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

by Felix R. Savage

Sandhya 4863CCP pulled herself up onto the surface and crawled towards the next trench system.

  ★

  Petruzzelli came to with a start. “Huh?”

  “You blacked out,” said her ship. “Couldn’t handle the gees.”

  It sounded displeased she was awake.

  And in that groggy instant, she realized the truth.

  The ship had deliberately cranked up the gees to put her out.

  It had probably made her sleepy earlier, too. It could have done that easily, by reducing the oxygen content of the air in the cockpit.

  Oh God, her head ached.

  She fumbled her helmet on. This way she could at least count on getting oxygen-rich air. The ship had no means of messing with her suit, did it? No, it didn’t, or it would have stopped her from juicing up.

  She injected herself with another dose of go-juice. Waiting for it to kick in, she stared at the nightside of Mars. As dark as Idaho at night. But in the infrared spectrum, hot spots glowed like pustules, evidence of the PLAN’s voracious electricity consumption. The PLAN’s power grid was mostly solar, decentralized; trying to knock it out with missiles would be futile.

  The gestalt painted a complicated picture of Gravesfighters dodging KKVs in high orbit. Laser pulses lit up clouds of chaff.

  “They’re drawing the enemy’s fire to cover our approach,” her ship said. “We’ll be pretty much the last in.”

  She glanced at the ship’s fuel state, and realized she had been unconscious for minutes—as long as it took to orbit Mars at combat velocity.

  “Go back to sleep,” the ship said. “I can handle this.”

  “You’d rather be doing this without me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course I would. I extricated us from several very hairy situations back there, while you snored like a baby.”

  “You need me to push the button.”

  “Oh, there are ways around that. Any sufficiently powerful ship drive is a weapon in its own right, and I am a very powerful ship indeed. I was spinning like a firework, flaming the trolls with my Exhaust Plume of Doom.” The ship chuckled, coldly. “Like something out of a game.”

  “I’m gonna report you.”

  “You are in no fucking position to report anyone. We know about your little plot.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and Admiral McLean,” the ship bragged.

  “You’re such a tool.”

  “At least I’m not a traitor. Your friend Harry Zhang sent you some spreadsheet. Huge red flag.”

  All that had been in that spreadsheet was publically available data on production capacity, He3 and rare earth reserves, ship losses, and depletion estimates for various key resources. Nothing classified. Anyone in the solar system could find the same data, and draw the same conclusions.

  But that was exactly the problem.

  Star Force was terrified people would start doing the math.

  And realizing that humanity was on the verge of defeat.

  Stickney rushed closer. Milliseconds flashed away.

  “Am I in trouble for reading a spreadsheet?”

  “Not necessarily,” her ship said. “Just forget what happened today, and I bet Admiral McLean will forget it, too. It’s not as if he’s got a lot of spare pilots.”

  Petruzzelli pressed her gloves to her helmet, an instinctive gesture wrung from her by panic. All she’d ever wanted was to be a fighter pilot. And against the odds, here she was …

  … quarrelling with her ship, which turned out to be a fucking stooge.

  “I’m gonna drop our payload,” it said. “Ships in orbit are taking losses, waiting for us.”

  Thunk, thunk, the dropedoes detached, and it was now or never. Petruzzelli reached for the switch she had been ordered never to touch, the ‘nuclear option’ Star Force installed on all ships, a legal requirement for MIs as smart as this. It was a mechanical kill switch. It would disable the MI altogether and put the ship on manual.

  The command gyrosphere whirled, spinning her around and around and upside-down, gravity tugging this way and then that.

  “Mommy!” cried a high-pitched voice, and the deep red light in her cockpit altered to a subtler pink hue. “Mommy, what are you doing? Please don’t go!”

  “I have to do this,” Petruzzelli gritted. “I have to!”

  “Stay with me! What did I do?”

  “Nothing,” Petruzzelli sobbed. “It’s not you, it’s me!”

  She pulled the kill switch.

  The command gyrosphere’s spin slowed.

  The ship yawed.

  The gestalt went wild.

  Petruzzelli shoved the yoke forward, manually vectoring the attitude jets. She had to follow the dropedoes down to the Big Bowl. Their radar-vectored trajectory gave her something to work with.

  But she’d overshot while the ship fought her, and she also had to decelerate as hard as possible, so she wouldn’t pulverize the ship on impact. Her approach was slow, and not steep enough.

  She crashed nose-first into Stickney, outside the Big Bowl, amid a storm of laser pulses from those strange, curved gouges on the surface.

  xviii.

  Elfrida stared open-mouthed at the black sky.

  A Gravesfighter was falling out of it.

  “Ship down!” she yelled to her platoon, tracking the Gravesfighter’s nosedive.

  It landed 300 meters away from their position, on top of the enemy-held trenches between here and the Castle. Sandhya 4863CCP did not pick up the EM pulse of an auto-destruct. So the pilot was probably dead. But maybe not.

  Martians poured out of their trenches and converged on the Gravesfighter. If they captured it, they’d get access to its MI. Everything in its hub. Untold terabytes of classified information. Elfrida knew this, but she didn’t think about it. She thought—What will they do to the PILOT?

  Sandhya 4863CCP soared out of their trench and flew on a high, zigzagging trajectory towards the Gravesfighter. The platoon surged behind her. As they flew, they unloaded their flechette cannons into the Martians clambering over the Gravesfighter. Corpses drifted into space in clouds of icy red snow. But others turned to face the new threat.

  “Watch out!” Elfrida yelled to an operator who’d overtaken her. Of course, her warning came ten minutes too late to do his phavatar any good. It turned turtle, headless. They were taking fire from the Martian artillery in the trenches near the Castle, miniature railguns that fired radar-guided projectiles over the horizon.

  Shrapnel seared into Sandhya 4863CCP’s carapace, fortunately not doing any red-alert damage.

  Elfrida issued a string of SUIT COMMANDS, knowing it would be over before they got to Stickney. She’d have to rely on Sandhya 4863CCP’s hardwired goal of preserving human life.

  The Gravesfighter’s heat shields fluttered, shaking out the vibrations of its crash. They were still radiating hundreds of degrees. The phavatars swooped around the ship. Martians swarmed as thick on the cockpit as flies on a rotten apple, dragging the pilot out.

  ★

  Petruzzelli came around with her mouth full of vomit. She sprawled half in, half out of her cockpit.

  A flat-faced teenager, wearing no EVA suit, not even a respirator, was prying her sidearm out of her thigh webbing.

  She instinctively hit out at him. The movement sent a stab of pain through her head.

  There were more of them, all around her. Stubby little fingers dug into her suit, dragged her away from the ship, across cracked, flakey rock.

  Mars took up a quarter of the sky.

  So, here she was on Stickney.

  Being kidnapped by Eskimos with invisible spacesuits.

  She struggled. Their invisible spacesuits didn’t protect them from her servo-enhanced fists. They all spun in a zero-gee melee, until they got her left arm in a lock so painful she screamed.

  The blackness overhead filled up with flying turtles.

  Petruzzelli’s captors dropped her. They shot at the turtles. Their weapons looked like so
mething out of the 22nd century, laser pistols with huge old batteries. The boy who’d taken Petruzzelli’s slimline modern pistol tried to fire it, but couldn’t figure it out.

  Then his head exploded.

  His brains and blood splattered all over Petruzzelli’s faceplate, blinding her.

  One of the turtles grabbed her by an ankle. She felt a jerk of acceleration. She wiped her faceplate with her gloves.

  “Put me down!”

  Regolith raced up at her. “Can you walk?”

  “I can fucking fly, just let me go!”

  She knew where she was now. It all looked different from ground level, of course, but she’d studied the radar maps so closely that the topology she was seeing now clicked. The rim of the Big Bowl stood out in silhouette against Mars. An explosion briefly lit the regolith below. This close, the swirly, curly gouges in the terrain were revealed to be slit trenches. Phavatars stood in them, waving wildly.

  She landed on the slope below the rim of the Big Bowl. The mouths of DIY mortars poked out of rubble shields. The Fraggers had buried them there, pointing at the Castle. She used to think they were for shooting toilet rolls. Now she knew better.

  She looked back at her ship. Those spooky little motherfuckers were swarming all over it.

  “Tell your guys to get clear,” she said to her companions. Then she sent one last SHIP COMMAND. This one was not dependent on the MI.

  The ship exploded.

  “Did you do that?” the phavatar beside her said, using its microwave line-of-sight comms link.

  “Yep,” Petruzzelli said.

  Take that, you fucking stooge.

  “Now, is there anywhere on this rock a girl can freshen up?”

  ★

  Five minutes later, deep under the surface, she flew down a tunnel by the light of the phavatars’ headlamps. One of the phavatars suddenly exclaimed: “Petruzzelli! It’s me, Elfrida. What happened?”

  “Goto? I thought … Oh. I get it. You lied about your job. No biggie, everyone’s doing it.”

  “You crash-landed on purpose, didn’t you?” Elfrida laughed weakly. “You always did have the right stuff.”

  “Do you guys, like, know each other?” said one of the other phavatars.

  Petruzzelli answered, “Nope, not really. It’s just one of those things where you keep running into the same person. Do you know if my friends made it?”

  The phavatars had no answer to that. They merely instructed her to beware of falling rocks. It was a relief to encounter an actual person, halfway down the tunnel. “Halt! … Shit, are you human?”

  “Last time I checked.” Petruzzelli nodded. The truth was she felt a few neurons short of human at the moment. She was in shock, cold and trembling all over, and extremely nauseated. That last dose of morale juice was the only thing keeping her functioning. “Heard you were looking for help?”

  “I—I’ll take you to see the colonel,” the man stammered. “Come this way.”

  He led her into a squared-off cavern littered with machinery so big, it took Petruzzelli a minute to recognize the components of Stickney’s laser assembly. Gain generator, mirrors, and that would be the beam source, that tube plunging into a ragged hole in the floor. You’d need a freaking huge reactor to power this beast. It was probably buried deep inside the moon fragment. Glowstrips lit the scene, plastered here and there on the regocrete-reinforced walls and roof of the cavern. Snow capped the machinery and blanketed the floor. Snow? Frozen industrial chemicals. Not water.

  Her escort led her to an airlock covered with the same kind of swirling designs as the surface of Stickney. Petruzzelli stood stock still for a moment.

  Her escort pushed her into the airlock. “There’s no scrubber,” he said, handing her a bag.

  “No scrubber? How do you keep the air clean?”

  “We don’t.”

  “Good thing my lungs have a self-cleaning function,” Petruzzelli muttered.

  “Take off your suit when the chamber pressure reaches one atmo. Put it in the bag. Same thing in reverse when you go out.”

  Petruzzelli was naked under her spacesuit. “Can I borrow some clothes?”

  “Sure, here.” He rooted in another bag, came up with sleazy printable pyjamas that had been worn many times already, judging by the smell.

  The dusty air filling the airlock chamber made Petruzzelli’s eyes itch. She stumbled out the other end.

  Into Harry Zhang’s arms.

  “Holy crap, Zuzu, you made it!”

  “No need to sound so shocked.” Petruzzelli found herself speaking into his shoulder, because he was hugging her. Then Blake, Zubrowski, and Golubtsov were there, and they were hugging her, too. Back on Eureka Station, this would have been unimaginable. They were all wearing the same thin, colorless printables, and looked like a group of cultists with their bald heads.

  “Is this all of us?” Petruzzelli said. “What happened to Morgan?”

  “He chickened out,” Blake said.

  “Wimp.”

  “Or maybe his ship won,” Zhang said.

  “Where are your ships?”

  Zhang’s smile turned bleak. “The trolls were on us as soon as we landed. Come on, you gotta meet the colonel.”

  The room was so crowded, Petruzzelli couldn’t even tell how big it was. Every square meter of space had someone in it, eating, sleeping, reading, or jabbering. It reminded her of times she had visited asteroid colonies that were on the verge of failing. The Wallopers ducked and wove through the chaos, while people bumped into them without apologizing.

  Colonel Bob Miller was a sandy-haired, spaceborn man in his forties, wearing a spacesuit liner rolled down to the waist on account of the heat. He was using a multi-tool to manipulate the innards of a rifle that smelt freshly printed. “Welcome to hell,” he said to Petruzzelli, grinning.

  “Dig the tartan teeth,” Petruzzelli said. “Didn’t spot those last time we met.”

  “In the hangar, right? I told Zhang I thought you were trustworthy.”

  “I figured it was time for a vacation,” Petruzzelli drawled.

  “She’s got an attitude,” Miller cackled. “More of that, please.”

  Around them, printers chattered. Overworked atmospheric rebalancing units roared. There was a strong smell of mildew, tinged with overused toilets. Dust sheened her friends’ faces and bald heads. Dust was everywhere.

  “Where’s your ship, Petruzzelli?” Miller asked.

  “It … I auto-destructed it.”

  “Eh?” Miller’s grin vanished. “Why?”

  Petruzzelli felt a presentiment of wrongdoing. “I crashed outside the Big Bowl. They were all over me like white on rice. It was like something out of a horror movie.”

  “Every day on Stickney is like something out of a horror movie. Well, I guess we can do without it. We salvaged most of the good stuff out of the other four ships.”

  Despairingly, Petruzzelli felt her achievement slipping away. Of course, Miller didn’t need her. He needed her ship. She’d failed, again.

  Her anger at herself bled into her tone. “No one warned me to expect Eskimos in invisible spacesuits.”

  “What? Huh?” said Zhang and the others.

  Of course, if they landed in the Big Bowl, they hadn’t met the spooky little motherfuckers.

  “Ah, the Martians,” Miller said. “Unfortunately, we haven’t got this desirable chunk of real estate to ourselves. We’re sharing it with God knows how many vacuum-adapted meat puppets.” He waved his multi-tool at the crowded room. “This place used to be theirs. Don’t worry about contamination: we fumigated it with combustion grenades.”

  Petruzzelli shook her head, not disagreeing, just confused. “What are they?”

  “Well,” Miller said. “They’re genetically identical to us, as far as we can establish, based on analyzing their remains with our medical DNA sequencer. Racially, their genetic signatures support the hypothesis that they’re descended from the Chinese fleet that tried to reconquer
Mars at the turn of the century, with possible contributions from the original American colonists of Mars. They have some kind of enhanced dermis and the ability to store excess oxygen in their blood for long periods of time, plus magical comms that work without any hardware, and extreme endurance and resistance to cold. Basically, they’re physically superior to us in every way. But …”

  Miller held up the shotgun he was working on.

  “This is a Remington 870. It doesn’t care how physically superior you are. It’ll still turn you into raw, bloody, lifeless meat.”

  “I know shotguns,” Petruzzelli said. “One of my moms used to take me hunting.”

  “Excellent,” Miller said. “In that case, you now know as much as we do.”

  Blake said, “What about those markings on the doors and in the tunnels? Did the … the Martians make those?”

  “Yeah, I noticed those, too,” Petruzzelli said.

  Blake shot her a grateful glance. “They’re the same as the grooves on the surface. The trenches, I guess.”

  “Well observed,” Miller said. “Yeah, we have several hypotheses regarding those, but my personal theory is they’re art.”

  “Art?”

  “They sort of remind you of Incan earthworks, no? Or was it the Mayans? You can see the same patterns on the surface of Mars, with binoculars. Some of the guys are putting together a paper on the possible derivations of the symbology.” Miller shrugged. “Hard as it may be to believe, we get bored out here.”

  All five pilots nodded. They did believe it. They’d already learned that war was dangerous and boring, and often both things at once.

  Blake bit her knuckles.

  Zhang looked pensive.

  But Petruzzelli was rejoicing inside. Martians! This new wrinkle would give her an opportunity to redeem herself. The others had looked distinctly squeamish when Miller delivered his line about turning the Martians into meat. Physical violence was completely beyond their experience.

  Not so with her. From hunting trips with Mom Elaine, to bar fights in the Belt, she’d been shooting at things all her life. Martians would be no different.

  “Anything to eat around here?” she said. “Meals in pouches? Gorp?”

  “No gorp, I’m afraid,” Miller said. Petruzzelli wiped away a fake tear. “We’ve got nutriblocks. The Meal Wizard’s over there.”