The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

  Elfrida snickered, abashed. “Nahhh. Let them figure it out for themselves. It’s more fun for us that way.”

  The HUD area of her contacts flashed. “Ugh, leave me alone … Oh.”

  “Mendoza?” said Colden.

  Elfrida nodded. She hurried out of the mess. There was no privacy on Eureka Station. She spotted a supply locker, kicked out the maidbot that resided in it, and stepped in.

  A light automatically came on, no brighter than the light in the back of a refrigerator. Shelves of detergent and antibacterial wax cramped her shoulders.

  “John?” she whispered. She had her regulation throat mic and earbuds on, so she could talk instead of typing. “I’m here.”

  Then she had to wait. She listened to the noise of the party swelling and fading, and thought about Stickney. She thought about that guy, Zubrowski, who’d taken the stuff. She remembered swinging her edged truncheon into Martian faces, so many faces. She bit her knuckles. Tears spilled out of her eyes. At the three-minute mark, she whispered, “John, I can’t take this anymore. Please come and get me.”

  “You’re never gonna guess where I am,” he said over her voice. She divided by the speed of light as he spoke. He was about 26 million kilometers away. Close. “I can’t say anything specific, but I’m coming. We’re coming.” He laughed. It felt like he was ignoring her distress, but of course, he hadn’t yet heard the last thing she said. “What’s been going on? I tried to get hold of you yesterday, but you didn’t answer. Anyway, I’ll be there in about a week. I’m coming alone, in a Superlifter. I know Eureka Station has mega-defenses, so if you could fix it so I don’t get fragged on sight that would be great.”

  “But I don’t want you to come here! I thought we were going to go on an adventure in your boss’s new ship. I thought we would leave all this shit behind.” She felt selfish as she spoke.

  Mendoza was still talking. “That’s the good news. The bad news—well, it’s completely trivial by comparison. I lost my lower left leg. But I’ve still got most of the knee. Anyway, good stuff is happening, and when I get there I’ll be able to tell you all about it. I’m going to stay on the air for another few minutes. Let me know if you can arrange landing permission.”

  The party noise got louder. “Goto!” Colden yelled from the hall.

  “You what your leg what?” Elfrida said.

  A text from Colden flashed up in her HUD. “Get back here quick. There’s an admiral looking for you.”

  Elfrida stepped out of the storage locker.

  “Oh, there you are,” Colden said. “So that’s why the maidbot’s been rampaging through the mess, trying to vacuum up people’s feet. Ha, ha. Get back in here right now.”

  Elfrida followed Colden into the mess. The party had expired. The maidbot was vacuuming. The snacks and cocktails had vanished. The agents stood in small groups, pretending to chitchat.

  Alone by the buffet stood a couple of Marines, and Admiral McLean.

  “Does this thing work?” he said jovially, slapping the coffee-maker. Elfrida reflected that he had probably not had to get his own coffee for years.

  “I’ll do it if you like, sir,” she said, stepping forward. “What’s your poison?”

  “Just the woman I was looking for. Cappuccino with an extra shot.”

  The extra shot made Elfrida think of Mendoza, a certified caffeine junkie. Their conversation felt like it had happened in a dream. This was reality. Eureka Station, her stuffed-up nose, General McLean watching her with tiger’s eyes. She pushed the right combo of buttons. Frothy milk jetted into a plastic cup.

  McLean sipped, nodded approval, and faced the room. “You did well out there. In fact, you exceeded expectations.”

  “Not mine.” Director Petroskova came in, her tiny frame clad in a pantsuit and spike heels. McLean nodded to her—he’d been expecting her. “I have always had confidence in the abilities of the Space Corps, and I’ve developed a great respect for Agent Goto’s leadership.”

  Colden moved across the room. “Then why don’t you give her a promotion, ma’am? We don’t have any field managers. They were all left on Earth, or wherever.”

  And I know why, Elfrida thought. Because they would have tried to protect us from you people.

  “Goto’s been doing the job of a field manager. I think she deserves to be recognized for it.”

  “Already done,” Petroskova said, neatly disarming Colden. “I’ve come to congratulate Goto, as well as yourself, Agent Colden,” and she named six more platoon leaders, “on your promotion to field manager. We expect great things from you in future.”

  The agents clapped. Elfrida smiled without feeling it. She’d yearned for this promotion for years.

  “More managers. Just what we need,” McLean joked. “The rest of you will have to keep them in line; make sure they don’t get too big for their gecko boots.”

  Agents subserviently tittered.

  “That’s right,” McLean said. “Now, it may surprise you to learn that Star Force Command is not perfect. We didn’t anticipate it would be possible to take Stickney. However, we are flexible. Now that Stickney is ours, we are going to double our supply flights. We’ll drop tools, bots, and materials to repair the railgun and the laser assembly. We’ll also drop heavy ordnance of our own: scatterguns, hypervelocity coilguns … and a contingent of Marines, to install and man them.”

  Elfrida grinned at tools and materials and heavy ordnance. Her grin faded at Marines. Bob Miller was not going to like that. Well, too bad for him. The Fraggers had been jerking Star Force around for long enough. They would just have to learn to cooperate, for the sake of humanity.

  “Additionally, we’ll reinforce our telepresence support operations,” McLean said. “We’ve heard from many of you that the signal delay makes your job harder than it needs to be. We agree. You need to be operating in something close to real time. So, congratulations to all of you. You’re going to Stickney.”

  An audible gasp swept through the mess. Agents went ashen. One boy actually leant over and threw up.

  Chin tucked in, hands behind his back, McLean froze them with his autocratic glare. “You’ll be as safe as you are now! You won’t be out on the surface with the Marines. You’ll be snug in your couches, same as ever. The only risk is getting slagged on the way, and if you think that same risk doesn’t apply here, you’re dreaming.”

  Agents turned beseeching gazes to Director Petroskova.

  “I have nothing to add,” Petroskova said. “Except that the President asked me to tell you personally that she’s very proud of you. I’m sure your families will also be very proud of you, when the record of these difficult days is declassified.”

  “Oh, you bitch,” someone in the back of the mess said.

  McLean seemed to grow five centimeters taller. “Stop thinking about yourselves for a minute,” he roared. “Humanity is. At. War. For our. SURVIVAL. I’m sorry to BURST your little BUBBLE, but you signed up to serve, and BY GOD you will SERVE. You’re not the only ones. Do you think we would be doing this if we had ANY CHOICE? Do you think I fucking LIKE it?”

  The mess went dead quiet, except for the sound of that person still puking.

  Elfrida’s HUD flashed. Mendoza had received her pitiful plea for him to come get her. Since she’d hung up on him, he’d emailed her. “Elfrida, I’m worried about you. Are you OK?”

  Blinking away tears, she surreptitiously gaze-typed a reply.

  “Forget it. Don’t come. They’re sending me to Stickney. I guess … I guess this is it. It was a nice dream, John. I love you.”

  Whether Mendoza replied to that or not, she never knew. No sooner had she sent it than her personal comms stopped working. So did everyone else’s. They had been elevated to a new level of CLASSIFIED existence.

  The rest of the day went by in a blur. Pack, queue up for baggage inspections, queue up again for dysentery shots—dysentery? Really?—queue up again to be issued with a buttload of mil-spec survival kit shit, and que
ue up for the last time to board a Flattop.

  The hangar was busier and more chaotic than a street market in Rome. Ground crew manhandled stuff into the Flattop’s cavernous launch bays. Marines floated around the ship, keeping an eye on the EVA-suited Space Corps agents stumbling aboard.

  As she awaited her turn, Elfrida saw a petite figure flying across the hangar. There was only one person on Eureka Station who would wear a Hermès spacesuit.

  Director Petroskova landed on the ramp and beckoned Elfrida out of line. She opened a private suit-to-suit channel. “My dear, I admire your comportment. I feel you deserve to know the story behind the story.”

  “What story?” Elfrida said. She was now boiling with anger on behalf of all the other agents. “We did something they didn’t think was possible, and we’re being punished for it.”

  Petroskova’s helmet moved from side to side. Her faceplate was a reflective blank bubble. “It has nothing to do with you. This operation has been on the planning table for a long time, and it’s now moving forward. But the timing is unrelated to anything you and your agents did.”

  “What, then?”

  “Something else happened yesterday,” Petroskova said. “Something which has given us hope for the first time that we may actually be able to win this war. I’m not at liberty, obviously, to say what, but I want you to understand you’re not being punished.”

  “What do you call it, then, ma’am, when you send four hundred scared kids to the most dangerous place in the known universe?”

  “A strategy,” Petroskova said crisply. She reached out and brushed Elfrida’s faceplate with a glove. “Have faith, Agent Goto.”

  Elfrida shied away from her unwanted touch. “I have to go.”

  “Just remember that everything I said was true. You are brave. And I do have confidence in your leadership. Take care of them.”

  “That’s my job, ma’am,” Elfrida said. She turned her back on the director of the Space Corps and followed the others up the ramp into the Flattop. She didn’t believe a word Petroskova had said. In the chaos of securing berths for everyone, she forgot about it, anyway.

  xxvii.

  Almost the first thing the Marines did when they landed on Stickney was to arrest the Star Force deserters. Golubtsov had died in the tunnel, so now it was just the three of them: Petruzzelli, Zhang, and Blake.

  The Marines put them on their honor. That lasted until Petruzzelli punched a Master Sergeant in the face. After that, they resorted to zip-ties.

  Star Force had occupied the Castle. They’d sterilized it with ethylene oxide gas and were now repressurizing it, bit by bit. The Martians’ furniture had been spaced or covered with plastic sheets. A trove of oxygen tanks had been discovered in underground storage. Some of the tanks had been reused so many times they still had United States flags on them. Petruzzelli thought the air smelled wrong, but everything seemed wrong to her now.

  Starting with the fact that she was tied to a flipping cot, which still—EtO gas or not—had crumbs of barbecued Martian ingrained in its polyfoam mattress.

  ★

  Elfrida went to see the prisoners.

  Before she could speak a word, Petruzzelli snarled at her, “Why are we being punished? We liberated Stickney!”

  Elfrida winced. She leaned against the wall by the door. An unreasoning instinct told her to keep her distance from Petruzzelli, even if the woman was tied up. “You did steal a two-billion-spider spaceship,” she said.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Come on, Petruzzelli; you deserted. Did you expect them to give you a medal?”

  Looking into Petruzzelli’s angry eyes, she saw that Petruzzelli had expected a medal or something like that, some sort of positive recognition for her part in this fiasco. She believed she had done the right thing. And maybe she had.

  “Care package,” Elfrida said, holding up a shrinkfoam bag.

  “Woo-hoo.”

  “I have permission to untie your hands, but I won’t if you’re going to hit me.”

  Petruzzelli laughed. It was a cracked, false sound. “I’m not mad at you. You tried to help. And you’ve been punished for it, too: you’re here.”

  “It’s not a punishment. It’s an honor,” Elfrida said flatly.

  The other ex-Gravesfighter pilot, Harry Zhang, raised his head. Black circles ringed his eyes. “How was your trip?”

  “Oh, we experienced a bit of turbulence. I got to watch the new Secrets of the Galactic Core movie.”

  Elfrida sat crosslegged on the empty cot between Petruzzelli and Zhang. “Wasn’t there one more of you?” she asked.

  “Blake’s a psych case,” Petruzzelli said. “She gets to move around.”

  “Oh.” Elfrida leaned over and cut the zip-ties around Zhang’s and Petruzzelli’s wrists with the Swiss Army knife she’d got on Mercury.

  Petruzzelli rubbed her wrists. She wore a grubby UN-blue spacesuit liner. A rigid foam cast encased her right shin. This was still zip-tied to the cot. She sat with her back against the wall, neck curved down. Her hair had started to grow in. Its natural color turned out to be sandy brown.

  “We came in a Flattop,” Elfrida said. “We had an escort of about fifty Gravesfighters. Most of them made it. The orbital fortresses started firing on us like one AU out. Our shield lasted most of the way, but then we started taking hits. The good thing is that a Flattop’s so big, it can take hits. Anyway, I didn’t have a great view. We were down in the launch bays, waiting to be shot into space like champagne corks, just in case. I dunno if ejection would have saved anyone. As it was, one of the launch bays took a direct hit from a KKV. A hundred and twelve people died.”

  She paused, not deliberately. She was thinking of the agents she’d lost, trying to remember all their names, as she had promised herself she would.

  “But we made it,” she went on. “The lasso worked.”

  She had helped to build it. Her quip about watching movies told only part of the tale. She’d spent most of the four-day journey from Eureka Station on the couch, operating a phavatar, taking apart the ruined laser cannon, and stringing high-tensile-strength wire between the arms of its pointing and tracking assembly.

  “XO Carasso took the helm on our final approach. He snagged the wire on his first try, which is good, because if he missed, we’d have had to go all the way around Mars before trying again. They said afterwards we only had a fifty percent chance of making it. He seriously deserves a—” She caught Petruzzelli’s eye. “Never mind.”

  Petruzzelli smiled lopsidedly. “A medal? I agree. I crashed a Gravesfighter into this rock, I thought that was something. That’s some kick-ass flying.”

  “The Thunderjack’s just sitting out there in the Big Bowl,” Elfrida said. “It looks like Noah’s Ark or something. Most people are still living in there.”

  Zhang stirred. “Has Mercury started delivering ships to Earth yet?” he asked.

  “Um, not that I’m aware of,” Elfrida said.

  “Has China changed their mind about sitting it out?”

  “No,” Elfrida said. She tried not to China-bash. “The PLAN blew up Tiangong Erhao, and they’re still being all noble and restrained. So I think we can rule out any help from that quarter for the foreseeable future.”

  “Huh.” Zhang lapsed back into silence.

  Petruzzelli leaned forward. “In that case, nothing’s changed.”

  “How can you say that? We’re here. We’ve got a Flattop. We’re fixing the railgun.”

  “With what, magic?”

  “The Marine Engineering Corps thrives on a challenge. We’re also fixing the laser assembly. The Castle reactor is a dead loss, so we’re going to run it off the Flattop’s reactor—”

  “Why hasn’t the PLAN nuked the Thunderjack yet?”

  “Oh, they have. I guess they don’t dare drop anything too big, because that could fracture Stickney itself. But it was raining nukes out there for a while. So we built a humongous rubble shield.”

>   The phavatars had done most of that work, too. Were still doing it. This was really Elfrida’s first break since she’d gotten here.

  ”We’re going to win this thing,” she insisted.

  Petruzzelli looked skeptical.

  “I guess I shouldn’t tell you this.” But it was all over Stickney. Why not? “We’re going to land infantry on Mars. Stickney will be their jumping-off point.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Zhang said.

  “It’s true! That’s why we weren’t allowed to help you at first. They didn’t want to risk losing the phavatars. But you won, so now we can move forward. Boots on the ground is the only way you ever win a war.” She repeated what she had heard the Marines say. “It’s going to be decisive.”

  “It’s going to be a disaster,” Zhang said, and Petruzzelli nodded. Why were they so negative? Of course, they wanted to believe that they and her precious Fraggers were the only heroes in this war.

  “Well, no one else feels that way,” Elfrida said. “The mood on Earth has really improved. People are partying in the streets.” She laughed at a sudden memory of one vid from Earth. “Someone made a giant fiberglass sculpture of the Big Turd and threw it off the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Petruzzelli scoffed, “They’ve been lied to. You’ve been lied to. Just like we were. You have to free us.”

  “Petruzzelli, what, so you can tell Star Force they’re doing it wrong?”

  Petruzzelli glanced at Zhang. He made a tiny calming movement with one hand.

  “I can’t free you,” Elfrida said, modulating her voice for all she was worth. “I’m sorry. But I did bring you some goodies.” She opened her care package. Shrinkfoam was a stretchy smart material, the successor to bubblewrap of yore. Its cushioning properties had saved the contents from getting smushed during their journey from Eureka Station.

  Gwynneth Blake, the third surviving deserter, wandered into the room. She swooped on Elfrida and hugged her. “Kit-Kats,” she said, holding one up. “I thought I’d never see one again! OMG, Twixes. On a rock orbiting Mars. Is this a triumph of the human spirit, or what?”