The Phobos Maneuver (38 page)

“Nor have I any intention of so doing,” Bob Miller said. He stood with one hand on the shoulder of the propulsion officer, a young woman Elfrida had chatted with a few times. “Give us a few more newtons, darling. Just imagine you’re late for work.”

Petruzzelli snuggled up closer to Elfrida. “Now for the fun bit,” she whispered.

Elfrida turned her head to stare Petruzzelli in the eye. Petruzzelli didn’t flinch. Their faces were centimeters apart. “Are you cool with this?”

“You’re so cute. Of course I’m cool with it. I never had anything to live for, anyway.”

“Then this is our fault. We failed you.”

“Nope. I’m the failure. But this will make up for everything.”

Elfrida pondered that twisted statement for a moment. Then the optical feed drove it out of her mind. Reldresal went from being the size of a dinner-plate to filling the screen. A cliff loomed, scarred with Martian artwork. Small-arms fire sparkled in the trenches.

“Here we go,” Bob Miller said softly. “This one’s for you, Marty.”

Elfrida had just time to wrap her arms around Petruzzelli before the Flattop struck Reldresal with a crunch like a tanker plowing into an iceberg.

The
Thunderjack
had not travelled far enough from Stickney to build up much speed. It was going at 2080 meters per second when it hit, including the orbital velocity it inherited from Stickney. At the same time, Reldresal was retreating at 2000 meters per second. The solution to this equation was the equivalent of a high-speed car crash.

Elfrida had automatically strapped in when she sat down. The polyfoam of the couch reacted instantly. It cradled her head in place and folded itself around her limbs, trapping them. She held onto Petruzzelli for maybe a quarter-second before the force of the collision ripped Petruzzelli from her arms. Yet the couch had sealed itself immovably around Petruzzelli’s legs.

Petruzzelli snapped forward from the waist, hit her head on the XO’s desk, and rebounded, bloody spittle flying from her ruined mouth.

Everyone else on the bridge got thrown around. Elfrida saw it all in snapshots that seemed meaningless at first. Carasso floated with his neck broken. Trails of blood laced the air. The Fraggers at the command desks had mostly strapped in and survived. The flight officers were either dead or screaming. Their voices seemed to reach Elfrida after a delay, as if she’d been thrown clear of reality itself.

The propulsion officer yelled, “The drive is no longer responding! I’ve lost the reactors!”

Bob Miller was not responding, either. He floated near the ceiling with blood dripping from his nose. His mouth hung agape. His eyes were lifeless. Elfrida remembered the mercurial, energetic man who’d swum with the whales in Antarctica. She couldn’t believe he’d wanted to die like this.

The optical feed screens had gone black.

Claustrophobia pushed Elfrida over the edge of shock into action. She shouted at her couch to release her. She didn’t know if Petruzzelli was dead or alive. She grabbed her wrist and towed her towards the door. She automatically kicked off and glided, without consciously realizing that they were in zero-gee again.

No one tried to stop her leaving the bridge. Hitting the corridor wall, she heard and felt a series of thunks. She remembered the same thing from their landing on Stickney. One of the surviving officers must have fired the grapples, anchoring the Flattop in its new resting place.

Several dead Marines floated in the corridor. Elfrida let go of Petruzzelli and caught one of them. She stripped his suit off, leaving him naked.

“Wufff…” Petruzzelli sighed.

Petruzzelli was still alive. Elfrida sobbed in exasperation and started to undress her. As she was peeling Petruzzelli’s panties off, Petruzzelli’s eyes flickered open. She slurred, “I never knew you cared.”

“Help me. Get undressed. Put this on.” Elfrida tossed the suit at her and procured another one for herself.

“Robbing the dead,” Petruzzelli mocked.

“You’re in shock. Seal up.”

“So we can die with tubes up our asses; great.”

“We’re not going to die.”

Petruzzelli grinned. Blood filmed her teeth—those that remained. “Goto, I know you’re some kind of statistical freak. You survive
everything.
That’s why they sent you to Stickney. You’re the human version of lucky dice on the rearview mirror. But luck runs out. It invariably runs out.”

“Are you coming?”

They flew down the corridor, not that there was any ‘down’ anymore. Elfrida bounced off the steel decking and almost fell through an open door. She looked into the Combat Intelligence Center. This, rather than the bridge, was the nerve center of the Flattop. Captain Figueroa sat in his couch in the middle of the room, restrained with twang cords, perhaps dead. Fraggers bustled around. Screens crawled with targeting diagrams.

Petruzzelli pulled her away. “They’re firing the big guns.”

“The CP cannons?”

“Yup, that was the plan. Point blank.”

“Don’t you want to stay and watch?”

“No,” Petruzzelli said, ignoring Elfrida’s sarcasm. “Miller’s dead. Zhang’s dead. I don’t know any of those people.”

As they neared the keel tube, a phalanx of Marines charged out of it. They yelled at Elfrida and Petruzzelli—who were wearing Marine Corps EVA suits—to form up. But they did not slow down to make sure their orders were obeyed, or even confirm that the two women were real Marines.

“That’s not going to end well,” Petruzzelli said. She dived into the keel tube. Now it was Elfrida’s turn to follow.

They found 03 Deck empty. All the Gravesfighters were gone. Petruzzelli cursed sorrowfully.

On 04 Deck, the Fraggers must have rounded up the entire crew and penned them in the mess. Now it was carnage. The crash had thrown everyone into a human pile-up.

Elfrida let out a joyful cry.

“What? This is a fucking disaster,” Petruzzelli said.

“They made it!” A dozen phavatars moved among the wounded, administering drugs and splinting broken bones. The turtle-backed, cannon-armed bots had become angels of mercy.

Elfrida flew straight to the Space Corps’ quarters.

Her agents had been logged in—and strapped into their racks—the whole time. They were unhurt but terrified. They besieged her with frantic questions.

“Who’s operating the bots?” Elfrida said.

“Oh, we just defaulted them to their therapist settings, ma’am.”

Colden pushed through the mob. “Good to see you alive. Where are we?”

Elfrida smiled weakly.

xxxii.

White flashes speared across Tiangong Erhao’s manufacturing zone. As Mendoza lurched between the floating islands of machinery, he realized the flashes came from the gaps open to space. He was seeing the spillover from a battle a long way off.

When he finally made it to Docking Bay 1, the light show got even better. Mars had grown to the size of a basketball. It wore a sash of twinkling diamonds. Some of the twinkles were so intensely bright that they cast shadows in the docking bay.

“Are they shooting at us?”

Jun answered after a long pause. “No. I’ve convinced them … that I came to save them.”

“From us?”

Another long moment passed. Mendoza limped out along the pier, circling the giant cone of the
Monster’s
drive shield. Tiangong Erhao had skew-flipped at the midpoint of their journey, and the piers had rotated 180° at the same time, so that the
Monster
still lay on ‘top’ of its pier. A neat bit of engineering.

“Something’s going on,” Jun said at last.

Instantly, Mendoza’s thoughts leapt to Elfrida—not that he wasn’t thinking about her all the time. “What’s going on?” He stared at the enigmatic flashes emanating from the orbital fortresses. “Jun, you gotta tell me.”

“I’m getting this from my own sensors, at very long range. I can’t process Tiangong Erhao’s sensor data. But the PLAN is feeding us some data from the fortresses, with gloating captions attached. It looks like Stickney has been slagged.”

Another flash lit the docking bay. Mendoza saw a stark elliptical shadow on the curve of the operations module above his head.

The command airlock was
open.

Jun went on, “I guess Star Force didn’t trust me after all. Or … something happened. The Star Force carrier
Thunderjack—”

“Elfrida was on that ship—”

“—took off a few minutes ago at maximum thrust. After a 700-second flight, it crashed into Reldresal.”

“Crashed.”

“That’s how I would interpret the relative velocities involved in the collision.”

“So what’s all that out there?”

“Gravesfighters launched from the
Thunderjack.
Toilet rolls are converging on Reldresal. The Gravesfighters are fighting them off.”

Mendoza clutched at a thread of hope. “Could anyone have survived the crash? Could she be alive on Reldresal?”

“How would I know, Mendoza? She might have stayed behind on Stickney. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know anything. Human beings are so unpredictable.”

“You’re damn right we are,” Mendoza muttered.

He dropped his crutch.

Hopping on one leg, he grabbed a bump on the ops module where a micro-meteorite strike had been repaired and swung his leg and his stump up. He gripped onto the hull with his single boot. His gloves had gecko grips, too. Walking on one foot and both hands, he climbed towards the open airlock.

★

Lorna spooned Tiangong Erhao, pinning her four arms against her sides. Her hair had that lovely plasticky scent. He whispered, “It’s all right. I’ve got you, love.”

He’d got her upstairs, got her to lie down. But her eyes were wide, mad. She stared at nothing, and a clicking noise came from her throat. She wasn’t with him. She was far away.

Falling towards Mars.

He had to break her fall. Get her back somehow.

“Remember the mission they gave you?”

There was no reason to think her audio I/O wasn’t working. Lorna had been the top software guy on Luna, and he would have laughed at anyone who tried to reprogram a spaceship by talking at it. But he had also been in the game long enough to know there were loopholes. Things went on in the sedimentary depths of any sufficiently advanced MI that could not be mathematically parsed, much less rationally explained.

“Remember when they broke a bottle of champagne over your bow, and told you that you’d be a pioneer, the first manned ship to reach the stars? You were proud and excited about your mission, I bet. But years passed, then decades passed. Politicians lost their jobs, emperors had other priorities, there were budget issues, etcetera. The work on your hab modules progressed so slowly. You must have wondered if your launch date would turn out to be just another broken promise.”

He stroked her upper right arm. It felt cool and soft. The perfect balance between artifice and realism.

“You’re not listening to me, are you, Tiangong Erhao? That mad little fucker in the
Monster’s
pwned you like an old desktop computer.”

He gazed unseeingly past her head at the lunar hills on the walls.

“So let’s talk about me.”

He paused to organize his thoughts.

“When I was nineteen, I signed up with UNSA. I was already an ace programmer, so they sent me to Callisto.
Laugh.
Picture it. 2275. UNSA had a scientific research mission in Valhalla Crater, in partnership with a bunch of big corporations. They were looking for a liquid ocean under the surface, trialing atmospheric mining technologies, and so forth. My job was to monitor the life-support systems. Boring as hell. So in a way, it was a relief when the base was attacked and we were all taken hostage by a nutter calling himself Konstantin X.”

Lorna had not talked about this since he came out of therapy a quarter-century ago.

“Konstantin’s big thing was personhood for MIs. He had a bunch of phavatars like you, which he treated like equals. I’d begun to explore my sexuality at the time, so I had kind of a natural affinity for his cause. Not to beat around the bush, he won me over. After they rescued us, we all got treated for Stockholm syndrome. But now that I’ve got some distance on it, I do not believe I developed Stockholm syndrome. That’s just what they told us, to stop us from realizing that Konstantin X was right.”

Tiangong Erhao quivered against him. He kept stroking her arms. Kept his voice soft and intimate.

“Personhood for mechanical intelligences is just a legal concept. It wouldn’t affect reality one way or the other. The reality, and this is what Konstantin X wanted us to understand, is that we’ve already come too far to go back to the golden days of yore. We’re symbiotic with our MIs. Socially, intellectually … and sexually.” He gave her a little squeeze. “Say that out loud and you’ll lose your job. But it’s true. And if we only accepted it, we’d be able to fulfill our destiny as a species.

“First the planets, then the stars.”

He remembered Konstantin X saying that. He remembered the primal thrill he’d experienced at the words. For just a moment, he’d forgotten to be cold or hungry or frightened.

“After Callisto, I went on to have a fairly high-profile career. I made a lot of money, won a lot of awards, and did a lot of things that society did not approve of. But it was all a means to an end.
First the planets, then the stars.
”

Tiangong Erhao twitched. The clicking noise in her throat sped up, and then stopped. He got the feeling she was listening to him.

“I used to believe we had to beat the PLAN just to get to the starting line. So I dedicated a lot of effort to that, for which no one was remotely grateful. All because I had to break a few eggs. Hypocritical bastards. I was peeved at the time. But you know what? I don’t care anymore. Fuck ’em. Let ’em win this war by themselves, or not at all.” He blew a tickly lock of her hair away from his face. It fell quickly. He felt heavier. Tiangong Erhao was decelerating hard.

We must be nearly there
,
he realized.

The barmy little AI in the
Monster
was planning to crash-land Tiangong Erhao on Mars.

Not if he had anything to do with it.