The Phobos Maneuver (20 page)

“Someone has to do the right thing,” Gwynneth Blake said, into the wall. She lay facedown, finished.

Petruzzelli wasn’t finished. She pushed up to her hands and knees. Felt like there was an 800-pound hog riding on her back. “So what’s your big idea? We can’t abandon the guys on Stickney.”

“Of course not.” Zhang faced her on his hands and knees. The tendons in his neck quivered with the sheer effort of keeping his head up. “So
we
just have to go on flying suicide missions. Right?” Suddenly, he pushed off into a burpee. He stood erect. In five gees. “I don’t want to die,” he said. “Woooo. Fuck this Coriolis effect.”

“So we take them off!” Petruzzelli said. The idea energized her. She pushed up into a squat. The Coriolis force made her head swim. “Of course! Smuggle engine parts into the dropedoes. Get them to build escape pods. They could use the dropedoes. Then we’d pick them up. It’d be tricky …” She saw a vision of herself as one of the brave pilots who saved the Stickney heroes’ lives.

Zhang crumpled sideways. His body hit the wall of the centrifuge with all the force of five gravities. Zubrowski dragged his left arm out from under him. There was blood. On the wipe-clean wall, on Zhang’s skinsuit, on Zubrowski’s hands. When you had a nanotically reinforced skeleton, it was awfully hard to break a bone. But flesh remained fragile for now, at least until it was replaced by something synthetic.

Zhang pushed Zubrowski away. “You’ve been listening to your ship, haven’t you, Zuzu?”

“It’s pretty smart.”

“No, it isn’t.” Zhang dragged his injured hand to his face. He stared cross-eyed at the blood. “It’s been programmed to put that idea in your head. If enough people listened to their ships, we might end up taking them all off. Problem solved, from Geneva’s point of view. And it would all be on the individual pilots who quote,
disobeyed orders,
unquote. No need for the UN to betray its own principles.”

Petruzzelli had a feeling similar to when some instrument on the
Kharbage Collector’s
bridge used to go on the blink. Shocked, and betrayed. She had
trusted
her ship. She squatted there with the weight of the world on her shoulders.

“The reason we’re in a hurry,” Zubrowski said from his supine position, “is that we suspect some of the others are conspiring with their ships. We’ve got wind of a plot involving some of the Houston Howlers. They’re planning a so-called rescue, with magnetic grapples. Snag the Fraggers when they come out to pick up their next load of stuff.”

“How’d you hear about that?” was all Petruzzelli could think of to say.

“Zubrowski is sleeping with one of the Howlers,” Zhang said. “But it isn’t serious. Right, Z?”

“That’s right, Z,” Zubrowski said.

“This
is serious. The war’s at an inflection point. It’s up to us.”

Petruzzelli’s vision was tunnelling down. Zhang’s face floated at the wrong end of a gray telescope.

“Are you in?”

A few moments ago, she would have said she’d have to think about it. Now she grunted, “Are you kidding? Just tell me what to do.”

“First things first. Climb. We’ll finish this discussion in the showers.”

Zhang refused offers of help from Zubrowski, Morgan, and Petruzzelli. Somehow, he made it to the top without using his left hand. After what had happened to him, Petruzzelli didn’t dare try to stand up, but she hit all her touchpoints.

It was an even greater feeling than usual when the centrifuge stopped. Petruzzelli followed the others to the showers. She felt light enough to dance.

★

Elfrida woke up with her alarm shining in her eyes.
Shit!
Late for work! Her temples throbbed, despite the hangover pills she’d taken last night. She hustled through her minimal morning routine. Wet wipes for face and armpits, skin cream to combat space-station dryness. She pulled her gecko boots on, and changed the t-shirt she’d slept in for a less grungy one. There was no point trying to look good, considering what her day held.

She caught up with Colden in the mess. The Space Corps agents had been assigned to a region of Wheel Two formerly occupied by some division of Eureka Station’s privileged, sinecured ground crew. Those folks knew the procurement system like their own names. They’d acquired a robot chef that would fix you anything from scrambled eggs to Black Forest gateau. Elfrida was in too much of a hurry to take advantage this morning. Her waistline didn’t need it, anyway. She grabbed a soymilk Americano, and followed Colden out of the mess. “Whew! That was quite a night.”

“Sleep well?” Colden smirked.

“Ow!” Elfrida had burned her mouth. “You really should get in touch with Kristiansen.”

“I cannot think about him first thing in the morning,” Colden said. But she had been thinking about him last night, and talking about him. She often did when she was drunk.

Elfrida took careful sips of her coffee as they walked through Wheel 2 to the therapy clinic. The corridors were more like deep slots. They meandered between promontories of antiquated, noisy life-support machinery. Buttresses of asteroid rock supported prefab eyries splarted into any and all available gaps. Smart posters provided splashes of color. They chirruped messages about hygiene and information security, which were drowned out by the noise of the 08:00 shift change. Elfrida finished her coffee and handed the cup to a passing recycling bot.

The therapy clinic was a depressing backwater on Wheel Three. Psych cases, including failed suicides, jittery pilots, and unstable personality disorders, sat on brightly colored beanbags, waiting for their appointments. Droning music, intended to keep those in the waiting area calm, filtered through strategically hidden speakers in the ceiling. Elfrida and Colden walked past those waiting glumly for their turn to speak and receive meds, down a staff-only corridor. They both applied their faces to an iris scanner and touched a fingerprint reader. An unmarked door swung open with a barely audible hiss.

They stepped into their real place of work: a gigantic, brand-new telepresence center.

Rows of couches, packed like economy-class plane seats, held the twitching bodies of phavatar operators from every division of Star Force, plus a hundred or so Space Corps agents.

Much of the work of the Space Corps, in pre-war days, had consisted of long-distance telepresence operations. They had spent their days suit-hopping among phavatars dispatched to remote asteroid colonies, dealing with health emergencies and social problems from many light-seconds away. They were better at it than the Star Force professionals.

Colden touched Elfrida on the shoulder. “See you,” she said, and headed for her assigned couch. Elfrida followed suit.

These couches had to be manned around the clock, so the operators worked three shifts. Elfrida touched the button that would signal her arrival.

The operator in ‘her’ couch jerked. He logged out, removed his headset, mask, and gloves, and sat up. “Hey! Good morning, or is it good night?”
Class of ’88,
Elfrida thought.
Still in his teens.
“Have a great day!” He passed her the headset and bopped off, moving easily, not even stiff after eight hours in the couch.

Elfrida sat down, thoughts about the physical resilience of the young spinning darkly through her head. She also marveled at the reminder that some people were enjoying this war.

She put on the headset and pulled the still-warm gloves onto her hands. Because she was late, she didn’t bother with the sanitizer wipes for the mask. She fitted it over her face, feeling the residue of oily teenage skin transfer to her cheeks. Two holes under her nostrils allowed her to breathe. She closed her eyes and saw the log-in screen.

She’d be operating Oliver 475AX today. A new one. They shuffled the assignments every shift, so you’d have no chance to form a rapport, even if you were inclined to.

She logged in.

And opened her eyes on Stickney.

xvi.

In his former life, Mendoza had been a bit of a hacker. Now, wrapped in freezeblankets on the bridge of the
Monster,
he used his old tricks to access forums hidden in the spam-flooded, virus-infested badlands of the internet. Most people relied on curated feeds for their news, but if you went off the beaten track, you could find information that was too raw for even the cheekiest curator.

The PLAN had nuked Hyderabad.

What?

He surfed over to the official news feeds, where all was positivity and reassurance. UNSA had come up with a cute little sim that let you play at being a PORMS operator, guarding Earth against meteors flung by the PLAN from deep space.

Back to the forums. Now they were saying it had been a cobalt bomb. Someone had posted pictures of the flash.

Back to
The Solar System Today.
Yup, Hyderabad was in the news. An industrial accident …

Mendoza didn’t know which was more frightening: the fact that Earth’s PORMSnet turned out not to be 100% effective, or the fact that the UN was trying to cover it up, or the fact that the cover-up was so freaking lame. There hadn’t been any industrial accidents on Earth for a century, because there wasn’t any industry on Earth anymore.

Back to the forums.
Yeah, man, and they got Midway, too …

He was freaking himself out. He floated over to the fridge and got a mochaccino. The fridge hummed, cool and bright inside. The screen on the door glowed death blue. This refrigerator contained a tame copy of the Heidegger program, known as the Ghost, which Jun used tactically on occasion. Mendoza had seen what the Heidegger program could do in the wild, and felt uneasy sharing the bridge with it, but that didn’t stop him from eating and drinking stuff out of the fridge.

Beep!

His frayed nerves twitched spasmodically at the sound. He hadn’t heard it for so long he’d forgotten what it was. The doorbell!

Not a physical doorbell, of course, but an alert Kiyoshi had set up.

Someone was attempting to enter one of the airlocks.

Mendoza put his mochaccino back in the fridge and checked the external optical feed. He expected to see either nothing, or one of the
Monster’s
own repair bots which had somehow got stuck outside.

He saw a torpedo-shaped drone three meters in length, towing a mini-Wetblanket full of bundles.

The torpedo bore a familiar logo on its fuselage: a lower-case orange ‘a’ with a jaunty drone flying around it.

Mendoza scratched the beard he’d grown, because shaving was too much trouble. “WTF?” he muttered. Then he went back to the internet.

New search:
How far can Dronazon’s drones fly, anyway?

Beep! Beep!

“Jun?”

Alternately floating and kicking off, Mendoza went to the data center at the end of the bridge and peeked in. Twelve stacks of billion-crystal processing units hummed. The cooling system roared. Cold air rolled out. Mendoza retreated, rubbing his goose-fleshed arms. Dumb to look for Jun in there
.
You might as well slice the top of a person’s skull off to look for them in their brain.

He drifted ‘down’ through the now-empty rooms of the ops module, occasionally calling out. They’d turned off the air circulation down here to save on oxygen. The atmosphere smelled stale. Apart from the sound of his own voice, the ship was silent.

But not
quite
silent.

From time to time, as he floated past one of the PA speakers, he heard a whispery crackle, like voices on a radio channel not properly tuned in.

He stopped on the crew deck, where the whispers seemed louder. Floated up to the nearest speaker. Held his breath and let his mouth hang open, the better to listen.

Whkwssshoo … shpptffftao …

“Jun! Jun, where are you?”

Mendoza took a suit from the command airlock and exited the ship. Reeling out a tether behind him, he flew around the heat radiators, careful not to get too close—the
Monster
was not in Ghost mode right now, which meant the radiators could easily be hot enough to melt through his tether.

The Dronazon courier waited patiently outside the crew airlock. It was unmanned, controlled by an operator somewhere on Earth or Midway.

Instead of approaching it, Mendoza let his tether all the way out. He was now flying clear of the Monster, like a kite. He looked down on the ship’s 350-meter length—metal hills, a forest of heat radiators casting stark shadows. Then he looked out into space. The sun washed out everything else in the sky. He could see nothing. Then he could see something.

He fiddled with his suit’s optical telescope functionality until it came into focus.

A blue-green dot.

Mom,
Mendoza thought. And then he thought of Hyderabad, and a terrible sadness welled up within him.

He flew down to the engineering module, released his tether, and let himself in. The airlock said the atmosphere down here was still OK. He pulled off his helmet.

Music flooded into his ears.

Haydn? Stravinsky? Wickjyerema? No. The choral harmonies sounded like Haydn, but the bombast was missing, and he’d
never
heard a string section used like that. It harmonized with his sadness, somehow explaining and curing it at once, the way good music should do.

He floated ‘down’ past the catwalks around the reactor. The lights were on. The drive stuck up into the middle of the engineering deck, jacketed in heat shields. The floor around it was an all-purpose manufacturing area. Bots worked busily, feeding the printers and collecting their output. The machines were probably making a hell of a noise, but the music drowned it out.

“Jun!” Mendoza shouted. “This is awesome! It’s beautiful! But it’s kind of loud!”

Jun’s projection walked out from behind the reactor. Mendoza had never been so glad to see him.

“Do you like it?” Jun yelled.

“I love it.” Mendoza landed near him. The floor vibrated with the activity of the printers. “It’s kinda Haydn-esque, but those strings? And what’s the percussion section doing? I really need to get back into music. This makes me realize I haven’t listened to anything in ages. Who is this, anyway? I’m embarrassed I don’t know.”