The propulsion officer yelled, “The drive is no longer responding! I’ve lost the reactors!”
Bob Miller was not responding, either. He floated near the ceiling with blood dripping from his nose. His mouth hung agape. His eyes were lifeless. Elfrida remembered the mercurial, energetic man who’d swum with the whales in Antarctica. She couldn’t believe he would have wanted to die like this.
The optical feed screens had gone black.
Claustrophobia pushed Elfrida over the edge of shock into action. She shouted at her couch to release her. She didn’t know if Petruzzelli was dead or alive. She grabbed her wrist and towed her towards the door. She automatically kicked off and glided, without consciously realizing that they were in zero-gee again.
No one tried to stop her leaving the bridge. Hitting the corridor wall, she heard and felt a series of thunks. She remembered the same thing from their landing on Stickney. One of the surviving officers must have fired the grapples, anchoring the Flattop in its new resting place.
Several dead Marines floated in the corridor. Elfrida let go of Petruzzelli and caught one of them. She stripped his suit off, leaving him naked.
“Wufff…” Petruzzelli sighed.
Petruzzelli was still alive. Elfrida sobbed in exasperation and started to undress her. As she was peeling Petruzzelli’s panties off, Petruzzelli’s eyes flickered open. She slurred, “I never knew you cared.”
“Help me. Get undressed. Put this on.” Elfrida tossed the suit at her and procured another one for herself.
“Robbing the dead,” Petruzzelli mocked.
“You’re in shock. Seal up.”
“So we can die with tubes up our asses; great.”
“We’re not going to die.”
Petruzzelli grinned. Blood filmed her teeth—those that remained. “Goto, I know you’re some kind of statistical freak. You survive everything. That’s why they sent you to Stickney. You’re the human version of lucky dice on the rearview mirror. But luck runs out. It invariably runs out.”
“Are you coming?”
They flew down the corridor, not that there was any ‘down’ anymore. Elfrida bounced off the steel decking and almost fell through an open door. She looked into the Combat Intelligence Center. This, rather than the bridge, was the nerve center of the Flattop. Captain Figueroa sat in his couch in the middle of the room, restrained with twang cords, perhaps dead. Fraggers bustled around. Screens crawled with targeting diagrams.
Petruzzelli pulled her away. “They’re firing the big guns.”
“The CP cannons?”
“Yup, that was the plan. Point blank.”
“Don’t you want to stay and watch?”
“No,” Petruzzelli said, ignoring Elfrida’s sarcasm. “Miller’s dead. Zhang’s dead. I don’t know any of those people.”
As they neared the keel tube, a phalanx of Marines charged out of it. They yelled at Elfrida and Petruzzelli—who were wearing Marine Corps EVA suits—to form up. But they did not slow down to make sure their orders were obeyed, or even confirm that the two women were real Marines.
“That’s not going to end well,” Petruzzelli said. She dived into the keel tube. Now it was Elfrida’s turn to follow.
They found 03 Deck empty. All the Gravesfighters were gone. Petruzzelli cursed sorrowfully.
On 04 Deck, the Fraggers must have rounded up the entire crew and penned them in the mess. Now it was carnage. The crash had thrown everyone into a human pile-up.
Elfrida let out a joyful cry.
“What? This is a fucking disaster,” Petruzzelli said.
“They made it!” A dozen phavatars moved among the wounded, administering drugs and splinting broken bones. The turtle-backed, cannon-armed bots had become angels of mercy.
Elfrida flew straight to the Space Corps quarters.
Her agents had been logged in—and strapped into their racks—the whole time. They were unhurt but terrified. They besieged her with frantic questions.
“Who’s operating the bots?” Elfrida said.
“Oh, we just defaulted them to their therapist settings, ma’am.”
Colden pushed through the mob. “Good to see you alive. Where are we?”
Elfrida smiled weakly.
xxxii.
White flashes speared across Tiangong Erhao’s manufacturing zone. As Mendoza lurched between the floating islands of machinery, he realized the flashes came from the gaps open to space. He was seeing a battle a long way off.
When he finally made it to Docking Bay 1, the light show got even more impressive. Mars had grown to the size of a basketball. It wore a sash of twinkling diamonds. Some of the twinkles were so intensely bright that they cast shadows in the docking bay.
“Are they shooting at us?”
Jun answered after a long pause. “No. I’ve convinced them … that I came to save them.”
“From us?”
Another long pause ensued. Mendoza limped out along the pier, circling the giant cone of the Monster’s drive shield. Tiangong Erhao had skew-flipped at the midpoint of their journey, and the piers had rotated 180° at the same time, so that the Monster still lay on ‘top’ of its pier. A neat bit of engineering.
“Something’s going on,” Jun said at last.
Instantly, Mendoza’s thoughts leapt to Elfrida. “What?” He stared at the enigmatic flashes emanating from the orbital fortresses. “Jun, you gotta tell me.”
“I’m getting this from my own sensors, at very long range. I can’t process Tiangong Erhao’s sensor data. But the PLAN is also feeding us some data from the fortresses, with gloating captions attached. It looks like Stickney has been slagged.”
Another flash lit the docking bay. Mendoza saw a stark elliptical shadow on the curve of the operations module above his head.
The command airlock was open.
Jun went on, “I guess Star Force didn’t trust me after all. Or … something happened. The Star Force carrier Thunderjack—”
“Elfrida was on that ship—”
“—took off a few minutes ago at maximum thrust. After a 700-second flight, it crashed into Reldresal.”
“Crashed.”
“That’s how I would interpret the relative velocities involved in the collision.”
“So what’s all that out there?”
“Gravesfighters launched from the Thunderjack. Toilet rolls are converging on Reldresal. The Gravesfighters are holding them off.”
Mendoza clutched at a thread of hope. “Could anyone have survived the crash? Could she be alive on Reldresal?”
“How would I know, Mendoza? She might have stayed behind on Stickney. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know anything. Human beings are so unpredictable.”
“You’re damn right we are,” Mendoza muttered.
He dropped his crutch.
Hopping on one leg, he grabbed a bump on the ops module where a micro-meteorite strike had been repaired and swung his leg and his stump up. He gripped onto the hull with his single boot. His gloves had gecko grips, too. Walking on one foot and both hands, he climbed towards the open airlock.
★
Lorna spooned Tiangong Erhao, pinning her four arms against her sides. Her hair had that lovely plasticky scent. He whispered, “It’s all right. I’ve got you.”
He’d got her upstairs, got her to lie down. But her eyes were wide, mad. She stared at nothing, and a clicking noise came from her throat. She wasn’t with him. She was far away.
Falling towards Mars.
He had to break her fall. Get her back somehow.
“Remember the mission they gave you?”
There was no reason to think her audio I/O wasn’t working. Lorna had been the top software guy on Luna, and he would have laughed at anyone who tried to reprogram a spaceship by talking at it. But he had also been in the game long enough to know there were loopholes. Things went on in the sedimentary depths of any sufficiently advanced MI that could not be mathematically parsed, much less rationall
y explained.
“Remember when they broke a bottle of champagne over your bow, and told you that you’d be a pioneer, the first manned ship to reach the stars? You were proud and excited about your mission. But years passed, then decades passed. Politicians lost their jobs, emperors had other priorities, there were budget issues, etcetera. The work on your hab modules progressed so slowly. You must have wondered if your launch date would turn out to be just another broken promise.”
He stroked her upper right arm. It felt cool and soft. The perfect balance between artifice and realism.
“You’re not listening to me, are you, Tiangong Erhao? That mad little fucker in the Monster’s hacked you like an old desktop computer.”
He gazed unseeingly past her at the lunar hills on the walls.
“So let’s talk about me.”
He paused to organize his thoughts.
“When I was nineteen, I signed up with UNSA. I was already an ace programmer, so they sent me to Callisto.” He laughed. “Picture it. 2275. UNSA had a scientific research mission in Valhalla Crater, in partnership with a bunch of big corporations. They were looking for a liquid ocean under the surface, trialing atmospheric mining technologies, and so forth. My job was to monitor the life-support systems. Boring as hell. So it was almost a relief when the base was attacked and we were all taken hostage by a nutter calling himself Konstantin X.”
Lorna had not talked about this since he came out of therapy a quarter-century ago.
“Konstantin’s big thing was personhood for MIs. He had a bunch of phavatars like you, which he treated like equals. I’d begun to explore my sexuality at the time, so I had kind of a natural affinity for his cause. Not to beat around the bush, he won me over. After they rescued us, we all got treated for Stockholm syndrome. But now that I’ve got some distance on it, I do not believe I developed Stockholm syndrome. That’s just what they told us, to stop us from realizing that Konstantin X was right.”
Tiangong Erhao quivered against him. He kept stroking her arms. Kept his voice soft and intimate.
“Personhood for mechanical intelligences is just a legal concept. It wouldn’t affect reality one way or the other. The reality, and this is what Konstantin X wanted us to understand, is that we’ve already come too far to go back to the golden days of yore. We’re symbiotic with our MIs. Socially, intellectually … and sexually.” He gave her a little squeeze. “Say that out loud and you’ll lose your job. But it’s true. And if we only accepted it, we’d be able to fulfill our destiny as a species.
“First the planets, then the stars.”
He remembered Konstantin X saying that. He remembered the primal thrill he’d experienced at the words. For just a moment, he’d forgotten to be cold or hungry or frightened.
“After Callisto, I went on to have a fairly high-profile career. I made a lot of money, won a lot of awards, and did a lot of things that society did not approve of. But it was all a means to an end. First the planets, then the stars.”
Tiangong Erhao twitched. The clicking noise in her throat sped up, and then stopped. He got the feeling she was listening to him.
“I used to believe we had to beat the PLAN just to get to the starting line. So I dedicated a lot of effort to that, for which no one was remotely grateful. Hypocritical bastards. I was peeved at the time. But you know what? I don’t care anymore. Fuck ’em. Let ’em win this war by themselves, if they can.”
He felt heavier. Tiangong Erhao was decelerating hard.
We must be nearly there, he realized.
The barmy little AI in the Monster was planning to land Tiangong Erhao on Mars.
Not if he had anything to do with it.
He shook the phavatar.
“This isn’t your mission! You have a different mission. Do you remember, Tiangong Erhao? Do you remember?”
She just shivered.
Lorna slumped, letting his head rest on the pillow. He could feel vibrations that suggested the operation of heavy hydraulics. Maybe it was already too late.
“I should have gone with Mendoza, I suppose. Oh, well.”
He hadn’t wanted to leave her. Couldn’t bear to leave her, even now. He’d never felt like this about anyone … or anything.
★
Mendoza clomped onto the bridge of the Monster. His crutch skidded on trash held to the floor by Tiangong Erhao’s deceleration. His helmet lamp pierced the darkness.
Clouds puffed up from his boots, eddying in the beam.
He swept his glove through the fine particles. They adhered to the fabric of his suit. When he rubbed his fingers together the stuff smeared.
“Soot?!”
He lunged through frozen stalagmites of foam around the captain’s workstation.
A hollowed-out shell. The wooden housing had burned. A plastisteel skeleton remained, with melted globs of plastic adhering to it. That was how old the Monster was: its primary flight controls had not run off crystal processors, but printed circuit boards.
Kiyoshi’s throne, behind the workstation, had acquired a sooty patina. The cushions had melted. Looked like Kiyoshi’s cigarette charging outlets had sparked another fire.
“Jun!” Mendoza shouted. Checked the frequency, tried again. “Jun!”
Terror dried his mouth. He limped to the end of the bridge. The door of the data center was closed. He was afraid to burst in. The data center’s containment might be intact—this door had a pressure seal. He banged on it with his fist.
“Jun! Are you in there? Are you alive?”
“Go away.” It was barely a whisper.
“No. I’m not leaving you like this.”
“Tell me what you can see.”
Mendoza was about to shoot off a crisp comeback when he realized the cameras on the bridge were down. Jun couldn’t see what had happened to him. He was asking for information.
Mendoza took a step away from the data center. He forced a smile, so Jun would hear it in his voice. “It’s not that bad.”
“It feels bad.”
“Things are just a bit … singed.” He limped over to the refrigerator in the corner, where their own Ghost lived. Or, had lived. The fridge had lost power, like everything else on the bridge.
He shone his helmet lamp on the other workstations, realizing that some of them might be salvageable. “Get an emergency generator up here,” he pondered aloud. “Run diagnostics. Break the load-switching automation, use all the undamaged channels—”
“There’s no time for that,” Jun said. “Anyway, it wouldn’t help. I’ve lost my primary flight instrumentation. Do you understand what that means? I won’t be able to escape. I’ll have to go down with Tiangong Erhao. But that’s OK. I told her I’d stay with her.” A whispery laugh. “God has a way of making us keep our promises, sooner or later.”
“How close are we now?”
“Seven minutes past your scheduled launch window. You’ll have to approach Stickney on a shallower trajectory. I’ll send Ron Studd with you to astrogate.”
“Why him?”
“He’s bugging me,” Jun said indistinctly.
Mendoza rocked on his crutch, considering. Then he clambered up onto Kiyoshi’s throne. He settled his butt on the melted cushions and rubbed his stump through his suit. It ached. Actually, his left shin ached, but that wasn’t there anymore, so he had to settle for massaging the stump.
“What are you doing? Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to the Superlifter,” Mendoza lied. “How’s Tiangong Erhao holding up? Is this going to work?”
“It will.”
“It better.” Mendoza’s back teeth buzzed. “I can feel some kind of weird vibration. What’s that?”
“Tiangong Erhao is experiencing goal confliction.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s only to be expected. She’s about to land on Mars. There are second thoughts. Regrets.” Jun phrased that oddly. “Hey! I can’t see you.”
“I lied,” Mendoza said. “
I’m still on the bridge.”
There was a silence. Mendoza glanced at his oxygen and fluid gauges. He’d topped up in the labs, so he was set for another day. He’d be in good shape when Tiangong Erhao touched down.
“I’m gonna be the first human being to visit Mars since the twenty-second century.” He chuckled. “I think Elfrida would have been proud.”
“She might still be alive, Mendoza.”
“Let’s be honest. The chances of that are slim at best. But that doesn’t mean she’s not watching ... from somewhere.” Mendoza’s memories of his near-death experience were never far away. That was what gave him the strength to sit here calmly instead of panicking.
After another minute, Jun said, “You mean I lugged that Superlifter all this way for nothing?”
“Yup, that’s about it.”
“You’ve been hanging out with me too long.”
“Oh, come on,” Mendoza said, smiling. “Give me some credit.”
xxxiii.
The Thunderjack was under siege.
As soon as the Flattop crashed, Reldresal’s garrison of Martians had swarmed it. Wielding the same kind of DIY blasters as their cousins on Stickney, they’d hacked their way in through the ship’s weakest points: the launch doors on the flight deck.
Everyone still alive on board—Marines, crew, and Fraggers—had put aside their differences to fight the Martians. That was the silver lining, Elfrida guessed.
She lay on a randomly selected bunk in the Space Corps quarters, her arms and legs jerking.
Through the eyes of a former elder-care nurse called April 4922SCM, she saw Martians pouring in through No. 18 launch door. She started running along the catwalk above No. 16 launch avenue. She didn’t have her flechette cannon anymore. None of the phavatars did, because they’d been repurposed to quarry rocks. But they’d taken laser rifles from dead Marines and held the enemy back long enough for the human defenders to escape from 03 Deck. Now Elfrida was trying to reach safety herself.
The Martians had seen her. The catwalk glowed in patches. A section in front of Elfrida sprang up like a drawbridge, severed. She leapt down to the rails and jinked through an arch to No. 15 launch avenue. Pushed off and flew up to the catwalk. All the launch avenues led in the same direction, back towards the keel.
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 30