The Phobos Maneuver (31 page)

Then it toppled off the stool and squelched back up to the bridge to resume its vigil.

xxv.

Petruzzelli floated in a sea of molten sodium. Her suit told her it was between 85 and 95 degrees celsius. The laser assembly hadn’t been used for months, so the coolant liquid had had time to cool down … some.

Now and then she collided gently with unseen walls.

The fluid was still pushing out of the heat exchanger pipe, flooding through the unpressurized tunnels, and it was carrying her with it.

At the same time it was nucleating around her suit, coating her in a layer of soft crystals, slowly fossilizing her.

She had 25 hours of air left, so she could conceivably live for another day like this, encased in hot ice.

She thought about taking the stuff. Every Star Force suit came with a self-euthanasia option. A lot of her suit’s functionality was off-line, but the E-button—End-It-All button, as they called it—glowed green in her HUD. It’d be easy. A needle sliding into her arm. GAME OVER.

What held her back?

Maybe it was memories of her family. They weren’t all bad.

Or maybe it was a sudden memory of Scuzzy the Smuggler, in a bar on 6 Hebe, scratching his cubital port, itching to get to his junk dealer. She’d stopped him.
She hadn’t even known him, but she’d decided out of nowhere she wasn’t gonna let him go down that road. So she’d kept him clean for one day, and then they’d gone their separate ways.

And afterwards she’d descended into a long, gradual spiral of despair, because she’d found a way out of her life. She’d found it and then lost it again, like letting go of a vital component on a spacewalk.

Joining Star Force had been her attempt to get it back. To stop living for a paycheck, and live for a purpose. To
serve.

Well, look where that got her.

Fury charged her limbs with energy. She kicked through the viscous sea, fighting
against
the sluggish current.

And burst into vacuum.

Her arms whirled, free of the clinging liquid. Hit a wall. A grab handle. She hauled herself up, the coolant inflicting a searing toll of pain on her broken leg as it let go. Clinging above the sodium tide, she frantically scraped crystals off her faceplate.

She was in a normal-sized hall with doors hanging open on either side. The walls were blackened, bubbled. The gluey tide of liquid sodium came up to the handles of the doors. She’d been floating along in it for at least twenty meters—half the length of the hall—without knowing it was only waist deep.

Where the hell was she?

She hauled herself along a row of grab handles to the nearest door. Peeking in, she saw cots and lockers in rows … on the ceiling. Quick revision of perspective: the tide of liquid sodium was creeping along the
ceiling,
for no particular reason. That was just where it had happened to stick.

She floated down to the cots. Everything was charred. There were charred bodies in the cots, too. Martians.

She was in the Castle. And there’d been a fire or an explosion, which gave her hope.

She opened a couple of lockers, found weird twisted objects, carved rocks. Nothing useful. She drifted out of the door and explored some more, staying low so her head wouldn’t stick up into the molten river on the ceiling.

The hall ended in a T-junction. To her right, a shaft rose out of sight, mostly blocked by the liquid sodium. She went left, and found Blake in a room full of desks arranged in a circle. Blake was sitting at one of the desks trying to make its embedded screen work.

“Hey, Blake.”

Wonder of wonders, the microwave comms links still worked.

“Zuzu,” Blake said, listlessly.

“This place is kind of a disappointment, isn’t it?” Petruzzelli said. “Reminds me of my high school.”

Blake looked up. “Where did you go to high school?”

“Idaho. It was a boarding school for maladjusted kids. Looked just like this.”

“Oh. I went to boarding school, too. In Switzerland. Cost my family a packet, and all I did was play games.”

“Me, too.”

“I guess I kept thinking of this as just another game, killing time.” Blake abandoned the useless desk and floated away from Petruzzelli. “But there’s no log-out screen. I keep trying to log out, but I can’t …”

It sounded to Petruzzelli like Blake was either broken, or breaking before her eyes. “Hey, you’ve got that stuff stuck all over your back. Hold still.” She used her gloves to scrape molten sodium off Blake’s suit. It had the consistency of soft ice cream. “That’s better. Ouch!”

“You OK?”

“I broke my leg. Coming?”

“Where?”

“The railgun, of course,” Petruzzelli said. “This is the Castle. The railgun’s got to be pretty close to here.”

“Despairing chuckle,”
Blake said. “Star Force should’ve tried harder to hold onto you.”

They found an airlock at the end of the hall. This would be the way out. But the airlock’s control panel didn’t respond. They were trapped. And they had no weapons they could use to break out.

“All right,” Petruzzelli said. “I saw a shaft going up. We’ll try that.”

They climbed the ladder running up the shaft. They found dead Martians, scorched halls and rooms, and at the top of the shaft, some living Martians. The Martians were climbing down, while Petruzzelli and Blake were climbing up. There was a brief, nasty melee. It ended when a bubble of molten sodium drifted up the shaft and slopped over the Martians. They exploded, none too ceremoniously.

Petruzzelli kicked away, screaming. Bits of Martian covered her suit, all red and steaming. Where the steam touched the molten sodium, it exploded again in pretty petite puffs of silver.

“Liquid sodium explodes on contact with water,” said Miller’s voice in her helmet. “One suit breach and you’re a goner.”

“Sir?”

“Got you,” and Miller’s glove fastened on her wrist.

“Blake’s down there.”

“Be right back,” said a Fragger. She and two others dived down the shaft.

There were five Fraggers up here, counting Miller. The others brought Blake up, screaming her head off. And then there were ten. “This is all of us,” Miller said.

They had started off a hundred and twenty-seven strong.

Miller’s voice had a flat, hopeless tone.

“What happened?” Petruzzelli said, meaning everything.

“I’m a fighter pilot,” Miller said. “I don’t know crap about infantry tactics. I was faking my ass off, and our boys and girls paid for it.”

“So did the Martians,” Petruzzelli said.

Miller cheered up slightly. “Yeah. Their bomb ruptured the heat exchanger pipe. They may have done that on purpose, to mop us up.”

“But it also killed them,” said another survivor.

A third took up the tale. “A few of us got clear. We advanced ahead of the flood. Fuck it, we were just running. But then we came to an airlock. What do you do when confronted with a Martian airlock covered in weird-ass artwork? Obviously, you shoot it to fuck and back.”

“Another interesting property of molten sodium,” said Miller, “is that it burns on contact with air. What we’re seeing here is far less than the volume that was in that pipe. Most of it went up into a conflagration that consumed all the air in the Castle. We huddled and hunkered down until the temps went down. Then we came up here.”

Here
: a circular room full of burnt furniture. with deep slit windows all around. Windows! Who put windows in a space habitat? Obviously, the Martians did.

This whole place was built on an outmoded template, Petruzzelli thought. It was probably what that first American base on Mars had looked like, 150 years ago. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? That’s probably how AIs thought.

Blake was peering out of one of the windows. Petruzzelli went to look over her shoulder.

“Wow,” she said.

They really were at the top of the Castle. The curvature of Stickney fell away at such brutal angles it felt like they were looking down from a mountaintop. And straight down the artificially graded slope below them ran the railgun.

Its rails stuck up in tortured arcs, twisted beyond repair. A line of ripped-out stitches 200 meters long.

The Martians had sabotaged it.

All this death and destruction had been for nothing.

But Blake wasn’t looking at the wreckage. Her gloved finger pointed, trembling. “They’re coming!”

Tiny figures jetted across the plain, towards the railgun. Mini-explosions traced their path. Petruzzelli coaxed her suit to zoom in.

“It’s the phavatars,” she said in disgust. “Well, thanks for showing up, I guess. Better late than never.
Not.
”

Blake hammered on the window with her fists. It flexed. Transparent aluminum. It might break if they could find something hard to hit it with. “We’re up here! Help! Help!”

“They took the long way round,” Miller said, crowding the women aside. “I wonder if any of our surface team survived?”

★

Petruzzelli dropped lightly into a trench. The sky shrank to a black slot. The phavatar that had dropped her off hovered in the gap. “When you want to go back, stick your head up and shout. We’ll be around.”

“OK,” Petruzzelli transmitted.

The phavatar’s chirpiness made her feel physically sick. The Fraggers had taken the brunt of the assault. The phavatars—who’d been meant to protect them—had joined the battle so late that there was nothing left for them to do except mop up the few Martian stragglers still hiding in the trenches.

This trench had been cleared already. Petruzzelli’s helmet lamp picked out jagged walls. She bounded along the trench, towards the other helmet lamp she’d seen from the sky.

Zhang sat at the bottom of the trench, cradling Zubrowski’s head on his lap.

“Awww,” Petruzzelli breathed, sinking down beside them.

“He took the stuff,” Zhang said.

“Why?”

“Dunno. He was kinda shaky from the start. He said something about aliens, and then he said goodbye.”

Zhang stroked Zubrowski’s helmet.

“Were you and him …?” Petruzzelli said, leaving the question open.

“Yes. Not that it matters now.”

“I’m sorry,” Petruzzelli said.

“So’m I.” After a moment, Zhang stirred himself to ask, “Did we win?”

Petruzzelli laughed. Once she started, she couldn’t stop. Her eyes teared up, and her ribs twinged. “Sorry,” she choked. “It’s not funny. I just spent a couple of hours swimming through sodium icecream.”

“And I’ve got rad poisoning,” Zhang said.

“Me, too. Anyway, yeah. We won.”

“The railgun?” Sudden hope brightened Zhang’s voice.

“Oh, the railgun. No. It’s fucked. They sabotaged it when they saw us coming.”

“Then nothing’s changed. We’re still losing.”

“Do
not
take the stuff, Zhang,” Petruzzelli said with sudden urgency. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

She got her arms around him. Zubrowski’s body slipped to the floor of the trench. Petruzzelli kicked off and floated with Zhang out of the trench, shouting, “Survivors here! Need a lift!”

xxvi.

On Eureka Station, and in fact throughout the solar system, all anyone was talking about was the Fraggers’ triumph on Stickney. No one mentioned the phavatars. Fair enough: they hadn’t contributed much. But Elfrida and Colden thought the operators deserved to celebrate, too.

The day after the battle, they snuck up to Wheel Four and bought cocktails, chips, candy, and other goodies forbidden under Star Force’s health code. They held a party in their mess. Elfrida passed out Kit-Kats and Mars Bars from a bag, feeling like a drug dealer. Younger agents competed to entertain those who had not been on shift during the battle. Elfrida watched them indulgently, sipping a rather nasty margarita in a pouch.

“You figure we should say something?” Colden said.

“Such as, remember how many Martians died so we could have this party? Fuck that.”

“No,” Colden said, startled. “We’ve got Sophie Gilchrist to say that stuff. I was thinking of telling them that hangover pills work best if you take them while you’re still drunk.”

Elfrida snickered, abashed. “Nahhh. Let them figure it out for themselves. It’s more fun for us that way.”

The HUD area of her contacts flashed. “Ugh, leave me alone … Oh.”

“Mendoza?” said Colden.

Elfrida nodded. She hurried out of the mess. There was
no
privacy on Eureka Station. She spotted a supply locker, kicked out the maidbot that resided in it, and stepped in.

A light automatically came on, no brighter than the light in the back of a refrigerator. Shelves of detergent and antibacterial wax cramped her shoulders.

“John?” she whispered. She had her regulation throat mic and earbuds on, so she could talk instead of typing. “I’m here.”

Then she had to wait. She listened to the noise of the party swelling and fading, and thought about Stickney. She thought about that guy, Zubrowski, who’d taken the stuff. She remembered swinging her edged truncheon into Martian faces, so many faces. She bit her knuckles. Tears spilled out of her eyes. At the three-minute mark, she whispered, “John, I can’t take this anymore. Please come and get me.”

“You’re never gonna guess where I am,” he said over her voice. She divided by the speed of light as he spoke. He was about 26 million kilometers away.
Close.
“I can’t say anything specific, but I’m coming.
We’re
coming.” He laughed. It felt like he was ignoring her distress, but of course, he hadn’t yet heard the last thing she said. “What’s been going on? I tried to get hold of you yesterday, but you didn’t answer. Anyway, I’ll be there in about a week. I’m coming alone, in a Superlifter. I know Eureka Station has mega-defenses, so if you could fix it so I don’t get fragged on sight that would be great.”

“But I don’t want you to come
here!
I thought we were going to go on an adventure in your boss’s new ship. I thought we would leave all this shit behind.” She felt selfish as she spoke.

Mendoza was still talking. “That’s the good news. The bad news—well, it’s completely trivial by comparison. I lost my lower left leg. But I’ve still got most of the knee. Anyway, good stuff is happening, and when I get there I’ll be able to tell you all about it. I’m going to stay on the air for another few minutes. Let me know if you can arrange landing permission.”