The Phobos Maneuver (29 page)

xxiii.

We get bored out here,
Colonel Miller had said to Petruzzelli when she and the other pilots first arrived on Stickney. But she hadn’t found that to be true at all. There was plenty to do. And she hadn’t even clapped eyes on a Martian yet.

In fact, with the coming of the Star Force deserters, everything had changed. In the intervals between toilet-roll strafing runs, the four intact Gravesfighters had been cannibalized for their shields, armaments, and fuel cells by shifts of brave men and women working on the surface. Petruzzelli had worked as many of those shifts as she was allowed, maxing out her radiation exposure quota. In her eyes at least, it went some way towards making up for her reckless destruction of her own ship. In the end, of course, the toilet rolls got the Gravesfighters. But by then, they were mere useless shells. The good stuff had all been hacked out and carried underground.

By far the best prizes were two functional charged-particle cannons. Fragger engineers retooled them into man-portable weapons. In zero-gee, it didn’t matter that each cannon was ten meters long and weighed three tons. The smallest female Fragger could carry one, the only difficulty being corners. They ripped out the precision targeting and beam control hardware, and replaced it with the simplest user interface ever: a lever.

While all this was being done, they lived on half-rations of water. They didn’t have much to begin with, and they had to crack quite a lot of it to top up the cannons’ supply of hydrogen ions.

Six days after Petruzzelli and her companions landed, Colonel Miller gathered them all together in their fetid refuge under the laser assembly.

“Thanks to our brave mutineers,” he began, “we now have a decent chance of capturing the Castle.”

Ironic applause.

“If we don’t capture it, we’ll run out of water before our next supply drop, anyway. So this really is it. Elfrida?”

One of the phavatars rose to its feet. It had a battered masculine face, but the voice that came out was Elfrida’s.

“Thank you, Colonel. As you know, I think this is a stupid idea. But now you’ve gone and used up your water, I guess it’s too late to talk you out of it. So we’ll do what we can to help. Specifically, I’ve spoken to the other platoon leaders on shift today, and we’ve agreed to mount a new assault on the Castle. We’ll go over the top, using the Whipple shields from the Gravesfighters to provide cover against enemy artillery. We’ll probably get shot to shit, but it should work as a diversion. I’m very glad
you’re
not going over the top, anyway. The maintenance tunnel probably goes straight to the Castle. I just hope it’s not full of Martians. And like I said, we’ll do our best to draw as many of them out to the surface as possible.”

The phavatar sat down.

“OK,” Colonel Miller said. “Who’s going with the phavatars?”

Twenty-odd Fraggers stuck up their hands. So did Harry Zhang. And so did Luc Zubrowski.

Petruzzelli turned to the two Zs. “Are you crazy?”

“There have to be some humans in the surface assault party, or the Martians won’t think it’s for real.”

“The Martians don’t
think.”

“But something controlling them does. It’s OK, Zuzu. We’ll stay under the Whipple shields. That’ll protect us from the rads.”

But not from blaster fire,
Petruzzelli thought. But she didn’t attempt to further dissuade them. After all, it wasn’t like the alternative—going with the tunnel party—would be a stroll in the park.

The laser assembly’s heat exchanger pipe plunged into the rock of Stickney, through a tunnel slightly wider than the pipe itself. It had to lead to a condenser apparatus somewhere, and its angle suggested the condenser must be in or near the Castle. That would make the pipe about 700 meters long, which was about right, given the heat load it would have had to dissipate when the laser assembly was working.

When the Fraggers first got here, the Martians working on the laser assembly had fled down the tunnel—further proof it led to the Castle. The Fraggers had given chase, but at that time, they hadn’t had shotguns, and the Martians had chaffed up their laser rifles. They had taken so many casualties they had to retreat. The Martians had then barricaded the tunnel from their end.

The assault party scuffed through the snow in the cavern and filed into the tunnel. Petruzzelli shuffled along with a queasy feeling in her bowels. She’d been shitting her guts out yesterday, which made her no better and no worse off than half the Fraggers. She had Stickney dust inside her skinsuit, in her molars, in her hair. Her faceplate was covered with flecks and grease.

“I think they’ve put us in the middle so we won’t be in danger of hitting anything,” said Blake from beside her. “To be honest with you, I don’t mind. This is taking years off my life.”

Petruzzelli considered admitting that she, too, was terrified—literally scared shitless. Instead she just shrugged and adjusted her rifle strap. Each of them had a clunky home-printed shotgun, plus lots of spare shells.

It was absolutely dark. She squelched along on her gecko boots, trailing her right glove along the side of the 3-meter diameter coolant pipe. Then she collided with the Fragger in front of her. The column had halted.

“The guys in front must’ve reached the barricade,” Blake said nervously.

They had a dedicated relay channel. It transmitted the officers’ commands back along the tunnel via line-of-sight. “Ready.” Colonel Miller’s voice was as calm as a lunar sea. “Aim. Fire.”

The man in front of Petruzzelli slammed into her. She slammed into Blake, and the impact transmitted itself all the way to the back of the column.

“Move! Move!”

They hustled forward. Ahead, Petruzzelli saw a faint red glow emanating from the side of the pipe. It was heat. The CP cannon had … worked.

Its stream of charged particles, expanding in a narrow cone, had vaporized the Martians’ barricade.

It had also vaporized the front end of the column.

Petruzzelli de-gripped and floated over a stretch of red-hot slag. Black patches smoked, cooling. Those had been human beings. Had Miller known this would happen?

“At least we didn’t rupture the pipe,” the man in front of her said. “Dog knows what kind of nasty stuff might come boiling out of there. But it seems to be well-shielded; two cheers for Martian engineering.”

Miller sent a runner back to carry the news to the small force that had remained behind in the laser assembly cavern. When the woman returned, bad news percolated along the column.

“No diversion.”

“The phavatars haven’t gone over the top.”

“They’re just freaking
sitting
there.”

“The Farce is with us!”

“I knew it,” Petruzzelli whispered. Miller had trusted Elfrida to make the diversion happen. Big mistake.

Blake said to her, “Zhang and Zoob will go over the top, with or without the phavatars.”

“I know. Sucks, doesn’t it? If we don’t get some action soon, they’ll kill more Martians than us.”

★

When Elfrida asked for a meeting with the boss, she hadn’t expected to get
the
boss.

Admiral Jeremy McLean was the most important person on Eureka Station. When Elfrida walked into his office, she got an impression of belly and brass buttons. A heartbeat later she saw the keen intelligence in his eyes.

“How’s life in tactical telepresence, Agent Goto?”

“That’s what I was hoping to discuss with you, sir.” Elfrida sat down on the ergoform he indicated, pulling her grotty sweatshirt straight. She felt sorely out of place not being in uniform. Her knees were knocking with nerves. “There’s an emergency on Stickney, and I requested permission to provide support. But Captain Pataki rejected my mission plan, so I thought—”

“You thought you’d go over his head,” Commander McLean said. “Actually, Captain Pataki forwarded your mission plan to me. Miller and his merry band are going in through the heat-sink infrastructure?”

“Yes, sir.” She tucked her hands under her thighs to stop herself from fidgeting. “I promised them that the COPs would support their attack by creating a diversion on the surface.” COPs—Combat-Optimized Phavatars. Star Force did come up with a good acronym from time to time, although no one outside of officer country ever used it. “At the present time, sir, my team’s logins have been disabled, so—”

Commander McLean cut her off. “You promised Colonel Miller that the COPs would provide backup for this risky, strategically pointless operation,
without
first clearing it with Captain Pataki?”

Elfrida wilted. “Yes, sir,” she muttered. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, she had thought. She had never imagined that Pataki would disable everyone’s logins. “Strategically
pointless,
sir?”

The door chimed. A short, sturdy officer, bearing a remarkable physical resemblance to a gorilla, came in and saluted.

“Executive Officer Carasso,” McLean greeted him. “Thanks for stopping by. Coffee?”

★

The man ahead of Petruzzelli fired a foil round into the darkness. Fiery globs stuck to distant walls. Screams sliced into her ears. Someone came hurtling backwards, whanged into her, and she whanged into Blake, and Colonel Miller yelled, “Don’t you fucking pussy out on me, ladies and gentlemen! We’re
better
than them!”

Mobility packs sputtered. They flew forward, scraping the pipe and the wall of the tunnel. Up ahead, the flicker of burning foil lit a wider place, and it was clogged with drifting suits, and there was so much smoke from all those foil rounds that she could see the laser beams stabbing across the killing zone, a familiar shade of blue, like welding torches.

They’d advanced 500 meters along the maintenance tunnel, vaporizing two more barricades en route. Now, suddenly, the Martians were on top of them. Jostling along in the middle of the charge, Petruzzelli saw the little bastards boiling out of the roof. The tunnel doglegged, and that was the way they needed to go.

Chaff rounds filled the cavern with sparkling snow. She flew clear of the pack, hit the wall, bounced off. Fired into the Martian vanguard. She anticipated the recoil, let it spin her around, and fired in a new direction. Her suit informed her that an area on her left hip was ablated to a depth of four millimeters. That was nothing. The chaff and the smoke were degrading the Martians’ blaster pulses, and her suit’s armor could stop the rest.

She blasted a Martian with both barrels. Its torso exploded into a mist of red pulp. She let out a yell of triumph. It was crazy the way you could go from
ohshit
to
we’re winning
in a split second. Terror and elation combined into a laser-sharp focus on her next kill, and her next.

Fragments of shouted commentary got through to her, so broken-up she might as well have been listening to gibberish. But she didn’t need to hear, to know they were winning.

And then the cavern lit up like noon on Earth; bodies hurtled towards her, and Petruzzelli had just time to think
ohshit
before her helmet went black.

Something crashed into her so hard, it was like landing on Stickney all over again. She collided with the wall. Her right leg crumpled under her. Agony flared. She might’ve blacked out for a second; couldn’t tell. Everything was black, anyway. Her suit shouted out a damage report that went on and on in excruciating detail.

Reacting with stunned slowness, she watched her telemetry display scroll. OK, she wasn’t going to die in the next five minutes. Time to—to—

She overrode her helmet filters. When she could see again, the first thing she saw was the face of a Fragger. Helmet gone. Suit burned right off his body.
Skin
burned off his body, too, leaving the muscle and sinew beneath exposed in a grisly pantomime of the man he used to be. She pushed him away. Fought loose of a knot of corpses. They’d saved her by taking the brunt of the blast. Them, and Star Force suit technology.

TNT with a rubble shell,
she thought.
Martians waited for us to get into the kill zone, then rolled it down the shaft.

“Hello? Anyone?”

I might be the only person still alive
—

“Zuzu?”

“Blake, thank fuck.”

“Form on me,” came Colonel Miller’s voice. She picked him out of the chaos, high on the roof, near the tunnel the Martians had come out of. She triggered her mobility pack several times before understanding dawned that it no longer functioned. She kicked off with her good leg. “Do not move!” her suit said. “You have a tibial shaft fracture. I have immobilized your right leg, but maneuvering carries a significant risk of further injury.”

“Too fucking bad,” Petruzzelli said. Miller alive meant the assault was still a green light. She flew towards him, batting body parts out of her way. Her right leg stuck out behind her, stiff and useless. She injected herself with the strongest dose of painkillers her suit would allow.

Every time something moved, it startled her. Most of the movement was dead people floating very slowly towards the floor. A pitiful handful of Fraggers converged on Miller’s position.

And:

A bubble of greenish-white fluid bulged out of the heat exchanger pipe.

“Hustle!” Miller shouted.

But Petruzzelli was in the middle of the cavern with a busted mobility pack. No way to hustle.

Terror made her actually start flapping her arms, as if that would somehow make her move faster.

The pipe burst. The coolant fluid swelled out like a corpse-green wall. It came for her at tsunami speed, and swallowed her alive.

xxiv.

Still very far from Mars, Tiangong Erhao continued to hurtle through space. It had travelled six million kilometers from its starting point, but relative to the vastness of the solar system, it had barely crawled off Earth’s crusty doorstep.

All this time, of course, the CDTF and Star Force had been scouring the volume for the vanished ships. Paranoid accusations flew between Beijing, Shackleton City, and Star Force’s dispersed headquarters in Geneva, Houston, Woomera, and Baikonur. The UN and Luna were at the brink of accusing the Chinese of treachery when, 92 hours after their disappearance, a drone found the missing ships.