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

by Felix R. Savage

  They’d built a flimsy scaffolding on an asteroid fragment.

  Covered said scaffolding with the mylar used for solar sails, the thinnest and strongest fabric in existence.

  Inflated the balloon with carbon monoxide.

  And heated it up, using one of the thorium breeder reactors, until chemistry took over …

  … and the asteroid fragment vaporized, to coat the inside of the bubble with a not-found-in-nature nickel-steel alloy containing trace amounts of platinum and palladium.

  Hey presto, instant spaceship.

  Well, almost.

  This was just the first of eight modules that had to be built. The thickness of the alloy shell had to be measured all over to make sure it was consistent. Decking, wiring, and insulation had to be installed. Then would come the fun part.

  People squeezed eagerly into the sphere, ooh-ing and aah-ing as if they could already see their future homes and gardens, churches and mosques, fishponds and chicken coops and goat runs, schools and gyms and micro-gee waterfalls.

  Mendoza felt a twinge of sadness. Elfrida should have been here to see this.

  His HUD flashed up a new email alert. It couldn’t be from her. His latest email wouldn’t even have reached Earth yet.

  To: John Mendoza [ID string attached]

  From: Fr. Benjamin Torres [ID string attached]

  Dear Mr. Mendoza,

  I am very sorry to inform you that your mother is dead. She received the Anointing of the Sick and I was present to bestow a Blessing of the Pope. Our dear sister will be very much missed …

  Mendoza shut down his comms program. He felt dizzy. He heard himself gasping. His suit told him in its toneless voice that he was consuming more oxygen than normal, and his pulse rate had spiked; did he wish to report a medical emergency?

  “No,” Mendoza choked out.

  Dead. Dead, and I wasn’t there.

  A tone of criticism seemed to run through the parish priest’s email. Or maybe Mendoza was just projecting.

  I didn’t even know she was sick!

  She was only seventy-five …

  A glove fastened on his shoulder. A new suit-to-suit channel appeared in his frequency selector. “Congratulations, Mendoza,” the boss-man said. “Couldn’t have pulled this off without you.”

  Mendoza blurted, “My mother just died.”

  “You’re kidding! I’m truly sorry about that.”

  “I didn’t even know she was sick.”

  “Are you beating yourself up over this? Do you think you should’ve been there?”

  Mendoza nodded, but it didn’t make his clunky old bubble helmet move. “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, she wouldn’t have wanted you to be there. She would’ve wanted you to be right here, where the future is.”

  In time, Mendoza might be able to convince himself of that. He might even allow himself to reflect that there was nothing tying him to Earth now. But in this moment, he knew his mother had wanted him to marry Elfrida and settle down in Manila, so he only nodded again, invisibly.

  The boss-man sighed. “Come with me. I’m heading over to the Monster.”

  The boss-man knew that Mendoza was friendly with Kiyoshi Yonezawa and his brother, and that Mendoza’s best friend in the colony, the Jesuit priest Thomas Lynch, could often be found aboard the Monster. Immersed in grief, Mendoza assumed the boss-man was ferrying him over there to receive the consolation he needed. In the Philippines it was common sense: you didn’t leave a newly bereaved person alone.

  But the boss-man greeted Kiyoshi with, “It worked. Not even gonna come and see?”

  Kiyoshi was hanging by his knees from a branch of an apricolmond sapling, hand-pollinating it. He grabbed the branch with one hand and twisted to face them, still upside-down.

  “Hell with that,” he said. “The PLAN just destroyed 6 Hebe.”

  The boss-man went still for a minute, checking the news for himself. Everyone else in the garden was quiet. Mendoza accessed the Monster’s news feed. It was true. There were atrocity pictures snapped by long-range telescopes.

  “Well, well,” the boss-man said. “So much for those folks that said the PLAN won’t hit the Belt… their ships can’t make it out here, it’s nothing to do with us, not our war …”

  Mendoza said, “I hate to put it like this, but maybe it’s nothing to do with the war? Maybe it’s business as usual.”

  “But it’s not,” the boss-man said. “The PLAN has always targeted purebloods. But there weren’t any purebloods on 6 Hebe. It was a complete melting-pot. So we declared war, and the PLAN has responded. This is their way of saying, ‘Bring it, metalfuckers.’ Equal-opportunity genocide. Meanwhile, Star Force is still sitting on its bureaucratic ass, making ‘preparations.’ Now are you convinced that we need to get the fuck out of the asteroid belt?”

  “6 Hebe, man,” Kiyoshi said. He was red in the face, although it could have been because he was hanging upside-down. “I used to go there all the time. I’ve got friends there. Had.”

  “Yeah. It sucks.”

  “Check out the feeds from Ceres. ” Kiyoshi flipped upright and dropped to the ground. “They’re panicking. They should be. Their Star Force garrison consists of two cruisers and a handful of measly smart mines. We’ve all got people on Ceres. Friends, family.”

  “So tell them to come and join us.”

  “In the Bigelows?”

  “We completed Salvation Module One today.”

  “An economy-sized steel balloon,” Kiyoshi scoffed.

  The boss-man started to explain why and how the Salvation would not only get built, but would be the best spaceship in history. The other people working in the garden had tactfully drifted away, but now they drifted back to listen. This was why everyone loved the boss-man: he was an uber-geek. Give him a problem and he’d science the ever-loving shit out of it, enjoying every minute.

  Mendoza glanced around the garden. He was hoping to see Jun Yonezawa, Kiyoshi’s brother. He saw abundant greenery. The Monster’s garden was the ship’s cargo module, a fat torus rotating around its spine, cunningly landscaped to cut off sight lines in every direction. Fruit trees and lattices separated the neat plots of vegetables where they stood. Mendoza squinted up past the sun-tube—the titanium sleeve around the spine of the Monster, covered in flexible UV tiles—to the other side of the garden, where shrubs and cherry trees broke up a topography of artificial hills. That was Jun’s place: a twist on the classical Japanese garden, with a shrine to Our Lady hidden beneath the trees. There was even a little stream with a plank bridge. An insane waste of space, from the life-support perspective.

  “Something wrong?” Jun said, appearing as a distant blur on his contacts.

  “Nothing,” Mendoza said, and then, with a shrug, “My mother died.” It seemed wrong to mention it, when hundreds of thousands of people on 6 Hebe had also died. But he hadn’t known them.

  “I’ll pray for her soul.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kiyoshi said to the boss, “You haven’t solved the bootstrap problem. Your Bussard ramjet won’t start working until you get the ship up to six percent of the speed of light.”

  “Twenty thousand kilometers per second, give or take,” the boss-man said. “Constant acceleration’ll get you there.”

  “In about four years,” Kiyoshi sneered.

  Kiyoshi seemed to be on the right side of the argument. He was saying all the pragmatic things that any spaceship engineer would say. Yet his objections couldn’t beat the boss’s sheer charisma. Kiyoshi stood half a meter taller than the boss, space-born, all gangly limbs and big mouth. The boss physically outshone him without even trying. Earthborn, he had the physique of a wrestler, the beard of a prophet, and the voice of a public-television documentary narrator. All the people in the garden were Japanese—they were Kiyoshi’s people—but they were watching the boss-man, hanging on his every word.

  Personally, Mendoza suspected Kiyoshi’s opposition to Salvation was sour grap
es. After all, the plain truth was that Kiyoshi would be nothing and nobody without his ship. And the boss-man was about to build a better ship than the Monster.

  Kiyoshi, however, was not rolling over. “If you want to hide out in the Kuiper belt, and to be honest? It’s a fucking stupid idea; there’s plenty of room left in trans-Jovian space. But if you’ve got some good reason for going out that far, just buy a regular old He3-D drive, or a bunch of them. Quit dicking around with antimatter. It’s a waste of money.”

  “Pretty soon,” the boss answered, “the price of He3 is going to go through the roof.”

  “That’s true,” Jun said, neutrally.

  “Frag off,” Kiyoshi said to his brother.

  Jun shrugged and vanished.

  “He knows whereof he speaks,” the boss-man said smugly. “The war’s turning the economy upside-down. Palladium, iridium, all the precious metals are surging against the UN spider. They’re all talking about the death of fiat currency.”

  “For the hundredth time in history.”

  “Sure, sure, but it pays to be careful.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Kiyoshi drawled. “We’ve already shifted our capital into real estate. Picked up four Jupiter trojans before the asking price went parabolic. We also invested in a tourism company with operations on Ganymede and Io. I’m looking to double my money there. All the Galilean colonies are seeing a surge in rich vacationers. What else? Took a flyer on 30,000 hectares of farmland in someplace called Saskachew, whatsit. Gonna flip that for a profit during the next Mars opposition.”

  Mendoza winced. The watchers had the decency to look embarrassed.

  The boss-man just laughed. “Small-time shit. Talk to me about buying farmland in Saskatchewan—that’s what it’s called, it’s in Canada—when you’ve made your first trillion.”

  Kiyoshi’s lips whitened. He turned to the others. “You know how he made his first trillion? And his second, and his third?”

  Mendoza actually did not know this. The boss seemed to have sprung fully formed into the solar system with a bottomless bank account.

  “You know how phavatars are actually a recent thing? They’re everywhere now, but twenty years ago, they were high-end corporate toys. The mass-market potential was always there, but it took a killer app to create the demand that would make the market take off. And that’s where our fearless leader came in. Yes, we have the honor of knowing the inventor of the first affordable sexbot.”

  The boss’s face turned mauve.

  “I’m not going to mention the specific details of his invention, because there are decent people present. But it apparently enables these bots to … satisfy their owners. Basically, he nailed the elusive customer experience that fetishists have been seeking since the era of blow-up dolls. So he was making billions a year from that one patent … until the ISA froze all the Hasselblatter-related bank accounts in the solar system last year.” Kiyoshi shrugged. “He had a few sexbots of his own when we first met. But that didn’t go with the whole wise patriarch shtick, so they got dumped.”

  The boss mastered himself. “It isn’t how you make it, it’s how you spend it.” He turned to the crowd. “I’m not a Biblical scholar, whereas I know many of you are, so I’ll defer to your expertise. But this is the first I heard that flipping real estate in the midst of a panic was a Christian teaching.”

  “Oh, just get the fuck off my ship,” Kiyoshi shouted.

  There was a moment’s complete silence.

  “OK,” the boss-man said. “OK.” He glanced at Mendoza, who was doing his best to blend into the trees. Then he ambled towards the airlock, settling his helmet onto his collar seal.

  Mendoza thought: He won that round.

  ★

  Kiyoshi squatted on the tiny patch of grass in front of Our Lady’s statue. There was no real solitude in the garden. There were just too many people on board right now. But thanks to Jun’s clever landscaping, the branches arching over the shrine gave the illusion of solitude.

  Real privacy was electronic. He subvocalized, rather than spoke aloud, letting his BCI transmit his words straight to Jun.

  ~We have to do something.

  “I agree,” Jun said, via Kiyoshi’s cochlear implants. He sat on a mossy ‘stone’ sculpted from lightweight fiberglass. The moss was real. Jun’s slight, black-cassocked body was not. He looked absolutely solid to Kiyoshi’s eyes, down to the brooding crease between his thick, black eyebrows. He appeared to be about thirty, six years younger than Kiyoshi. But Jun had died when he was twenty-seven. What Kiyoshi saw now was a projection on his retinal implants. He’d brought Jun back to life in the hub of the Monster as a customized off-the-shelf virtual companion. Three years later, Jun was much more than that. John Mendoza believed he was an artificial super-intelligence, and Mendoza was an IT guy—he could recite you technical chapter and verse. Kiyoshi concurred, with reservations. You would assume an ASI wouldn’t do stupid shit. And Jun still did, from time to time.

  This, however, was not one of those times.

  “6 Hebe,” Jun said quietly. “What’s next? Ceres? You’re right. We can’t just sit here. We have to do something. The UN won’t. It’s not necessarily that they don’t give a crap about us,” he added, anticipating the words forming on Kiyoshi’s lips. “They can’t. They haven’t got the ships or the manpower. Star Force really wasn’t ready for this. They haven’t even moved against Mars yet. When they do ramp up their war effort, that’s going to be their priority—not splitting their resources up to protect the colonies.”

  ~But what can we do?

  “I actually have an idea. It came to me when I was talking to Father Tom recently.”

  ~Bore the PLAN to death with theological hairsplitting? Kiyoshi joked. He liked Father Tom, but the priest could be very … Jesuitical. He and Jun had been spending a lot of time together recently. Although Jun was a member of the Order of St. Benedict of Passau, which emphasized humble piety, he’d recently gotten interested in Jesuit history and spirituality—topics that Father Tom was only too willing to expound upon for hours on end.

  “Something not unrelated to that,” Jun said. “You know, everyone’s got the wrong idea of how to beat the PLAN. We can’t defeat them kinetically.”

  Kiyoshi’s back tensed. Jun was alluding to an insight they shared, which never even occurred to anyone else in this godless solar system. “Damn straight.” He spoke with such force the words came out of his mouth, instead of staying subvocalized. “You can’t nuke the Devil. Demons laugh at bombs. They’re laughing at us right now. Jesus, there was this one place on 6 Hebe, a little bar called the Ganesha, they used to do live music … OK, I gotta stop.”

  Jun folded his cassock over his legs, pulling the illusory material tight around his kneecaps. “We have to do what needs doing, and we’re the only ones who can do it.”

  “The PLAN doesn’t need bombing. It needs …”

  “Exorcising.”

  A patter of applause came from the trees. Kiyoshi whipped around so fast he fell on his butt. Half a dozen bright-eyed children peeked out of the trees. Kiyoshi tried to frown, but he couldn’t help smiling.

  “I’m telling Yonezawa-sencho how we’ll defeat the PLAN, for good,” Jun said to the children, and then he resumed speaking silently in Kiyoshi’s ears.

  Kiyoshi forced his face to stay stony. On the face of it, Jun’s idea sounded crazy. But it was the right kind of crazy. And if it worked … peace in the solar system. Something they had never known.

  ~I like it, he said at last. ~But there’s one problem. What will we do with everyone? We can’t take them. And I can’t leave them here with the boss-man.

  “No. We’ll just to have to find another ship.”

  “Where?”

  Jun spread his hands: he didn’t know, either. “Stat Crux, dum volvitur orbis,” he said. Kiyoshi knew that much Latin. Only the Cross stands, and the world revolves around it.

  ★

  Mendoza hung out on the bridge of t
he Monster until Kiyoshi and Jun came in. Kiyoshi looked pleased to see him, this time. “Coffee?”

  Mendoza accepted. He felt like he had to try and make things better. He had not known that the tension between Kiyoshi and the boss-man had gotten so bad. Get the fuck off my ship. Wow.

  Kiyoshi had no coffee-maker, but he had a stash of blended coffee drinks in the refrigerator on the bridge. These were rare treats out here, 200 million klicks from the nearest café. Mendoza chose a macchiato with coconut milk. Hesitantly, he said, “Couldn’t you just, you know, try to get along with him? That might be enough.”

  “Enough for what? Nothing’s ever enough for him.” Kiyoshi was vaping. His cigarette smelt like dope. “He, I’m telling you, is a fucking sociopath.”

  Mendoza hunched his shoulders. He hated being caught in the middle like this. “I don’t know how it’s sociopathic to hide out in the Kuiper belt,” he muttered. “People have done it before. That’s how they found He3 on Eris.”

  “Which is still uneconomical to mine. The price would have to hit seven figures per kilogram before it would make sense to exploit it.” Kiyoshi exchanged a glance with Jun.

  Jun said, “A lot of people think we’re going to Eris.”

  “I should just tell them the truth,” Kiyoshi groused.

  Mendoza looked up. “Where are we really going, then?”

  For a moment, both of the Yonezawa brothers were silent. The Monster’s aging air circulation system rumbled. A fly crawled over the chequered marble-look floor.

  It was Jun who answered.

  “Planet X.”

  And if he said it, it was true.

  Mendoza choked on his coffee. Kiyoshi waved a dry-wipe around, catching droplets of java. The Monster was an old ship, with a lot of unprotected wiring behind the walls. “Sorry,” Mendoza said. “For real? We’re going out to the Oort Cloud?”

  Jun nodded.

  Planet X was a gas giant a bit bigger than Jupiter, the only Sudarsky Class II planet in the solar system—for a very generous definition of in. Discovered in 2042 and visited several times since by unmanned probes, it orbited the sun at a distance of 17,000 AUs. Yes, seventeen thousand times as far away as Earth. Out there, the sun would be indistinguishable from any other star. Planet X had a rocky core, a gas envelope composed mostly of water clouds, and two iceball moons about the size of Ganymede and Io, as well as a host of tinier ones. It inhabited a numinous corner of the public imagination. Game designers enjoyed populating it with sapient extremophiles. Its very name magnetized those who did not believe humanity had yet discovered all there was to know about the solar system, let alone the universe. Including Mendoza.