Free The Callisto Gambit by Felix R. Savage Page B

them!”
    “ You wouldn’t. But Father Tom is crazy smart. He definitely had our number.” With a sour smile, Kiyoshi waved at the guns. “You might as well put these back where they belong. Safer not to have ‘em all in one place. Make sure the kids can’t get at them.”
    When they’d scattered, he collapsed at the captain’s workstation. His plan to overhaul the Salvation and board her had not yet been finalized. It had been more of a Plan Z, to be implemented if they had another cascade of failures in the hydroponic farm. It had given him and his friends hours of fun as they plotted out how they could fake a drive failure, trick the boss-man into letting them dock with the Salvation , and then mount a surprise assault on the fuselage.
    Now Kiyoshi abandoned the whole idea. He didn’t put it past Father Tom to warn the boss-man, all in the name of preventing violence.
    Twenty days to Callisto, he thought. We can make it.
    We’ll just eat less.
    As his angry reaction faded, he felt a bit relieved. His old school friends versus Brian’s boys? Kalashnikovs versus flechette cannons? It probably wouldn’t have gone well at all. There was only so much the element of surprise could do for you.
    He probably owed Father Tom for warning him off.
    All the same, he’d kept his own rifle back. He touched it from time to time as he monitored the ship’s stats, like a better Catholic than him might touch a favorite religious totem.
     
     

iv.
     
    The solar system was big.
    When Kiyoshi was a second-grader on 11073 Galapagos, their science teacher had organized a game to help them understand just how big it was. Sensei had given one child a kabocha squash. That was the sun. She had stood at one end of the hollowed-out asteroid. The other children had got washers, or vitamin pills, or grains of rice. They’d walked down the unfinished canyon of Cathedral End, counting off paces. Venus had stopped 19 paces from the sun. Earth had stopped 26 paces away. Kiyoshi had been given the B12 pill that represented Jupiter. He’d walked all the way out of Cathedral End, into the tightly-knit streets, almost back to school, before he’d counted off his alloted 135 paces.
    He’d then eaten the B12 pill, started to run, and got halfway home before a passing adult collared him and dragged him back to school.
    But unlike most of what he learnt at school, the lesson had stuck.
    The outer solar system was no place to run out of fuel.
    There was a good reason why humanity had not ventured beyond the asteroid belt until the 23 rd century.
    Nowadays, colonies flourished on the moons of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Schemes to mine the atmospheres of these three gas giants were perpetually in development. There was a gloomy little scientific outpost on Pluto. Drones poked around the Kuiper Belt. The exponential increases in fuel efficiency of the Clean Revolution, which made ship drives faster, cheaper, and lighter, had enabled even a beater like the Kharbage Collector to reach Jupiter.
    But not comfortably.
    Not with 564 people on board.
    (Four people had died.)
    Low on fuel, Kiyoshi had been forced to coast for a week. That had allowed the Salvation to pull ahead of them. He’d lost track of the big ship’s radar profile in the noisy crowd of spacecraft around Jupiter. So he didn’t even know for sure that the boss-man really had landed on Callisto. But it looked like everyone else in the outer Belt either had, or was trying to.
    Kiyoshi had no choice but to join the queue.
    He had to land, before more people died.
    The hydroponics had failed. They’d eaten the roots and seeds.
    Kiyoshi distracted himself from his growling stomach by calculating and recalculating their approach to Callisto. The astrogation computer was behaving oddly, and he was on his knees under the astrogator’s workstation, shining a flashlight into its guts, when Sister Terauchi slapped his ankle.
    “We’re going to eat the fertilizer,” she said.
    Kiyoshi sat