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

by Felix R. Savage

  “So you now have root access to the orbital fortresses?”

  “I’m unable to confirm that, since I can’t use my own comms. But Star Force says about half of them have gone dark, correct? So, yeah. That’s likely.”

  “So when we land on the surface—”

  “It won’t work twice.”

  “I was thinking more of the possibility that they’ll want revenge.”

  “Not to worry,” Jun said. “The Monster has no aerobraking capability. We’ll burn up in Mars’s atmosphere before we reach the surface.”

  “OK.” Mendoza paused. “Jun, have you still got your music?”

  “The oratorio?”

  “Or any of the other stuff you were working on. I’d just like to hear something.”

  He leaned back in the comms couch, boots hooked through the stirrups. Angelic bursts of sound filled his ears.

  He’d hooked up one of the smaller screens to the external visual feed. Presently he saw a flash in the Valles Marineris. They were passing around the nightside of Mars, so the flash was very bright.

  Star Force pinged him. “First impact,” said the same officer as before.

  “Do we know what it was?”

  “Smaller half of Reldresal.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Huh? This is great. Look at that cloud of dust and ejecta. The PLAN is having a very bad day.” The officer’s tone got business-like again. “We expect to enter orbit in two hours and fifteen minutes. We will not be attempting a landing on any of the orbital fortresses, under the current circumstances. We’ll park in high orbit and dispatch rescue drones. What is your current altitude?”

  “Eight point one thousand klicks.”

  “Oh.”

  Mendoza nodded, although the officer couldn’t see it. An orbital fortress tumbled across his screen, glowing in patches. He flinched back from the screen, it was so big. So close.

  “That is Limtoc,” the Star Force officer said, seeing the same thing from a much greater distance. “Guess they took the stuff.”

  “They’re self-destructing!”

  “Don’t try it at home. I’ve sent you written instructions. All you need to do is gain a couple thousand klicks of altitude.”

  Mendoza sighed. “It’s been nice talking to you, but I was in the middle of listening to some music, so …”

  He killed the comms link. This time he set it to deny all incoming transmissions.

  Ping.

  Ping.

  Ping.

  Wait.

  That wasn’t Star Force.

  Ping.

  “Jun, I’ve got a transmission coming in on the microwave band.”

  “Answer it!”

  He traced the signal. Line of sight. The Monster’s radar sketched in a 3D representation of the signal’s physical source.

  “A toilet roll,” he breathed. “Look at this, Jun. The PLAN’s revenge is here already. That was fast.”

  “Toilet rolls don’t use the microwave frequency.”

  “That we know of,” Mendoza said. “I’m just gonna ignore it.”

  He sat back. Waiting for the the toilet roll to frag the Monster, he prayed the Our Father.

  Funny. The toilet roll wasn’t moving. It just seemed to be drifting, like they were.

  Its signal was weak and getting weaker. He hit ACCEPT.

  “Mayday. Mayday,” said a woman’s voice.

  Mendoza cleared his throat. “Mayday received. This is John Mendoza in the Monster. What’s your location?”

  “John?!?”

  xxxvii.

  A giant badminton shuttlecock rolled across the ocher dinner plate of Mars. Running on its auxiliary ion thrusters, the Superlifter emitted little heat and no light. Hot gas seeped from the secondary engine nacelles.

  Petruzzelli grabbed Elfrida’s hand— “Come on! This is our only chance!”

  “Sorry,” Elfrida said. “I was just pinching myself to make sure it’s real.”

  They flew clear of the toilet roll’s cockpit. Elfrida had never been gladder to leave a ship.

  They’d tried to fly the toilet roll off the fragment of Reldresal, but the attempt had been in vain. As Elfrida had guessed, you had to have PLAN neuroware in your brain to pilot one of these detestable little ships. Then the mini-Castle had exploded. The fragment had fractured into yet smaller fragments. The toilet roll had fallen into space. Cowering in the cockpit, they’d tumbled on an unpowered trajectory, broadcasting Maydays from their suit radios, for how long? Maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour.

  Until someone answered.

  Tears floated around inside her helmet and splatted like rain on her forehead. She fell through the airlock and disentangled herself from Petruzzelli.

  “John? John?”

  “It’s Ron, actually,” said the cassocked figure in the pilot’s couch, too late for Elfrida to break her momentum. She’d thrown herself at the figure she believed to be Mendoza. Instead of hitting him, she flew through him and bounced off an empty couch.

  “My couch, if you don’t mind,” said the cockpit speakers.

  Elfrida rolled off it.

  “Ron Studd.” The monk reappeared. He was just a projection, aesthetically convincing but not pleasing. He looked like he was half-Japanese, half-gerbil. “I’m part of Jun. Strap in. We’re heading out to high orbit to wait for Star Force.”

  “Where’s Mendoza?”

  “Stayed on board. He said to tell you he loves you.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “He feels morally obligated to stay with Jun,” Ron Studd said. “We lost power, lost the hub. The Monster’s going down.”

  Petruzzelli peeled herself off the rear wall of the cockpit. “You lost power? Be specific.”

  “Electrical power to the bridge. Mendoza ran a line up from Engineering, but the hub is slagged.”

  “But your reactor is OK? Your main drive?”

  “No problems down there. Problem is the flight instrumentation. It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “As in, there was a fire on the bridge, gone. The instrumentation—Jun could reinvent it from first principles, but how’s he gonna use it without the hub? What’s he gonna install it on? Mendoza recovered astrogation, but that doesn’t get us anywhere, with Jun stuck in the data center. So my orders are to take you ladies to safety.”

  Petruzzelli shrugged her carbine strap off her shoulder. She pointed the carbine at Ron Studd. “Take us to the Monster.”

  “Lady, you may not have noticed, but I’m a projection.”

  “Got your attention all the same, didn’t I? Take us to the Monster.”

  “Nothing doing.”

  ★

  But Petruzzelli refused to accept that.

  The Monster was Scuzzy the Smuggler’s ship.

  So, he wasn’t on board.

  Petruzzelli refused to let his ship die.

  She could do this for him. And in a strange way, it felt like she was also doing it for Michael.

  “I’m a Gravesfighter pilot,” she said. “I’ve flown multiple combat missions in the balkiest spaceship ever vomited up by the scientific-industrial complex. As a part of my training, I also learned to fly with no instrumentation, just dead reckoning and a four-function calculator. If that’s not enough, I used to be a professional astrogator, and I captained a Startractor for two years. I can fly your crappy old tub. Just get me over there.”

  The projection tilted its head on one side. A smile spread across its face, making it look quite nice. “You know, I’m a larger part of Jun than he likes to admit.”

  “And?”

  “Done.”

  ★

  The first thing Mendoza said to Elfrida was: “Don’t look at my left leg …”

  “What leg?” she responded.

  They both broke into laughter, and hugged, helmets pressed together.

  Elfrida’s friend, Alicia Petruzzelli, sat at the astrogation workstation, perfectly relaxed, playing the kludgil
y repaired console like a piano. She exchanged rapid-fire commentary with Jun. They were speaking the language of velocity, thrust, and torque, which Mendoza had never mastered. Petruzzelli evidently spoke it like a native. She was even making Jun laugh.

  “Well, hello,” she said. “We just missed obliteration by a whisker, again. That fragment shouldn’t have been there. Looks like the big break-up is going faster than we expected.”

  Elfrida shuddered. Mendoza knew she was thinking about the Martians. That had been the most startling revelation of all. A million million Little Sisters. Elfrida had killed uncountable numbers of them, and yet it clearly still hurt her to think of their deaths. All he could do was hold her. He hoped that would be enough.

  “The Badfinger keeps pinging us,” Petruzzelli said. “Do we want to rendezvous with them? I vote no.”

  It was unanimous.

  “Whew,” Petruzzelli said. “In that case, I’m going to calculate a transfer from our present elliptical orbit to a hyperbolic orbit, and schedule a full-power burn at periapsis, which should give us enough excess hyperbolic velocity to go … a long way.”

  ★

  Elfrida said, “So, John, are you finally going to take me to see 99984 Ravilious?”

  To her surprise, Mendoza looked uncomfortable. “There’s something I didn’t mention.”

  “What?”

  “99984 Ravilious doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “That’s quite a big thing not to mention.”

  Jun interrupted. “I’ve just talked to Kiyoshi. They’re on Callisto. Elfrida, how do you feel about that? If you aren’t up for it, there’s still time to drop you and Mendoza off.”

  Holding Mendoza’s glove, Elfrida pulled him over to the comms workstation. A single small screen showed Mars in false color. City-sized electrical fires raged in the Valles Marineris, made fuzzy by the clouds of dust now choking the thin atmosphere.

  “Callisto sounds fine,” she said. “It’s a long way from here, right?”

  “It is,” Mendoza said somberly.

  “Then let’s go. Just as long as I can call my parents and tell them where I am.”

  Jun chuckled. “Sure.”

  The Monster burned out of Mars orbit. Star Force tracked its departure from a distance.

  After some time, the Monster vanished from the Badfinger’s IR tracking screens.

  Acting on direct presidential orders, the Badfinger tried to keep the Monster on radar. But the distance between the ships was too great by now, and the Monster was moving too fast, accelerating and torqueing unpredictably … as if it were being flown by a combat-trained pilot.

  Before long, it was gone.

  THE STORY CONTINUES IN

  THE MARS SHOCK

  BOOK 6 OF THE SOL SYSTEM RENEGADES SERIES!

  PREVIEW CHAPTER

  THE MARS SHOCK

  Author’s Note: This story follows chronologically after the end of The Phobos Maneuver. It stars Jennifer Colden and Magnus Kristiansen, two of Elfrida Goto’s former Space Corps colleagues.

  i.

  Jennifer Colden knew that Danny Drudge was going to be trouble as soon as she set eyes on him.

  Barely a meter sixty, runny-nosed, spotty-chinned, he looked like he should’ve still been in high school, but he stepped off the landing shuttle blabbering like a wizened vet.

  “Roses are red, violets are blue, a vial of lovejuice is cheaper than you.”

  The target of his humor, a big-bosomed girl with silky black hair, stammered out a lame comeback.

  “Shut the fuck up, all of you,” Colden yelled, staring directly at Drudge.

  Each of the seven newbies had a profile bubble floating above their heads. In the heavily shielded interior of Alpha Base, wireless comms worked. So Colden knew each of their names, she knew which impoverished corner of Earth they each came from, and she knew they’d had exactly two months of training. On Mars, that should be enough to keep them alive. It wouldn’t necessarily keep them healthy. She was proof.

  She herded them away from the busy junction outside the scrubbing area, and took them through the garden to the quartermaster’s office. Each of them signed for a sleeping bag, minimal toiletries, and a couple of changes of uniform. Every gram of mass carried by the landing shuttles was the subject of an intra-agency bidding war, every flight. The Space Corps always lost out. After all, they were just telepresence operators. They didn’t need high-spec protective gear. So they had to print their stuff on base from recyclable materials. The black-haired girl, Allison Gwok, fingered her new uniform, grimacing at the greasy feel of the non-organic fabric.

  Colden took them to their berth, a ten-rack cabin on the other side of the garden. This was the bottom deck of the base, apart from the garage and scrubbing area. You could feel the vibration of the treads crunching over the Martian regolith. They sat on their bunks and stared at her. All except Drudge. He bit into an ear of dwarf corn he must have swiped on their way through the garden. “It’s real!” he exclaimed, chomping.

  “Yes,” Colden said, “and you’re not allowed to pick the corn, or the strawberries, or the apricolmonds, as you must have been told.”

  “Aw, chica. I mean, ma’am. It’s there for us to eat, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but the culinary services specialists do the picking. The garden is basically a lifestyle benefit. They had to do something to make this place a bit less hellish.”

  She smiled. They didn’t smile back. Their faces and blue-uniformed bodies were like bunches of flowers in the paintless, cheerless berth. It healed Colden a little bit to see them—still untouched by Mars, like a breath of Earth air. Not that they’d stay that way for long.

  “I heard they have a suicide problem out here,” Drudge said.

  “Yup,” Colden said. “But that’s the infantry. In the Space Corps, we just die of lack of exercise. We never go outside, you know.”

  Justin Mattis—a bulked-out, tattooed bruiser—said stoically, “Guess we just gotta win this war, brah.”

  “Could be a while,” Colden said. “A few more weeks, a few more years, we just don’t know. Every time we gain some momentum, something happens and we bog down again. When we first landed, they said the war was as good as won. Obviously not. They told me I would be rotated out after a month. It’s been three months. The PLAN just keeps coming up with new ways to torture us.” She smiled, but she was flashing on faces exploding, hot blood spattering her optic lenses. The ghosts followed her home and mutely asked: Why? And she answered, Because we have to win. But that wasn’t something she wanted to share with the newbies. They’d find out what it was like, all too soon.

  Mattis was muttering a question to Drudge. Colden said, “Care to share that, Mattis?”

  “Ma’am, I was just asking, what’s the PLAN?”

  The other newbies tittered. Mattis looked embarrassed.

  “That’s actually a very good question, Mattis,” Colden said. “The easy answer is it’s an AI.”

  “It’s been nuking our space colonies since forever!” Drudge chimed in, regurgitating the media’s canned version of the long war. “And now we’re finally nuking it back, YEEEAHH!”

  “Like I said, that’s the easy answer,” Colden said. “The PLAN came into existence here on Mars in 2165. It slaughtered all the colonists and immediately began to build out its own energy grid and manufacturing infrastructure. Earth took a cautious stance, waiting and watching, until a Chinese fleet fell into the PLAN’s hands. The AI reverse-engineered and improved the Chinese ships on a massive scale. Then it was game on. As you said, Drudge, the PLAN began to attack our colonies throughout the solar system, targeting purebloods. We don’t talk much about that anymore, because it doesn’t matter.” She deliberately did not look at the newbies who appeared to be purebloods themselves. It didn’t matter anymore, because the PLAN no longer had the luxury of selecting its targets. “What matters is that we are here now, fighting to eliminate this threat to humanity, and we’re doing a damn good job,
considering how much we still don’t know. What is the PLAN? The answer, Mattis, is we don’t really have any idea. But we don’t need to know what it is, to stomp it.”

  “YEEEAHH!” Drudge said.

  The others looked more confused, rather than less.

  Colden worked up a smile. “Don’t worry about it. Just do the job, and let the wonks figure out what it all means.”

  This was the best advice she had to give. They gazed at her with the merciless pity of the young.

  “When’s chow?” Drudge said.

  Colden sighed. “I was trying to break it to you gently. Our shift starts in—” she glanced at her wrist tablet— “sixteen minutes. Don’t worry, you’ll have an IV.”

  ★

  Here in Alpha Base, Jennifer Colden was a short, curvy woman of Tutsi heritage, with a posh accent she had inherited from her adoptive parents. She was thirty-two and seriously out of shape. It was a professional hazard for telepresence operators.

  On the job, she was an eight-foot combat-optimized robot with an armored carapace, a Faraday cage around her head, a flechette cannon in her right arm, a slug-thrower in her left arm, and hydraulic legs that ate the klicks relentlessly.

  She led her platoon, including all seven newbies, at a run across a sandy canyon in Sulci Gordii, the corrugated doormat of Olympus Mons. She calculated their route by inertial guidance, with help from the radio-navigation beacons mounted on Star Force’s surface vehicles. Mars had no geomagnetism, so compasses didn’t work. It was the middle of the day, but a thick blanket of dust hid the sun. The haze reduced visibility to a few hundred meters of rock-strewn desert.

  They zigzagged through a rubble field. Sharp-edged boulders stood at improbable low-gee angles. The wind blew eddies of dust up from dark patches of sand fused into glass by intense heat. Satellite data showed that they were passing near an impact crater the size of a city block.