“Sleep well?” Colden smirked.
“Ow!” Elfrida had burned her mouth. “You really should get in touch with Kristiansen.”
“I cannot think about him first thing in the morning,” Colden said. But she had been thinking about him last night, and talking about him. She often did when she was drunk.
Elfrida took careful sips of her coffee as they walked through Wheel 2 to the therapy clinic. The corridors were more like deep slots. They meandered between promontories of antiquated, noisy life-support machinery. Buttresses of asteroid rock supported prefab eyries splarted into any and all available gaps. Smart posters provided splashes of color. They chirruped messages about hygiene and information security, which were drowned out by the noise of the 08:00 shift change. Elfrida finished her coffee and handed the cup to a passing recycling bot.
The therapy clinic was a depressing backwater on Wheel Three. Psych cases, including failed suicides, jittery pilots, and unstable personality disorders, sat on brightly colored beanbags, waiting for their appointments. Droning music, intended to keep those in the waiting area calm, filtered through hidden speakers in the ceiling. Elfrida and Colden walked past those waiting glumly for their turn to speak and receive meds, down a staff-only corridor. They both gazed into an iris scanner and touched a fingerprint reader. An unmarked door swung open with a barely audible hiss.
They stepped into their real place of work: a gigantic, brand-new telepresence center.
Rows of couches, packed like economy-class plane seats, held the twitching bodies of phavatar operators from every division of Star Force, plus a hundred or so Space Corps agents.
Much of the work of the Space Corps, in pre-war days, had consisted of long-distance telepresence operations. They had spent their days suit-hopping among phavatars dispatched to remote asteroid colonies, dealing with health emergencies and social problems from many light-seconds away. They were better at it than the Star Force professionals.
Colden touched Elfrida on the shoulder. “See you,” she said, and headed for her assigned couch. Elfrida followed suit.
These couches had to be manned around the clock, so the operators worked three shifts. Elfrida pushed the button that would signal her arrival.
The operator in ‘her’ couch jerked. He logged out, removed his headset, mask, and gloves, and sat up. “Hey! Good morning, or is it good night?” Class of ’88, Elfrida thought. Still in his teens. “Have a great day!” He passed her the headset and bopped off, moving easily, not even stiff after eight hours in the couch.
Elfrida sat down, thoughts about the physical resilience of the young spinning darkly through her head. She also marveled at the reminder that some people were enjoying this war.
She put on the headset and pulled the still-warm gloves onto her hands. Because she was late, she didn’t bother with the sanitizer wipes for the mask. She fitted it over her face, feeling the residue of oily teenage skin transfer to her cheeks. Two holes under her nostrils allowed her to breathe. She closed her eyes and saw the log-in screen.
She’d be operating Oliver 475AX today. A new one. They shuffled the assignments every shift, so you’d have no chance to form a rapport, even if you were inclined to.
She logged in.
And opened her eyes on Stickney.
xvi.
In his former life, Mendoza had been something of a hacker. Now, wrapped in freezeblankets on the bridge of the Monster, he used his old tricks to access forums hidden in the spam-flooded, virus-infested badlands of the internet. Most people relied on curated feeds for their news, but if you went off the beaten track, you could find information that was too raw for even the cheekiest curator.
The PLAN had nuked Hyderabad.
What?
He surfed over to the official news feeds, where all was positivity and reassurance. UNSA had come up with a cute little sim that let you play at being a PORMS operator, guarding Earth against meteors flung by the PLAN from deep space.
Back to the forums. Now they were saying it had been a cobalt bomb. Someone had posted pictures of the flash.
Back to The Solar System Today. Yup, Hyderabad was in the news. An industrial accident …
Mendoza didn’t know which was more frightening: the fact that Earth’s PORMSnet turned out not to be 100% effective, or the fact that the UN was trying to cover it up, or the fact that the cover-up was so freaking lame. There hadn’t been any industrial accidents on Earth for a century, because there wasn’t any industry on Earth anymore.
Back to the forums. Yeah, man, and they got Midway, too …
He was freaking himself out. He floated over to the fridge and got a mochaccino. The fridge hummed, cool and bright inside. The screen on the door glowed death blue. This refrigerator contained a tame copy of the Heidegger program, known as the Ghost, which Jun used tactically on occasion. Mendoza had seen what the Heidegger program could do in the wild, and felt uneasy sharing the bridge with it, but that didn’t stop him from eating and drinking stuff out of the refrigerator.
Beep!
His frayed nerves twitched at the sound. He hadn’t heard it for so long he’d forgotten what it was. The doorbell!
Not a physical doorbell, of course, but an alert Kiyoshi had set up.
Someone was attempting to enter one of the airlocks.
Mendoza put his mochaccino back in the fridge and checked the external optical feed. He expected to see either nothing, or one of the Monster’s own repair bots which had somehow got stuck outside.
He saw a torpedo-shaped drone three meters in length, towing a mini-Wetblanket full of bundles.
The torpedo bore a familiar logo on its fuselage: a lower-case orange ‘a’ with a jaunty drone flying around it.
Mendoza scratched the beard he’d grown, because shaving was too much trouble. “What the heck?” he muttered. Then he went back to the internet.
New search: How far can Dronazon’s drones fly, anyway?
Beep! Beep!
“Jun?”
Alternately floating and kicking off, Mendoza went to the data center at the end of the bridge and peeked in. Twelve stacks of billion-crystal processing units hummed. The cooling system roared. Cold air rolled out. Mendoza retreated, rubbing his goose-fleshed arms. Dumb to look for Jun in there. You might as well slice the top of a person’s skull off to look for them in their brain.
He drifted ‘down’ through the now-empty rooms of the ops module, occasionally calling out. They’d turned off the air circulation down here to save on oxygen. The atmosphere smelled stale. Apart from the sound of his own voice, the ship was silent.
But not quite silent.
From time to time, as he floated past one of the PA speakers, he heard a whispery crackle, like voices on a radio channel not properly tuned in.
He stopped on the crew deck, where the whispers seemed louder. Floated up to the nearest speaker. Held his breath and let his mouth hang open, the better to listen.
Whkwssshoo … shpptffftao …
“Jun! Jun, where are you?”
Mendoza took a suit from the command airlock and exited the ship. Reeling out a tether behind him, he flew around the heat radiators, careful not to get too close—the Monster was not in Ghost mode right now, which meant the radiators could easily be hot enough to melt through his tether.
The Dronazon courier waited patiently outside the crew airlock. It was unmanned, controlled by an operator somewhere on Earth or Midway.
Instead of approaching it, Mendoza let his tether all the way out. He was now flying clear of the Monster, like a kite. He looked down on the ship’s 350-meter length—metal hills, a forest of heat radiators casting stark shadows. Then he looked out into space. The sun washed out everything else in the sky. He could see nothing. Then he could see something.
He fiddled with his suit’s optical telescope functionality until it came into focus.
A blue-green dot.
Mom, Mendoza thought. And then he thought of Hyderabad, and a terribl
e sadness welled up within him.
He flew down to the engineering module, released his tether, and let himself in. The airlock said the atmosphere down here was still OK. He pulled off his helmet.
Music flooded into his ears.
Haydn? Stravinsky? Wickjyerema? No. The choral harmonies sounded like Haydn, but the bombast was missing, and he’d never heard a string section used like that. It harmonized with his sadness, somehow explaining and curing it at once, the way good music should.
He floated ‘down’ past the catwalks around the reactor. The lights were on. The drive stuck up into the middle of the engineering deck, jacketed in heat shields. The floor around it was an all-purpose manufacturing area. Bots worked busily, feeding the printers and collecting their output. The machines were probably making a hell of a noise, but the music drowned it out.
“Jun!” Mendoza shouted. “This is awesome! It’s beautiful! But it’s kind of loud!”
Jun’s projection walked out from behind the reactor. Mendoza had never been so glad to see him.
“Do you like it?” Jun yelled.
“I love it.” Mendoza landed near him. The floor vibrated with the activity of the printers. “It’s kinda Haydn-esque, but those strings? And what’s the percussion section doing? I really need to get back into music. This makes me realize I haven’t listened to anything in ages. Who is this, anyway? I’m embarrassed I don’t know.”
“Heh. I wrote it.”
“You!”
“Yeah. I started off composing Gregorian chants, and then I got into oratorio. This is called St. Stephen. Check it out.”
Mendoza logged into the shipboard sim. The engineering deck stayed the same shape and size, but now it seemed to be built of stone. Earthlight shone through stained-glass windows. Candles burnt in iron sconces. Where the machinery had been, a full orchestra occupied the fabbery floor. The choir came in with a long-drawn-out Amen, and Mendoza looked up to see thirty monks standing on the catwalks around the reactor. They were Jun’s sub-personalities—his virtual brothers. He had retired them from active shipboard life, but they’d clearly found something else to do.
"Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" sang the young monk Ron Studd.
“Stop,” Jun shouted. “You sound like an altar boy. You’re about to be stoned to death. Try and sound like it.”
“I think he sounds great,” Mendoza said.
Jun sighed. He waved a hand, and the orchestra laid down their bows. “Composing music is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Much harder than flying a ship. I had to write a bunch of brand-new algorithms—sprezzatura, legato, allegro—still working on those.”
“Didn’t you hear me calling you earlier?”
“No, sorry.”
Mendoza didn’t know if that was the honest truth, or if Jun was blatantly admitting that he’d been ignoring him. “I saw Earth out there,” he said. “It was almost the size of the moon. We were going to cross Earth’s orbit at a distance of 0.75 AUs from Earth itself. Looks like we’re a whole lot closer than that.”
“We are.”
“What the heck is going on, Jun? Are we going back to Earth?”
“No.”
“But we’re not going to Eureka Station, either, are we?”
“No.”
Not going to Eureka Station.
Not going to pick up Elfrida.
I should have known.
In frustration and anger, he demanded, “Where are we going?”
“I can’t tell you right now.”
Jun floated away, towards the rumbling printers. Mendoza shouted after him, “Did you hear the PLAN nuked Hyderabad?”
“Yes. By the way, we’ve got a Dronazon delivery,” Jun replied. “It’s waiting at the crew airlock, unless it’s given up.”
“I didn’t know you were placing an order.”
“Could you sign for it?”
“Not until you tell me what it is.”
“Just some stuff I need,” Jun said vaguely.
Mendoza was too angry to do anything but leave. He spacewalked again and signed for the delivery—or rather, provided his voiceprint and ID. The drone passed him the Wetblanket it was towing. Then it flipped over and vanished. Of course, it hadn’t really vanished. It had just gone off in another direction, which looked like vanishing when you were travelling at hundreds of kilometers a second. Mendoza posted the Wetblanket into the engineering deck airlock, and then returned to the ops module.
Shhhptwfftz ... aooo …
He floated back towards the bridge, muttering four-letter words, drowning the whispers out.
How could he have been so dumb as to think Jun, much less Kiyoshi, gave a shit about Elfrida?
They’d just used his love for her to rope him into this mission, for what purpose Jun wouldn’t fucking tell him, which meant it was guaranteed to be unpleasant.
Mendoza knew from unpleasant. He’d gotten pretty good at blocking shit out, but he had seen gigadeath. He had seen the PLAN’s malware and its reverse-engineered bacteria kill people like insects. He’d come close to killing people himself.
He thought of Hyderabad again. He knew when he got back to the bridge, he’d log on and follow the story to its bitter end. The line between internet surfing and reality was so thin, and getting thinner all the time. He couldn’t block shit out anymore. He was in the middle of it—and so was Elfrida. And they had never been further apart.
Fffftpaooo czsht …
It still sounded like gibberish. Faint, staticky gibberish.
But the longer he listened, the more Mendoza had a feeling the whispers were actually Chinese.
xvii.
“Your move,” Petruzzelli’s ship said to her.
“Sorry. Was thinking.” She drew a virtual two of hearts from the virtual discard pile.
Twenty-five hours down. Twenty-five to go.
Twenty-five more hours of bluffing.
The ship, of course, made its move instantly. Even though it was playing with one hand tied behind its back, so to speak, it was still beating her.
“Your stress indicators are spiking,” it said. She’d selected its Luna-accented personality again, which made her think of the Fragger colonel, Miller. “Don’t be a sore loser.”
“Oh, frag off,” Petruzzelli muttered. She pressed her knees against the bars of the command gyrosphere. Felt the bruises from the centrifuge. Drew and discarded. Did the ship suspect what she was thinking? No, it couldn’t. If it suspected, it’d be working on her, trying to change her mind. Wouldn’t it?
She lost the game. Ran systems checks. Slept. Woke. Ate. Ran systems checks again.
Three hours out from Mars, the PLAN ambushed the fleet, with the usual results. Fifty Gravesfighters had set out from Eureka Station. Forty-four Gravesfighters flew on. No Fraggers had been invited to participate in the mission this time, which made Petruzzelli think someone suspected something. Maybe after Miller’s desertion, they didn’t trust the remaining Luna Union pilots.
She sucked some more gorp out of her suit’s nutrient nozzle, played one last game of gin rummy with her ship, and then it was time to say hello to Mars.
As the orbital fortresses loomed larger in the gestalt, she felt herself getting uncontrollably sleepy.
It was a reaction, she thought, to the unusual stress she was experiencing. She instructed her suit to inject her with a dose of morale juice. Immediately she perked up. The gestalt flowed through her neural implants like a song she knew by heart. Her mechanical readouts flickered in the deep red light of the cockpit like favorite storybooks.
“Hey,” her ship said. “Did you just juice up?”
“Yeah.”
“That stuff is terrible for you. It’ll wear out your adrenal glands.”
Petruzzelli laughed. “What are you, my mother? Fuck my adrenal glands.”
Those few seconds had brought the fleet into range of the orbital fortresses. Threat vectors sliced across the gestalt. She threw the ship into a heavy-gee turn.
The fleet was already scattering in forty-four different directions. Petruzzelli chose a trajectory that would make her one of the last to approach Stickney. They hurtled past Mars into space, travelling at three times escape velocity, decelerating hard.
A troll popped up at her five o’clock low. No problem. Morale juice made trolls look like bonus points. She spun on her thrusters and threw a stream of charged particles into its path. The troll achieved a brief afterlife as a flash of light. X-ray flux chased her as she ran.
“Look,” she said, stealing a glance at her optical feed. “You can see the Big Turd.”
“Olympus Mons,” her ship corrected her.
“What the hell do you think they have down there?”
“Water-splitting facilities? Computers? We’re still moving too fast.”
“No, we’re not,” Petruzzelli said, puzzled. “We’re on vector for orbit insertion with an apoapsis of forty-one thousand klicks. If that doesn’t work for some reason, we’ll just U-turn and dive into the gravity well.”
“Waste of fuel. I’m going to hit the brakes, OK? Get ready for some heavy gees.”
She didn’t even have time to argue. In the space of a heartbeat, she blacked out.
★
~Hello, Sandhya 4863CCP, Elfrida subvocalized, stifling a yawn. ~Nice to meet you. I’m Elfrida Goto and I’ll be your operator today
“Mumpfh,” said Sandhya 4863CCP.
Like all the phavatars on Stickney, Sandhya 4863CCP was a former civilian bot—not a therapist, this one, but a nanny. When it was minding toddlers in Mumbai, it had been styled as a pretty young Indian woman. Elfrida had no way of knowing what it looked like now, as she was seeing through its eyes. But she only had to glance at the other phavatars in her platoon to know that Sandhya 4863CCP was equally repulsive.
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 16