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

by Felix R. Savage

At this stage, Star Force was being very selective.

  They’d take you all right, but if you got recruited as a ground-pounder, that’s where you’d stay for the rest of the war. Same went for specialties such as telepresence, IT, demolitions, and so forth. Everyone wanted to go into battle, really into battle, not just remotely from a couch in low earth orbit. But only a few of these volunteers would ever set foot on a spaceship. Those with the best of the best qualifications … and those who knew how to work the system.

  Petruzzelli had all the desirable qualifications. Everyone in line had murmured enviously when she mentioned captaining a recycling barge in the Belt. But she also, unbeknownst to them, had an ISA dossier. It was now clear she had to do something about that if she was going to end up where she wanted in this war. She needed a definite, non-disputable gold star to balance out the black mark against her. Something so bright and shiny it would obscure the black mark from view.

  So she’d left the queue and hopped on the bus to Murtaugh.

  “I need a testimonial,” she said to her parents. “Testimonials, plural. The more the better.” She knew this from the guys in line who had researched ‘the system’ to death. “Real endorsements from real people. It’s the new fad.”

  “That’s not a new fad, it’s an old one,” Mom Gretchen said. “They used to call them character references.”

  “I guess everything that goes around comes around.” She looked at Dad Ezra—the only one of these people she’d met before today. “So could you do a testimonial for me?”

  “Well, honey, I hardly know you,” he demurred.

  “All you have to do is say I’m a good person!”

  “And I’m sure you are, but I don’t feel qualified to say so. It would be unethical.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said hopelessly. She knew what he was really saying: I’m not gonna lift one finger to help the UN fight their war.

  She left soon after that. Tempest followed her out, gushing about how nice it had been to meet her. Halfway down the drive, she got around to asking Petruzzelli to pay for the eggs. Biting back tears, Petruzzelli paid up. She knew her family was financially strapped. Small farmers always were. Not much different, actually, from asteroid colonists. Maybe this was happening to her because she’d treated all those settlers in the Belt unfairly. Sure, she’d only been doing what Adnan Kharbage told her to, but still. She held some responsibility for it. Maybe it was only fair that she, now, should be deprived of her one true dream.

  Out of sight of the farm, she sat down in the middle of the road. The silence of the countryside cocooned her. The Dirtglue® felt springy under her butt. She watched an army of ants dragging a cicada’s carcass away. She rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, inadvertently making her retinal implants flex. IS THERE AN EMERGENCY? they enquired in large text.

  “Why, yes,” Petruzzelli muttered. “Humanity is in real danger of extinction, and now that we’re finally doing something about it, my family doesn’t want to know.”

  She scrolled through her address book, trying to think of anyone else who might provide a testimonial for her. She fired off emails to Martin Okoli and a few of her other old colleagues from Kharbage LLC. Then she thought of the perfect person.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me!”

  A driverless delivery truck careened around the bend, its electric engine silent. It halted, its soft bumper nudging her suitcase.

  “Excuse me!” it trilled.

  “Hang on,” Petruzzelli said, scrambling to her feet. “Where are you going?”

  “Boise! With stops at … Murtaugh… Twin Falls … and Mountain Home!”

  “That’ll do.” Petruzzelli raised her thumb, making sure the truck’s sensors could see it. The tailgate opened. She climbed aboard and wedged her suitcase between sacks of hog feed. She nodded at the other hitchhikers flicking at their tablets in the dark, and enabled the backlight of her retinal implants, so she could write another email.

  ★

  From: Alicia Petruzzelli [ID string attached]

  To: Elfrida Goto [ID string attached]

  Hey! How’s everything going? I know it’s been ages. I’m really sorry about that. I suck at staying in touch.

  Well, it looks like you’re still in the Space Corps. (This information was available on Elfrida’s public profile.) I guess you guys will be operating in a support capacity? Or maybe you won’t be involved at all? It’s really hard to tell at this stage how big of a thing this is going to be, isn’t it? I mean, we don’t even know what Geneva’s strategy is, which I guess makes sense, because the PLAN is always listening, of course. Every announcement has to have a high disinformation quotient. But I heard (from the guys waiting in line at the Boise recruiting office) that they’re recruiting INFANTRY. Which has to mean they think we might end up in a ground war. Pretty exciting! And now I’d better not say anymore or this email might get ‘lost.’

  Anyway. Fill me in on what you’ve been up to! And while we’re chatting, I wonder if you could do one thing for me. It would only take five minutes …

  v.

  “All you have to do is say I’m a good person,” Petruzzelli had concluded, with a smiley-face that made Elfrida Goto remember Petruzzelli’s comical eyebrows.

  But it wasn’t that easy. Too positive, and her testimonial would seem fake. Elfrida needed to paint Petruzzelli as a person who had the right stuff. But she was pretty sure Petruzzelli would not want her to mention the most right-stuff thing she’d ever done: stealing a Star Force ship to save 30,000 helpless asteroid colonists. Elfrida herself had been involved with that escapade. The ISA had warned her never to mention it to anyone.

  In the end it took her an hour of recording and re-recording to produce five minutes of vid. She focused on the time she’d crossed paths with Petruzzelli in the Belt, the year after the 11073 Galapagos incident. That time, Petruzzelli had helped her to rescue another bunch of squatters—who’d turned out to be scammers, but never mind that. “Alicia really goes out of her way to help people,” Elfrida said, staring sincerely at the camera. “And I should also mention that she’s great at teamwork.” A bald-faced lie: Petruzzelli was the kind of person who broke teams. But Elfrida knew Star Force was big on teamwork.

  Her friend Jennifer Colden walked into the room as Elfrida was giving the vid one last editing pass.

  “God almighty,” Colden said, glancing at her tablet. “Why are you staring at the camera like that? You look insane.”

  “I was trying to look sincere.”

  “Microexpression fail.”

  “It’s so hard to be honest,” Elfrida fretted.

  She sent the vid to Petruzzelli, who replied seconds later with a pic of herself giving a double thumbs-up. No way she could have even watched the vid yet. She had orange-and-yellow streaked hair. In the time Elfrida had known her, it had been magenta, then turquoise, and now it was a sunburst. Elfrida wondered if Petruzzelli was really cut out to be a Star Force pilot.

  “Hurry up,” Colden said. “Get packed. We have to catch the two o’clock flight, or we’ll miss our connection in Amsterdam.”

  Colden also worked for the Space Corps. They had been summoned to a ‘training session’ at an undisclosed location. So, as far as they could tell, had every other Space Corps agent on Earth. Their itineraries went as far as Antarctica, so Elfrida suspected they would be heading off-planet, because one of Earth’s three big rail launchers was on Mt. Erebus in Antarctica. In answer to Petruzzelli’s unasked question—How big of a thing is this going to be?—Elfrida could have answered, if she weren’t concerned about having her email flagged for security issues: BIG.

  She and Colden had shuttered the Space Corps office in Rome, which doubled as Colden’s apartment. Now they were at Elfrida’s parents’ place on Piazza Benedetto Cairoli.

  As Elfrida dragged long-unused cold-weather gear out of the closet, her mother hovered, offering to pull strings to get them out of the war. Elfrida’s mother, Ingrid Haller, worked for
the NHRE—the New Holy Roman Empire, a shambolic little state occupying most of old Italy plus a chunk of the Balkans. Ingrid Haller had formerly been undercover, but now she assisted the cardinal who ran the Foreign Office. She thus had access to a lot of information she was not allowed to share with her husband and daughter.

  It was pretty clear what she was driving at now. Elfrida sat back on her heels. Her chest felt tight. “Mom. I don’t want a religious exemption or anything like that. Am I getting through to you? I am NOT quitting the Space Corps.”

  Colden retreated into the living-room.

  Elfrida kept talking loudly enough for Colden and her father to hear. “I know you’ve probably heard things that make you pessimistic about this, this whole, this war. Which is why you’re trying to get me out of it. But please, just STOP!”

  Ingrid Haller folded her arms. Her Austrian accent thickened, proving how upset she was. “All right, Ellie. I hear you. I will stop. But—”

  “There is no but,” Elfrida said, yanking the toggle of her rucksack closed. “We’ve been through this already. You wanted me to quit after I came back from Mercury. And then you wanted me to quit after I came back from Luna. But because I’ve seen the worst the PLAN can do, that’s exactly why I have to be a part of fighting them!”

  Colden said from the living-room, “I’m really pretty sure we won’t be fighting, per se, Ms. Haller. I mean, we’re the Space Corps. A typical day in the life is vaccinating livestock or teaching kids culturally appropriate nursery rhymes.”

  Ingrid Haller twitched her head as if Colden’s voice was a fly buzzing around her ears. She said quietly to Elfrida, “You think you have seen the worst the PLAN can do, but that is exactly my fear. You haven’t seen the worst. No one has.”

  They humped their rucksacks downstairs. In the alley off Piazza Benedetto Cairoli, heads popped out of windows, and shopkeepers came out of doors to wish them buona fortuna. Their departure was supposed to be a secret, but there were no secrets in an inner-city piazza. Elfrida’s eyes teared up. Romans! She loved them, and they considered her and Colden to be hometown girls, although Colden was the adopted daughter of FUKish aid workers, and Elfrida was Japanese-Austrian.

  Amid the warm salutations, Elfrida’s mother crammed bags stuffed with food into their hands. Her father whacked her shoulder lightly. This was the closest Tomoki Goto ever came to a public display of affection.

  “Itte kimasu,” [I’ll be back soon,] Elfrida said to him.

  “Ki o tsukete ne.” [Take care.]

  In Amsterdam, they boarded a chartered supersonic jet with two hundred other Space Corps agents.

  “OK, now I’m scared,” Elfrida said.

  “Me, too; I just saw Sophie Gilchrist. Put your bag in that seat, make her think it’s taken.”

  “Colden, a chartered jet? We usually have to fly cattle class, at our own expense. Is this still the Space Corps?”

  Colden looked up from opening Elfrida’s mother’s foilpack of Wiener Schnitzel. Her eyes reflected Elfrida’s fears. But what she said was, “Your parents are great.”

  “I know.” Elfrida decided not to complain about her mother’s over-protectiveness. She was thirty years old, not six. She could understand why her mother was worried. She changed the subject. “That woman I did the testimonial for, Petruzzelli? She has like four mothers and five fathers.”

  “How does that even work?”

  “I dunno. It’s all legal. I think it’s quite common, actually.”

  “Suddenly, I don’t feel so weird anymore.”

  Elfrida shook her head. “No, Colden, we’re the weird ones.” She gestured to include the other Space Corps agents yelling back and forth as the jet queued to take off. “We have or had married parents, we graduated from college, we’ve got full-time jobs … that’s weird. It’s because we’re UN. You’re second-generation, I’m third-generation—my mother used to work for the UN, and three of my grandparents did. We live in a bubble.”

  “That’s really interesting,” Colden said. “I never thought of that, but now that you say it, it’s obvious.”

  “I never noticed it, either, until someone pointed it out to me.”

  “Maybe that’s why everyone hates the UN. Because we’re normal.”

  “You’re probably onto something. Although, I dunno about normal. Is it normal to get on a jet in Amsterdam, with no clue where you’re going, in the knowledge that your employer has just declared war on a hostile AI with better technology?”

  Colden snorted. She clearly did not want to think about their destination. “The person who pointed that out to you. Would that be a certain person who keeps sending you Bible verses?”

  Elfrida threw an elbow into Colden’s ribs. “How’d you know?”

  “Because you always go pink when you talk about him.”

  vi.

  John Mendoza floated in space, in a smelly third-hand miner’s spacesuit. He seemed to be alone in the star-sprinkled abyss, except for the object behind him. This was an oblate sphere 200 meters in diameter, made of asteroid iron.

  The sphere blocked out the sun. A single feature rose above its surface: a shack-sized industrial air circulation unit rated for 105 cubic meters. The unit had been manually upgraded to cleanse and process the atmosphere within the sphere, which was a human-unfriendly mixture of carbon monoxide and toxic metallic vapors.

  Mendoza had done the majority of the work on the air circulation unit, and now he was monitoring it. But there wasn’t much to monitor. The unit was venting carbon monoxide to space at a controlled rate, which was exactly what it had been doing for the last five hours.

  So, oblivious to the miracle of industrial chemistry behind him, equally blind to the jeweled sweep of the heavens, Mendoza concentrated on his email. He was writing to Elfrida, his one true love, and he wanted to get every word right.

  I’m having a great time out here.

  Had there ever been a more boring opener in the history of email? It was true, but still boring. The trouble was that Mendoza couldn’t say anything about the Salvation project. He sent his emails via the Monster, so nobody censored them, but he censored himself, having fully taken on board the boss-man’s concerns about the ISA. He himself had tangled with the ISA before and was not keen to repeat the experience.

  So: having a great time out here.

  Elfrida had known that 99984 Ravilious existed. But she didn’t know that it no longer existed. Every day they were apart, more stuff happened, deforming the Venn diagram of their lives. The overlap was getting smaller and smaller. Mendoza was desperately trying to retard that process.

  It’s weird, but I feel at home in space now. In fact, every day I look at the stars, and I wonder: what’s out there? There’s so much we still don’t know, even about our own solar system! You feel the same way, right? You’ve always had that wanderlust.

  The plan had been for Elfrida to come out and join him here. They’d got as close as shopping for flights to 6 Hebe, the nearest major asteroid colony. And then … this stupid goddamn war.

  I wish you were here. It’s so damn exciting, and I want to share it with you. And even apart from my own selfish wants [Mendoza added a smiley face], you’re NEEDED here. You’ve got expertise in life-support systems, hydroponics, micro-gee health care, all that stuff. You’re EXACTLY the kind of person we need. I’ve actually talked to the boss about you. He says, tell her to get her ass out here! That’s the way he talks.

  He reread that paragraph. Decided, sadly, that it gave too much away. Deleted it and started again.

  Wish you were here …

  In the end, his email consisted of that, plus a Bible verse. John 15:13. He always included a Bible verse. It was a way of communicating with her without flapping his lips, and also a nudge. He worried she might be falling away from the Church in his absence. She was a recent convert, and Mendoza suspected she was not 100% committed to the Faith.

  He hit send, and then glanced at the display on the air recirculatio
n unit.

  “Shit!”

  On the far side of the sphere, Bridget Williams, a Mormon, was monitoring the second air recirculation unit.

  Mendoza radioed her. “Bridget, my unit’s stopped venting. I, uh, don’t know how long …”

  She laughed. “Venting’s finished, dude! I was about to radio you. Shut down your unit and c’mon over. We’re just waiting for the boss, then we’re going in.”

  Mendoza flew around the sphere on his mobility pack. He’d gotten used to spacewalking without a tether, although he still felt a reflexive twinge of fear every time he unclipped. The spaceborn knew no such fears. There was a whole crowd of them buzzing around the far side of the sphere. Parents towed small children in transparent papooses. They were coming over from the Bigelows. The Queen of Persia drifted about a klick away, status lights blinking on her slabby 1,500-meter hull.

  The colonists wore self-luminescent spacesuits, or old ones painted to glow in gaudy patterns. They were bright fireflies flitting around in the twilight of the distant sun. Some went for culturally symbolic designs. Mendoza liked the Amazonians’ logo of a hammer, with the jokey slogan Everything Is A Nail. He looked for Kiyoshi’s non-glowing, patched and re-patched black EVA suit, but did not see it.

  The boss-man arrived, riding a D&S bot shaped like a metal shark, with a polyfoam saddle. He looked like some kind of space cowboy. Mendoza knew he carefully calculated these things for effect, but it worked. It made people laugh as well as cheer.

  The boss-man nosed his D&S steed up to the sphere. Bridget Williams had chalked a circle around her air recirculation unit. An industrial-power cutter laser shot out from the D&S bot’s nose and cut it out.

  A two-meter disk of metal popped free, spinning like a giant coin with an air recirculation unit stuck on one side. Williams caught it, pulsing her mobility pack so it didn’t carry her away. She measured its thickness. “Eleven point one five centimeters!”

  Whoops broke out. Mendoza cheered with the rest, cracking his lungs. Despite the Pashtuns’ confidence in the procedure, no one had known until this moment whether it would work.