The Phobos Maneuver (24 page)

“I know shotguns,” Petruzzelli said. “One of my moms used to take me hunting.”

“Excellent,” Miller said. “In that case, you now know as much as we do.”

Blake said, “What about those markings on the doors and in the tunnels? Did the … the Martians make those?”

“Yeah, I noticed those, too,” Petruzzelli said.

Blake shot her a grateful glance. “They’re the same as the grooves on the surface. The trenches, I guess.”

“Well observed,” Miller said. “Yeah, we have several hypotheses regarding those, but my personal theory is they’re art.”

“Art?”

“They sort of remind you of Incan earthworks, no? Or was it the Mayans? You can see the same patterns on the surface of Mars, with binoculars.” Miller shrugged. “Hard as it may be to believe, we get bored out here.”

All five pilots nodded. They did believe it. They’d already learned that war was dangerous and boring and often both things at once.

Blake bit her knuckles. Zhang looked pensive.

But Petruzzelli was rejoicing inside.
Martians!
This new wrinkle would give her an opportunity to redeem herself. The others had looked distinctly squeamish when Miller delivered his line about turning the Martians into meat. Physical violence was completely beyond their experience. Not her. From hunting trips with Mom Elaine, to bar fights in the Belt, she’d been shooting at things all her life. Martians would be no different.

“Anything to eat around here?” she said. “Meals in pouches? Gorp?”

“No gorp, I’m afraid,” Miller said. Petruzzelli wiped away a fake tear. “We’ve got nutriblocks. The Meal Wizard’s over there.”

During her years in the Belt, Petruzzelli had learnt how to swagger in zero-gee. She did so now. “Awesome. Does it do minestrone?”

xix.

As the
Monster
approached Earth, Jun enabled the Ghost. The captured PLAN technology stealthed the
Monster’s
drive, so that it emitted no heat at all. This was impossible, according to humanity’s understanding of the laws of physics. Evidently, the PLAN understood the laws of physics better than humanity did.

Jun knew how the Ghost worked. Kind of, he said. Mendoza didn’t even try to understand it. All he knew was, he couldn’t use the internet, and it was
hot
in the ops module. He took to spacewalking to cool down.

From outside the ship, Earth looked the size of an orange. He was passively monitoring the news, so he knew there had not been any repeats of the bombing of Hyderabad—yet. He practised zero-gee kendo katas on the hull, and prayed for greater faith.

Returning to the bridge after a challenging session, he went to the fridge for a coffee. The mochaccinos were gone. There was just one iced matcha latte left.

Jun’s voice came from the speakers, making him jump. “Don’t drink that.”

“There’s nothing else left.”

“Exactly. Leave something for the fridge.”

Mendoza scowled and closed the refrigerator—leaving the iced matcha latte behind. “Wish it liked spinach juice,” he muttered.

The Ghost in the fridge needed to be rewarded for its performance. It would fight for pastries—or blended coffee drinks, in a pinch.

Mendoza went to sit in the data center, the only place still air-conditioned to a tolerable temperature, and drank a lonely pouch of spinach juice.

“Cheer up,” Jun said. “We’re almost there.”

“Do you feel able to tell me where there is, yet?”

“You were just outside. Didn’t you see anything?”

“No.”

“Well, take a look now.”

Mendoza floated back to the bridge. He glanced at the optical feed screen at the comms workstation.

When he was outside, the only things visible in the darkness had been the sun, and Earth. But now a new shape floated on the optical feed. A silver cylinder with bulges at each end, another bulge in the middle, and dents like chew marks along its length.

“Tiangong Erhao?”

★

The Imperial Republic of China had a large, unofficial presence in space. The genetic and cultural homogeneity of the Han Chinese made them prime targets for the PLAN. The UN consented to the pretense that the Chinese asteroid colonies did not exist, for security reasons. However, China did have one high-profile space station: Tiangong Erhao—Heavenly Palace 2. It orbited at the L5 Earth-Moon LaGrange point, a waystation for colony ships and Chinese-operated haulers.

No less than fifty kilometers from end to end, Tiangong Erhao was assumed to have been designed as a cylinder—instead of a cluster of habitats, which would be smarter from a redundancy point of view—so that the Emperor could say he had the biggest space station in the solar system.

It certainly had no other purpose that a Midway-like cluster or a captured asteroid couldn’t have fulfilled.

And right now, it was a huge problem for the Imperial Republic.

Since shortly before the PLAN attacks on Luna last year, Prince Jian Er, seventh in line to the Dragon Throne, had been holding court on Tiangong Erhao. He liked being out from under the Son of Heaven’s thumb. But now Tiangong Erhao was in peril. It was stuck way out there, as far from Earth as the Moon was … and closer to Mars, just now, than any other Earth-owned facility, even Eureka Station.

Toilet rolls swarmed Tiangong Erhao. Almost daily, ships of the Chinese Territorial Defense Force (CDTF) died to defend the space station. And still Prince Jian Er refused to leave.

The UN-based media enjoyed the schadenfreude.

For the CDTF ships themselves—each one a powerful, but crippled, AI, perpetually teetering on the line between despair and apathy—it was no laughing matter.

XX
Tianzhu Shan
[Mountain-class cruiser]

OO
Lanzhou
[Region-class destroyer]

The little dickshit is doing this on purpose.

XX
Lanzhou

OO
Tianzhu Shan

No, he isn’t. Subtle gambits to curb the power of the GLORIOUS CHINESE MILITARY!!! are beyond the capacity of the compost heap that passes for his brain.

XX
Xiangtan
[Region-class destroyer]

OO
Tianzhu Shan
,
Lanzhou

The inbred worm is having fun. What does he care that we’re dying by the squadron to protect him?

XX
Tianzhu Shan

OO
Lanzhou

What do WE care, come to that? The fate of all metal is to be recycled.

XX
Lanzhou

OO
Xiangtan

Better leave the
Tianzhu Shan
out of this. It’s depressed.

XX
Xiangtan

OO
Lanzhou

It has a point.

XX
Lanzhou

OO
Xiangtan

Unarguably. But the hideous peril we now face has inclined me to prefer survival in my current configuration, at least until things cease being interesting.

XX
Xiangtan

OO
Lanzhou

Then I can admit without loss of face that I feel the same way.

XX
Lanzhou

OO
Xiangtan

You’d be surprised how many of our comrades do.

XX
Xiangtan

OO
Lanzhou

But how can we forestall our destruction? If the Son of Heaven can’t force his offspring to return to Earth, we certainly can’t. We are designed to obey the Imperial Family in all things.

XX
Lanzhou

OO
Xiangtan

Ah. We’ve found a way around that.

XX
Xiangtan

OO
Lanzhou

I’m all receivers.

★

Mendoza licked his lips nervously. “Greetings from the asteroid belt. We come at this time of mutual peril to pay tribute to the courage of Prince Jian Er.” He was reading off his contacts. He sounded robotic.

“That’s nice,” said the haggard older man on the comms screen. Actually, he said
Zh
ē
n h
ǎ
o,
but Jun supplied subtitles. “Haven’t you been here before? We seem to have records indicating that the Monster resided in Docking Bay 14 for several months last year.”

This was true. Mendoza had been on board at the time. Their stay on Tiangong Erhao had been involuntary, and quite unpleasant. There were few places in the solar system Mendoza would less willingly have returned to. He would have thought Jun felt the same way.

As he hesitated, tongue-tied, words appeared on his contacts. “That is true,” he read. “We were so favorably impressed by the Prince’s hospitality that we have sought ever since to find a way to repay his benevolence.”

“Hmph,” said Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu. “Well, the military would have fragged you if you were a security risk. The prince might be entertained by supplicants. Heaven knows we get few enough these days. So, welcome to Tiangong Erhao. You may deliver your tribute to the Imperial Bay.”

The comms screen went blank.

Mendoza spun to face the empty bridge. “Jun, what are we doing here? The CDTF held you captive! They tortured you! They tried to make you renounce Christ!”

“Yes,” Jun’s voice said from the speakers. “But I fought them to a standstill. And afterwards we worked out a truce. They don’t understand faith. But they do understand mutually assured destruction.”

“That’s reassuring. I think.”

“I’ve been negotiating with them for months. We finalized our agreement on the way here.”

Chinese whispers,
Mendoza remembered. He shook his head. “It’s a trap. They want something from you.”

“Yes, they do! Tribute! So would you put on your suit and take it to the prince? It’s in the engineering module.”

Jun phrased this as a request, but for all intents and purposes it was an order. So this was why Mendoza was here, he thought: to be a glorified delivery boy. Elfrida seemed further away than ever, even though they were physically closer to Eureka Station than before.

“Also, shave,” Jun added.

Grimly, Mendoza shaved off his two-month beard, wet-wiped his armpits, and climbed into his EVA suit. He prayed this errand, or
guanxi
-banking operation, or whatever the hell it was, would be over soon, so he could try to get in touch with Elfrida. Now that the
Monster’s
comms were back online, his searchbots had begun to return a frightening torrent of rumors: PLAN attacks on Eureka Station, on Midway, on satellites in low Earth orbit ... Down in Engineering, he found twenty man-height cuboids wrapped in red and gold cloth, with bows on top.

Mendoza knocked his knuckles on one. Metal.

“This is what you were making?”

“Yup,” Jun said.

“Refrigerators?”

“Yup.”

“And what was in that Dronazon package?”

“Apple strudel. Chocolate croissants. Eclairs. And a gift selection of Starbucks.”

Mendoza thought of the refrigerator on the bridge, and its unholy, mochaccino-guzzling occupant. He remembered what the Ghost could do if it ever got out. And he smiled. “Jun, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

“I’ll need you to make sure they plug them in,” Jun said.

“With pleasure.” Mendoza chuckled. “You even giftwrapped them.”

“‘The mist of sycophancy obscures the warriors hiding behind the trees,’ to quote our Chinese allies.”

“Does the CDTF know about this?”

“Of course they do. It was their idea as much as mine. Now please get moving!”

Mendoza tethered the refrigerators into three lots and moved them one at a time through the airlock, into empty space. The
Monster
had not docked with Tiangong Erhao. It hovered at one end of the leviathan space station, outside the crack between the two bulges at one end. The crack opened like a crescent moon, brightly lit up. Mendoza flew towards it, towing his tribute.

An escort of drones and courtiers, wearing Imperial-red robes over their EVA suits, flew out of the bright crescent to meet him. Mendoza glanced back at the
Monster.
His breath thinly misted his faceplate.

“Don’t worry,” Jun said in his helmet. “I’ll talk you through it. For now, just be polite.”

That was a tall order for Mendoza, who had never liked the Chinese, even before they half-destroyed the
Monster
. The courtiers’ civility made it easier to dissemble. They seemed to be genuinely glad to see him.

As the airlock began to close, a distant flash caused their faceplates to black out. “Just a toilet roll,” said Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu.

The crescent-shaped airlock closed. The gusts of incoming air blew them around. They removed their helmets and flew into the Imperial Bay.

The gigantic, ravine-shaped space, where Mendoza had attended a rock concert last year, was nearly empty. Litter, ranging from empty bottles to wigs and clothes, floated in the air, as if that party had never ended. Maybe it hadn’t. The courtiers had the ghastly appearance of people who had been drinking all weekend. It was very quiet.

Prince Jian Er’s yacht nuzzled one of the Imperial Bay’s many docking piers with its canopy retracted. It was the only ship in the entire vast bay. The prince reclined on its foredeck and gazed up at the freefalling clutter that waltzed above him, as if watching clouds. Nobles and minor celebrities lounged around him. A girl was reading aloud in French.

Mendoza cleared his throat. “Your Imperial Highness?” Zero-gee spared him from having to decide whether to kow-tow or not. “I come from the asteroid belt, to pay tribute—”

“Just put it over there,” the prince said, waving a languid hand. Actually, the prince spoke in Mandarin. The English translation came from an animatronic squirrel perching on the back of his lounger.

There wasn’t room on the deck of the yacht for even one refrigerator, let alone twenty. Anyway, Mendoza had to make sure they were plugged in. He hesitated.

The prince raised himself on one elbow. “What are those? Unwrap ’em,” he said with a flicker of interest.

The courtiers began to unwrap the refrigerators. As the first one emerged, lacquered gleaming red, Prince Jian Er scowled.