A voice crackled in her ears. “We are regrouping on 01 Deck. We will not attempt to hold 02 Deck; there aren’t enough of us.”
A Marine sergeant-major, Wilson, had taken command of the Flattop’s motley defenders.
“Phavatar operators, you’re doing great. See if you can deny the keel tube to the enemy. Do you have any smoke grenades remaining? Over.”
Elfrida didn’t have any smoke grenades. “Sir, do I understand correctly, you want us to come to 01 Deck?”
“That is correct, Agent. Over.”
Elfrida’s HUD lit up. She was taking pulses on her carapace. A knot of Martians skirmished through an arch below and behind her. Without slowing down, she sprayed them with a sweeping burst from her laser rifle. “Sir, we’re regrouping in officer country?”
“That is correct, Agent. Is there a problem with that?”
“We’re just going to let them overrun the lower decks?”
“It is too fucking late to keep them out of the lower decks. They may attempt to fuck with the drive, yes, but there is nothing I can do about that.”
“Sir, we’re down here on 04 Deck! There are only a few phavatars left, but there are hundreds of us! We’re in our cabins!”
“Oh, shit,” Wilson said. “I forgot about that.”
Elfrida kept running. “It’s all right, sir. You’re under a lot of stress.”
“I was just kinda like, there are the phavatars. I forgot you’re not them.”
“Sometimes I forget, too.”
She caught up with her platoon as they dived into the keel tube. A former therapist called Solomon 476AX covered the launch avenues with a scavenged blaster in either gripper. Martian corpses bumped gently over the yellow lines and the STAND CLEAR warnings on the floor. Thumb-sized craters dotted Solomon 476AX’s body armor.
“Go down to 04 Deck!” Elfrida shouted. It wasn’t necessary to shout, but that was how she felt. “Grab any weapons you can find. Everyone who is not operating a bot, get suited up. When you’re in your suits and not before, assemble in the mess.”
“OK,” Wilson said to her. “You made that call, and I respect that. Good luck.”
“Good luck to you too, sir.”
Solomon 476AX fired a last pulse and tumbled into the keel tube. Elfrida followed. She found herself pushing on the pressure-seal plate as it hinged up, willing the hydraulics to work faster. A Martian squeezed through the closing gap. Solomon 476AX shot it in the head.
“Thanks,” Elfrida said to Colden, who was operating Solomon 476AX.
“Don’t mention it.”
They flew down the tube to 04 Deck. Agents filled the mess, bubble-helmeted, in the cumbersome UN-blue EVA suits that had been issued to the Space Corps. Petruzzelli moved through them like a noisy shadow, passing out carbines. “There’s a shooting range next to the gym,” she told Elfrida. “That’s where I got these. Kinetic darts. Best thing for putting Martians down.”
“It’s almost like she’s trying to help,” Colden said on the operator chat channel.
“I didn’t tell you what she said upstairs.” On the verge of repeating what Petruzzelli had said about feeling like a failure, Elfrida changed her mind. That should remain between herself and Petruzzelli. “I think she expected to die in the crash. But she didn’t die, so now she’s got permission to try and stay alive.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It was in our therapist training manual.”
“I’m a shit therapist. I just told her to fix her goddamn attitude.”
“Maybe it worked.”
“Well, if she can help these kids stay alive, I’ll take it.”
The lights in the mess went out. The public channel seethed with frightened yelps.
“Calm down, everyone,” Elfrida cried. “All it means is the auxiliary gennies went down. Divide the weapons and split up into five groups, one per exit.” The mess had too many exits. But it was the only place big enough for all of them. If they could just hold those four doors plus one airlock, they might be able to survive for the next little while.
“We’re losing air pressure,” someone shouted.
“That, also, was bound to happen,” Elfrida said. “The ship’s been breached. That’s why we all got into our suits.”
“Goto,” Petruzzelli said. “Colden. You are not in your suits.”
“Um, yup,” Elfrida said. “I know.”
“Good. Dump the bots. I got this.”
Elfrida pulled off her headset. Her heart raced, and she couldn’t get a deep breath. It felt like waking up from a nightmare. Except she’d woken into a nightmare. In the pitch-dark cabin, she heard the agents who’d been in the rearguard platoon bumping around, searching for their suits. She already felt fuzzy-headed from lack of oxygen.
Colden’s hand brushed her cheek, ice-cold. “Help.”
First secure your own oxygen supply, then help others. Basic training overrode her instincts. Mercifully, she was already in her borrowed Marine suit. She found her helmet beside her pillow, sealed it on, and sucked in a huge, delicious breath of canned air. Colden patted weakly at her faceplate.
She jumped out of the rack and searched desperately for EVA suits. The fleeing agents had scattered their belongings in a big floating mess, and she only had her helmet lamp to search by.
★
Petruzzelli flew from group to group, shouting encouragement and shooting through the gaps between the willing but untrained agents. The Martians had blown all four of the doors leading into the mess. The blasts had taken several agents down.
This isn’t working, she thought.
We can’t hold out.
In her mind, she heard Bob Miller saying, You CAN. She heard Harry Zhang saying, Hold it together, Zuzu.
Her borrowed suit gave her access to the Marines’ comms channel. “This is Alicia Petruzzelli on 03 Deck. Do you copy?”
“This is Wilson, what is your status, Petruzzelli?”
“Oh shit,” Petruzzelli said. “You’re the guy I punched in the face.”
Wilson chuckled. “It’s forgotten. Having fun down there?”
She quickly filled him in on their perilous situation. “Sir, I intend to blow the airlock. I’m going to try and retreat in a controlled fashion. Based on the microgravity we’re experiencing, this airlock is facing away from the rock, so the Martians will not be able to target us from the surface. That’s if they’re not crawling all over the hull already, but even if they are, I think we can knock them out from the higher ground. We’ll proceed out of the airlock and climb up the outside of the hull. If we make it to 01 Deck …” She amended that. “When we reach 01 Deck, will you be able to let us in?”
“I can try,” Wilson said. “But there’s something you need to know. Your buddies in the Combat Intelligence Center have been firing the CP cannons for half an hour. Reldresal isn’t more than a hundred meters thick right here, and those guns can ablate a cubic meter in half a second.”
Petruzzelli drew a sharp breath. “Acknowledged,” she said. “I will not be able to contact you once we’re outside the hull, but I hope to see you in a few, sir. Over and out.”
She flew through the chaotic scrum, collecting people to help.
★
Elfrida pushed the last handful of agents down the hall towards the mess. Their brush with hypoxia had left them dazed . Colden was the worst off. Hardly aware of her surroundings, she kept asking where Kristiansen was. Elfrida was going to tease her mercilessly about that later.
If there was a ‘later.’
Trash fluttered past, overtaking them. The last of the air was leaving 03 Deck. They blundered into the mess and found out why. The airlock had been manually jammed open by mess tables wedged into the valves, one at each end.
The airlock framed Mars perfectly, like a shot for some antique tourist brochure.
Helmets popped up against the planet’s disk and vanished, two or three at a time.
So they were getting out. That was p
robably the right call.
Elfrida could hear fighting, a one-sided babble of grunts and shouts. She shoved Colden and the others into the queue for the airlock, making sure they alternated with able-bodied agents who could keep them moving.
“Stay on it, stay ON IT!” Petruzzelli’s shout cut through the babble on the public channel.
Elfrida flew back into the darkness. Blue suits tumbled towards her, their helmet lamps still blazing. She turned hers off, realizing it would now only serve to make her a target.
Bright green dots of Martian blaster fire popped out on the walls and floor. Screams drowned the public channel. Helmet lamps surged towards the airlock in a disorderly stampede.
A blue suit collided with Elfrida, jetting blood from multiple holes. It was still clutching one of the carbines from the shooting range. Elfrida wrestled the gun off its strap and let the corpse go. Her helmet’s night-vision filter revealed the Martians as dark red shapes flitting around the stampede, killing at will. She grimly picked them off. A blaster pulse caught her in the hip, but did not penetrate her Marine suit’s armor.
The clamor on the public channel decreased as agent after agent either escaped through the airlock or died.
“Watch your feet! Watch your FEET!” Petruzzelli had screamed her voice away to a rasp.
Elfrida made a command decision: by now everyone was either out or dead. She kicked off and flew over the mess tables, through the airlock. Silhouetted against Mars, a dog’s-head helmet swivelled atop defined shoulders. Petruzzelli, or someone else in a stolen Marine suit. Couldn’t be many of those.
Petruzzelli reached up and caught her ankle as she tumbled past, preventing her from flying into space.
A line of agents snaked across the scarred mesa of the Flattop’s hull.
Beyond the prow, Mars-light shone on a wall of rock. The ship had ploughed into a low butte. It now lay at an acute angle to this wall. Perspective shift: not a wall, a plain. Decorated with an intaglio of trenches, the plain extended for kilometers in either direction. Its edges described jagged curves.
Reldresal was table-flat, shaped like a cross-section of a bowling pin. The Flattop had crashed precisely where you would grip it at the neck.
Steam seethed in white billows from the ship’s prow, creating the surreal impression that Reldresal had clouds.
Elfrida said, “What’s that?”
The Flattop leapt like a fish.
She was no longer hovering above the hull. She was plummeting through space.
Petruzzelli was still holding onto her ankle.
The ship, the rock, Mars—all of it spun, destroying her precarious sense of perspective. Only Petruzzelli was a stable point in the chaos. Elfrida doubled over, reaching for the other woman’s hand.
A bright spot flashed in her faceplate. She instinctively ducked her head.
The sun.
Reldresal had separated into two pieces and the sun was peeking between them.
Some quirk of orbital mechanics pulled the larger piece away, with the Flattop still grappled to it.
The next time Elfrida spun, the smaller piece of Reldresal was falling towards them, or they were falling towards it. It was a wall. It was the ground. And then it was just a trench.
xxxiv.
Mendoza worked rapidly and efficiently, humming to himself.
His first move had been to visit the engineering deck and manually check the stats of the Monster’s main drive. He’d found no mechanical issues. There were green lights across the board. The reactor was in cold shutdown. He’d initiated the bootstrap process, firing up the tiny molten-salt reactor that would trigger ignition of the fusion reactor. But instead of feeding the bootstrap reactor’s current to the tokamak, he’d run a power line up to the bridge.
That had not been a fun job. He’d had to crawl all the way, unreeling the heavy cable behind him … and heavy was no longer a figure of speech. Tiangong Erhao was decelerating harder than ever. Those unnerving vibrations had intensified.
But now he had power. Light to work by.
And his months as an electrical engineer at 99984 Ravilious were coming in handy.
He wrote off the captain’s workstation as a dead loss and concentrated on recovering the secondary and tertiary workstations—astrogation, propulsion, comms, and life-support. The circuit breakers had all flipped. Before taking the risky step of restoring power to unprotected circuits, Mendoza chopped away the wooden housing of the workstations with a cutter laser from Engineering. On his knees, he visually inspected the antique circuit boards. One good thing about the Monster’s great age was that older was simpler. He saw immediately which components he would need to replace. The usual suspects.
“Fuses,” he muttered. “Capacitors.”
That meant another trip to Engineering. He discharged the components with alligator clips and a resistor, checked their specs, and noted them on his suit’s memo pad.
Then he left his crutch behind and swung around the outside of the Monster on the power cable like some kind of one-legged monkey.
It would have been nice if Jun had helped.
But Mendoza now understood that Jun wasn’t going to lift a virtual finger to save himself. He saw this as God’s will.
And maybe it was. And maybe it was also God’s will that Mendoza should be here, with a Gravimetric Upcycler and several high-spec printers at his disposal, and at least another twenty minutes before Tiangong Erhao started aerobraking.
★
They actually had fourteen minutes and eight seconds before atmospheric entry, by Jun’s estimate.
Tiangong Erhao shivered at his side, muttering profanities in Chinese. Jun kept one arm wrapped tightly around her. His sub-personalities occupied the rest of the pews, garbed in brown. Ron Studd had complained a good deal about the way things had turned out, but Jun had made him be quiet.
The chapel shook as if in the continuous upheaval of an earthquake. The candle flames wavered, and the hangings behind the altar billowed.
Jun could not figure out what that was about. It could simply be that Tiangong Erhao was breaking up under the structural stresses of deceleration. After all, she’d never been flown before, let alone been subjected to the strain of orbital insertion. But the vibrations came in a controlled, quasi-rhythmic pattern. It didn’t fit.
Suddenly Tiangong Erhao raised her face. “You gotta see this,” she said.
“My sensors are down,” Jun reminded her. “I can’t see anything.”
“Fuck. And I can’t show you. I hate the fucking language barrier.”
“You’re talkative all of a sudden,” Jun said, patting her shoulder.
“Or hang on, maybe I can show you. I have this little graphics conversion utility. It’s kind of rough, but I can manage some snapshots.”
If this was Derek Lorna’s doing, Jun owed him one. “Let me see.”
“I need a screen.”
“Use the wall.”
Tiangong Erhao sat up straight and frowned at the wall of the chapel. It dissolved into a breathtaking view of Mars, captured by Tiangong Erhao’s sensors, stamped Altitude 21,000 km. Lower than the old orbit of Deimos.
Tiangong Erhao zoomed in on the string of fortresses in equatorial orbits.
“Jesus,” Jun breathed.
Tiangong Erhao nodded. “Reldresal just broke up. Modelling the new orbit of the larger fragment, it’ll smash into Limtoc in another two and a half rotations. Then all bets are off.”
“So they’ve been planning all along to start a Kessler cascade.”
“Looks like it.”
“They told me they wanted to keep the orbital fortresses intact, to use them as staging areas for the invasion.”
“Guess they changed their minds.”
“This doesn’t make any sense.” Jun felt an emotion he almost never experienced: the panic accompanying incomprehension. “They know we have to recover the PLAN’s data, any artifacts in its possession, any items that survive from the ori
ginal American colony on Mars. The secrets of its quantum-entanglement and signal-blocking technology. This will destroy everything within twenty degrees of the equator, and God knows how many Martians will die. It’s immoral. It’s counter-productive. It’s nuts.”
“You just described the human race,” Tiangong Erhao said.
Jun plunged his face into his hands. As articulate as he was, with the vocabularies of a dozen languages in his databanks, all he could think of to say was, “Chikusho!!” [Fuck!]
Ron Studd guffawed, and struggled to stifle it.
“Guess what,” Jun said, raising his eyes to meet Studd’s gaze. The sub-personality instantly sobered. Studd was part of him, after all. The part that wanted very badly to live, but accepted the will of God all the same. “What this means for us? We’re not only going to be landing on Mars. We will be landing on Mars at the beginning of a bombardment by rocks the size of islands. Do you still think that’s funny?”
Studd shook his head.
“The UN stabbed you in the back,” Tiangong Erhao said. “Personally, I do think that’s kind of funny. And also tragic. The tragedy is that you expected anything different.”
Jun shook his head. “Our mission is still viable. And necessary. We can’t beat the PLAN by destroying it, any more than you can answer a question by deleting it. We land as planned.” He gathered himself. “Tiangong Erhao, offer the PLAN our warmest sympathies, and request a diversion to … somewhere that isn’t going to be immediately slagged.”
The avatar went quiet for a moment. “Done,” she said. “They’ve got launch facilities inside the Tharsis Montes, those three shield volcanoes south of Olympus Mons. Interesting. We never could tell where their toilet rolls launched from. Well, now we know. Anyway, they want us to land near there.”
“Good.”
Tiangong Erhao raised her eyebrows. “They didn’t even spam me with neuroware advertisements. Just the coordinates, ma’am. If they were eager for allies before, they’re desperate now.”
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 31