The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

  The trolls hurtled into a high-gee turn, almost doubling back on their own course.

  “Hold onto your hat,” Petruzzelli grunted, accelerated to six gees. Whoof. The pressure expelled all the air from her lungs, before they kicked into low gear and started to work harder.

  “Trolls are running for home,” Blake panted.

  I can freaking see that.

  “Let ’em go!”

  No.

  The oxygen level in Petruzzelli’s brain was dropping. Blackness ate at the edges of her vision. She danced backwards through an eight-gee turn. Something sparked in her fiery tail, like a marshmallow caught by a blowtorch. Score one.

  “Resume formation,” Zhang bawled.

  Blake peeled off Petruzzelli’s wing, heading back to the others. The squadron was diving towards Mars. Within seconds they would slip into an elliptical polar orbit with perigee at 7000 klicks out.

  The same altitude as the PLAN’s cloud of orbital fortresses.

  Already, the orbital fortresses were opening up on them. Monstrously powerful laser beams stabbed into space. Each beam was actually a stream of pulses, for maximum destructiveness. Of course, they were invisible to the naked eye, but so many Gravesfighters now swarmed around Mars, the gestalt could assemble a projection from tiny reflections bouncing off detritus. Petruzzelli saw the beams on her screen in red splendor, crisscrossing, weaving tassels for Mars’s deadly belt of fortresses. Two beams trapped a Gravesfighter like a pair of scissors. It cooked off.

  And as if that wasn’t enough, KKVs accompanied the beams: barrel bombs launched from railguns on the orbital fortresses.

  The fortresses had been there for decades. The PLAN had systematically dismantled Mars’s larger moon, Phobos, over the first two decades of this century, while the watchers on Eureka Station sat scratching their chins and theorizing. The result was 317 fragments between one and five kilometers long, orbiting at the same height as before, guided and boosted by laser-beam ‘nudges’ from the ground and—this was the clever bit—from each other. There was no chance of a collision, although nearly all the fortresses still orbited in the equatorial plane. Any fortresses at risk would just exchange fire, tweaking each other’s orbits by the required number of centimeters.

  Energy weapons were civilized. Dial down the pulse intensity and you could fire warning shots that would give the offender a mere bad sunburn. That was why humanity used them for planetary interdiction. You didn’t necessarily want to kill a smuggler or someone whose transponder had glitched.

  Kinetic weapons were death on rails.

  The PLAN had added railguns to its orbital fortresses very recently, just in the last year or so. The Star Force pilots believed it was the Fraggers’ fault. Regardless, they now had to fly through clouds of pebbles and micromissiles that exploded on contact, while staying out of the laser cannons’ fields of fire.

  All four squadrons broke up into the age-old formation known as Every Man For Himself. In the age of gestalt feeds, this was actually a viable tactic.

  The laser beams sprayed wide in pursuit.

  Petruzzelli had her orders, but she wanted to catch that troll. She screamed down towards the north pole, overhauling the smear on her radar. It finally broke stealth. They did, when you pushed them hard enough. The smear became a clearly defined cylinder. Its filthy D-D torch blazed out blue-white, turning it into a beautiful target. Neutrons showered Petruzzelli's ship, but she trusted the shields to handle it. She pushed the button. Her CP cannon fired a stream of charged particles accelerated to 90% of the speed of light.

  BOOM.

  The troll vaporized. A few fragments were flung clear. Some of them hung immobile in front of her. Those were the dangerous ones: the ones that didn’t seem to move, because they were hurtling straight at you. She skew-flipped and vaporized the fragments with her exhaust plasma.

  Still decelerating, she flashed through the radiation from her kill. Her HUD flickered, rad-hardened electronics taking the damage. The altimeter whirred down through 11,000 klicks. 10,000. “We’ll go in over the north pole,” she grunted.

  “It was nice knowing you.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  She guided the ship into a polar orbit. The gestalt went crazy. She could still achieve payload delivery, if—

  —she could—

  —avoid these—

  —damn lasers—

  If a laser could see you, it could hit you. That was the basic rule of engagement for weapons that fired at the speed of light.

  Fortunately for Petruzzelli, the fortresses were all busy shooting at her friends.

  They didn’t have 100% coverage. Each orbital fortress tumbled or rotated, creating blind spots. So it was more like 98%. Her nav screen made the blind spots look like a 3D checkerboard with only a few white squares; she had to scoot from one to the next. Speeding up and slowing down, pulling as much as 12 gees for split-second durations, dropping lower and burning higher, she made her trajectory as unpredictable as possible.

  “This is the point of having a human in the loop,” she told her ship. “To make it look like we’re nuts.”

  There was a method to her madness, however, and that was to time her pass across the equator so she’d cross the orbit of Stickney, one of the smaller orbital fortresses.

  Everyone else was doing the same thing. The gestalt sprouted a thread marked DROP-OFF QUEUE—although queue was a misnomer. Half a hundred Gravesfighters and Fraggers screamed in from half a hundred directions. Lotta people were deploying their point-defense drones, having saved them for this dangerous moment. Stickney drew the fire of every other fortress nearby. It orbited in a lethal storm of mines and micromissiles just waiting to lock on to Gravesfighter drive signatures. Star Force drones charged down in waves, illuminating Stickney in a corona of explosions.

  Stickney.

  A name given by humans long ago to the largest crater on Phobos.

  Now attached to this one orbital fortress, which happened to have a large bowl-shaped feature, but was otherwise indistinguishable from the others, except in one crucial aspect: its laser cannon wasn’t working.

  Because a few hundred Fraggers, back in March, had landed on it and taken the cannon out.

  And that, boys and girls, is why we are fighting this war.

  The Fraggers were still there.

  Petruzzelli hurtled over Stickney, noticing how pretty it looked in the pink reflected light of Mars. Timed to the nanosecond, her dropedoes sprang out of their trusses and streaked down towards the moonlet. She never saw if they landed, or got picked off. She was already past and away, running for home, left with only the pictures captured by her ship to chew over.

  Stickney was shaped roughly like a cone with a depression in the top. The sides, scarred with swirly patterns, fell away from the Big Bowl, where the Fraggers had landed six months ago in the teeth of enemy fire. The laser cannon was still there, a blockhouse with its shutters hanging open, looking for all the world like a broken jaw. Petruzzelli zoomed in on the Big Bowl: “Look!”

  A tiny human figure, photographed in the act of running towards a dropedo that had made it down.

  “Yes, that appears to be a Luna Union officer,” her ship said.

  “What’s the problem, ship? Isn’t it nice to know they’re still alive? The PLAN jams their comms. They could be dead, for all we know. I’m glad they’re still alive to pick up their toilet paper.”

  And water and food and meds and oxygen …

  … and up-armored bots …

  … why?

  But she’d already asked her ship about that, and got nowhere.

  “Check this one out,” her ship said.

  Petruzzelli frowned at the last photograph in the sequence. The ship pointed out a blotch at the far side of the Big Bowl.

  “Cheezus, that’s a ship.”

  “A Fragger.”

  “I thought the PLAN blew up all their ships; that’s why they’re stuck. Are we sending them new ones? What�
�s the point? The PLAN will just blow those up, too. They’re living underground, in the maintenance tunnels of the laser assembly. I’m guessing you couldn’t fit a ship down there.”

  “That’s one of the Fraggers that flew out with us. Check the casualty list.”

  Petruzzelli did. Her brain was totally scrambled. It took her a few seconds. “That guy I talked to … Miller. He’s missing!”

  “That was him.”

  “He crashed? Fuck.”

  “His ship is intact. Or was, when I took this picture.”

  “He landed.” Petruzzelli shook her head. “What a …” She was about to say dumbass, but then she remembered Miller’s calm, collected attitude in the hangar, when he must already have had this in mind, and a different word came out: “Hero.”

  “Hero?”

  “Yeah, sure. Landing on a moonlet in orbit around Mars, with no hope of ever getting home? I call that heroic.”

  “But these heroes are on the end of a multi-trillion-spider supply chain stretching back to Earth, and out to the gas giants, financed and maintained by us. Star Force is burning through money, ships, and pilots, every day, all to keep a couple of hundred heroes breathing.”

  “I like how you put pilots last, there,” Petruzzelli said dryly. “I guess you do have a point. But still. This is the human spirit at its finest, right? It’s like something out of a—”

  “Game,” her ship said, taking the word out of her mouth. “It is like something out of a game. But this is a real war. Real pilots died back there. Your friend Williams got cooked. Didn’t you notice?”

  Petruzzelli had, but the ship was sadly wrong about Williams being her friend. None of them were her friends. “Too bad,” she mumbled, sinking lower in her couch.

  The ship wasn’t finished. “We weren’t ready for this war. Luna forced us into it, knowing it would be against the UN’s core principles to leave valiant warriors to die. Basically, they used those heroes as pawns in a political grudge match. Doesn’t that make you mad?”

  “I heard they were all volunteers,” Petruzzelli said. It seemed odd that her ship was suddenly so opinionated, even questioning the premise of their mission. But she was too tired to think about it. Her bones burned. Every breath hurt. When she shut her eyes she could still see enemy fire vectors. She injected herself with a sedative, and slept.

  xii.

  Back at Eureka Station two days later, she endured a scolding from Wing Commander Roarke for chasing that troll. Typical: they didn’t want you to fight. Just get in, deliver your payload, and get out. Well, she’d done that, anyway.

  She went home to freshen up. She had her own little room, with a real shower. Water pressure sucked, but it was hot, and she stayed in until the shower beeped to tell her she’d used up her water allotment.

  She dried off and put on civvies. She didn’t have to style her hair, because she had no hair anymore. Oh, the joys of serving humanity! She decided on stick-on electric blue horns. She was a cyborg now. She might as well look like one. And actually, the bald-skull-and-horns look was kinda fierce. She added blue eyelash spray, lipstick, and a pair of primitive-y earrings.

  The Star Force pilots all had their quarters on Wheel One. If you thought of Eureka Station as a set of hollow cylinders stacked inside each other, Wheel One was the outermost cylinder. It had the best spin gravity. It also had officer country, but nothing was perfect. Outside Wheel One—upstairs, from Petruzzelli’s point of view—was the surface of the asteroid, where robots performed various zero-gee maintenance functions.

  Downstairs, the real life of the station went on. Wheels Two, Three, and Four housed the ground crews, their families, and all the other tens of thousands of support personnel who kept the ships flying. Eureka Station had been operating for so long now that this auxiliary community had outgrown its support role. It had a life of its own. Third-generation Eurekans worked as pet groomers, skin designers, and bonsai artists. Their isolation during Eureka’s century of secret existence had made them into an aloof, suspicious people. If you tried to talk to them, they’d pretend they didn’t speak English. In actuality, some of them really didn’t.

  But they sure did know how to mix a mean margarita.

  A whole section of Wheel Four teemed with bars and clubs, catering to the station’s disproportionately large population of young singles. The UV lights had been jarked here; they never came on. The artificial night sparkled with LED signage and virtual sales pitches. Every few meters you passed from one local network zone into another: from rock music to folk to rocketpunk, from the smell of woodsmoke to the perfume of incense—all of this transmitted via your BCI’s network connection. It reminded Petruzzelli of 6 Hebe.

  Shame about 6 Hebe.

  But the anything-goes colonial ethos lived on, on Eureka Station. The difference here was the whopping noob quotient. Personnel fresh off the latest transport pinballed hilariously from building to building. It took you a while to learn to walk in one-fifth of Earth’s gravity.

  Petruzzelli had no problems in this regard. She strolled down the strip, enjoying appraising glances from guys she’d never look twice at. Pings thudded into her ‘Ignore’ folder. Despite her show of confidence, she knew that not every bar on the strip was safe for her. That pilot who died today, Williams, had once got beaten up when she went for a quiet drink in the wrong watering-hole. People didn’t trust each other here. That was the noob quotient, again. And the war.

  She made for a big building clad in gengineered glow-in-the-dark ivy. Called, of course, The Ivy, this was a Star Force-friendly brew pub. The bouncer scoped the PILOT flash on her profile, nodded her in, and blatantly checked out her ass.

  Wood-look tables and chairs crowded an arena-shaped space on several higgledy-piggledy levels. The scrum around the bar threw off a cloud of virtual chit-chat, people shouting visually over the raucous music. Petruzzelli winced and un-joined the local network. The music and the visual clutter vanished. Suddenly she was in a nice quiet pub, half-empty, the ambiance marred only by the dolts around the bar, who were still shouting over a frug-rock track that only they could hear.

  “Get me a big-ass margarita,” she told the waiter, a human being. “Plenty of salt.”

  She collapsed in a spindle-legged chair on one of the mezzanine levels and propped an elbow on the railing. Her margarita came within minutes. She raised a silent toast to Williams. Not that she’d really known her. But her death was symbolic of … of—she remembered what her ship had said: the stupidity the waste the politics—of something.

  So she’d get drunk. It wouldn’t take many spiders out of her account. Alcohol worked fast in micro-gee.

  A margarita and a half later, something caught her eye.

  A knot of baldies coming into the pub, talking and laughing.

  Oh God. Zhang, Zubrowski, Blake—the whole fucking clique.

  She slid down in her chair. Absorbed in their own conversation, the Wallopers trooped up to the top level of the pub and took a table out of her line of sight.

  She finished her margarita and hailed a waiter, but the pub was filling up. She wouldn’t get any service now unless she used the local network to place her order, and she really hated frug-rock. She left her seat, went down to the bar level, pushed between people blinded to reality by the virtual crap on their implants.

  Ahead of her, two short Earthborn women were getting trampled by young men pogoing up and down, out of control, dancing with imaginary partners.

  Petruzzelli stood 176 centimeters and she was in the best shape of her life. Anyway, it didn’t take a lot of skill to throw an elbow into someone’s gut.

  The two women toppled gratefully against the bar. “Whew! Wow! Thanks. Oh.”

  “Oh. My. God,” Petruzzelli said. “Goto?”

  “Holy crap!” Elfrida Goto exclaimed. “Petruzzelli!” She turned to her friend, a plump chick with Nubian coloring who wore sparkly electric blue eyeshadow, a top hat, and not much else. Elfrida herself wore an arrangeme
nt of khaki and white triangles that you might call a dress if you were feeling generous. “Colden, this is Alicia Petruzzelli! Remember, I did that testimonial for her? I hope that was helpful rather than the opposite, Petruzzelli?”

  “It was great. Obviously. I’m here.”

  “Yeeeeah! It’s so awesome that you got in! This is my friend Jennifer Colden.”

  “Ahem,” said the bartender.

  “Oh, oh God, yeah. OK, I’ll have a … a craft beer, and—”

  “We have thirty-seven varieties of craft beer.”

  Elfrida dithered. “What do you recommend, Petruzzelli?”

  “Coke,” Petruzzelli said. She herself had lost her desire for another margarita. Jennifer Colden wrinkled her nose. “OK,” Petruzzelli said to the bartender. “Three Bathtub Brews. I’ve got this.”

  “Oh God, Petruzzelli, you shouldn’t!” Elfrida kept talking as they followed Petruzzelli up to the mezzanine level. “Seriously, this is amazing! Colden and I just figured we’d have a night on the town for old times’ sake, like a recapture our youth kind of thing, but running into you, wow, this is a real blast from the past! I mean that in a totally good way.”

  The table where Petruzzelli was sitting had been stolen. They found another, less desirable table near the toilets. “Cheers,” Petruzzelli said. “So what brings you guys to Eureka Station?”

  Elfrida and Colden exchanged a look. Colden answered. “We’re here on duty.”

  ”Well, yeah, I figured. This isn’t the kind of place you would come for fun.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” Colden said. She eyed the scrum around the bar. “That ’roided-out dude with the full sleeves is kinda tasty.”

  “Colden. He’s like eighteen,” Elfrida tsked. She explained to Petruzzelli: “Colden met her Mr. Right when we were kids. He’s brainy, courageous, heart in the right place—he works for Medecins Sans Frontieres!—and he’s even OK-looking. But something happened—”

  “My issues happened,” Colden sighed.

  “So she’s on this, like, kick to find Mr. As-Wrong-As-Possible. To show Kristiansen. Or something.”