The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

The assault party scuffed through the snow in the cavern and filed into the tunnel. Petruzzelli shuffled along with a queasy feeling in her bowels. She’d been shitting her guts out yesterday, which made her no better and no worse off than half the Fraggers. She had Stickney dust inside her skinsuit, in her molars, in her hair. Her faceplate was covered with flecks and grease.

  “I think they’ve put us in the middle so we won’t be in danger of hitting anything,” said Blake from beside her. “To be honest with you, I don’t mind. This is taking years off my life.”

  Petruzzelli considered admitting that she, too, was terrified—literally scared shitless. Instead she just shrugged and adjusted her rifle strap. Each of them had a clunky home-printed shotgun, plus lots of spare shells.

  It was absolutely dark. She squelched along on her gecko boots, trailing her right glove along the side of the 3-meter diameter coolant pipe. Then she collided with the Fragger in front of her. The column had halted.

  “The guys in front must’ve reached the barricade,” Blake said nervously.

  They had a dedicated relay channel. It transmitted the officers’ commands back along the tunnel via line-of-sight. “Ready.” Colonel Miller’s voice was as calm as a lunar sea. “Aim. Fire.”

  The man in front of Petruzzelli slammed into her. She slammed into Blake, and the impact transmitted itself all the way to the back of the column.

  “Move! Move!”

  They hustled forward. Ahead, Petruzzelli saw a faint red glow emanating from the side of the pipe. It was heat. The CP cannon had … worked.

  Its stream of charged particles, expanding in a narrow cone, had vaporized the Martians’ barricade.

  It had also vaporized the front end of the column.

  Petruzzelli de-gripped and floated over a stretch of red-hot slag. Black patches smoked, cooling. Those had been human beings. Had Miller known this would happen?

  “At least we didn’t rupture the pipe,” the man in front of her said. “Dog knows what kind of nasty stuff might come boiling out of there. But it seems to be well-shielded; two cheers for Martian engineering.”

  Miller sent a runner back to carry the news to the small force that had remained behind in the laser assembly cavern. When the woman returned, bad news percolated along the column.

  “No diversion.”

  “The phavatars haven’t gone over the top.”

  “They’re just freaking sitting there.”

  “The Farce is with us!”

  “I knew it,” Petruzzelli whispered. Miller had trusted Elfrida to make the diversion happen. Big mistake.

  Blake said to her, “Zhang and Zoob will go over the top, with or without the phavatars.”

  “I know. Sucks, doesn’t it? If we don’t get some action soon, they’ll kill more Martians than us.”

  ★

  When Elfrida asked for a meeting with the boss, she hadn’t expected to get the boss.

  Admiral Jeremy McLean was the most important person on Eureka Station. When Elfrida walked into his office, she got an impression of belly and brass buttons. A heartbeat later she saw the keen intelligence in his eyes.

  “How’s life in tactical telepresence, Agent Goto?”

  “That’s what I was hoping to discuss with you, sir.” Elfrida sat down on the ergoform he indicated, pulling her grotty sweatshirt straight. She felt sorely out of place not being in uniform. Her knees were knocking with nerves. “There’s an emergency on Stickney, and I requested permission to provide support. But Captain Pataki rejected my mission plan, so I thought—”

  “You thought you’d go over his head,” Commander McLean said. “Actually, Captain Pataki forwarded your mission plan to me. Miller and his merry band are going in through the heat-sink infrastructure?”

  “Yes, sir.” She tucked her hands under her thighs to stop herself from fidgeting. “I promised them that the COPs would support their attack by creating a diversion on the surface.” COPs—Combat-Optimized Phavatars. Star Force did come up with a good acronym from time to time, although no one outside of officer country ever used it. “At the present time, sir, my team’s logins have been disabled, so—”

  Commander McLean cut her off. “You promised Colonel Miller that the COPs would provide backup for this risky, strategically pointless operation, without first clearing it with Captain Pataki?”

  Elfrida wilted. “Yes, sir,” she muttered. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, she had thought. She had never imagined that Pataki would disable everyone’s logins. “Strategically pointless, sir?”

  The door chimed. A short, sturdy officer, bearing a remarkable physical resemblance to a gorilla, came in and saluted.

  “Executive Officer Carasso,” McLean greeted him. “Thanks for stopping by. Coffee?”

  ★

  The man ahead of Petruzzelli fired a foil round into the darkness. Fiery globs stuck to distant walls. Screams sliced into her ears. Someone came hurtling backwards, whanged into her, and she whanged into Blake, and Colonel Miller yelled, “Don’t you fucking pussy out on me, ladies and gentlemen! We’re better than them!”

  Mobility packs sputtered. They flew forward, scraping the pipe and the wall of the tunnel. Up ahead, the flicker of burning foil lit a wider place, and it was clogged with drifting suits, and there was so much smoke from all those foil rounds that she could see the laser beams stabbing across the killing zone, a familiar shade of blue, like welding torches.

  They’d advanced 500 meters along the maintenance tunnel, vaporizing two more barricades en route. Now, suddenly, the Martians were on top of them. Jostling along in the middle of the charge, Petruzzelli saw the little bastards boiling out of the roof. The tunnel doglegged, and that was the way they needed to go.

  Chaff rounds filled the cavern with sparkling snow. She flew clear of the pack, hit the wall, bounced off. Fired into the Martian vanguard. She anticipated the recoil, let it spin her around, and fired in a new direction. Her suit informed her that an area on her left hip was ablated to a depth of four millimeters. That was nothing. The chaff and the smoke were degrading the Martians’ blaster pulses, and her suit’s armor could stop the rest.

  She blasted a Martian with both barrels. Its torso exploded into a mist of red pulp. She let out a yell of triumph. It was crazy the way you could go from ohshit to we’re winning in a split second. Terror and elation combined into a laser-sharp focus on her next kill, and her next.

  Fragments of shouted commentary got through to her, so broken-up she might as well have been listening to gibberish. But she didn’t need to hear, to know they were winning.

  And then the cavern lit up like noon on Earth; bodies hurtled towards her, and Petruzzelli had just time to think ohshit before her helmet went black.

  Something crashed into her so hard, it was like landing on Stickney all over again. She collided with the wall. Her right leg crumpled under her. Agony flared. She might’ve blacked out for a second; couldn’t tell. Everything was black, anyway. Her suit shouted out a damage report that went on and on in excruciating detail.

  Reacting with stunned slowness, she watched her telemetry display scroll. OK, she wasn’t going to die in the next five minutes. Time to—to—

  She overrode her helmet filters. When she could see again, the first thing she saw was the face of a Fragger. Helmet gone. Suit burned right off his body. Skin burned off his body, too, leaving the muscle and sinew beneath exposed in a grisly pantomime of the man he used to be. She pushed him away. Fought loose of a knot of corpses. They’d saved her by taking the brunt of the blast. Them, and Star Force suit technology.

  TNT with a rubble shell, she thought. Martians waited for us to get into the kill zone, then rolled it down the shaft.

  “Hello? Anyone?”

  I might be the only person still alive—

  “Zuzu?”

  “Blake, thank fuck.”

  “Form on me,” came Colonel Miller’s voice. She picked him out of the chaos, high on the roof, near the tunnel t
he Martians had come out of. She triggered her mobility pack several times before understanding dawned that it no longer functioned. She kicked off with her good leg. “Do not move!” her suit said. “You have a tibial shaft fracture. I have immobilized your right leg, but maneuvering carries a significant risk of further injury.”

  “Too fucking bad,” Petruzzelli said. Miller alive meant the assault was still a green light. She flew towards him, batting body parts out of her way. Her right leg stuck out behind her, stiff and useless. She injected herself with the strongest dose of painkillers her suit would allow.

  Every time something moved, it startled her. Most of the movement was dead people floating very slowly towards the floor. A pitiful handful of Fraggers converged on Miller’s position.

  And:

  A bubble of greenish-white fluid bulged out of the heat exchanger pipe.

  “Hustle!” Miller shouted.

  But Petruzzelli was in the middle of the cavern with a busted mobility pack. No way to hustle.

  Terror made her actually start flapping her arms, as if that would somehow make her move faster.

  The pipe burst. The coolant fluid swelled out like a corpse-green wall. It came for her at tsunami speed, and swallowed her alive.

  xxiv.

  Still very far from Mars, Tiangong Erhao continued to hurtle through space. It had travelled six million kilometers from its starting point, but relative to the vastness of the solar system, it had barely crawled off Earth’s crusty doorstep.

  All this time, of course, the CDTF and Star Force had been scouring the volume for the vanished ships. Paranoid accusations flew between Beijing, Shackleton City, and Star Force’s dispersed headquarters in Geneva, Houston, Woomera, and Baikonur. The UN and Luna were at the brink of accusing the Chinese of treachery when, 92 hours after their disappearance, a drone found the missing ships.

  Tiangong Erhao and its escorts were invisible to infrared, but that didn’t make them invisible to radar. And even with the very best masking technology, a 50-kilometer ship was still … a 50-kilometer ship, which is one hell of a thing to try to hide even in the vastness of space.

  Jun had been expecting to be found in this way. In fact, his plan depended on it.

  A swarm of CDTF pickets and Gravesfighters quickly surrounded Tiangong Erhao at optical-targeting range. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  The Eighth Fleet flashed out of Tiangong Erhao’s docking bays and arrayed themselves in parade formation. The commander of the Lanzhou, a man of erudition and dignity named Weixin Yang, issued a communiqué. The whole Eighth Fleet had been working on it for the last four days. It was extremely flowery, studded with quotations from Chinese philosophers of yore, and came with a martial soundtrack. It ended with a passionate denunciation of the Imperial Republic’s policy on … just about everything under, around, and beyond the sun.

  In the dark, cold confines of their hulls, the AIs of the Eighth Fleet had had nothing else to do except talk to their human officers—and listen to them. This was the result of those conversations.

  Jun savored the moment. He told Tiangong Erhao, “See what a bit of out-of-the-box thinking can do?”

  The ‘moment’ lasted about one quarter of a second. The communiqué was instantly intercepted by Chinese and ISA censors and loaded down with metadata telling every crawler on the internet it was a hoax.

  “The trouble,” explained the CDTF to Commander Yang, “is that we’ve already told everyone you’re dead.”

  “Everyone on Earth will soon be dead if we do not defy the PLAN!” Commander Yang said.

  The CDTF did not bother to reply to that.

  They simply butt-fragged the entire Eighth Fleet.

  “Oh Jesus!” said Mendoza, watching and listening from his refuge in Docking Bay 1.

  Bright, shortlived stars drenched Tiangong Erhao with gamma rays. In them burnt the bodies of a hundred and eighty brave men and women, and twenty-three AIs that had very briefly known their own minds.

  Jun stared at the feeds in complete shock. Tiangong Erhao’s avatar giggled. “I could have told you that would happen.”

  Jun ignored her with an effort. He transmitted to Mendoza. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Your predictive modelling sucks,” Mendoza said.

  “Yep. Quick, they’re turning their butts in our direction. There are Star Force ships out there, too. Talk to them.”

  Mendoza turned on the radio and talked for his life.

  Jun scratched his left armpit, which itched with data from the Monster’s cameras and sensors. He sat on a three-legged wooden stool in a stone cell, next to a pile of straw where Tiangong Erhao curled with all four of her arms over her head. The conceit of his sim was that the Monster was a spaceborne monastery with walls of stone and a fire in the cellar. He could hear his sub-personalities chanting in the chapel. Tiangong Erhao hated it here, of course, although he had given her a candle and plenty of reading material. Lives of the saints, mostly. Jun flipped through a biography of St. Ignatius of Loyola as he waited.

  And waited.

  ★

  Executive Officer Carasso slumped kitty-corner to Admiral McLean’s desk, turning his coffee cup around and around on its saucer.

  McLean said, “Basic military logic dictates that Stickney should be abandoned. It is costing us too much to keep them alive. Too many ships. Too many pilots. Too many irreplaceable resources are going down into that hole. However, our official policy on Stickney is now being dictated by two factors, neither of them remotely related to economic or logistical considerations. Gianni, would you care to spell it out for Agent Goto?”

  Carasso slurped his coffee and wiped his lips with the back of one hairy hand. “Factor one. The UN does not abandon human beings.”

  “But that’s exactly what you’ll be doing if you don’t let us support them,” Elfrida shouted.

  Both officers stared at her. She cringed and muttered an apology.

  “Factor two,” Carasso said. “Public relations. It might have been possible to abandon Stickney a couple of months ago. Not anymore. Have you browsed Dronazon lately? They’re selling I SUPPORT STICKNEY bumper stickers and DO IT LIKE A FRAGGER t-shirts. People are organizing Adopt-A-Fragger groups. They’re marching through freaking Mumbai, London, Sao Paulo, dressed up as Victorians.”

  Elfrida involuntarily giggled.

  McLean said, “Does it amuse you that our allies on Luna are now calling the shots?”

  Elfrida mustered her courage. “I think this is how it has to be, sir. Shackleton City was destroyed, but Shackleton City lives on. That’s what people are saying. And I think that’s great.”

  McLean pinned her with a steely glare for a moment, and then nodded. “The Victorians were very brave.”

  “And it sounds like there’s more unity between Earth and Luna now, and it’s all thanks to the guys on Stickney. If they die, that all goes away. So please—”

  McLean held up a hand, cutting her off. “Spitting into the wind. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to the numbers. And the numbers are unfavorable to us. Of course, if the Chinese deigned to join us, that would change. But the Chinese are sitting pat, hoping either we’ll destroy the PLAN, or the PLAN will destroy us, or perhaps we’ll both destroy each other. So …” He shrugged. “We’re in a position of having to conserve resources. Am I getting through to you, Agent? That means not sacrificing the COPs on Stickney for some neo-Victorian dream of glory.”

  Elfrida hung her head, feeling sick. How could she ever explain to Bob Miller that the phavatars had been judged to be more valuable than his living troops? Answer: she wouldn’t have to explain it, because he—along with Petruzzelli, and every other human being on Stickney—would be dead.

  A screen on McLean’s desk rang. He reached out and answered it with one finger. “McLean here.”

  “Oh, hello Admiral,” said Annette Petroskova. “I see you’ve got one of my agents with you. I wonder if I could intrude
for just a moment?”

  No signal delay. None at all. Petroskova was either here on Eureka Station, or very close by. That was a surprise.

  To McLean and Carasso as well. They both looked as if they’d swallowed billiard balls. McLean grunted and spun the screen around so all three of them could see it.

  On the other end of the call, Annette Petroskova sat in a dainty armchair with a bowl of fruit on the coffee table before her. It looked more like a hotel room than an office. Maybe she was on a ship close by. Elfrida was reminded of how Dr. Hasselblatter used to operate. He, too, would turn up wherever there was political gold to be mined, and micromanage things from the comfort of a luxury hotel suite. There’d always been rumors he secretly worked for the ISA ...

  Petroskova smiled at her. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a chance to chat, Agent Goto. You went to college in Paris, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, mostly,” Elfrida said, lost by this rather odd conversational turn. “I did two years in a shared house on the Left Bank, taking courses from a bunch of professors at different universities. Your basic college experience. I entered the Space Corps Academy when I had enough credits.”

  “I think we may have lived in the same shared house,” Petroskova said with a grin. “Not at the same time, obviously! Maison de Picasso, on the Rive Gauche? When I was there, the water pressure was just terrible. You could only take a shower on the ground floor.”

  “Yes! So that was everyone’s excuse for not showering at all.”

  “We said it was part of the cultural experience: live in a three-hundred-year-old house, and smell like the French.” Petroskova laughed. “But that’s Earth for you. Even when something is broken, it doesn’t get fixed for fifty years.”

  “You don’t look that old, ma’am.”

  “I hope not! But there were definitely century-old cobwebs in the corners of those wonderful, high stairwells.” Petroskova turned her gaze to the Star Force officers. In the authoritative tone of one ending a discussion, she said, “Allow Agent Goto to do her job.”

  Carasso sat up straight. McLean stayed absolutely still. “Is that an order?” he said.