The Phobos Maneuver (33 page)

“I don’t believe it,” Zhang said.

“It’s true! That’s why we weren’t allowed to help you at first. They didn’t want to risk losing the phavatars. But you won, so now we can move forward. Boots on the ground is the only way you ever win a war.” She repeated what she had heard the Marines say. “It’s going to be decisive.”

“It’s going to be a disaster,” Zhang said, and Petruzzelli nodded. Why were they so negative? Of course, they wanted to believe that they and her precious Fraggers were the only heroes in this war.

“Well, no one else feels that way,” Elfrida said. “The mood on Earth has really improved. People are partying in the streets.” She laughed at a sudden memory of one vid from Earth. “Someone made a giant fiberglass sculpture of the Big Turd and threw it off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Petruzzelli scoffed, “They’ve been lied to.
You’ve
been lied to. Just like we were.
You have to free us.”

“Petruzzelli, what, so you can tell Star Force they’re doing it wrong?”

Petruzzelli glanced at Zhang. He made a tiny calming movement with one hand.

“I can’t free you,” Elfrida said, modulating her voice for all she was worth. “I’m sorry. But I did bring you some goodies.” She opened her care package. Shrinkfoam was a stretchy smart material, the successor to bubblewrap of yore. Its cushioning properties had saved the contents from getting smushed during their journey from Eureka Station.

Gwynneth Blake, the third surviving deserter, wandered into the room. She swooped on Elfrida and hugged her. “Kit-Kats,” she said, holding one up. “I thought I’d never see one again! OMG,
Twixes.
On a rock orbiting Mars. Is this a triumph of the human spirit, or what?”

Blake was obviously as high as a kite on her PTSD meds. Elfrida smiled and let her have her pick of the goodies—leftovers from the Space Corps victory party on Eureka Station.

Petruzzelli folded her arms, refusing to touch the chocolates and cookies. “This isn’t what we planned.”

“Oh, my God,” Elfrida said. “Do share what
your
plan was.”

Zhang gave a tiny shake of his head. Petruzzelli ignored him. “Capture the railgun. And bombard the other fortresses. No, just shut up and listen. It would work. Here’s how. We throw rocks at, say, Limtoc. The transfer of velocity kicks it onto a collision path with, say, Reldresal.”

“And the PLAN kicks it back,” Elfrida said smartly. “Same way they’ve been adjusting the orbits of these fortresses for decades.”

“But not with one of the fortresses under constant bombardment. The Fraggers scienced this to death. You keep throwing rocks, and pretty soon, one of two things happens. Either Limtoc collides with Reldresal. Or it just falls to pieces.”

Zhang peeled the wrapper off a Twix bar. He broke the bar in half and half again, reducing it to fragments. Opened his hand and let the fragments float away. “This is a problem too complex for our MIs to analyze,” he said, watching the candy crumbs dance in the air. “As soon as the orbital fortresses start colliding and breaking up, the number of potential collisions increases exponentially. It only takes a few collisions before you would need all the processing power in the solar system to predict what hits what next. After one sol or so, it probably gets too complex even for an AI. But never mind that. The point is that as soon as you break up Limtoc, or any fortress, you
guarantee
enough of the fragments will hit Mars to give the PLAN a very bad day. No boots on the ground required.”

“I guess Star Force considered that option and nixed it,” Elfrida fumbled.

“Or maybe Star Force is a bureaucracy with no experience actually fighting wars.” Petruzzelli snatched a floating crumb of Twix out of the air. She popped it into her mouth and gave Elfrida a chocolatey grin. “Thanks for the snacks. Could you tell that jarhead outside I need my diaper changed?”

Elfrida plunged through the repressurized corridors of the Castle, past workbots repairing doors, installing sensors and cameras, and painting over any traces of Martian artwork. The infantry were going to land in a barracks very similar to the ones they had had on Eureka Station.

She flew down the flexitube that had been threaded through the former heat exchanger tunnel. Traffic jams in the tube made her late getting back to the Flattop. She hurried to her couch—actually her rack on 04 Deck. Forty to a cabin, toilets down the hall, round-the-clock noise. Her new high-spec immersion kit lay on her pillow. She took a swallow of Gatorade. Then she put on her headset, mask, and gloves, and swung her sledgehammer once more into the side of a Martian trench.

The rubble heaped on top of the Flattop had to constantly be replenished, as every laser cannon in the neighborhood was trained on it. That meant a lot of quarrying. Elfrida straightened her phavatar’s back to watch a new cloud of rock dust boiling off. When it stopped, a group of phavatars made a concerted rush for the ablated location, each carrying a boulder twice its size. They dumped their loads into the new crater, and followed that up with freshly mixed regocrete, squirted from tanks carried on their backs. It was just to hold the rubble in place.

Stickney turned, silhouetting the busy figures against the dayside of Mars. Elfrida gritted her teeth. The PLAN’s ziggurats and earthworks—clearly visible from here, recognizable as the originals of the artwork she was destroying with her sledgehammer—seemed to mock the little labors of the phavatars. But to Elfrida, her operators were heroic. They were scared, they were space-sick, none of them had wanted to come here—understatement of the decade—and yet they were doing their jobs with a will, and doing them well.

I don’t care who’s right,
she decided.
I don’t care if the admirals have a clever plan to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, as usual. All I care about is looking after my kids. I WILL get them safely home.

★

Bob Miller came to visit them.

“The first two regiments are coming on the Flattop
Badfinger
,”
he said. “They’ll be here in eleven days.”

“How do you know that?” Petruzzelli said.

“I asked the brig gen. He confirmed it.”

“Did he also specify you could spread it around?”

Miller glanced up. “No listening devices in here, yet.”

Zhang said, “Then we have to do it before they get here.”

“Yes,” Miller said. He was twitchy. He was juicing, Petruzzelli thought.
Not
dealing with the fact he’d killed three-quarters of his troops. He spotted the last Kit-Kat, floating near the ceiling, and uncurled to seize it. “The taste of home. Our ladies and gentlemen are ready to go.”

“How?” Zhang said.

“The Flattop, of course,” Miller said. “The problem is getting aboard. They won’t let me past the airlock. It’s political.”

Petruzzelli said, “But they might let
us
go aboard.”

“They might.”

“If we kick up enough of a fuss …”

“No, no,” Zhang said. “I know a better way.”

“Well?”

“How are you feeling?”

Petruzzelli stared. “Crappy, of course.”

“Me, too,” Zhang said. “Seeing Blake made me think of it.
She’s
traumatized? I am more traumatized than she is. Actually, when Zoob died, I lost the will to live. I was this close to taking the stuff. Wasn’t I, Zuzu? You can vouch for me.”

“You’ll need to present actual symptoms,” Miller said. “But I might be able to help with that. I’ve still got a few cc’s of a certain drug that’s popular on Luna. It relaxes your inhibitions …”

xxviii.

Mendoza stood at the end of the
Monster’s
pier, gazing out of Docking Bay 1 into space. The stars looked bright and near.

A spectral red crayon drew a circle around a fuzzy dot. “There it is,” Jun said.

“Eureka Station?” Mendoza said, because Jun had pointed it out to him before.

“You can still make it.”

“Jun, I’m not going to Eureka Station. What’s the point? Elfrida isn’t there anymore. So I’m going with you … all the way.” Jun started to speak. Mendoza overrode him. “End of discussion!”

The pain in his missing leg was making him cranky. He knew he should apologize. He adjusted his crutch under his left arm. He’d made it from Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu’s staff of office.

Something prodded him in the back.

He stumbled around in a half-circle. Lost his balance, caught himself with his crutch. He stood face to face with the
Monster’s
biggest repair bot. It stretched out one of its ape-like arms and tapped him on the chest. “There’s not a whole lot of difference between jumping and being pushed,” Jun said.

Mendoza edged sideways. His crutch slipped on the rails, and he toppled. Space yawned beneath him. He grabbed the edge of the pier with both hands as his crutch drifted away, flipping in slow, lazy circles.

The repair bot reached down, caught Mendoza around the waist, and set him on the pier. He promptly overbalanced onto hands and knees. Jun said, “Why aren’t you wearing your leg?”

“I can’t get used to it.” Mendoza’s ragged breath fogged his faceplate.

“Yeah. Sorry. It’s not a very good prosthetic. You could get a real one on Eureka Station. Sensory feedback, integrated telemetry. Better than the real thing.”

“Please, Jun. Please … just let up.”

Mendoza crawled past the repair bot’s legs, back towards the
Monster.
He was still afraid Jun might toss him into space. There were Gravesfighters around. He saw them from time to time, flashing like quasars. One of them would undoubtedly pick him up, but he might be free-floating for a while before that happened.

“You don’t understand the risks.”

“Maybe not, but I understand that Elfrida is on Stickney. I love her, Jun. Don’t ask me to abandon her out there.”

Jun laughed dryly. It wasn’t clear to Mendoza what was so funny. “All right. You win.” The repair bot stooped over Mendoza and picked him up. It carried him back to the Superlifter and held him up so he could work the airlock. He fell into the cockpit, pulling off his helmet to inhale the rank, fetid air. This cramped space now felt like home. “I’ll make you a new crutch,” Jun said from the cockpit speakers. “If you do something for me.”

“What?” Mendoza said, knowing what.

“Your job.”

“I can’t walk far enough yet,” Mendoza muttered. He lay on the pilot’s couch and peeled his EVA suit off, exposing the club of nuskin bandages that covered his stump. It still felt tender to the touch. The medibot spidered over to change the bandages.

“Repair bot’ll carry you,” Jun said.

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“And maybe never, huh, Mendoza?”

“I said I’ll do it.”

“It’s important.”

“I know it’s important, Jun. But I’m a wimp, OK? I’m freaking scared of facing hordes of mutants in an unknown environment—it’s all analog in there, right? No networked cameras, nothing that would create a digital trail. The scientists were too smart for that. So the—the
things
might all be dead. They might be dying. I might have to kill them. Just give me a while longer to psych myself up, OK?” Mendoza lay back, digging his fingers into the edges of the couch. He felt angry and ashamed. It was like Jun was saying that the experiments were just as important as Elfrida. Every individual an equally precious child of God? Say what? Even if they were a humanzee?

Even if they were an AI?

Suddenly understanding Jun’s insistence, he raised his head. “I’ll do it, Jun. I swear. But I wasn’t kidding: I’m not ready. My leg …” The medibot unwrapped the final bandage. The stump was a red, raw mass of scab tissue. “Ten more days to go, right?”

“Yes.”

“So I still have time to practice walking. And maybe I’d better put in some target practice, too.”

★

Derek Lorna rolled over. The movement lifted his whole body off the bed, in this forgiving micro-gee environment. He reached out in the dark. His fingers encountered smooth, cool sheets. A patch of stickiness. He flopped further, and found the bedside table. Squeezed the light switch.

The bedroom sprang out at him. Shag carpet, chrome furniture. Smart wallpaper depicted the hills of the Wolong Nature Reserve in Sichuan. Aspirational fifty years ago, the décor now looked dated. On the walls, as if in mid-air, hung portraits of selected Chinese emperors: Qin Shi Huang, the Kublai Khan, Mao Zedong, Xu Lifan—the last being the emperor regnant in 2239, the year Tiangong Erhao was assembled.

Lorna had known about this bijou retreat for ages. It was a prop, only used when VIPs visited the labs. Such visitors saw what they wanted to see. To be fair, however, the house was a
good
fake. Everything worked, even the shower.

Lorna stepped in with a glad sigh of anticipation, snapped the respirator over his nose and mouth, and revelled in the slow cataract of water. Lastly he depilated his jaw and moisturized his skin.

He smiled at himself in the mirror. He looked better than he had since he came to Tiangong Erhao. Healthier. Better-nourished.
Happier,
even.

A servitor handed him a towel and he dried off.

“Would thir be pleathed to take coffee?” the servitor slurred. Its larynx and hyoid bone were properly positioned for speech, but its ape-like jaw structure gave it a lisp.

“Sounds good,” Lorna said. “I’ll have it in bed. Black, no milk, a splash of liquid monkfruit.”

He tossed the servitor his towel and returned to the bedroom. The smart wallpaper made it seem like he was on a flying carpet with furniture on it, coasting over one of China’s most famous landscapes.

“I joined UNSA straight out of uni,” he said aloud. “Never really saw much of Earth. The Former United Kingdom? That’s where I’m from, you know. A pit. The less said, the better. All I wanted was to escape, and I did. Later in life I did sometimes wonder if I’d missed out. The jungles of Arabia; the African savannahs; the wildlife preserves of Sichuan …” He grinned. “They can keep ’em.”

In the bed, the phavatar of Tiangong Erhao stirred languidly. She said, “My DNA banks rival any on Earth. When I reach Barnard’s Star, I will recreate this landscape from scratch, complete with giant pandas.”