The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5)

by Felix R. Savage

  Michael’s chest felt tight. They couldn’t be this wimpy! “It’ll only take four months,” he pleaded.

  “At least four and a half,” Codfish said. “And if we run out of reaction mass along the way …”

  “We won’t.” Michael’s confidence returned. “I’ve crunched the numbers. Our delta-V budget will get us there with propellant to spare. And if—if they won’t let us park, then we’ll just cruise straight on to 39 Laetitia.” He revealed his Plan B unwillingly. “They’ve got a big colony, a physical precious metals market, branch offices of UNSA and UNESCO, a couple of really good Chinese restaurants …”

  Haddock tugged his goatee. “I wouldn’t mind visiting 39 Laetitia,” he allowed. “Where there’s a UNESCO office, there’s money to be made. But Michael, ye’re forgetting something.”

  “What?”

  “The war.”

  Michael shrugged violently. “Who cares about the stupid war?”

  “Aye, ye’re a true son of the Belt,” Haddock said. “We’re from Earth, so perhaps ye’ll allow that we have a better understanding of the stakes and the likely outcome.”

  “OK, great futurologist, share your predictions.”

  Kelp giggled at this.

  Captain Haddock didn’t smile. “Star Force is buggered,” he said curtly. “Humanity is buggered. War? It’s going to be a wipeout.”

  Michael sagged. “That’s why my father wanted to send me to Earth. He didn’t say so. But I know what he was thinking.”

  “Aye. And that’s why we’re going to Titan.”

  “Titan?”

  “Titan,” confirmed Codfish. “Where it rains hydrocarbons, and you can fly by flapping your arms—”

  “And,” Haddock finished, “tourism is exploding.”

  Michael said, “Titan is three point two billion kilometers from Earth.”

  “Sure that’s the point,” Haddock said. “Your daddy has one view on the matter. I respect that. But we have another. And we’re not alone.”

  “I said billion, not million.”

  “The further the better, for a certain type of person. The rich type.” Haddock rubbed his hands.

  “Nuh uh,” Michael said. “You don’t understand. This ship’s not going a billion kilometers anywhere. We only get milligee acceleration. Plus, there’s fuel to think about.”

  “We might have to stop off at one of the Jovian moons to fill up the tanks,” Haddock conceded.

  Galvanized, Michael swung back to the 3D starmap. “Well, look at where Jupiter is right now. It’s on the same side of the sun as 99984 Ravilious. So we can swing by, and then if it doesn’t work out, we can divert to Ganymede or Callisto instead of 39 Laetitia. I don’t mind,” he added generously.

  Haddock pulled on his goatee. “We’d be headed in the wrong direction.”

  “Not really. Look at this. Considering the distances involved, a few newtons of off-axis thrust could alter our trajectory into this one …” Craning up at the starmap, he snapped his fingers to run a pork chop algorithm. “Or this one, or this one …” Red lines multiplied, arcing out from Ceres to every major asteroid this side of the sun, until it looked like Ceres was exploding in a fountain of blood. “We could go anywhere!”

  He mentally crossed his fingers, praying.

  “I have a question,” Coral said. “Why are you so small?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re spaceborn, right? But you’re much smaller than Kelp. You look Earthborn.”

  Michael sighed. Impatiently, he sorted through the photo albums he kept on his contacts and threw a picture of Ceres, with all its orbitals, up on the bridge’s big screen. “See that O’Neill? No, the little one in a low polar orbit. That’s our other house.”

  Kelp looked up. “Spin gravity?”

  “Yeah. I was born in one full gee. I’ve pretty much always lived in gravity. That’s my school over there.” He pointed to another of the habitats orbiting Ceres like a cloud of metal flies. “I mean, my last school. They kicked me out in second grade.”

  “Why’d you get kicked out?”

  The truth was that Michael had refused to go back unless he could take his mecha with him. The school refused to let him keep it. “For being an obnoxious little genius,” he said, stealing the phrase Petruzzelli had often used—in loving tones—to describe him. Why had she left him behind?

  “The gravity in here hurts my bones,” Kelp said. The rotation of the command module around the spine of the Kharbage Collector produced 0.7 gees. To Michael, it was nothing. “That’s why I’m not standing up and applauding.”

  “Applauding?”

  “I don’t want to go to freaking Titan.” Kelp turned to his father. “Dad, all we need is somewhere safe to hide out. We don’t need to go that far. 99984 Ravilious would do, wouldn’t it?”

  Michael grinned gratefully at the other boy. He said, “Engineering & Maintenance is a zero-gee environment. You could hang out there if you would feel more comfortable.” He realized that might sound as if he were trying to kick Kelp off the bridge. “I mean, that’s where I usually hang out. I have lots of stuff down there, like a bunch of different printers and a Gravimetric Upcycler.”

  Captain Haddock stroked his goatee, hiding his expression. “Yer argument is not without its merits, sprog o’ mine,” he told Kelp. “Against that, the ‘frag you if I ever see you again’ thing is not a concern to be dismissed lightly. But then again, there’s a war on. ‘Twould be a small man who couldn’t put aside old grudges in the service of the common good!”

  For some reason, he winked at Michael. Then he set his ostrich-feather hat at a new, rakish angle.

  “Cap’n,” he ordered Codfish, “plot the swiftest route to 99984 Ravilious!”

  “Yay!” Michael and Kelp shouted together.

  Codfish scowled. “I don’t know how. You do it.”

  “All ye have to do is tell the astrogation computer where ye want to go, numbskull.”

  “All right, all right. I still think this is a bad idea, but no one ever listens to me.”

  Anemone poked her head up through the hatch in the floor that led down to the crew quarters. “Dinner is served,” she said. “Lucky I’m good at cooking with nutriblocks.”

  iii.

  99984 Ravilious no longer existed.

  Where once an M-type asteroid, massing 1.5 x 1015 kg, and measuring ten kilometers at its longest axis, had rotated in a lonely orbit around the sun, there now drifted a cloud of gravel. The pieces ranged from a few centimeters to three kilometers in diameter.

  It was not easy to blow up an asteroid made mostly of iron.

  They had done it by packing explosives into the cavity at the big end of 99984 Ravilious.

  Until ten days ago, that cavity had been filled with air. It’d had a sun-tube running down the middle. Thorium breeder reactors had supplied heat and energy. They’d also powered the thrusters that had spun 99984 Ravilious up to 0.25 gees of rotational gravity. Hydroponic farms had provided enough food for the asteroid’s population of six-and-a-half thousand, with a freezable surplus. They’d even had pigs. Chickens, of course. The boss-man had kept a herd of goats on his farm down at the desert end of the cavern. Although it was organized on different social principles, the colony used to remind Kiyoshi Yonezawa of his home, 11073 Galapagos, a hollowed-out Venus trojan.

  11073 Galapagos had been destroyed by the PLAN.

  Nuked.

  The fruits of all their hard work flung into the vacuum like so much garbage.

  And now the boss-man had done the same thing to 99984 Ravilious, on purpose.

  Kiyoshi did not believe it had been necessary, could not visualize the better future the boss-man kept talking about, and dwelt bitterly on the sheer waste of it.

  Oh, sure, they’d evacuated the goats beforehand. Big whoop. Kiyoshi hated goats. The farms were gone. All 6,503 people who had inhabited 99984 Ravilious were now squashed into a fleet of Bigelows—inflatable habs designed to hold fifty people e
ach, max—which the boss-man had procured, a few at a time, over the years. Kiyoshi had even bought a few of those Bigelows himself, not knowing what they were for, just following orders. Now he felt stupid.

  He had evacuated his own people to his ship, the Monster, and moved the Monster to a safe distance. Those asteroid fragments were dangerous. Drifting around, crashing into each other, shattering into smaller pieces, shooting off metallic shrapnel that could go straight through a Bigelow—it was a wonder they hadn’t lost any of the habs yet.

  The Bigelows trailed on tethers, like a disorganized flock of ducklings, behind the boss-man’s own ship, the Queen of Persia.

  Queen of Persia.

  Give me a break.

  The ship was a former ITN hauler. It hadn’t gone anywhere since the boss-man stole it, in his final act of piracy before reinventing himself as an underground space colonization guru.

  Kiyoshi made the rounds of the Bigelows, talking to people, gauging how they felt about the destruction of 99984 Ravilious. Depressingly, they all trusted the boss-man to deliver on his promises of better things to come. Guru didn’t come close. These people, exiled from the UN, by choice or not, had accepted the boss as their god.

  And why shouldn’t they, when the Queen of Persia contained the supplies of water and oxygen they needed to survive, as well as the farms, bottled up and transported to the old hauler before the big boom, in the holds of the boss-man’s fleet?

  That fleet: two old Startractors, a Steelmule, a couple of fifth-hand Hyperponys, and a refinery bought on the cheap from a bankrupt mining operation out Eros way. Plus, of course, the Monster.

  The captains of these ships, like Kiyoshi himself, had served the boss-man faithfully for years, running his errands throughout the solar system, stockpiling the stuff he wanted.

  For what? they’d often wondered.

  Now they knew.

  “Creative destruction, man!” said the captain of the Steelmule. He was the thirty-first person who’d used that phrase to Kiyoshi today. “We’re gonna show the UN who’s got balls!”

  Kiyoshi didn’t even bother to talk to the other pilots.

  He went to have a chat with the Pashtuns, precisely because they were the boss’s own people. They would know what he was really thinking.

  The Pashtuns—the men, anyway—were outside, in spacesuits bought as a job lot from the same mining company that had sold them the refinery. Galactic Endeavors, said the logos on their mobility packs. They were building some scaffolding on a medium-sized fragment of 99984 Ravilious. A few kilometers off, the other fragments waltzed around in a lethal dance.

  Kiyoshi helped to build the scaffolding. It was made of goat silk—a fiber that the boss-man’s gengineered goats produced in their milk. Stronger than spider silk, stickier than duct tape. They sprayed splart on the filaments to stiffen them into rods, and connected these with more splart. Gradually, they were building a geodesic sphere around the fragment.

  “How big are you going for?” Kiyoshi asked.

  “Two hundred meters in diameter.”

  “And we’re making how many of these?”

  “Eight.”

  “We could have just chipped pieces off the end.”

  “You’re undermining morale,” said a Pashtun elder, whose beard almost filled his faceplate with gray curls. “Go away.”

  That was fairly blunt, as was the custom of the Pashtuns. Kiyoshi went and sat in the Bigelow they had tethered to the fragment. It was one of the Pashtuns’ home habs. Divided by a curtain down the middle, so that the women could have privacy, it reeked of body odor, curry, and goats—some of the wretched creatures had ended up in here, goat-napped by the Pashtun children, who treated them as pets. Bleating drifted from behind the curtain. Female voices argued in Pashto-English creole. On the men’s side, half a dozen exhausted construction workers floated, sipping tea from pouches. Kiyoshi copied their pose, crosslegged in the air, and talked to them about the technicalities of the project.

  The Pashtuns had once worked in the oil industry, long ago and far away on Earth. After the oil industry died its long-overdue death in the early 23rd century, they had moved into space as asteroid miners. They gave the impression that this process was old hat to them.

  “It’s the same procedure we use to extract platinum-group metals from M-type rocks. Only this time, we will be extracting iron.”

  The boss-man arrived. Someone must have told him Kiyoshi was wandering around, undermining morale.

  All the Pashtuns bowed low. In zero-gee, this meant doubling over so their turbans brushed their socks. The boss-man doffed his helmet. “Stinks like a fucking hab in here,” he bellowed—a joke that hadn’t gotten old yet. It would, Kiyoshi judged, after they’d all been living in habs for another couple of weeks. Living in a hollowed-out asteroid, you were at the top of the property ladder in the Belt. This might feel like an adventure at the moment, slumming it in Bigelows. But it sounded like the women, at least, were getting fed up with the lack of gravity and the goat feces floating around mucking up everything from their hair to their sleeping squats to the food prep areas.

  Accepting a pouch of tea, the boss-man turned to Kiyoshi. “Glad I tracked you down! I need you to go and pick a cargo up from Laetitia. Liquid hydrogen. Seeds. Splart, we always need splart.”

  Kiyoshi was wise to this trick by now. The boss-man started off by asking you to do something reasonable. And before you knew it, you were helping to build geodesic spheres of goat silk for a goddamn Bussard ramjet.

  “Get Zygmunt or Brian to do it,” Kiyoshi said. “I have five hundred and sixty-four people living on the Monster right now. I can’t schlep cargoes.”

  “Ah well, it can wait,” the boss-man said. And then the trap closed. “I’ll make sure your people are the first to move in, when Salvation is operable.”

  Salvation.

  The boss-man had named his soon-to-be-built 7,000-person ship Salvation.

  It was not at all a given that he had a sense of irony about it.

  “I appreciate that,” Kiyoshi said. What else could he say, with the Pashtun men staring at him, waiting for him to show appropriate gratitude for this mark of favor? They carried knives. Peshkabz had needle-sharp points, as well as symbolizing the cultural heritage of the Pashtunwali. Kiyoshi wondered for just a second if coming in here had been a bad idea. But, no—he was the boss’s right-hand man. Their partnership went back sixteen years. He deserved to be first in line for living space in Salvation, deserved to be honored in front of these roughnecks, would have felt slighted by anything less …

  Jesus.

  The way the man worked on your head.

  “So,” Kiyoshi said, with an expression of brow-furrowed concern. “Scanners picked up a ship heading this way. It’s a long way out. Could be making for Laetitia. But you think it might be the ISA?”

  This was a calculated low blow.

  “Nope,” the boss-man said. “It’s just some stuff I ordered from Ceres. Soil matrix. Bamboo seeds. Spare parts.”

  “That’s good to hear. Because it kinda looks like there are two ships coming—one shadowing the other. I thought the second one might be … you know.”

  The ISA. The spooks. The information police of the solar system, who dabbled in other kinds of policing, too. The boss-man was wanted for murder, ship theft, IP theft, and God knows what else. Not many people were aware of this. Kiyoshi had taken a risk by alluding to it.

  “As soon as I know the ISA are coming,” the boss-man said, “you’ll know it.” He reached over and slapped Kiyoshi on the shoulder. His black eyes were hard. “You’ve got that nice hypervelocity coilgun; you never use it.”

  The Pashtun men laughed. It had definitely been a mistake to come in here.

  “I’m just wondering,” Kiyoshi murmured.

  “Like I said, when I know, you’ll know.”

  “My sources say there’s a lot of chatter on Ceres. All those procurement trips. People aren’t gonna not notice w
hen someone buys sixteen antimatter generators.”

  “Your sources?” The boss turned to the other men. “His brother.”

  “Better source than your brother,” Kiyoshi said, keeping his anger in check.

  Right on cue, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, Ph.D., entered the Bigelow. He came in through the airlock, darted into the changing cubicle, and exchanged his spacesuit liner for a traditional Pashtun tunic, loose trousers, and turban. He floated around the curtain into the women’s side. Cue screeches. A late convert to Islam—as opposed to the politically advantageous pretense of Islam—Dr. Hasselblatter simply could not get it through his head that the Pashtuns took purdah seriously.

  He returned to the men’s side, not at all embarrassed by his faux pas, towing his newly-wedded wife, one of the spaceborn Pashtun girls. His seven-year-old son followed, riding on his pet goat.

  The boss-man looked unamused. Kiyoshi’s smile, by contrast, was genuine. Dr. Hasselblatter was good for the Pashtuns, in his opinion. Dr. Hasselblatter had once been a famous politician, the director of the Space Corps, and a prominent member of the President’s Advisory Council. Now he was a construction worker in the asteroid belt. He was much happier. And his absent-minded insouciance was a useful corrective to the Pashtun community, who tended to be too uptight, Kiyoshi thought, about shariah-related stuff.

  Yet the boss-man begrudged his brother his happiness. Before he lost his job, Dr. Hasselblatter had not only provided 99984 Ravilious with priceless inside information, he had kept the ISA off the boss-man’s back. For twenty years, he’d singlehandedly made sure those charges stayed stuffed in the back of some virtual filing cabinet. Highly-ranked UN bureaucrats wielded amazing powers. But when a person fell from that high, they fell hard. Dr. Hasselblatter had ‘resigned’ last year amid a sex scandal. And when he lost his job, the boss-man had lost his protection.

  The Salvation project had started the day Kiyoshi brought Dr. Hasselblatter out here, shorn of all his clout and connections.

  No wonder the boss-man greeted his younger brother with a grin that could have sliced through splart.