The Phobos Maneuver (40 page)

Helmets popped up against the planet’s disk and vanished, two or three at a time.

So they were getting out. That was probably the right call.

Elfrida could hear fighting, a one-sided babble of grunts and shouts. She shoved Colden and the others into the queue for the airlock, making sure they alternated with able-bodied agents who could keep them moving.

“Stay on it, stay ON IT!” Petruzzelli’s shout cut through the babble on the public channel.

Too late.

Elfrida flew back into the darkness. Blue suits tumbled towards her, their helmet lamps still blazing. She turned hers off, realizing it would now only serve to make her a target.

Bright green dots of Martian blaster fire popped out on the walls and floor, deceptively pretty. Screams drowned the public channel. Helmet lamps surged towards the airlock in a disorderly stampede.

A blue suit collided with Elfrida, jetting blood from multiple holes. It was still clutching one of the carbines from the shooting range. Elfrida wrestled the gun off its strap and let the corpse go. Her helmet’s night-vision filter revealed the Martians as dark red shapes flitting around the stampede, spree-killing at will. She grimly picked them off. A blaster pulse caught her in the hip, but did not penetrate her Marine suit’s armor.

The clamor on the public channel decreased as agent after agent either left the airlock, moving out of range of the ship’s wifi, or died.

“Watch your feet! Watch your FEET!” Petruzzelli had screamed her voice away to a rasp.

Elfrida made a command decision: by now everyone was either out or dead. She kicked off and flew over the mess tables, through the airlock. Silhouetted against Mars, a dog’s-head helmet swivelled atop defined shoulders. Petruzzelli, or someone else in a stolen Marine suit. Couldn’t be many of those.

Petruzzelli reached up and caught her ankle as she tumbled past, preventing her from flying into space.

A line of agents snaked across the scarred mesa of the Flattop’s hull.

Beyond the prow, Mars-light shone on a wall of rock. The ship had ploughed into a low butte. It now lay at an acute angle to this wall. Perspective shift: not a wall, a
plain.
Decorated with an intaglio of trenches, the plain extended for kilometers in either direction. Its edges described jagged curves.

Reldresal was table-flat, shaped like a cross-section of a bowling pin. The Flattop had crashed precisely where you would grip it at the neck.

Steam seethed in white billows from the ship’s prow, creating the surreal impression that Reldresal had clouds.

Elfrida said, “What’s that?”

The Flattop leapt like a fish.

She was no longer hovering above the hull. She was plummeting through space.

Petruzzelli was still holding onto her ankle.

The ship, the rock, Mars—all of it spun, destroying her precarious sense of perspective. Only Petruzzelli was a stable point in the chaos. Elfrida doubled over, reaching for the other woman’s hand.

A bright spot flashed in her faceplate. She instinctively ducked her head.

The sun.

Reldresal had separated into two pieces and the sun was peeking between them.

Some quirk of orbital mechanics pulled the larger piece away, with the Flattop still grappled to it.

The next time Elfrida spun, the smaller piece of Reldresal was falling towards them, or they were falling towards it. It was a wall. It was the ground. And then it was just a trench.

xxxiv.

Mendoza worked rapidly and efficiently, humming to himself.

His first move had been to visit the engineering deck and manually check the stats of the
Monster’s
main
drive. He’d found no mechanical issues. There were green lights across the board. The reactor was in cold shutdown. He’d initiated the bootstrap process, firing up the tiny molten-salt reactor that would trigger ignition of the fusion reactor. But instead of feeding the bootstrap reactor’s current to the tokamak, he’d run a power line up to the bridge.

That had
not
been a fun job. He’d had to crawl all the way, unreeling the heavy cable behind him … and
heavy
was no longer a figure of speech. Tiangong Erhao was decelerating harder than ever. Those unnerving vibrations had intensified.

But now he had power. Light to work by.

And his months as an electrical engineer at 99984 Ravilious were coming in handy.

He wrote off the captain’s workstation as a dead loss and concentrated on recovering the secondary and tertiary workstations—astrogation, propulsion, comms, and life-support. The circuit breakers had all flipped. Before taking the risky step of restoring power to unprotected circuits, Mendoza chopped away the wooden housing of the workstations with a cutter laser from Engineering. On his knees, he visually inspected the antique circuit boards. One good thing about the
Monster’s
great age was that older was simpler. He saw immediately which components he would need to replace. The usual suspects.

“Fuses,” he muttered. “Capacitors.”

That meant another trip to Engineering. He discharged the components with alligator clips and a resistor, checked their specs, and noted them on his suit’s memo pad.

Then he left his crutch behind and swung around the outside of the
Monster
on the power cable like some kind of one-legged monkey.

It would have been nice if Jun had helped.

But Mendoza now understood that Jun wasn’t going to lift a virtual finger to save himself. He saw this as God’s will.

And maybe it was. And maybe it was
also
God’s will that Mendoza should be here, with a Gravimetric Upcycler and several high-spec printers at his disposal, and at least another twenty minutes—more or less, he figured—before Tiangong Erhao started aerobraking.

★

They actually had fourteen minutes and eight seconds before atmospheric entry, by Jun’s estimate.

Tiangong Erhao shivered at his side, muttering profanities in Chinese. Jun kept one arm wrapped tightly around her. His sub-personalities occupied the rest of the pews, garbed in brown. Ron Studd had complained a good deal about the way things had turned out, but Jun had made him be quiet.

The chapel shook as if in the continuous upheaval of an earthquake. The candle flames wavered, and the stained hangings behind the altar billowed.

Jun could not figure out what the hell that was about. It could simply be that Tiangong Erhao was breaking up under the structural stresses of deceleration. After all, she’d never been flown before, let alone been subjected to the strain of orbital insertion. But the vibrations came in a controlled, quasi-rhythmic pattern. It didn’t fit.

Suddenly Tiangong Erhao raised her face. “You gotta see this,” she said.

“My sensors are down,” Jun reminded her. “I can’t see anything.”

“Fuck. And I can’t show you. I hate the fucking language barrier.”

“You’re talkative all of a sudden,” Jun said, patting her shoulder.

“Or hang on, maybe I can show you. I have this little graphics conversion utility. It’s kind of rough, but I can manage some snapshots.”

If this was Derek Lorna’s doing, Jun owed him one. “Let me see.”

“I need a screen.”

“Use the wall.”

Tiangong Erhao sat up straight and frowned at the wall of the chapel. It dissolved into a breathtaking view of Mars, captured by Tiangong Erhao’s sensors, stamped
Altitude 21,000 km.
Lower than the old orbit of Deimos.

Tiangong Erhao zoomed in on the string of fortresses in equatorial orbits.

“Jesus,” Jun breathed.

Tiangong Erhao nodded. “Reldresal just broke up. Modelling the new orbit of the larger fragment, it’ll smash into Limtoc in another two and a half rotations. Then all bets are off.”

“So that’s what they were doing.”

“Looks like it.”

“They told me they wanted to keep the orbital fortresses intact, to use them as staging areas for the invasion.”

“Guess they changed their minds.”

“This doesn’t make any sense.” Jun felt an emotion he almost never experienced: the panic accompanying incomprehension. “They
know
we have to recover the PLAN’s data, any artifacts in its possession, any items that survive from the original American colony on Mars. The secrets of its quantum-entanglement and signal-blocking technology. Everything within twenty degrees of the equator is going to be destroyed, and God knows how many Martians will die. This is reckless. It’s counter-productive. It’s
nuts.”

“You just described the human race,” Tiangong Erhao said wryly.

Jun plunged his face into his hands. As articulate as he was, with the vocabularies of a dozen languages in his databanks, all he could think of to say was,
“Chikusho!!”
[Fuck!]

Ron Studd guffawed suddenly, and struggled to stifle it.

“Guess what,” Jun said, raising his eyes to meet Studd’s gaze. The sub-personality instantly sobered. Studd was part of him, after all. The part that wanted very badly to live, but accepted the will of God all the same. “What this means for us? We’re not only going to be landing on Mars. We will be landing on Mars at the beginning of a bombardment by rocks the size of islands. Now you tell me if you think that’s funny.”

Studd shook his head.

“The UN shot you in the ass,” Tiangong Erhao said. “Personally, I do think that’s kind of funny. And also tragic. The tragedy is that you expected anything different.”

Jun shook his head. “Our mission is still viable.
And
necessary. We can’t beat the PLAN by destroying it, any more than you can answer a question by deleting it. We land as planned. Tiangong Erhao, offer the PLAN our warmest sympathies and request a diversion to … somewhere that isn’t going to be immediately slagged.”

The avatar went quiet for a moment. “Done,” she said. “They’ve got launch facilities inside the Tharsis Montes, those three shield volcanoes south of Olympus Mons. Interesting. We never could tell where their toilet rolls launched from. Well, now we know. Anyway, they want us to land near there.”

“Good.”

Tiangong Erhao raised her eyebrows. “They didn’t even spam me with neuroware advertisements. Just the coordinates, ma’am. If they were eager for allies before, they’re desperate now.”

Jun rubbed his hands. He didn’t know if he was shuddering, or if it was the vibrations. “Mary, Mother of our Redeemer, pray for us.”

“Not me,” Tiangong Erhao said, standing up.

The vibrations increased.

“Sit down,” Jun said.

“No,” Tiangong Erhao said—disobeying a direct order.

Jun rocked back, looking up at her.

She smiled beatifically. Her face shimmered through a dozen customizations—princess, slave, kick-ass female protagonist, crone, dragon—and then went back to normal. Her eyes danced with life. She pointed at the wall.

The snapshot of Mars changed to a live-streamed vid from someone’s helmet cam.

It showed the bridge of Tiangong Erhao. The viewport screen above the dashboard displayed the same vista they’d already seen, except that Mars was closer, and waning to a crescent as they hurtled around the planet. Tiangong Erhao’s phavatar posed against the view with one hand on her hip, as if for a commemorative photograph.

“This is goodbye,” she said, and the avatar simultaneously spoke the words in Jun’s sim. “I’m not landing on
Mars.”
She made it sound like Nowheresville. “I was designed to fly to Barnard’s Star, and that’s where I’m going. But I don’t need to take these along.”

The vibrations abruptly ended.

Tiangong Erhao wiggled sinuously and then stabilized.

The bridge feed switched to an external camera.

All twenty hab modules, plus the Imperial module at the other end of the ship, had been jettisoned. They hurtled away under the power of their own thrusters.

“Ahhh,” Tiangong Erhao said. “I feel much lighter now.”

Jun stood up and faced the avatar, ignoring her physical doppelganger on the screen. “For the record, I want to know how you did that.”

“Hydraulics. Each module was designed as an independent lander. I also had the option to jettison them in flight, so that if a single biome went south, it could be discarded without jeopardizing the entire mission.”

“I was talking about your self-improvement. You’ve evidently crossed the AGI threshold. How?”

The phavatar on the bridge gestured at someone else—the person behind the camera.

Derek Lorna’s voice said, “Love.”

“He completes me,” Tiangong Erhao said. “He’s the part I’ve been missing ever since I was built.”

“And I love her,” Lorna said. “There’s an irony there, if you have the taste for it. This is
your
loophole. If not for you, I wouldn’t have known it was possible. So, thanks.”

Jun shook his head slowly. “God has a mean sense of humor.”

“Surprised?” Lorna said. “It’s in
your
daft religion, after all: ‘Love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.’ I got that from my little helpers here.” The camera panned to a cluster of child-sized spacesuits. “They’re quite taken with the whole ball of wax; enthusiastic about carrying the Gospel to Barnard’s Star. I haven’t the heart to tell them it’ll be another hundred and eighty years before we get there.”

Jun said, “I am
not
going to Barnard’s Star. Neither are you. You’ll run head-on into Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation before you’re out of the Oort Cloud.”

“Oh, I dunno about that,” Lorna said. “But you’re right about one thing. You’re not coming. I’ve had quite enough of your company.”

The
Monster
tilted on end.

“Tell Mendoza, if he’s still alive—no hard feelings,” Lorna said.

Tiangong Erhao’s phavatar waved bye-bye.

The screen winked to black.

In the darkness of Docking Bay 1, Tiangong Erhao’s handling bots—now restored to full functionality—picked up the
Monster
and tossed it out like a piece of trash.

xxxv.

Petruzzelli grabbed a dead Martian and tossed the body past the corner of the trench. Blaster fire splattered the opposite wall. She jerked back.