Free The Callisto Gambit by Felix R. Savage

said, not meeting her eye. He hadn’t made exactly the decision that she thought he had. “We’re going after them.”
    ★
    Kiyoshi flew the ship by himself. He’d given several of his childhood friends officer positions, which entitled them to hang out on the bridge, but none of them knew much about astrodynamics. That was OK. Kiyoshi preferred to fly solo. He’d been doing it half his life.
    Never, though, had he flown a ship as dumb as this one. The hub was a real dog. He had to check its key computations by hand, with a calculator.
    Nestled in freezeblankets at the captain’s workstation, living on cigarettes and stim pills, he coddled the Startractor along in the Salvation ’s wake. He kept a prudent distance of a few tens of thousand klicks, until one night, his comms officer woke him from a doze.
    ★
    “Callisto.”
    The room was no more than a closet with a window. It contained nothing except a bowl of water, on the floor, a crucifix, on the wall ...
    … and a VHF radio with quantum encryption, issued to Thomas Lynch by the Society of Jesus, so that he could communicate with the Order no matter where in the solar system he might be.
    Now he was using it to communicate with the Startractor wallowing along in the Salvation’s wake.
    “Callisto. That’s where we’re going. I had it from Brian, and you can be sure he knows.”
    80,000 kilometers away, Kiyoshi Yonezawa said, “Makes sense. Makes sense. I knew he couldn’t be running for Planet goddamn X. Even an antimatter drive needs propellant, and I know how much liquid hydrogen he’s got. Not enough to reach the orbit of Neptune, let alone the heliopause. So he’s making a fuel stop.”
    The VHF radio’s antenna was mounted on one of the sensor bumps of the Salvation’s Caledonia/Hibernia module. The officers in the Salvation’s comms section knew it was there—Father Lynch had made it a condition of his presence on board. They might have noticed the antenna reorienting itself towards the smaller ship astern. But they had no hope of breaking his encryption.
    “Can you make it?” he asked.
    There was a long pause. Father Lynch assumed Kiyoshi was crunching the numbers. “Yes. Just.”
    “Good. Good, then we’ll see you there.”
    “Yes.”
    “I’m hoping we won’t see you any sooner than that, Yonezawa. You wouldn’t get a warm reception.” Father Lynch hunched over his radio, head bowed, one finger depressing the encryption key, the other hand curled into a white-knuckled fist around his pectoral cross. The priest knew Kiyoshi Yonezawa rather well, and he suspected that Kiyoshi was planning something stupid.
    There was a long, long pause. Then Kiyoshi began to laugh. In between hoots of mirth, he gasped, “Damn you, Father.”
    “I’m hoping we can fix this situation without either one of you murdering the other,” Father Lynch said. A smile floated to his lips, but it was uncertain. He seemed to hear a dark edge to Yonezawa’s laughter.
    “I would hope so, too,” Kiyoshi said, sobering. “But if the boss’s intention wasn’t to murder my people by leaving us behind, what the hell was it?”
    “Maybe you can ask him yourself.”
    “Maybe I will, on Callisto.” Kiyoshi cut the connection.
    “The peace of the Lord be with you,” Father Lynch said into the dead radio.
    Sighing, he cut the little unit’s power and stowed it in the safe in the corner of the room. But he made no move to rise. For several minutes he stayed where he was, on his knees.
    All the room held was the bowl of holy water and the crucifix on the wall.
    It was all he needed.
    Water and God.
    His burden seemed to lighten for a minute, as he remembered that he wasn’t alone, that Jesus was always with him. And for that moment, even the impending destruction of the solar system seemed a bearable thing.
    At last he rose, genuflected, and left the little room. He walked along the upstairs balcony of his apartment building, which was open to the gentle breezes