The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

  It took them a while to get out of the bar as Haddock knew everyone and felt compelled to stop and speak to each person they passed on the way to the exit. He and his family were namsadang, of course. They’d had a successful piracy thing going at one point, but their ship had been lost and they’d been stuck on Ceres for a while now. That was about to change.

  Regardless of the poor circumstances they’d found themselves in, Haddock hadn’t wasted his time here, using it to bank a multitude of connections and favors.

  He had called in one of those many favors today.

  They exited the Galaxy’s Best Bar into a red-light district whose caverns and connecting passages extended every which way into the fiber-reinforced ice. This material, known as cryocrete, improved on the ancient concept of pykrete: it was ice mixed with bamboo chips, which were widely available on Ceres, since bonsai bamboo was everyone’s favorite crop to grow for clothes. The first generation of habs had been built on cryocrete foundations in hopes that it would prevent subsidence—unfortunately it hadn’t. The same material had been used for subsequent infills. It was strong enough to contain the pressure of one atmosphere at a thickness of just a meter. As the Belows sank, tunnels and large caverns had been carved out of the cryocrete layers between the habs—but the idea of ‘layers’ was misleading. Everything melted its way down at a slightly different pace, so no two habs were ever at exactly the same depth at the same time. You might trudge through a cavern dotted with trailers up on blocks, which called itself 30 Below, and then squeeze through the shell of a disused modular hab embedded in the cavern’s wall, emerging further down in the toasty infrared heating of the Libertarian Society on 29. Even natives tended to lose their bearings on occasion.

  There were Belows in all of Ceres’s Big Four craters—Occator, Dantu, Nawish, and Kerwan—and Occator was far from the biggest. But no one knew just how big it was. The place was continually morphing, sinking, and being expanded. Michael got hopelessly lost outside of his favorite haunts. The Haddock gang were no better off. But today, Haddock had got hold of one of the elusive personages known as navigators, who claimed to carry maps of the Belows in their heads.

  This navigator was a teenage girl with a runny nose. She led them through the labyrinth to the piece de resistance of Occator Belowser ingenuity: Lake Chandler. Michael had never been here before. He stared in delight. From the frost-rimed wharf, black water stretched out of sight into mazy shadows. Glowstrips garlanded the odd support pillar, which appeared to have been left there for decoration, rather than to hold up the roof—nothing needed much holding up on Ceres. Corrugated paths of light glimmered on the water. Smaller lights drifted in the distance: boats. Real boats! You weren’t allowed to go boating on Lake Occator, on the surface, because it would disturb the seaweed.

  “This is so cool,” Michael said to their navigator.

  “It’s just a big fish farm.” She waved at one of the nearby boats. Its two-man crew rowed it back to the wharf. “These guys will take you the rest of the way.”

  The boat was flat-bottomed, crudely welded together from sheet aluminum. Michael perched amidships on a cooler sticky with fish scales. The rowers’ backs bent and straightened in perfect synchrony. The boat skimmed over the water. Michael remembered the Harrow brochures his father had made him look at. There’d been vid of boys like him rowing sculls, on an actual river, on Earth … But no. He had a mission of far greater import than that.

  The wharf receded out of sight. That did not mean they’d come very far, since Ceres was so small the horizon was rarely more than a kilometer away. Michael started to see sheets of ice floating on the water. “The lake stays liquid because of the habs underneath it,” said one of the rowers. “We’re technically on Fifteen Below—”

  “Fourteen Below,” disagreed the other.

  “—so there’s a lot of hot stuff down there. We also have some dedicated generators warming up the hatcheries on the bottom of the lake.”

  “So why does the lake stay up?” Michael said. “It should be flooding everything under it.”

  “Splart,” the first rower said.

  Michael nodded. “I love splart.”

  “Everyone loves splart.”

  The boat’s prow ran up on an ice floe. Hammering noises echoed out of the dark. “That way,” the rowers said. “Bye.”

  In pitch darkness broken only by the beams of their headlamps, half a dozen excavator bots were enlarging the cavern. They looked like heavy-duty versions of Michael’s mecha, with the addition of circular-bladed ice saw attachments. People in snowsuits dragged sledges heaped with spoil.

  Michael and his friends fell in with the miners. They were all going the same way: up a sloping tunnel that narrowed as they climbed, up and up, to a steel-floored lobby with an airlock on the far side.

  “Wow!” Michael said to his friends. “See what this is? It’s a spaceship!” The Belowsers had crashed the ship into the floor of the crater and bored in.

  While they waited to use the airlock, Michael and his friends inflated their helmets and checked their seals. They were all wearing EVA suits under their coats so they didn’t really need the coats for warmth. But it was inadvisable to walk through the Belows in a spacesuit. It marked you as a tourist and could set you up for an uncomfortable encounter or three if you were unlucky.

  They stumbled out onto the top of a landslide. The tunnel emerged halfway down the west side of a wrinkle ridge on the floor of Occator Crater. In the weak light of noon, they slid and bounced to the bottom. The miners kept dumping spoil out of the airlock above them, so they finished their pell-mell descent in a hail of ice and clay chips.

  The bottom of the spoil dump fanned out across the wrinkled gray landscape. It resembled the salt-ice landslides that some early observers of the dwarf planet had taken for alien installations. Adulterated with clay, the ice was brownish rather than pure white, but that was still a lot paler than the dusty surface, so the landslide stuck out like a scar.

  The five of them seemed to be completely alone: microscopic specks in the 90-kilometer bowl of Occator Crater. The crater’s south wall, almost five kilometers high, caught the sun. To the north and west rose knife-edged terrain folds, reminiscent of the ripples when a stone is dropped into a puddle.

  Michael whistled. His skimmer bounced around the shoulder of the landslide. The little blue vehicle was just an electric buggy with simple controls … but it was his. His father couldn’t remote-control it. This morning, Michael had commanded it to come here and wait for him.

  Kelp and Coral ended up riding on the roof, holding onto the antennas. Their legs waved in the air every time Michael drove over a bump.

  He paralleled the terrain fold to the north until he could be sure they were out of sight of the big water-splitting facility on its far side, and of the Occator Lake dome, which was over there as well. Then he turned the skimmer north. Up and over the fold they went, Kelp and Coral screaming on the roof. The soft, flaky clay of the summit crumbled under the skimmer’s wheels. They were leaving tracks that would, literally, be visible from space. Michael drove downhill so fast the skimmer left the ground and soared heart-stoppingly out over the slope.

  The wheels spun helplessly in the vacuum. The skimmer tilted to the passenger side, where Captain Haddock was sitting; he was heavier. They were going to flip, and there was nothing Michael could do about it.

  Kelp’s legs dangled down past his elbow. Coral’s legs joined them. They were shifting their weight to balance the skimmer out.

  The skimmer struck the ground with two wheels and bounced. Then it came down on all six wheels. Michael drove with more careful consideration after that.

  As they neared the spaceport, Codfish texted them. He was on board the Kharbage Collector. He had requested a launch slot for later today and gotten it. Adnan Kharbage approved of a man who was willing to start work immediately.

  “The launch slot system is a farce, anyway,” Michael said. This wasn’t Luna, wh
ere hundreds of spacecraft landed and took off every day, coordinated as tightly as trains on Earth. Or had, anyway, before the PLAN razed Shackleton City.

  He drove through the hillbilly clutter of Occator Shipyard, jinking between recycling depots and warehouses that leaned like the Tower of Pisa. A water tanker took off from just over the horizon, burning straight up. The gravity on Ceres was so low that even the biggest spacecraft could and did land on the surface. Radioactive jets of steam spurted over the horizon, dispersing in arrow-straight lines. On the roof of the skimmer, Coral and Kelp cringed and muttered about neutrons. A lot of those old tankers still used deuterium in their drives.

  “Radiation exposure quotas are for sissies,” Michael teased them. He was in high spirits, knowing now that they were going to make it.

  He drove around a couple of his father’s ships, spaced out kilometers apart. A robot refueling truck pootled past. Then the Kharbage Collector loomed over the horizon, sitting upright on its jackstands, like a twenty-storey building with a crosspiece.

  “I see you,” Codfish texted.

  “Did you spoof the external optical feed, like I said?” Michael texted back urgently.

  “I plugged in those codes you gave me.”

  Michael relaxed. “That’s all right then.”

  Codfish stood in the Engineering & Maintenance airlock, waving at them. A stairway curved down from the airlock, clearing the folded radiator vanes. Michael left his skimmer with a final set of instructions. Go home, he ordered it, and tell my father and Stepmom No. 5 that I’m dead.

  He had pondered about the most plausible fate for himself, and had tentatively chosen squashed-in-a-landslide, but the problem with that was his father would soon ascertain there hadn’t been any landslides today—and then when he saw Lake Chandler, far beneath the surface, plied by tin-can boats, its water just barely above freezing, he’d hit on the perfect story.

  I drowned.

  He did not think about the devastating effect this would have on his father and stepmother. He did think about the effect it would have on Petruzzelli. It would serve her right.

  And what a surprise she’d have when he caught up with her.

  ★

  “She hasn’t really gone back to Earth,” Michael said to Captain Haddock and his family.

  “Why do ye think she would have lied?” Captain Haddock said.

  Michael backed out from under the comms workstation. He returned his screwdriver, flashlight, multimeter, and wire cutters to his utility belt. He also pocketed an important recent purchase: a black-market transponder. He had been making sure he could install it without breaking the comms system, once they were too far away to chase.

  “Why would she lie?” he echoed. “Easy. She’s wanted to quit for ages, but she could never come up with a good enough reason. So this was the perfect excuse. But she definitely wouldn’t go back to Earth. She hates Earth. And volunteer for Star Farce? No way. Petruzzelli isn’t the do-gooder type. Not by a long shot.”

  Codfish’s wife, Coral, nodded in agreement. “She’s a selfish, mercenary bitch.”

  Michael did not take offense at that assessment. There was nothing wrong with being selfish and mercenary, in his world. “Yes, and she hates it when anyone gets the better of her.”

  The Kharbage Collector launched while he was speaking. Haddock crouched on his haunches in front of Petruzzelli’s workstation—no, not Petruzzelli’s anymore—playing arpeggios on the consoles with one hand. In his free hand he gripped a bottle of tequila. From somewhere he had produced a cocked hat with an ostrich plume, which now rested rakishly on his brow. Codfish leaned awkwardly over him, talking to traffic control, so they’d think he was flying the ship.

  The pirates had only been aboard for a few hours, but the bridge already smelled like kimchi instead of Italian food. They had found Petruzzelli’s stash of black-market booze, too. He couldn’t believe she had not taken that with her. It was like she’d left her whole life behind.

  He waited patiently on his knees, holding onto the loose front of the comms workstation to stop it from falling off, while thrust gravity tugged everything sideways. When the Collector cleared Ceres space, Haddock damped their burn. The ship stopped rattling. Ordinary spin gravity returned. Michael picked up where he’d left off. It felt good to finally say these things he’d been thinking for so long.

  “Petruzzelli is obsessed with her ex. She even set up a DNA trace on him! The supermajors have DNA sniffers at all the big spaceports, you know. We can, ahem, access that data through the company. So she’s been stalking him online. And I even caught her writing to him once, although I’m pretty sure she didn’t send it.”

  “She is the obsessive type,” Coral agreed.

  “Yeah. And it drives her nuts that he slept with her, and then took ten thousand spiders off her, and hacked her watch—” Michael giggled; it had been pretty funny at the time, to him— “then vanished. So that’s where she’s gone. I’m sure of it. She’s going to track him down.” Michael giggled again. “For his sake, I hope we find him first!”

  “Wait,” Haddock said. Now that Ceres traffic control was no longer on the screen with them, he sat up on Petruzzelli’s couch, feet planted wide. “Who are we talking about?”

  “Scuzzy the Smuggler, of course. You know him.”

  The pirates exchanged dark glances.

  “We do,” Haddock acknowledged.

  They’d all met back when they were running that UNVRP scam. Scuzzy the Smuggler had been involved with that somehow, although Michael had never set eyes on him. So had the pirates. When it all went sideways, Petruzzelli had given the pirates a lift to 6 Hebe. That was how they’d gotten to be so familiar with the Kharbage Collector. And it was on 6 Hebe Petruzzelli and Scuzzy had had their fateful one-night stand.

  “Have you seen him since then?” Michael asked.

  “Never a hair, and I thank the gods of my ancestors for that,” said Haddock.

  “Then I bet you don’t know where he is now. But I do. He’s at home on 99984 Ravilious.”

  Michael expected the pirates to react with blank stares to the name of this asteroid. But Anemone yelped, and Codfish muttered a curse. Even Haddock seemed to pale slightly.

  “You’ve heard of it?” Michael said in disappointment.

  “Who on Ceres has not heard of 99984 Ravilious?” Haddock said. “The Belows is alive with rumors about that nest of purebloods, ne’er-do-wells, and religious fanatics. They’ve been buying antimatter.”

  “Antimatter generators,” Michael countered. That was the rumor he’d heard. “Nobody used to know where they were, but recently they’ve been buying loads of stuff, and stuff has to be delivered.”

  He put down his tools and jumped up on the end of Petruzzelli’s desk. A 3D starmap hung above it, a holographic sphere the size of an exercise ball, with the sun in the middle. Not-to-scale planets and rocks swarmed in a fuzzy ring around the ecliptic. Michael walked around the desk’s U-curve until he stood in front of Captain Haddock, forcing the pirate to look up at him. His head was inside the bottom of the starmap. The projectors sparkled at the bottom of his field of vision. Haddock’s face looked navy blue.

  “The tramp hauler Now You See It left Ceres two days ago,” Michael said, “carrying a cargo for 99984 Ravilious. And I’m 99% sure Petruzzelli was on board.”

  He reached up into the sphere. The labels could not be read from this angle but Ceres was easy to find—the largest thing in the asteroid belt, 2.8 AUs from the sun. He dragged his index finger away from it, extending the red line of their current trajectory to a spot halfway around the Belt, 2.45 AUs out. His finger ended up in a region of space that looked empty at this scale. It was in the middle of Gap 2.5, one of the Kirkwood Gaps in the Belt, which had been cleared of asteroids by gravitational interactions with Jupiter.

  Of course, there remained a few asteroids wandering through all that emptiness. Spreading his arms, Michael zoomed the projection in until the whole sphere
was dark blue, with a single low-albedo dot in the center. This dot did not represent any asteroid that existed in Kharbage, LLC’s databanks. It was Michael’s best guess, based on rumors and the Now You See It’s trajectory.

  “99984 Ravilious.” The asteroid’s label appeared at his command, blood-red. “All we have to do is tag along behind the Now You See It, and they’ll take us there.”

  Haddock reached between Michael’s legs. Michael skipped sideways. Haddock picked up his bottle of tequila and slurped. “You’re assuming we want to go.”

  “Well, don’t you? You’re short of money. And I bet they’re using those antimatter generators for something really cool. We could get in on the ground floor of the next technological revolution.” Michael deliberately appealed to the pirates’ desire to make an easy buck.

  But Haddock shook his head, and Kelp, in the corner, looked up from his book. “We’ve been there before.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah.”

  Codfish explained, “For about three days. They didn’t even let us off the ship. We were quarantined. No comms. It was boring. And dangerous. I hate boring and dangerous.”

  Michael relaxed. “Well, it will be different this time, because Petruzzelli and Scuzzy will be there.”

  “Which is exactly the problem,” Haddock said, sounding less piratical than usual. “Scuzzy, as you call him—his real name is Kiyoshi Yonezawa—is bad news.”

  “He’s a pirate,” Coral said, without the slightest hint of self-awareness.

  “All other considerations aside, he said that if he ever saw us again, he’d scrag us.”

  “Frag us, Dad,” said Kelp. “He said he’d frag us. With extreme prejudice.”

  Anemone left the bridge, saying she was going to fix dinner.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” Haddock said. “It’s just not a good idea.”

  Michael’s chest felt tight. They couldn’t be this wimpy! “It’ll only take four months,” he pleaded.