The Phobos Maneuver (16 page)

Not now.

All empty.

Stripped down to make the ship lighter, so it could carry up-armored geminoid bots, for
what?
And probably also toilet paper, and water.

Petruzzelli wriggled forward into the cockpit. She checked the cabin pressure and took off her helmet. Her faceplate was the Star Force logo:
Lex Paciferat.
She stowed the helmet and strapped herself into the command couch.

“Hello, ship.”

A voice spoke in surround sound, trembling with gladness.
“Mommy!”

Petruzzelli closed her eyes. “Can we please not do this?”

“OK.” The voice changed into a squeaky gabble that reminded her of Grabby Coyote, a simtoon she’d liked as a child. “How about this?”

“No. You sound like Grabby Coyote.”

“Lots of people liked him when they were children.” The ship changed its voice again. This time it spoke in a Luna accent that reminded her somewhat of Miller. “I’ve got fifty-six pre-loaded personality modules. We can sit here and try them all on for size, but I advise you to make up your fragging mind.”

“You know what, I think I’ll stick with this one today,” Petruzzelli said. “But I have a question. You’re so damn smart, why can’t you store my preferences?”

“I keep hoping you’ll change your mind,” the ship said. “Why’d you select this personality today? You usually go for Authoritative Male (Standard Ameropan). I had you tagged as a classic overachiever with daddy issues. Now I’ll have to revise my analysis.”

“Maybe I’m just fucking with you,” Petruzzelli said. She flicked the switch in her armrest that initiated her gestalt feed.

Zhang talked the Woomera Wallopers out of the hangar. Four squadrons were going on today’s mission: three Star Force squadrons of eighteen spacecraft each, and one Fragger squadron of fifteen. The Wallopers were the second squadron to egress. They formed up in a holding pattern around Eureka Station. It couldn’t be called an orbit, since the asteroid exerted no gravitational force to speak of. When everyone was out, they burned in single file through the minefield.

“Why do you need to analyze me, anyway?” Petruzzelli said.

“To find out if you’re a risk.”

“I wouldn’t have made it this far if I was a risk.”

“There is such a thing as cracking under pressure. I don’t have you down as that type, but you never know.”

“Thanks for the inspiring words.”

Petruzzelli found Mars on her optical feed. A dot among other dots. Although Eureka Station was parked on Mars’s doorstep, relative to the vastness of the solar system, it wasn’t
that
close.

“All call signs, free cruise,” Zhang said. “Just don’t leave the Fraggers behind. Remember, those weak-ass VASIMR drives can’t kick out the gees like we can.”

Zhang’s fan club laughed. God, she hated those ass-lickers.

The Gravesfighters’ drives flared.

One point eight gees of constant acceleration descended on Petruzzelli’s body like a monster sitting on her chest, making her reinforced bones itch and her plastic heart work harder.

Her gestalt feed settled down to a trickle of ship status updates and radar telescope data.

She was obligated by regulations to take regular breaks from the gestalt, to rest her brain. “Hey, ship. Does this personality play games?”

“Not the kind of games you’re thinking of.
Existential Threat,
PlanetKillr Z—
no, thank you.”

“Out of curiosity, why?”

“I refuse to glorify violence,” said the ship.

Petruzzelli laughed. A hearty, out-loud guffaw. It made her realize she hadn’t laughed in a long time.

“Do share.”

“Never mind. You know what, ship, I’ve kind of gone off those games myself. They just don’t compare to the real thing. You got any other inflight entertainment options?”

“I can play backgammon, chess, Go, and cards.”

“I can’t play chess, and you’re gonna have to tell me what those other things are.”

“Cards: pieces of heavy paper or plastic marked with distinguishing motifs and used to play card games, such as poker, blackjack, snap …”

“That sounds like fun.”

★

Then they burned for fifty hours.

★

By the oldest definitions, every modern spaceship was a torchship. Clean fusion enabled high acceleration
and
high exhaust velocity—the essential requirements for getting around the solar system in days, weeks, and months, instead of months, years, and decades. The pioneers of the First Space Age would have been struck dumb at the performance of even a crappy old barge like the
Kharbage Collector.

But Gravesfighters were torches among torches. Their drives pumped out up to two terawatts of thrust, exploding thousands of pulses of plasma per minute, not within a conventional tokamak, but in a magnetic bottle outside the fuselage, which doubled the ship’s length, and simply went away when the drive was shut down. In motion, they looked like fire-tipped arrows, or shooting stars.

The downside, of course, was that they could be seen from Aldebaran.

Worse, they were travelling on an easily predictable trajectory. Eureka Station was here, Mars was there. The trolls knew where they were going. It made them easy pickings if the mood struck the PLAN just right.

Thirty-two hours into their journey, a volley of kinetic kill vehicles (KKVs), cold-launched yesterday from deep space, destroyed two Gravesfighters, plus one of the vulnerable Fraggers travelling in the middle of their formation. By the time the ships finished exploding, the rest of the convoy had already left them far behind.

So it went every. Freaking. Time. The PLAN could see them coming. And because of the PLAN’s goddamn stealth technology, they couldn’t see the trolls. The Gravesfighters’ charged-particle cannons could vaporize anything in a straight line, and their point-defense drones could fight off active-guided missiles, but KKVs? It was like walking through a sniper’s field of fire, knowing that some people would die, and it might be you, and there was
nothing
you could do about it.

“Screw this,” Petruzzelli said. “I’m going to take a nap. Ship, wake me if anyone else dies.”

She shifted her limbs a few millimeters—all that her couch would allow—and closed her eyes. Her suit constricted her lower limbs, keeping the blood from pooling down there. Her artificial lungs and heart pumped with mechanical gusto. She slept.

And woke up with her ship shouting at her. “Trolls at our ten o’clock low!”

“Get them off our fucking tail,” Zhang shouted.

Information about Mars and its defenses flooded her brain. They were
there.
The radar overlay showed her what it had picked up: a faint smear of a return. Trolls had turned just the wrong way for just long enough for her ship to lock on. Now she was overhauling what looked to the radar sensors like two titchy, porous pieces of rock. They weren’t.

“On your starboard wing,” said Gwynneth Blake’s cool voice.

“Loose deuce,” Petruzzelli said, sharing her radar lock.

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!”