The Phobos Maneuver (8 page)

“Hurry up,” Colden said. “Get packed. We have to catch the two o’clock flight, or we’ll miss our connection in Amsterdam.”

Colden also worked for the Space Corps. They had been summoned to a ‘training session’ at an undisclosed location. So, as far as they could tell, had every other Space Corps agent on Earth. Their itineraries went as far as Antarctica, so Elfrida suspected they would be heading off-planet, because one of Earth’s three big rail launchers was on Mt. Erebus in Antarctica. In answer to Petruzzelli’s unasked question—
How big of a thing is this going to be?—
Elfrida could have answered, if she weren’t concerned about having her email flagged for security issues:
BIG.

She and Colden had shuttered the Space Corps office in Rome, which doubled as Colden’s apartment. Now they were at Elfrida’s parents’ place on Piazza Benedetto Cairoli.

As Elfrida dragged long-unused cold-weather gear out of the closet, her mother hovered, offering to pull strings to get them out of it. Elfrida’s mother, Ingrid Haller, worked for the NHRE—the New Holy Roman Empire: a shambolic little state occupying most of old Italy plus a chunk of the Balkans. Ingrid Haller had formerly been undercover, but now she assisted the cardinal who ran the Foreign Office. She thus had access to a lot of information she was not allowed to share with her husband and daughter.

It was pretty clear what she was driving at now. Elfrida sat back on her heels. Her chest felt tight. “Mom. I don’t want a religious exemption or anything like that. Am I getting through to you? I am NOT quitting the Space Corps.”

Colden retreated into the living-room.

Elfrida kept talking loudly enough for Colden and her father to hear. “I know you’ve probably heard things that make you pessimistic about this, this whole, this war. Which is why you’re trying to get me out of it. But please, just STOP!”

Ingrid Haller folded her arms. Her Austrian accent thickened, proving how upset she was. “All right, Ellie. I hear you. I will stop. But—”

“There is no
but,”
Elfrida said, yanking the toggle of her rucksack closed. “We’ve been through this already. You wanted me to quit after I came back from Mercury. And then you wanted me to quit after I came back from Luna. But because I’ve seen the worst the PLAN can do, that’s exactly why I have to be a part of fighting them!”

Colden said from the living-room, “I’m really pretty sure we won’t be fighting, per se, Ms. Haller. I mean, we’re the Space Corps. A typical day in the life is vaccinating livestock or teaching kids culturally appropriate nursery rhymes.”

Ingrid Haller twitched her head as if Colden’s voice was a fly buzzing around her ears. She said quietly to Elfrida, “You think you have seen the worst the PLAN can do, but that is exactly my fear. You haven’t seen the worst. No one has.”

They humped their rucksacks downstairs. In the alley off Piazza Benedetto Cairoli, heads popped out of windows, and shopkeepers came out of doors to wish them
buona fortuna.
Their departure was supposed to be a secret, but there were no secrets in an inner-city piazza. Elfrida’s eyes teared up. Romans! She loved them, and they considered her and Colden to be hometown girls, although Colden was the adopted daughter of FUKish aid workers, and Elfrida was Japanese-Austrian.

Amid the warm salutations, Elfrida’s mother crammed bags stuffed with food into their hands. Her father whacked her shoulder lightly. This was the closest Tomoki Goto ever came to a public display of affection.

“Itte kimasu,”
[I’ll be back soon,] Elfrida said to him.

“Ki o tsukete ne.”
[Take care.]

In Amsterdam, they boarded a chartered supersonic jet with two hundred other Space Corps agents.

“OK,
now
I’m scared,” Elfrida said.

“Me, too; I just saw Sophie Gilchrist. Put your bag in that seat, make her think it’s taken.”

“Colden, a
chartered
jet?
We usually have to fly cattle class, at our own expense. Is this still the Space Corps?”

Colden looked up from opening Elfrida’s mother’s foilpack of Wiener Schnitzel. Her eyes reflected Elfrida’s fears. But what she said was, “Your parents are great.”

“I know.” Elfrida decided not to complain about her mother’s over-protectiveness. She was thirty years old, not six. She could understand why her mother was worried. She changed the subject. “That woman I did the testimonial for, Petruzzelli? She has like four mothers and five fathers.”

“How does that even work?”

“I dunno. It’s all legal. I think it’s quite common, actually.”

“Suddenly, I don’t feel so weird anymore.”

Elfrida shook her head. “No, Colden,
we’re
the weird ones.” She gestured to include the other Space Corps agents yelling back and forth as the jet queued to take off. “We have or had married parents, we graduated from college, we’ve got full-time jobs …
that’s
weird. It’s because we’re UN. You’re second-generation, I’m third-generation—my mother used to work for the UN, and three of my grandparents did. We live in a bubble.”

“That’s really interesting,” Colden said. “I never thought of that, but now that you say it, it’s obvious.”

“I never noticed it, either, until someone pointed it out to me.”

“Maybe that’s why everyone hates the UN. Because we’re normal.”

“You’re probably onto something. Although, I dunno about normal. Is it
normal
to get on a jet in Amsterdam, with no clue where you’re going, in the knowledge that your employer has just declared war on a hostile AI with better technology?”

Colden snorted. She clearly did not want to think about their destination. “The person who pointed that out to you. Would that be a certain person who keeps sending you Bible verses?”

Elfrida threw an elbow into Colden’s ribs. “How’d you know?”

“Because you always go pink when you talk about him.”

vi.

John Mendoza floated in space, in a rather smelly third-hand miner’s spacesuit. He seemed to be alone in the star-sprinkled abyss, except for the object behind him. This was an oblate sphere 200 meters in diameter, made of asteroid iron.

The sphere blocked out the sun. A single feature rose above its surface: a shack-sized industrial air circulation unit rated for 10
5
cubic meters. The unit had been jugaaded—manually upgraded—to cleanse and process the atmosphere within the sphere, which was a human-
un
friendly mixture of carbon monoxide and toxic metallic vapors.

Mendoza had done the majority of the work on the air circulation unit and now he was monitoring it. But there wasn’t much to monitor. The unit was venting carbon monoxide to space at a controlled rate, which was exactly what it had been doing for the last five hours.

So, oblivious to the miracle of industrial chemistry behind him, equally blind to the jeweled sweep of the heavens, Mendoza concentrated on his email. He was writing to Elfrida, his one true love, and he wanted to get every word right.

I’m having a great time out here.

Had there ever been a more boring opener in the history of email? It didn’t help that it was wholly accurate and true. The trouble was that he couldn’t say anything about the
Salvation
project. Mendoza sent his emails via the
Monster,
so nobody censored them, but he censored himself, having fully taken on board the boss-man’s concerns about the ISA. He himself had tangled with the ISA before and was not keen to repeat the experience, ever.

So:
having a great time out here.

Elfrida knew that 99984 Ravilious existed. But she didn’t know that it no longer existed. Every day they were apart, more stuff happened, deforming the Venn diagram of their lives. The overlap was getting smaller and smaller. Mendoza was desperately trying to retard that process in ever more creative ways.

It’s weird, but I feel at home in space now. In fact, every day I look at the stars, and I wonder: what’s out there? There’s so much we still don’t know, even about our own solar system! You feel the same way, right? You’ve always had that wanderlust.

The plan had been for Elfrida to come out and join him here. They’d got as close as shopping for flights to 6 Hebe, the nearest major asteroid colony. And then … this stupid goddamn war.

I wish you were here. It’s so damn exciting, and I want to share it with you. And even apart from my own selfish wants,
smile,
you’re NEEDED here. You’ve got expertise in life-support systems, hydroponics, micro-gee health care, all that stuff. You’re EXACTLY the kind of person we need. I’ve actually talked to the boss about you. He says, tell her to get her ass out here!
Smile.
That’s the way he talks.

He reread that paragraph. Decided, sadly, that it gave too much away. Deleted it and started again.

Wish you were here …

In the end, his email consisted of that, plus a Bible verse. John 15:13. He always included a Bible verse. It was a way of communicating with her without flapping his lips, and also a nudge. He worried she might be falling away from the Church in his absence. She was a recent convert, and Mendoza secretly suspected she was not 100% committed to the Faith.

He hit send, and then glanced at the display on the air recirculation unit.

“Shit!”

On the far side of the sphere, Bridget Williams, a Mormon, was monitoring the second air recirculation unit.

Mendoza radioed her. “Bridget, my unit’s stopped venting. I, uh, don’t know how long …”

She laughed. “Venting’s finished, dude! I was about to radio you. Shut down your unit and c’mon over. We’re just waiting for the boss, then we’re going in.”

Mendoza flew around the sphere on his mobility pack. He’d gotten used to spacewalking without a tether, although he still felt a reflexive twinge of fear every time he unclipped. The spaceborn knew no such fears. There was a whole crowd of them buzzing around the far side of the sphere. Parents towed small children in transparent papooses. They were coming over from the Bigelows. The
Queen of Persia
drifted about a klick away, status lights blinking on her slabby 1,500-meter hull.

The colonists wore self-luminescent spacesuits, or old ones painted to glow in gaudy patterns. They were bright fireflies flitting around in the twilight of the distant sun. Some went for culturally symbolic designs. Mendoza liked the Amazonians’ logo of a hammer, with the jokey slogan
Everything Is A Nail.
He looked for Kiyoshi’s non-glowing, patched and re-patched black EVA suit, and did not see it. A pall fell on his mood.

The boss-man arrived, riding a D&S bot shaped like a metal shark, with a polyfoam saddle. He looked like some kind of dorky space cowboy. Mendoza knew he carefully calculated these things for full effect, but it worked. It made people laugh as well as cheer.

The boss-man nosed his D&S steed up to the sphere. Bridget Williams had chalked a circle around her air recirculation unit. An industrial-power cutter laser shot out from the D&S bot’s nose and cut it out.

A two-meter disk of metal popped free, spinning like a giant coin with an air recirculation unit stuck on one side. Williams caught it, pulsing her mobility pack so it didn’t carry her away. She measured its thickness. “Eleven point one five centimeters!”

Whoops broke out. Mendoza cheered with the rest, cracking his lungs. Despite the Pashtuns’ confidence in the procedure, no one had known until this moment whether it would work.

They’d built a flimsy scaffolding on an asteroid fragment.

Covered said scaffolding with the mylar used for solar sails, the thinnest and strongest fabric in existence.

Inflated the balloon with carbon monoxide.

And heated it up, using one of the thorium breeder reactors, until chemistry took over …

… and the asteroid fragment
vaporized,
to coat the inside of the bubble with a not-found-in-nature nickel-steel alloy containing trace amounts of platinum and palladium.

Hey presto, instant spaceship.

Well, almost.

This was just the first of eight modules that had to be built. The thickness of the alloy shell had to be measured all over to make sure it was consistent. Decking, wiring, and insulation had to be installed. Then would come the fun part. People squeezed eagerly into the sphere, ooh-ing and aah-ing as if they could already see their future homes and gardens, churches and mosques, fishponds and chicken coops and goat runs, schools and gyms and micro-gee waterfalls.

Mendoza felt a twinge of sadness. The reason was not far to seek. Or rather, the reason was 430 million kilometers away. Elfrida should have been here to see this.

His HUD flashed up a new email alert. It couldn’t be from her. His latest email wouldn’t even have reached Earth yet.

To: John Mendoza [ID string attached]

From: Fr. Benjamin Torres [ID string attached]

Dear Mr. Mendoza,

I am very sorry to inform you that your mother is dead. She received the Anointing of the Sick and I was present to bestow a Blessing of the Pope. Our dear sister will be very much missed …

Mendoza shut down his comms program. He felt dizzy. He heard himself gasping. His suit told him in its toneless voice that he was consuming more oxygen than normal, and his pulse rate had spiked; did he wish to report a medical emergency?

“No,” Mendoza choked out.

Dead.
Dead, and I wasn’t there.

A tone of criticism seemed to run through the parish priest’s email. Or maybe Mendoza was just projecting.

I didn’t even know she was sick!

She was only seventy-five …

A glove fastened on his shoulder. A new suit-to-suit channel appeared in his frequency selector. “Congratulations, Mendoza,” the boss-man said. “Couldn’t have pulled this off without you.”

Mendoza blurted, “My mother just died.”

“You’re kidding! I’m truly sorry about that.”

“I didn’t even know she was sick.”

“Are you beating yourself up over this? Do you think you should’ve been there?”

“Nod,”
Mendoza muttered. Nodding in a clunky old bubble helmet, like the one he was wearing, didn’t make the helmet move.