His suit, having come out of an emergency locker on Prince Jian Er’s yacht, had top-of-the-line telemetry. He knew enough Chinese to decipher its external sensor feedback. Wisps of methane were leaking out of the Superlifter’s cockpit vents. Its life-support systems were functioning.
“Jun’s telling me to go away,” Mendoza said incredulously.
At the same time, Lorna glimpsed movement above him. Tiangong Erhao’s face poked over the curve of the cargo module. She crawled around it on hands and knees, head down.
“Gecko pads on her knees,” Lorna marvelled. “The prince really did think of everything.”
“What?”
“Tiangong Erhao. The stupid thing’s followed us.”
Which might, or might not be a problem. Lorna was pretty sure there was nothing looking out of the phavatar’s eyes. Chinese protocols were so different. Incompatibly different. The Monster had hijacked Tiangong Erhao with some amazingly advanced command-and-control program—but that did not mean it could process a single byte of raw image data from Tiangong Erhao’s cameras.
“Who cares?” Mendoza said. “Come and help me check these cables.”
Lorna trudged back to him. The hawser running from the ops module had a braid of fiberoptic cables looped around it. Mendoza was hanging by his knees from the hawser, visually examining the cables.
Lorna followed the cables with his headlamp to the head of the pier, where they vanished into a hatch. Several badly singed Chinese drones lay around the hatch’s opening.
“It’s got to be a connectivity problem,” Mendoza said.
“I doubt it,” Lorna said. “The likeliest explanation is that your AI bit off more than it could chew.”
“What do you mean?”
Lorna sighed. He’d forgotten more about artificial intelligence than Mendoza had ever learned, and nothing was going to convince him that ‘Jun Yonezawa’ qualified as an artifical superintelligence on the level of the PLAN. It was a kooky little oddity with a knack for reusing other people’s stuff. It had snuck through the faith loophole—the very same bootstrap method Lorna himself had accidentally discovered when he developed the stross-class phavatar. It had believed its way to self-awareness. And, with wearisome predictability, it had got too big for its boots. Now it was in trouble. “I expected this to happen,” he told Mendoza. “I just didn’t expect it to happen quite so soon.”
“What? What’s happening?”
Lorna waved his hands. “Anti-malware. Self-scans. Automatic goal recovery. The biter bit.”
“I don’t get it,” Mendoza said, weakly.
Lorna decided to seize the moment. “Look at that!” he said, pointing into the gloom.
Mendoza caught the hawser with one glove and twisted his upper body around to look.
Lorna jumped as high as he could, slapped the release button on Mendoza’s thigh holster, and grabbed Mendoza’s pistol as it fell.
Oldest trick in the book.
“Sucker,” he panted.
Time seemed to slow down. Mendoza’s hand travelled towards his empty holster. Lorna raised the pistol. It had no bio-verification. It was made to be used by any person wearing a spacesuit. Mendoza let out a wordless roar of woe and betrayal.
Lorna shot him.
The plasma pulse hit Mendoza in the leg. It also splashed onto the hawser. Fiber optic cables snapped, spitting white-hot sparks into the vacuum.
Mendoza screamed, writhing, slowly falling. Blood jetted from his left knee. The rest of his leg was plain gone.
Lorna sighted carefully on Mendoza’s center mass.
Mid-trigger-squeeze, he noticed that the pistol was down to three bars of energy. It was an antique, with a single intensity setting, and Lorna needed every remaining erg of power for something else.
“Fuck you, anyway. You left me here to fucking die,” he shouted at Mendoza. “Now it’s your turn.”
He ran down the pier. Mendoza screamed and screamed in his helmet. Lorna leapt, his momentum carrying him high enough to get a fingertip hold on the auxiliary clamps projecting down from the spine. Hand over hand, legs swinging out, he climbed up to the Superlifter’s crew airlock.
Hatch type. He wedged the pistol into the hinge seals and fired.
Again.
The hatch fell away, smoking.
Alarm lights inside the chamber strobed.
Lorna took a firm grip on the nearest grab handle. He placed the muzzle of the pistol against the center of the inner seal, where four broad flanges overlapped to form an airtight seal. Then he squeezed the trigger.
The pulse burnt a hole the size of a man’s head. The atmosphere inside the cockpit blew out. Lorna held on, battered by the gale. He yanked the torn tips of the flanges, bending the flexible metal over, helping the air escape faster.
A body slammed against the inside of the valve.
Lorna stared in astonishment. He had not imagined there was anyone aboard. But his surprise didn’t slow him down. He grabbed one of the unknown person’s legs and pulled them halfway out, wedging them between the flanges and further enlarging the breach.
A Superlifter’s cockpit was small. It didn’t take long for all its atmosphere to vent to the vacuum. Stuff went with it—tablets, books, medical waste, jewelry that sparkled in the alarm lights, worth a fortune. Gone.
Lorna breathed heavily. Silence. At some point during the last few minutes, Mendoza’s screams had stopped. Lorna figured he was now the only living human being on Tiangong Erhao.
He peered through the hole. Corpses flaked off the near wall, where the gale had pasted them, and floated to the floor of the cockpit.
He crawled over the body he’d jammed in the valve.
Prince Jian Er.
Lorna laughed out loud.
Entering the cockpit, he counted ten bodies. Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu was still alive, gasping and flopping around, foam crusting his lips.
“What goes around, fucking comes around,” Lorna told him.
He waited for them all to die. Then he tossed them out of the airlock, one by one. He was shaking with fatigue. He sucked down the last of the nutrient fluid in his suit’s reservoir. Tasted like sweet green tea. He was looking forward to some proper grub once he got underway. He could see at a glance that the Superlifter was fully provisioned with consumables, as well as fuel.
He saw it all now. Mendoza had been meant to pilot the Superlifter. He’d have flown the prince to safety—or rather, to Eureka Station, where he’d doubtless have been taken hostage by the UN.
Lorna had never been to Eureka Station, and did not care to go there now. But where else could he get to in this titchy craft, given their present course?
On the dashboard, he caught sight of the Superlifter’s external optical feed. It showed the view out of the docking bay. Tiangong Erhao had not yet travelled far from its old orbit. Lorna could see the moon.
Luna.
The sight of that blurry gray-white blob hit him like a punch.
Fuck it. He was leaving now, while he still had a chance of getting home.
He bent his gaze to the dashboard. If he couldn’t hack into this baby, he did not deserve any of his ‘Programmer of the Year’ accolades.
He was concentrating hard when the phavatar of Tiangong Erhao entered the cockpit through the shattered airlock. It unleashed a flurry of kung fu blows that rendered him unconscious in a split second. It tied him up with a length of fiber optic cable, hauled him out of the docking bay, and took him to the labs—a skyscraper-sized rigid hab tucked into the end of the manufacturing zone. This was the only pressurized area on the ship, and hence the only place of confinement available on short notice. There, it stripped off Lorna’s EVA suit and left him.
xxii.
“Mendoza. Mendoza!”
Mendoza crawled through the dark. He was not aware of the cold. He felt no pain. Ahead of him burnt a welcoming light. He crawled towards it eagerly. He was going home.
“By His most tender
mercy, may the Lord pardon you …”
A familiar figure approached out of the light. Mendoza rose to his knees.
“Inay?” [Mom?]
The light haloed her gray head. All the wrinkles were gone from her face, and she wore a tender expression he had seen too rarely when she was alive. “You have to go back, nonoy.”
Mendoza’s sister appeared at their mother’s side. The PLAN had blown Consuelo apart, but now she was whole again. “Not yet, Johnny. Someday. But not today.”
“… may the Lord pardon you, forgive you your sins, and lead you to everlasting life …”
Mendoza reached out to his mother and sister, but an irresistible force dragged him backwards. He fell through the dark. Through space. Into the maw of Docking Bay 1.
He saw the moon in a sky full of stars. He saw a bot clinging to the hawsers, splicing cables together. Then he fell into the Superlifter.
Floating in the cockpit, he saw himself lying on the captain’s couch, still in his spacesuit. Bots labored around him. A black-haired man knelt beside the couch, one bare hand on Mendoza’s faceplate, tracing the sign of the cross.
Mendoza sat up. Puke welled into his throat. He breathed deeply. Swallowed it. “Whoa.”
“Mendoza! Praise be to God!”
Mendoza’s field of view felt brutally restricted, in comparison to the god-like perspective he’d had a minute ago. A medibot stooped over his lower body, hiding his legs. Otherwise, he seemed to be alone.
“I saw you,” he said, urgently. It felt like rushing to write down a dream before he could forget it. “I went … somewhere else. And when I came back, you were here. I saw you. You were here.”
“Well, of course I’m here,” Jun said, through the speakers in Mendoza’s helmet. He sounded like he was crying. Of course, an AI could not shed real tears.
Mendoza felt for his rucksack. Gone. “The Sacrament! Did I lose it?”
“It’s right here,” Jun said. The medibot swivelled to point a scalpel at Mendoza’s rucksack, safe in the webbing above the dashboard. Blood dripped from the scalpel’s tip. “I thought you were dying. I’ve never seen anyone lose that much blood and survive. Mendoza, I have to tell you something. Your leg—”
“Gone below the knee. I know. I saw.” Mendoza reclined again. He still felt no pain. In fact, he couldn’t feel anything except heaviness below his hips. Jun must’ve pumped him full of nerve blockers. He gazed at the optical feed, the same moon and stars he had seen a moment ago. He had a sense of supernatural calm. “I saw a bot out there, fixing the comms link. That’s good.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.You couldn’t have seen that.”
“I saw it.”
“All right, I believe you.” Jun made a throat-clearing noise. “Mendoza, I’m sorry. I had to choose between you and the comms link. I thought you were already dead. It took me eighteen seconds to realize you were still alive. Your suit saved you. It sealed itself off. Applied pressure like a tourniquet.”
“We got these suits from a mining company. I guess this kind of thing happens to miners quite often.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK. I was always having trouble with my feet, anyway.”
“I’ll make you a prosthetic. Or a scary-looking claw, if you like.”
“Neat.” Mendoza yawned. “Where’s Lorna?”
Jun’s voice hardened. “Drifting in space, is my guess. I lost the link for three minutes and twenty seconds. It took me another eight minutes and thirty-five seconds to regain full control. During that time, Tiangong Erhao used its phavatar to remove Lorna from the Superlifter. I expect it spaced him.”
“Why would it do that?”
“He murdered Prince Jian Er and his courtiers.”
“Oh. Wait a minute. How did he get to them?”
“They were in this Superlifter.”
“Why?”
“Saving power,” Jun said evasively.
Mendoza pushed himself up with his hands. An IV line jerked his arm back. The needle had been plunged straight through his suit.
“Don’t move!” Jun said. “You’re still in critical condition!”
“I want to go aboard the Monster.” He remembered the suspicions that had brought him here in the first place. His sense of calm fragmented. “Why did you tell me to go away?”
“There is no air on board.”
“Why?”
“I let it go bad.”
“What about the garden?”
“I let it die.”
“I don’t care!”
“You want to sit in the data center, in a spacesuit, on a sandbag full of dry ice? Feel free,” Jun shouted.
“You know, it’s really frustrating to yell at someone you can’t see,” Mendoza shouted back.
“I don’t have enough spare capacity to dick around with graphics,” Jun yelled. “I’m overclocking my core by an extra five percent, just to talk to you! I’ve repurposed all my subsystems to play music! I’m not a freaking spaceship anymore. My drive is a church organ. My radar dishes are amplifiers. There is nothing left.”
Chills raced down Mendoza’s spine. It sounded like Derek Lorna had been right. Jun had bitten off more than he could chew.
But he wouldn’t have started a job he could not finish. There had to be something else going on, some other plan in play.
Again, Mendoza remembered the wine spilling on the bridge. Crimson droplets, as red as blood, going everywhere.
“I’m going to mend the Superlifter’s airlock and repressurize the cockpit,” Jun said. “Don’t try to move around. The medibot will look after you. There are enough consumables on board for twenty. If you need me, just call.” The subtext was clear: Don’t.
“But I never got to the labs. That’s the whole reason you brought me.”
“Oh, Mendoza, no, it isn’t. That was the plan. But nothing ever goes according to plan. You would think I’d have learned that lesson by now,” Jun said, with a strange note of happiness in his voice. “Nothing and nobody’s perfect.”
“No shit.”
“Stay here. Play around with the controls. In six days you’re going to be flying this thing.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“You’ve done so much for me. Just this conversation … it’s been amazing. Goodbye. Get better.”
Mendoza flopped back on his couch. The movement sent a sudden, agonizing twinge up his leg. He gasped in pain. Then he said aloud inside his helmet, “I know why you brought me. It’s because I’m not Kiyoshi. He’d have called you on your bullshit long before now.”
And now it was too late.
Might not be too late for a man with two legs and a pair of wire cutters.
But Mendoza was laid up in the Superlifter, half a leg short, without the ability to move unaided.
xxiii.
We get bored out here, Colonel Miller had said to Petruzzelli when she and the other pilots first arrived on Stickney. But she hadn’t found that to be true at all. There was plenty to do. And she hadn’t even seen a Martian yet.
In fact, with the coming of the Star Force deserters, everything had changed. In the intervals between toilet-roll strafing runs, the four intact Gravesfighters had been cannibalized for their shields, armaments, and fuel cells by shifts of brave men and women working on the surface. Petruzzelli had worked as many of those shifts as she was allowed, maxing out her radiation exposure quota. She felt that this went some way towards making up for her reckless destruction of her own ship.
In the end, of course, the toilet rolls had got the Gravesfighters. But by then, they were mere useless shells. The good stuff had all been hacked out and carried underground.
By far the best prizes were two functional charged-particle cannons. Fragger engineers retooled them into man-portable weapons. In zero-gee, it didn’t matter that each cannon was ten meters long and weighed three tons. The smallest female Fragger could carry one, the only difficulty being corners. They ripped out the precis
ion targeting and beam control hardware, and replaced it with the simplest user interface ever: a lever.
While all this was being done, they lived on half-rations of water. They didn’t have much to begin with, and they had to crack quite a lot of it to top up the cannons’ supply of hydrogen ions.
Six days after Petruzzelli and her companions landed, Colonel Miller gathered everyone in their fetid refuge under the laser assembly.
“Thanks to our brave mutineers,” he began, “we now have a decent chance of capturing the Castle.”
Ironic applause.
“If we don’t capture it, we’ll run out of water before our next supply drop, anyway. So this really is it. Elfrida?”
One of the phavatars rose to its feet. It had a battered masculine face, but the voice that came out was Elfrida’s.
“Thank you, Colonel. As you know, I think this is a stupid idea. But now you’ve gone and used up your water, I guess it’s too late to talk you out of it. So we’ll do what we can to help. Specifically, I’ve spoken to the other platoon leaders on shift today, and we’ve agreed to mount a new assault on the Castle. We’ll go over the top, using the Whipple shields from the Gravesfighters to provide cover against enemy artillery. We’ll probably get shot to shit, but it should work as a diversion. I’m very glad you’re not going over the top, anyway. The maintenance tunnel you’ve found probably goes straight to the Castle. I just hope it’s not full of Martians. And like I said, we’ll do our best to draw as many of them out to the surface as possible.”
The phavatar sat down.
“OK,” Colonel Miller said. “Who’s going with the phavatars?”
Twenty-odd Fraggers stuck up their hands. So did Harry Zhang. And so did Luc Zubrowski.
Petruzzelli turned to the two Zs. “Are you crazy?”
“There have to be some humans in the surface assault party, or the Martians won’t think it’s for real.”
“The Martians don’t think.”
“But whatever’s controlling them does. It’s OK, Zuzu. We’ll stay under the Whipple shields. That’ll protect us from the rads.”
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 22