The Phobos Maneuver (11 page)

“And though it pains me to admit it, sprog o’ mine, it succeeded. I was right to begin with. Should have trusted my gut instinct. We’re going to Titan. May have to stop at Callisto to refuel.”

“We are NOT going to Titan!” Michael shouted.

He dashed over to the storage lockers and threw them open. Random merchandise cascaded out on top of him. He grabbed a sack of splart, broke off the nozzle tip, and lugged it back to the elevator. He squeezed splart all over the crack between the doors. He had to stand on an ergoform to get the top. The biting smell of the powerful epoxy filled his nostrils.. When he was done, he dragged the sack over to the hatch which led to the crew quarters, and splarted that shut, too.

The pirates banged on the other side of the elevator doors.

“You can’t come in!” Michael shouted. His heartbeat felt like a piston in his chest.

“We’re stuck in the fucking elevator,” Haddock shouted. His voice came from the elevator, and also from the intercom.

“You are not stuck!” Michael shouted. “You can go down to the crew quarters!” His eyes filled with tears. “I don’t care WHERE you go, as long as you leave me alone!”

Kelp’s and Codfish’s voices came from the elevator, too quiet to distinguish any words.

“Right,” Haddock said. “I should have known better than to trust a son of Adnan Kharbage. Clearly it’s all the same to you if we starve. I ask only that you bury us in space, wrapped in our auld thermal blankets, to commemorate our lifelong commitment to the frontiers of human endeavor.”

“You won’t starve,” Michael said.
“You’ve
got all the food and water. I don’t have anything.” This was not strictly true. He had a zillion pouches of minestrone soup left behind by Petruzzelli, as well as a crate of protein bars that were so disgusting, not even asteroid squatters would buy them.

Coral muttered something about ungrateful brats, and predicted that Michael would come out when he got hungry.

Michael shut off the intercom.

He reconfirmed their trajectory.

Destination: 99984 Ravilious.

Then he laid his head down on the captain’s workstation and cried.

viii.

Elfrida’s teeth chattered as she opened her new email from Mendoza.

“Oh no. His mother’s died.”

“Whose mother?” Colden said.

“John’s.”

Colden pulled a third thermal shirt over her head. “Yowchies.”

“You could at least try to sound sympathetic.”

“I am sympathetic, but I don’t even know the guy.”

“And he says … whoa.”

“What?”

“He might come and pick me up. He says they’re working on it.”

“Good luck with that. What’s he going to do, land his illegally tooled-up pirate ship at Erebus Spaceport?”

They both snickered. “He is not a pirate!” Elfrida said with mock offense. “He just hangs out with them.”

She and Mendoza had been talking about her going to 99984 Ravilious ever since they last parted. But the outbreak of war had put their plans on hold. She’d been trying not to think about what could have been, and almost resented him now for giving her spurious hope. Colden was right, of course: he could not possibly come and pick her up
here
.

The Space Corps chartered jet had landed at Erebus Spaceport in Antarctica. But instead of heading into orbit, the agents had left the spaceport aboard a convoy of buses. They had driven in the dark across the causeway linking the spaceport to the mainland. When they woke up they were bucketing along the potholed two-lane highway that followed the Victoria Land coastline, within sight of a wrinkled gray sea.

Thirty-six hours after Elfrida had said goodbye to her parents in Rome, they had stepped off the bus on the Scott Coast, in pitch darkness.

There was no one around to tell them what to do, except an annoying PA system that did not take questions.

Also, it was freaking
cold.

Climate change may have melted most of the Ross Ice Shelf, but that didn’t make Western Antarctica a place where anyone sane would choose to live.

Like Colden, Elfrida had already put on every fleece and thermal shirt she’d brought. The two women now struggled into their coats and snowpants. Good thing they’d obeyed the advice in their briefing to pack cold-weather gear. Joining others who’d passed a shivering and jetlagged night wishing they’d brought warmer gear, they filed out of the big Nissen hut that accommodated them on the slope above the coast road.

The Nissen hut had obviously been put up yesterday, as had the other buildings in the encampment. The snow still bore the tracks of construction vehicles. On the roof of a paintless steel mess hall, a Space Corps pennant flew alongside a UN flag, snapping briskly in the icy wind.

A high rocky bluff loomed behind the camp, capped with snow. Downhill, on the other side of the coast road, stood a haphazard assortment of vehicles—all-terrain buses, snowcats, and a large trailer up on blocks. Their garish colors reminded Elfrida of a fly-by-night surfer village, except that nobody would go surfing in these sub temperate waters.

Waves curled onto the pebbly beach beyond the vehicles. The sun squatted on the horizon out to sea, a sullen blob scarved in gray cloud. The low-angled light tinted the snow pink. It made Elfrida think of sunset, even though it was morning. This was winter at the south pole. The wuthering of the wind emphasized the silence.

“Coffee,” Colden said.

“Hot chocolate,” Elfrida said.

They headed for the mess hall. An announcement halted them, blaring from speakers barnacled to the corners of the buildings. “All personnel, assemble on Lilly Beach. Tout le personnel, se réunissent sur Lilly Plage …”

By the time the announcement got around to repeating itself in Portuguese, the fifth of the UN’s official languages, the Space Corps agents had figured out that Lilly Beach / Plage / Playa / Plyazh / Praia must be the strip of gravel they could see from here. They drifted that way, turning their ankles on boulders hidden under the snow. A lot of people had neglected to pack appropriate footwear. Not Elfrida and Colden. They were veterans by comparison with most of these kids. Striding along smugly in their snowboots, they crossed the coast road ahead of the others.

They had to walk through the village of parked vehicles to reach the beach. Steam and the smell of a variety of foods cooking wisped out of the big trailer’s vents. Adelie penguins clustered around the steps, clearly hoping for handouts.

The first human being they saw was a man sitting in the open side door of a snowcat, watching the pack ice in the bay. His bright yellow wetsuit showed off a swimmer’s physique. “Is this all of you?” he said.

“No,” Elfrida said. “The others stopped to pet the penguins.”

“Don’t. They’re pests.”

The man had an Australian accent. He nodded out to sea.

“Be here any minute.”

Teeth chattering, Elfrida strained her eyes. At first she saw nothing. The low sun gilded the pack ice and the gaps of water between the bergs. Then the man pointed. Just a few hundred meters away, a whale breached. A ragged arc of spray dispersed in the wind.

People’s heads popped out of the boiling foam. Some of them swam expertly. Others doggy-paddled.

Elfrida texted Colden, using the gaze-typing interface of her contacts.
“Cetaceophiles.”

“Looks that way,”
Colden texted back.

Cetaceophiles were pretty much the only people, apart from spaceport workers, who lived in Antarctica. They lived off the land, as it were, by working as guides. What safari trips had been to the 21
st
century, swimming with the whales was to the 23
rd
. Elfrida therefore assumed the hapless swimmers struggling towards shore were tourists, despite the fact that she did not see a fleet of luxury RVs or a cruise ship anchored in the bay.

The rest of the Space Corps agents straggled down to the beach, fussing over a girl who had been pecked by a penguin. Yellow Wetsuit shot them a sour look. He was setting up a windbreak, stomping on the pegs to drive them into the beach. Elfrida and Colden helped by holding up the bright red nylon while he worked.

The wetsuit-clad swimmers stumbled out of the surf in pairs, with scuba tanks on their backs and bubble helmets on their heads. Each tourist was assisted by a cetaceophile. They dropped onto hands and knees as soon as they hit the beach. Refusing offers of help, they crawled doggedly uphill until they could collapse in the shelter of the windbreak.

Colden:
“Do you think we’re going to have to do that?”

Elfrida:
“Didn’t bring wetsuits …”

Colden:
“There are ICEBERGS floating out there. If anyone tries to make me get in that water, I’m going home. WTF does this have to do with the war?”

A helicopter thudded overhead, descending to land on the road. Elfrida scarcely noticed it, horrified and fascinated by what she now saw. One of the tourists had managed to stay upright. He lurched up the beach. Yellow Wetsuit went to meet him. When the two men stood side by side, it became apparent that the ‘tourist’ was freakishly skinny, and tall.

Spaceborn
tall.

Those raised in microgravity, much less freefall, often grew into string-bean people: 190 centimeters was average for a woman, 210 for a man. This tourist struggling mightily to stay on his feet was about that.

But if he
was
spaceborn, he should have been dead. The spaceborn could not survive in Earth’s gravity. Their hearts were too weak, their bones too breakable. Oh, they could last for a while on bedrest, but swimming in Antarctic waters? No way.

The crowd of Space Corps agents parted. A petite woman in a designer bubble-coat strode onto the beach, followed by a dozen aides.

Elfrida:
“OMG it’s Petroskova.”

Colden:
“Scope the Yves St. Laurent.”

Elfrida: “
Scope the retinue.”

Colden:
“Many minions.”

Elfrida:
“What’s the collective noun for minions? An incompetence of minions?”

Colden:
“A squabble of minions? An encumbrance of minions?”

Their banter masked nervousness. Annette Petroskova was the director of the Space Corps. She had replaced Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter last year after Dr. Hasselblatter quit amidst a sex scandal. Petite and gray-haired, she resembled a well-groomed Yorkshire terrier, but appearances were misleading. For thirty years she had dedicated herself to the fine art of climbing ladders and kicking them away with followers still attached.

She looked almost human right now as she was clearly freezing her butt off. Standing close to her, Elfrida could see gooseflesh on the sliver of skin at the neck of her cape. But her voice carried, clear and strong. “Welcome! We’re honored and humbled to have you here with us. It makes me proud—personally, and on behalf of the people of Earth—to call you friends and colleagues.”

Colden:
“Oooh, I feel special.”

Elfrida:
“She’s just trying to put us off our guard.”

Petroskova had not been talking to them at all. She walked down the beach to the tourists. Almost all of them were sprawled on the gravel in exhaustion. The one who’d stayed upright shook hands with her. He’d unsealed his scuba helmet, revealing spiky red hair and a pale, UV-deprived complexion.

Elfrida and Colden sidled closer.

“… in appreciation of your heroism,” Petroskova said. No,
gushed.
Something was not right. This was the way Petroskova would address someone who outranked her.

The red-haired man responded, “Others sacrificed their lives. We came back alive. What’s so heroic about that?”

His accent cut Elfrida to the bone. Clipped, with a lilt. Last time she heard that accent she’d been on the moon.
“Colden, he sounds like he’s from Shackleton City!”

“I thought everyone from Shackleton City was dead.”

The PLAN had struck Luna’s largest city last year with a lethal double-tap of nukes and bio-terror.

“No, just most of them,”
Elfrida replied absently.

Petroskova steamrolled on. “Please accept Earth’s gratitude in the name of those fallen heroes. We promise to help in whatever way we can to ensure your full recovery.”

The red-haired man shrugged. Not in the least daunted, Petroskova pivoted to speak to the other ‘tourists’.

Elfrida seized her moment. She walked up to the red-haired man. She had to tilt her head right back to look him in the eye.”Can I ask your name?”

“Bob Miller.”

“I’m Elfrida Goto.” Her name would mean no more to him than his did to her. She was just being polite. She had already tried to sneak a look at his public profile, but either he didn’t have a wifi connection, or he didn’t have a public profile. Which was unheard of. Then again, it was
also
unheard of for the director of the Space Corps to fly to Antarctica to say hello to a bunch of …

… tourists?

Who all happened to be young and spaceborn?

Bob Miller was not so young. Forties. He had hazel eyes so clear they were hard to meet. She felt the other Space Corps agents watching her, hoping she could clear up the confusion.

“What are you doing here?” she asked bluntly.

“Swimming with the whales. It’s supposed to be therapeutic.”

“Yes, it’s very popular with tourists. But not spaceborn tourists. When the spaceborn come to Earth, they basically have to lie flat with a machine breathing for them. Ha ha.”

“Not if they’ve had their skeletons reinforced, and their hearts and lungs replaced with plastic ones.”

“Oh, of course. But isn’t that, like, insanely expensive?”

Miller shrugged. “We’d no choice, did we?”

A cetaceophile passed out pouches of hot soup. Miller accepted one, and removed the cap with his teeth. His teeth were tartan. Gray, with black and red stripes.

“What clan?” Elfrida said. She’d worked with some neo-Highlanders in space.

Miller smiled for the first time. “Balmoral. It’s an homage to my sister Martine. She was a fan of all things Victorian. She died in Shackleton City last year.” He drank his soup. “I had to get my teeth replaced, anyway; jawbone, the lot. Tartan seemed like a sensible choice at the time.”