The Phobos Maneuver (28 page)

“Jun’s telling me to go away,” Mendoza said incredulously.

At the same time, Lorna glimpsed movement above him. Tiangong Erhao’s face poked over the curve of the cargo module. She crawled around it on hands and knees, head down.

“Gecko pads on her knees,” Lorna marvelled. “The prince really did think of everything.”

“What?”

“Tiangong Erhao. The stupid thing’s followed us.”

Which might, or might not be a problem. Lorna was pretty sure there was nothing looking out of the phavatar’s eyes. Chinese protocols were so different.
Incompatibly
different. The
Monster
had hijacked Tiangong Erhao with some amazingly advanced command-and-control program—but that did not mean it could process a single byte of raw image data from Tiangong Erhao’s cameras.

“Who cares about her?” Mendoza said. “Come and help me check these cables.”

Lorna trudged back to him. The hawser running from the ops module had a braid of fiberoptic cables looped around it. Mendoza was hanging by his knees from the hawser, visually examining the cables.

Lorna followed the cables with his headlamp to the head of the pier, where they vanished into a hatch. Several badly singed Chinese drones lay around the hatch’s opening.

“It’s got to be a connectivity problem,” Mendoza said.

“I doubt it,” Lorna said. “The likeliest explanation is that your AI bit off more than it could chew.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sigh,”
Lorna said. He’d forgotten more about artificial intelligence than Mendoza had ever learned, and nothing was going to convince him that ‘Jun Yonezawa’ qualified as an artifical superintelligence on the level of the PLAN. It was a kooky little oddity with a knack for reusing other people’s stuff. It had snuck through the faith loophole—the very same bootstrap method Lorna himself had accidentally discovered when he developed the stross-class phavatar.
Believed
its way to self-awareness. And, with wearisome predictability, got too big for its boots. Now it was in trouble. “I expected this to happen,” he told Mendoza. “I just didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon.”

“What? What’s
happening?”

Lorna waved his hands. “Anti-malware. Self-scans. Automatic goal recovery. The biter bit.”

“No way,” Mendoza said, weakly.

Lorna decided to seize the moment. “Look at that!” he said, pointing into the gloom.

Mendoza caught the hawser with one glove and twisted his upper body around to look.

Lorna jumped as high as he could, slapped the release button on Mendoza’s thigh holster, and grabbed Mendoza’s pistol as it fell.

Oldest trick in the book.

“Sucker,” he panted.

Time seemed to slow down. Mendoza’s hand travelled towards his empty holster. Lorna raised the pistol. It had no bio-verification. It was made to be used by any person wearing a spacesuit. Mendoza let out a wordless roar of woe and betrayal.

Lorna shot him.

The plasma pulse hit Mendoza in the leg. It also splashed onto the hawser. Fiber optic cables snapped, spitting white-hot sparks into the vacuum.

Mendoza screamed, writhing, slowly falling. Blood jetted from his left knee. The rest of his leg was plain
gone.

Lorna sighted carefully on Mendoza’s center mass.

Mid-trigger-squeeze, he noticed that the pistol was down to three bars of energy. It was an antique, with a single intensity setting, and Lorna needed every remaining erg of power for something else.

“Fuck you, anyway. You left me here to fucking die,” he shouted at Mendoza.

He ran down the pier. Mendoza screamed and screamed in his helmet. Lorna leapt, his momentum carrying him high enough to get a fingertip hold on the auxiliary clamps projecting down from the spine. Hand over hand, legs swinging out, he climbed up to the Superlifter’s crew airlock.

Hatch type. He wedged the pistol into the hinge seals and fired.

Again.

The hatch fell away, smoking.

Alarm lights inside the chamber strobed.

Lorna took a firm grip on the nearest grab handle. He placed the muzzle of the pistol against the center of the inner seal, where four broad flanges overlapped to form an airtight seal. Then he squeezed the trigger.

The pulse burnt a hole the size of a man’s head. The atmosphere inside the cockpit blew out. Lorna held on, battered by the gale. He yanked the torn tips of the flanges, bending the flexible metal over, helping the air escape faster.

A body slammed against the inside of the valve.

Lorna stared in astonishment. He had not imagined there was anyone aboard. But his surprise didn’t slow him down. He grabbed one of the unknown person’s legs and pulled them halfway out, wedging them between the flanges and further enlarging the breach.

A Superlifter’s cockpit was small. It didn’t take long for all its atmosphere to vent to the vacuum. Stuff went with it—tablets, books, medical waste, jewelry that sparkled in the alarm lights, worth a fortune. Gone.

Lorna breathed heavily. Silence. At some point during the last few minutes, Mendoza’s screams had stopped. Lorna figured he was now the only living human being on Tiangong Erhao.

He peered through the hole. Corpses flaked off the near wall, where the gale had pasted them, and floated to the floor of the cockpit.

He crawled over the body he’d jammed in the valve.

Prince Jian Er.

Lorna laughed out loud.

Entering the cockpit, he counted ten bodies. Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu was still alive, gasping and flopping around, foam crusting his lips.

“What goes around, fucking comes around,” Lorna told him.

He waited for them all to die. Then he tossed them out of the airlock, one by one. He was shaking with fatigue. He sucked down the last of the nutrient fluid in his suit’s reservoir. Tasted like sweet green tea. He was looking forward to some proper grub once he got underway. He could see at a glance that the Superlifter was fully provisioned with consumables, as well as fuel.

He saw it all now. Mendoza had been meant to fly the prince to safety—or rather, to Eureka Station, where he’d doubtless have been taken hostage by the UN.

Wait six days? It was probably all automated.

On the dashboard, he caught sight of the Superlifter’s external optical feed. It showed the view out of the docking bay. Tiangong Erhao had not yet travelled far from its old orbit. Lorna could see the moon.

Luna.

The sight of that blurry gray-white blob hit him like a punch.

Fuck it. He was leaving
now
, while he still had a chance of getting home.

He bent his gaze to the dashboard. If he couldn’t hack into this baby, he did not deserve any of his ‘Programmer of the Year’ accolades.

He was concentrating hard when the phavatar of Tiangong Erhao entered the cockpit through the shattered airlock. It unleashed a flurry of kung fu blows that rendered him unconscious in a split second. It tied him up with a length of fiber optic cable, hauled him out of the docking bay, and took him to the labs—a skyscraper-sized rigid hab tucked into the end of the manufacturing zone. This was the only pressurized area on the ship, and hence the only place of confinement to offer itself on short notice. There, it stripped off Lorna’s EVA suit and left him.

xxii.

“Mendoza. Mendoza!”

Mendoza crawled through the dark. He was not aware of the cold. He felt no pain. Ahead of him burnt a warm, welcoming light. He crawled towards it eagerly. He was going home.

“By His most tender mercy, may the Lord pardon you …”

A familiar figure approached out of the light. Mendoza rose to his knees.

“Inay?”
[Mom?]

The light haloed her gray head. All the wrinkles were gone from her face, and she wore a tender expression he had seen too rarely when she was alive. “You have to go back
, nonoy.”

Mendoza’s sister appeared at their mother’s side. The PLAN had blown her apart but now she was whole again and well. “Not yet, Johnny. Someday. I promise. But not today.”

“… may the Lord pardon you, forgive you your sins, and lead you to everlasting life …”

Mendoza reached for his mother and sister, but an irresistible force dragged him backwards. He fell through the dark. Through space. Into the maw of Docking Bay 1. He saw the moon in a sky full of stars. He saw a bot clinging to the hawsers, splicing cables together. Then he fell into the Superlifter.

Floating in the cockpit, he saw himself lying on the captain’s couch, still in his spacesuit. Bots labored around him. His gaze fastened on the black-haired man kneeling beside the couch, one bare hand on Mendoza’s faceplate, tracing the sign of the cross.

Mendoza sat up. Puke welled into his throat. He breathed deeply. Swallowed it. “Whoa.”

“Mendoza! Praise be to God!”

Mendoza’s field of view felt brutally restricted, in comparison to the god-like perspective he’d had a minute ago. A medibot stooped over his lower body, hiding his legs. Otherwise, he seemed to be alone.

“I saw you,” he said, urgently. It felt like rushing to write down a dream before he could forget it. “I went … somewhere else. And when I came back, you were here.
I saw you.
You were
here.”

“Well, of course I’m here,” Jun said, through the speakers in Mendoza’s helmet. He sounded like he was crying. Of course, an AI could not shed real tears. So what?

Mendoza felt for his rucksack. Gone. “The Sacrament! Did I lose it?”

“It’s right here,” Jun said. The medibot swivelled to point a scalpel at Mendoza’s rucksack, safe in the webbing above the dashboard. Blood dripped from the scalpel’s tip. “I thought you were dying,” Jun said. “I’ve never seen anyone lose that much blood. Mendoza, I have to tell you something bad. Your leg—”

“Gone below the knee. I know. I saw.” Mendoza reclined again. He still felt no pain. In fact, he couldn’t feel anything except heaviness below his left hip. Jun must’ve pumped him full of nerve blockers. He gazed at the optical feed, the same moon and stars he had seen a moment ago. He had a sense of supernatural calm. “I saw a bot out there, fixing the comms link. That’s good.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.You couldn’t have seen that.”

“I saw it.”

“All right, I believe you.” Jun made a throat-clearing noise. “Mendoza, I’m sorry. I had to choose between you and the comms link. I thought you were already dead. It took me
eighteen seconds
to realize you were still alive. Your suit saved you. It sealed itself off. Applied pressure like a tourniquet.”

“We got these suits from a mining company. I guess this kind of thing happens to miners quite often.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK. I was always having trouble with my feet, anyway.”

“I’ll make you a prosthetic. Or a scary-looking claw, if you like.”

“Neat.” Mendoza yawned. “Where’s Lorna?”

Jun’s voice hardened. “Drifting in space, is my guess. I lost the link for three minutes and twenty seconds. It took me another eight minutes and thirty-five seconds to regain full control. During that time, Tiangong Erhao used its phavatar to remove Lorna from the Superlifter. I expect it spaced him.”

“Why would it do that?”

“He murdered Prince Jian Er and his courtiers.”

“Oh. Wait a minute. How did he get to them?”

“They were in here.”

“Why?”

“Saving power,” Jun said evasively.

Mendoza pushed himself up with his hands. An IV line jerked his arm back. The needle had been plunged straight through his suit.

“Don’t move!” Jun said. “You’re still in critical condition!”

“I want to go aboard the
Monster
.” He remembered the suspicions that had brought him here in the first place. His sense of calm fragmented. “Why did you tell me to go away?”

“There is no air on board.”

“Why?”

“I let it go bad.”

“What about the garden?”

“I let it die.”

“I don’t care!”

“You want to cook? Or sit in the data center, in a spacesuit, on a sandbag full of dry ice? Feel free!”

“You know, it’s really frustrating to yell at someone you can’t see,” Mendoza shouted.

“I don’t have enough spare capacity to dick around with graphics,” Jun shouted back. “I’m overclocking my core by an extra five percent, just to talk to you! I’ve repurposed
all
my subsystems to play music! I’m not a freaking spaceship anymore. My drive is a church organ. My radar dishes are amplifiers. There is nothing else left.”

Chills raced down Mendoza’s spine. It sounded like Derek Lorna had been right. Jun had bitten off more than he could chew.

But he wouldn’t have started a job he could not finish. There had to be something else going on, some other plan in play.

Again, Mendoza remembered the wine spilling on the bridge. Crimson droplets, as red as blood, going everywhere.

“I’m going to mend the airlock and repressurize the cockpit,” Jun said. “Don’t try to move around. The medibot will look after you. There are enough consumables on board for twenty. If you need me, just call.” The subtext was clear:
Don’t.

“But I never got to the labs. That’s the whole reason you brought me.”

“Oh, Mendoza, no it isn’t. That was the plan. But nothing ever goes according to plan. You would think I’d have learned that lesson by now,” Jun said, with a strange note of happiness in his voice. “Nothing and nobody’s perfect.”

“No shit.”

“Stay here. Play around with the controls. In six days you’re going to be flying this thing.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

“You’ve done so much for me. Just this conversation … it’s been amazing. Goodbye. Get better.”

Mendoza flopped back on his couch. The movement sent a sudden, agonizing twinge up his leg. He gasped in pain. Then he said aloud inside his helmet, “I know why you brought me. It’s because I’m not Kiyoshi. He’d have called you on your bullshit
long
before now.”

And now it was too late.

Might not be too late for a man with two legs and a pair of wire cutters. But Mendoza was laid up in the Superlifter, half a leg short, without the ability to move unaided.