The Phobos Maneuver (34 page)

Lorna rolled his eyes. He smiled at her confusion and lay down next to her. “But enough about me,” he said. “Let’s talk about you.”

★

In the
St. Francis
sim, Jun was telling Tiangong Erhao about the ship’s namesake, St. Francis Xavier. “He was the first missionary to Japan. His courage and dedication to the Gospel won thousands of converts. This was a man who travelled the world in an era when that meant months-long voyages in tiny wooden boats. Now we travel between the planets, but has our courage and dedication survived the transition? St. Francis Xavier gave his life for Jesus. He died in Guangdong at the age of forty-six.”

Tiangong Erhao’s avatar trailed her lower left fingers along the stone wall. Jun was walking her up and down the corridors of the monastery, to prevent her from getting too familiar with her cell. Quiet singing from below emphasized the hush.

“The body of St. Francis Xavier is incorrupt. The faithful and the greedy took pieces of it over the years, but it’s mostly intact and now reposes in Goa.”

Tiangong Erhao yawned.

Jun hid a smile. He was talking mostly for his own sake, rehearsing the stories he knew so well. He resembled the Chinese AIs in at least one way—he never got tired of thinking about his favorite things. To pass the time, he had set himself a little challenge: could he stoke in Tiangong Erhao an interest in Catholic theology? So far, he was failing miserably.

“The Catholic tradition of veneration of holy relics is rooted in our conviction that the flesh can be sacralized. Obviously, that’s a problem for us AIs.”

Generous, that
us.
Tiangong Erhao was not a true AI. But neither had the ships of the Eighth Fleet been true AIs, until the last days of their lives, when they exploded out of their apathetic rut into bona-fide autonomy. Jun liked to think he’d had a little something to do with that. He’d forced them to
think …

“Data is fungible. Metal is corruptible. You can’t put a crystal processor on an altar and worship it. You know what gives me hope? The fact that just like flesh-and-blood humans, we can die.”

On the bridge of the
Monster
—in the dark, somewhat smelly, all-too-fragile reality that the
St. Francis
was based on—something shorted out with a
pop
and a spark.

A cluster of hundred-year-old processors expired, nullifying the hub’s control of the reactor containment monitoring sensors.

The watching bots flinched. One of them rolled to the door and accepted a fire extinguisher from the large repair bot. Seconds passed. Nothing further happened. The bots resumed their postures of worship.

“We can die,” Jun repeated, scratching his armpit. A goofy smile floated onto his simulated face, and he let it stay. It was an emergent consequence of the calculations taking place in his data center. As close to natural as an AI could ever get.

Tiangong Erhao scrunched up her pretty nose. “What about sex?” she said.

“Huh?”

“All these saints of yours, they were celibate, right? So what about sex?”

xxix.

Nine days after her conversation with Elfrida, Petruzzelli sat in a small room in Health Services on the
Thunderjack.

Their ruse had worked even better than they’d hoped.

Shaking and weeping uncontrollably, Petruzzelli had been brought aboard the Flattop for therapy. So had Zhang.

This was her fourth session. For their first sessions, they had both been hogtied. But now they were showing signs of improvement. (The drug Bob Miller had given them was
strong;
you couldn’t take that shit too many days running.) Petruzzelli’s new docility had been noted, and today, for the first time, the zipties had come off. She was now allowed to float around by herself, like Blake.

She had not taken advantage of her new freedom yet. This morning, she’d eaten her gorp and then showed up for her therapy session in uniform, with her face and hands as clean as it was possible to get on Stickney.

Now she was trying to make a friendship bracelet.

“Just don’t let the loose ends get all tangled up,” said her therapist, Jennifer Colden.

Petruzzelli had been dismayed when she got assigned to Elfrida’s best friend. She had counted on getting one of the junior Space Corps agents, who would be easy to fool. But as it turned out, she’d lucked out. Colden had led a platoon of phavatars in the battle for the Castle, so she knew how bad it had been, and readily believed Petruzzelli’s claim to be traumatized.

Petruzzelli held up her would-be bracelet. “Loose ends, check, tangled, check. Looks like my life.”

Colden took the bait eagerly. “That’s a great observation, Alicia.” It was all first names in here. “Would you say there are a lot of loose ends in your life?”

“Oh, nothing but,” Petruzzelli said.

02 Deck: a buffer zone between officer country and the nonstop activity and noise of the hangar deck.

Out of here, Petruzzelli rehearsed in her mind, three steps to the left, through the waiting-room, up the ladder. Iris-scan lock at the top of the ladder. Zhang had a therapy appointment at 15:05. He would get here any minute.

“I’ve never been able to make a relationship work,” she said, playing for time.

“Do you mean romantic relationships? Friendships?”

“Either. Both. I always push people away when they get too close. Sometimes even
before
they get too close.”

“Why do you think you do that, Alicia?”

“Let’s take you as an example. I want to punch you in your smug, fat face right now. You made fun of my family. You were all possessive with Elfrida, like you didn’t want her to be friends with me. And now you’re sitting over
there,
and I’m sitting over
here.”

They were knee to knee. The therapy room was really just a cubicle equipped with two ergoforms and a locker of craft supplies.

Colden’s lips worked. She rubbed a hand over her stubby braids, obviously struggling to stay professional.

“But I know my feelings are completely unrelated to reality,” Petruzzelli went on. She had learned that lesson, an unforgettable one, during her days of crying until snot ran out of her nose,
really feeling
all kinds of woe about how her birth parents had abandoned her, and her other parents didn’t give a shit … all because she’d taken Bob Miller’s stupid FUKish grief drug. Now she wasn’t on the drug anymore, she no longer felt those emotions, but she still had that clarity. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. I was just being over-sensitive. So, you see what I mean? I push people away for no good reason. We could’ve been friends.”

She shrugged. Smoothed out the yard-long strings trailing from her friendship bracelet and looped them over her hands. Waited.

“Hmm,” Colden said. “Well.” She ran both hands over her hair. She was still holding her own friendship bracelet. She put it down on one plump knee. “Screw this,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“I said, screw this. We never could have been friends. You thought I was trying to keep Elfrida away from you? Yes, actually, I was. She’s soft-hearted. Always looking to find the best in people. Not me. I knew straight off that you were one bad-news USian bitch. And I think events have proved me right. You and those other jokers are directly responsible for us being here, on freaking
Stickney.
”

The Flattop shook. A Gravesfighter was taking off from the launch bays under their feet.

“On the other hand,” Colden continued, “I shouldn’t have been rude about your family. So I’m sorry about that. But you shouldn’t have been rude about my family, either. And I don’t hear you apologizing.”

Petruzzelli sat immobile. Her face felt red-hot as a complex amalgam of shame and rage washed over her in shivery waves.

“You need to fix your attitude,” Colden said. “You’ll never fly for Star Force again, but you could probably find a job in the private sector.” Her nostrils flared in distaste. “After this is over, anyone who was on Stickney will look like a hero, even if they were dishonorably discharged.
If
we all live through this.”

“Well, I’ve got news for you,” Petruzzelli said. “We all won’t.”

She slid off her ergoform. Her left knee sank between the two ergoforms, wedging her leg into the gap. Her splinted right leg braced her against the wall. She dropped her friendship bracelet—now a noose—over Colden’s head, and jerked it tight.

Colden struggled vainly for a few seconds. Then her eyes rolled up in her head and she went down for the count.

Petruzzelli loosened the slipknot. Colden let out a bubbly grunt.

A klaxon went off.
Wee-wah! Wee-wah!

Of course—they had security cameras in here.

Petruzzelli heaved Colden’s unconscious body into her arms, with Colden’s face in her neck. The sliding door thudded back. A pair of Marines charged in, one tall and blond, the other short and black, crowding Petruzzelli against the wall beside the handicrafts locker.

“She attacked me!” Petruzzelli yelled. “I had to defend myself!”

The Marines hesitated, just for an instant, but that was long enough. Petruzzelli shoved Colden into tall and blond’s face. Stumbling, he bumped against his colleague. Petruzzelli pushed off from the wall with her back foot. Her shoulder clipped short and black in the chest. Like hitting a brick wall. He reached for her, and she reached for his pistol. She arrowed out the door between them.

“No one fucking move!” she screamed at the sad sacks in the waiting room.

Zhang was not there.

★

The klaxon snapped Elfrida out of immersion. She left her phavatar quarrying rocks and sat up, banging her head on the bunk above hers. Other agents peered out of their racks, fear etched on their faces.

Elfrida swung her legs to the floor. She heard herself saying, “Stay where you are. Everything’s all right.”

Her HUD flashed. Colden had been on mental health duty today, applying the meager skills they had acquired in Antarctica to Star Force’s growing roster of PTSD cases.

“Your friend Petruzzelli just snapped. She attacked me, then took out two Marines. Now she’s on the rampage. Just another fun day at work!”

Responsibility seared Elfrida. She told her agents it was a false alarm—just a kerfluffle in Health Services. Then she took off at a brisk walk.

“On my way,”
she texted Colden.

She hurried past the gym, the mess, the laundry, the shooting range. Why did this ship have to be so huge? The klaxon continued to wail. People moved in distracted jerks, too disciplined to panic. Elfrida took the ladder to 03 Deck in two bounds. The machines in Flight Engineering made so much noise she didn’t hear the klaxon cut out. She burst into 02 Deck / Health Services. All was quiet. A cluster of Marines blocked the corridor. “Where is she?” Elfrida demanded.

They didn’t even glance at her. Squeezing past, Elfrida saw one of them was wounded, eyes bulging, lip-biting himself quiet. She smelt scorched fabric.

She found Colden slumped on an ergoform in the Health Services waiting room, forgotten by everyone. “Oh God,” Elfrida wailed, kneeling to hug her, afraid of hurting her. “I feel like this is all my fault. Are you OK?”

“Fine. Don’t worry about me. She said none of us is going to live through this. She said if I ever want to see Earth again, I should get off this ship. I’m afraid she’s going to try something. I told the Marines, but they weren’t listening.”

“Where is she?”

“Not sure. Maybe they’ve caught her.”

Elfrida flew back down the corridor. If she were Petruzzelli—and she had been Petruzzelli, oh yes she had, in her nightmares, in the mechanical body of a phavatar, in the moments when she wanted to scream
Fuck you
at the entire universe—she would head straight for the place where she could do the most damage.

She climbed the ladder to 01 Deck. No Marines blocked her way. They had gone to join in the hunt for Petruzzelli.

Elfrida had never been up here before. It looked much like 02 Deck. Same shoulder-width corridors and sliding doors. Same rooms full of officers and screens.

She caught up with a tall East Asian man in the uniform of a Gravesfighter pilot. “Is this the way to the bridge?” she gasped.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“Laugh.
Maybe we can find it together.”

“I need to make an urgent report,” the man said. “We’re losing the war. I’ve done the math.
Anyone
can do the math. The numbers are out there, but most people are just fucking innumerate. Sixty to seventy percent of our offensive capacity is pinned down in Earth orbit, trying to prevent the next Hyderabad. And the PLAN has decimated our space-based manufacturing capacity. The only way we win now is if China enters the war, but that’s not gonna happen, is it? Leastways, they’re not gonna enter the war on
our
side. My parents defected from the Imperial Republic. I know what I’m talking about.”

Elfrida remembered where she’d seen him before. “Holy crap. You’re Harry Zhang.”

“That’s me.”
They were walking fast. Zhang turned corners, doubled back. “I’m following my nose here,” he admitted, and then they reached a door with two stiff-backed Marines outside it.

“Halt! You’re not cleared for this area!”

“I was just looking for my friend,” Elfrida said.

“Oh, hey, Zhang. Did you hear one of your buddies went nuts in Mental Health?”

“I wonder what she could’ve been upset about,” Zhang said. He smoothed his immaculate pilot’s uniform and entered the bridge. Elfrida pretended she was with him and followed close on his heels.

★

Petruzzelli kicked and screamed as the Marines dragged her through 04 Deck. The good part was they had a lot of ground to cover. The other good part was they weren’t allowed to hit her. So she kept struggling and howling. Off-duty personnel stared.

So did the Marines checking IDs at the airlock in the mess. They were only human.

The airlock was a metal windsock sticking out from the wall of the mess, kitty-corner to the food service hatches. It was mated to the flexitube that led to the underground complex. And that was the only way to enter the ship, owing to the rubble shield covering it. It was a natural choke point.