The Phobos Maneuver (15 page)

Blake: “What about when amateur astronomers see it? I know nobody would have stumbled on it, because ships stay wayyy away from Mars. But people look.”

Zhang: “The ISA probably taps them on the shoulder and advises them that they should keep their yaps shut.”

Petruzzelli silently agreed with that. After all, the ISA had done the same thing to her over 11073 Galapagos. But now she was one of the privileged few, in the need-to-know circle. She read on. Eureka Station was hollow. Population: holy shit, 362,703. As she scanned it, the final digit changed into a four. A footnote appeared: “Congratulations to Dan and Esmerelda Marquez of Shell Four on the birth of a healthy baby girl!”

“I have a question,” she said aloud. “We’re how close to Mars?”

Blake: “One point six AUs. Same distance as from Mars to the sun. That’s kind of the definition of a LaGrange point.”

Petruzzelli gritted her teeth. “It was rhetorical, Gwynnie. My point is, we’re well within the PLAN’s favored operating range. Why don’t they just blow this place to fuck?”

Zhang: “That’s in Chapter Six: Trespassers Will Be Vaporized. Says Eureka Station has the most advanced minefield in the solar system. A self-organizing cloud of cluster mines, programmed to avoid ships with Star Force transponders, extending up to 10,000 klicks out.”

“Well, I guess that’s reassuring.”

“You know what, Zuzu? I’m totally not an expert, but can I give you some friendly advice?”

“Go for it.”

“When we get dirtside, find someone to screw. It’ll make you feel better.”

x.

Michael knelt at the captain’s workstation aboard the
Kharbage Collector,
wishing he’d never been born. He ignored the repetitive banging from the elevator. It sounded like the pirates had climbed up the elevator shaft and were trying to break the doors down.

They were far too late to alter the
Kharbage Collector’s
course.

Unfortunately.

Biting back sobs, Michael concentrated on the secondary astrogation screen he’d thrown up at the captain’s workstation. If he had a crew, he would have had an actual astrogator. As it was, he had to do everything.

So it had taken him a while to notice that 99984 Ravilious wasn’t where he had thought it was.

While the
Kharbage Collector
decelerated, still shadowing the
Now You See It,
a cluster of rocks had appeared a little way sunward. That was 99984 Ravilious. Michael had assumed it was a single big asteroid, not a family of little ones, but the
Now You See It
was definitely heading for the gravel cloud.

He’d frantically altered the
Kharbage Collector’s
course. This had not been easy. A Startractor didn’t have fancy gimbaled thrusters, powerful gyroscopes, or rotation wheels for torque. He’d instructed the hub to bring the ship’s nose around with the attitude boosters, while still decelerating. But the hub had screwed it up, or he had, because something was very wrong.

The
Kharbage Collector
was now hurtling straight towards 99984 Ravilious.

Much
too fast.

At this rate, the ship’s plume of plasma would fry the vulnerable Bigelow habs he could see on radar. That’s if he didn’t crash into one of those rocks.

They were drifting around all the time, orbiting around a notional center of gravity in a chaotic dance too complex for the
Kharbage Collector’s
hub to analyze. It kept warning him that they were on a collision course with this or that rock, and then changing its mind a second later.

Hands trembling, he transmitted again on every frequency commonly used for ship-to-ship comms. “Hello. I think I might be going to crash into you. I’m really sorry. Is anyone there?”

Whack, thwack
on the elevator doors.

Michael willed the comms screen to light up.

He’d already sent several transmissions, starting hundreds of thousands of klicks back. The tone of his messages had shifted from cocky greetings to cries for help.

Crack!
The mirrored cladding of the elevator column—what was left of it—fell to the deck in splinters.

Three minutes to impact. Or, three minutes until he blew straight through the cluster of rocks and out the other side. He wished the hub would make up its mind.

The comms screen told him he had an incoming transmission. He pounced on it.

“Hey. You in the
Paladin.”

The ISA’s phavatar might have given them a pass, but Michael’s black-market transponder still wasn’t broadcasting any of the usual information about trajectory, destination, and ownership. No wonder the voice—it was a voice, not a text transmission—did not see fit to be polite.

“I’ve been trying to hail you for the last half-hour!”

What? In horror and shame, Michael realized he must have had the radio stuck on ‘transmit’ until just now.

“Get off of that kamikaze trajectory right this fucking second! You have twenty seconds to comply, starting now.”

Michael started to type an explanation about how he couldn’t alter course fast enough to avoid all the rocks. In this way fifteen seconds passed.

A cutter laser bored through the seal on the elevator doors. Splart dust blossomed. A metal claw punched through.

“Five seconds,” the voice said. This time it came with a face. Michael guessed that the voice’s owner didn’t mind being seen by someone who was going to be nanodust in a minute. He was probably about fifty, but to Michael he just looked old. And scary. Curly beard, hooked nose and rugged brow. Terrifying black eyes. “Care to identify yourself? I’d like to know who I’ll be vaporizing.”

Michael switched to vid-call mode. It didn’t matter anymore if they knew he was just a kid. “My name’s Michael. I’m really sorry. I screwed up. I think I know what I did wrong. When I changed course, I forgot to increase my rate of burn to compensate for the thrust going into the sideways component. So I’m not decelerating hard enough. But now it’s too
late—”

The bearded man vanished. A different face appeared. This was a much younger man, East Asian, wearing what appeared to be a hoodie. “Hello, Michael. I need your permission to take over your hub.”

Michael started crying. The hub reported in urgent red caps that this new transmission had installed a rootkit which was attempting to gain administrator privileges. “Allow,” Michael blurted.

“OK,” the man said. “I’m going to attempt to save your ship. It might get bumpy.”

Michael’s mecha, with Kelp riding in the cradle, smashed the elevator doors and lunged onto the bridge. At the same time, the
Kharbage Collector’s
drive coughed out a burst of acceleration that caused everything on the bridge to slide sideways. The mecha fell over. Michael fell off his couch.

“Hey!” the East Asian man said. “That looks like Captain Haddock’s kid.”

The rest of the pirates surged onto the bridge. Haddock saw the comms screen and backpedaled. Too late. The screen split into two. Another man appeared alongside the first one. They looked so much alike, they had to be brothers. The second man pointed in what would have been Haddock’s direction, if they were in the same room. “I told you, if I ever saw you again I would frag your ass.”

“Scuzzy the Smuggler!” Michael blurted.

“Shit,” said Kiyoshi Yonezawa, for it was he. “Did you come all this way just to call me names?”

Exclamations from the pirates pulled Michael’s attention back to the optical feed. The rocks had grown to enormous size. Bergs of nickel iron, half-sunlit, they were not small asteroids, but shards of a large one. You could tell by the shear marks and the signs of melting. The ship had ‘stopped’—that is, it had decelerated to near-zero relative velocity—right next to the largest one.

“Booyah!” said Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s brother. “How’s that for parallel parking?”

The
Kharbage Collector
was still moving, inching out of the danger zone in stops and starts, as if playing Red Light, Green Light. Ahead, two asteroid fragments kissed in slow motion, striking sparks off each other’s cliffs.

Michael rubbed his eyes. “Are you going to frag us?”

“No,” said Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s brother.

“You picked a good day to arrive,” Yonezawa said.

“Sorry,” Michael said, on the assumption this was sarcasm.

“Oh, don’t worry about it! I’ll come over and say hello. Is there anything you need immediately? You’ve had a long voyage.”

“Tequila,” said Captain Haddock.

“You old pirate. How about mochaccinos? Ice cream for the kids? We can catch up. You can tell me what Alicia Petruzzelli is doing these days.”

xi.

Petruzzelli, encased in a state-of-the-art armored suit, harassed the ground crew trussing dropedoes onto her Gravesfighter’s Whipple shield. She’d learned the hard way not to trust their mass distribution calculations. She made them weigh each dropedo on the inertial balance meter at the corner of her Gravesfighter’s parking space.

Dropedoes:
drop pods + torpedoes. A cute name for objects that Petruzzelli hated with a burning passion, like all the pilots did.

“How can toilet paper and protein bars be so freaking heavy?” she wise-cracked to the pilot of the Gravesfighter parked next to hers, who’d wandered into her peripheral vision.

Whoops.

It wasn’t that pilot.

Same suit, because the armored ones only came in Star Force blue. But this wasn’t a Star Force pilot. He was spaceborn-tall, and his faceplate—decorated on the outside, see-through one-way—was the Union Jack with the moon in the corner. He was a Fragger.

The Luna Union flew out of Eureka Station, same as Star Force did. There were far fewer of them, but they had an outsize say in mission planning. And
they
didn’t hate the dropedoes.

“Can I help you?” she said coolly.

“I wanted to use the inertial balance meter, if you don’t mind.” They spoke via their suits’ microwave line-of-sight links.

“It’s not mine.”

The Fragger crooked a finger to the ground crew who were following him, dragging a dropedo of his own. They struggled to lift it onto the meter, even in the 0.5 gees of spin gravity in the hangar.

“Whew,” Petruzzelli said, watching. “Two point six tons. That’s gonna be a big ask for your ship.”

Gravesfighter and Fragger pilots never missed a chance to rib each other about the supposed inferiority of their respective ships.

“Toilet paper doesn’t weigh that much,” the Fragger said. “I’m going to find out what’s in it.”

“You’re not allowed.”

“I don’t need permission to find out what I’ll be risking my arse for.”

The Fragger took a rotary tool from his belt and started working on the dropedo’s screws. Several more Gravesfighter pilots wandered over to watch, although none volunteered to help. The dropedo was designed to be easily opened. Screws plinked to the floor. An armored slab hinged up.

Dead human faces stared up at them through a cloudy layer of shrinkfoam.

Everyone swore and stepped back.

That was one funny thing about this war. No dead bodies. Star Force casualties got vaporized. The other side didn’t have any bodies to begin with.

The Fragger bent over the dropedo. His nametag said MILLER. “So
that’s
where they bury ‘em.”

Petruzzelli laughed. “They aren’t real.”

“They’re real … real bots.” Miller poked a gloved finger into the shrinkfoam. “Look at that, they’ve been up-armored.”

The bots were packed into the dropedo like sardines in a can. Craning over the hatch, Petruzzelli saw that each one rested in an attached shell, which curved down into a cowl over its forehead. Mesh masks covered their faces, like something a fencer would wear. Their features were more realistic than what you’d see in customer service, for example. They were all skin tones, male and female, all ages.

“I heard something about this when I was on Earth,” Miller said. “On the one hand, it’s a sign of desperation; on the other hand, it’s an ingenious idea; on the gripping hand, they’re bloody heavy, aren’t they? I suppose it’s the power packs.”

The other pilots trickled away. It was interesting to know what was in the dropedoes, but it didn’t change the fact that they had to carry them. Petruzzelli stayed put, since this was her parking space.

Centipede-like propellant tankers snaked across the hangar while laborers swarmed around the ships. The hectic activity pumped up her adrenaline. And now she had to fly with the knowledge that those spooky, dead-faced bots were flying with her. Great.

Miller screwed the dropedo’s lid back on. “This your first mission?” he said to her.

“Third. You?”

“Eighth.”

“Whoa.”

“You in Zhang’s squadron?”

Harry Zhang’s leadership of the Woomera Wallopers had been formalized, as everyone expected. Now he was
Captain
Zhang, which had made him even more conceited and annoying. Petruzzelli nodded.

“Say hi to him for me.”

Aha, a power play. Rather than say hi himself, this veteran Fragger would rather use her to convey his greetings to Zhang. “Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t.”

Miller chuckled. “Good luck out there.”

Time
. Petruzzelli launched into a standing jump, powered by her suit, which carried her diagonally over the flank of her Gravesfighter—a clever use of the Coriolis force in the rotating hangar, not that anyone was watching … except Miller. Was she showing off for him? Yeah, actually. She was. She landed on top of the ship and squeezed in through the tiny hatch, slid sideways, said hello to her drones with a quick squirt of information, squeezed through the other hatch in the inner shield, and finally reached the airlock, a valve not much wider than her own shoulders.

No one ejected from a Gravesfighter. The option hadn’t even been built in. You were either alive and fighting for the duration, or you were nanodust.

The airlock opened onto a tiny vestibule where she had room to turn the right way up. Amenities for long voyages: the vestibule converted into a microbead shower,
or
a toilet, and there were cunning little brass-knobbed lockers that could have been packed with food, toiletries, and personal items up to the weight limit.