“Coffee,” Colden said.
“Hot chocolate,” Elfrida said.
They headed for the mess hall. An announcement halted them, blaring from speakers barnacled to the corners of the buildings. “All personnel, assemble on Lilly Beach. Tout le personnel, se réunissent sur Lilly Plage …”
By the time the announcement got around to repeating itself in Portuguese, the fifth of the UN’s official languages, the Space Corps agents had figured out that Lilly Beach / Plage / Playa / Plyazh / Praia must be the strip of gravel they could see from here. They drifted that way, turning their ankles on boulders hidden under the snow. A lot of people had neglected to pack appropriate footwear. Not Elfrida and Colden. They were veterans by comparison with most of these kids. Striding along smugly in their snowboots, they crossed the coast road ahead of the others.
They had to walk through the village of parked vehicles to reach the beach. Steam and the smell of food cooking wisped out of the big trailer’s vents. Adelie penguins clustered around the steps, clearly hoping for handouts.
The first human being they saw was a man sitting in the open side door of a snowcat, watching the pack ice in the bay. His bright yellow wetsuit showed off a swimmer’s physique. “Is this all of you?” he said.
“No,” Elfrida said. “The others stopped to pet the penguins.”
“Don’t. They’re pests.”
The man had an Australian accent. He nodded out to sea.
“Be here any minute.”
Teeth chattering, Elfrida strained her eyes. At first she saw nothing. The low sun gilded the pack ice and the gaps of water between the bergs. Then the man pointed. Just a few hundred meters away, a whale breached. A ragged arc of spray dispersed in the wind.
People’s heads popped out of the boiling foam. Some of them swam expertly. Others doggy-paddled.
Elfrida texted Colden, using the gaze-typing interface of her contacts. “Cetaceophiles.”
“Looks that way,” Colden texted back.
Cetaceophiles were pretty much the only people, apart from spaceport workers, who lived in Antarctica full-time. They lived off the land, as it were, by working as guides. What safari trips had been to the 21st century, swimming with the whales was to the 23rd. Elfrida therefore assumed the hapless swimmers struggling towards shore were tourists, despite the fact that she did not see a fleet of luxury RVs or a cruise ship anchored in the bay.
The rest of the Space Corps agents straggled down to the beach, fussing over a girl who had been pecked by a penguin. Yellow Wetsuit shot them a sour look. He was setting up a windbreak, stomping on the pegs to drive them into the beach. Elfrida and Colden helped by holding up the bright red nylon while he worked.
The wetsuit-clad swimmers stumbled out of the surf in pairs, with scuba tanks on their backs and bubble helmets on their heads. Each tourist was assisted by a cetaceophile. They dropped onto hands and knees as soon as they hit the beach. Refusing offers of help, they crawled doggedly uphill until they could collapse in the shelter of the windbreak.
Colden: “Do you think we’re going to have to do that?”
Elfrida: “Didn’t bring wetsuits …”
Colden: “There are ICEBERGS floating out there. If anyone tries to make me get in that water, I’m going home. What does this have to do with the war?”
A helicopter thudded overhead, descending to land on the road. Elfrida scarcely noticed it, horrified and fascinated by what she now saw. One of the tourists had managed to stay upright. He lurched up the beach. Yellow Wetsuit went to meet him. When the two men stood side by side, it became apparent that the ‘tourist’ was freakishly skinny, and tall.
Spaceborn tall.
Those raised in microgravity, much less freefall, often grew into string-bean people: 190 centimeters was average for a woman, 210 for a man. This tourist struggling mightily to stay on his feet was about that.
But if he was spaceborn, he should have been dead. The spaceborn could not survive in Earth’s gravity. Their hearts were too weak, their bones too breakable. Oh, they could last for a while on bedrest, but swimming in Antarctic waters? No way.
The crowd of Space Corps agents parted. A petite woman in a designer bubble-coat strode onto the beach, followed by a dozen aides.
Elfrida: “OMG it’s Petroskova.”
Colden: “Scope the Yves St. Laurent.”
Elfrida: “Scope the retinue.”
Colden: “Many minions.”
Elfrida: “What’s the collective noun for minions? An incompetence of minions?”
Colden: “A squabble of minions? An encumbrance of minions?”
Their banter masked nervousness. Annette Petroskova was the new director of the Space Corps. She had replaced Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter last year after Dr. Hasselblatter quit amidst a sex scandal. Petite and gray-haired, she resembled a well-groomed Yorkshire terrier, but appearances were misleading. For thirty years she had dedicated herself to the fine art of climbing ladders and kicking them away with followers still attached.
She looked almost human right now, as she was clearly freezing her butt off. Standing close to her, Elfrida could see gooseflesh on the sliver of skin at the neck of her cape. But her voice carried, clear and strong. “Welcome! We’re honored and humbled to have you here with us. It makes me proud—personally, and on behalf of the people of Earth—to call you friends and colleagues.”
Colden: “Oooh, I feel special.”
Elfrida: “She’s just trying to put us off our guard.”
But Petroskova had not been talking to them at all. She walked down the beach to the “tourists.” Almost all of them were sprawled on the gravel in exhaustion. The one who’d stayed upright shook hands with her. He’d unsealed his scuba helmet, revealing spiky red hair and a pale, UV-deprived complexion.
Elfrida and Colden sidled closer in order to eavesdrop.
“… in appreciation of your heroism,” Petroskova gushed. Something was not right. This was the way Petroskova would address someone who outranked her.
The red-haired man responded, “Others sacrificed their lives. We came back alive. What’s so heroic about that?”
His accent cut Elfrida to the bone. Clipped, with a lilt. Last time she heard that accent she’d been on the moon. “Colden, he sounds like he’s from Shackleton City!”
“I thought everyone from Shackleton City was dead.”
The PLAN had struck Luna’s largest city last year with a lethal double whammy of nukes and bio-terror.
“No, just most of them,” Elfrida replied absently.
Petroskova steamrolled on, “Please accept Earth’s gratitude in the name of those fallen heroes. We promise to help in whatever way we can to ensure your full recovery.”
The red-haired man shrugged. Not in the least daunted, Petroskova pivoted to speak to the other “tourists”.
Elfrida seized her moment. She walked up to the red-haired man. She had to tilt her head right back to look him in the eye.”Can I ask your name?”
“Bob Miller.”
“I’m Elfrida Goto.” Her name would mean no more to him than his did to her. She was just being polite. She had already tried to sneak a look at his public profile, but either he didn’t have a wifi connection, or he didn’t have a public profile. Which was unheard of. Then again, it was also unheard of for the director of the Space Corps to fly to Antarctica to say hello to a bunch of …
… tourists?
Who all happened to be young and spaceborn?
Bob Miller was not so young. Forties. He had hazel eyes so clear they were hard to meet.
Elfrida felt the other Space Corps agents watching her, hoping she could clear up the confusion.
“What are you doing here?” she asked bluntly.
“Swimming with the whales. It’s supposed to be therapeutic.”
“Yes, it’s very popular with tourists. But not spaceborn tourists. When the spaceborn come to Earth, they basically have to lie flat with a machine breathing for them. Ha
ha.”
“Not if they’ve had their skeletons reinforced, and their hearts and lungs replaced with plastic ones.”
“Oh, of course. But isn’t that, like, insanely expensive?”
Miller shrugged. “We’d no choice, did we?”
A cetaceophile passed out pouches of hot soup. Miller accepted one, and removed the cap with his teeth. His teeth were tartan. Gray, with black and red stripes.
“What clan?” Elfrida said. She’d worked with some neo-Highlanders in space.
Miller smiled for the first time. “Balmoral. It’s an homage to my sister Martine. She was a fan of all things Victorian. She died in Shackleton City last year.” He drank his soup. “I had to get my teeth replaced, anyway; jawbone, the lot. Tartan seemed like a sensible choice at the time.”
“Can I ask what happened?” Elfrida said.
Miller’s smile vanished. His bright hazel eyes locked onto hers. “My Fragger Mk II was shot down on one of the PLAN’s orbital fortresses. During the exfil operation, my jaw got crushed. It turns out that flexible helmets have disadvantages. Any more questions?”
Elfrida had stopped listening after the words shot down. Gaping at him, she said, “It’s already STARTED?”
“Of course it has. We started it.”
Colden texted her. “Welp, I think I can clear a few things up. I’m talking to the whale-huggers. The spaceborn guys are special ops types from Luna. Yes, Luna has special forces. Who knew? They took a pounding in combat, and they’re here to recuperate.”
“Yeah, I just found that out.” Elfrida spoke out loud by accident. Bob Miller grinned at her.
“And what are WE doing here?” Colden continued. “You’re gonna love this. We’re their therapists.”
★
It came to light later that someone, never to be named, had over-zealously applied a CLASSIFIED stamp to the briefing materials the Space Corps agents were meant to have received. So sorry! Here you go!
That sorted out, Petroskova and her minions helicoptered back to civilization.
The Space Corps agents remained on the Scott Coast for the next three months, along with a dozen cetaceophiles and two hundred and fifteen special forces personnel from the moon.
★
In private, Elfrida and Colden called Bob Miller and his troops the Really Cool Manly Men. This was not intended as a compliment.
The special forces recuperating on the Scott Coast included a couple dozen women, a handful of individuals of indefinite gender, and one hermaphrodite, but if anything, these strove to be even more Cool and Manly than the actual males.
The RCMM hiked in the snow before breakfast; they did small-unit tactical exercises on the headland; and of course, they swam with the whales, under the guidance of the cetaceophiles. 23rd-century popular wisdom held this to be therapeutic. It certainly worked wonders for the RCMM’s fitness levels. The frail, stumbling “tourists” soon morphed into lean, mean swimming machines who just happened to be very tall. They would have looked like fashion models, if not for their dubious cosmetic augments, such as Bob Miller’s ridiculous tartan teeth.
Many of the RCMM also sported tattoos of a flag new to the solar system, as of last year. It consisted of a star and crescent—the symbol of Islamic theocracy—in the top left corner, superimposed on another symbol almost as old, which was called the Union Jack.
After the catastrophic PLAN bombardment of Luna, a handful of oligarchic families had declared independence from the UN. They were evenly split between exiled Arab royalty and tech moguls whose heritage went back to the old United States. All they had in common was a passion for Victoriana. Hence, the flag.
Some of the RCMM even had prosthetic limbs skinned in the same colors. For a nation less than a year old, the Independent Republic of Luna sure did inspire strong patriotic passions. The Fraggers could be heard singing on their hikes: “Oh it’s a long way to the mo-o-on. It’s a long way to burn. It’s a long way to the mo-o-on, so take your fragging turn!”
They called themselves Fraggers, after their ships—small, stealthy fighters developed on Luna for the Luna Defense Force, which many of them had belonged to before independence. Post-independence, the LDF had been reorganized and greatly expanded. Bob Miller claimed that they could and would win this war before Star Force got off its ass.
“If it was that easy, you wouldn’t be here, would you?” Elfrida said to him, after enduring another lecture about the technicalities of combat against the PLAN’s space fighters, known as toilet rolls.
He shut down like she’d flipped a switch, and she kicked herself. If she’d let him go on, he might have spoken about the disaster he’d briefly referred to on their first day … an action that had obviously gone badly for Miller and his troops.
Or so Elfrida assumed.
Neither she, nor Colden, nor any of the other Space Corps agents were having any luck getting the Really Cool Manly Men to talk about it.
“We’re supposed to be their therapists,” Colden groused. “How can you help someone who won’t mention their trauma?”
“Maybe they’ve been told not to mention it?” Elfrida said. “It might be a military intelligence thing.”
“That would be really stupid.”
“I know! We’re supposed to be allies.”
Elfrida decided on total openness. “Listen,” she said to Bob Miller. She had been in charge of pairing up RCMM and agents, and had assigned Miller to herself in hopes of repairing the dumb-as-a-rock first impression she’d made. “I’m not a licensed therapist. I’m not a therapist at all.”
“Do tell,” said Miller sarcastically.
“But I have had lots of therapy myself. We all have. It’s mandatory after you complete an assignment that might have been traumatic in any way. So I know how you feel. You wish this would be over so you can get back to work. But I guarantee you won’t be allowed to go back into combat until you’ve had the required number of sessions. So—”
“I’ve never had therapy before,” Miller said. “But I think one rule is that you’re not supposed to assume you know how the patient feels.”
“Oh. Whoops.”
“I’m actually not wishing this would be over. I’m wishing you would swim into fondling range. You have a very nice ass.”
Elfrida folded her arms. “That is classic,” she said. Not that she wasn’t a teensy bit flattered. “It’s projection. Or transference. Or something.”
“No, it’s sexual deprivation,” Miller said. She could see his goofy grin through the bubble of his scuba helmet.
They were finning around at a depth of three meters. Over their heads, the choppy gray roof of the sea bent and flexed. Both of them wore wetsuits, of course. Most of the Space Corps agents still adamantly refused to go in the water, but Elfrida had decided to give it a try. She had hoped Miller would be more forthcoming underwater, in an environment that was more comfortable for him—both because swimming mimicked freefall, and because their wetsuits were like spacesuits, interposing layers of tech between them, so it wasn’t as intimate as talking face to face. So far, it seemed to be working … if you could count lewd come-ons as openness.
Now that they had gotten used to the sea, the RCMM often dived deep. They could collapse their artificial lungs at will, just like whales—an adaption for burning at ten gees, which was equally useful in the ocean. All the cetaceophiles had the same augment. It was the price of entry into their exclusive club. But Elfrida would have gotten the bends if she tried to go much deeper than this. So she and Miller were paddling around within reach of the wintry sun’s light, while swells rolled over them to break on the beach.
The intense cold of the water seeped through Elfrida’s wetsuit like a distant whisper: the idea of cold, rather than actual discomfort.
“Of course, I knew you weren’t a real therapist,” Miller said. They were speaking by radio, suit to suit. It really did feel like being back in space.
“Yeah? How?”
“Because
you aren’t a robot.”
Normally, all therapists were robots. People confided more freely in machines than in other human beings; it was scientifically proven. But geminoid bots could be very realistic. “How do you knoooow I’m not a robot?” Elfrida teased him.
“If you were a robot you’d have a thigh gap.”
“Oh, frag off.”
“That was meant as a compliment. It’s cute. Spaceborn women are too skinny.”
“Maybe they didn’t have time to reprogram the actual therapists to deal with post-combat issues. I mean, it’s not as if anyone has ever been in combat … real, ship-to-ship combat ... before you guys.”
Ignoring this conspicuous invitation to talk about his experiences, Miller mused, “Men have instincts formed by thousands of years of evolution. We like a shapely figure. Of course we haven’t suddenly started to prefer stick insects. It’ll probably take hundreds of years for that to change.”
Elfrida kicked, putting more water between them. “Bob,” she said, “stop flirting with me. I have a boyfriend.”
“Really? I asked some of your friends, and they said you only sleep with girls. That’s OK. I like a challenge.”
Whoever he had asked, they obviously weren’t real friends of hers. Only Colden and one or two others knew that Elfrida had gone through a sort of life change a couple of years ago. She had stopped sleeping with women and begun to sleep with …well, one man. She no longer had any sexual interest in anyone, male or female, apart from John Mendoza.
“Who’s this boyfriend, then? Is he here?”
“No, he’s in space, actually.”
“Aha. Bet he’s not as cool and manly as I am.” Miller winked; he must have overheard Elfrida and Colden ragging on the Really Cool Manly Men.
“Cool and manly is as cool and manly does,” Elfrida said severely. “He used to be an astrodata analyst, but now … well, it’s a do-whatever-needs-doing kind of deal. Mostly fixing machines. Electrical engineering.” She shrugged, wishing she had a better idea of what Mendoza was doing out there. His emails were so cryptic. Of course, it had to be that way. The colonists of 99984 Ravilious didn’t want anyone to know they were there. And for good reason, because Elfrida knew for a fact they got up to some legally dubious stuff more often than not.
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 9
