The Phobos Maneuver (21 page)

“Heh. I wrote it.”

“You!”

“Yeah. I started off composing Gregorian chants, and then I got into oratorio. This is called
St. Stephen.
Check it out.”

Mendoza logged into the shipboard sim. The engineering deck stayed the same shape and size, but now it seemed to be built of stone. Earthlight shone through stained-glass windows. Candles burnt in iron sconces. Where the machinery had been, a full orchestra occupied the fabbery floor. The choir came in with a long-drawn-out
Amen,
and Mendoza looked up to see thirty monks standing on the catwalks around the reactor. Jun’s sub-personalities—his brothers. He had retired them from active shipboard life, but they’d clearly found something else to do.

"Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" sang the young monk Ron Studd.

“Stop,” Jun shouted. “You sound like an altar boy. You’re about to be stoned to death, FFS.”

“I think he sounds great,” Mendoza said.

Jun sighed. He waved a hand, and the orchestra laid down their bows. “Composing music is the hardest thing I’ve
ever
done. Much harder than flying a ship. I had to write a bunch of brand-new algorithms—sprezzatura, legato, allegro—still working on those.”

“Didn’t you hear me calling you earlier?”

“No, sorry.”

Mendoza didn’t know if that was the honest truth, or if Jun was blatantly admitting that he’d been ignoring him. “I saw Earth out there,” he said. “It was almost the size of the moon. We were going to cross Earth’s orbit at a distance of 0.75 AUs from Earth itself. Looks like we’re a whole lot closer than that.”

“We are.”

“What the heck is going on, Jun? Are we going back to Earth?”

“No.”

“But we’re not going to Eureka Station, either, are we?”

“No.”

“Where are we going?”

“I can’t tell you right now.”

Jun floated away, towards the rumbling printers. Mendoza shouted after him, “Did you hear the PLAN nuked Hyderabad?”

“Yes. By the way, we’ve got a Dronazon delivery,” Jun replied. “It’s waiting at the crew airlock, unless it’s given up.”

“I didn’t know you were placing an order. I should have ordered a ‘Do It Like A Fragger’ t-shirt.”

“Could you sign for it?”

“Not until you tell me what it is.”

“Just some stuff I need,” Jun said vaguely.

Mendoza was too angry to do anything but leave. He spacewalked again and signed for the delivery—or rather, provided his voiceprint and ID. The drone passed him the Wetblanket it was towing. Then it flipped over and vanished. Of course, it hadn’t really vanished. It had just gone off in another direction, which looked like vanishing when you were travelling at thousands of kilometers a second. Mendoza posted the Wetblanket into the engineering deck airlock, and then returned to the ops module.

Shhhptwfftz ... aooo …

He floated back towards the bridge, muttering four-letter words, drowning the whispers out.

How could he have been so dumb as to think Jun gave a shit about Elfrida? Much less Kiyoshi?

They’d just used his love for her to rope him into this mission, for what purpose Jun wouldn’t fucking tell him, which meant it was guaranteed to be unpleasant.

Mendoza knew from unpleasant. He’d gotten pretty good at blocking shit out, but he had seen gigadeath. He had seen the PLAN’s malware and its reverse-engineered bacteria kill people like insects. He’d come close to killing people himself.

He thought of Hyderabad again. He knew when he got back to the bridge, he’d log on and follow the story to its bitter end. The line between internet surfing and reality was so thin, and getting thinner all the time. He couldn’t block shit out anymore. He was in the middle of it—and so was Elfrida.

Fffftpaooo czsht …

It still sounded like gibberish. Faint, staticky gibberish.

But the longer he listened, the more Mendoza had a feeling the whispers were actually Chinese.

xvii.

“Your move,” Petruzzelli’s ship said to her.

“Sorry. Was thinking.” She drew a virtual two of hearts from the virtual discard pile.

Twenty-five hours down. Twenty-five to go.

Twenty-five more hours of bluffing.

The ship, of course, made its move instantly. Even though it was playing with one hand tied behind its back, so to speak, it was still beating her.

“Your stress indicators are spiking,” it said. She’d selected its Luna-accented personality again, which made her think of the Fragger colonel, Miller. “Don’t be a sore loser.”

“Oh, frag off,” Petruzzelli muttered. She pressed her knees against the bars of the command gyrosphere. Felt the bruises from the centrifuge. Drew and discarded. Did the ship suspect what she was thinking? No, it couldn’t. If it suspected, it’d be working on her, trying to change her mind. Wouldn’t it?

She lost the game. Ran systems checks. Slept. Woke. Ate. Ran systems checks again.

Three hours out from Mars, the PLAN ambushed the fleet, with the usual results. Fifty Gravesfighters had set out from Eureka Station. Forty-four Gravesfighters flew on. No Fraggers had been invited to participate in the mission this time, which made Petruzzelli think someone suspected something. Maybe after Miller’s desertion, they didn’t trust the remaining Luna Union pilots.

She sucked some more gorp out of her suit’s nutrient nozzle, played one last game of gin rummy with her ship, and then it was time to say hello to Mars.

As the orbital fortresses loomed larger in the gestalt, she felt herself getting uncontrollably sleepy.

It was a reaction, she thought, to the unusual stress she was experiencing. She instructed her suit to inject her with a dose of morale juice. Immediately she perked up. The gestalt flowed through her neural implants like a song she knew by heart. Her mechanical readouts flickered in the deep red light of the cockpit like favorite storybooks.

“Hey,” her ship said. “Did you just juice up?”

“Yeah.”

“That stuff is terrible for you. It’ll wear out your adrenal glands.”

Petruzzelli laughed. “What are you, my mother? Fuck my adrenal glands.”

Those few seconds had brought the fleet into range of the orbital fortresses. Threat vectors sliced across the gestalt. She threw the ship into a heavy-gee turn.

The fleet was already scattering in forty-four different directions. Petruzzelli chose a trajectory that would make her one of the last to approach Stickney. They hurtled past Mars into space, travelling at three times escape velocity, decelerating hard.

A troll popped up at her five o’clock low.
No problem.
Morale juice made trolls look like bonus points. She spun on her thrusters and threw a stream of charged particles into its path. The troll achieved a brief afterlife as a star. X-ray flux chased her as she ran.

“Look,” she said, stealing a glance at her optical feed. “You can see the Big Turd.”

“Olympus Mons,” her ship corrected her.

“What the hell you think they have down there?”

“Water-splitting facilities? Computers? We’re still moving too fast.”

“No, we’re not,” Petruzzelli said, puzzled. “We’re on vector for orbit insertion with an apoapsis of forty-one thousand klicks. If that doesn’t work for some reason, we’ll just U-turn and dive into the gravity well.”

“Waste of fuel. I’m going to hit the brakes, OK? Get ready for some heavy gees.”

She didn’t even have time to argue. In the space of a heartbeat, she blacked out.

★

~Hello, Sandhya 4863CCP,
Elfrida subvocalized, stifling a yawn.
~Nice to meet you. I’m Elfrida Goto and I’ll be your operator today

“Mumpfh,” said Sandhya 4863CCP.

Like all the phavatars on Stickney, Sandhya 4863CCP was a former civilian bot—not a therapist, this one, but a nanny. When it was minding toddlers in Mumbai, it had been styled as a pretty young Indian woman. Elfrida had no way of knowing what it looked like now, as she was seeing through its eyes. But she only had to glance at the other phavatars in her platoon to know that Sandhya 4863CCP was equally repulsive.

~We all here?
Elfrida was in charge of the platoon.

Distracted responses trickled in.

Each phavatar had a steel carapace that came up behind its head like a hood, and wrapped around, enclosing its skull—processors, memory crystals, other vital stuff—in a mesh Faraday cage. Their skinny, pathetically naked legs stuck out, much abraded and scorched on the backs by the exhaust from the mobility jets under their carapaces. Their arms were flechette cannons with grippers hanging off the bottoms of their barrels. Grenades and spare clips wreathed their torsos. Faces that still could pass for human stared out blankly through their mesh masks.

They were crawling along a trench on the surface of Stickney.

It heartened Elfrida to see it was not the same trench they’d been in when she logged out yesterday.

She could tell by the walls. The regolith bore no signs of superheating—no glassy patches, or shattered regions where pockets of gas had blown out. No one had fought over this trench yet.
So how did we get here?
She hastily scanned the action summary left for her by the last agent to operate Sandhya 4863CCP. At the same time, she was reviewing the phavatar’s telemetry, reading status reports from the rest of her platoon, figuring out exactly where they were, and updating her phavatar’s
.config
file.

Every operator developed a repertoire of SUIT COMMANDS he or she found to be effective. They squirted them in at the beginning of each shift, so that the phavatars could implement them in real time. This made them legally and morally responsible for whatever the phavatars did.

Energy pulses zinged around the elbow of the trench, chewing holes in the regolith ahead of Sandhya 4863CCP.

“Incoming!” shouted Delitsky, one of Elfrida’s lieutenants, a 20-year-old Space Corps agent from Kiev. The whole platoon’s stress indicators spiked, a row of red flames on Elfrida’s master display. This had all happened 194 million kilometers away, ten minutes ago. It was stressful all the same.

Sandhya 4863CCP retracted her head under her carapace, and Elfrida’s vision went black. She pulled herself forward with her grippers. Scuttling around the elbow of the trench at cockroach speed, she fired both flechette cannons blindly.

Elfrida had worked hard on that sequence, literally crawling around in the gym with a blanket over her head to see how it would go.

The phavatars could do this kind of thing by themselves, supposedly. But in reality, it had been ninety years since the last ground war on Earth. No one alive had first-hand knowledge of small unit tactics. Worse yet, lots of potential reference data from the 21
st
and 22
nd
centuries had been lost because it was stored on digital media that degraded or got deleted. The Star Force programmers had had to go back to the
First
World War, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
to learn about trench warfare.

A bullet slammed into Sandhya 4863CCP’s carapace, tossing her back into the wall of the trench. Gravity on Stickney was next to nil. You could float away like
that.
Maybe that was why the previous occupants of this rock had dug trenches.

Elfrida’s back throbbed as if she’d been hit by a bullet herself. Sympathetic debilitation was the phenomenon whereby telepresence operators felt their phavatars’ pain. These bots didn’t emit stingy pain signals like most phavatars, so Elfrida had only sensed a light tap on the back. But her brain was still trying to convince her it hurt.

Two more phavatars scrambled over Sandhya 4863CCP. They charged up the trench, firing bursts of flechettes. Scrawny dark figures bounded away. One of them paused to whirl a sling around its head. A primitive combustion grenade hurtled at the two phavatars and exploded between them.

Faraday cages did not keep out chemical flames. “Fuuuuck!” screamed Delitsky. “I’m out!”

Sandhya 4863CCP reached into her chest webbing, where her breasts had once been. She took out one of her own grenades and threw it with the accuracy of a champion softball pitcher. A bright white flash engulfed the hostile who’d taken Delitsky out.

The platoon surged forward into a gently expanding cloud of ash.

A half-dozen hostiles cowered behind the next bend. Elfrida’s grenade had incinerated the lot of them.

Their charred bodies floated up when the phavatars kicked them.

Twisted into unnatural poses, their limbs outflung, or burned to stumps, each one was the size of an Earth-born child.

No spacesuits. No respirators. No protection from the vacuum, or from the blizzard of radiation that howled around Stickney. Burnt scraps of cloth flaked from their bodies. Their weapons were slagged; wouldn’t have been worth taking, anyway. Just laser pistols so big and clumsy the operators called them
blasters,
like something out of an old movie. And slings. And lengths of pipe.

The phavatars scuffled through the corpses like armored giants. The operators made crude comments about burning the bacon.

Elfrida noticed that one operator wasn’t joining in the banter. Gilchrist? Holy crap, it was
Sophie
Gilchrist, her and Colden’s classmate from way back when. She must’ve just got rotated into Elfrida’s platoon today.
I’ll have to talk to her,
Elfrida thought.

But Sandhya 4863CCP had other things in mind. She went back to see to Delitsky’s phavatar.

Having lost contact with Eureka Station, it was now operating autonomously. It brushed past Elfrida and knelt among the charred bodies. “I can see you’ve suffered a severe trauma,” it said gruffly. It held up body parts, matched their ragged ends together, and shook its head. “This is really beyond the scope of my expertise. But I’ll see what I can do.”

The operators murmured curses. When a phavatar lost contact with its operator, it reverted to its original personality. This was by design. Phavatars could not be permitted to operate lethal weaponry without a human in control. There was nothing
less
lethal than a therapist, so the programmers had left those algorithms as-is to serve as defaults. However, it was pretty awful to watch.