in between the circular plates where cargo would have been anchored. The propellor arm that rotated around the ship’s nose was aleady slowing down. He was going to halt it. Spin gravity? The Galapajin didn’t need no stinking spin gravity. Waste of power. One of those modules was for passengers, the other for crew, but it was a good bet they’d be using both of them for food production.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It was a recycling barge, as I understand. Fomerly known as the Kharbage Collector.”

  ii.

  Michael Kharbage crouched in his mecha, trying not to cry. Kiyoshi Yonezawa had let him keep his mecha when he threw him off the Kharbage Collector. That was a crumb of comfort amidst his shock and despair. Nothing like this had ever happened to him. Would this be the last thing that ever happened to him?

  He floated helplessly into space, together with the other people Yonezawa had tossed off the Kharbage Collector: Captain Haddock—a self-styled pirate—and Haddock’s family. The Collector and the Monster shrank to tinker-toys adorned with LEDs. Captain Haddock uttered a monotonous string of piratical swears. Michael used to think Captain Haddock was a real pirate. That was why he’d hired him when he needed an adult to help him steal the Kharbage Collector from his dad. But compared to Kiyoshi Yonezawa, Haddock was a piker. And now he was as helpless as Michael himself.

  Fear yammered in Michael’s head. They drifted closer to the fragments of the asteroid 99984 Ravilious. The free-floating iron mountains blocked out the sun.

  Back in the inner system, humanity was embroiled in a life-or-death war against the PLAN, the voracious AI that had occupied Mars and wanted the rest of the solar system, too. Ships were battling. Carriers and orbitals were exchanging barrages of unthinkable destructive power. But it was all so far away. Out here, in this black void sprinkled with stars, the rest of humanity might as well not have existed.

  Nothing moved except the asteroid fragments. In slow motion, two of the massive rocks crashed together. Splinters flew. Michael cowered in his mecha’s cradle.

  “Have you not got thrusters on that thing, Michael?” Captain Haddock demanded.

  “Yes,” Michael said, swallowing tears. “But I can’t tow all of you.” There were six of them: Haddock, his brother Codfish, Codfish’s wife Coral, Haddock’s wife Anemone, and their son Kelp, who was twelve years old to Michael’s ten. “Anyway, where would we go? What are we going to do?”

  Kelp said calmly, “It’s OK. Someone’s coming.”

  A Dumptruck shot out from among the fragments. Michael had seen this type of spacecraft before, on his travels with Alicia Petruzzelli, the previous captain of the Kharbage Collector. It was a dumpster with rocket jets on the bottom and a railed cage at the prow for the operator. Powered by hydrogen and a few grains of uranium, Dumptrucks were commonly used by asteroid miners to shift rubble.

  This one glided past the stranded group, slowly enough that they all had time to grab onto Michael, who pulsed his mecha’s thrusters to heave them aboard. The bottom of the Dumptruck was dusted with what looked like soil.

  “Hi,” said the spacesuited figure on the prow, raising a hand in greeting without looking around. “I’m Brian. What happened?”

  Captain Haddock erupted. “That accursed pirate Yonezawa happened! Did he not steal our ship from under us? He did that!”

  “MY ship!” Michael piped up.

  “Are yez going to let him get away wi’ it?” Haddock demanded.

  “Hmm,” Brian said, distractedly. He was piloting the Dumptruck between the asteroid fragments. Flame belched from its rockets. Although monstrously fuel-inefficient, these old-fashioned chemical drives could really pour on the thrust. The Dumptruck squirted through a gap so narrow, Michael instinctively shut his eyes in anticipation of a collision that didn’t happen. “The thing is,” Brian said, “that Startractor is not your ship anymore. It now belongs to the boss. Call it a fine levied on you for coming here without an invitation. We’ll see what he decides to do about it.”

  Anemone said indignantly, “No one needs an invitation to travel in the asteroid belt! Space belongs to everyone.”

  “You’re namsadang, aren’t you? I understand that’s how you see it.” Michael digested the information that the Haddock gang’s identities were already known. They were namsadang, offshoots of a loose criminal network with origins in the old Earth State of North Korea. That was where they got their definition of private property (‘it belongs to everyone, until I want it, and then it’s mine’). “But the fact is,” Brian said, “you do need an invitation to join the Salvation. We’re quite selective. Well, we’ll see.”

  The Dumptruck glided out of the rubble cloud. Michael caught a glimpse of flashing lights. He worked the pedals under his feet to flip the mecha upright. It was four-legged, with a pair of powerful grippers that he operated with his hands. He made it grab the lip of the skip and pull itself up to look out.

  They were rushing towards another spaceship. Right now, it appeared the size of a mushroom, but Michael’s high-end suit allowed him to zoom in. Judging by the size of the ant-like human figures moving around on various regions of its hull, the ship was perfectly enormous. Its shape resembled the steering column of a car. The slab-sided fuselage—easily 1,500 meters long, six times the size of the Kharbage Collector—was crowned by a modular torus. This consisted of eight spheres joined by trusses, like an octagonal steering wheel. The torus rotated slowly. But centripetal acceleration was relative to radius as well as velocity, and that torus had to be a kilometer across, so they probably had as much as one gee of spin gravity at the rim.

  Forward of the torus, a weird structure wobbled in the vacuum, half as long again as the ship. Had Michael come from Earth—rather than Ceres, where rain meant drippings from the ceiling—he would have mentally compared it to an umbrella blown inside-out. Even without an apt comparison, the sheer scale of the rib-and-spoke arrangement impressed him. He took it for an advanced heat exchanger, like the Hail Cycle systems utilized by Star Force carriers, although it was funny that it should be at the opposite end of the ship from the drive.

  “Whaddaya think?” Brian said. “That’s the Salvation.”

  “Wow.”

  “Wow?”

  “I mean, the fuselage looks like an ITN hauler, but they don’t put toruses on those, ‘cos haulers only have four-man crews. Actually, I’ve never seen a spinning torus on a spaceship at all. They only use them for space stations, orbitals, things that don’t have to move. The structual resilience just isn’t there. But I can see how the modular structure would help with that.”

  “You know a lot about ships,” Brian said, amused. “How old are you?”

  “Ten.” Raised in spin gravity, Michael was small for his age, so he couldn’t get away with pretending
to be older. “But I’ve been around ships my entire life. And I’ve never seen one like this. Who built it for you? The Centiless shipyard at Midway? LGM Technologies on Mercury? Adastra at the Earth-Moon L1 point? They do some nice customizations.”

  “We built it ourselves.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “The fuselage is an ITN hauler. In its former life, it hauled liquid hydrogen from Titan to the inner system. It’s basically a big tin can with a drive, but it does the job. We fabbed the torus ourselves, using the nickel iron from those fragments back there.”

  “How?”

  “Vapor deposition. Sounds like a bloody joke, eh? But it worked. It was the boss’s idea. And now you’ll have the pleasure of meeting him.”

  The Dumptruck dived towards the Salvation.

  “Show-off,” Coral muttered, clearly meaning Michael. But he didn’t care. He’d proved to Brian that he wasn’t just any castaway.

  They landed on a donut-shaped docking pad in the center of the torus, which rotated around a dorsal column the size of a skyscraper. The column ended in a blocky module, high overhead. The spokes sprayed outwards from there like an upside-down Christmas tree. Warning lights affixed to their tips twinkled blue against the darkness of space. Michael craned up. He was so preoccupied with trying to work out what that was, that he barely noticed the other craft parked on the docking pad until he heard Anemone and Coral giggling.

  “That’s the Now You See It,” Brian said. “They had an invitation.”

  “I know what ship it is.” Michael recognized the tubby hauler. “We followed them here.”

  He’d thought the Now You See It was just a delivery truck, lugging consumables from Ceres to 99984 Ravilious. But people were filing out of the fat little ship’s belly, clinging to the rails of the steps as if this were their first time in space. That was what Coral and Anemone were laughing at. Their relatively short stature categorized the passengers as Earthborn, so maybe they really were noobs.