Chapter 21
Day Two
(age twenty-four)
Landing on Io was only slightly less awful than taking off from Callisto. Kelli thought about curling up in her sleeping bag and enduring it in peace, but she wanted to see what Io looked like through the window.
The view didn’t disappoint. Io was an entire wash of garish color, sulfur-yellows mottled with red, black, white, and sickly green.
Parts of its surface bubbled, a thin heat-haze shimmering over them.
Smoke rose from the hottest points and drifted up, some swirling around the planet, some rising entirely out of its gravity well and into Jupiter’s.
The stormy red-orange globe of Jupiter loomed bigger here.
Io was the closest inhabited moon to Jupiter: melted and squeezed by the massive planet’s tidal pull, it was a perilous place, but one that came with a functionally infinite supply of geothermal energy, which powered all the heavy industries at the Jovian system’s heart.
The buildings, once they swooped close enough to see them, proved nearly as spectacular as the planet itself.
Foundries and factories stood on mile-long platforms supported by flexible stilts, strong enough to withstand an earthquake or a minor lava flow.
Some of the platforms stacked six or seven layers on top of each other, cartoonishly, each one supporting an entire city’s worth of machines for raw material processing or refining or manufacturing, with a geostationary satellite hovering above the top for emergency egress.
Kelli leaned forward in her restraints, trying to see which of those strange-looking platforms they were going to land on; but then Rowan said “Here we go,” and after that it was all Kelli could do to grit her teeth through the jangle of fire and smoke and not scream.
By the time they thunked down on their landing pad, she’d lost track of what surface feature was where, or what route they’d gone.
Gravity was back, though, a heaviness like a weighted blanket that settled over her as she caught her breath, on her back, in the padded chair.
Io was a smaller world than Callisto but denser, and everything was heavier here, which felt strangely good but also immediately exhausting.
Kelli didn’t scream. This was where her entire shady deal with Rowan was going to happen. She had to stay alert.
“Who are we meeting exactly? From the syndicate?” she asked as the engines powered down and the restraints rose off her.
Before the descent, she’d caught up on exercise and freshened up with a sponge bath in the awkward cubby of the bathroom, then changed into her very best clothes—the rose-gold blouse, paired with a sleek black skirtsuit and shiny flats.
She’d put on a bit of makeup—nothing too wild; just a tawny powder over the cheeks and a neutral lipstick.
Her hair probably needed some work, though.
“Bigwigs, actually. Ever heard of Conchita Quixada?”
“No. Is she in charge?”
“Yeah, more or less. She’s the don in charge of Io, so she runs this branch.
Her daughter Rosaura is a huge fan of Ship of Fools, and is, not coincidentally, turning sixteen today.
You’re being hired to talk to Rosaura about the show, as a birthday present.
But you’re just one of the attractions today—there’s a whole party. ”
He flashed her a grin, then rolled over his seat and climbed down through the hatch—a feat which took some gymnastics now that there was gravity again. Kelli looked after him in frightened consternation. “A party?” she echoed.
In a way, that was more intimidating than the thought of meeting a crime boss. She hadn’t been to a party since grade school.
Walking felt different on Io; every part of Kelli felt ever so slightly heavier than before.
She felt like she must be trudging, or striding heavily like a character on television.
But Rowan’s shape, walking beside her, still moved more like a person from Callisto than from Earth or AdventureVerse, so she supposed that must still be what she was doing, too.
Rowan had changed, before landing, into what she supposed were party clothes: a pair of tight jeans and a loose black jacket, over a pale and well-fitted shirt, with a bit of understated, masculine jewelry; a bangle around the right wrist to match the watch on his left; a good belt with a silvery buckle.
She followed him through a tunnel onto a big scaffolding.
There were windows at the sides with a view onto the enormous hangar where they’d just landed.
A whole bunch of spaceships perched here on a grid of landing pads, with trenches to carry away the engine exhaust, but without real walls between or around them; there wasn’t even a proper wall at the hangar’s side.
Dozens of yards away, the floor just dropped off over the dizzyingly distant volcanic surface.
The tunnel for humans, at least, was pressurized and enclosed, and didn’t drop off dramatically anywhere.
The air here carried the scent of hard-boiled eggs that had gone off a little, along with a spicy air freshener that someone had put in to try to mask it, which made Kelli want to sneeze.
Two other people Rowan and Kelli’s age had come out into the tunnel to greet them—a slight figure with an undercut and a tall bleach-blond woman.
“Kelli!” said Rowan. “This is Ting Jiang and Zhaleh Attar. And this is Kelli Reynolds, script supervisor for Ship of Fools, right on schedule.”
“Great to finally meet you,” said the short one with the undercut, extending a hand. Kelli didn’t like to touch strangers, but she knew what was expected of her, so she did the handshake. “I’m Ting. They/them.”
A nonbinary person! Kelli had read about those, but she’d never met one, or at least, not one who was willing to say so the instant they met her.
She took a closer look at Ting. They were skinny and almost pointedly enveloped by their punky clothes—fingerless gloves, a long black vest, strategically ripped to show glimpses of a shiny silver fabric underneath.
Their voice was androgynous like Rowan’s.
The part of their hair that wasn’t shaved had grown long, soft and straight, but their chin sported a tiny, lovingly kept soul patch.
“Um, nice to meet you,” said Kelli, stammering a little.
“Charmed,” said the bleach-blond woman, who must have been Zhaleh, inclining her head as she looked Kelli up and down.
She wore a figure-hugging sweater patterned in pastel blue, green, and gold, over a pair of leather pants and high heels.
Big crystals dangled from her earlobes, in shades that matched the sweater, and her artificially pale hair fell down in immaculate waves.
Her voice was so graceful and smooth that Kelli honestly couldn’t tell if she was supposed to believe she was charmed or not.
She tried not to stare at Zhaleh’s pants, or any other part of her.
“Ting,” said Rowan, “can you give Kelli the tour for a minute? Kelli, don’t worry, I’ll be right there with you most of the night, I just gotta set Zhaleh up on distro first.”
Kelli did not want to wander a moon she’d never been to with a person she’d just met, and she didn’t know what “distro” was. Distribution? Probably. Distributing illegal goods, she was sure.
“Giving me the grunt work,” Zhaleh said with an affectionate roll of her eyes, “while you play minder to the special guest all night.”
“I’m not letting you near her,” said Rowan, in a sharp tone that turned Kelli’s head. It was sharper than anything he’d said to her on the way here, even when she’d literally screamed at him. What had a beautiful woman like Zhaleh done to deserve a tone like that?
“Come on,” said Ting, motioning to Kelli. “I’ll show you around.”
Kelli was too flustered to do anything but follow them.
The tunnel opened out into an industrial-looking multilevel warren of halls and stairs.
There were no parks and arbors and hyperloop stations here, it seemed, no leaves twining around the walls on trellises; it must not have been safe here.
Sometimes if there was work going on with a lot of sparks and a lot of fumes, it was more economical to skip the plants and just spend the extra money on even more CO2 scrubbers.
In place of those things all she could see was metal rafters, catwalks, gratings, and stairs, all surrounded by an even heavier and more oppressive ceiling than the ceilings on Callisto.
Io didn’t only get its tidal heating from Jupiter; it also got even more radiation from the magnetosphere than the other moons, and the habitable parts of its platforms were all wrapped in a layer of protective titanium alloy, several feet thick.
The insides of those shielded, alloyed walls looked like they’d originally been black and gray, blooming here and there with ominous red-orange patches of rust. But overtop of that grim industrial background people had painted on all sorts of other things.
Io’s corridors bloomed like an oil slick, in dark and sickly colors even more garish than the forest-greens and violets of Rowan’s ship, some only a few shades off-black and others glinting with iridescence.
Io clashed with itself. In some corners the colors twirled together into abstract murals she couldn’t make sense of—small ones, little more than someone’s initials on the wall, or big alien landscapes twenty feet on a side.
Somewhere far below them, some huge machine thrummed, many times bigger and deeper than standard life support.
Kelli badly wanted her noise-cancelling headphones.
The air also bloomed with too many smells: oil and metal and a different cheap air freshener in every corridor, with that sickly egg smell still palpably underlying it all. She felt queasy, breathing that air.
“What is this place?” she asked. “A factory?”