The Phobos Maneuver (12 page)

“Can I ask what happened?” Elfrida said.

Miller’s smile vanished. His bright hazel eyes locked onto hers. “My Fragger Mk II was shot down on one of the PLAN’s orbital fortresses. During the exfil operation, my jaw got crushed. It turns out that flexible helmets have disadvantages. Any more questions?”

Elfrida had stopped listening after the words
shot down.
Gaping at him, she said, “It’s already STARTED?”

“Of course it has. We started it.”

Colden texted her.
“Welp, I think I can clear a few things up. Been talking to the whale-huggers. The spaceborn guys are special ops types from Luna. Yes, Luna has special forces. Who knew? They took a pounding in combat, and they’re here to recuperate.”

“Yeah, I just found that out.” Elfrida spoke out loud by accident. Bob Miller grinned at her.

“And what are WE doing here?”
Colden continued.
“You’re gonna love this. We’re their therapists.”

★

It came to light later that someone, never to be named, had over-zealously applied a CLASSIFIED stamp to the briefing materials the Space Corps agents were meant to have received. So sorry! Here you go! That sorted out, Petroskova and her minions helicoptered back to civilization.

The Space Corps agents remained on the Scott Coast for the next three months, along with a dozen cetaceophiles and two hundred and fifteen special forces personnel.

★

In private, Elfrida and Colden called Bob Miller and his troops the Really Cool Manly Men. This was not a compliment.

The special forces recuperating on the Scott Coast included a couple dozen women, a handful of individuals of indefinite gender, and one hermaphrodite, but if anything, these strove to be even more Cool and Manly than the actual males.

The RCMM hiked in the snow before breakfast; they did small-unit tactical exercises on the headland; and of course, they swam with the whales, under the guidance of the cetaceophiles. 23
rd
-century popular wisdom held this to be therapeutic. It certainly worked wonders for the RCMM’s fitness levels. The frail, stumbling ‘tourists’ soon morphed into lean, mean swimming machines, who just happened to be very tall. They would have looked like fashion models, if not for their dubious cosmetic augments, such as Bob Miller’s ridiculous tartan teeth.

Many of the RCMM also sported tattoos of a flag new to the solar system, as of last year. It consisted of a star and crescent—the symbol of Islamic theocracy—in the top left corner, superimposed on another symbol almost as old, which was called the Union Jack.

After the catastrophic PLAN bombardment of Luna, a handful of oligarchic families had declared independence from the UN. They were evenly split between exiled Arab royalty and tech moguls whose heritage went back to the old United States. All they had in common was a passion for Victoriana. Hence, the flag.

Some of the RCMM even had prosthetic limbs skinned in the same colors. For a nation less than a year old, the Independent Republic of Luna sure did inspire strong patriotic passions. The Fraggers could be heard singing on their hikes: “Oh it’s a long way to the mo-o-on. It’s a long way to burn. It’s a long way to the mo-o-on, so take your fragging turn!”

They called themselves Fraggers, after their ships—small, stealthy fighters developed on Luna for the Luna Defense Force, which many of them had belonged to before independence. Post-independence, the LDF had been reorganized and greatly expanded. Bob Miller claimed that they could and would win this war before Star Force got off its ass.

“If it was that easy, you wouldn’t be here, would you?” Elfrida said to him, after enduring another lecture about the technicalities of combat against the PLAN’s space fighters, known as toilet rolls.

He shut down like she’d turned off a faucet, and she kicked herself. If she’d let him go on, he might have spoken about the disaster he’d briefly referred to on their first day … an action that had obviously gone badly for Miller and his troops.

Or so Elfrida assumed.

Neither she, nor Colden, nor any of the other Space Corps agents were having any luck getting the Really Cool Manly Men to talk about it.

“We’re supposed to be their therapists,” Colden groused. “How can you help someone who won’t mention their trauma?”

“Maybe they’ve been
told
not to mention it?” Elfrida said. “It might be a military intelligence thing.”

“That would be really stupid.”

“I know! We’re supposed to be allies.”

Elfrida decided on total openness. “Listen,” she said to Bob Miller. She had been in charge of pairing up RCMM and agents, and had assigned Miller to herself in hopes of repairing the dumb-as-a-rock first impression she’d made. “I’m not a licensed therapist. I’m not a therapist at all.”

“Do tell,” said Miller sarcastically.

“But I have had lots of therapy myself. We all have. It’s mandatory after you complete an assignment that might have been traumatic in any way. So I know how you feel. You wish this would be over so you can get back to work. But I guarantee you won’t be allowed to go back into combat until you’ve had the required number of sessions. So—”

“I’ve never had therapy before,” Miller said. “But I think one rule is that you’re not supposed to
assume
you know how the patient feels.”

“Oh. Whoops.”

“I’m actually not wishing this would be over. I’m wishing you would swim into fondling range. You have a very nice ass.”

Elfrida folded her arms.
“That
is classic,” she said. Not that she wasn’t a teensy bit flattered. “It’s projection. Or transference. Or something.”

“No, it’s sexual deprivation,” Miller said. She could see his goofy grin through the bubble of his scuba helmet.

They were finning around at a depth of three meters. Over their heads, the choppy gray roof of the sea bent and flexed. Both of them wore wetsuits, of course. Most of the Space Corps agents still adamantly refused to go in the water, but Elfrida had decided to give it a try. She hoped Miller would be more forthcoming underwater, in an environment that was more comfortable for him—both because swimming mimicked freefall, and because their wetsuits were like spacesuits, interposing layers of tech between them, so it wasn’t as intimate as talking face to face. So far, it seemed to be working … if you could count lewd come-ons as openness.

Now that they had gotten used to the sea, the RCMM often dived deep. They could collapse their artificial lungs at will, just like whales—an adaption for burning at ten gees, which was equally useful in the ocean. All the cetaceophiles had the same augment. It was the price of entry into their exclusive club. But Elfrida would have gotten the bends if she tried to go much deeper than this. So she and Miller were paddling around within reach of the wintry sun’s light, while swells rolled over them to break on the beach.

The intense cold of the water seeped through Elfrida’s wetsuit like a distant whisper: the
idea
of cold, rather than actual discomfort.

“Of course, I knew you weren’t a real therapist,” Miller said. They were speaking by radio, suit to suit. It really did feel like being back in space.

“Yeah?” she answered inattentively.

“You aren’t a robot.”

Normally, all therapists were robots. People confided more freely in machines than in other human beings; it was scientifically proven. But geminoid bots could be very realistic. “How do you
knoooow
I’m not a robot?”
Elfrida teased him.

“If you were a robot you’d have a thigh gap.”

“Auggghh; frag off.”

“Not complaining. It’s cute. Spaceborn women are too skinny.”

“Maybe they didn’t have time to reprogram the therapists to deal with post-combat issues. I mean, it’s not as if anyone has ever been
in combat … real, ship-to-ship combat ... before you guys.”

Ignoring this conspicuous invitation to talk about his experiences, Miller mused, “Men have instincts formed by thousands of years of evolution. We like a shapely waistline. Of course we haven’t suddenly started to prefer stick insects. It’ll probably take hundreds of years for that to change.”

Elfrida kicked, putting more water between them. “Bob,” she said, “stop flirting with me. I have a boyfriend.”

“Really? I asked some of your friends, and they said you only sleep with girls. That’s OK. I like a challenge.”

Whoever he had asked, they obviously weren’t real friends of hers. Only Colden and one or two others knew that Elfrida had gone through a transition a couple of years ago. She had stopped sleeping with women and begun to sleep with …well,
one
man. She had no sexual interest in anyone else anymore, male or female.

“Who’s this boyfriend, then? Is he here?”

“No, he’s in space, actually.”

“Aha. Bet he’s not as cool as I am.”

“He used to be an astrodata analyst, but now … well, it seems to be a do-whatever-needs-doing kind of deal. Mostly fixing machines. Electrical engineering?” She shrugged, wishing she had a better idea of what Mendoza was doing out there. His emails were so cryptic. Of course, it had to be that way. The colonists of 99984 Ravilious didn’t want anyone to know they were there. And for good reason, because Elfrida knew for a fact they got up to some legally dubious stuff more often than not.

Miller interpreted her vagueness as a purposeful evasion. “Your boyfriend wouldn’t be doing war-related work, would he?”

Pointing an accusing neoprene-gloved finger at him, Elfrida said, “Are you trying to pump me for intelligence, Colonel Miller?”

“Two can play at that game, can’t they?”

It took Elfrida a minute to process that. When she did, she felt stupid. Incredibly
stupid. “Do you seriously think we’re trying to …
interrogate
you? That’s not what this is about!” But now she felt sure it was.
That
was why the UN had chosen to use Space Corps agents, rather than robot therapists. However good its programming, a robot would never be able to create the impression of well-meaning cluelessness that might lull a RCMM into letting slip tidbits of actionable intelligence.

“That is what it’s about, as far as I know,” Miller said. “Prime Minister Hope ordered us to accept Geneva’s friendly invitation to recuperate on Earth, precisely because it was thought we might find out something useful about the UN’s war planning. Of course, here we are stuck in fragging Antarctica. So that wasn’t a good idea.”

“Wow,” Elfrida said. “Just wow. We’re supposed to be allies.”

“Allies always spy on each other.”

“Yes, but …”

“And our government doesn’t have a very high opinion of the UN. I suppose you wouldn’t understand that.”

“Excuse me, I
do
understand. The PLAN attacked Luna, and Space Force didn’t react in time. I was
there
, dude. When the Dust plague killed half of everyone in Shackleton City, I was there. I saw people dying, alone in their spacesuits. I saw corpses being dragged out of the domes and stacked up so they froze together into piles. I walked two thousand kilometers with the survivors to New Riyadh. I carried their babies. Tiny babies swimming in adult-sized sharesuits … some of them died on the way.”

“OK,” Miller said after a moment. “I didn’t know that. Sorry.”

Elfrida forced the memories away. She was hyperventilating, breathing so hard that her faceplate had begun to fog up. “Just please don’t assume I don’t understand.”

“My bad.”

She pulled herself together. “No, it’s OK. Most people on Earth think Luna broke away from the UN for no good reason. No good reason? The UN just proved it couldn’t protect you. I’d say that’s an excellent reason to take your security into your own hands.” See, warm and empathetic, precisely as specified in the training manual.

Miller spun in the water and dived into the murky depths below them.

Elfrida clenched her fists in frustration, and shouted after him, “Did you guys seriously think you could defeat the PLAN
on your own?”

“No,” Miller’s voice came back by radio. “It was revenge.”

“I remember you said you lost your sister.”

No answer. She switched on her helmet lamp. The beam carved a foggy wedge of light in the water. No Miller.

A new voice came through on the public channel. Ed, the cetaceophile who was leading today’s dive. “Gangway, everyone! Little Sister’s coming through!”

Before Elfrida could move—not that she had any idea which
way
to move—a gigantic shape rocketed up from the depths. Someone clung to a fin. More people paddled madly in the sperm whale’s wake. Their voices jammed the public channel, hoots of joy punctuated with huge noisy gasps as they reinflated their lungs.

Caught in the turbulence of the whale’s passage, Elfrida tumbled helplessly. The light faded above her. She finned upwards and broke the surface a few meters from the whale. Its blowhole smoked. Spray rained down on the sea and on Elfrida. She ripped her visor up—not a smart move, but she’d panicked for a minute there, and she needed to breathe fresh air.

She smelled the sea, the whale. How could anything so big be so very much alive? The others in the group were playing with it, stroking its mottled sides, nuzzling it. Her ears filled with the susurration of the waves and the squeak of pack ice collisions.

Tinnily, the speaker in her helmet said, “You need to improve.” This was followed by the chittery sound that the translation program used to represent whale laughter.

It had been known for several hundred years that whales had a language and society of their own. Less than a century ago, increasingly powerful computers had finally managed to compile a Whale-English translation program. This was still a work in progress, but the cetaceophiles, who knew their finny friends better than any machine ever could, confirmed that whales really did have a strange sense of humor.

“Experience is the mother of foolishness,” Little Sister added.

“Well, thanks very much for that insight,” Elfrida said crossly. A wave slopped into her open visor. She felt icy water leaking down past her neck seal.

“You are a small mammal.
Chitter chitter.”