The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

  They were knee to knee. The therapy room was really just a cubicle equipped with two ergoforms and a locker of craft supplies.

  Colden’s lips worked. She rubbed a hand over her stubby braids, obviously struggling to stay professional.

  “But I know my feelings are completely unrelated to reality,” Petruzzelli went on. She had learned that lesson, an unforgettable one, during her days of crying until snot ran out of her nose, really feeling all kinds of woe about how her birth parents had abandoned her, and her other parents didn’t give a shit … all because she’d taken Bob Miller’s stupid FUKish grief drug. Now she wasn’t on the drug anymore, she no longer felt those emotions, but she still had that clarity. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. I was just being over-sensitive. So, you see what I mean? I push people away for no good reason. We could’ve been friends.”

  She shrugged. Smoothed out the yard-long strings trailing from her friendship bracelet and looped them over her hands. Waited.

  “Hmm,” Colden said. “Well.” She ran both hands over her hair. She was still holding her own friendship bracelet. She put it down on one plump knee. “Screw this,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, screw this. We never could have been friends. You thought I was trying to keep Elfrida away from you? Yes, actually, I was. She’s soft-hearted. Always looking to find the best in people. Not me. I knew straight off that you were one bad-news USian bitch. And I think events have proved me right. You and those other jokers are directly responsible for us being here, on freaking Stickney.”

  The Flattop shook. A Gravesfighter was taking off from the launch bays under their feet.

  “On the other hand,” Colden continued, “I shouldn’t have been rude about your family. So I’m sorry about that. But you shouldn’t have been rude about my family, either. And I don’t hear you apologizing.”

  Petruzzelli sat immobile. Her face felt red-hot as a complex amalgam of shame and rage washed over her in shivery waves.

  “You need to fix your attitude,” Colden said. “You’ll never fly for Star Force again, but you could probably find a job in the private sector.” Her nostrils flared in distaste. “After this is over, anyone who was on Stickney will look like a hero, even if they were dishonorably discharged. If we all live through this.”

  “Well, I’ve got news for you,” Petruzzelli said. “We all won’t.”

  She slid off her ergoform. Her left knee sank between the two ergoforms, wedging her leg into the gap. Her splinted right leg braced her against the wall. She dropped her friendship bracelet—now a noose—over Colden’s head, and jerked it tight.

  Colden struggled vainly for a few seconds. Then her eyes rolled up in her head and she went down for the count.

  Petruzzelli loosened the slipknot. Colden let out a bubbly grunt.

  A klaxon went off. Wee-wah! Wee-wah!

  Of course—they had security cameras in here.

  Petruzzelli heaved Colden’s unconscious body into her arms, with Colden’s face in her neck. The sliding door thudded back. A pair of Marines charged in, one tall and blond, the other short and black, crowding Petruzzelli against the wall beside the handicrafts locker.

  “She attacked me!” Petruzzelli yelled. “I had to defend myself!”

  The Marines hesitated, just for an instant, but that was long enough. Petruzzelli shoved Colden into tall and blond’s face. Stumbling, he bumped against his colleague. Petruzzelli pushed off from the wall with her back foot. Her shoulder clipped short and black in the chest. Like hitting a brick wall. He reached for her, and she reached for his pistol. She arrowed out the door between them.

  “No one fucking move!” she screamed at the sad sacks in the waiting room.

  Zhang was not there.

  ★

  The klaxon snapped Elfrida out of immersion. She left her phavatar quarrying rocks and sat up, banging her head on the bunk above hers. Other agents peered out of their racks, fear etched on their faces.

  Elfrida swung her legs to the floor. She heard herself saying, “Stay where you are. Everything’s all right.”

  Her HUD flashed. Colden had been on mental health duty today, applying the meager skills they had acquired in Antarctica to Star Force’s growing roster of PTSD cases.

  “Your friend Petruzzelli just snapped. She attacked me, then took out two Marines. Now she’s on the rampage. Just another fun day at work!”

  Responsibility seared Elfrida. She told her agents it was a false alarm—just a kerfluffle in Health Services. Then she took off at a brisk walk.

  “On my way,” she texted Colden.

  She hurried past the gym, the mess, the laundry, the shooting range. Why did this ship have to be so huge? The klaxon continued to wail. People moved in distracted jerks, too disciplined to panic. Elfrida took the ladder to 03 Deck in two bounds. The machines in Flight Engineering made so much noise she didn’t hear the klaxon cut out. She burst into 02 Deck / Health Services. All was quiet. A cluster of Marines blocked the corridor. “Where is she?” Elfrida demanded.

  They didn’t even glance at her. Squeezing past, Elfrida saw one of them was wounded, eyes bulging, lip-biting himself quiet. She smelt scorched fabric.

  She found Colden slumped on an ergoform in the Health Services waiting room, forgotten by everyone. “Oh God,” Elfrida wailed, kneeling to hug her, afraid of hurting her. “I feel like this is all my fault. Are you OK?”

  “Fine. Don’t worry about me. She said none of us is going to live through this. She said if I ever want to see Earth again, I should get off this ship. I’m afraid she’s going to try something. I told the Marines, but they weren’t listening.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Not sure. Maybe they’ve caught her.”

  Elfrida flew back down the corridor. If she were Petruzzelli—and she had been Petruzzelli, oh yes she had, in her nightmares, in the mechanical body of a phavatar, in the moments when she wanted to scream Fuck you at the entire universe—she would head straight for the place where she could do the most damage.

  She climbed the ladder to 01 Deck. No Marines blocked her way. They had gone to join in the hunt for Petruzzelli.

  Elfrida had never been up here before. It looked much like 02 Deck. Same shoulder-width corridors and sliding doors. Same rooms full of officers and screens.

  She caught up with a tall East Asian man in the uniform of a Gravesfighter pilot. “Is this the way to the bridge?” she gasped.

  “I was going to ask you the same question.”

  “Laugh. Maybe we can find it together.”

  “I need to make an urgent report,” the man said. “We’re losing the war. I’ve done the math. Anyone can do the math. The numbers are out there, but most people are just fucking innumerate. Sixty to seventy percent of our offensive capacity is pinned down in Earth orbit, trying to prevent the next Hyderabad. And the PLAN has decimated our space-based manufacturing capacity. The only way we win now is if China enters the war, but that’s not gonna happen, is it? Leastways, they’re not gonna enter the war on our side. My parents defected from the Imperial Republic. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Elfrida remembered where she’d seen him before. “Holy crap. You’re Harry Zhang.”

  “That’s me.” They were walking fast. Zhang turned corners, doubled back. “I’m following my nose here,” he admitted, and then they reached a door with two stiff-backed Marines outside it.

  “Halt! You’re not cleared for this area!”

  “I was just looking for my friend,” Elfrida said.

  “Oh, hey, Zhang. Did you hear one of your buddies went nuts in Mental Health?”

  “I wonder what she could’ve been upset about,” Zhang said. He smoothed his immaculate pilot’s uniform and entered the bridge. Elfrida pretended she was with him and followed close on his heels.

  ★

  Petruzzelli kicked and screamed as the Marines dragged her through 04 Deck. The good part was they had a lot of ground to cov
er. The other good part was they weren’t allowed to hit her. So she kept struggling and howling. Off-duty personnel stared.

  So did the Marines checking IDs at the airlock in the mess. They were only human.

  The airlock was a metal windsock sticking out from the wall of the mess, kitty-corner to the food service hatches. It was mated to the flexitube that led to the underground complex. And that was the only way to enter the ship, owing to the rubble shield covering it. It was a natural choke point.

  People continued to drift in through the airlock as Petruzzelli’s captors dragged her along.

  Bob Miller had dressed his surviving Fraggers in civvies, so they mostly blended in, apart from being too tall. And in microgee, their height wasn’t obvious.

  The Marines manhandled Petruzzelli into the narrow corridor that led past the gym to the brig. People clogged the corridor behind them. Petruzzelli’s vision seemed to fog over, and she screamed in earnest, flashing back to the battle in the heat exchanger tunnel.

  A gangly man flew over the looky-loos. Stepping on people’s heads, pushing off, he aimed twin Martian blasters at the Marines. One of the men crumpled sideways with a steaming hole in his face. Petruzzelli sprang back. Miller’s compatriots fought through the crowd. They kicked and shoved the other Marines into the brig and slammed the door on them.

  Miller told Petruzzelli that thirty-five Fraggers had made it onto the Flattop. Half of them had gone to the engineering deck, and the other half had stayed with him. Shouting, and brandishing Martian blasters that they’d cached underground before Star Force got here, they herded people out of the airlock, off the ship. It was like stuffing toys into a stinky old sock. When no more would go, they closed the airlock and undocked the flexitube.

  Scorched spots appeared on the walls of the mess, announcing the arrival of more Marines. Soldiers on both sides dived underneath the mess tables and shot between the legs of the benches.

  While that was going on, Miller took Petruzzelli and a couple of others and snuck out through the kitchen.

  ★

  The bridge of the Thunderjack was no bigger than a subway carriage, crammed with decrepit computers. Half a dozen officers lay on acceleration couches, their fingers flickering over touchpads, their minds elsewhere. Electronics hummed and trilled. Elfrida glimpsed optical feeds that showed the waxing face of Mars, and others that showed nothing but rock—the rubble shield her agents had built over the Flattop.

  Zhang marched up to an older officer, whom Elfrida also recognized. Executive Officer Carasso was talking in angry bursts to someone not present. He broke off to snarl at Zhang, “Get out of my face.”

  “I’ve come to report, sir,” Zhang said calmly. “The mission was a success. We wiped out the Martians. A guy I cared about got wiped out, too. But that’s war, right, sir?”

  Carasso’s gaze darted to Elfrida.

  “The admirals wanted to abandon Stickney,” Zhang continued. “They even got the ships on their side. But you weren’t going to be outwitted by a bunch of machines. So you tapped me to fake a mutiny. Dumb volunteers. They can be talked into anything, right, sir? They want to be heroes so bad. That’s how I convinced Zoob and the others to come with me. I feel really fucking bad about that now, sir. Especially now I know you lied to me. ”

  “You’re a condescending little fuck, you know that?” Carasso gave a minute shrug, inviting Elfrida to share in his pretended perplexity. She didn’t have to pretend. She really was perplexed.

  “We did it,” Zhang said. “We won Stickney. However, I’ve been feeling kinda stupid recently. You know what I mean, sir? I’m feeling kinda … used. You told me once we liberated Stickney, we’d use the railgun to shoot down the other orbital fortresses. That would be the smart move. It’s the same thing the Fraggers thought of. I was not informed at any time that we were planning to use Stickney as a jumping-off point for infantry!”

  On the last words, Zhang’s voice rose to a shriek. Everyone on the bridge tensed as if a string linking them all like marionettes had been jerked.

  Carasso shifted his haunches. “Goddamn,” he muttered. He drew a palm-size laser pistol and shot Zhang in the head.

  Zhang’s body fell slowly. His arms and legs danced. A junior officer reacted with trained efficiency. He seized the corpse and kicked it into a stirrup space beneath one of the workstations.

  Carasso met Elfrida’s eyes for a third time, apologetically. “Psych case,” he said.

  Elfrida swallowed a bubble of nausea. “Did you have to shoot him?”

  “Good point. I should have kept him as a hostage. His gravity-dodging buddies have just taken control of my hangar and launch bays. But it chaps my ass to hear people whining about being uuuused. We’re all being used. That is war. The intelligence picture changes from moment to moment, and we have to adapt accordingly. If that does not comport with your own ideas about how this war should be won, too fucking bad. Don’t whine about it, just sit your little ass down and thank the Lord you have someplace to sit.”

  “Is that a threat, sir?”

  “Oh, I’m not threatening you. You’ve got a special classification. You’re some kind of lucky mascot.”

  Shouts and cries reached their ears. The Marines who’d been standing guard outside tumbled into the bridge. The last one was helped on his way by a red Gecko Doc planted in his rear.

  Petruzzelli lunged into the bridge, aiming a Martian pistol in a two-handed grip, screaming at everyone to put their fucking hands up. Elfrida dived over Carasso’s couch and curled into a ball in its shelter. “I don’t feel very lucky,” she muttered.

  “Statistics,” said Carasso, “are superstition for people with master’s degrees.”

  He got to his feet, hands raised at an insulting forty-five-degree angle.

  Petruzzelli and her cohorts killed the Marines. This instantly subdued the Flattop’s officers.

  Affecting a leisurely swagger, she then turned to Carasso. “We meet again, sir. You know how you once told me to eat the pain? Now it’s your turn. I’m a nice person, so I’ll try and make it quick.”

  Elfrida stood up. She found herself staring down the barrel of Petruzzelli’s blaster. She started to shake. It was like being back in the trenches, this time for real. Controlling her voice, she said, “You might want to know a couple of things before you frag him. He’s on your side. He helped you to desert, or allowed it, or something.”

  Petruzzelli cursed. “He threw us away. That’s what you’re saying. Remind me why I shouldn’t kill him.”

  “Also,” Elfrida said desperately, “they did consider your strategy, but some new intelligence came in or something.”

  “Who said that?”

  Elfrida mutely pointed at Zhang’s body, which had rolled out of the chink where it had been stowed. A smell of ordure rose.

  “Aw, fuck.” Petruzzelli stared at Carasso with burning eyes.

  Bob Miller flew onto the bridge. “Just talked to the lads in Engineering. They have secured the reactors.”

  “Bob!” Elfrida exclaimed, not taking in what he’d just said, so relieved was she to see him. Finally, someone sane was here.

  “Goto.” He flashed her his foxy grin. “We do seem to bump into each other in the damnedest places, don’t we?”

  He fastened an arm around Petruzzelli and rubbed the side of her head, forcing her to lower her aim.

  “Let’s talk.” Elfrida’s words tumbled over each other. “Petruzzelli, I’m really sorry your friend is dead, but lots of other people are dead, too. Don’t turn this into some kind of tit-for-tat thing.”

  “Sit down and shut up,” Petruzzelli yelled at her.

  Elfrida sank onto the nearest couch, which was Carasso’s. “Bob,” she pleaded. “Remember the whales? Revenge isn’t a strategy.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Miller agreed. “Winning is a strategy.”

  He started to squeeze past the couch where she was sitting. The Flattop suddenly juddered up and down. Bob fell on top of
her and caught himself with a hand planted next to her head.

  “You’ve got me in fondling range at last,” Elfrida said with a weak smile.

  “So I have. What a shame.”

  “Ugh, leave her alone,” Petruzzelli cawed. “She doesn’t matter.”

  Miller vaulted over the couch and headed for the far end of the bridge. Petruzzelli shot Elfrida a grin of triumph. Then she went back to hassling the Flattop’s officers. The Fraggers were holding them at gunpoint, forcing them to execute tasks at their workstations. “Don’t take all fucking day!” Petruzzelli shouted at them.

  A Fragger frisked Carasso and took away his pocket pistol. The rough search left him looking rumpled and old.

  “Acting on bad intelligence is a losing strategy,” he said, pitching his voice for them all to hear.

  Bob Miller glanced at the XO. “I’ve got all the intelligence I need. Your paymasters on Earth are determined to commit ground troops to this insane conflict. For cultural, political, and career-related reasons, they need to prove that the PLAN can be beaten. IT CANNOT BE BEATEN. But it can be destroyed. Excuse me.”

  The Flattop shook. Elfrida glimpsed splinters of light on one of the optical feed screens. The Flattop’s own guns were breaking up the rubble shield, cracking it like an eggshell.

  “I’m going to reveal classified information,” Carasso said loudly. “I’ll lose my job 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.”