The Phobos Maneuver (18 page)

“Oh, calm down, guys!” Elfrida said. “I’m just saying. All this unnecessary secretiveness drives me nuts. That’s all.”

“Me, too,” Petruzzelli said.

“Thank you. And regarding the Fraggers, all I was wondering was if any of the guys we knew made it back here. But I wouldn’t want to implicate you in a loose-lips situation, Petruzzelli.” Elfrida drained her beer. She ran her hands over her messy updo. “Let’s talk about something else.”

Of course, then none of them could think of anything to say. After a moment Colden pointed at Petruzzelli’s chest. Her plunge-necked top showed the top of the scar that ran from her collarbone to the tip of her sternum. “What happened?”

“Oh, that’s where I had my lungs and heart replaced.”

“Whoa,” Elfrida said. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but your hair—”

“Yeah. It’s gone.”

“I remember when we first met it was purple.”

“Magenta.”

“Yeah, and then when you made captain you changed it to turquoise.”

“I didn’t stick with that for long.”

“God, wasn’t that a weird time?” Elfrida seemed to have decided that reminiscences of the Belt would be a safe topic. “All that shit was going down on 4 Vesta, and you were, like, out there, rescuing colonists from pirates …”

Petruzzelli smiled in relief. Thank dog, Elfrida didn’t suspect that Petruzzelli had actually been in league with Captain Haddock and his gang. They were bad news. Hopefully someone had locked them up by now. “Yeah, there were a lot of crazy characters around,” she said. “Always are. It’s the Belt.”

“So you were working out there?” Colden said.

“Yeah,” Elfrida answered for her. “She captained a recycling barge! She was basically flying that thing solo, weren’t you? Oh, Colden, she was bad-ass. Even with
turquoise hair.”

Elfrida’s praise touched Petruzzelli. She thought:
If I can’t trust her, who can I trust?
Before she had really decided whether to speak, she heard herself blurt: “Speaking of crazy characters, Goto, I wonder if you ever heard anything more from Scuzzy the Smuggler?” Her brain caught up with her mouth at that point. “I mean, Kiyoshi Yonezawa. That was his name, right? The captain of the
Unicorn.”

As if she didn’t know his name. As if she didn’t know that the
Unicorn
had changed its name to the
Chimera,
and then to the
Monster,
and then—a few months back—had vanished from the Belt’s spaceways. Her best guess, Scuzzy had gone to ground at his skeevy hideout in Gap 2.5.

Elfrida’s reaction surpassed Petruzzelli’s worst fears. She physically flinched in her chair. Then she said, “Ah,” and then, “Er,” and then, “Oh, right.” The light was poor, but it looked like she was blushing.

A jealous suspicion entered Petruzzelli’s mind. But no, it couldn’t be. Elfrida only dated women … right?

Colden stared curiously. She didn’t seem to understand Elfrida’s confusion, either.

“Sorry,” Elfrida said. “It was just surprising to hear you mention
him!
It was such a long time ago.” She tilted her beer stein to her lips. It was empty. “Can we get some service here?”

“Who are we talking about now? Scuzzy what?” Colden said.

Elfrida shot a guilty glance at Petruzzelli. Then she stood up. “I’m going to go get us another round. Colden, you come with. Petruzzelli, you stay here so no one takes our table …”

Petruzzelli shrugged. Watching them go, she did not know if she was angrier at Elfrida, or at herself. Elfrida was a shitty liar. Obviously, she knew
something
about Kiyoshi Yonezawa. And just as obviously, she was telling the whole story to Colden right now. Sharing secrets that she deemed Petruzzelli unworthy of.

They came back. Petruzzelli accepted her refill in stony silence. She felt like throwing it in their faces.

“So,” she said to Colden. She wanted to hurt her somehow.
“I’m curious. How does someone who looks like you end up with a name like Jennifer Colden? Normally, Africans have fashionable names like Aja or Kibibi. Not to get personal or anything.”

“Not at all. I’m a Tutsi,” Colden said. “I was orphaned in the infowars. A FUKish couple adopted me. They died in the
first
PLAN raid on Luna.” Her gaze met Petruzzelli’s coolly. “I loved the heck out of them.” Then she landed her counterpunch. “What about you? Elfrida says you have like six mothers and eight fathers. What was that like growing up?”

Petruzzelli stared at Elfrida, shocked by her betrayal. Elfrida had the decency to look embarrassed.

“Three mothers and four fathers, at the moment,” Petruzzelli said. “Excuse me. I need to take a leak.”

The toilets were unisex. The chemical they used in place of water stank so bad Petruzzelli’s eyes watered. She went into a cubicle, locked the door, and punched the wall as hard as she could. The aerofoam yielded, so she didn’t hurt herself, and it wasn’t satisfying. On the bright side, her tantrum made no noise.

Hand sanitizer units ran down one wall, opposite a row of urinals. In the mirror she saw Zhang. She saw too much of Zhang, actually.

“Zuzu!” Unabashed, he zipped up and came to sanitize his hands at the next unit. “When did you get here?”

“Just now,” Petruzzelli lied. “I didn’t know you were here! Where are you sitting?”

“Oh, back there.” Zhang waved vaguely. “Everyone’s here, but listen, we’re about to ditch. Do you want to come? I mean, I really want you to come. You can’t not come.” He seized her hands in his and dropped to his knees. “You have to come!”

Petruzzelli laughed. Zhang drunk was a lot nicer than Zhang sober. “Sure, but where are you going?”

“We haven’t decided yet. Let’s just get out of here. The place has been completely overrun by simheads and saddoes on the pull.” He nudged her out of the toilets. “Exhibit A.” He sent her a text: a snapshot he’d just taken with his retinal implants, with Elfrida and Colden circled. He’d captioned it: “Someone told us that micro-gravity makes you lose weight!!”

Petruzzelli giggled. She felt a tiny bit disloyal for a moment, and then not at all. She waved a casual goodbye to Elfrida and Colden as she followed Zhang out of the pub.

★

“You told her too much,” Colden said, watching Petruzzelli leave the pub with her fellow pilots.

“I told her nothing,” Elfrida protested.

“You told her too much nothing. If she was clued up about therapy, she’d have guessed
we
don’t know anything about it.”

“Petruzzelli is the type of person who would cross the solar system to avoid a therapy session.”

“Yeah, maybe, but you shouldn’t have rambled on about knitting and stuff. Volunteering too much detail is one of the classic ways liars get caught.”

“She believed us,” Elfrida said.
Us,
because it stung to be called a liar. But if preserving their cover story made her a liar, Colden was one, too.

Truthfully, she had hated deceiving Petruzzelli. She drank from her new stein of beer, tilting it and slurping the micro-gravity bulge of liquid. She was drunk enough that she’d regret it tomorrow. She searched in the pocket of her party dress for her hangover pills. They worked better if you took them while you were still drunk.

“Maybe she did believe us,” Colden went on. “But what’s gonna happen when she flies into the shit, and gets assigned to a therapist … and it isn’t one of us; it isn’t even human—it’s just a crappy old sub-geminoid bot running thirty-year-old Jungian software?”

“Petruzzelli won’t fly into the shit. She’s an ace pilot.”

“Gravesfighter pilots fly an average of six missions before they’re either killed or massively traumatized.”

Elfrida did not want to engage with that bald statement of probability. She pulled a handful of junk out of her pocket. There were the pills. She offered them to Colden—a wordless apology.

Something else had come out of her pocket, too: an old phone that Elfrida now used as an offline photo album. The egg-shaped gadget displayed a picture of Elfrida and Mendoza on a swan boat in Central Lagoon, on their vacation in New York last year.

Colden picked a hangover pill out of Elfrida’s hand. Touching the picture, she said, “Anything?”

Elfrida shook her head. “I don’t dare email him from here. They’d delete it before I hit send.”

“Yeah, but you told him before we left—”

“I told him we were being posted to Eureka Station, yeah. That got through. But at that time we didn’t even know what or where Eureka Station was, so obviously, he doesn’t know what or where it is, either.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

“Huh?”

“You can be kind of naïve sometimes” Colden said affectionately. She nodded at the yoofs dancing in front of the bar. “The ISA, versus thousands of keenie greenies with anonymous vlogs, personal virtual servers, ciphering skills, and God knows what-all? No contest. People are going to find out, and that’s a good thing in my opinion. It sucks that no one back home knows what’s happening on Stickney.”

xiii.

The
Kharbage Collector
edged safely out of the cluster of asteroid fragments, still under the control of Kiyoshi Yonezawa’s mysterious associate.

A gigantic old cargo hauler bellied out of the darkness and matched the
Kharbage Collector’s
relative velocity.

“That’s the
Chimera,”
Captain Haddock said.

“The
Monster,”
Kiyoshi Yonezawa corrected him over the radio. “Just like your ship is the
Paladin.”

Yonezawa seemed to assume that Captain Haddock was in charge. Michael had expected that. He was just a kid.

But he was not prepared for what happened next.

Yonezawa came aboard at the head of a party of Japanese people. They smiled and welcomed the newcomers to 99984 Ravilious.

Then they took the Gravimetric Upcycler, all four of the
Kharbage Collector’s
printers, and the ship’s entire complement of workbots.

Michael watched the optical feed in shocked disbelief. The Longvoyager floated alongside them like a stack of dumplings on a skewer. Its huge, spherical cargo module rotated around the ship’s spine at a lazy pace. The thieves queued at the airlocks of the operations module, towing the stuff they’d taken from the
Kharbage Collector.
.

His
stuff.

“My stuff!”

“Told you he was a pirate,” Coral said.

“Hey, I resent that.”

Kiyoshi Yonezawa had stayed on their bridge while his associates stole their stuff. Spaceborn-tall and skinny, he had long black hair tied back so it wouldn’t float in freefall. He wore a loose tunic with a picture of a lion on it over his EVA suit. He sure looked like a pirate. He never stopped moving—
prowling
—but he had frighteningly steady eyes. He also had a Habsafe™ laser rifle. He was not exactly covering them with it, but it was the only weapon on the bridge.

“I’m not a pirate,” he explained. “I’m helping you out.”

“OK,” Michael squeaked.

Captain Haddock scoffed, “Ye’ll strip the ship and then
help
us on our way!”

“No, we won’t,” Yonezawa said. “The ship’ll probably be dismantled for parts. It’s falling apart. Not worth refurbishing. I’m making sure your valuables find a good home first. Like I said: helping you out. Otherwise, you’d probably get spaced when the Pashtuns or the Mormons roll up to clean you out.”

Haddock and Codfish protested loudly.

“Shut up,” Yonezawa yelled. They went quiet. He was the one with the gun. “Around here, visitors come in two varieties: invited guests and uninvited intruders. You’re the latter. You’re lucky the boss didn’t frag you.”

Codfish rounded on his brother in a sudden rage.
“You
agreed to this. You thought you could sell him the Upcycler and the printers.”

Michael gasped. Of course, that was why Haddock had agreed to come here in the first place. He should have guessed.

“It would have worked a treat, if the kid hadn’t locked us out of the thunderin’ bridge!”

“Is that what happened?” Yonezawa chuckled. “Well, you’re right. If you’d stood off and used your drive as an implicit threat, we probably would have bought the Upcycler. How much do those retail for nowadays?”

Half as much as a ship like the
Kharbage Collector,
Michael knew. On the optical feed, Yonezawa’s associates bundled the Gravimetric Upcycler into the other ship’s airlock. Then they flocked back to the
Collector.

Two of them came up to the bridge, carrying Michael’s top-of-the-line child-sized EVA suit, and the pirates’ grungy ones.

“Here you go,” Yonezawa said. “Suit up.”

They obeyed. What choice did they have? Yonezawa hustled them out of the bridge, up to the transfer point, and down the keel tube to the quarterdeck. It was the first time Michael had left the bridge in more than two months. He panicked. “Can I please take my mecha?”

“No,” Yonezawa said. “What would you want that old thing for?”

Because I’m scared. I feel safer in the mecha.
When he was travelling with Petruzzelli, he’d never left the ship without it. “Petruzzelli gave it to me. It’s the only thing she ever gave me!”

“Petruzzelli?”

“Yes! Alicia Petruzzelli!” Michael’s original mission recurred to him. “Don’t you even remember her?”

“Petruzzelli! Christ, yeah. She had a twin-module Startractor.
This
ship?”

“Yes!”

“How about that. Small world. Did you steal it from her?”

Michael shook his head. If he spoke, he would cry. Yonezawa’s surprise was real. Petruzzelli wasn’t here. He’d guessed that a while back, but it crushed him to have it confirmed.

“This lad here is the son of the CEO!” Haddock said. “His father is Adnan Kharbage himself, owner of Kharbage, LLC!”

Yonezawa raised an eyebrow. “The recycling company that bought the exploitation rights to our home asteroid, and leaked our astrodata to the PLAN? Well, well. So I guess we can call this payback.”

He herded them ahead of him into the quarterdeck. Then he subvocalized to someone on his radio network. A few minutes later, the mecha was pushed onto the quarterdeck.

“You can have this,” Yonezawa said. “It’s just deadweight.”