The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5)

by Felix R. Savage

  Michael leapt into the mecha’s cradle.

  “Cheer up, me hearties,” Captain Haddock sighed. “The Chimera, blast it, the Monster’s a fine ship. Plenty of room to spread out.”

  “Sorry to break it to you, but you’re not coming aboard the Monster,” Yonezawa said. “I don’t like you. Anyway, I haven’t got room.” He gestured with his rifle. “Airlock’s over there.”

  “Ye’re murdering us!”

  “Tell the boss from me, I’m keeping the Startractor, but he can have you.”

  “That auld pirate will kill us as soon as look at us!”

  Yonezawa levelled his rifle at Haddock’s face.

  They packed into the airlock.

  “He monitors the FM band, so use your suit radios to call for help if you need to. Good luck.”

  The airlock closed.

  The five pirates, and Michael in his mecha, tumbled disconsolately into space.

  xiv.

  “I hate this,” Mendoza said, watching the six suited figures float away from the dilapidated Startractor. He had been one of those who brought their EVA suits up from the engineering deck.

  Kiyoshi turned on him. “Do you want to go pick Elfrida up or not?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then get over it. We need their ship. They stole it in the first place, so, no need to feel guilty about taking it off them. C’mon, let’s get off this truck.”

  Mendoza and Kiyoshi flew back towards the Monster. The fragments of 99984 Ravilious sparkled in the sun. The Monster had approached so close to the fragments during the capture of the Startractor that drifting rocks obscured their view of the colony. But Mendoza could see sunlit glimpses of the Salvation, a spindly wheel turning.

  In a little under three months, the Salvation had gone from a crazy dream to a physical reality.

  Just today, the Now You See It had returned from Ceres with a bunch of new recruits and fifty thousand tons of soil for the hab modules.

  Mendoza hated leaving the project at such a crucial time. But retrieving Elfrida was more important. She’d told him she was on Eureka Station. Where the hell is that? Mendoza had trawled the internet for clues. There was nothing at first, and then a trickle, and then a flood of hearsay about a Star Force base on a Mars trojan asteroid.

  He had to get her out of there.

  And now, here was this heaven-sent opportunity. Mendoza managed to convince himself that Kiyoshi was right. The pirates would land on their feet.

  They reached the Monster’s command airlock. Kiyoshi keyed in the combination, spoke today’s password for the voiceprint lock, and finally inserted a keycard in the recently installed physical lock.

  He was so freaking paranoid these days.

  Was it really OK to leave him here?

  Jun had said it was OK. He and Kiyoshi had worked it out between them. Jun would take Mendoza to pick Elfrida up in the Monster, and Kiyoshi and the Galapajin would stay here. They were already packing to move into the Startractor. The chaos in the ops module looked terminal, but Mendoza knew they would all get packed, round up their children, test their EVA suits, and complete the transfer in a few hours. They were Japanese.

  On the bridge, Kiyoshi convened a meeting of his inner circle. Mendoza did not speak Japanese, and had to rely on Jun to translate for him.

  “They’re worried,” Jun subtitled a particularly tense exchange.

  “About Kiyoshi and the boss-man? I’m worried, too,” Mendoza gaze-typed. “They aren’t even talking anymore.”

  “Oh, it’s not that. Kiyoshi and the boss are adults. They’ll work it out. This is about fabbing the right kind of connectors to tether Bigelows in the Startractor’s cargo bays. It’s all technical issues with this lot,” Jun typed in Mendoza’s chat window. “They believe if they can get the engineering right, God will take care of everything else. And that’s not a bad way to go through life. That’s why I’m OK with leaving them here.”

  This reassured Mendoza. When the meeting broke up, and the Galapajin drifted off the bridge, he thrust his fists over his head, stretching. “I know maybe I shouldn’t say this, but I am pumped to be getting out of here.”

  “No, you shouldn’t say it,” said Father Tom. He had stayed behind to give Mendoza last-minute instructions.

  “You know what I mean, Father.” Mendoza slapped the captain’s workstation. “Hope I’m gonna be able to fly this thing!”

  “Don’t worry, all you’ll have to do is water the plants,” Jun said, as his projection entered the bridge from the data center. He settled into the astrogator’s couch. Delta-V calculations flickered across the screens. “We should be able to reach Earth in less than a month.”

  “Elfrida’s on Eureka Station.”

  “Of course she is,” Jun said. “I was speaking broadly.”

  “And of course, we’ll have to cross Earth’s orbit to reach Eureka Station, given where the planets are at the moment. Of course.” Mendoza shook his head apologetically. “I’m a bit nervous. I keep wondering, what if we have nothing to say to each other? What if we’ve grown apart?”

  Kiyoshi had half a dozen cigarettes tethered to the arms of his throne, with different mixes loaded. He stuck one in his mouth and began disconnecting the rest to take with him. He clearly had nothing to contribute on this topic. Mendoza was not surprised. Kiyoshi didn’t have a love life. He used to sneak around a fair bit when he was portside, but among his own people, he lived as chastely as a monk.

  “Regarding your responsibilities, John,” Father Tom tapped him on the arm. “First and foremost, you’ll pray the Divine Office daily.”

  Mendoza nodded. Father Tom had ordained him a deacon a couple of months back. “I already do, Father.”

  “And so does Jun, so you’ll have no opportunity to slack off on that. But there’s something else you alone will be responsible for.” From the rucksack he wore over his EVA suit, Father Tom took a pyx hand-forged from asteroid iron. “The Holy Eucharist,” he said, holding it up, then gave it to Mendoza, and took out a bulb-shaped bottle made of opaque, two-inch-thick Moon glass. “The Precious Blood.”

  Mendoza fell to his knees, clutching the vessels. In zero-gee, this came out as bending his knees in the air. “I’ll guard it with my life, Father.” He frowned. He knew this was a stupid question, but he had to ask. “What if I drop it?”

  “You won’t drop it,” Father Tom said, with just a hint of menace.

  “No, but just in case. I mean, if it’s the Host, I pick it up and consume it, but what if it’s the Precious Blood?”

  “It used to be illegal to reserve the Precious Blood at all,” Father Tom said. “The Vatican changed canon law to allow it in space, when the priest may have to travel millions of kilometers to his congregation. But it does present new dilemmas in zero-gee. If the Precious Blood is spilled on the floor, you wash the area with water, then pour the water into the sacrarium and drink that. But what if it never reaches the floor? What if there is no floor? I suppose you would have to scramble around catching all the drops. It’s never happened to me.”

  Kiyoshi uncoiled from his throne. “Well, I’m going,” he said, kicking off in the direction of the door.

  “Wait,” said Mendoza. He went after him and hugged him. “Be careful, dude.”

  “You be careful,” Kiyoshi said. “Don’t spill the Precious Blood. Or Jun will space you.”

  Father Tom left next, after blessing the data center and each of the workstations.

  The thumps and bumps from the outer regions of the ops module dwindled to silence. And then they were alone.

  “Guess it’s just you and me now,” Mendoza said to Jun’s projection. He forced a laugh. He’d never spent any extended length of time alone with Jun before, and didn’t know exactly how it was going to go.

  “Yep. I’ll see you when it’s time for the Daily Office,” Jun said. “I’ve got stuff to do.” His projection floated back into the data center. The door closed.

  “OK,” Mendo
za muttered to the empty bridge. “This is going to be a long four months.”

  He chuckled to himself. What a lot he was going to have to say to Elfrida, when they were finally together again.

  xv.

  First thing every morning, Petruzzelli checked her email. You didn’t get much email on Eureka Station. It was just a habit. But the morning after she went drinking with Zhang and the others, her bleary eyes took in a name that woke her up fast.

  From: Adnan Kharbage [ID string attached]

  To: Alicia Petruzzelli @ Star Force

  How are you, missy? I hope your glamorous new career is very rewarding. Soon after you left, Michael ran away. He wanted to bring you back home. This is what he said to me. I did not take him seriously and now I deeply regret it. He stole the Kharbage Collector to chase after you, and fell prey to pirates. We have searched the volume but they are gone.

  One cannot torture oneself with hope forever. He has now been missing for 137 days. With a breaking heart, I accept that he is dead. I thought you should know.

  Regards,

  Adnan Kharbage, CEO, Kharbage, LLC

  Petruzzelli sat up in bed, clutching handfuls of her blanket. She reread the email. It still said the same thing.

  “Michael,” she croaked. “Oh, Mikey.”

  It was her fault.

  “It’s not my fault,” she said aloud, denying it.

  He wanted to bring you back home.

  “You’re full of shit, Adnan.” That was it. Adnan Kharbage still held a grudge against her for quitting. He was messing with her mind. “This is such transparent crap. Mikey’s got a genius-level IQ. He wouldn’t do anything that stupid.”

  She rolled out of bed, muscles aching. Nausea rolled into her throat, reminding her how much she’d drunk last night. She pawed through the discarded clothes on the floor of her cubicle, looking for the pouch of Gatorade she’d bought from a vending machine on the way home.

  Her HUD flashed again. Another email. She tensed, ready to delete it unread. But it was from Zhang.

  You awake, cupcake? We’ve got the day off. Wanna do some heavy-gee training?

  Petruzzelli hesitated, and then replied, K. See you there.

  The cool kids had invited her to join their gang at last. She was flattered, but wary. But she needed something to take her mind off Michael Kharbage, so she went.

  The Woomera Wallopers had reserved a whole centrifuge, but only five of them turned up: Zhang, Zubrowski, Blake, Morgan, and Golubtsov. The same crew, in fact, who’d traipsed all over Wheel Four last night, looking for a really kickin’ juice bar that Zubrowski knew he knew, until they gave up and wandered into an orgy club, where sexbots served them overpriced cocktails spiked with vitamin K.

  They were all still wobbly and quiet from that, Petruzzelli very much included. They took their positions, spaced out around the 2-meter centrifuge. It spun faster and faster, until Petruzzelli felt her artificial lungs and heart transition into low gear. The digital readout in her HUD confirmed that she was experiencing four gees.

  She now had to climb up to the top of the centrifuge, touching a set sequence of pressure sensors along the way. She wrenched her head sideways. It felt like lifting a car with her neck. Zhang, next to her, had not moved. He grinned—his face distorted by the gees—and beckoned with one finger.

  Oh, fuck this, Petruzzelli thought. She heaved her body sideways. Like wearing concrete armor.

  “Thanks for coming,” Zhang grunted. She could still smell last night’s cocktails on his breath. “We’re here to plot a mutiny.”

  “Sorry, but I missed the beginning of this movie.”

  “Yeah,” Zubrowski said. He was right behind her. He’d crawled around the wall of the centrifuge, so now she was sandwiched between him and Zhang. “We didn’t know if you’d be up for it.”

  Williams, she realized. Williams was in their gang, but she died, so they need someone to replace her. She was intrigued, nonetheless. “Go on.”

  “We’re deserting,” Zubrowski grunted into the back of her neck.

  “Okayyy. This is kinda sudden. What happened?”

  “This bloody war happened,” Gwynneth Blake said from above her.

  Petruzzelli screwed herself up onto one elbow. Blake was kneeling—kneeling—on the wall of the centrifuge above their heads, bracing her weight on her hands. Her unbuttoned lapels hung straight down like sheets of metal.

  “I don’t get you,” Petruzzelli grunted.

  “They opened up the Force to volunteers,” Blake gasped. “They asked for the best and the brightest. And they got us.”

  They got YOU, Petruzzelli thought. And they got me: a two-bit recycling barge captain who happened to know someone with a statistical-outlier classification.

  “But they didn’t know, or understand, what they would be getting,” Zhang said into her face, close enough to kiss. “People who’ve spent their careers in the private sector. People who are used to thinking for themselves. Assessing situations and taking action. People who are not used to taking it in the shorts from a fat, hairy little martinet.”

  “Ouch! Ooh, Admiral McLean, that feels goood!” Zubrowski fluted.

  “He’s screwed so many pilots, he needs a VD exam,” Morgan shouted from the other side of the centrifuge.

  “They’re all murderers,” said Golubtsov, climbing the wall.

  Petruzzelli nodded. There’d been quite a lot of this last night, too. She looked into Zhang’s eyes. “Think you could come up with better mission profiles? Because if you do, I bet Flight Command would like to hear about it.”

  Zhang got his hands under him and started to do a pushup on the wall. “All they know is what they’ve always done. Throw stuff at the problem until it goes away. Or, until we run out of stuff.”

  “Not this again,” Petruzzelli said. She copied Zhang’s position, competitive as always.

  “We’re doing it wrong,” Zhang grunted.

  “Someone has to do the right thing,” Gwynneth Blake said, into the wall. She lay facedown, finished.

  Petruzzelli wasn’t finished. She pushed up to her hands and knees. Felt like there was an 800-pound hog riding on her back. “So what’s your big idea? We can’t abandon the troops on Stickney.”

  “Of course not.” Zhang faced her on his hands and knees. The tendons in his neck quivered with the sheer effort of keeping his head up. “So we just have to go on flying suicide missions. Right?” Suddenly, he pushed off into a burpee. He stood erect. In five gees. “I don’t want to die,” he said. “Woooo. Fuck this Coriolis effect.”

  “So we take them off!” Petruzzelli said. The idea energized her. She pushed up into a squat. The Coriolis force made her head swim. “Of course! Smuggle engine parts into the dropedoes. Get them to build escape pods. They could use the dropedoes. Then we’d pick them up. It’d be tricky …” She saw a vision of herself as one of the brave pilots who saved the Stickney heroes’ lives.

  Zhang crumpled sideways. His body hit the wall of the centrifuge with all the force of five gravities. Zubrowski dragged his left arm out from under him. There was blood. On the wipe-clean wall, on Zhang’s skinsuit, on Zubrowski’s hands. When you had a nanotically reinforced skeleton, it was awfully hard to break a bone. But flesh remained fragile, at least until it was replaced by something synthetic.

  Zhang pushed Zubrowski away. “You’ve been listening to your ship, haven’t you, Zuzu?”

  “It’s pretty smart.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Zhang dragged his injured hand to his face. He stared cross-eyed at the blood. “It’s been programmed to put that idea in your head. If enough people listened to their ships, we might end up taking them all off. Problem solved, from Geneva’s point of view. And it would all be on the individual pilots who quote, disobeyed orders, unquote. No need for the UN to betray its own principles.”

  Petruzzelli had a feeling similar to when some instrument on the Kharbage Collector’s bridge used to go on the blink. Shocked, and betrayed. S
he had trusted her ship. She squatted there with the weight of the world on her shoulders.

  “The reason we’re in a hurry,” Zubrowski said from his supine position, “is that we suspect some of the others are conspiring with their ships. We’ve got wind of a plot involving some of the Houston Howlers. They’re planning a so-called rescue, with magnetic grapples. Snag the Fraggers when they come out to pick up their next load of stuff.”

  “How’d you hear about that?” was all Petruzzelli could think of to say.

  “Zubrowski is sleeping with one of the Howlers,” Zhang said. “But it isn’t serious. Right, Z?”

  “That’s right, Z,” Zubrowski said.

  “This is serious. The war’s at an inflection point. It’s up to us.”

  Petruzzelli’s vision was tunnelling down. Zhang’s face floated at the wrong end of a gray telescope.

  “Are you in?”

  A few moments ago, she would have said she’d have to think about it. Now she grunted, “Are you kidding? Just tell me what to do.”

  “First things first. Climb. We’ll finish this discussion in the showers.”

  Zhang refused offers of help from Zubrowski, Morgan, and Petruzzelli. Somehow, he made it to the top without using his left hand. After what had happened to him, Petruzzelli didn’t dare try to stand up, but she hit all her touchpoints.

  It was an even greater feeling than usual when the centrifuge stopped. Petruzzelli followed the others to the showers. She felt light enough to dance.

  ★

  Elfrida woke up with her alarm shining in her eyes. Shit! Late for work! Her temples throbbed, despite the hangover pills she’d taken last night. She hustled through her minimal morning routine. Wet wipes for face and armpits, skin cream to combat space-station dryness. She pulled her gecko boots on, and changed the t-shirt she’d slept in for a less grungy one. There was no point trying to look good, considering what the day ahead of her would hold.

  She caught up with Colden in the mess. The Space Corps agents had been assigned to a region of Wheel Two formerly occupied by some division of Eureka Station’s privileged, sinecured ground crew. Those folks knew the procurement system like their own names. They’d acquired a robot chef that would fix you anything from scrambled eggs to Black Forest gateau. Elfrida was in too much of a hurry to take advantage of it this morning. Her waistline didn’t need it, anyway. She grabbed a soymilk Americano, and followed Colden out of the mess. “Whew! That was quite a night.”