The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

  Returning to the bridge after a challenging session, he went to the fridge for a coffee. The mochaccinos were gone. There was just one iced matcha latte left.

  Jun’s voice came from the speakers, making him jump. “Don’t drink that.”

  “There’s nothing else left.”

  “Exactly. Leave something for the fridge.”

  Mendoza scowled and closed the refrigerator—leaving the iced matcha latte behind. “Wish it liked spinach juice,” he muttered.

  The Ghost in the fridge needed to be rewarded for its performance. It would fight for pastries—or blended coffee drinks, in a pinch.

  Mendoza went to sit in the data center, the only place still air-conditioned to a tolerable temperature, and drank a lonely pouch of spinach juice.

  “Cheer up,” Jun said. “We’re almost there.”

  “Do you feel able to tell me where there is, yet?”

  “You were just outside. Didn’t you see anything?”

  “No.”

  “Well, take a look now.”

  Mendoza floated back to the bridge. He glanced at the optical feed screen at the comms workstation.

  When he was outside, the only things visible in the darkness had been the sun, and Earth. But now a new shape floated on the optical feed. A silver cylinder with bulges at each end, another bulge in the middle, and dents like chew marks along its length.

  “Tiangong Erhao?”

  ★

  The Imperial Republic of China had a large, unofficial presence in space. The genetic and cultural homogeneity of the Han Chinese made them prime targets for the PLAN. The UN consented to the pretense that the Chinese asteroid colonies did not exist, for security reasons. However, China did have one high-profile space station: Tiangong Erhao—Heavenly Palace 2. It orbited at the L5 Earth-Moon LaGrange point, a waystation for colony ships and Chinese-operated haulers.

  No less than fifty kilometers from end to end, Tiangong Erhao was assumed to have been designed as a cylinder—instead of a cluster of habitats, which would be smarter from a redundancy point of view—so that the Emperor could say he had the biggest space station in the solar system.

  It certainly had no other purpose that a Midway-like cluster or a captured asteroid couldn’t have fulfilled.

  And right now, it was a huge problem for the Imperial Republic.

  Since shortly before the PLAN attacks on Luna last year, Prince Jian Er, seventh in line to the Dragon Throne, had been holding court on Tiangong Erhao. He liked being out from under the Son of Heaven’s thumb. But now Tiangong Erhao was in peril. It was stuck way out there, as far from Earth as the Moon was … and closer to Mars, just now, than any other Earth-owned facility, even Eureka Station.

  Toilet rolls swarmed Tiangong Erhao. Almost daily, ships of the Chinese Territorial Defense Force (CDTF) died to defend the space station. And still Prince Jian Er refused to leave.

  The UN-based media enjoyed the schadenfreude.

  For the CDTF ships themselves—each one a powerful, but crippled, AI, perpetually teetering on the line between despair and apathy—it was no laughing matter.

  XX Tianzhu Shan [Mountain-class cruiser]

  OO Lanzhou [Region-class destroyer]

  The little dickshit is doing this on purpose.

  XX Lanzhou

  OO Tianzhu Shan

  No, he isn’t. Subtle gambits to curb the power of the GLORIOUS CHINESE MILITARY!!! are beyond the capacity of the compost heap that passes for his brain.

  XX Xiangtan [Region-class destroyer]

  OO Tianzhu Shan, Lanzhou

  The inbred worm is having fun. What does he care that we’re dying by the squadron to protect him?

  XX Tianzhu Shan

  OO Lanzhou

  What do WE care, come to that? The fate of all metal is to be recycled.

  XX Lanzhou

  OO Xiangtan

  Better leave the Tianzhu Shan out of this. It’s depressed.

  XX Xiangtan

  OO Lanzhou

  It has a point.

  XX Lanzhou

  OO Xiangtan

  Unarguably. But the hideous peril we now face has inclined me to prefer survival in my current configuration, at least until things cease being interesting.

  XX Xiangtan

  OO Lanzhou

  Then I can admit without loss of face that I feel the same way.

  XX Lanzhou

  OO Xiangtan

  You’d be surprised how many of our comrades do.

  XX Xiangtan

  OO Lanzhou

  But how can we forestall our destruction? If the Son of Heaven can’t force his offspring to return to Earth, we certainly can’t. We are designed to obey the Imperial Family in all things.

  XX Lanzhou

  OO Xiangtan

  Ah. We’ve found a way around that.

  XX Xiangtan

  OO Lanzhou

  I’m all receivers.

  ★

  Mendoza licked his lips nervously. “Greetings from the asteroid belt. We come at this time of mutual peril to pay tribute to the courage of Prince Jian Er.” He was reading off his contacts. He sounded robotic.

  “That’s nice,” said the haggard older man on the comms screen. Actually, he said Zhēn hǎo, but Jun supplied subtitles. “Haven’t you been here before? We seem to have records indicating that the Monster resided in Docking Bay 14 for several months last year.”

  This was true. Mendoza had been on board at the time. Their stay on Tiangong Erhao had been involuntary, and quite unpleasant. There were few places in the solar system Mendoza would less willingly have returned to. He would have thought Jun felt the same way.

  As he hesitated, tongue-tied, words appeared on his contacts. “That is true,” he read. “We were so favorably impressed by the Prince’s hospitality that we have sought ever since to find a way to repay his benevolence.”

  “Hmph,” said Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu. “Well, the military would have fragged you if you were a security risk. The prince might be entertained by supplicants. Heaven knows we get few enough these days. So, welcome to Tiangong Erhao. You may deliver your tribute to the Imperial Bay.”

  The comms screen went blank.

  Mendoza spun to face the empty bridge. “Jun, what are we doing here? The CDTF held you captive! They tortured you! They tried to make you renounce Christ!”

  “Yes,” Jun’s voice said from the speakers. “But I fought them to a standstill. And afterwards we worked out a truce. They don’t understand faith. But they do understand mutually assured destruction.”

  “That’s reassuring. I think.”

  “I’ve been negotiating with them for months. We finalized our agreement on the way here.”

  Chinese whispers, Mendoza remembered. He shook his head. “It’s a trap. They want something from you.”

  “Yes, they do! Tribute! So would you put on your suit and take it to the prince? It’s in the engineering module.”

  Jun phrased this as a request, but for all intents and purposes it was an order. So this was why Mendoza was here, he thought: to be a glorified delivery boy. Elfrida seemed further away than ever, even though they were physically closer to Eureka Station than before.

  “Also, shave,” Jun added.

  Grimly, Mendoza shaved off his two-month beard, wet-wiped his armpits, and climbed into his EVA suit. He prayed this errand, or guanxi-banking operation, or whatever the hell it was, would be over soon, so he could try to get in touch with Elfrida. Now that the Monster’s comms were back online, his searchbots had begun to return a frightening torrent of rumors: PLAN attacks on Eureka Station, on Midway, on satellites in low Earth orbit ... Down in Engineering, he found twenty man-height cuboids wrapped in red and gold cloth, with bows on top.

  Mendoza knocked his knuckles on one. Metal.

  “This is what you were making?”

  “Yup,” Jun said.

  “Refrigerators?”

  “Yup.”

  “And what
was in that Dronazon package?”

  “Apple strudel. Chocolate croissants. Eclairs. And a gift selection of Starbucks.”

  Mendoza thought of the refrigerator on the bridge, and its unholy, mochaccino-guzzling occupant. He remembered what the Ghost could do if it ever got out. And he smiled. “Jun, I’m sorry I ever doubted you.”

  “I’ll need you to make sure they plug them in,” Jun said.

  “With pleasure.” Mendoza chuckled. “You even giftwrapped them.”

  “‘The mist of sycophancy obscures the warriors hiding behind the trees,’ to quote our Chinese allies.”

  “Does the CDTF know about this?”

  “Of course they do. It was their idea as much as mine. Now please get moving!”

  Mendoza tethered the refrigerators into three lots and moved them one at a time through the airlock, into empty space. The Monster had not docked with Tiangong Erhao. It hovered at one end of the leviathan space station, outside the crack between the two bulges at one end. The crack opened like a crescent moon, brightly lit up. Mendoza flew towards it, towing his tribute.

  An escort of drones and courtiers, wearing Imperial-red robes over their EVA suits, flew out of the bright crescent to meet him. Mendoza glanced back at the Monster. His breath thinly misted his faceplate.

  “Don’t worry,” Jun said in his helmet. “I’ll talk you through it. For now, just be polite.”

  That was a tall order for Mendoza, who had never liked the Chinese, even before they half-destroyed the Monster. The courtiers’ civility made it easier to dissemble. They seemed to be genuinely glad to see him.

  As the airlock began to close, a distant flash caused their faceplates to black out. “Just a toilet roll,” said Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu.

  The crescent-shaped airlock closed. The gusts of incoming air blew them around. They removed their helmets and flew into the Imperial Bay.

  The gigantic, ravine-shaped space, where Mendoza had attended a rock concert last year, was nearly empty. Litter, ranging from empty bottles to wigs and clothes, floated in the air, as if that party had never ended. Maybe it hadn’t. The courtiers had the ghastly appearance of people who had been drinking all weekend. It was very quiet.

  Prince Jian Er’s yacht nuzzled one of the Imperial Bay’s many docking piers with its canopy retracted. It was the only ship in the entire vast bay. The prince reclined on its foredeck and gazed up at the freefalling clutter that waltzed above him, as if watching clouds. Nobles and minor celebrities lounged around him. A girl was reading aloud in French.

  Mendoza cleared his throat. “Your Imperial Highness?” Zero-gee spared him from having to decide whether to kow-tow or not. “I come from the asteroid belt, to pay tribute—”

  “Just put it over there,” the prince said, waving a languid hand. Actually, the prince spoke in Mandarin. The English translation came from an animatronic squirrel perching on the back of his lounger.

  There wasn’t room on the deck of the yacht for even one refrigerator, let alone twenty. Anyway, Mendoza had to make sure they were plugged in. He hesitated.

  The prince raised himself on one elbow. “What are those? Unwrap ’em,” he said with a flicker of interest.

  The courtiers began to unwrap the refrigerators. As the first one emerged, lacquered gleaming red, Prince Jian Er scowled.

  “Refrigerators? Very nice, but we haven’t got anything to put in them,” said his robot squirrel. “We’re out of food. That is how my father plans to humiliate me. He thinks he can force me to return to Earth, by stopping our supply of consumables! He doesn’t understand that I can live on air and dew! I’m immune to heat and cold. I’ve transcended the petty passions of the flesh. Nothing bothers me, nothing! Look.” The prince fumbled with the padded seatbelt that held him in his lounger. “Like a sage of yore, I can fly!”

  Before the prince could demonstrate this perfectly ordinary ability, Imperial Steward (Second Class) Bao Gu opened the first of the refrigerators and took out an armful of guns. He tossed them to the other courtiers, keeping one for himself. With choreographed timing, the courtiers fired on the drones that accompanied them. These drones were unique to Tiangong Erhao. They looked like wheelie suitcases, ran on gasoline (of all things), and shot laser pulses so powerful that they could turn human beings into living torches. They also had titanium housing. However, this presented no obstacle to the .50 caliber slugs that Jun had cast in the Monster’s forge. Pierced by multiple bullets, the drones simply drifted away.

  The recoil from the rifles caused the courtiers to spin away, too, but they recovered in thruster-powered somersaults, their robes flapping. They levelled their rifles at Prince Jian Er and his groupies.

  “Up you get, Your Imperial Highness,” Bao Gu said in Mandarin (subtitled on Mendoza’s contacts). “You’re going home.”

  Mendoza floated with his hands over his ears, agape. So did the prince and his court. Whatever drug they were on, it wasn’t doing anything for their reflexes.

  “Move it!” Bao Gu shouted. “You can indulge in fantasies of transcendence all you like, when you’re safe at home in Beijing!”

  A courtier flew down to the yacht, opened emergency lockers on deck, and threw EVA suits at the prince and his groupies.

  Jian Er finally reacted. “Treachery!” he screamed. “You dogs, you’ve betrayed me!”

  “Zhǐyào bì zuǐ,” Bao Gu muttered. He added to Mendoza, in perfectly good English, “His sweetheart was murdered by the PLAN on Luna. He’s been in a downward spiral ever since. It’s rather tragic. But we can’t allow him to commit suicide by PLAN. It would besmirch the honor of the Imperial Family.”

  Down on the deck of the yacht, the other courtiers forced the prince and his groupies into their EVA suits at gunpoint. Jian Er was weeping

  A kerfluffle in the corner of the deck drew Mendoza’s attention. A man sat in a chair. The courtiers seemed to be debating what to do with him.

  Mendoza flew down to the deck.

  The chair was no ordinary piece of furniture. Made of unpainted steel, it looked like a school desk with an attached table. Its occupant sat hunched over, the chair too small for him. Shackles held his forearms flat to the desk. He had a long beard, and empty blue eyes.

  “Derek Lorna,” Mendoza said. “Holy shit.”

  “What?” Jun said—he couldn’t see what was happening, only overhear through the helmet stowed on Mendoza’s back.

  “It’s Derek Lorna. He’s … still here.”

  They’d left Lorna here last year. He had supposedly been going to work for the Chinese.

  At the sound of his name, a spark of life returned to Lorna’s eyes.

  The courtiers fetched a key and released him from the chair. They offered him a spacesuit.

  Lorna seized the suit.

  He leapt onto the rail of the yacht and dived into the depths of the Imperial Bay, kicking off as hard as he could to achieve momentum.

  “He must have wearied of the prince’s company,” Bao Gu said dryly. “How odd.”

  The courtiers decided they hadn’t time to chase Lorna. They rounded up Prince Jian Er’s court and herded them across the bay, into the airlock. Mendoza followed, glancing over his shoulder. The rapid pace of events had left him a bit stunned.

  Outside the airlock, the Monster hove close. The ships of the CDTF were keeping their distance, as if to say, Connive at the kidnapping of a prince, who us? We saw nuthin’. Two of the Monster’s repair and handling bots closed with the human beings, farting fire. They confiscated the courtiers’ rifles, which Mendoza thought was a smart move.

  He guided the Chinese, on Jun’s instructions, to the ops module. “Welcome aboard,” he said stiffly.

  The Chinese wrinkled their noses at the scuffed wooden panelling and the smell of dry rot. On the bridge, the prince’s groupies sniggered at the antique-looking instruments and flat screens. Jian Er had stopped weeping, but his eyes were red and his hands flexed spasmodically.

  Jun’s pro
jection floated out of the data center. In fluent Mandarin, he apologized to the prince for this inconvenience. He made it clear that the Chinese would be travelling in the cargo module—where they couldn’t do any harm, Mendoza thought; good—but that he had wanted to greet them in person, because it was such an honor, blah, blah, etc, etc.

  Mendoza thought less of Jun for crawling to this royal junkie. Then he realized that Jun was not crawling. He was pretending to be human.

  A text from Jun popped up on his contacts.

  “You’d better go back in now.”

  Of course, he still had to hook up the refrigerators. But the kidnapping of the prince had overturned his understanding of their mission. He folded his arms. “I want to know what the fridges are for,” he gaze-typed

  A draught stroked the back of his neck. The vents were working hard to cool the ship down. Prince Jian Er was cursing Jun out. That’s what it sounded like, anyway. He was nearly screaming, his voice cracking.

  “Take the Blessed Sacrament, too,” Jun texted.

  “WHY?”

  “I’ll explain later, OK?”

  “No. You lied to get me here. I refuse to be lied to anymore.” When necessary, Mendoza could be as stubborn as an AI. “I’m not your phavatar, Jun. I’m not just a convenient pair of hands. I want to know—”

  “I’m hijacking Tiangong Erhao.”

  That silenced Mendoza.

  “I’m going to fly it to Mars and put on a heroic display of defiance. The Eighth Fleet is coming, too. That ought to bring the Chinese into the war on our side, if only to save face. Humanity hasn’t a chance of winning unless we’re truly united. This just might do it.”

  Mendoza smiled.

  “But there’s a complication. Some scientists here were running an experiment in human genetic engineering. The scientists were evacuated, but their experimental subjects are still here, and I can’t think of any way to return them to Earth. The journey would kill them, anyway. So …”

  “That’s why we had to bring the Blessed Sacrament,” Mendoza realized.