Day Six
(age twenty-four)
Ganymede loomed up in front of them, the biggest and first settled of Jupiter’s moons, paler and grayer than Callisto but shot through with the white lines of enormous tidal grooves.
Its sides glittered with the domed-over lights of human settlements, strings of beads brighter than the chalk-colored lines beneath them.
Kelli remembered reading in geography class how Ganymede was like a layer cake: thick, cracked, pocked crusts of rock and ice, with an uninhabitable ocean underneath; then a thick crust formed by another kind of ice, and another ocean beneath that, down and down.
Nobody but miners, which were mostly automated, ever ventured down through those layers.
Ganymede’s cities clung, barnacle-like, to the outermost surface, half sunken into that rock-ice crust to protect themselves from Jupiter’s magnetospheric radiation, which was more intense here than on Callisto, though not as intense as Io’s. Nothing was ever as intense as Io.
Rowan and Zhaleh had cooked up a cover story for ground control, complete with forged registrations and other papers to back it up.
The four of them were a group of students from the university on Europa, taking a quick break to visit Ganymede and Io as tourists.
The spaceship belonged to Rowan’s rich parents.
Kelli had not bothered to memorize more detail, because the only person who was ever going to ask about their cover story was ground control, and that was going to be an automated system talking to Rowan, not her.
Once they landed, she knew the plan. Head to Inspiration headquarters on the hyperloop.
Jam the comms, distract the humans, and use Kelli’s credentials plus Rowan’s prompting skills to get into the data center.
Copy the character kernel onto a data chip.
Erase the evidence that they’d been there, and get out again before the jamming stopped.
Pirates who raided an AdventureVerse island could sail away laughing, dodging their victims’ curses and musket fire; but in a place like Ganymede there were only the hyperloop and the spaceport, with its careful set of preflight checks and confirmations.
They needed to calmly exit using those methods, like ordinary people doing everyday business, before any human realized there was a problem.
Except, of course, that Baz would know.
Kelli was counting on that. By now, Baz must have read her original messages, even if it still might take him a while to get the rest. Baz might not be on Ganymede himself, but he’d had plenty of time to contact one of Inspiration’s professional security teams on the surface.
For all Kelli knew, that team might be waiting to arrest them as soon as they arrived.
Or maybe not—Rowan had switched out the transponder, after all, and they wouldn’t be looking for a ship called the Blue Bolt.
But the team was planning on using Kelli’s credentials, and if Baz had any sense at all, he’d know to look for those.
He’d tell Ganymede’s community standards enforcement professionals that they needed to swoop down and catch any group that had Kelli in it.
Even if that didn’t happen immediately, the only question was when.
Things would get dicey after that. Baz would be annoyed that she’d gone in without backup to do a security professional’s job.
Conchita Quixada, back on Io, would be even more annoyed.
If Kelli did this right, then it wouldn’t be obvious to Conchita that Kelli had betrayed her—as opposed to just being bad at heists.
But a person like Conchita might make good on her threats anyway.
She might send Inspiration all of her blackmail material as soon as she heard of the arrest.
In short, this was going to be one of the most awful days Kelli had ever had.
But it was the best that she knew how to do.
She’d sabotaged the mission as much as she safely could, and she’d try to sabotage it more while it was underway.
Better than meekly complying, bringing Orlando’s character kernel to the Quixadas for real, and letting them get away with everything they’d done.
Just before landing, when Kelli was starting to strap herself into her sleeping bag, Ting came in and knocked on the side of the doorway.
“Hey,” said Ting.
“Hey,” said Kelli. Ting took this as an invitation and glided the rest of the way in, catching themselves on the wall—which would soon be floor—next to the bag.
“I know this has been, uh, tricky for you,” said Ting. “How are you doing?”
“I am psychologically capable of doing a heist,” said Kelli, remembering what Zhaleh had said. “That’s the most you can ask. I don’t think you can ask me to be happy about it.”
“That’s fair,” said Ting. They lowered their voice. “Do you want a little advice? Rowan might have already told you, but there’s something we always do on days like this, when the mission’s tough and we gotta do it anyway.”
“What?” said Kelli.
“We use our imaginations,” said Ting. Their voice was low enough that Rowan and Zhaleh, both crashing around and getting last-minute things ready, wouldn’t hear.
“We play pretend. You’ve seen heists on television, right?
Imagine you’re one of those characters. You’re cool and sexy and competent, and nothing fazes you.
All you want out of life is this one piece of shiny stolen treasure and you’re gonna get it, right? Just stay focused on how that feels.”
Kelli blinked at Ting. She didn’t think she could possibly explain that she’d already been doing that the whole time.
“Why do you need that?” she asked. “How is that even pretend for you? You do heists all the time.”
“I dunno.” Ting shrugged. “There’s good days and bad days, right? But on bad days, it helps.”
Kelli pressed her hands to her forehead. What would Orlando say in this conversation? She couldn’t figure that out. It got circular. But she could be Orlando, all right. She could be him for just one day longer.