The Phobos Maneuver (3 page)

They were sitting in a bar at the bottom of the Belows, so far down that the floor was awash in salty water. The bar’s radioisotope electric generator provided heat as well as power for the lights, air circulation, and sound system. This kept the booze in the optics liquid, but it was still so cold everyone was breathing fog, their self-heated coats zipped up to the chin. You basically lived in your coat in the Belows.

The first colonists on Ceres, 120 years ago, had dug in. This was standard practice in the Belt. Whether you were living on a tiny asteroid or a dwarf planet, you needed protection from radiation and impacts. A few meters of regolith above your head took care of that. Digging in also meant digging
out
rock and nickel iron that could be used as construction materials, so it made sense twice over.

The trouble was that Ceres was a watery little world. Its mantle of mixed ice and rock contained more water than all the fresh water on Earth put together, and that was a
lot
considering that Ceres was only 3% Earth’s size. A liquid ocean sloshed around the dwarf planet’s molten core.

Of course, the crust was frozen solid. Average surface temperature: anywhere from -100° to -150°. Step out on the surface unprotected and you’d turn into a human popsicle in a nanosecond.

But habitats generated heat. Whether they were inflatable mining camps, or rigid bunkers constructed from local cryocrete and magnesium silicate, the people and machinery inside got hot. The excess heat had to be dumped via tangles of coolant pipes.

Thus, anything you put down on the surface of Ceres would eventually sink, like a hot spoon stuck into a tub of ice cream.

For the crust was not quite solid. Active hydrological processes in the mantle drove resurfacing, most often at a glacial pace, sometimes in the form of spectacular mudslides. The high salt content of the dwarf planet’s water lowered its freezing point, making it even more prone to melt into slush.

Into this slush the first generation of habitats had been sinking for more than a century. A logical response to the problem might have been to abandon the whole idea of digging in, but the sunk costs fallacy had prevailed, together with dread of the PLAN. Underground habitats were relatively safe from orbital bombardment. So those early colonists had doubled down, building new habs on top of their first ones in Occator, Dantu, Nawish, and Kerwan craters, while continuing to use the old ones.

Those original structures now lay far below the floors of their respective craters, like the bottom layers of 800-meter sponge cakes. It had been confidently predicted that people would move out once they got tired of living so far underground. Psychologists imagined that human beings could not thrive without going outside sometimes. The psychologists turned out to have underestimated the ability of
Homo sapiens
to stay cheerful under empirically dire conditions. Also, no one had predicted the sheer number of people wishing—or being forced—to move
in,
from all corners of the solar system. So those habs stayed full, and expanded sideways as well as down.

From a life-support standpoint, Ceres was the asteroid belt’s Goldilocks destination: enough gravity to grow plants, a surface area the size of India, and all that water, which could be consumed, or split into hydrogen and oxygen. The Ceres PR department claimed the dwarf planet had become humanity’s first 100% self-sufficient colony—though in some circles this claim was considered dubious at best.

The patrons of the Galaxy’s Best Bar, deep beneath Occator Crater, would have described it in less glowing terms, if they hadn’t all been drunk.

Except for Michael. He was on orange juice. Kicking the heels of his wellies against his bar stool, he said, “I wonder if Codfish is there yet?”

★

“Tell me more about your piloting experience,” Adnan Kharbage said to Min-Joon Park.

Adnan had left the first round of interviews to his secretary, who’d eliminated the no-hopers and forwarded him a list of possibles. There were only three people on it. One had been a foilhat who’d bored Adnan for half an hour about the Fermi Paradox. Another had already accepted a different job. That left Min-Joon Park, who seemed too good to be true.

“Oh, I’ve piloted pretty much every kind of ship out there.
Smile,”
Park said. He was a slender Earthborn man of medium height. His dark eyes radiated honesty.

“The
Kharbage Collector
is a twin-module StarTractor.”

“Yes, I’m very familiar with that ship. I mean that type of ship.”

Perhaps English was not Park’s first language. “I am sorry for this personal question …” It was rude to ask people about their ethnic background, even when it was literally as obvious as the nose on their face. “You were born in Korea?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What brought you into space?”

“Oh, you know.
Rueful grin!”
Park’s use of emoticodes proved he was used to spending a lot of time in a spacesuit, where self-captioning had to substitute for facial expressions. “I wanted to see the solar system. My family has always travelled extensively.”

“You wouldn’t by any chance be a
namsadang?”

“A
namsadang?
Certainly not!”

It was understandable that Park should take offense. The
namsadang
were a nomadic community with roots in the Korean peninsula, created when the reunification of North and South Korea had thrown thousands of North Korean black marketeers, wheeler-dealers, snakeheads, scammers, and grifters out of a job. They had drifted all over the world and eventually into outer space, staying networked, and mostly keeping to their old trades. Adnan apologized for raising the topic. Park almost certainly wasn’t a
namsadang.
If he was, he’d have better prospects—now that war had broken out—than driving the
Kharbage Collector
for the kind of money Adnan was offering.

Just to make sure, Adnan said, “I have had problems in the past with captains who used my ships for independent, and actually sometimes illegal, enterprises.” Even Petruzzelli had gotten mixed up at one point with a scheme to extort compensation payments from UNVRP. Adnan hadn’t punished her for it, since in principle he approved. But now they were all living a lot closer to the edge. “That kind of thing is strictly prohibited. It could get us into a lot of trouble, the kind that
no one
needs.”

“I understand.”

“Each of my ships is equipped with a transponder that continually transmits its location,” Adnan mentioned, “as well as a full suite of onboard recording devices. All transmissions are monitored by a compliance lawyer, for safety and insurance purposes.”

“I understand.”

Petruzzelli had induced Michael to jark the recording devices while she was up to her hijinks. That wouldn’t be a problem in future, since Michael would soon be on his way to Earth. Speaking of which, he had to track the boy down. Whenever Michael came home to Ceres, he vanished like a rabbit down a hole.

“That’s about it,” Adnan concluded. “Do you have any questions for me at this time, Mr. Park?”

Park looked worried. “Could you give me some indication of when I might hear—”

“Hear what?”

“Embarrassed smile.
About the job?”

“You’ve already got the job!” Adnan laughed. He reached across the table and slapped Park on the bicep, nearly knocking the smaller man out of his ergoform in the low gravity. “You were the only candidate who wasn’t either a lunatic or unavailable. So I made the decision to hire you as soon as you turned out to be a normal human being!”

“Ha, ha,” said Park, looking relieved.

“I am honored to welcome a pilot of your caliber to Kharbage, LLC. My secretary will be in touch shortly. And now, if you will excuse me …”

★

A text popped up on Michael’s contacts.
“Got the job.”
It came from Min-Joon Park, better known to his family, friends, and enemies as Codfish. It reached the others around the bar table at the same time.

“Arrr! There was never any doubt,” said Codfish’s brother, Min-Jae, who went by the alias Captain Haddock. “That profile you cooked up for him was a thing of radiant beauty, Michael. Testimonials from nonexistent employers, and even a CSR award!”

Michael grinned. It was nice when your efforts paid off. But now they would have to move fast. He slipped off his bar stool, landing with a splash in the three centimeters of water on the floor.

“What worries me,” said Codfish’s wife, Coral, “is that Cod’s never actually flown a spaceship in his life.”

“Cease your funning, wench,” Haddock said. “He won’t be flying this one, either. I will.”

While they spoke, Anemone, Haddock’s wife, had paid their tab. The last to slide off his stool was Haddock and Anemone’s son, Kelp, who’d had his nose in a book the entire time. He dawdled after them, rolling up his tablet and stuffing it in his coat pocket. Kelp was two years older than Michael. Spaceborn, he looked like a long, wavering piece of the seaweed he was named after. He was always reading books—not useful ones, either, but stupid fiction. Michael didn’t have much time or patience for him.

It took them a while to get out of the bar as Haddock knew everyone and felt compelled to stop and speak to each person they passed on the way to the exit. He and his family were
namsadang,
of course. They’d had a successful piracy thing going at one point, but their ship had been lost and they’d been stuck on Ceres for a while now. That was about to change.

Regardless of the poor circumstances they’d found themselves in, Haddock hadn’t wasted his time here, using it to bank a multitude of connections and favors.

He had called in one of those many favors today.

They exited the Galaxy’s Best Bar
into a red-light district whose caverns and connecting passages extended every which way into the fiber-reinforced ice. This material, known as cryocrete, improved on the ancient concept of pykrete: it was ice mixed with bamboo chips, which were widely available on Ceres, since bonsai bamboo was everyone’s favorite crop to grow for clothes. The first generation of habs had been built on cryocrete foundations in hopes that it would prevent subsidence—unfortunately it hadn’t. The same material had been used for subsequent infills. It was strong enough to contain the pressure of one atmosphere at a thickness of just a meter. As the Belows sank, tunnels and large caverns had been carved out of the cryocrete layers between the habs—but the idea of ‘layers’ was misleading. Everything melted its way down at a slightly different pace, so no two habs were ever at exactly the same depth at the same time. You might trudge through a cavern dotted with trailers up on blocks, which called itself 30 Below, and then squeeze through the shell of a disused modular hab embedded in the cavern’s wall, emerging further
down
in the toasty infrared heating of the Libertarian Society on 29. Even natives tended to lose their bearings on occasion.

There were Belows in all of Ceres’s Big Four craters—Occator, Dantu, Nawish, and Kerwan—and Occator was far from the biggest. But no one knew just how big it was. The place was continually morphing, sinking, and being expanded. Michael got hopelessly lost outside of his favorite haunts. The Haddock gang were no better off. But today, Haddock had got hold of one of the elusive personages known as navigators, who claimed to carry maps of the Belows in their heads.

This navigator was a teenage girl with a runny nose. She led them through the labyrinth to the piece de resistance of Occator Belowser ingenuity: Lake Chandler. Michael had never been here before. He stared in delight. From the frost-rimed wharf, black water stretched out of sight into mazy shadows. Glowstrips garlanded the odd support pillar, which appeared to have been left there for decoration, rather than to hold up the roof—nothing needed much holding up on Ceres. Corrugated paths of light glimmered on the water. Smaller lights drifted in the distance: boats. Real boats! You weren’t allowed to go boating on Lake Occator, on the surface, because it would disturb the seaweed.

“This is so cool,” Michael said to their navigator.

“It’s just a big fish farm.” She waved at one of the nearby boats. Its two-man crew rowed it back to the wharf. “These guys will take you the rest of the way.”

The boat was flat-bottomed, crudely welded together from sheet aluminum. Michael perched amidships on a cooler sticky with fish scales. The rowers’ backs bent and straightened in perfect synchrony. The boat skimmed over the water. Michael remembered the Harrow brochures his father had made him look at. There’d been vid of boys like him rowing sculls, on an actual river, on Earth … But no. He had a mission of far greater import than that.

The wharf receded out of sight. That did not mean they’d come very far, since Ceres was so small the horizon was rarely more than a kilometer away. Michael started to see sheets of ice floating on the water. “The lake stays liquid because of the habs underneath it,” said one of the rowers. “We’re technically on Fifteen Below—”

“Fourteen Below,” disagreed the other.

“—so there’s a lot of hot stuff down there. We also have some dedicated generators warming up the hatcheries on the bottom of the lake.”

“So why does the lake stay up?” Michael said. “It should be flooding everything under it.”

“Splart,” the first rower said.

Michael nodded. “I love splart.”

“Everyone loves splart.”

The boat’s prow ran up on an ice floe. Hammering noises echoed out of the dark. “That way,” the rowers said. “Bye.”

In pitch darkness broken only by the beams of their headlamps, half a dozen excavator bots were enlarging the cavern. They looked like heavy-duty versions of Michael’s mecha, with the addition of circular-bladed ice saw attachments. People in snowsuits dragged sledges heaped with spoil.

Michael and his friends fell in with the miners. They were all going the same way: up a sloping tunnel that narrowed as they climbed, up and up, to a steel-floored lobby with an airlock on the far side.

“Wow!” Michael said to his friends. “See what this is? It’s a
spaceship!”
The Belowsers had crashed the ship into the floor of the crater and bored
in.