The Phobos Maneuver

by Felix R. Savage

  “They seem to like you,” Lorna said. “How’d you do that?”

  “I baptized them into the Faith.”

  “Huh. Just as long as they don’t start getting ideas about predestination.”

  “That’s Calvinism.”

  “Same difference.” Lorna threw open the door of the master bedroom. An enormous bed seemed to float on top of a lunar hill. On the bed reclined the phavatar of Tiangong Erhao, stark naked except for a strategically draped sheet. “Wakey wakey, sweet buns! We’ve got a visitor.”

  Mendoza knew what he had to do. He planted his crutch on an illusory outcropping of moonrock. He wrangled the Kalashnikov into his improvised elbow grip.

  The servitors rushed into the room, knocking him sideways, and hurled themselves on top of the phavatar. It sat up with an electronic shriek, slinging small furry bodies off the bed.

  For a second, Mendoza thought the servitors had attacked the phavatar. But they swarmed the bed again, snuggled into its lap, and tucked themselves under its arms.

  A human shield.

  A gengineered hybrid shield.

  It doesn’t matter, Mendoza reminded himself. “Get out of the goddamn way,” he shouted at them.

  “You told uth Jethuth thayth to forgive our enemieth.”

  Lorna, caught in mid-reaction, laughed out loud.

  “Jethuth thayth thou thalt do no murder,” another servitor added. “Matthew nineteen.”

  “How’d you suddenly get to be Bible scholars?” Mendoza demanded.

  “After you told uth that Jethuth ith our thalvation, we did a databathe thearch to validate your claimth. There ith a book called Bible in Ancient Hithtory thection which ith all about Him.”

  “Thou thalt not commit adultery, thou thalt not thteal, thou thalt not bear falthe witneth,” added another servitor, piously.

  The darn creatures had BCIs. They could quote the whole New Testament at him.

  Lorna was laughing so hard he had to sit down. “Hoist on your own petard, Mendoza. Serves you right for evangelizing the natives.” He rolled across Tiangong Erhao’s lap, displacing a couple of servitors. Pillowing his head on her thigh, he grinned up at the little creatures. “Go on. This is so freaking cute.”

  “Honor thy father and thy mother, and love thy neighbor as thythelf.”

  “Oh yeah. What about that, Mendoza? Aren’t we neighbors, trapped together in here?”

  Mendoza’s helmet speakers crackled. Jun was laughing, too. He always was able to laugh at himself.

  But Mendoza wasn’t giving up yet. “It’s not a person. It’s just a freaking remote control toy.” The phavatar’s behavior seemed to bear out his assertion. It had not reacted to the ruckus. It sat gazing into the distance, absently grooming the neck fur of a servitor.

  “Are you sure about that?” Lorna said.

  “Yes. It’s just a user interface.”

  “She. She’s integrally linked to the hub. Way more processing power than meets the eye.”

  “Doesn’t make her sapient. Look at her. She’s a freaking cabbage.”

  The phavatar’s gaze snapped into focus. Meeting his eyes, it smiled. “I was just thinking about what to have for breakfast,” it said.

  “Nutriblocks again,” Lorna said with an eye-roll. “Care to join us, Mendoza? Your little converts fix a mean cup of recycled water with artificial flavoring and caffeine.”

  “It’s not morning for me. It’s night.” Mendoza sighed. “OK, OK. Fine. I have to stay up, anyway.”

  ★

  Jun’s attention snapped away from the theological debate in the labs. Something else required his full attention.

  Mars.

  Seven hours out, Tiangong Erhao had just been detected by the PLAN’s orbital radar installations.

  They hailed him—or rather, Tiangong Erhao. The transmission consisted of the same nervous-breakdown-inducing gibberish that washed out of Mars around the clock, 365 days a year. ENLARGE YOUR PENIS / MAKE A THOUSAND SPIDERS PER HOUR IN YOUR SPARE TIME / LOSE WEIGHT EASILY. That was the part that could be understood by humans. It was multiplexed with another signal in computerese: who are you are you part of us why are you so COLD?

  The PLAN had never before encountered an enemy ship that utilized its own stealth technology.

  Sitting in the last pew in the St. Francis’s chapel, Jun drew courage from his sub-personalities. Their chant was the program that would destroy the PLAN’s sick virtual reality like Joshua’s horn shattering the walls of Jericho. If this worked.

  He turned to Tiangong Erhao. “Tell them one of your investors is a Chinese construction company. Say they sneaked a copy of the Heidegger program off 4 Vesta, where a scientific research group is studying it. Say you figured it out straight away. You think it’s the most brilliant piece of software ever written.”

  Actually, the Heidegger program was a vicious murder weapon. The closest Jun had come to cracking it was tricking it into preferring pastries to human brains. But the PLAN believed Tiangong Erhao’s assertion. One of the unexamined assumptions it inherited from its forebears was that the Chinese were better at everything. Its self-congratulatory plaudits boiled across the void. BEST NEUROWARE / GET IT HERE FOR FREE / SPAM TEMPLATES INCLUDED!

  Jun shivered violently. This was the closest anyone had ever come to directly communicating with the PLAN. Tiangong Erhao was not finding it easy, either. Her eyes showed white all around. Her hair stood on end as if she’d been electrified.

  ★

  “What’s he doing to her?” Lorna shouted. The phavatar had suddenly sat up straight and dropped its coffee cup. Mendoza stared in alarm.

  “I would like to propose a joint venture,” the phavatar jabbered. “Your ships and my smarts. Your people and mine. My mission has been approved by the Emperor. Ha ha! Together we can conquer the solar system. Those stupid monkeys in the UN won’t stand a chance!”

  ★

  “Good,” Jun whispered. He stroked Tiangong Erhao’s knee. “You’re doing great.” Some of his sub-personalities glanced around in concern. Jun shook his head at them—it’s fine. He shifted closer to Tiangong Erhao, their hips touching on the pew. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. For a confusing instant he remembered Emily-Francis, his childhood friend. They would have married, if he hadn’t become a monk and she a nun.

  ★

  “This signal latency is really annoying,” the phavatar shouted. She was grinning madly, teeth gritted. She waved her arms, hitting Lorna in the face. “Can we talk face to face? Yeah? That’s great!”

  Lorna moaned. He hugged the phavatar from behind, avoiding its arms, and rubbed his cheek against its silicone one. It shrugged him off, shouting out its residual velocity and angle of approach, and yammering about its never-before-used aerobraking capability.

  “It’s working,” Mendoza breathed. “This is really something. Jun, have I ever told you I admire the heck out of you?”

  ★

  Mendoza had, and now it rang hollower than ever.

  On the bridge of the Monster, a small fire smouldered under the captain’s workstation. Too many short-circuits at once. Jun had opened the airlocks. Air was whooshing out of the operations module, depriving the fire of oxygen. Too slowly. The housekeeping bots stared passively at the bluish flames consuming the flight control motherboard. They no longer had the power to help. Jun had diverted all his remote-control resources to Tiangong Erhao.

  The flames licked over the wooden sides of the workstation, which had once been trees on a Japanese mountainside.

  Inergen fire suppression gas hissed down from the ceiling. Unfortunately, Kiyoshi had taken most of the cylinders with him to the StarTractor, and Jun hadn’t had a chance to replace them. The nozzles sputtered dry before the gas could reach a high enough concentration to make any difference.

  The smell of burning things penetrated the sim. Tiangong Erhao reared, half-rising from her pew. Like any spaceship, she was terrified of fire.

  “Hush! It’s OK.”


  He had to not think about it.

  “Tell them we have received their trajectory guidance. Tell them we’re coming in.”

  “I don’t like this,” Tiangong Erhao whimpered.

  “It’s all right, dear.” Jun kissed the side of her face. Just a brotherly kiss, the way he had kissed Emily-Francis a couple of times. “I’m right here. I’m not going to leave you.”

  ★

  “GET THEM TO THE SUPERLIFTER NOW.”

  The red text splashed into Mendoza’s vision like a bucket of blood. He started up, wiping crumbs from his mouth, and grabbed his crutch. “OK, we have to go. Jun says now.”

  “I’m not leaving her!” Lorna yelled.

  “So bring her,” Mendoza yelled back, but the phavatar wasn’t going anywhere. Stiff as steel, it hunched at the dining table, babbling. It was oblivious to the humans, except when Lorna tried to pick it up bodily. Then it hit him.

  “Fuck this,” Lorna said, bleeding from a cut lip. He bent across the table and shouted into Tiangong Erhao’s face. “Can you hear me, my darling? Just stop it!”

  “Oooh yes, in the foothills of Olympus Mons, I see it,” Tiangong Erhao gushed. “So that’s your spaceport! It just looks like a flat bit of Mars! Tee hee! Oh, I see: you never normally land any ships on the surface, period! You launch them from your mountaintop catapults, and they never come back—they just keep fighting until they die! Wowee! And you have deep space fuel depots and manufacturing plants no one knows about? Wow, that’s super awesome! Yes, of course we do, too. The UN thinks it knows it alll, but they haven’t even mapped the whole asteroid belt yet. Free-market capitalism runs on information inefficiencies. That’s why centralized information control is so great! Tee hee! We have sooo much in common!”

  “Remember who you are!” Lorna yelled at the phavatar. “Tiangong Erhao, remember what you were built for!”

  For an instant, the phavatar’s eyes focused on him.

  “I … I can’t remember …”

  Mendoza lunged at Lorna. “Don’t fuck it up!”

  Lorna hit out at him without looking. His backhand caught Mendoza in the chest, and Mendoza lost his balance. His crutch skidded out from under him and he struck his head on the table on his way down.

  Seeing stars, he crawled towards the door. Lorna threw his crutch at him. He pulled himself up by holding onto the door handle, got his crutch into his armpit, and limped out.

  xxxi.

  The Thunderjack lifted off from the surface of Stickney, shedding rubble from its sides. Its drive drenched the Big Bowl in superheated plasma. The laser assembly slumped as struts melted. Everyone who had not taken shelter underground died.

  Amid the boulders tumbling away from the ship, phavatars also fell. But more stayed put, clutching antennas and hatch covers and any place where a firm handhold could be had, as Elfrida had told them to.

  As soon as the Flattop cleared the surface, its fans of radiator nozzles telescoped out to their full two-kilometer span. The phavatars who’d been holding onto them fell off. Sixty-three clung on to the outside of the ship.

  “Just cling on anywhere ,” Elfrida had told her agents. Now she told them: “Work your way around to the airlocks.”

  “Deploy the freaking drones,” Petruzzelli screamed at the Thunderjack’s officers. “We’re taking fire!”

  Carasso said calmly, “No drones. They were due to be replenished when the Badfinger arrived.”

  “No drones, no problem,” Bob Miller said. “We’ve got Gravesfighters.” He snatched up a hardwired mic. “Pilots! What’s your status? Right, that’s a go. Go, go!”

  “The launch bays are opening!” an agent shouted in Elfrida’s headset. His phavatar was scaling the outside of the Whipple shield at 03 Deck level, giving him a good view. “Our Gravesfighters are escaping!”

  “They’re not ours anymore,” Elfrida whispered.

  “They’re—oh God! One of them just went up. Two, three—they’re getting toasted, ma’am!”

  Bob Miller said, “They’ll buy us enough time to reach our destination. Fortunately we’re not going very far.”

  Elfrida hissed to the agents, “We don’t have much time. Quit gawking and get to those airlocks!”

  Petruzzelli saw Elfrida talking into the headset. She flew over and snatched it away, pulling the cord out. “Whatever you’re doing there, it can’t be as much fun as this, Goto. Check out the view!”

  The optical feed screens on the Flattop’s bridge were smaller than your standard TV screen, but when Petruzzelli flipped up the screen on the XO’s desk, Elfrida got a view so good, her blood curdled.

  The Flattop was plunging towards Mars.

  The monstrous eye of Grindavik Crater seemed to blink at her.

  The ship shuddered from end to end.

  Elfrida remembered their journey here. She’d been in a suit, down below in the dark, left to guess at what was happening.

  It had been better not to know.

  Not to see death coming.

  Petruzzelli snuggled onto the couch next to her. “Scoot over,” she said, settling an arm around Elfrida’s shoulders. “There it is! See it?”

  Grindavik blinked again. This time Elfrida’s perspective shifted and she realized she was seeing an orbital fortress lined up with the crater. The rock was wider than it was thick, and rotating lazily.

  Reldresal.

  Here it came around again. Blink.

  Flash.

  A flurry of electronic trills went off. The Flattop’s officers cursed, breaking their stoic silence.

  “Looks like we just took a point-blank hit from Reldresal’s laser cannon,” Petruzzelli said. “Well, it’s always nice to go out with a bang.”

  The location of the flash bloomed white. The Flattop had returned fire, decisively. Forgetting her terror for a moment, Elfrida cheered with the others.

  “Our bow shield is seven-tenths ablated,” Carasso said. “We can’t survive another direct hit.”

  “We won’t have to,” Bob Miller said. He spoke to one of his own officers, who’d taken over the gunnery desk. “Keep it up. Keep their heads down.”

  Vibrations tickled Elfrida’s bottom and back. The Flattop was throwing kinetic buses at Reldresal. These lethal packages, fired from the coil-guns that girdled the carrier’s bulbous waist, fragmented before impact into hundreds of individual warheads, similar to gangs of point-defense drones. Not as smart, but heavier. Each warhead delivered 1.2 Hiroshimas of explosive force.

  With one laser cannon knocked out, the defenders on Reldresal would be sitting ducks until the rock’s rotation brought the other cannons around far enough to target the Flattop. They presumably had a railgun or two, but they had zero chance of stopping all the Thunderjack’s warheads. Explosions burst like blue-white fireworks. Even if some were airbursts, some had to be getting through to the surface.

  And yet Reldresal remained whole, and seemed to flee ahead of the Flattop. Lower orbits were faster orbits.

  “It’s not fucking working, is it, Bob?” Carasso smirked. “You can’t blow up a moon fragment with buses.”

  “Nor have I any intention of so doing,” Bob Miller said. He stood with one hand on the shoulder of the propulsion officer, a young woman Elfrida had chatted with a few times. “Give us a few more newtons, darling. Just imagine you’re late for work.”

  Petruzzelli snuggled up closer to Elfrida. “Now for the fun bit,” she whispered.

  Elfrida turned her head to stare Petruzzelli in the eye. Petruzzelli didn’t flinch. Their faces were centimeters apart. “Are you cool with this?”

  “You’re so cute. Of course I’m cool with it. I never had anything to live for, anyway.”

  “Then this is our fault. We failed you.”

  “Nope. I’m the failure. But this will make up for everything.”

  Elfrida pondered that twisted statement for a moment. Then the optical feed drove it out of her mind. Reldresal went from being the size of a dinner-plate to
filling the screen. A cliff loomed, scarred with Martian artwork. Small-arms fire sparkled in the trenches.

  “Here we go,” Bob Miller said softly. “This one’s for you, Marty.”

  Elfrida had just time to wrap her arms around Petruzzelli before the Flattop struck Reldresal with a crunch like a tanker plowing into an iceberg.

  The Thunderjack had not travelled far enough from Stickney to build up much speed. It was going at 2080 meters per second when it hit, including the orbital velocity it inherited from Stickney. At the same time, Reldresal was retreating at 2000 meters per second. The solution to this equation was the equivalent of a high-speed car crash.

  Elfrida had automatically strapped in when she sat down. The polyfoam of the couch reacted instantly. It cradled her head in place and folded itself around her limbs, trapping them. She held onto Petruzzelli for maybe a quarter-second before the force of the collision ripped Petruzzelli from her arms. Yet the couch had sealed itself immovably around Petruzzelli’s legs.

  Petruzzelli snapped forward from the waist, hit her head on the XO’s desk, and rebounded, bloody spittle flying from her ruined mouth.

  Everyone else on the bridge got thrown around. Elfrida saw it all in snapshots that seemed meaningless at first. Carasso floated with his neck broken. Trails of blood laced the air. The Fraggers at the command desks had mostly strapped in and survived. The flight officers were either dead or screaming. Their voices seemed to reach Elfrida after a delay, as if she’d been thrown clear of reality itself.

  The propulsion officer yelled, “The drive is no longer responding! I’ve lost the reactors!”

  Bob Miller was not responding, either. He floated near the ceiling with blood dripping from his nose. His mouth hung agape. His eyes were lifeless. Elfrida remembered the mercurial, energetic man who’d swum with the whales in Antarctica. She couldn’t believe he’d wanted to die like this.

  The optical feed screens had gone black.

  Claustrophobia pushed Elfrida over the edge of shock into action. She shouted at her couch to release her. She didn’t know if Petruzzelli was dead or alive. She grabbed her wrist and towed her towards the door. She automatically kicked off and glided, without consciously realizing that they were in zero-gee again.