The Phobos Maneuver (25 page)

“Refrigerators? Very nice, but we haven’t got anything to put in them,” said his robot squirrel. “We’re out of food. That is how my father plans to humiliate me. He thinks he can force me to return to Earth, by stopping our supply of consumables! He doesn’t understand that I can live on air and dew! I’m immune to heat and cold. I’ve transcended the petty passions of the flesh. Nothing bothers me, nothing! Look.” The prince fumbled with the padded seatbelt that held him in his lounger. “Like a sage of yore, I can fly!”

Before the prince could demonstrate this perfectly ordinary ability, Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu opened the first of the refrigerators and took out an armful of guns. He tossed them to the other courtiers, keeping one for himself. With choreographed timing, the courtiers fired on the drones that accompanied them. These drones were unique to Tiangong Erhao. They looked like wheelie suitcases, ran on gasoline
(of all things), and shot laser pulses so powerful that they could turn human beings into living torches. They also had titanium housing. However, this presented no obstacle to the .50 caliber slugs that Jun had cast in the
Monster’s
forge. Pierced by multiple bullets, the drones simply drifted away.

The recoil from the rifles caused the courtiers to spin away, too, but they recovered in thruster-powered somersaults, their robes flapping. They levelled their rifles at Prince Jian Er and his groupies.

“Up you get, Your Imperial Highness,” Bao Gu said in Mandarin (subtitled on Mendoza’s contacts). “You’re going home.”

Mendoza floated with his hands over his ears, agape. So did the prince and his court. Whatever drug they were on, it wasn’t doing anything for their reflexes.

“Move it!” Bao Gu shouted. “You can indulge in fantasies of transcendence all you like, when you’re safe at home in Beijing!”

A courtier flew down to the yacht, opened emergency lockers on deck, and threw EVA suits at the prince and his groupies.

Jian Er finally reacted. “Treachery!” he screamed. “You dogs, you’ve betrayed me!”

“Zh
ǐ
yào bì zu
ǐ
,”
Bao Gu muttered. He added to Mendoza, in perfectly good English, “His sweetheart was murdered by the PLAN on Luna. He’s been in a downward spiral ever since. It’s rather tragic. But we can’t allow him to commit suicide by PLAN. It would besmirch the honor of the Imperial Family.”

Down on the deck of the yacht, the other courtiers forced the prince and his groupies into their EVA suits at gunpoint. Jian Er was weeping

A kerfluffle in the corner of the deck drew Mendoza’s attention. A man sat in a chair. The courtiers seemed to be debating what to do with him.

Mendoza flew down to the deck.

The chair was no ordinary piece of furniture. Made of unpainted steel, it looked like a school desk with an attached table. Its occupant sat hunched over, the chair too small for him. Shackles held his forearms flat to the desk. He had a long beard, and empty blue eyes.

“Derek Lorna,” Mendoza said. “Holy shit.”

“What?”
Jun said—he couldn’t see what was happening, only overhear through the helmet stowed on Mendoza’s back.

“It’s Derek Lorna. He’s … still here.”

They’d left Lorna here last year. He had supposedly been going to work for the Chinese.

At the sound of his name, a spark of life returned to Lorna’s eyes.

The courtiers fetched a key and released him from the chair. They offered him a spacesuit.

Lorna seized the suit.

He leapt onto the rail of the yacht and dived into the depths of the Imperial Bay, kicking off as hard as he could to achieve momentum.

“He must have wearied of the prince’s company,” Bao Gu said dryly. “How odd.”

The courtiers decided they hadn’t time to chase Lorna. They rounded up Prince Jian Er’s court and herded them across the bay, into the airlock. Mendoza followed, glancing over his shoulder. The rapid pace of events had left him a bit stunned.

Outside the airlock, the
Monster
hove close. The ships of the CDTF were keeping their distance, as if to say,
Connive at the kidnapping of a prince, who us? We saw nuthin’.
Two of the
Monster’s
repair and handling bots closed with the human beings, farting fire. They confiscated the courtiers’ rifles, which Mendoza thought was a smart move.

He guided the Chinese, on Jun’s instructions, to the ops module. “Welcome aboard,” he said stiffly.

The Chinese wrinkled their noses at the scuffed wooden panelling and the smell of dry rot. On the bridge, the prince’s groupies sniggered at the antique-looking instruments and flat screens. Jian Er had stopped weeping, but his eyes were red and his hands flexed spasmodically.

Jun’s projection floated out of the data center. In fluent Mandarin, he apologized to the prince for this inconvenience. He made it clear that the Chinese would be travelling in the cargo module—where they couldn’t do any harm, Mendoza thought;
good—
but that he had wanted to greet them in person, because it was such an honor, blah, blah, etc, etc.

Mendoza thought less of Jun for crawling to this royal junkie. Then he realized that Jun was not crawling. He was pretending to be human.

A text from Jun popped up on his contacts.

“You’d better go back in now.”

Of course, he still had to hook up the refrigerators. But the kidnapping of the prince had overturned his understanding of their mission. He folded his arms.
“I want to know what the fridges are for,”
he gaze-typed

A draught stroked the back of his neck. The vents were working hard to cool the ship down. Prince Jian Er was cursing Jun out. That’s what it sounded like, anyway. He was nearly screaming, his voice cracking.

“Take the Blessed Sacrament, too,”
Jun texted.

“WHY?
”

“I’ll explain later, OK?”

“No. You lied to get me here. I refuse to be lied to anymore.”
When necessary, Mendoza could be as stubborn as an AI.
“I’m not your phavatar, Jun. I’m not just a convenient pair of hands. I want to know—”

“I’m hijacking Tiangong Erhao.”

That silenced Mendoza.

“I’m going to fly it to Mars and put on a heroic display of defiance. The Eighth Fleet is coming, too. That ought to bring the Chinese into the war on our side, if only to save face. Humanity hasn’t a chance of winning unless we’re truly united. This just might do it.”

Mendoza smiled.

“But there’s a complication. Some scientists here were running an experiment in human genetic engineering. The scientists were evacuated, but their experimental subjects are still here, and I can’t think of any way to return them to Earth. The journey would kill them, anyway. So …”

“That’s why we had to bring the Blessed Sacrament,”
Mendoza realized.

“Yes. And that’s why I had to bring you. You are a deacon, after all.”

Mendoza nodded. It was time for him to rise to his responsibilities. He pushed off and flew to the tabernacle Jun had built high on the concave wall of the bridge, above the throne Kiyoshi had installed at the captain’s workstation. The tabernacle had a solid steel door, engraved with the Archangel Michael slaying unclean spirits. Mendoza genuflected in the air. He took out the pyx that held the Host, and the stoppered chalice that held the Precious Blood. He looked around for something to carry them in.

Prince Jian Er was still yelling at Jun. Before Mendoza could react, he threw a punch at the projection.

His fist went straight through it. He wheeled through the air.

Seeming not to comprehend what had happened, Jian Er kicked off from the far wall and hurled himself at the projection again.

At the same time, driven by an unthinking instinct, Mendoza floated down to get between Jun and Jian Er.

The prince crashed into him.

The chalice flew out of Mendoza’s grip.

It curved through the air and hit the back of Kiyoshi’s throne.

It did not break.

The stopper came out.

As Mendoza watched in transfixed horror, the Precious Blood splashed into the air. The breeze from the vents caught it, breaking large globules into smaller ones. The dark red spray fell on the consoles and screens of the captain’s workstation.

Jian Er seized a handful of Mendoza’s EVA suit, punched him in the face, and screamed in English, “You will die for this!”

Pain radiated through Mendoza’s cheek and jaw. He kicked Jian Er away and dived after the Precious Blood.

Mop it up before it goes into the vents—

But it wasn’t going into the vents. Not with cool air blowing out of them. The drops had already started to vanish into the cracks and gaps in the turn-of-the-century wood-veneered workstation.

Mendoza decided to wipe the consoles with the sleeve of his suit. He could wash it later, drink the water, like Father Lynch had said—

“Leave it!” Jun’s projection shouted. The shout came from all the bridge speakers at once. The Chinese gasped. Abandoning his pretense of being human, Jun arrowed through them and materialized between Mendoza and the workstation. “Leave it!”

“It’s going into the cracks, Jun! There’re unprotected circuits down there! Legacy stuff. Liquid is deadly to electronics! You’ll get short-outs, rust—”

“Leave it,” Jun whispered.

The look in Jun’s eyes hit Mendoza like a two-by-four. He’d never thought about the fact that Jun had not taken Communion since he died. Mendoza had been away from the Church himself for a while, so he knew what that felt like. He knew how spiritually parched you got. You’d do anything to get back with God.

“OK,” he muttered. “OK, Jun.”

“Is there any left?”

Without being aware of it, Mendoza had caught and re-stoppered the chalice. He peered inside. “A little.”

“Good. Then just leave this.”

Mendoza turned his back on the workstation. Behind him, Jun’s projection sat on Kiyoshi’s throne at an unnatural angle, arms wrapped around his shins, head on his knees. Mendoza floated in front of him, pistol in hand, keeping the Chinese away, until all the Precious Blood had seeped through the cracks and vanished.

There were a few drops left on the screens. Mendoza bent his head and licked them up, tasting dust.

After that, he said to Bao Gu, “I’m going back in. Wait for me, I guess.”

“Do we have any choice?”

“No,” Mendoza conceded.

Jun’s projection had already vanished.

As Mendoza left, the R&H bots arrived to escort the Chinese off the bridge.

On his way to the airlock, he found a rucksack the Galapajin had left behind. He stored the Blessed Sacrament—what was left of it—carefully inside. Then he went back to Tiangong Erhao.

★

“You came back,” Derek Lorna said.

Lorna was sitting on a promontory of machinery at the bottom of the Imperial Bay, wearing the imperial-red spacesuit he’d stolen from the prince’s yacht. It was a much better one than Mendoza’s, which had been bought third-hand from a bankrupt mining company.

“Yeah,” Mendoza said. “I came back. But not for you, dude. I have to plug these fridges in.”

He jerked on the tether connecting his string of fridges.

“Sabotage?” Lorna guessed.

He was like that. It had taken him five seconds to reach the conclusion that Mendoza had had to have spelled out for him. Then again, Lorna wasn’t encumbered with a labored sense of right and wrong, either.

“Creative engineering,” Mendoza answered. He blinked up the map Jun had given him. It showed views of
Tiangong Erhao
in cross-section and elevation. The sheer scale of the place blew his mind.

“If there are viruses in those babies, you’ll have to physically install them in each sub-network,” Lorna said.

“Yeah, that’s what Jun said.”

“It would be best to put them in the distributed processing centers. I can show you where those are.”

Mendoza regarded him. This man had bullied him into working for a conspiracy that planned to conquer Mercury for its resources. The conspiracy had failed. Mendoza had lost his job. The very agency he used to work for, the United Nations Venus Remediation Project, had been disbanded. But in a way, that catastrophe had been a blessing in disguise. If Lorna hadn’t wrecked Mendoza’s life, he’d still be a wage slave on Luna. He’d never have gone out to 99984 Ravilious, never have been reconciled with Elfrida. Would be free from the worries ticking over in the back of his mind …

He decided to forgive Lorna. It was the Christian thing to do.

God knows the guy has suffered enough, anyway.

“Deal,” he said, sticking out his hand.

Lorna floated up to shake hands. He stayed in a sitting position in the air, as if he were too stiff to straighten his back and legs. “You’re a good man, John Mendoza. This way. We can take the train.”

“A
train?”

“Oh, yeah.”

They left the Imperial Bay through an airlock in the side of the ravine. Lorna said the rest of the station was in vacuum. Lights came on as they moved, revealing rows of empty caverns and tracks stretching into a tunnel. The train lay shuddering on maglev rails sunk into the floor, a sleek yellow lozenge. They loaded the fridges into a carriage without seats.

“So what’s the plan?” Lorna said, suit to suit.

Mendoza consulted his instructions. “First, install the fridges. Then I need to find the laboratories. You know where those are?”

“Sure.”

“I’m told,” Mendoza said, “that the Chinese have an experimental human breeding program. They’ve been gengineering human beings for better adaptation to zero-gee, to space in general. They’ve raised generations of … people … with prehensile feet, stronger bones, the ability to produce vitamin B12 in their bodies, organic rad-hardening, you name it. They keep them in cages.”

“That’s right,” Lorna said. “Are you going to put them down? I’ll help. It’s about time I did something to improve the universe.”

Mendoza smiled unwillingly. It was good to know Lorna felt the same way he did about this rumored atrocity. “Nope. But I still need to get to them.”