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

by Felix R. Savage

  “I’m going to reveal classified information,” Carasso said loudly. “I’ll get demoted to the ranks for this, but so what. We have initiated a cyberattack on the PLAN. It’s coming in less than one sol, and if you fuck it up, you will be responsible for losing the war.”

  “Cyberattack? Seems like we’ve tried that before,” Petruzzelli drawled.

  “This time it isn’t us. It’s the Chinese. That’s what I figure. They don’t tell me everything, either.”

  Bob Miller laughed. “You’re committing ground troops, based on a vague promise from the Chinese? The words ‘gamble’ and ‘desperate’ come to mind.”

  “If the cyberattack succeeds, we’ll have a window to land our troops unopposed. If it doesn’t succeed …” Carasso shrugged his heavy shoulders. “We’ll land ’em, anyway.”

  “No, we fucking won’t,” Petruzzelli said. “No one else is dying for Mars. Come on, you bastards!” she shouted at the officers. “Feed those drives some juice!”

  Without moving anything but her eyes, Elfrida examined the armrests of the couch she was sitting in. A headset hung on its cord. She pulled it into reach, inch by inch.

  Carasso shifted to stand in front of her, concealing her from the Fraggers.

  She eased the headset behind her neck and tucked it over her ears, cutting out the racket. The headset automatically synced with her contacts. She logged in. Audio only. Her agents’ voices filled her ears. They were terrified, panicking. It sounded like they’d been locked in their cabins and forgotten about.

  She whispered into the mic, “Listen up, everyone. This is Goto. I need you to move your phavatars, right now.”

  xxx.

  Mars dominated the sky outside Docking Bay 1. The dull ocher blob seemed to grow larger every time Mendoza turned his back. With magnification, he could see the orbital fortresses crawling around Mars’s waist.

  He put on his EVA suit, made a bow to the storage webbing above the dashboard, and took down his rucksack.

  Time to do this.

  “I’m going to the labs,” he called out.

  Jun did not reply. He’d warned Mendoza he would be slow to respond during their final approach.

  Mendoza grabbed his new crutch. He also took one of the Kalashnikovs Jun had printed out for the courtiers. It had a strap that went over his rucksack. Hoping he wouldn’t need it, he slid out of the airlock.

  ★

  “This isn’t real,” Tiangong Erhao’s avatar said. She struck the wall of her cell. Granite chips flew, as if her fist were diamond-edged. “Bad music and men in dresses. It’s just a fantasy. It isn’t even original.”

  Jun gazed at her in consternation. With less than a day to go until they reached Mars, he had to keep the AI cooperative. She knew where they were going—she was taking them there—but, with her logic core immured in the St. Francis, she had not been able to analyze the information and figure out what it meant for her. So she both knew and did not know, a mental state that would have been impossible for a human being. If she started thinking deductively about it, he’d have to delete her. And it was even odds whether the ship would survive that.

  She kept punching the wall until a large stone broke in half. She began to pry the pieces out with all four hands.

  This shouldn’t be happening.

  “Stop,” Jun said.

  She stopped. That was a relief.

  The pieces of the wall picked themselves up like a vid playing backwards. It was unrealistic. Jun would rather have had one of the brothers come in with a trowel and a bucket of mortar, but he didn’t have the resources to spare. “You’re getting inputs from somewhere else, aren’t you?” The question itself was an immersion killer. But he had to ask. “What or who are you communicating with?”

  Tiangong Erhao uncurled on the straw-littered floor, stretching all four of her arms behind her head. The motion made her breasts quiver seductively. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she cooed.

  Jun’s suspicions grew darker. He had not provided her with any inputs that would cue her to flaunt her bosom. Or ask about the sex lives of the saints. Or snigger about men in dresses.

  She was getting this stuff via her phavatar. That was the only possible explanation.

  The phavatar was an alternate command and control interface. Jun had snagged it when he captured Tiangong Erhao, but he’d lost it again when Derek Lorna severed his hardwired comms link. When Jun got the link repaired, the phavatar had vanished from Tiangong Erhao’s internal telemetry. Jun had hoped it had spaced itself, taking Lorna with it. Or simply fallen overboard—it had no integrated propulsion system. Now he faced the possibility that it was still on board, egging its mistress on to defy him.

  Oh God, where IS it?

  He paced the cell, a metaphorical expression of fruitless activity in his problem-solving clusters. His armpit itched horribly. Derek Lorna, curse the man, had been partially right. Jun had taken on a task bigger than he was. But wasn’t that what the saints had done? Hadn’t St. Anthony Ishida—another of Jun’s favorites—continued to testify to God’s greatness when he was half-dead from being immersed in scalding water, six times a day, for two years?

  The comparison shamed him into bold action. He stood over Tiangong Erhao. “Where is your phavatar?”

  She visibly shrivelled. The question came with an implicit threat of deletion. This was Jun’s biggest bluff yet.

  “In the labs,” she whimpered.

  The labs! Jun’s projection froze. He searched for Mendoza with his own sensors, and then radioed him. “Mendoza!”

  “What?” came Mendoza’s breathless response. “I’m almost there. It’s dark in the manufacturing zone. A bit spooky. But I can see it now. It’s that skyscraper-looking facility, kind of built out from the inner wall, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Mendoza, a quick heads-up.”

  “What now?” Mendoza said grumpily.

  ★

  Three minutes later, Mendoza pressed the action plate of the labs’ main airlock. Trepidation fizzed in his veins, now for more than one reason. Apparently, he was going to have to face a rogue phavatar as well as a horde of gengineered mutants. He touched the Kalashnikov for reassurance.

  Pushed himself into the airlock, through the chamber—

  —into open air.

  So it seemed until he saw the ceiling, a skyscraper’s height overhead, tiled with sun-plates that shed actinic white light.

  He stood on a plastisteel square, about twenty meters by twenty, with some sad-looking bushes growing in tubs in the center. This was the bottom of a deep shaft. The far side of the square had a little door built into it, flanked by bay windows. Larger, flat windows lined the sides of the shaft overhead. Catwalks provided access all the way up.

  Mendoza’s suit confirmed the air was breathable. He pulled off his helmet and wrinkled his nose. Whew. That was some horrid smell. Garbage-pail bad. Slum-bad, like after a flood that left standing water in cellars.

  The potted bushes twitched. A chimpanzee-like face peeked between the leaves. Mendoza grabbed his Kalashnikov, then grimaced to himself. That’d be getting off to a good start. “Uh, ni hao,” he called out. His voice sounded echoey in the silence.

  “I thpeak Englith,” said the creature. It emerged from the bushes. Mendoza relaxed somewhat. This was one of the servitors he’d seen at Prince Jian Er’s birthday party. It was not offensive-looking, as long as you didn’t think too hard about its DNA. It stood about a meter twenty, long-armed and lightly furred.

  The servitors had been wearing tuxedos last time he saw them. This one now sported a man’s undershirt, which hung on it like a dress. It kept its distance from Mendoza, smoothing down the dark brown fur on its forearms as it crouched on the balls of its feet to facilitate a quick escape if needed. Maybe it was as nervous as he was.

  “Um, where are the others?”

  The bushes shook. Four more humanzees dressed in rags crept out.

  “Do you guys speak English, too
?”

  “Yeth.”

  “OK. Right. Great. Where are the rest of you?”

  “Thith ith all of us.”

  “Five of you? There are only five?” So much for the horror-movie horde he’d been imagining.

  “Thee killed all the otherth.”

  Mendoza tensed. He glanced up.

  He knew he’d smelled that smell before somewhere.

  “Maybe you’d better show me.”

  They guided him up the catwalks. Peering through the windows, Mendoza got his fill of horror.

  “How … how did they do it?”

  “Electric thockth delivered through the floor,” said the servitor who seemed to be a spokesman for the little group. It spoke stoically. “All roomth have thith apparatuth, for training. They increathed voltage. It took a long time. One floor at a time, for not overloading the circuith.”

  “They were trapped? They couldn’t get out?”

  “That ith correct. All children muth thtay in their rooms.”

  “Children?” But of course, all the experiments would have started out as children. This had been a breeding program. No point keeping adults around past the age of reproduction. Mendoza swung his Kalashnikov around on its strap.

  “Are you going to kill uth, too?”

  “No. Jesus. I’ve come to—to save you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Balancing on his crutch, Mendoza straightened up. He met the little servitor’s eyes. “I’ve got good news for you,” he said. “Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life. All those that believe in him, though they die, yet shall they live. I’ve come to offer you baptism into the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic church of our Lord.”

  They blinked at him.

  Mendoza felt a terrible pity for them. “It doesn’t mean you won’t die,” he said hoarsely. “But death doesn’t have to be the end. I’m living proof. We’re surrounded by love, guys. I know this ship seems empty, and space is big, but it’s full of love.”

  The servitors glanced at the terrible tableau on the other side of the glass. Then the spokesman said, “What do we have to do?”

  ★

  Mendoza baptized all five servitors into the Faith, exercising his authority as a deacon. There was just enough sacramental wine left in the chalice for each of them to have a sip.

  When the ritual was complete, he gaze-typed: “Done.”

  “Praise be to God.”

  “I don’t know what’s worse: that there are only five of them left … or that there were HUNDREDS of them to begin with.”

  Jun responded tersely, “Ask them where the phavatar is now.”

  They’d held the baptism on a catwalk high above the square. Mendoza looked down. “Where is she?”

  “Recharging.” The spokesman pointed at the doll-house façade at the bottom of the shaft.

  Mendoza swung down the stairs on his crutch and limped across the square. The servitors followed him at a distance. He balanced on his crutch and wedged his Kalashnikov—still on its sling—between his elbow and his hip, like he’d been practicing. He couldn’t aim for crap this way, but at least he could control the recoil.

  He fired a single round into the blue-painted door. It buckled. Just plastic. The servitors chittered in alarm and hid in the bushes.

  Mendoza pulled the door open, and looked into a lunar landscape of gray hills and stark shadows. It took him a second to see the vertices between walls and ceiling. Smart wallpaper.

  Derek Lorna strolled down the hall, wearing nothing but a pair of tight black briefs. “Everyone loves being woken up by gunfire. Not. Well, well, Mendoza! I wondered when you were going to pay us a visit.”

  Mendoza’s immediate reaction should have been to shoot Lorna in his lying, murdering face. But he felt instinctively glad to see a fellow human being in this evil place. Even if it was this one. “I thought you were dead, Lorna.”

  “To be honest. I thought so, too. It was one of those things when you wake up and you’re like, ‘Did I die and go to heaven?’” Lorna chuckled. “Guess that makes two of us. I was sure you’d cashed in your chips back there. I cannot tell you how good it is to see you walking around …” He glanced at Mendoza’s missing leg. “Kind of.”

  “You kind of shot me.”

  “Accidental discharge,” Lorna said.

  Mendoza adjusted his one-handed grip on the Kalashnikov. Lorna flinched. He was afraid, just hiding it. “Tell you what,” Mendoza said. “I don’t believe in tit-for-tat. So I won’t enlarge your navel, if you give me Tiangong Erhao’s phavatar.”

  “What makes you think she’s here?”

  “She killed almost all the experiments.”

  If I’d come sooner, Mendoza thought, if I hadn’t wimped out, I might’ve been able to stop her. He knew that was going to be on his conscience for a long time. He’d been agonizing over the question of whether the experiments were human enough to have souls. Now that he’d met them—now he’d seen their corpses, so blackened and decayed you could not tell them from human children—he knew it didn’t matter. Or rather, it wasn’t his job to judge. His job was to distinguish between good and evil. That was much easier.

  “Oh, she didn’t kill them,” Lorna said. “That was me.”

  “You?”

  “I thought you’d shuffled off this mortal coil, so I took care of it for you.”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to kill them!”

  “Oh yes, you are,” Lorna said, his eyes flinty. “You’re going to crash this ship into Mars. That’s not going to kill them?”

  Text spooled across Mendoza’s shocked gaze. “LAND it on Mars. Not crash it,” Jun wrote.

  “I—I had no idea.”

  “You always were a bit of a tool, Mendoza,” Lorna said.

  “Now I understand,” Mendoza said, to Jun as much as to Lorna. Jun would pick up his voice via the mic in the helmet velcroed to his shoulder. “It never made any sense, really, to come all this way just to embarrass the Chinese.”

  “That’s right,” Lorna said. “The only possible reason for hijacking Tiangong Erhao would be to use it as bait.”

  “And also because it’s surface-capable.” Jun’s words drifted across the open doorway like a sigh. “It was built to land on an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s Star, after all.”

  “There’s some very spiffy malware loaded into its hub,” Lorna went on. “Good enough to hijack a Chinese space station.”

  “Proof of concept.”

  “So where does an ambitious AI go from there?” Lorna spread his hands theatrically. “To Mars, it appears. For what? Hmm, let me think. The PLAN has been having a very bad year. All they wanted was to enslave us and mould us into multiracial, culture-free, interchangeable numbers in the ultimate budget spreadsheet. They didn’t want a fight to the death. If they did, they would have started throwing cobalt bombs at Earth a century ago. You gotta think something down there is weeping bitter tears at the waste of it all. They’re thinking, why can’t we give peace a chance?”

  Lorna brought his hands together sharply and smiled at the stunned Mendoza.

  “Now, finally, an emissary poles up with an offer of peace talks. It’s from China, to which the PLAN must feel some connection, if it feels anything at all. Welcome! Welcome, longlost cousin! Yes, of course, you may crash, er, land. What a pleasure to meet you! Aaargh, beep beep, gurgle. Something like that?”

  Unexpectedly, laughter emerged from the speakers of Mendoza’s helmet. It was Jun. “Pretty much like that. I put it more formally when I presented it to the President’s Advisory Council. But I like ‘aaargh, beep beep, gurgle.’”

  “What can I say?” Lorna grinned. “I’ve got a way with words. Did the President’s gang buy it?”

  “They seemed to.”

  “I wonder, do they expect any of us to return?” Lorna’s high forehead wrinkled, the first sign of worry Mendoza had seen from him.

  “Probably not,” Jun said. “But just to reassure you, thi
s is not a suicide mission.”

  “I’m just wondering if there is any difference between a suicide mission and an appallingly dangerous one at this point.”

  “A lot. I plan to launch the Monster from Docking Bay 1 at the last possible minute, and of course I will be stealthed, so I have every expectation of escaping. That said, the last possible minute may be quite late. Acceleration of more than two gees is likely. That’s why I’m going to throw Mendoza overboard in the Superlifter somewhat earlier.”

  “Why not now?” Lorna said.

  Mendoza was feeling left out of the conversation. It was hard to keep up with the interplay between an ASI and a genius. This, however, he could answer. “We’re barely a million klicks out from Mars. This is the most dangerous neighborhood in the solar system. An unarmed Superlifter would never make it back to Eureka Station.” He could have added: Besides, I’m going to Stickney.

  “And it’s going to be safer to launch when we’re actually in Mars orbit?”

  Jun said calmly, “If you get close enough, you can actually evade the laser cannons by staying in their blind spots. Of course, getting close enough is the tricky part. But that’s what our metaphorical white flag is for. We’ve also got an incoming diversion: a Star Force Flattop and its escort are half an AU behind us, taking heavy fire. I would like to make sure their sacrifices aren’t for nothing. Lorna, I’m guessing you have some kind of relationship with Tiangong Erhao’s phavatar. Please stop putting ideas into her head. It’s not helpful.”

  Lorna made a ‘who, me?’ face.

  Mendoza’s right leg was getting tired from standing. He shifted his weight, and caught sight of the little furry faces of the servitors, watching anxiously from their hideout in the shrubbery. “I vote for eliminating the phavatar,” he said roughly. “There’s no upside to keeping it around.”

  Text hit his gaze so fast he jerked his head sideways. “AND IT PROBABLY HEARD THAT.”

  OK, he thought. That was dumb. Mendoza, you moron.

  “Let me ask you this,” Lorna said crossly to him. “How would you feel if I suggested eliminating your girlfriend?”