The Phobos Maneuver (6 page)

The ISA. The spooks. The information police of the solar system, who dabbled in other kinds of policing, too. The boss-man was wanted for murder, ship theft, IP theft, and God knows what else. Not many people were aware of this. Kiyoshi had taken a risk by alluding to it.

“As soon as I know they’re coming,” the boss-man said, “you’ll know it.” He reached over and slapped Kiyoshi on the shoulder. His black eyes were hard. “You’ve got that nice hypervelocity coilgun; you never use it.”

The Pashtun men laughed. It had definitely been a mistake to come in here.

“I’m just wondering,” Kiyoshi murmured.

“Like I said, when I know, you’ll know.”

“My sources say there’s a lot of chatter on Ceres. All those procurement trips. People aren’t gonna
not
notice when someone buys sixteen antimatter generators.”

“Your sources?” The boss turned to the other men. “His brother.”

“Better source than
your
brother,” Kiyoshi said, keeping his anger in check.

Right on cue, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, Ph.D., entered the Bigelow. He came in through the airlock, darted into the changing cubicle, and exchanged his spacesuit liner for a traditional Pashtun tunic, loose trousers, and turban. He floated around the curtain into the women’s side. Cue screeches. A late convert to Islam—as opposed to the politically advantageous pretense of Islam—Dr. Hasselblatter simply could not get it through his head that the Pashtuns took purdah seriously.

He returned to the men’s side, not at all embarrassed by his faux pas, towing his newly-wedded wife, one of the spaceborn Pashtun girls. His seven-year-old son followed, riding on his pet goat.

The boss-man looked unamused. Kiyoshi’s smile, by contrast, was genuine. Dr. Hasselblatter was good for the Pashtuns, in his opinion. Dr. Hasselblatter had once been a famous politician, the director of the Space Corps, and a prominent member of the President’s Advisory Council; now he was a construction worker in the asteroid belt. He was much happier. And his absent-minded insouciance was a useful corrective to the Pashtun community, who tended to be too uptight, Kiyoshi thought, about shariah-related stuff.

Yet the boss-man begrudged his brother his happiness. Before he lost his job, Dr. Hasselblatter had not only provided 99984 Ravilious with priceless inside information, he had kept the ISA off the boss-man’s back. For twenty years, he’d singlehandedly made sure those charges stayed stuffed in the back of some virtual filing cabinet. Highly-ranked UN bureaucrats wielded amazing powers. But when a person fell from that high, they fell hard. Dr. Hasselblatter had ‘resigned’ last year amid a sex scandal. And when he lost his job, the boss-man had lost his protection.

The
Salvation
project had started the day Kiyoshi brought Dr. Hasselblatter out here, shorn of all his clout and connections.

No wonder the boss-man greeted his younger brother with a grin that could have sliced through splart.

“Get that kid out of here,” he said.

He might have meant the goat, but he probably meant Junior Hasselblatter. Dr. Hasselblatter’s son was the bane of his uncle’s existence. Actually, he was the bane of everyone’s existence. Today he had harnessed his goat into a pair of homemade wings, which flapped at the pull of a lever.

Dr. Hasselblatter ignored the command. Kiyoshi noticed for the first time that he looked alarmed. He wrapped his arms around his wife. “I just heard!” he exclaimed.

“What?” everyone shouted. They had not got completely out of the habit of thinking that Dr. Hasselblatter had privileged access to information.

“War! We’ve declared
war
on Mars!”

The Pashtun men roared. Even Kiyoshi snickered.

“We know,” they all chorused.

Out here, they had no internet access. The boss-man used to have a slick system of redirects involving dark pools of privately-owned servers, but he’d cut the cord during the sex scandal slash ISA panic. Six months had passed since then, so if the ISA were coming to arrest him, they weren’t burning metal to get here. But he’d never renewed their internet connection. It turned out they could get along just fine without it. Ship radios picked up the feeds, and news items percolated through the colony fast enough, depending on how interesting they were.

It said a good deal about the priorities of the colony—and the boss-man’s success in alienating his followers from the rest of the solar system—that war between the UN and the PLAN was
not
considered very interesting. This also explained why Dr. Hasselblatter had only just heard about it.

“But this is a historical event,” he insisted. “Humanity is taking a stand! Finally,
finally
we’re striking back at the PLAN!
What
a day! A watershed moment in the history of human civilization …”

This was too much for Kiyoshi. “Ten to one, it’s disinformation,” he said sharply. “And if it isn’t? They’ll pull back as soon as Star Force gets their delicate little fingers burned.”

He tended to be cynical about the UN. They’d let his home asteroid get slagged.

“This time is different! This is no hollow PR campaign. They’re planning a
war.”
A shrewd look came over Dr. Hasselblatter’s face. “The President’s hand must have been forced. She’s not a risk-taker. Her job’s on the line now—”

“Oh, Abdullah,” the boss-man said. “The President’s problems aren’t your problems anymore.” He said it kindly. For just a moment, he was not the boss, he was just an older brother setting a younger brother straight. Kiyoshi knew that tone of voice because he used it himself sometimes. “It’s a mess, but it’s four hundred million kilometers away. Anyway, Insha’Allah and all that. Allah will sort it out.”

Junior Hasselblatter’s flying goat crashed into the tea party, breaking it up. Dr. Hasselblatter’s wife spoke sharply to her stepson. Sullen, he hugged his goat, and Dr. Hasselblatter hugged all three of them. The real Pashtun men went to put their spacesuits on, embarrassed by this public display of affection.

Kiyoshi caught up with the boss-man outside. “‘Allah will sort it out’?”

Certain privileges came with being the boss’s right-hand man. Kiyoshi could talk to him like this, at least on a private suit-to-suit channel.

“Hey,” the boss-man said. “There is a definite upside. The ISA is much less likely to come chasing after me in the middle of an all-out war.”

“Naw, it’s the Allah talk that gets me.”

“Hey,” the boss-man said. “Call it God if you want. Call it fate, call it luck. Long as it’s on my side, I don’t care what you call it. There are a thousand ways to gain popularity, and all of them are right in the right circumstances.”

“In the name of Jesus Christ, may you be forgiven for lying your ass off.”

“I’m heading over to visit the Amish. Wanna come and hear me lie my ass off about how fusion energy isn’t a worldly convenience?”

Kiyoshi let out an involuntary laugh. Wished he could take it back. “Someday,” he said into the gunky mic in his helmet, “I want to hear you tell the Pashtuns—hell, everyone—that you and Dr. H. are from California; that you aren’t even Pashtuns, but half Iranian and half German or something; and that you never cracked open the Koran, much less the Bible or the Mormon scriptures or whatever else until you got interested in preserving minority cultures.”

“Oh, most people are already aware,” the boss-man said. They were puttering away on small blasts of gas from their mobility packs. Behind them, the Pashtuns clung like flies to the nearly-invisible web of strands that would become one-eighth of the
Salvation.
“They just don’t care. Same as the war. It doesn’t matter a lick way out here. There’s a disconnect this far out from civilization. You should know that all too well.”

It
will
matter if the ISA comes for you,
Kiyoshi thought. “Even our cynical bunch might be interested enough to know your real name.”

“I doubt it.”

His real name was Qusantin Hasselblatter—but that wasn’t what Kiyoshi was referring to. He meant the boss’s old nom de guerre: Konstantin X.

“You have my permission to share that tidbit … later. When it’s too late for anyone to have second thoughts.
Sinister chuckle.”

“Aw, go and chuckle sinisterly at the Amish,” Kiyoshi said, laughing.

They split up. Kiyoshi had a long trek back to his ship. For half an hour, he floated on his fragile jet of ionized gas, with no external proof he was moving at all, relative to the fragments of 99984 Ravilious which were the only things big enough to see. A radio beacon in his HUD guided him towards the
Monster.
He stared glumly at the distant sun, tinted by his faceplate to a putrid shade of green. So, revealing the boss’s real name wouldn’t give him any leverage. He’d had a feeling it wouldn’t, but it was worth a shot. Maybe if he knew more of the compromising details … but those were buried deep in the ISA’s databank vaults.

Sometime later, he thought about the war again. He really did not believe it would come to anything. On balance, it was a gift to the boss-man, giving anyone who might have been on the fence about the
Salvation
project a reason to work faster and harder.

But other people might fall for the UN’s hype. Some might take Dr. Hasselblatter’s view that this was a watershed moment in the history of human civilization, yadda, yadda.

Kiyoshi thought of Alicia Petruzzelli. He’d only known her for one day, and most of that time had been taken up getting to know her in the Biblical sense.
Forgive me oh Lord, for I am a hopeless fornicator.
Though not recently, for want of opportunities.

She was exactly the type to fall for the hype. The thought gave him a pang of a particularly Japanese sadness. He saw Petruzzelli as a cherry blossom, plucked haphazardly from her branch and carried away by the whim of the wind.

Oh well. Ain’t no wind that can blow across 400 million klicks of vacuum.

iv.

Petruzzelli walked along a country road in Idaho, towing her suitcase. She walked between plots of varying hues of yellow and brown, and a thousand shades of green. July heat dampened her armpits. Back on Earth for the first time in years, she was hyper-aware of the smells, the dirt under her boots, the weather. The sky was overcast, as it usually was on Earth.

Since the late 21
st
century, fleets of cloud-seeders had plied Earth’s oceans, flinging up water vapor to increase the planet’s albedo. These and other geoengineering gimmicks had stabilized the climate. It was slightly warmer than it had been in the 21
st
century, but that turned out to be good for plants. Idaho had once been a desert. Now it was one of the nations in the Breadbowl federation, helping to feed the world with cutting-edge agriculture. Bots labored in the fields, wielding hoe and cultivator attachments on the ends of rugged tentacles.

She had gotten off the bus in Murtaugh, figuring to save money by walking the rest of the way, but she was hot and tired as hell by the time she reached the Chevy that stood on blocks at the end of her parents’ turn-off. She gave the Chevy’s trunk a friendly slap. It was an antique, protected from the elements by a coat of splart—a sculpture, not a working vehicle. As she trudged up the dirt lane, she heard the lazy whump of the wind turbines in the fields. Trees shaded the lane. The air smelt so rich and earthy she could taste it on her tongue.

The farm buildings came in view. A young woman backed out of the dairy, her arms full of trays. Turning to shut the door with her hip, she saw Petruzzelli. “Oh! Hey! Sorry, I didn’t hear the van. I’ve got the eggs right here, I’ll just grab the … cheese …” She trailed off as she saw that Petruzzelli was not the person she’d been expecting. She backed up. Petruzzelli knew what she saw: a woman her own age. with skin as pale as paper and hair like a solar flare, wearing a t-shirt that said KILL ALL THE FUGLIES, and red Gecko Docs that were designed for walking on spaceship decks, not dirt roads. It was all too obvious that she’d just come back from outer space this morning.

The woman dropped the eggs.

“Don’t call the police,” Petruzzelli said, urgently. “I live here.”

“No, you don’t. Who are you?”

“Who are
you?”

“Tempest Petruzzelli.”

What Petruzzelli had figured. “Gotcha. Then I guess you’re my mom.”

Tempest’s lips twitched; she was subvocalizing to someone, probably showing them what her retinal implants saw. Then she swooped on Petruzzelli with her arms open. “Alicia!” she exclaimed, hugging her. “It’s so great to finally meet you! Wow! C’mon in!”

“Sorry about the eggs.”

“Oh God, yeah, I don’t know what we’re going to do about that.” A collie dog lolloped around the corner of the farmhouse and nosed at the spreading puddle of yolks. “I told the guy from the famers’ market we would have twelve dozen, but I guess we won’t have any. It’s going to suck if they run out. But it’s not your fault! C’mon, everyone’s gonna be so excited to see you …”

Still talking, Tempest led Petruzzelli into the farmhouse, which managed to be at once rambling and cozy. There were layers of history here, if you knew where to look. The indestructible old sofa in the living-room dated back to Petruzzelli’s childhood. Now a pair of toddler twins sat on it with a large teddy-bear, which was teaching them math. Petruzzelli noticed a new infestation of batik, and suspected Tempest. She already disliked the woman. Unfair? Maybe, but Tempest was
still
going on about those eggs, and she clearly blamed Petruzzelli, even if she said the contrary.

The kitchen was the nerve center of the farm. A vast, scarred table held a miscellany of computers and snarled cables with crumbs caught in them. Mom Elaine’s stained-glass suncatchers dotted the windows. Baking aromas wafted from the Viking gas range. Two men and two women sat around the ancient table, drinking tea and noodling on the computers. Petruzzelli knew none of them. At least that was what she thought until the older, shaven-headed man stood up. “Alicia! When did you get back?”

“Dad Ezra! You shaved off your dreads.”

“Going bald,” he stage-whispered.