Free The Callisto Gambit by Felix R. Savage Page A

of Deck 2, and went down the stairs to the ‘village square.’
    This open area was one of many on the residential deck of Hibernia/Caledonia. Saplings and rustic benches stood around a shared tap. The idea had been to encourage neighborhood solidarity—and save water—by putting in only one spigot for every twenty families. It had worked: young mothers sat chatting on the benches, while their toddlers splashed in the spigot’s overflow gutter, and made mud pies from the soil underfoot. The breeze from the air recirculation units, concealed in the blue-sky smartpaper on the ceiling, dried the washing on lines stretched from window to window. The Irish community had adjusted to an eighteenth-century lifestyle with remarkably little fuss.
    Father Lynch’s eye fell on the one person who didn’t belong in this wholesome scene: a brown-skinned, curly-headed boy scuttling away with a rucksack on his shoulders.
    He strode after Michael Kharbage and caught him by the arm. “What are you doing here?”
    The boy defiantly jerked away. His eyes held so much fear that Father Lynch regretted his harsh tone.
    “Sure you can go wherever you like. Were you coming to see me?” He smiled.
    “No,” Michael said. “Anyway, I’m going now. I have to get back to work.”
    The boss had put the child to work in the propulsion section, according to Captain Haddock and his family (who were themselves unhappily moored in Construction). If there were castes on the Salvation— and there were, oh yes, unofficial though they be—the Propulsion lads were the Brahmins, the tippy-top dogs on whom the whole mission depended. Michael’s pride showed in the way he wore his new printed-to-fit uniform, even though it made him stick out down here more than his coloring did. His skin after all, was not darker than Father Lynch’s own. Lots of the Irish had some African in their lineages. So Michael had no real reason to feel shy or out of place. Yet there was the fear in his eyes.
    Too fast for the boy to react, Father Lynch seized his rucksack. He opened its suspiciously lumpy main compartment. It held a directional microphone.
    The boy would have just sat there, pretending to read a book or something, while the microphone soaked up everything being said inside the thin-walled apartment building.
    That was one way around encryption, Father Lynch admitted ruefully to himself.
    “What did you hear?” he asked.
    “Everything you said!” Michael snatched the rucksack back. “The boss is going to be pretty cross when he finds out you were talking to Kiyoshi Yonezawa!” He almost spat the name. Such hatred was a sad thing to see in a child so young.
    Father Lynch’s smile faded. “Actually, I don’t think the boss will be cross at all. And if he is, he’s welcome to take it up with me. He knows I’ll do whatever it takes to keep the colony intact … and I’ve not given up on the Galapajin, either. We need them, and they need us.”
    ★
    On the bridge of the Startractor, Kiyoshi stabbed the disconnect button, boiling with rage.
    He faced his childhood friends. They had stood around the captain’s workstation, listening in on his conversation with Father Tom. Now they looked confused. Some of the smarter ones looked disappointed. Not many of them were smart. They were the 11073 Galapagos junior high goof-off gang, now in their mid to late thirties. Mouth-breathers. Alcoholics, several of them. Kiyoshi loved them, but he didn’t have any illusions about their IQs.
    He pushed through them. At the far side of the bridge, the pregnant sow reclined on a bed of rags. Kiyoshi eased her aside and opened the emergency life-support locker. With a clatter, ten Kalashnikovs and twice as many HabSafe™ laser rifles tumbled out. His friends automatically went to pick up the weapons. Kiyoshi gestured for them to stop. “He guessed. That damn Jesuit guessed.”
    “No way,” exclaimed Miyazaki-kun. “How? No one would ever guess we were gonna board