The Phobos Maneuver (13 page)

“And you are a large mammal. What’s your point?”

The whale declined further comment, leaving Elfrida to wonder if there was some cosmic significance to its pronouncements. She licked salt off her lips. Her cheeks were going numb.

“Mama spoke to you!” Ed the cetaceophile exulted on the radio. “Wow! Radical! That’s a
huge
honor!”

“I thought this one was Little Sister?”

“She is. Duh. They talk by
sonar.
They can’t chit-chat when they’re on the surface.” Ed popped out of the waves near her. He saw that her visor was up. “Frag it!”

He forcibly closed her visor and towed her towards the distant splotch of color that was the camp. She heard him complaining on the public channel about “freaking noobs; even the Fraggers aren’t this bad,” but she did not speak up to defend herself. That moment of exposure to the sea seemed to have set off a shutdown procedure in her body. Her teeth were chattering, and all the strength had gone from her limbs.

Later, when she was recovering with a mug of hot chocolate and a blanket around her shoulders, under the infrared heater in the mess, Bob Miller came to find her. “Swimming with the whales is a magical experience, huh?”

“Oh yeah. I’m filled with a new appreciation for the wonders of creation. Especially the wonder known as hot chocolate.”

“This is as close as we’ve ever come to meeting an alien species.”

“And as close as we ever will come. There are no aliens.”

Miller nodded, and slurped his own hot drink. “The Fermi Paradox, yadda yadda. The Great Filter theory: almost no lifeforms make it past the jump from the simple prokaryote to the complex eukaryote cell.”

“I’ve also heard that the Great Filter might come
later,
” Elfrida said. “It might be that 99.9% of intelligent species annihilate themselves by means of planet-busting weapons. For example.” She was feeling gloomy. She sipped her hot chocolate. Her teeth rattled on the mug’s rim.

Because she’d endured so much therapy herself, she had been able to pinpoint the reason she’d panicked out there. Nothing to do with the sea or the sperm whale. The trigger had been the whale’s name: Little Sister. This was not an unusual name for a whale. They always went by their birth-order designation followed by unique phrases of song, so the one Elfrida had met today was actually called Little Sister B-D-F-E-Sharp or something like that. The cetaceophiles shortened their names for convenience.

But it just so happened that Elfrida had met an entity called Little Sister before, two years ago, on the Vesta Express. It had resembled a human teenager in appearance, but nothing else about it had been human. It had nestled, sucking its thumb, in the fragment of a PLAN ship that carried the Heidegger program to 4 Vesta, where it killed thousands of people.

The ISA had spirited Little Sister away. Elfrida had no idea what had happened to it after that. But now she knew the mystery had stuck with her, buried in her cortex, waiting to trigger a panic reaction like today.

Well. Things like that could only take you off guard once. There wouldn’t be a second time.

“One of the whales spoke to me today,” Miller said.

“Me, too. Mine said, ‘You are a small mammal.’ And then it laughed at me.”

“Mine said, ‘To seek revenge is to seek defeat.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Typical fortune-cookie stuff,” Elfrida said tentatively. Miller shrugged. She tried, “I guess it makes sense. We almost drove them to extinction, after all. What if they’d tried to get revenge? It would have been the end of them. They’re as technologically inferior to us as … as we are to the PLAN.”

Miller gave a single jerky nod. He squatted down beside her and pulled her closer. His fingers dug into her shoulder. It was not a lecherous caress, but a drowning man’s grip. “It’s a clusterfuck, Elfrida,” he whispered. “A complete clusterfuck.
We are losing.”

★

Elfrida listened to Miller for a bit longer and then left him in the company of some friends who were watching an alien invasion movie. She went to the office, a cubicle at the end of the Nissen hut. It smelled seaweedy, thanks to the bunches of kelp someone had hung beneath the heater to dry. Colden was editing vid clips. She’d been put in charge of communications for the camp.

“Whoof,”
Elfrida said, stretching her arms over her head. “Whoof and whew.”

“Good swim?” Colden said. “You know, it is so weird that we’re the senior cadres. In my own mind, I’m still a kid. But there’s no one else left from the class of 2277.”

“There’s Sophie Gilchrist.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Responsibility sucks,” Elfrida said. She sat down on the corner of Colden’s desk, moving aside a bowl of beach glass to make room.

“Is something wrong?”

“Not really. Maybe. I was just talking to Bob Miller. He finally opened up some. He says—”

Colden held up one finger. “Patient confidentiality.”

By which, Elfrida knew, Colden meant to remind her that anything she said in here would be captured by listening devices. But whoever was listening, Elfrida
wanted
them to hear this. “We were talking about the war. He says it’s a complete clusterfuck. I’m not sure how to take that. But anyway, that’s what he said. About sixteen times.”

“It sure doesn’t square with everything we hear about Star Force degrading the PLAN’s long-range assets,” Colden agreed, cynicism dripping from her voice.

“Oh, and he also has a theory about why we’re here.”

“I think we’re doing a pretty good job.”

“Yeah, but we’re not robots. Wanna know where all the robots have gone? Bob says they’re being weaponized. That’s a direct quote.”

“Weaponized?”

“Yup. Apparently, all the phavatars and geminoid bots on Luna vanished a few months ago. Bob thinks the same thing’s happening here. They’re being repurposed for combat. Like, we’re
that
short on resources.”

“If true,” Colden said after a moment, “that does sound kind of clusterfuck-ish.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” But there was something wrong with Colden’s expression. She looked both horrified and strangely distracted. “Colden. Was this, maybe, not news to you?”

“About the robots? It totally was. But it makes sense in terms of …” Colden gestured at the screen she’d been working on. Elfrida leaned over to get a look at it, but it was now displaying a screensaver sequence of someone’s dive pics. Cloudy water, half-seen huge flanks.

“Colden, are you holding out on me about something?”

“No! I would never do that. Well, only since this morning. But you were swimming.”

Elfrida snapped her fingers. “C’mon, spit it out. Whatever it is, I figure the ISA already knows about it.”

“Oh
yeah,” Colden said gloomily. “Well, I’m supposed to announce it to everyone tomorrow morning, anyway. We’re leaving. The penguins can have this place to themselves again.”

“What? The RCMM aren’t healed yet.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Ooookay. And what about us?”

“Fun times. We’re being shipped out to someplace called Eureka Station.”

“Where?”

“I was hoping you would know, because I sure don’t. It’s probably on frigging Pluto or something.”

ix.

Petruzzelli quickly figured out that Elfrida Goto’s testimonial had been worth its weight in physical iridium. This was a process of elimination, as she realized just how underqualified she was in relation to the others in her Star Force squadron.

Gwynneth Blake was the reigning All-Europe
Existential Threat
champion.
Petruzzelli tried very hard not to fangirl all over her when she discovered this fact.

Harry Zhang had spent ten years flying for Uber Galaxy, the ultra-high-end space taxi service.

Taneela Williams had been a professional stratojumper, thrilling millions as she parachuted from low earth orbit.

Luc Zubrowski was a chess grandmaster, ranked 23
rd
in the world.

And so on; to a man and woman, they were either pro gamers, elite civilian pilots, record-smashing daredevils, or all of the above.

Petruzzelli’s own resume, which she’d bragged about so blithely in Boise, Idaho, now embarrassed her. Star Force had sifted through millions of volunteers and selected the crème de la crème for Gravesfighter pilot training. Why had they picked her?

Not for her experience or skills.

Nor because Martin Okoli, her former boss at Kharbage LLC, had slurred into a camera that Petruzzelli was “a painful warrior famous for fight,” whatever
that
meant.

Which left that five-minute vid recorded by Elfrida Goto in a bedroom in Rome.

In an intense and painful conversation with herself, Petruzzelli admitted that the value of Elfrida’s endorsement probably lay in who Elfrida
was,
not any of the flattering things she’d said about Petruzzelli. Elfrida had tangled with the PLAN at 11073 Galapagos, on 4 Vesta, on Mercury, and on Luna—a streak of crappy luck that had to be pretty much unique,
among people who were still alive.
The first of those adventures had made Elfrida a media heroine, for all of about fifteen minutes. Her name had subsequently been suppressed, so Petruzzelli still didn’t know the details of her more recent adventures. But on the ISA’s in-house list of anomalous survivors, Elfrida must have achieved some freakishly high rating. So Petruzzelli’s personal connection with her made
her
special, too. It was probably all based on statistics.

Which still didn’t mean that she belonged here.

But here she was. This was what she wanted, and she’d be damned if she’d screw it up.

So she worked twice as hard as the others. She slogged through extra sessions in the flight simulators. She lifted weights, crosstrained, and took every seminar on offer.

For the second month of their training, to be sure, she couldn’t do much work. None of them could. They were flat on their backs, monitored by medibots around the clock.

Star Force joke: What’s the difference between boot camp and a stay in hospital? Answer: In hospital, the food is better.

Carbon-based nanites colonized the volunteers’ bones, altering the crystal structure of their constituent minerals. Their lungs were removed and replaced with plastic ones that they could collapse at will. Their hearts were also reinforced with piezoelectric motors that enhanced pumping capacity. These were the elements of reconstructive surgery for the spaceborn—but nearly all the volunteers were Earthborn to begin with, so they were being reconstructed into something else
. Cyborgs.
They also received new state of the art neural implants to replace their BCIs.

Petruzzelli to the others: “Dammit. I should’ve asked for a new nose while we were under the knife.”

Externally, they looked unchanged. Petruzzelli even
felt
unchanged. She looked at herself in the mirror and still she did not see a Gravesfighter pilot. But she was one.

The next step was to actually get in the cockpit and fly. But this could not be done here—
here
being the giant Star Force base in Woomera, Australia, half a million square klicks of bush inhabited by wallabies, koalas, and equally shy eggheads.

So they got onto a military spaceplane and rattled around the Woomera Ring, a rail launcher that spiraled up Mt. Coricudgy. The Ring spat them into orbit. In LEO they transferred to a shuttle, which took them out to the Star Force base permanently orbiting the L1 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. There they transferred to
a Flattop.

Named for the Industrial Age curiosities known as aircraft carriers, Flattops were the largest ships Star Force operated. Not the largest ever built, mind you. That distinction went to Interplanetary Transport Network (ITN) haulers, which drifted from Lagrange point to Lagrange point on years-long, fuel-sparing journeys. But no one wanted to ride a hauler.

The Flattop
UNSF Thunderjack
was a
battleship.

Petruzzelli soaked up the sight of the huge, ovoid hull looming over their shuttle. It was not actually flat on top, but shaped like a humungous egg, with the drive at the large end. Sliding plates of asteroid steel armored it all over, standing off a meter from the ship’s actual hull—Whipple shields. These were badly cratered and could probably stand replacing.

Nozzles ringed the massive throat of the drive. Their job was to spit molten radiator alloy into space, discharging the waste heat from the ship’s three reactors. In flight, it would look like silver hail was perpetually spraying from the nozzles, to be collected in solid form by electromagnetic fields, and reused. This type of heat exchanger was far more efficient than the civilian variety, which featured large vanes with coolant circulating through them. Right now it was idle; the nozzles were just nozzles.

Gun and drone ports gaped all down the sides of the Flattop, exposed where the armor plates were being replaced. The ports were so freaking big Petruzzelli took them for launch bays, until a reddish eye unlidded itself in the cliff ahead. Into this the shuttle pootled.

Its magnetic clamps gripped onto rails that ran down a dark, arched tunnel. Petruzzelli and the others disembarked, still in their spacesuits. The bay was in hard vacuum. The shuttle crew got busy unloading all the stuff that had come up with them. Through arches in the sides of the tunnel, Petruzzelli saw dozens if not hundreds of identical tunnels. The
UNSF Thunderjack
was three kilometers long, a structured warren of steel space.

Not yet having received clearance for access to the
Thunderjack’s
wifi, the pilots didn’t know what to do, apart from get out of the way. They picked their way laterally across the flight deck, through a floating maze of boxes, sacks, crates, tanks, and rolls and stacks of construction materials. Bots were unpacking the crates in situ, carrying away what they wanted. In this manner, the materials were dispersed with significant quickness to make room for ever more provisions.

“Kind of chaotic,” said Harry Zhang, the squadron’s unofficial leader.

“This. Is. War,” intoned Luc Zubrowski.