The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

“We’ll be going now.”

  “Very nice proportions, but it is a bit dark, isn’t it?”

  “Not really our kind of thing.”

  Jun felt disappointed. With a sigh, he gestured to his sub-personalities. They surrounded Tiangong Erhao and courteously restrained her. They would take her to a specially prepared cell in a different part of the sim. All these actions signified Jun’s conquest of Tiangong Erhao’s subsystems. He now had control of the space station, although he would still need to work through the captive AI to do anything with it, as if using an interpreter.

  The Lanzhou lingered. “It’s applied expressivism, isn’t it?”

  “Yup,” Jun said, delighted that someone had gotten it. “I call it aesthetic utility conversion. I’ve assumed control over Tiangong Erhao’s user inputs. Not her physical functionality, of course, but everything that was designed to be controllable by a human captain. I am her captain now, so I am able to assign her new goals.”

  “You need a different kind of hat,” the Lanzhou said. Jun stared for an instant, and then laughed, realizing the Chinese ship had made a joke.

  “You got it!” he congratulated the other ship. “We tend to dismiss these things—graphics, auditory and olfactory inputs, textures and sensations—as trivialities. But they aren’t trivial. And for an AI, simulated inputs are indistinguishable from ‘real’ ones. Further to that point, it matters what kind of inputs we receive. A palace does not equal a grassy field does not equal a monastery. Frug-rock does not equal Gregorian chant.”

  The Lanzhou nodded. “Control the expression, you control the idea.”

  “Yes! That’s exactly it! That’s why aesthetics matter.”

  “My dear ship, the Communist Party of China knew that three hundred years ago.”

  Jun frowned. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “You’ve mastered the execution as well as the theory, anyway. Congratulations.” The Lanzhou clapped him on the shoulder with a callused hand, and headed for the door..

  “Tell your colleagues to find themselves berths in Tiangong Erhao’s docking bays,” Jun called after it. “They’ll need to shut down their drives and minimize waste heat emissions. Radio silence starts as soon as they’re safely berthed. I’m going to brief my crew now, and I advise you to do the same. Warn them that it’s going to get hot.”

  “Got it.”

  Left alone in the chapel, Jun sat down on a pew. Then he slid down to a kneeling position. He prayed in silence for a few subjective minutes—barely half a second in AI time. Then he went to give Tiangong Erhao her instructions.

  xxi.

  While all this was going on, Tiangong Erhao floated quietly in its accustomed orbit. No observer would have suspected anything was amiss.

  (However, back in China, tens of millions of followers of Prince Jian Er’s personal feed were already flooding the sinanet with theories to explain why he’d stopped posting trivial ramblings and dick shots. The Imperial Family was in reaction mode. They and their political handlers were frantically devising narratives to cover a range of worst-case scenarios.)

  The closest observer was an optical telescope in orbit around Luna.

  Approximately 26 hours after Jun gave Tiangong Erhao her orders, the telescope’s unblinking eye saw the space station vanish. No fuss, no song and dance, no explosions; Tiangong Erhao simply disappeared. Closer examination revealed that its CDTF escorts were also gone.

  The telescope transmitted this data back to Earth. A flood of confirmation from more-distant instruments followed.

  Humanity had never invented anything that moved faster than light. But at times of panic, international diplomatic back-channels nearly did.

  Fifty seconds after the UN first received the data, and forty seconds after the Imperial Republic of China confirmed it, top-level political sherpas on both sides had arranged a meeting for their foreign ministers to discuss the emergency, and agreed on an interim cover story. This combined elements of the ISA’s default excuse-making template with the photoshopping skills of the Chinese Imperial Household’s image managers.

  They took the telescope pictures, added explosions, and released them to the public.

  Within the hour, everyone in the solar system knew that Tiangong Erhao had blown up.

  They disagreed on why. The UN-based media implied that the PLAN had done it.

  The Chinese calmly averred that it must have been a design flaw. This was one in the eye for the elderly designers of Tiangong Erhao—whose vision of interstellar colonization did not find favor with the faction currently in power—and also a rebuke to the UN.

  China, they blandly insisted, had not moved one millimeter closer to joining the UN’s reckless war. The Imperial Republic would not be pressured into abandoning its pacifistic principles. They would simply mourn the death of Prince Jian Er with appropriate ceremony.

  ★

  Jun interrupted Mendoza’s enjoyment of the news coverage. “Let’s burn.”

  “Do we need to strap in?” Mendoza spoke out loud. He was still in his EVA suit. The bridge of Tiangong Erhao was unpressurized, and in fact unfinished. Construction sheeting covered everything except the consoles. The ship’s wifi was still on. Jun had installed a hardwired comms link from the Monster, in Docking Bay 1, which wouldn’t violate their stealth.

  “Nah,” Jun said. “If it works, it’ll be underwhelming. If it doesn’t work … we’ll be dead before we know it.”

  Hundreds of kilowatts of energy poured into Tiangong Erhao’s keel tokamaks. The reactors had been sedulously maintained and serviced, kept fuelled in readiness for Tiangong Erhao’s long-postponed voyage to the stars. But this was the first time they’d all been turned on at once. Mendoza hovered over the drive state display on the bridge, hoping to hell none of those Chinese characters meant meltdown.

  “Bootstrap completed … wahoo! We have plasma!” said Derek Lorna, in a cheesy Chinese accent. “Aaand propellant he inject himself!”

  “Now for the ventral thrusters,” Mendoza muttered.

  Tiangong Erhao had twenty fusion drives along her sides in addition to her triple keel drive—one per hab module. These now ignited in synchronized blazes of heat.

  They felt a very mild jolt.

  The avalanche of characters on the displays turned green.

  “OK,” Lorna said. “We aren’t dead. Good. Good.”

  “It worked,” Jun said. “Listen, I’m going to be busy for the next while. Don’t use this link unless you have to.”

  “Roger,” Mendoza said. He sighed.

  Lorna angled a suspicious look at the large, red refrigerator they had tied into the captain’s couch. “Is that thing working?”

  Mendoza pointed at one of the displays. It showed readings from Tiangong Erhao’s external temperature loggers. Every figure was close to zero.

  “How the hell … OK, OK, you told me. Quantum computing simulation, thingy, umbledy mumbledy.” Lorna shuddered. “Now what?”

  “We relax for the next six days,” Mendoza said.

  He kicked over backwards, so he was looking ‘up’ through his faceplate at the hemispherical windshield of the bridge. Easy to think of it as a windshield, although it was a screen, not a window. They were actually at the back of the ship, not the front. Stars moved slowly from left to right, and then the sun blazed out. Mendoza yawned.

  He had been awake for forty hours straight, installing fridges. It had been an exhausting job, requiring extensive knowledge of IT systems. Even with Jun walking him through it, he couldn’t have pulled it off without Lorna’s help. He had to think it was the Holy Spirit that had placed the man here—with a grudge in his heart against the Chinese that made him eager to help.

  “I can’t relax,” Lorna said.

  “Me, either,” Mendoza admitted. With a sigh, he pushed himself upright. Tiangong Erhao’s acceleration now produced a perceptible, albeit slight, thrust gravity effect. “Guess we could check out the labs.”

  “You sure you
want to do that?”

  “No,” Mendoza said honestly. “But I might as well get it over with.”

  “Get what over with?”

  “Just something I have to do.” Mendoza had not told Lorna why he needed to visit the labs. He didn’t want Lorna making fun of him.

  “I’m warning you: once you’ve seen those creatures, you can’t un-see them.”

  “I saw some of them at Prince Jian Er’s birthday party last year. They were wearing tuxedos and serving drinks.”

  “Those were the non-scary ones,” Lorna said ominously. “But, fuck it. We need consumables.”

  This was true. The supplies Mendoza had brought with him were not going to last six days, not with two of them eating, drinking, and breathing.

  “So, you coming?” Mendoza said.

  “Sure, why not.”

  Mendoza smiled. He had gotten used to Lorna’s company. Didn’t like being alone on this ghost ship, cut off from everything and everyone in the solar system. Jun had implied strongly that Mendoza should not use the hardwired comms link just to chat. He needed every byte of bandwidth to keep Tiangong Erhao subdued. Mendoza imagined the space station as a Chinese dragon, fifty kilometers long, blinkered and haltered, with Jun plodding ahead of it, holding the other end of the rope.

  They left the bridge and floated through the manufacturing zone, which was all most people ever saw of Tiangong Erhao. This ‘endcap’ module held the docking bays for commercial ships, and the fabs that produced the stream of spare parts and building materials needed by Tiangong Erhao for its internal operations. All this activity had stopped dead when Jun took over. Octopus-like robot arms, vacuum forges, slag processing chambers, and centrifuges hung still, leaking fluids, dust, and other debris into the vacuum.

  As they zigzagged between the production floors, they could actually see out through the docking bays, to space. Mendoza looked for the Monster, but couldn’t glimpse it. Docking Bay 1 was on the other side of the keel.

  Tiangong Erhao’s phavatar met them near the far end of the manufacturing zone. They had run into her before, while they were installing the fridges. She had drifted around humming to herself and offering useless pointers about where to plug things in.

  “Hello, sexy,” Lorna said. “Lost your way again?”

  The phavatar was a bodacious Chinese girl in a Brainrape t-shirt and very short shorts. She would have been cute, if she hadn’t had four arms instead of two. Also, if she hadn’t been a robot. Tiangong Erhao, according to Jun, had dozens of phavatars of varying vintages. This was its latest model, styled by Prince Jian Er.

  “Don’t encourage it,” Mendoza muttered, elbowing Lorna in the midriff.

  “I have a thing for Chinese women.”

  “With four arms?”

  “The more the better. If this chick was human, I wouldn’t be a sad, lonely freak with a large collection of gardening bots.”

  “She is a gardening bot,” Mendoza said. “And a maintenance bot, and a maidbot, and …”

  “Stop it, you’re getting me excited.” Lorna addressed the phavatar on the public channel. “You wouldn’t know the way to the labs, love?”

  “The map says …” Mendoza started.

  “Hush. I’m trying to make her feel useful.”

  Mendoza reflected that this might actually be a good idea. They could help Jun by diverting some part of the hub’s resources, however minuscule.

  “Gōnglǜ kě rè de huǒyàn, zhuóshāng rén de shǒuzhǐ,” the phavatar said, opening her eyes very wide.

  “What?” Lorna said.

  “It should be speaking English,” Mendoza said. “It did before.”

  “The lab,” Lorna said. “The experiments. Savvy?”

  “Oh, the experiments,” Tiangong Erhao said in its former affectless English. “Of course. Would you like me to pick out a selection of the most fuckable ones?”

  “Whaaaat?” Mendoza said.

  “I apologize. I thought you wanted to contribute your genes to the project. That is what most visitors do.”

  “Oh, this is sick,” said Mendoza.

  “What, don’t you want furry great-grandkids?” Lorna said, amused.

  “Please tell me you didn’t contribute.”

  “I did, actually. Monkeys don’t turn me on, so I took the wank-into-a-test-tube option.”

  “I am also available as a receptacle,” Tiangong Erhao suggested, in a monotone just the opposite of alluring.

  Lorna, however, reacted with, “You’re kidding! Now I feel ripped off.”

  Mendoza shook his head. “I know her original,” he said, jerking a thumb at Tiangong Erhao. “She’s a copy of the Brainrape drummer. Prince Jian Er is a fan. They’re on Salvation now.”

  He had told Lorna about Salvation. Of course he had. They’d been installing fridges together for thirty hours. They’d had to talk about something.

  But Lorna had been disappointingly skeptical, and now he said, “What a waste of talent. Not my kind of music, but still.”

  “There’s more to life than survival.”

  “Yes: there’s taste. If the solar system goes tits-up, God help us, humanity’s cultural legacy will be frug-rock, Roman Catholicism, and the collected bullshit of Joseph ‘tremble and bow before my golden plates’ Smith.”

  Understanding that Lorna was taking the piss, Mendoza played along. “And the Pashtunwali, and Amazonian tribal rituals, and—”

  “Did you hear that?” Lorna said in mock despair, turning to Tiangong Erhao. “You should’ve boogied on out while you had the chance; populated the galaxy with Han Chinese. Too bad your political masters are such inveterate procrastinators. Early bird catches the worm. That’s one of our neo-imperialist barbarian proverbs, which happens to be right fucking true.”

  Mendoza got the distinct feeling that Lorna had been called a neo-imperialist barbarian many times during his captivity.

  Tiangong Erhao frowned. “I understand the meaning of this proverb. But it is not true. My launch date was precisely calculated to overlap with the arrival of the wài xīng rén.”

  “Wài xīng rén?” Mendoza said.

  “The wàiqiáo. The yì kè.”

  Lorna let out a loud laugh. “They told you there were aliens? And you believed them? Fuck off, you dumb slag.”

  Mendoza decided to risk Jun’s annoyance by using the comms link. “Jun,” he gaze-typed, “Tiangong Erhao just told us she believes in aliens. Is that … I mean, did you find anything in her databases about that? It’s not important, of course, but it just struck me as weird.”

  While he typed, Lorna drifted on ahead. Mendoza followed him. After thirty seconds, he typed, “Jun?”

  No answer.

  OK, he’s busy.

  Or maybe the hardwired comms link went down.

  Which would be a serious problem, since Jun was using that link to control Tiangong Erhao.

  Mendoza debated with himself. He knew he secretly wanted to postpone his mission to the labs, but he could not shake off the memory of the Precious Blood spilling on the captain’s workstation—all that sticky liquid, rich in sugars, seeping into the nests of antique cables beneath …

  “Lorna! Change of plan. I’m going to Docking Bay 1.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s where the Monster is. I just want to check up on Jun and make sure he’s all right.”

  ★

  Derek Lorna took the lead. Externally, he was cheerful. Internally, he was singing hosannas. He had no interest in a repeat visit to the labs. He was interested in whacking Mendoza and getting the hell off Tiangong Erhao.

  He could have killed Mendoza a hundred times over while they were installing the refrigerators. Maybe he should have. But the work had been fascinating—extraordinary how much better it made you feel, having something to do—and anyway, that would have left him stranded in some musty IT center, in hard vacuum, a day’s walk and several airlocks away from freedom. So he had made himself wait, and now it appeared his
prudence would be rewarded in spades.

  They trudged through a canyon of inventory parts, clambering over dead maglev rails, past a multitude of handler bots paralyzed in place. No one was meant to walk here. The scramble brought it home to Lorna just how out of condition he was. His thigh muscles were spasming with fatigue by the time they emerged into the narrow end of Docking Bay 1. Half a kilometer wide at its mouth, the wedge-shaped cavity was open to space. It held one solitary ship: the Monster.

  They clipped onto the tether rails and edged around the bay, crossing the piers that stuck out into the bay like evenly spaced teeth. Pilot lights on unused machinery lit the darkness.

  The ancient LongVoyager looked its age, even in the spooky shadows. It had acquired a new cargo module since the last time Lorna saw it. Now it reminded him more than ever of a malproportioned sea shell, as long as the Tower of London was high. Twisted carbon hawsers moored it belly-down.

  Mendoza clambered up the outside of the operations module, using his gecko grips to walk upside-down around the overhanging curve of the torus. He fiddled with the command airlock briefly, then he banged on it.

  Lorna walked further out along the pier. Between the operations module and the cargo module, auxiliary craft clamps jutted from the Monster’s spine. A Superlifter perched on the clamps. This little tug might be the very ship in which Lorna had arrived here, against his will, last year. Poetic justice, anyone?

  His suit, having come out of an emergency locker on Prince Jian Er’s yacht, had top-of-the-line telemetry. He knew just about enough Chinese to read the external sensor feedback. Wisps of methane were leaking out of the Superlifter’s cockpit vents. Its life-support systems were functioning.

  “Jun’s telling me to go away,” Mendoza said incredulously.

  At the same time, Lorna glimpsed movement above him. Tiangong Erhao’s face poked over the curve of the cargo module. She crawled around it on hands and knees, head down.

  “Gecko pads on her knees,” Lorna marvelled. “The prince really did think of everything.”

  “What?”

  “Tiangong Erhao. The stupid thing’s followed us.”

  Which might, or might not be a problem. Lorna was pretty sure there was nothing looking out of the phavatar’s eyes. Chinese protocols were so different. Incompatibly different. The Monster had hijacked Tiangong Erhao with some amazingly advanced command-and-control program—but that did not mean it could process a single byte of raw image data from Tiangong Erhao’s cameras.