Miller interpreted her vagueness as a purposeful evasion. “Your boyfriend wouldn’t be doing war-related work, would he?”
Pointing an accusing neoprene-gloved finger at him, Elfrida said, “Are you trying to pump me for intelligence, Colonel Miller?”
“Two can play at that game, can’t they?”
It took Elfrida a minute to process that. When she did, she felt stupid. Incredibly stupid. “Do you seriously think we’re trying to … interrogate you? That’s not what this is about!” But now she felt sure it was. That was why the UN had chosen to use Space Corps agents, rather than robot therapists. However good its programming, a robot would never be able to create the impression of well-meaning cluelessness that might lull a RCMM into letting slip tidbits of actionable intelligence.
“That is what it’s about, as far as I know,” Miller said. “Prime Minister Hope ordered us to accept Geneva’s friendly invitation to recuperate on Earth, precisely because it was thought we might find out something useful about the UN’s war planning. Of course, here we are stuck in fragging Antarctica. So that didn’t work.”
“Wow,” Elfrida said. “Just wow. We’re supposed to be allies.”
“Allies always spy on each other.”
“Yes, but …”
“And our government doesn’t have a very high opinion of the UN. I suppose you wouldn’t understand that.”
“Excuse me, I do understand.” Elfrida’s memories sharpened her voice. “The PLAN attacked Luna, and Space Force didn’t react in time. I was there, dude. When the Dust plague killed half of everyone in Shackleton City, I was there. I saw people dying, alone in their spacesuits. I saw corpses being dragged out of the domes and stacked up so they froze together into piles. I walked two thousand kilometers with the survivors to New Riyadh. I carried their babies. Tiny babies swimming in adult-sized sharesuits … some of them died on the way.”
“OK,” Miller said after a moment. “I didn’t know that. Sorry.”
Elfrida forced the memories away. She was hyperventilating, breathing so hard that her faceplate had begun to fog up. “Just please don’t assume I don’t understand.”
“My bad.”
She pulled herself together. “No, it’s OK. Most people on Earth think Luna broke away from the UN for no good reason. No good reason? The UN just proved that it couldn’t protect you. I’d say that’s an excellent reason to take your security into your own hands.”
See: warm and empathetic, as specified in the training manual.
Miller spun in the water and dived into the murky depths below them.
Elfrida clenched her fists in frustration, and shouted after him, “Did you guys seriously think you could defeat the PLAN on your own?”
“No,” Miller’s voice came back by radio. “It was revenge.”
“I remember you said you lost your sister in Shackleton City.”
No answer. She switched on her helmet lamp. The beam carved a foggy wedge of light in the water. No Miller.
A new voice came through on the public channel. Ed, the cetaceophile who was leading today’s dive. “Gangway, everyone! Little Sister’s coming through!”
Before Elfrida could move—not that she had any idea which way to move—a gigantic shape rocketed up from the depths. Someone clung to a fin. More people paddled madly in the sperm whale’s wake. Their voices jammed the public channel, hoots of joy punctuated with huge noisy gasps as they reinflated their lungs.
Caught in the turbulence of the whale’s passage, Elfrida tumbled helplessly. The light faded above her. She finned upwards and broke the surface a few meters from the whale. Its blowhole smoked. Spray rained down on the sea and on Elfrida. She ripped her visor up—not a smart move, but she’d panicked for a minute there, and she needed to breathe fresh air.
She smelled the sea, the whale. How could anything so big be so very much alive? The others in the group were playing with it, stroking its mottled sides, nuzzling it. Her ears filled with the susurration of the waves and the squeak of pack ice collisions.
Tinnily, the speaker in her helmet said, “You need to improve.” This was followed by the chittery sound that the translation program used to represent whale laughter.
It had been known for several hundred years that whales had a language and society of their own. Less than a century ago, increasingly powerful computers had finally managed to compile a Whale-English translation program. This was still a work in progress, but the cetaceophiles, who knew their finny friends better than any machine ever could, confirmed that whales really did have a strange sense of humor.
“Experience is the mother of foolishness,” Little Sister added.
“Well, thanks very much for that insight,” Elfrida said crossly. A wave slopped into her open visor. She felt icy water leaking down past her neck seal.
“You are a small mammal.” The whale chittered in amusement.
“And you are a large mammal. What’s your point?”
The whale declined further comment, leaving Elfrida to wonder if there was some cosmic significance to its pronouncements. She licked salt off her lips. Her cheeks were going numb.
“Mama spoke to you!” Ed the cetaceophile exulted on the radio. “Wow! Radical! That’s a huge honor!”
“I thought this one was Little Sister?”
“She is. Duh. They talk by sonar. They can’t chit-chat when they’re on the surface.” Ed popped out of the waves near her. He saw that her visor was up. “Frag it!”
He forcibly closed her visor and towed her towards the distant splotch of color that was the camp. She heard him complaining on the public channel about “freaking noobs; even the Fraggers aren’t this bad,” but she did not speak up to defend herself. That moment of exposure to the sea seemed to have set off a shutdown procedure in her body. Her teeth were chattering, and all the strength had gone from her limbs.
Later, when she was recovering with a mug of hot chocolate and a blanket around her shoulders, under the infrared heater in the mess, Bob Miller came to find her. “Swimming with the whales is a magical experience, huh?”
“Oh yeah. I’m filled with a new appreciation for the wonders of creation. Especially the wonder known as hot chocolate.”
“This is as close as we’ve ever come to meeting an alien species.”
“And as close as we ever will come. There are no aliens.”
Miller nodded, and slurped his own hot drink. “The Fermi Paradox, yadda yadda. The Great Filter theory: almost no lifeforms make it past the jump from the simple prokaryote to the complex eukaryote cell.”
“I’ve also heard that the Great Filter might come later,” Elfrida said. “It might be that 99.9% of intelligent species annihilate themselves by means of planet-busting weapons.” She was feeling gloomy. She sipped her hot chocolate. Her teeth rattled on the mug’s rim.
Because she’d endured so much therapy herself, she had been able to pinpoint the reason she’d panicked out there. Nothing to do with the sea or the sperm whale. The trigger had been the whale’s name: Little Sister. This was not an unusual name for a whale. They always went by their birth-order designation followed by unique phrases of song, so the one Elfrida had met today was actually called Little Sister B-D-F-E-Sharp or something like that. The cetaceophiles shortened their names for convenience.
But it just so happened that Elfrida had met an entity called Little Sister before, two years ago, on the Vesta Express. It had resembled a human teenager in appearance, but nothing else about it had been human. It had nestled, sucking its thumb, in the fragment of a PLAN ship that carried the Heidegger program to 4 Vesta, where it killed thousands of people.
The ISA had spirited Little Sister away. Elfrida had no idea what had happened to—it? her?—after that. But now she knew the mystery had stuck with her, buried in her cortex, waiting to trigger a panic reaction like today.
Well. Things like that could only take you off guard once. There wouldn’t be a second time.
“One
of the whales spoke to me today,” Miller said.
“Me, too. Mine said, ‘You are a small mammal.’ And then it laughed at me.”
“Mine said, ‘To seek revenge is to seek defeat.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Typical fortune-cookie stuff,” Elfrida said. Miller shrugged. “Well, I guess it makes sense. We almost drove them to extinction, after all. What if they’d tried to get revenge? It would have been the end of them. They’re as technologically inferior to us as … as we are to the PLAN.”
Miller gave a single jerky nod. He squatted down beside her and pulled her closer. His fingers dug into her shoulder. It was not a lecherous caress, but a drowning man’s grip. “It’s a clusterfuck, Elfrida,” he whispered. “A complete clusterfuck. We are losing.”
★
Elfrida listened to Miller for a bit longer and then left him in the company of some friends who were watching an alien invasion movie. She went to the office, a cubicle at the end of the Nissen hut. It smelled seaweedy, thanks to the bunches of kelp someone had hung beneath the heater to dry. Colden was editing vid clips. She’d been put in charge of communications for the camp.
“Whoof,” Elfrida said, stretching her arms over her head. “Whoof and whew.”
“Good swim?” Colden said. “You know, it is so weird that we’re the senior cadres. In my own mind, I’m still a kid. But there’s no one else left from the class of 2277.”
“There’s Sophie Gilchrist.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. Responsibility sucks,” Elfrida said. She sat down on the corner of Colden’s desk, moving aside a bowl of beach glass to make room.
“Is something wrong?”
“Not really. Maybe. I was just talking to Bob Miller. He finally opened up some. He says—”
Colden held up one finger. “Patient confidentiality.”
By which, Elfrida knew, Colden meant to remind her that anything she said in here would be captured by listening devices. But whoever was listening, Elfrida wanted them to hear this. “We were talking about the war. He says it’s a complete clusterfuck. I’m not sure how to take that. But anyway, that’s what he said. We’re losing, he said. About sixteen times.”
“It sure doesn’t square with everything we hear about Star Force degrading the PLAN’s long-range assets,” Colden agreed, cynicism dripping from her voice.
“Oh, and he also has a theory about why we’re here.”
“I think we’re doing a pretty good job.”
“Yeah, but we’re not robots. Wanna know where all the robots have gone? Bob says they’re being weaponized. That’s a direct quote.”
“Weaponized?”
“Yup. Apparently, all the phavatars and geminoid bots on Luna vanished a few months ago. Bob thinks the same thing’s happening here. They’re being repurposed for combat. Like, we’re that short on resources.”
“If true,” Colden said after a moment, “that does sound kind of clusterfuck-ish.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” But there was something wrong with Colden’s expression. She looked both horrified and strangely distracted. “Colden. Was this, maybe, not news to you?”
“About the robots? It totally was. But it makes sense in terms of …” Colden gestured at the screen she’d been working on. Elfrida leaned over to get a look at it, but it was now displaying a screensaver sequence of someone’s dive pics.
“Colden, are you holding out on me about something?”
“No! I would never do that. Well, only since this morning. But you were swimming.”
Elfrida snapped her fingers. “C’mon, spit it out. Whatever it is, I figure the ISA already knows about it.”
“Oh yeah,” Colden said gloomily. “Well, I’m supposed to announce it to everyone tomorrow morning, anyway. Here it is: we’re leaving. The penguins can have this place to themselves again.”
“What? The RCMM aren’t healed yet.”
“Yes, they are. So saith La Petroskova.”
“Ooookay. And what about us?”
“Fun times. We’re being shipped out to someplace called Eureka Station.”
“Where?”
“I was hoping you would know, because I sure don’t.”
“It’s probably on frigging Pluto or something,” Elfrida said.
ix.
Petruzzelli quickly figured out that Elfrida Goto’s testimonial had been worth its weight in physical iridium. It must have been, because Petruzzelli was hideously underqualified relative to the others in her Star Force squadron.
Gwynneth Blake was the reigning All-Europe Existential Threat champion. Petruzzelli tried very hard not to fangirl all over her when she discovered this fact.
Harry Zhang had spent ten years flying for Uber Galaxy, the ultra-high-end space taxi service.
Taneela Williams had been a professional stratojumper, thrilling millions as she parachuted from low earth orbit.
Luc Zubrowski was a chess grandmaster, ranked 23rd in the world.
And so on; to a man and woman, they were either pro gamers, elite civilian pilots, record-smashing daredevils, or all of the above.
Petruzzelli’s own resume, which she’d bragged about so blithely in Boise, Idaho, now embarrassed her. Star Force had sifted through millions of volunteers and selected the crème de la crème for Gravesfighter pilot training. Why had they picked her?
Not for her experience or skills.
Nor because Martin Okoli, her former boss at Kharbage LLC, had slurred into a camera that Petruzzelli was “a painful warrior famous for fight,” whatever that meant.
Which left that five-minute vid recorded by Elfrida Goto in a bedroom in Rome.
In an intense and painful conversation with herself, Petruzzelli admitted that the value of Elfrida’s endorsement probably lay in who Elfrida was, not any of the flattering things she’d said about Petruzzelli. Elfrida had tangled with the PLAN at 11073 Galapagos, on 4 Vesta, on Mercury, and on Luna. Crappy luck was far from unique, although Elfrida had had an unusually long streak of it. What was unique was that after all that, Elfrida was still alive. The first of her adventures had made her a media heroine, for about fifteen minutes. Her name had subsequently been suppressed, so Petruzzelli didn’t know the details of her more recent adventures. But on the ISA’s in-house list of anomalous survivors, Elfrida must have achieved some freakishly high rating. So Petruzzelli’s personal connection with her made her special, too. It was probably all based on statistics.
Which still didn’t mean that she belonged here.
But here she was. This was what she wanted, and she’d be damned if she’d screw it up.
So she worked twice as hard as the others. She slogged through extra sessions in the flight simulators. She lifted weights, crosstrained, and took every seminar on offer.
For the second month of their training, to be sure, she couldn’t do much work. None of them could. They were flat on their backs, monitored by medibots around the clock.
Star Force joke: What’s the difference between boot camp and a stay in hospital? Answer: In hospital, the food is better.
Carbon-based nanites colonized the volunteers’ bones, altering the crystal structure of their constituent minerals. Their lungs were removed and replaced with plastic ones that they could collapse at will. Their hearts were also reinforced with piezoelectric motors that enhanced pumping capacity. These were the elements of reconstructive surgery for the spaceborn—but nearly all the volunteers were Earthborn to begin with, so they were being reconstructed into something else. Cyborgs. They also received new state of the art neural implants to replace their BCIs.
Petruzzelli said to the others, “Dammit. I should’ve asked for a new nose while we were under the knife.”
Externally, they looked unchanged. Petruzzelli even felt unchanged. She looked at herself in the mirror and still did not see a Gravesfighter pilot. But now she was one.
The next step was to actually get in the co
ckpit and fly. But this could not be done here—here being the giant Star Force base in Woomera, Australia, half a million square klicks of bush inhabited by wallabies, koalas, and equally shy eggheads.
So they got onto a military spaceplane and rattled around the Woomera Ring, a rail launcher that spiraled up Mt. Coricudgy. The Ring spat them into orbit. In LEO they transferred to a shuttle, which took them out to the Star Force base permanently orbiting the L1 Earth-Moon Lagrange point. There they transferred to a Flattop.
Named for the Industrial Age curiosities known as aircraft carriers, Flattops were the largest ships Star Force operated. Not the largest ever built, mind you. That distinction went to Interplanetary Transport Network (ITN) haulers, which drifted from Lagrange point to Lagrange point on years-long, fuel-sparing journeys. But no one wanted to ride a hauler.
The Flattop UNSF Thunderjack was a battleship.
Petruzzelli soaked up the sight of the huge, ovoid hull looming over their shuttle. It was not actually flat on top, but shaped like a humungous egg, with the drive at the large end. Sliding plates of asteroid steel armored it all over, standing off a meter from the ship’s actual hull. These Whipple shields were badly cratered and could probably stand replacing.
Nozzles ringed the massive throat of the drive. Their job was to spit molten radiator alloy into space, discharging the waste heat from the ship’s three reactors. In flight, it would look like silver hail was perpetually spraying from the nozzles, to be collected in solid form by electromagnetic fields, and reused. This type of heat exchanger was far more efficient than the civilian variety, which featured large vanes with coolant circulating through them. Right now the system was idle. The nozzles were just nozzles.
Gun and drone ports gaped all down the sides of the Flattop, exposed where the armor plates were being replaced. These ports were so freaking big Petruzzelli took them for launch bays, until a reddish eye unlidded itself in the cliff ahead. This was an actual launch bay. The shuttle flew into it.
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 10