The Phobos Maneuver (35 page)

People continued to drift in through the airlock as Petruzzelli’s captors dragged her along.

Bob Miller had dressed his surviving Fraggers in civvies, so they mostly blended in, apart from being too tall. And in microgee, their height wasn’t obvious.

The Marines manhandled Petruzzelli into the narrow corridor that led past the gym to the brig. People clogged the corridor behind them. Petruzzelli’s vision seemed to fog over, and she screamed in earnest, flashing back to the battle in the heat exchanger tunnel.

A gangly man flew over the looky-loos. Stepping on people’s heads, pushing off, he aimed twin Martian blasters at the Marines. One of the men crumpled sideways with a steaming hole in his face. Petruzzelli sprang back. Miller’s compatriots fought through the crowd. They kicked and shoved the other Marines into the brig and slammed the door on them.

Miller told Petruzzelli that thirty-five Fraggers had made it onto the Flattop. Half of them had gone to the engineering deck, and the other half had stayed with him. Shouting, and brandishing Martian blasters that they’d cached underground before Star Force got here, they herded people out of the airlock, off the ship. It was like stuffing toys into a stinky old sock. When no more would go, they closed the airlock and undocked the flexitube.

Scorched spots appeared on the walls of the mess, announcing the arrival of more Marines. Soldiers on both sides dived underneath the mess tables and shot between the legs of the benches.

While that was going on, Miller took Petruzzelli and a couple of others and snuck out through the kitchen.

★

The bridge of the
Thunderjack
was no bigger than a subway carriage, crammed with decrepit computers. Half a dozen officers lay on acceleration couches, their fingers flickering over touchpads, their minds elsewhere. Electronics hummed and trilled. Elfrida glimpsed optical feeds that showed the waxing face of Mars, and others that showed nothing but rock—the rubble shield her agents had built over the Flattop.

Zhang marched up to an older officer, whom Elfrida also recognized. Executive Officer Carasso was talking in angry bursts to someone not present. He broke off to snarl at Zhang, “Get out of my face.”

“I’ve come to report, sir,” Zhang said calmly. “The mission was a success. We wiped out the Martians. A guy I cared about got wiped out, too. But that’s war, right, sir?”

Carasso’s gaze darted to Elfrida.

“The admirals wanted to abandon Stickney,” Zhang continued. “They even got the ships on their side. But you weren’t going to be outwitted by a bunch of machines. So you tapped me to fake a mutiny. Dumb volunteers. They can be talked into
anything,
right, sir? They want to be heroes so bad. That’s how I convinced Zoob and the others to come with me. I feel really fucking bad about that now, sir. Especially now I know you lied to me. ”

“You’re a condescending little fuck, you know that?” Carasso gave a minute shrug, inviting Elfrida to share in his pretended perplexity. She didn’t have to pretend. She really was perplexed.

“We did it,” Zhang said. “We won Stickney. However, I’ve been feeling kinda stupid recently. You know what I mean, sir? I’m feeling kinda …
used.
You told me once we liberated Stickney, we’d use the railgun to shoot down the other orbital fortresses. That would be the smart move. It’s the same thing the Fraggers thought of. I was not informed at any time that we were planning to use Stickney as a jumping-off point for
infantry!”

On the last words, Zhang’s voice rose to a shriek. Everyone on the bridge tensed as if a string linking them all like marionettes had been jerked.

Carasso shifted his haunches. “Goddamn,” he muttered. He drew a palm-size laser pistol and shot Zhang in the head.

Zhang’s body fell slowly. His arms and legs danced. A junior officer reacted with trained efficiency. He seized the corpse and kicked it into a stirrup space beneath one of the workstations.

Carasso met Elfrida’s eyes for a third time, apologetically. “Psych case,” he said.

Elfrida swallowed a bubble of nausea. “Did you have to shoot him?”

“Good point. I should have kept him as a hostage. His gravity-dodging buddies have just taken control of my hangar and launch bays. But it chaps my ass to hear people whining about being
uuuused.
We’re
all
being used. That is war. The intelligence picture changes from moment to moment, and we have to adapt accordingly. If that does not comport with your own ideas about how this war should be won, too fucking bad. Don’t whine about it, just sit your little ass down and thank the Lord you have someplace to sit.”

“Is that a threat, sir?”

“Oh, I’m not threatening
you.
You’ve got a special classification. You’re some kind of lucky mascot.”

Shouts and cries reached their ears. The Marines who’d been standing guard outside tumbled into the bridge. The last one was helped on his way by a red Gecko Doc planted in his rear.

Petruzzelli lunged into the bridge, aiming a Martian pistol in a two-handed grip, screaming at everyone to put their fucking hands up. Elfrida dived over Carasso’s couch and curled into a ball in its shelter. “I don’t feel very lucky,” she muttered.

“Statistics,” said Carasso, “are superstition for people with master’s degrees.”

He got to his feet, hands raised at an insulting forty-five-degree angle.

Petruzzelli and her cohorts killed the Marines. This instantly subdued the Flattop’s officers.

Affecting a leisurely swagger, she then turned to Carasso. “We meet again, sir. You know how you once told me to eat the pain? Now it’s your turn. I’m a nice person, so I’ll try and make it quick.”

Elfrida stood up. She found herself staring down the barrel of Petruzzelli’s blaster. She started to shake. It was like being back in the trenches, this time for real. Controlling her voice, she said, “You might want to know a couple of things before you frag him. He’s on your side. He helped you to desert, or allowed it, or something.”

Petruzzelli cursed. “He threw us away. That’s what you’re saying. Remind me why I shouldn’t kill him.”

“Also,” Elfrida said desperately, “they
did
consider your strategy, but some new intelligence came in or something.”

“Who said that?”

Elfrida mutely pointed at Zhang’s body, which had rolled out of the chink where it had been stowed. A smell of ordure rose.

“Aw, fuck.” Petruzzelli stared at Carasso with burning eyes.

Bob Miller flew onto the bridge. “Just talked to the lads in Engineering. They have secured the reactors.”

“Bob!” Elfrida exclaimed, not taking in what he’d just said, so relieved was she to see him. Finally, someone sane was here.

“Goto.” He flashed her his foxy grin. “We do seem to bump into each other in the damnedest places, don’t we?”

He fastened an arm around Petruzzelli and rubbed the side of her head, forcing her to lower her aim.

“Let’s talk.” Elfrida’s words tumbled over each other. “Petruzzelli, I’m really sorry your friend is dead, but lots of other people are dead, too. Don’t turn this into some kind of tit-for-tat thing.”

“Sit down and shut up,” Petruzzelli yelled at her.

Elfrida sank onto the nearest couch, which was Carasso’s. “Bob,” she pleaded. “Remember the whales? Revenge isn’t a strategy.”

“No, it isn’t,” Miller agreed. “Winning is a strategy.”

He started to squeeze past the couch where she was sitting. The Flattop suddenly juddered up and down. Bob fell on top of her and caught himself with a hand planted next to her head.

“You’ve got me in fondling range at last,” Elfrida said with a weak smile.

“So I have. What a shame.”

“Ugh, leave her alone,” Petruzzelli cawed. “She doesn’t matter.”

Miller vaulted over the couch and headed for the far end of the bridge. Petruzzelli shot Elfrida a grin of triumph.
Then she went back to hassling the Flattop’s officers. The Fraggers were holding them at gunpoint, forcing them to execute tasks at their workstations. “Don’t take all fucking day!” Petruzzelli shouted at them.

A Fragger frisked Carasso and took away his pocket pistol. The rough search left him looking rumpled and old.

“Acting on bad intelligence is a losing strategy,” he said, pitching his voice for them all to hear.

Bob Miller glanced at the XO. “I’ve got all the intelligence I need. Your paymasters on Earth are determined to commit ground troops to this insane conflict. For cultural, political, and career-related reasons, they need to prove that the PLAN can be beaten. IT CANNOT BE BEATEN. But it can be destroyed. Excuse me.”

The Flattop shook. Elfrida glimpsed splinters of light on one of the optical feed screens. The Flattop’s own guns were breaking up the rubble shield, cracking it like an eggshell.

“I’m going to reveal classified information,” Carasso said loudly. “I’ll lose my job for this, but so what. We have initiated a cyberattack on the PLAN. It’s coming in less than one sol, and if you fuck it up, you will be responsible for losing the war.”

“Cyberattack? Seems like we’ve tried that before,” Petruzzelli drawled.

“This time it isn’t us. It’s the Chinese. That’s what I figure. They don’t tell me everything, either.”

Bob Miller laughed. “You’re committing ground troops, based on a vague promise from the Chinese? The words ‘gamble’ and ‘desperate’ come to mind.”

“If the cyberattack succeeds, we’ll have a window to land our troops unopposed. If it doesn’t succeed …” Carasso shrugged his heavy shoulders. “We’ll land ’em, anyway.”

“No, we fucking won’t,” Petruzzelli said. “No one else is dying for Mars. Come on, you bastards!” she shouted at the officers. “Feed those drives some juice!”

Without moving anything but her eyes, Elfrida examined the armrests of the couch she was sitting in. A headset hung on its cord. She pulled it into reach, inch by inch.

Carasso shifted to stand in front of her, concealing her from the Fraggers.

She eased the headset behind her neck and tucked the phones over her ears, cutting out the racket. The headset automatically synced with her contacts. She logged in. Audio only. Her agents’ voices filled her ears. They were terrified, panicking. It sounded like they’d been locked in their cabins and forgotten about.

She whispered into the mic, “Listen up, everyone. This is Goto. I need you to move your phavatars,
right now.”

xxx.

Mars dominated the sky outside Docking Bay 1. The dull ocher blob seemed to grow larger every time Mendoza turned his back. With magnification, he could see the orbital fortresses crawling around Mars’s waist.

He put on his EVA suit, made a bow to the storage webbing above the dashboard, and took down his rucksack.

Time to do this.

“I’m going to the labs,” he called out.

Jun did not reply. He’d warned Mendoza he would be slow to respond during their final approach.

Mendoza grabbed his new crutch. He also took one of the Kalashnikovs Jun had printed out for the courtiers. It had a strap that went over his rucksack. Hoping he wouldn’t need it, he slid out of the airlock.

★

“This isn’t real,” Tiangong Erhao’s avatar said. She struck the wall of her cell. Granite chips flew, as if her fist were diamond-edged. “Bad music and men in dresses. It’s just a fantasy. It isn’t even an original at that.”

Jun gazed at her in consternation. With less than a day to go until they reached Mars, he had to keep the AI cooperative. She knew where they were going—she was taking them there—but, with her logic core immured in the
St. Francis,
she had not been able to analyze the information and figure out what it meant for her. So she both knew and did not know, a mental state that would have been impossible for a human being. If she started thinking deductively about it, he’d have to delete her. And it was even odds whether the ship would survive that.

She kept punching the wall until a large stone broke in half. She began to pry the pieces out with all four hands.

This shouldn’t be happening.

“Stop,” Jun said.

She stopped. That was a relief.

The pieces of the wall picked themselves up like a vid playing backwards. It was unrealistic. Jun would rather have had one of the brothers come in with a trowel and a bucket of mortar, but he didn’t have the resources to spare. “You’re getting inputs from somewhere else, aren’t you?” The question itself was an immersion killer. But he had to ask. “What or who are you communicating with?”

Tiangong Erhao uncurled on the straw-littered floor, stretching all four of her arms behind her head. The motion made her breasts quiver seductively. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she cooed.

Jun’s suspicions grew darker. He had not provided her with any inputs that would cue her to flaunt her bosom. Or ask about the sex lives of the saints. Or snigger about men in dresses.

She was getting this stuff via her phavatar. That was the only possible explanation.

The phavatar was an alternate command and control interface. Jun had snagged it when he captured Tiangong Erhao, but he’d lost it again when Derek Lorna severed his hardwired comms link. When Jun got the link repaired, the phavatar had vanished from Tiangong Erhao’s internal telemetry. Jun had hoped it had spaced itself, taking Lorna with it. Or simply fallen overboard—it had no integrated propulsion system. Now he faced the possibility that it was still on board, egging its mistress on to defy him.

Oh God, where IS it?

He paced the cell, a metaphorical expression of fruitless activity in his problem-solving clusters. His armpit itched so badly he could hardly stand it. Derek Lorna, curse the man, had been partially right. Jun had taken on a task bigger than he was. But wasn’t that what the saints had done? Hadn’t St. Anthony Ishida—another of Jun’s favorites—continued to testify to God’s greatness when he was half-dead from being immersed in scalding water, six times a day, for
two years
?

The comparison shamed him into bold action. He stood over Tiangong Erhao. “Where is your phavatar?”

She visibly shrivelled. The question came with an implicit threat of deletion. This was Jun’s biggest bluff yet.