The Phobos Maneuver (17 page)

A tiny human figure, photographed in the act of running towards a dropedo that had made it down.

“Yes, that appears to be a Luna Union officer,” her ship said.

“What’s the problem, ship? Isn’t it nice to know they’re still alive? The PLAN jams their comms. They could be dead, for all we know. I’m glad they’re still alive to pick up their toilet paper.”

And water and food and meds and oxygen …

… and up-armored bots …

… why?

But she’d already asked her ship about that, and got nowhere.

“Check this one out,” her ship said.

Petruzzelli frowned at the last photograph in the sequence. The ship pointed out a blotch at the far side of the Big Bowl.

“Cheezus, that’s a ship.”

“A Fragger.”

“I thought the PLAN blew up all their ships; that’s why they’re stuck. Are we sending them new ones? What’s the point? The PLAN will just blow those up, too. They’re living underground, in the maintenance tunnels of the laser assembly. I’m guessing you couldn’t fit a ship down there.”

“That’s one of the Fraggers that flew out with us. Check the casualty list.”

Petruzzelli did. Her brain was totally scrambled. It took her a few seconds. “That guy I talked to … Miller. He’s missing!”

“That was him.”

“He crashed? Fuck.”

“His ship is intact. Or was, when I took this picture.”

“He landed.” Petruzzelli shook her head. “What a …” She was about to say
dumbass,
but then she remembered Miller’s calm, collected attitude in the hangar, when he must already have had this in mind, and a different word came out: “Hero.”

“Hero?”

“Yeah, sure. Landing on a moonlet in orbit around Mars, with no hope of ever getting home? I call that heroic.”

“But these
heroes
are on the end of a multi-trillion-spider supply chain stretching back to Earth, and out to the gas giants, financed and maintained by us. Star Force is burning through money, ships, and pilots, every day, all to keep a couple of hundred
heroes
breathing.”

“I like how you put pilots last, there,” Petruzzelli said dryly. “I guess you do have a point. But still. This is the human spirit at its finest, right? It’s like something out of a—”

“Game,” her ship said, taking the word out of her mouth. “It is like something out of a game. But this is a real war. Real pilots died back there. Your friend Williams got cooked. Didn’t you notice?”

Petruzzelli had, but the ship was sadly wrong about Williams being her friend. None of them were her friends. “Too bad,” she mumbled, sinking lower in her couch.

The ship wasn’t finished. “We weren’t ready for this war. Luna forced us into it, knowing it would be against the UN’s core principles to leave valiant warriors to die. Basically, they used those
heroes
as pawns in a political grudge match. Doesn’t that make you mad?”

“I heard they were all volunteers,” Petruzzelli said. It seemed odd that her ship was suddenly so opinionated, even questioning the premise of their mission. But she was too tired to think about it. Her bones burned. Every breath hurt. When she shut her eyes she could still see enemy fire vectors. She injected herself with a sedative, and slept.

xii.

Back at Eureka Station two days later, she endured a scolding from Wing Commander Roarke for chasing that troll. Typical: they didn’t want you to fight. Just get in, deliver your payload, and get out. Well, she’d done that, anyway.

She went home to freshen up. She had her own little room, with a real shower. Water pressure sucked, but it was hot, and she stayed in until the shower beeped to tell her she’d used up her water allotment.

She dried off and put on civvies. She didn’t have to style her hair, because she had no hair anymore. Oh, the joys of serving humanity! She decided on stick-on electric blue horns. She was a cyborg now. She might as well look like one. And actually, the bald-skull-and-horns look was kinda fierce. She added blue eyelash spray, lipstick, and a pair of primitive-y earrings.

The Star Force pilots all had their quarters on Wheel One. If you thought of Eureka Station as a set of hollow cylinders stacked inside each other, Wheel One was the outermost cylinder. It had the best spin gravity. It also had officer country, but nothing was perfect. Outside Wheel One—upstairs, from Petruzzelli’s point of view—was the surface of the asteroid, where robots performed various zero-gee maintenance functions.

Downstairs, the real life of the station went on. Wheels Two, Three, and Four housed the ground crews, their families, and all the other tens of thousands of support personnel who kept the ships flying. Eureka Station had been operating for so long now that this auxiliary community had outgrown its support role. It had a life of its own. Third-generation Eurekans worked as pet groomers, skin designers, and bonsai artists. Their isolation during Eureka’s century of secret existence had made them into an aloof, suspicious people. If you tried to talk to them, they’d pretend they didn’t speak English. In actuality, some of them really didn’t.

But they sure did know how to mix a mean margarita.

A whole section of Wheel Four teemed with bars and clubs, catering to the station’s disproportionately large population of young singles. The UV lights had been jarked here; they never came on. The artificial night sparkled with LED signage and virtual sales pitches. Every few meters you passed from one local network zone into another: from rock music to folk to rocketpunk, from the smell of woodsmoke to the perfume of incense—all of this transmitted via your BCI’s network connection. It reminded Petruzzelli of 6 Hebe.

Shame about 6 Hebe.

But the anything-goes colonial ethos lived on, on Eureka Station. The difference here was the whopping noob quotient. Personnel fresh off the latest transport pinballed hilariously from building to building. It took you a while to learn to walk in one-fifth of Earth’s gravity.

Petruzzelli had no problems in this regard. She strolled down the strip, enjoying appraising glances from guys she’d never look twice at. Pings thudded into her ‘Ignore’ folder. Despite her show of confidence, she knew that not every bar on the strip was safe for her. That pilot who died today, Williams, had once got beaten up when she went for a quiet drink in the wrong watering-hole. People didn’t trust each other here. That was the noob quotient, again. And the war.

She made for a big building clad in gengineered glow-in-the-dark ivy. Called, of course, The Ivy, this was a Star Force-friendly brew pub. The bouncer scoped the PILOT flash on her profile, nodded her in, and blatantly checked out her ass.

Wood-look tables and chairs crowded an arena-shaped space on several higgledy-piggledy levels. The scrum around the bar threw off a cloud of virtual chit-chat, people shouting visually over the raucous music. Petruzzelli winced and un-joined the local network. The music and the visual clutter vanished. Suddenly she was in a nice quiet pub, half-empty, the ambiance marred only by the dolts around the bar, who were still shouting over a frug-rock track that only they could hear.

“Get me a big-ass margarita,” she told the waiter, a human being. “Plenty of salt.”

She collapsed in a spindle-legged chair on one of the mezzanine levels and propped an elbow on the railing. Her margarita came within minutes. She raised a silent toast to Williams. Not that she’d really known her. But her death was symbolic of … of—she remembered what her ship had said:
the stupidity the waste the politics—
of
something.

So she’d get drunk. It wouldn’t take many spiders out of her account. Alcohol worked fast in micro-gee.

A margarita and a half later, something caught her eye.

A knot of baldies coming into the pub, talking and laughing.

Oh God. Zhang, Zubrowski, Blake—the whole fucking clique.

She slid down in her chair. Absorbed in their own conversation, the Wallopers trooped up to the top level of the pub and took a table out of her line of sight.

She finished her margarita and hailed a waiter, but the pub was filling up. She wouldn’t get any service now unless she used the local network to place her order, and she really hated frug-rock. She left her seat, went down to the bar level, pushed between people blinded to reality by the virtual crap on their implants.

Ahead of her, two short Earthborn women were getting trampled by young men pogoing up and down, out of control, dancing with imaginary partners.

Petruzzelli stood 176 centimeters and she was in the best shape of her life. Anyway, it didn’t take a lot of skill to throw an elbow into someone’s gut.

The two women toppled gratefully against the bar. “Whew! Wow! Thanks.
Oh.
”

“Oh. My. God,” Petruzzelli said. “Goto?”

“Holy crap!” Elfrida Goto exclaimed. “Petruzzelli!” She turned to her friend, a plump chick with Nubian coloring who wore sparkly electric blue eyeshadow, a top hat, and not much else. Elfrida herself wore an arrangement of khaki and white triangles that you might call a dress if you were feeling generous. “Colden, this is Alicia Petruzzelli! Remember, I did that testimonial for her? I hope that was helpful rather than the opposite, Petruzzelli?”

“It was great. Obviously. I’m here.”

“Yeeeeah! It’s so awesome that you got in! This is my friend Jennifer Colden.”

“Ahem,” said the bartender.

“Oh, oh God, yeah. OK, I’ll have a … a craft beer, and—”

“We have thirty-seven varieties of craft beer.”

Elfrida dithered. “What do you recommend, Petruzzelli?”

“Coke,” Petruzzelli said. She herself had lost her desire for another margarita. Jennifer Colden wrinkled her nose. “OK,” Petruzzelli said to the bartender. “Three Bathtub Brews. I’ve got this.”

“Oh God, Petruzzelli, you shouldn’t!” Elfrida kept talking as they followed Petruzzelli up to the mezzanine level. “Seriously, this is amazing! Colden and I just figured we’d have a night on the town for old times’ sake, like a recapture our youth kind of thing, but running into you,
wow,
this is a real blast from the past! I mean that in a totally good way.”

The table where Petruzzelli was sitting had been stolen. They found another, less desirable table near the toilets. “Cheers,” Petruzzelli said. “So what brings you guys to Eureka Station?”

Elfrida and Colden exchanged a look. Colden answered. “We’re here on duty.”

”Well, yeah, I figured. This isn’t the kind of place you would come for fun.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Colden said. She eyed the scrum around the bar. “That ’roided-out dude with the full sleeves is kinda tasty.”

“Colden. He’s like eighteen,” Elfrida tsked. She explained to Petruzzelli: “Colden met her Mr. Right when we were kids. He’s brainy, courageous, heart in the right place—he works for Medecins Sans Frontieres!—and
he’s even OK-looking. But something happened—”

“My issues happened,” Colden sighed.

“So she’s on this, like, kick to find Mr. As-Wrong-As-Possible. To
show
Kristiansen. Or something.”

“Or something,” Colden agreed, licking her lips with exaggerated lustfulness. This cracked Elfrida up.

Petruzzelli made her eyebrows
smile!
She sipped her Bathtub Brew. She didn’t really like beer. She was not enjoying this as much as she should have. She felt excluded. She’d had the idea that she was Elfrida’s best friend. But this Colden woman clearly knew Elfrida a lot better than Petruzzelli did. Sounded like they’d been friends forever, and knew everything about each other’s lives.

Their intimacy exposed the shallowness of Petruzzelli’s supposed friendship with Elfrida. How pathetic could you get? She’d conned herself into believing she was best friends with someone she hadn’t seen for years.

“So, you didn’t say what you’re doing here?” she asked.

”Oh,” Elfrida said. “We’re working as therapists. You can laugh now.”

“That’s cool. I guess once upon a time, all therapists were human, anyway.”

“Yeah. If you get into the history of it, it’s really interesting. Therapy was invented in the nineteenth century, and was perfected by the twenty-first century, when they developed the cognitive techniques we still use. But then it went completely out of fashion for like a hundred and fifty years. Psychology turned into just another branch of neuroscience. It was all scans and neural stimulation. But then people realized that guess what, there are some things you can’t reduce to a science … and so good old-fashioned talk therapy made a comeback. Because one of those things you can’t reduce to a science is friendship.”

“Which makes it kind of ironic,” Colden added, “that we now rely on machines for friendship!”

Petruzzelli failed to see the irony in that. Human friends were faithless.

“People
do
confide more readily in machines,” Elfrida said. “We can attest to that!” She and Colden both sniggered.

“Sounds like fun,” Petruzzelli said. “Is there much demand on station?”

“Oh, like you wouldn’t believe. A lot of pilots and ground crew are suffering from trauma—”

“Ground crew?” It burst out of her. “What do
they
have to be traumatized about?”

“We could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you,” Colden said.

“Anyway, all we do is basically what a bot would do,” Elfrida said. “We listen, get them to open up, and suggest cognitive tricks they can use to stop having bad emotional reactions. Oh, and there’s a lot of crafting. You’d better be careful, Petruzzelli, or you might end up on my couch, learning how to knit!”

“Laugh,”
Petruzzelli said.

“Anyway, I’ve been wondering,” Elfrida said. “Where in all these Wheels are the Luna Union guys?”

“Oh, the Fraggers? They don’t come down to the strip. They would get beaten up if they tried it. Do you get many of
them
on your couch?”

“No,” Elfrida said. “Not yet, anyway. Ha ha! But we kind of trained on them, back on Earth—”

“Goto,” Colden said warningly.

“Oh, Colden, it’s all right, she’s a freaking Star Force pilot! I’m sure she is aware of the situation on Stickney!”

“Hush,” Petruzzelli said. It was her turn to be alarmed by what Elfrida might say. For the first time she exchanged a glance with Colden, and read in the other woman’s eyes that she was also a bit worried about Elfrida. Made sense. You could not go through everything Elfrida had, without losing a few of the chocks under your jackstands.