The Phobos Maneuver (32 page)

The party noise got louder. “Goto!” Colden yelled from the hall.

“You what your leg
what
?” Elfrida said.

A text from Colden flashed up in her HUD.
“Get back here quick. There’s an admiral looking for you.”

Elfrida stepped out of the storage locker.

“Oh, there you are,” Colden said. “So that’s why the maidbot’s been rampaging through the mess, trying to vacuum up people’s feet. Ha, ha. Get back in here right now.”

Elfrida followed Colden into the mess. The party had expired. The maidbot was vacuuming. The snacks and cocktails had vanished. The agents stood in small groups, pretending to chitchat.

Alone by the buffet stood a couple of Marines, and Admiral McLean.

“Does this thing work?” he said jovially, slapping the coffee-maker. Elfrida reflected that he had probably not had to get his own coffee for years.

“I’ll do it if you like, sir,” she said, stepping forward. “What’s your poison?”

“Just the woman I was looking for. Cappuccino with an extra shot.”

The extra shot made Elfrida think of Mendoza, a certified caffeine junkie. Their conversation felt like it had happened in a dream. This was reality. Eureka Station, her stuffed-up nose, General McLean watching her with tiger’s eyes. She pushed the right combo of buttons. Frothy milk jetted into a plastic cup.

McLean sipped, nodded approval, and faced the room. “You did well out there. In fact, you exceeded expectations.”

“Not mine.” Director Petroskova came in, her tiny frame clad in a pantsuit and spike heels. McLean nodded to her—he’d been expecting her. “I have always had confidence in the abilities of the Space Corps, and I’ve developed a great respect for Agent Goto’s leadership.”

Colden moved across the room. “Then why don’t you give her a promotion, ma’am? We don’t have any field managers. They were all left on Earth, or wherever.”

And I know why,
Elfrida thought.
Because they would have tried to protect us from you people.

“Goto’s been doing the job of a field manager. I think she deserves to be recognized for it.”

“Already done,” Petroskova said, neatly disarming Colden. “I’ve come to congratulate Goto, as well as yourself, Agent Colden,” and she named six more platoon leaders, “on your promotion to field manager. We expect great things from you in future.”

The agents clapped. Elfrida smiled without feeling it. She’d yearned for this promotion for years.

“More managers. Just what we need,” McLean joked. “The rest of you will have to keep them in line; make sure they don’t get too big for their gecko boots.”

Agents subserviently tittered.

“That’s right,” McLean said. “Now, it may surprise you to learn that Star Force Command is not perfect. We didn’t anticipate it would be possible to take Stickney. However, we are flexible. Now that Stickney is ours, we are going to double our supply flights. We’ll drop tools, bots, and materials to repair the railgun and
the laser assembly. We’ll also drop heavy ordnance of our own: scatterguns, hypervelocity coilguns … and a contingent of Marines, to install and man them.”

Elfrida grinned at
tools and materials
and
heavy ordnance.
Her grin faded at
Marines.
Bob Miller was not going to like that. Well, too bad for him. The Fraggers had been jerking Star Force around for long enough. They would just have to learn to cooperate, for the sake of humanity.

“Additionally, we’ll reinforce our telepresence support operations,” McLean said. “We’ve heard from many of you that the signal delay makes your job harder than it needs to be. We agree. You need to be operating in something close to real time. So, congratulations to all of you. You’re going to Stickney.”

An audible gasp swept through the mess. Agents went ashen. One boy actually leant over and threw up.

Chin tucked in, hands behind his back, McLean froze them with his autocratic glare. “You’ll be as safe as you are now! You won’t be out on the surface with the Marines. You’ll be snug in your couches, same as ever. The only risk is getting slagged on the way, and if you think that same risk doesn’t apply here, you’re dreaming.”

Agents turned beseeching gazes to Director Petroskova.

“I have nothing to add,” Petroskova said. “Except that the President asked me to tell you personally that she’s very proud of you. I’m sure your families will also be very proud of you, when the record of these difficult days is declassified.”

“Oh, you
bitch,”
someone in the back of the mess said.

McLean seemed to grow five centimeters taller. “Stop thinking about yourselves for a minute,” he roared. “Humanity is. At. War. For our. SURVIVAL. I’m sorry to BURST your little BUBBLE, but you signed up to serve, and BY GOD you will SERVE. You’re not the only ones. Do you think we would be doing this if we had ANY CHOICE? Do you think I fucking LIKE it?”

The mess went dead quiet, except for the sound of that person still puking.

Elfrida’s HUD flashed. Mendoza had received her pitiful plea for him to come get her. Since she’d hung up on him, he’d emailed her.
“Elfrida, I’m worried about you. Are you OK?”

Blinking away tears, she surreptitiously gaze-typed a reply.

“Forget it. Don’t come. They’re sending me to Stickney. I guess … I guess this is it. It was a nice dream, John. I love you.”

Whether Mendoza replied to that or not, she never knew. No sooner had she sent it than her personal comms stopped working. So did everyone else’s. They had been elevated to a new level of CLASSIFIED existence.

The rest of the day went by in a blur. Pack, queue up for baggage inspections, queue up again for dysentery shots—
dysentery? Really?
—queue up
again
to be issued with a buttload of mil-spec survival kit shit, and queue up for the last time to board a Flattop.

The hangar was busier and more chaotic than a street market in Rome. Ground crew manhandled stuff into the Flattop’s cavernous launch bays. Marines floated around the ship, keeping an eye on the EVA-suited Space Corps agents stumbling aboard.

As she awaited her turn, Elfrida saw a petite figure flying across the hangar. There was only one person on Eureka Station who would wear a Hermès spacesuit.

Director Petroskova landed on the ramp and beckoned Elfrida out of line. She opened a private suit-to-suit channel. “My dear, I admire your comportment. I feel you deserve to know the story behind the story.”

“What story?” Elfrida said. She was now boiling with anger on behalf of all the other agents. “We did something they didn’t think was possible, and we’re being punished for it.”

Petroskova’s helmet moved from side to side. Her faceplate was a reflective blank bubble. “It has nothing to do with you. This operation has been on the planning table for a long time, and it’s now moving forward. But the timing is unrelated to anything you and your agents did.”

“What, then?”

“Something else happened yesterday,” Petroskova said. “Something which has given us hope for the first time that we may actually be able to win this war. I’m not at liberty, obviously, to say what, but I want you to understand you’re
not
being punished.”

“What do
you
call it, then, ma’am, when you send four hundred scared kids to the most dangerous place in the known universe?”

“A strategy,” Petroskova said crisply. She reached out and brushed Elfrida’s faceplate with a glove. “Have faith, Agent Goto.”

Elfrida shied away from her unwanted touch. “I have to go.”

“Just remember that everything I said was true. You
are
brave. And I do have confidence in your leadership. Take care of them.”

“That’s my job, ma’am,” Elfrida said. She turned her back on the director of the Space Corps and followed the others up the ramp into the Flattop. She didn’t believe a word Petroskova had said. In the chaos of securing berths for everyone, she forgot about it, anyway.

xxvii.

Almost the first thing the Marines did when they landed on Stickney was to arrest the Star Force deserters. Golubtsov had died in the tunnel, so now it was just the three of them: Petruzzelli, Zhang, and Blake.

The Marines put them on their honor. That lasted until Petruzzelli punched a Master Sergeant in the face. After that, they resorted to zip-ties.

Star Force had occupied the Castle. They’d sterilized it with ethylene oxide gas and were now repressurizing it, bit by bit. The Martians’ furniture had been spaced or covered with plastic sheets. A trove of oxygen tanks had been discovered in underground storage. Some of the tanks had been reused so many times they still had United States flags on them. Petruzzelli thought the air smelled wrong, but everything seemed wrong to her now.

Starting with the fact that she was
tied
to a flipping
cot,
which still—EtO gas or not—had crumbs of barbecued Martian ingrained in its polyfoam mattress.

★

Elfrida went to see the prisoners.

Before she could speak a word, Petruzzelli snarled at her, “Why are we being punished?
We
liberated Stickney!”

Elfrida winced. She leaned against the wall by the door. An unreasoning instinct told her to keep her distance from Petruzzelli, even if the woman was tied up. “You did steal a two-billion-spider spaceship,” she said.

“That’s bullshit.”

“Come on, Petruzzelli; you deserted. Did you expect them to give you a medal?”

Looking into Petruzzelli’s angry eyes, she saw that Petruzzelli
had
expected a medal or something like that, some sort of positive recognition for her part in this fiasco. She believed she had done the right thing. And maybe she had.

“Care package,” Elfrida said, holding up a shrinkfoam bag.

“Woo-hoo.”

“I have permission to untie your hands, but I won’t if you’re going to hit me.”

Petruzzelli laughed. It was a cracked, false sound. “I’m not mad at
you.
You tried to help. And you’ve been punished for it, too: you’re here.”

“It’s not a punishment. It’s an honor,” Elfrida said flatly.

The other ex-Gravesfighter pilot, Harry Zhang, raised his head. Black circles ringed his eyes. “How was your trip?”

“Oh, we experienced a bit of turbulence. I got to watch the new
Secrets of the Galactic Core
movie.”

Elfrida sat crosslegged on the empty cot between Petruzzelli and Zhang. “Wasn’t there one more of you?” she asked.

“Blake’s a psych case,” Petruzzelli said. “She gets to move around.”

“Oh.” Elfrida leaned over and cut the zip-ties around Zhang’s and Petruzzelli’s wrists with the Swiss Army knife she’d got on Mercury.

Petruzzelli rubbed her wrists. She wore a grubby UN-blue spacesuit liner. A rigid foam cast encased her right shin. This was still zip-tied to the cot. She sat with her back against the wall, neck curved down. Her hair had started to grow in. Its natural color turned out to be sandy brown.

“We came in a Flattop,” Elfrida said. “We had an escort of about fifty Gravesfighters. Most of them made it. The orbital fortresses started firing on us like one AU out. Our shield lasted most of the way, but then we started taking hits. The good thing is that a Flattop’s so big, it can take hits. Anyway, I didn’t have a great view. We were down in the launch bays, waiting to be shot into space like champagne corks, just in case. I dunno if ejection would have saved anyone. As it was, one of the launch bays took a direct hit from a KKV. A hundred and twelve people died.”

She paused, not deliberately. She was thinking of the agents she’d lost, trying to remember all their names, as she had promised herself she would.

“But we made it,” she went on. “The lasso worked.”

She had helped to build it. Her quip about watching movies told only part of the tale. She’d spent most of the four-day journey from Eureka Station on the couch, operating a phavatar, taking apart the ruined laser cannon, and stringing high-tensile-strength wire between the arms of its pointing and tracking assembly.

“XO Carasso took the helm on our final approach. He snagged the wire on his first try, which is good, because if he missed, we’d have had to go all the way around Mars before trying again. They said afterwards we only had a fifty percent chance of making it. He seriously deserves a—” She caught Petruzzelli’s eye. “Never mind.”

Petruzzelli smiled lopsidedly. “A medal? I agree. I crashed a Gravesfighter into this rock, I thought that was something. That’s some kick-ass flying.”

“The
Thunderjack’s
just sitting out there in the Big Bowl,” Elfrida said. “It looks like Noah’s Ark or something. Most people are still living in there.”

Zhang stirred. “Has Mercury started delivering ships to Earth yet?” he asked.

“Um, not that I’m aware of,” Elfrida said.

“Has China changed their mind about sitting it out?”

“No,” Elfrida said. She tried not to China-bash. “The PLAN blew up Tiangong Erhao, and they’re
still
being all noble and restrained. So I think we can rule out any help from that quarter for the foreseeable future.”

“Huh.” Zhang lapsed back into silence.

Petruzzelli leaned forward. “In that case,
nothing’s changed.”

“How can you say that? We’re here. We’ve got a Flattop. We’re fixing the railgun.”

“With what, magic?”

“The Marine Engineering Corps thrives on a challenge. We’re also fixing the laser assembly. The Castle reactor is a dead loss, so we’re going to run it off the Flattop’s reactor—”

“Why hasn’t the PLAN nuked the
Thunderjack
yet?”

“Oh, they have. I guess they don’t dare drop anything too big, because that could fracture Stickney itself. But it was
raining
nukes out there for a while. So we built a humongous rubble shield.”

The phavatars had done most of that work, too. Were still doing it. This was really Elfrida’s first break since she’d gotten here.

”We’re going to win this thing,” she insisted.

Petruzzelli looked skeptical.

“I guess I shouldn’t tell you this.” But it was all over Stickney. Why not? “We’re going to land infantry on Mars. Stickney will be their jumping-off point.”