The Phobos Maneuver (14 page)

Ahead, strip lighting illuminated a broader launch track. A glorious sight met their eyes.

A Gravesfighter.

In fact, a whole row of them.

This was the first time Petruzzelli had seen a Gravesfighter in real life. It hardly looked like a ship at all. No drive shields; no
drive,
at the moment. The D-He3 fusion reaction that drove the Gravesfighter’s awesome acceleration would occur inside a magnetic bottle that doubled the ship’s length. When switched off, it did not exist. The physical fuselage carried two layers of Whipple shields, making it ovoid, like a miniature version of the Flattop, with its large end chopped off. Gangs of point-defense drones and smart torpedoes lived in the 50-centimeter stand-off space between the shields; the smallest drone scouts, electronic beetles, geckoed out of their launch ports to see who had come calling. Sensors and scanners sprouted from the ovoid’s narrow end, ringing the mouth of the keel-mounted charged-particle cannon.

All in all, the Gravesfighter was the screamingly ugly result of several separate development programs mashed into one by the power of political lobbying.

To Petruzzelli, it was a beautiful sight to behold.

A gorilla in a spacesuit stepped out from behind the Gravesfighter. He gestured. Suddenly they had access to the ship’s wifi. The launch track broke out in a rash of WARNING: NO ACCESS signs.

“Welcome,” the gorilla rasped. His nametag said CARASSO. “We’re scheduled for a 24-hour turnaround. Find somewhere to bunk down.”

“Where?” Zhang said, undaunted by Carasso’s brashness.

“How would I fucking know? Try Cargo Deck B.”

Petruzzelli stepped forward and stroked the fuselage of the Gravesfighter. The UN-blue paint job was factory-fresh.

“I’d like to take a shower,” said Gwynneth Blake. “I’ve been in this suit for ages.”

All they could see in Carasso’s faceplate was reflections from the strip lighting, but his voice held so much wrath that every one of them—high-achieving professionals, stars in their respective fields, who had formerly answered to no one—cringed. “This is a Star Force battleship. Star Force is
at war.
Every
gram
of superfluous mass degrades our
military effectiveness.
There are no
fucking
showers.”

Petruzzelli stuck out her chin. “I’m a Gravesfighter pilot. This is a Gravesfighter. I’d like to hang out here and familiarize myself with it.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

“I happen to be the XO of this barge. That means I am your commanding officer. And
that
means you will address me as sir. Got it? Now fuck off and get some sleep.”

★

Despite this unpromising start, Petruzzelli managed to spend most of her time on board training. Of the 140 Gravesfighters on the
Thunderjack,
half belonged to the carrier’s own combat wing, and the others still had factory seals on their drives. So she didn’t have her own ship. But the active-duty Gravesfighters were just sitting there. After pestering the flight deck crew, Petruzzelli got permission to climb into a cockpit and practice the skills she’d learned at Woomera.

Skill One: forget about looking where you’re going.

The Gravesfighter’s cockpit had an external optical feed screen, but you were encouraged to disable it. At combat speeds, autokinetic effects and motion-induced blindness made the human sensorium dangerously unreliable.

Skill Two: watch the instruments.

She sat in a couch anchored inside a gyrosphere, which could rotate in any direction to keep her body aligned with the gravitational forces generated during maneuvers. All the gaps in the sphere were filled with screens, which she controlled by gaze commands and subvocalization. Her slick new neural implants worked so fast and so well that it felt like she was flying the ship via telepathy.

Skill Three—another Star Force joke: Think
you’re
flying your ship? Think again. And again. And again. The ship is flying the ship. You’re the decision-maker.

Which meant Petruzzelli had to be aware of all passive and active sensor / scanner information, along with all the information her ship could scoop up from other Gravesfighters, other Star Force ships, civilian transponder data, telescopes, and tactical probes,
and
the ship’s projections of what all those data sources would do in the short, medium, and long term,
and
its estimates of what they knew about
her …
and then she had to make decisions in split-second timeframes based on that glut of information.

Compared to this, flying the
Kharbage
Collector
had been as easy as pedaling a child’s bicycle.

Session after session, she floated out of the cockpit drenched in sweat, her muscles limp with the tension of imaginary battles.

“Eat the pain,” chortled XO Carasso, remotely watching her struggles.

Meanwhile, the rest of her squadron were partying down in Cargo Deck B. They’d staked out a campsite amidst the cargo where they socialized with the other replacement pilots travelling to the front. Petruzzelli kept her distance. She disdained her peers and envied them at the same time. She
had
to train this hard, just to catch up with them … and they knew it, too. Achievement scores had been publically posted during their time at Woomera. Petruzzelli had consistently ranked at the bottom of the pack.

Then came the day when she suited up and headed for the flight deck, only to find her vision obscured by STAND CLEAR: LAUNCH IN PROGRESS pop-ups. She swiped the gaudy balloons away. Deck crew hurtled past her, dragging fuel lines. Looking through the lateral arches, she saw that the straight line of parked Gravesfighters had frayed. Several ships nosed at their launch doors.

“Duck and cover!” shouted someone on the public channel, and Petruzzelli leapt down onto the nearest rails. She landed face to face with a yellow-suited techie.

“What’s going on?” she line-of-sighted him.

“Troll action.”

Star Force people shortened ‘toilet rolls’ to
trolls
.
It was quicker to say. The
Thunderjack
had been attacked by the PLAN.

“Are we in danger?”

“Shrug.
Drive-by nuking. They holed our port shields. The flyboys are chasing them. Waste of fuel.”

Bright light washed over them. A Gravesfighter had launched, using its maneuvering thrusters. Had it used its two-terawatt main drive, it would have melted the launch bay.

“We got a radar lock when the trolls dropped their bombs,” the techie said.

Another, brighter flash flooded the flight deck.

“Oops.”

Petruzzelli flew back down to Cargo Deck B. “We’re in action! Drive-by nuking!”

Harry Zhang was sitting cross-legged on the floor with Zubrowski’s head in his lap, tattooing something on Zubrowski’s temple. He looked up at her. “Yeah, I was expecting that. We gotta be pretty close to Mars.”

The
Thunderjack
had left Earth space on a curved trajectory that would pass the sun, cutting across the orbit of Venus. They had now been in flight for a little over two weeks. Their destination had not been announced, but there weren’t that many places to go out here.

Mars had been in opposition to Earth—that is, their closest approach when they were together on the same side of the sun—last August. This happened once every 26 months or so. After each opposition, Earth overtook Mars, and would lap it around the sun before coming into opposition again. Now, the two planets were on opposite sides of the sun. Even the PLAN historically took a break from raiding near-Earth facilities when there was this much space between them, not to mention the sun’s gravity well. The trolls were thought to have difficulty operating at long range. In contrast, Star Force’s capital ships could cross the solar system without topping up their tanks—just not at speed.

What did this mean for the people of Earth? They had breathing room of approximately one more year before the PLAN unleashed its full fury on them.

Star Force had to win before that, or at least put a
huge
fucking dent in the PLAN.

Crudely put, this was Geneva’s strategy, as the pilots understood it.

Petruzzelli let her helmet fall. It bounced under the
Thunderjack’s
0.4 gees of thrust gravity. “This is stupid,” she said.

Zhang had gone back to doing Zubrowski’s tattoo. It looked like it would be a koala bear, the unofficial mascot of the Woomera Wallopers. He looked up again. “What’s stupid?”

“Launching off a carrier. It takes twelve and a quarter seconds to go tactical. That’s plenty of time for any lurking troll to cook your ass. I don’t want to go out like that.”

Zhang turned off his tattoo needle and put it down on Zubrowski’s chest. Zubrowski sat up, wincing. “No,” Zhang said to Petruzzelli. “I’ll tell you what’s stupid, Zuzu.”

“Don’t call me Zuzu.”

“Sorry. Petruzzelli. This ship has already generated and burnt enough energy to light Earth for a year.”

“So?” She didn’t see his point. Spaceships
did
go through fuel and propellant like competitive eaters. So what? Clean fusion made energy cheap. On an average—pre-war—day in the solar system, petawatts were thrown away on getting people and stuff from one place to another.

“It’s not sustainable. I’ve done the math. Remember what we saw at Woomera? Robot trucks arriving at night with their lights off, bumper to bumper. Spaceplanes launching from the Woomera Ring all day, every hour on the hour. The scale of this war effort is simply huge. Now consider that the UN is
not
a war machine. It’s a peace-loving supranational technocracy. Our industrial base is geared to continual improvement of standards of living. And you can’t change that with PR hype. So we’re trying to win in a hurry—”

“Before the next Mars opposition, yeah, I know.”

Zhang shook his head. “Before we run out of stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Ships, fuel, spare parts, consumables. Fuel’s a biggie, since Luna’s production of He3 still hasn’t recovered.”

“Luna isn’t the only source of He3,” Petruzzelli said, eager to share her first-hand knowledge on this topic. “You can make it. All you need is plenty of volatiles and someplace that it’s OK to pollute. Such as an asteroid. Then you just set up a tritium breeder reactor and let ‘er rip. Lots of Belters are jumping into the market—”

“Well, yeah. They’re ramping up He3 production on Mercury, too. The problem is processing. It’s the same in every industry. Before you can make anything, you need to make the machines to make it, and before
that
you need to make parts for those machines, and the machines to make
those
parts … or ship them out from Earth. And most of our heavy industry is space-based, which means Star Force has to guard the factories so they can make the parts for the machines to make the parts for the machines that—”

Gwynneth Blake, reading a book next to Zhang, looked up and laughed. “In English, what he means is: we’re it. This strategy may be stupid, but it’s the only one we have. Because we’re all Earth has got.”

“Gotcha,” Petruzzelli said. The way Blake condescended to her made her burn inside.

All the other Woomera Wallopers were educated to a level she’d never achieved. They were the product of generations of associative marriage among the rich and picky. They knew about things that, to her, were the merest gloomy penumbra around her itching bones, the plasticky taste of canned air, and the Flattop’s relentless acceleration towards Mars.

“Harry, can you hurry up and finish my koala?” Zubrowski said, glancing into his mirrored wrist implant. “It looks like a skull.”

★

Star Force’s strategy was neither quite as desperate as Zhang figured, or as stupid as Petruzzelli imagined.

On their seventeenth day out, a public announcement boomed through Cargo Deck B. “Ladies and gentlemen, flyboys and flygirls, bilge rats and earthsacks … you now have access to our external feed. If this is your first time in this scenic region of the solar system, I suggest you check out the view.”

Petruzzelli instantly did.

“Welcome to Eeeeeuuureka Station!”

The only point of comparison that came to Petruzzelli was Midway, the famous constellation of habs, shipyards, and factories permanently stationed at the L1 Earth-Sun Lagrange point. But the space station now floating in the middle of her field of vision did not really resemble Midway. The similarity lay in its sheer size. A cloud of ships large and small maneuvered around an object completely covered with high-albedo surface installations, at least four kilometers long. She couldn’t tell if it was manmade or not. Somewhere on her left, Gwynneth Blake said—

“So, it turns out we have a base on a Mars trojan asteroid.”

Taneela Williams: “I didn’t even know Mars had any trojan asteroids.”

Harry Zhang: “This is good. This is good. This changes the math.” Pause. “But not much.”

Luc Zubrowski: “Oh, forget the freaking math for a while. Betcha they have booze, Harry. Booooze. And lovejuice!”

Growing larger all the time, the surface structures of Eureka Station resolved into shipyards, power plants, and refineries. Every square centimeter of surface not otherwise in use was covered with solar mesh. The whole conglomeration rotated slowly.

Blake: “It’s an asteroid. 5261 Eureka. It librates around the trailing L5 Lagrange point of Mars. Wow. Discovered in 1990. And deleted from all starmaps in 2181, along with the rest of the Eureka family, and 121514 Triumph, which leads Mars in its orbit at the L4 Lagrange point. This was an example of flawless cooperation between the UN, the Chinese, and the private sector.”

Williams: “Are you quoting something?”

Blake: “The Eureka Moment: A Noob’s Guide to Eureka Station. You’ve got a copy in your inbox.”

“Just highlight the good bits for me.”

Petruzzelli opened her own copy of the Noob’s Guide. Her faith in Star Force revived as she skimmed the history of Eureka Station. Earth’s motley space navies—the predecessors of Star Force—had occupied 5261 Eureka ten years after the Mars Incident. Ever since, despite political ructions—notably the expulsion of the Chinese, after they declined for the last time to join the UN—humanity had been building up its presence here. In fact, Eureka station was the second-oldest asteroid colony in the solar system. It had the firepower of a planet. And no one freaking knew about it. Petruzzelli felt proud enough to cry.