The Phobos Maneuver (2 page)

She flopped back into the comms couch, her cheeks tingling.

Two minutes later, Adnan Kharbage’s face creased into a wide grin. He opened his arms as if to hug her through the screen. “Exactly what I would do if I were younger! I’m proud of you for making this decision.”

“Oh,” Petruzzelli murmured. She had not expected this. Not at all.

Adnan Kharbage went on praising her for another fifteen seconds, and then her rant about the recycling business reached Ceres. His face darkened. His lower lip pooched out. “OK, missy. I had no idea you felt that way. In that case, I do not accept your resignation, because you are fired.” He waved dismissively at the camera to turn it off. “Bring back my ship.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “And also my son.”

Michael threw a wobbly. He swept all the clutter off the workstations. He picked up a ratchet wrench and whaled on the mirrored cladding of the elevator tube in the center of the bridge. He dumped out the trash he had bagged up and flung it at Petruzzelli. Then he hurled himself face-down on the floor, kicking and screaming, in full-blown tantrum mode.

As soon as he dropped the ratchet wrench, Petruzzelli pounced, but he was too fast for her. He slithered under the captain’s workstation—
her
workstation—and yanked out handfuls of hardwired connectors. Screens went blank. The 3D starmap hanging in the air vanished. The bridge noticeably dimmed.

Petruzzelli dragged Michael out by the heels. She manhandled him into the elevator, pushed him into freefall at the transfer point, and shoved him down the transit tube. He clutched at every grab handle along the way, but she pried his fingers loose, never allowing him to get a firm handhold. Tangled together, they fell into Engineering & Maintenance.

Because the ship was still accelerating, they fell straight through the center of the donut-shaped mezzanine and landed on top of the sacks of recycling garbage they’d collected from 159848 Redmayne.

Petruzzelli wrapped her body around Michael. He fit neatly into the curve between her chin and her knees. He writhed and screamed for a bit, then went still. Wet hiccups shook his chest.

She genuinely felt sorry for the kid. His father was one of the biggest pieces of shit in the asteroid belt. But for that very reason—because Michael was Adnan Kharbage’s son—she couldn’t let herself care too much about him. If she did, Adnan would just use it against her.

Well, he couldn’t do
that
anymore. She was through with the Kharbages—father and son.

She was going to miss the kid, even though he was such a handful. She kissed the sweaty parting of his hair.

“I have to do this, Mikey. I need you to understand. When I was your age, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. That’s
all
I wanted. I didn’t make the cut. Went into the private sector as an astrogator. But I never gave up. I kept working to get my pilot’s license. Then there was an unfortunate episode back when I was crewing on one of your dad’s other ships, the
Kharbage Can.
I kind of ‘borrowed’ a Star Force ship …”

“I know about that,” Michael muttered. “That was when you met Scuzzy the Smuggler, right?”

Scuzzy the Smuggler was what they called Petruzzelli’s ex. Petruzzelli was very sure about the scuzzy part, not so sure about ‘ex.’ Could you call someone your ex when you’d only slept with them once and never talked to them since? Did occasionally—all right, frequently—stalking someone on the internet make them more
ex
, or less?

“Uh uh,” she said. “That was later.”

“Where is he now?”

“Mikey, I have no idea. Anyway, back when I’m talking about, the PLAN was targeting Scuzzy’s home asteroid, but he wasn’t there.
I
was there. That’s why I took that Star Force ship: to save his people. Not that I knew they were his people at the time. I slagged three PLAN fighters, which is kind of epic, actually.
And
we saved nearly everyone. But the ISA didn’t want it getting out; it would’ve made Star Force look bad …” The ISA: the Information Security Agency. The spooks. They’d warned her on pain of penalties worse than death not to tell anyone the story she was telling Michael now. “So that was it; blacklisted. I got my license, but I thought I’d never be anything more than a commercial pilot. But now … This is my chance. This is what I’ve been waiting my whole life for, kid.”

Michael wriggled in her arms, trying to get away. They sank deeper into the mound of garbage sacks. One or more sacks must have got ripped in the airlock, because she could smell it.

“I don’t get what’s so great about being a pilot, anyway,” Michael said. “You don’t actually do anything. The ship does it all. You just tell it what to do.
I
could do that.” Even though it irked her, she had to admit that was a pretty astute observation for a kid.

She let him go. He floundered to the deck. Bounding high in the
Kharbage Collector’s
maximum 0.15 gees of thrust gravity, he circled the mound of sacks, poking and prodding until he found the ripped one. He pulled out a double handful of e-waste: crushed screens, fried circuit boards.

The recycling they picked up from remote colonies, as a rule, was split between e-waste, radioactive waste such as spent fuel pellets, and empty food and drink pouches. No matter how far from civilization they lived—or maybe,
because
they lived so far from civilization—asteroid colonists seldom attempted to grow all their own food. They depended on nutritionally fortified prepackaged foods to round out their diet. The
Kharbage Collector’s
Cargo Bay 1 was chock-a-block with that stuff. The company made a fortune on the markup.

The radioactive waste was self-explanatory: this far from the sun, you couldn’t make do with solar energy alone. You needed some kind of reactor-based supplement.

Then there was the e-waste. The colony on 159848 Redmayne had mining bots, agricultural bots, medibots, and a smart hub whose mechanical intelligence monitored their air quality, mineral toxicity, and other crucial life-support metrics. They also had comms, games, and screens. But modern electronic gizmos were designed to be disposable. Their crystal processors never stood up for long to the cosmic ray bombardment that was part and parcel of living in space. So, when colonists needed their bots and tools to function outside, they often rad-hardened them by replacing their crystals with DIY circuit boards that harkened back to the dawn of the space age. Hence Petruzzelli’s comment to the 159848 Redmayne settlers about printing integrated circuit components.

She watched Michael carry crisped electronics to the Gravimetric Upcycler. A smaller version of the units used in big recycling facilities, it could granulate and separate metals from plastics. They generally used it for making print-on-demand machine parts for sale to settlers. Michael dumped the e-waste into the hopper, lowered the lid, and punched a series of buttons. The Upcycler chattered and shook. After several minutes, its array of nozzles spewed granules as fine as sand into labeled containers. Michael left the metals, which contained lanthanides worth a lot of money, and took a container full of multicolored plastic granules over to his Metamaker printer. Petruzzelli figured he was going to fab replacements for the connectors he’d messed up on the bridge. He was a conscientious kid, in his way.

“If those colonists had an upcycler like this,” he said, “they could recycle their own stuff. Most of it, anyway.”

“Hey, good idea.” She was being ironic. “You should suggest it to your dad.”

“But then we wouldn’t make as much money.”

So, she wasn’t going to miss him
that
much.

★

Back on Ceres, Petruzzelli had a face-to-face interview with Adnan Kharbage. He questioned her about her reasons for wanting to join Star Force, and shook his head pityingly at her insistence she wanted to serve. The conversation devolved into an argument about Kharbage, LLC’s predatory business model.

“Your son is starting to notice things,” Petruzzelli said. “He pointed out recently that if the colonists had upcyclers and multimaterial 3D printers, our role in their lives would be greatly reduced.”

“That equipment is far too expensive for them to even consider purchasing,” Adnan said. “They are all stony broke.”

“And whose fault is that? Anyway, you could sell it to them on layaway with astronomical interest.”

“Teach a man to fish,” Adnan said, “and he will not buy any fish from you in the future.”

“I don’t think you’ve got that quote right,” Petruzzelli replied dryly.

It was kind of fun speaking honestly to her boss. She was also enjoying the well-scrubbed air of Ceres, blowing cold and moist off the salt lake in front of the Kharbages’ villa. She accepted a refill of arak.

“About Michael,” she said. “Why did you send him out with me?”

“Maybe I wanted to teach him to fish,” Adnan said.

“Ha, ha. In that case, he should be in school.”

“As you know, he has been expelled from every school on Ceres.” When Adnan said
every
school he meant the top private schools. A free UN education was no education at all, at least in his opinion.

“And I’m supposed to be the next best option to Winchester? All I’ve taught him is how to beat the Fuglies in
Existential Threat
.”

“He has also learned about spaceships and their correct operation. That’s important if he will join the company someday.”

“He didn’t need much teaching there,” Petruzzelli admitted. “He’s a whiz with mechanical systems. Pretty damn good with IT, too.”

“I know!” Adnan glowed. “My boy is a prodigy.”

“Still, I’d rather have had a crew.”

“Our margins are very, very slim.”

“Not that slim,” Petruzzelli said thoughtlessly, gesturing at the deluxe spread behind them. Adnan Kharbage’s ski chalet stood on stilts at the edge of a viridian expanse of planktonic seaweed, the largest body of liquid water on the surface of Ceres. Near the deck where they were sitting, sea otters frolicked, leaving black wakes in the sargassum. The sound of safety bells drifted from the slopes to the east of the lake, where people were skiing moguls. Clouds of snow rose like explosions. An oversized, rectangular ‘sun’ shone upon this mashup of an Alpine lake and an Antarctic nature preserve. Most Ceresites never got to see the horizon from one year’s end to the next. Adnan was doing nicely for himself—at the expense of pioneers who made a living by running filthy, poisonous He3 factories.

His brows drew together; he was clearly remembering he had fired her, and why. She stuck her arms into the sleeves of her coat. Tensed to rise, she said, “But about Mikey. Why? Really, sir, why? I mean, if there’s something I was meant to teach him, and didn’t, I would feel bad about that.”

Adnan Kharbage sagged like a sack of trash. “Ms. Petruzzelli, I hoped you would teach my son something he has not learned at home or at school: how to be a good person. Whether you succeeded or not remains to be seen.”

★

The next day, Petruzzelli got on a flight back to Earth. UNSA, the UN’s commercial spaceflight regulator, was commandeering private passenger ferries to redistribute personnel and equipment throughout the solar system in support of the coming war effort. Berths were scarce. Petruzzelli spent nearly all her severance pay on a first-class ticket, and still ended up sharing her cabin with two geologists who had suddenly received job offers from Star Force. She shared her black-market tequila with them and tried to suppress pangs of envy. At least they
had
job offers. What if, after all this, Star Force didn’t take her? What if she’d thrown her career away to chase a hopeless dream? That would be almost as humiliating as throwing everything away for a man.

ii.

The
Kharbage Collector
remained parked at Occator Spaceport, in the equatorial region of Ceres known as the Alps, while Adnan Kharbage hunted for someone to replace Petruzzelli. She had really left him up the proverbial creek. Good pilots were hard to find. Among professional astronauts, the ability to pilot a large commercial spacecraft was commonplace. Giving orders to the ship’s hub was all there was to it. Even a child could do that. What Adnan Kharbage—and every other ship-owner—sought in a pilot was something less easily quantified: a retentive mind stocked with general knowledge about how ships worked, to be drawn on when—not if—something went wrong … and above all, the psychological toughness to thrive on long, lonely journeys through sectors that subtended as much as 15% of the asteroid belt. Petruzzelli had all those qualities and some.

One obvious way to circumvent the risk of pilot failure was to hire more people. Human beings did better in groups as a rule. That’s just how it was. A ship like the
Kharbage Collector
would optimally carry a crew of fifteen to twenty. Kharbage, LLC had fielded crews that size in the days of the United Nations Venus Remediation Project (UNVRP), when the dream of terraforming Venus had unlocked a flood of taxpayer money for subcontractors to wallow in. But nowadays? Fuhgeddaboudit.

So Adnan Kharbage was looking for a steely-eyed flyboy—or flygirl—who dreamed of nothing more glorious than driving a garbage truck through vast empty volumes of space. He was having no luck, because half the other ship-owners on Ceres were also hiring. There’d been an extraordinary spate of resignations after the UN’s declaration of war.

Adnan had no opinion on
that.
None he was willing to voice openly, in any case. But he hadn’t gotten this far in life by failing to anticipate disasters, and expediently coming up with ways to mitigate said disasters and still turn a tidy profit. He made arrangements to send his son to boarding school on Earth.

★

“He’s bribed the government of the Former United Kingdom to get me into some dump called Harrow,” Michael said to his friends. “I’m not going, of course.”

“School is for losers,” they agreed.

“I already know everything.”

Michael uttered this sentence with the simplistic confidence of a child. It was not far off the mark as truth, with regard to the kind of stuff they taught in school these days. Michael had an IQ of 174—the result of a pre-birth genetic procedure done illegally and at great expense on Ganymede. These procedures tended to have unforeseen consequences, and Michael was no exception. He had a drugstore implant to manage his autism spectrum disorder. Nothing could be done about his extremely low boredom threshold.