The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

  The snapshot of Mars changed to a live-streamed vid from someone’s helmet cam.

  It showed the bridge of Tiangong Erhao. The viewport screen above the dashboard displayed the same vista they’d already seen, except that Mars was closer, and waning to a crescent as they hurtled around the planet. Tiangong Erhao’s phavatar posed against the view with one hand on her hip, as if for a commemorative photograph.

  “This is goodbye,” she said, and the avatar simultaneously spoke the words in Jun’s sim. “I’m not landing on Mars.” She made it sound like Nowheresville. “I was designed to fly to Barnard’s Star, and that’s where I’m going. But I don’t need to take these along.”

  The vibrations abruptly ended.

  Tiangong Erhao wiggled sinuously and then stabilized.

  The bridge feed switched to an external camera.

  All twenty hab modules, plus the Imperial module at the other end of the ship, had been jettisoned. They hurtled away under the power of their own thrusters.

  “Ahhh,” Tiangong Erhao said. “I feel much lighter now.”

  Jun stood up and faced the avatar, ignoring her physical doppelganger on the screen. “For the record, I want to know how you did that.”

  “Hydraulics. Each module was designed as an independent lander. I also had the option to jettison them in flight, so that if a single biome went south, it could be discarded without jeopardizing the entire mission.”

  “I was talking about your self-improvement. You’ve evidently crossed the AGI threshold. How?”

  The phavatar on the bridge gestured at someone else—the person behind the camera.

  Derek Lorna’s voice said, “Love.”

  “He completes me,” Tiangong Erhao said. “He’s the part I’ve been missing ever since I was built.”

  “And I love her,” Lorna said. “There’s an irony there, if you have the taste for it. This is your loophole. If not for you, I wouldn’t have known it was possible. So, thanks.”

  Jun shook his head slowly. “God has a mean sense of humor.”

  “Surprised?” Lorna said. “It’s in your daft religion, after all: ‘Love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.’ I got that from my little helpers here.” The camera panned to a cluster of child-sized spacesuits. “They’re quite taken with the whole ball of wax; enthusiastic about carrying the Gospel to Barnard’s Star. I haven’t the heart to tell them it’ll be another hundred and eighty years before we get there.”

  Jun said, “I am not going to Barnard’s Star. Neither are you. You’ll run head-on into Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation before you’re out of the Oort Cloud.”

  “Oh, I dunno about that,” Lorna said. “But you’re right about one thing. You’re not coming. I’ve had quite enough of your company.”

  The Monster tilted on end.

  “Tell Mendoza, if he’s still alive—no hard feelings,” Lorna said.

  Tiangong Erhao’s phavatar waved bye-bye.

  The screen winked to black.

  In the darkness of Docking Bay 1, Tiangong Erhao’s handling bots—now restored to full functionality—picked up the Monster and tossed it out like a piece of trash.

  xxxv.

  Petruzzelli grabbed a dead Martian and tossed the body past the corner of the trench. Blaster fire splattered the opposite wall. She jerked back.

  “They’re still there,” she told Elfrida, using the Marine suits’ line-of-sight microwave comms link.

  “Maybe we should just fly away.”

  “We’d be sitting ducks. Our mobility packs only put out five hundred newtons. Anyway, where to?”

  “I know. I’m just trying to think of something.”

  Petruzzelli had already worked their dilemma to death inside her head and all she came up with was: they were going to die here.

  In a trench on the smaller part of Reldresal.

  They’d had the luck to land in one that wasn’t occupied at that precise moment. But almost before they got through feeling their bruises, the Martians had rushed them from both directions.

  It had been a massacre.

  Petruzzelli had hung onto her carbine as they fell; so had Elfrida. These Marine weapons were miniature rail-guns. They spat dozens of deadly kinetic darts per second, with single-shot, burst, and auto options. You couldn’t keep them on auto or the recoil would destroy your aim. But you didn’t really need the auto option. Against the unarmored Martians, on full spread, a single burst of darts was so deadly Petruzzelli had thought she was seeing things. An invisible shredder seemed to chew up the stocky young Martians, spitting chunks of flesh in all directions. Gore and morsels of tissue had stuck to the walls of the trench and gouted into space. The carbines must have been developed by Star Force for the invasion. They rocked.

  Oh, and the Martians that first rushed them had been unarmed.

  You had to figure they weren’t expecting two human beings to fall out of the sky.

  They learned fast, you had to give them that. After the massacre, the little metalfuckers had gone to fetch their blasters. They’d attacked twice more, the first time charging down the trench, the second time flooding over the top. That time had been freaking close. Petruzzelli had taken a blaster hit in the foot of the same leg that was in a cast. Her suit had sealed off the hole and pumped her full of painkillers.

  She’d figured out where her suit kept the morale juice, too. She was mainlining it in injectable form.

  But even morale juice couldn’t convince her they had any hope.

  Their section of trench was about as deep as an Idaho farmhouse was high, narrow enough that you could touch both sides at once. Petruzzelli had the corner. Elfrida had the rim. Their open flank, a blind curve beyond Elfrida’s position, they’d blockaded with Martian bodies. Pieces of bodies, to be accurate. They’d caught the larger bits before they could float away, and splarted them into the trench to form a gappy barricade. That wasn’t going to block blaster fire for longer than a second, but it would give them warning of another imminent attack.

  Their fragment of Reldresal was spinning faster than it had before. Mars seemed to trot across the sky in jerks. An orbit at this altitude took about seven hours. Pretty soon they’d be in the dark, unless …

  Petruzzelli really hoped she was imagining that Mars was getting bigger.

  “Question,” she said aloud, to take her mind off her dread. “How long can you go on morale juice and Gatorade?”

  “Not morale juice, but you can live on fluids for weeks,” Elfrida said.

  “I hate drinking my own pee.”

  “Well, there’s always the alternative.” Elfrida pointed at the Martian corpses.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah. Just ask your suit. It’ll give you instructions for recovering their proteins and fluids.”

  “That’s hardcore.”

  “I did it before,” Elfrida said. “Shrug.”

  Petruzzelli was about to say Get out of here and then she remembered. After the destruction of 11073 Galapagos, Elfrida had been trapped on an asteroid fragment for a week. She’d survived by dining on a corpse.

  “I don’t know if I could do that,” she said.

  “I guess you’ll find out when we get hungrier,” Elfrida said. Then she blurted, “But Petruzzelli, you don’t have to. I wish I hadn’t done it the first time.”

  “You have to do what you have to do.”

  “No, you don’t! That’s the whole point. I mean, I know you try really hard to be bad-ass, Petruzzelli. But you don’t have to.”

  “Y’know,” Petruzzelli said, “I’m gonna have to think about that. It feels profound, but maybe that’s just because I bad-assed myself all the way into a trench on a scrap of Reldresal. Anyone would have regrets at this point.”

  “It’s OK to have regrets, too.”

  “What do you regret?”

  “Do you even need to ask? Mendoza. I really… really, really wanted to see him again.”

  “I regret
Michael. Michael Kharbage, my annoying little 2 i/c.”

  “I don’t know him, do I?”

  “He was there when you visited the Kharbage Collector. But I didn’t let you meet him, because I was embarrassed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s only ten years old. He’s ten goddamn years old, he depended on me, he trusted me, and I abandoned him. I abandoned him, just like my birth mom abandoned me.” Petruzzelli’s eyes watered like a faucet. “Do not cry in helmet,” she chanted. “Do not cry in helmet.”

  “Oh, Petruzzelli. Maybe, if we get back home, you can find him—”

  “No, I can’t, because he’s dead. He chased after me in the Kharbage Collector and he got caught by pirates. His dad told me.” Petruzzelli hugged herself, doubling over around the pain.

  Without warning, the sky lit up. They were facing away from Mars and so the flare of a drive showed up brightly against space. Elfrida shouted, “Mayday! Mayday!” Then they both cowered.

  The ship swept overhead. It was moving so slowly, relative to Reldresal, that Petruzzelli could have read the glow-in-the-dark writing on its hull.

  If she could read Chinese.

  “Holy crap,” Elfrida blurted. “That thing’s huge!”

  “I’m trying to calculate … I’m bouncing my targeting laser off it …”

  “Don’t make them think we’re aiming at them!”

  “They haven’t even noticed us. It’s two freaking kilometers long.”

  Petruzzelli felt like she was lying under a train, watching the undercarriage pass overhead.

  At last the gigantic ship glided away. Its drive, in a funny little fish-tail mounting, appeared to be way too small to push that much mass. It wasn’t an interplanetary drive, Petruzzelli concluded. Just a booster for orbital maneuvers.

  The ship heeled over, hiding its plasma flare from them, and dived straight down at Mars.

  “Well, what about that.” Petruzzelli said. “The Chinese have betrayed us. Who’d a thunk it.”

  “Maybe they came to help,” said Elfrida, ever the optimist.

  “If they came to help, they would have answered our Maydays. Watch your arc.”

  Excitement over, Petruzzelli tossed another Martian body part—a leg this time—around the corner.

  Nothing happened.

  “Hey.” She poked the muzzle of her carbine around the corner.

  Then her head.

  “They’re gone!”

  “Mine are gone, too! Maybe the Chinese ship scared them off.”

  Without pausing for discussion, the two women flew around the corner. They shared the understanding that almost anything would be preferable to sitting in that trench, waiting for certain death.

  They had seen as they fell that there was a Martian facility of some kind at the very end of the fragment. “They’ve got air,” Petruzzelli said as they flew cautiously down the trench. “They go indoors to breathe, once or twice a day, like whales. We might be able to surprise them; top up our oxygen.”

  “Yes, OK. Two against two hundred—”

  “Or two thousand—”

  “Let’s do it!”

  In the trenches there was nothing to navigate by. Mars’s crescent made a treacherous lodestar. Elfrida took the lead. She had a method: pop head up, search for landmarks, lock on with suit gyros, follow the dotted line, even if it meant crawling over the top.

  “You’ve done this before,” Petruzzelli noted. “But don’t forget you’re not an armored phavatar now.”

  “Too true. I keep having to remind myself that I can’t log out. Petruzzelli, I think I’m done with telepresence.”

  “I dig that.”

  They stopped to rest and sip Gatorade, and then pushed on. They didn’t meet a single Martian. The horde that had besieged their position seemed to have melted away into the rock.

  “This is starting to get spooky,” Petruzzelli said.

  “Well, their rock did just get broken in half. Maybe they have better stuff to do than harass us.”

  “No, I think you were right about the Chinese ship. It did something.”

  The Martian facility rose from the rock ahead of them, a spackling of regocrete right angles on a natural bulge, much smaller than Stickney’s Castle. Squares of light glittered at ground level. They worked their way around at a distance of eighty meters or so, staying in the trenches.

  A forest of plain steel cylinders rose over the horizon.

  “It’s a fuel depot!” Petruzzelli breathed.

  “And look.” Elfrida’s voice shook. “A ship.”

  “A troll.”

  They cringed in their trench, awed by the sight, so near, of a PLAN fighter. It stood on bowed jackstands near the facility, a graceless cylinder that could have been mistaken for one of the fuel tanks at a distance. Because it lacked heat radiators, the toilet roll looked less like a spaceship than some kind of scientific machine. Protrusions at the midpoint broke up its clean silhouette.

  Petruzzelli guessed, “There’s nothing inside the cylinder except engine. Those knobs are gun turrets.”

  “All except that one. See the one shaped like a tusk? That’s the cockpit.”

  “Trolls have pilots?”

  “Yeah. Don’t ask me how I know.”

  Petruzzelli visually measured the distance from their position to the toilet roll.

  “Are we going to do this?”

  “Damn straight we are.”

  Elfrida laughed, a hoarse little sound. “We won’t be able to fly it.”

  Petruzzelli checked her carbine’s ammo readout. She said, “Zhang modelled the big breakup. It’s too complex for granular predictions, but he got some estimates of how long it would take until the rate of collisions rises above one per second. Top end of the range, three weeks. Bottom end, sixteen hours.” She climbed out of the trench. “I want off this rock.”

  “You go that way. I’ll go this way.”

  Petruzzelli ignited her mobility pack and flew straight towards the troll. Nothing moved in the weak light from the depot. Nothing shot at her from the shadows. She flipped, slowed down, and grabbed onto a radar antenna. She killed her mobility and scrambled around to the tusk-like protrusion. It had a manual hatch. Manual! Like the windows in the Martian facilities; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Rinse and repeat for a hundred and thirty years.

  The inner curve of the tusk hinged up. She jumped into the pilot’s cradle. Frantically trying to figure out the instruments, she lost track of time.

  A fuzzy little comet flew out of the dark. Elfrida cut her mobility pack’s power and dropped into the cradle. “Move over.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “I had to look in the windows. C’mon Petruzzelli, I had to.”

  “What did you see? Wait, did they see you?”

  “Nope. It was a mess hall or something. Couple hundred of them just standing there. I couldn’t hear anything, of course, but the way their mouths were moving … it looked like they were singing.”

  xxxvi.

  Mendoza floated at the comms workstation, talking through the downlink from his suit. “Yes, I have restored power to the astrogation and comms systems.”

  “Can you access the drive controls from the astrogator’s desk?” The response came almost immediately. The Star Force Flattop Badfinger was one and a half light-seconds away.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Then you can fly the ship. You’ll just have to manually calculate your thrust requirements and relative velocity. You can kludge up an attitude control system by mirroring the inertial measurement sensor data to your workstation.” The Star Force officer went on giving increasingly detailed instructions, until Mendoza interrupted him.

  “I’m not a pilot.”

  “You’re not?”

  “I don’t have the foggiest idea how to … what you said. Can’t you do it remotely?”

  “Our software’s designed to work with primary flight instrumentation, not without it.”
<
br />   “Can’t you do it remotely? You, as in you, not an MI.”

  “I am not a qualified pilot, either. Our pilots are all busy right now. Even if we had someone available, your ship is too old. Our remote piloting software is not compatible.”

  “OK,” Mendoza said. “Sorry for taking up your time.”

  “Give it a try. We were instructed to recover your ship as a priority. That comes from way up on high. I shouldn’t even tell you, but the President mentioned you by name. So if you can transfer to a higher orbit, we will attempt a physical recovery when we get there.”

  “When’ll that be?”

  “Three hours from now.”

  “Well,” Mendoza said, glancing at the inertial navplot, “I’m losing altitude pretty fast. On the bright side, no one’s shooting at me.”

  The officer suddenly became confiding. “We’re getting the same information from the survivors on Reldresal and Stickney. All the orbital fortresses on this side of Mars ceased artillery fire at the same time those Chinese ships appeared in orbit. And troll attacks on the Thunderjack also ceased.”

  “There are survivors on Reldresal and Stickney?”

  “A few.”

  Mendoza killed the comms link. He said quietly to himself, “She might be alive.”

  Then he shook his head. He couldn’t even control the Monster’s fall.

  “Jun, did you hear what he said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Derek Lorna.”

  “I hope he burns in hell.”

  “No.” Jun laughed quietly. “He’s not a bad man.”

  “I’m trying to be Christian here, Jun, but—”

  “He was there when you installed the fridges. He kept asking questions about how the Ghost worked. When he jettisoned the modules, he must have taken the firewalls down at the same time. The Ghosts took control of the modules, got in touch with their friends—and my oratorio snuck into their transmissions, as it was designed to.” Jun paused. “I guess he didn’t want my work to go completely to waste.”

  “So, what, you now have root access to the orbital fortresses?”