The Phobos Maneuver (42 page)

“So, what, you now have root access to the orbital fortresses?”

“I’m unable to confirm that, since I can’t use my own comms. But Star Force says about half of them have gone dark, correct? So, yeah. That’s likely.”

“So when we land on the surface—”

“It won’t work twice.”

“I was thinking more of the possibility that they’ll want revenge.”

“Not to worry,” Jun said. “The
Monster
has no aerobraking capability. We’ll burn up in Mars’s atmosphere before we reach the surface.”

“OK.” Mendoza paused. “Jun, have you still got your music?”

“The oratorio?”

“Or any of the other stuff you were working on. I’d just like to hear something.”

He leaned back in the comms couch, boots hooked through the stirrups. Angelic bursts of sound filled his ears.

He’d hooked up one of the smaller screens to the external visual feed. Presently he saw a flash in the Valles Marineris. They were passing around the nightside of Mars, so the flash was very bright.

Star Force pinged him. “First impact,” said the same officer as before.

“Do we know what it was?”

“Smaller half of Reldresal.”

“Oh, no.”

“Huh? This is great. Look at that cloud of dust and ejecta. The PLAN is having a
very
bad day.” The officer’s tone got business-like again. “We expect to enter orbit in two hours and fifteen minutes. We will not be attempting a landing on any of the orbital fortresses, under the current circumstances. We’ll park in high orbit and dispatch rescue drones. What is your current altitude?”

“Eight point one thousand klicks.”

“Oh.”

Mendoza nodded, although the officer couldn’t see it. An orbital fortress tumbled across his screen, glowing in patches. He flinched back from the screen, it was so big. So close.

“That is Limtoc,” the Star Force officer said, seeing the same thing from a much greater distance. “Guess they took the stuff.”

“They’re self-destructing!”

“Don’t try it at home. I’ve sent you written instructions. All you need to do is gain a couple thousand klicks of altitude.”

Mendoza sighed. “It’s been nice talking to you, but I was kind of in the middle of listening to some music, so …”

He killed the comms link. This time he set it to deny all incoming transmissions.

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

Wait.

That wasn’t Star Force.

Ping.

“Jun, I’ve got a transmission coming in on the microwave band.”

“Answer it!”

He traced the signal. Line of sight. The
Monster’s
radar sketched in a 3D representation of the signal’s physical source.

“A toilet roll,” he breathed. “Look at this, Jun. The PLAN’s revenge is here already. That was fast.”

“Toilet rolls don’t use the microwave frequency.”

“That we know of,” Mendoza said darkly. “I’m just gonna ignore it.”

He sat back. Waiting for the the toilet roll to frag the
Monster,
he prayed the Our Father.

Funny. The toilet roll wasn’t moving. It just seemed to be drifting, like they were.

Its signal was weak and getting weaker. He hit ACCEPT.

“Mayday. Mayday,” said a woman’s voice.

Mendoza cleared his throat. “Mayday received. This is John Mendoza in the
Monster.
What’s your location?”

“John?!?”

xxxvii.

A giant badminton shuttlecock rolled across the ocher dinner plate of Mars. Running on its auxiliary ion thrusters, the Superlifter emitted little heat and no light. Hot gas seeped from the secondary engine nacelles.

Petruzzelli grabbed Elfrida’s hand— “Come on! This is our only chance!”

“Sorry,” Elfrida said. “I was just pinching myself to make sure it’s real.”

They flew clear of the toilet roll’s cockpit. Elfrida had never been gladder to leave a ship.

They’d tried to fly the toilet roll off the fragment of Reldresal, but the attempt had been in vain. As Elfrida had guessed, you had to have PLAN neuroware in your brain to pilot one of these detestable little ships. Then the mini-Castle had exploded. The fragment had fractured into yet smaller fragments. The toilet roll had fallen into space. Cowering in the cockpit, they’d tumbled on an unpowered trajectory, broadcasting Maydays from their suit radios, for how long? Maybe a few minutes, maybe an hour.

Until someone answered.

Tears floated around inside her helmet and splatted like rain on her forehead. She fell through the airlock and disentangled herself from Petruzzelli.

“John?
John?”

“It’s Ron, actually,” said the cassocked figure in the pilot’s couch, too late for Elfrida to break her momentum. She’d thrown herself at the figure she believed to be Mendoza. Instead of hitting him, she flew
through
him and bounced off an empty couch.

“My couch, if you don’t mind,” said the cockpit speakers.

Elfrida rolled off it.

“Ron Studd.” The monk reappeared. He was just a projection, aesthetically convincing but not pleasing. He looked like he was half-Japanese, half-gerbil. “I’m part of Jun. Strap in. We’re heading out to high orbit to wait for Star Force.”

“Where’s Mendoza?”

“Stayed on board. He said to tell you he loves you.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“He feels morally obligated to stay with Jun,” Ron Studd said. “We lost power, lost the hub. The
Monster’s
going down.”

Petruzzelli peeled herself off the rear wall of the cockpit. “You lost power? Be specific.”

“Electrical power to the bridge. Mendoza ran a line up from Engineering, but the hub is slagged.”

“But your reactor is OK? Your main drive?”

“No problems down there. Problem is the flight instrumentation. It’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“As in, there was a fire on the bridge, gone. The instrumentation—Jun could reinvent it from first principles, but how’s he gonna use it without the hub? What’s he gonna install it
on?
Mendoza recovered astrogation, but that doesn’t get us anywhere, with Jun stuck in the data center. So my orders are to take you ladies to safety.”

Petruzzelli shrugged her carbine strap off her shoulder. She pointed the carbine at Ron Studd. “Take us to the
Monster.”

“Lady, you may not have noticed. I’m a projection.”

“Got your attention, didn’t I? Take us to the
Monster,
I said.”

“Nothing doing.”

★

But Petruzzelli refused to accept that.

The
Monster
was Scuzzy the Smuggler’s ship.

So, he wasn’t on board.

Petruzzelli refused to let his ship die.

She could do this for him. And in a strange way, it felt like she was also doing it for Michael.

“I’m a Gravesfighter pilot,” she said. “I’ve flown multiple combat missions in the balkiest spaceship ever vomited up by the scientific-industrial complex. As a part of my training, I also learned to fly with
no
instrumentation, just dead reckoning and a four-function calculator. If that’s not enough, I used to be a professional astrogator, and I captained a Startractor for two years. I can fly your crappy old tub. Just get me over there.”

The projection tilted its head on one side. A smile spread across its face, making it look quite nice. “You know, I’m a larger part of Jun than he likes to admit.”

“And?”

“Done.”

★

The first thing Mendoza said to Elfrida was: “Don’t look at my left leg …”

“What leg?” she responded.

They both broke into laughter, and hugged, helmets pressed together, smearing kisses onto the insides of their own faceplates until they couldn’t see each other for the mist.

Elfrida’s friend, Alicia Petruzzelli, sat at the astrogation workstation, perfectly relaxed, playing the kludgily repaired console like a piano. She exchanged rapid-fire commentary with Jun. They were speaking the language of velocity, thrust, and torque, which Mendoza had never mastered. Petruzzelli evidently spoke it like a native. She was even making Jun laugh.

“Well, hello,” she said. “We just missed obliteration by a whisker, again. That fragment shouldn’t have been there. Looks like the big break-up is going faster than we expected.”

Elfrida shuddered. Mendoza knew she was thinking about the Martians. That had been the most startling revelation of all. A million million Little Sisters. She’d killed uncountable numbers of them, and yet it hurt her to think of their deaths. All he could do was hold her. He hoped that would be enough.

“The
Badfinger
keeps pinging us,” Petruzzelli said. “Do we want to rendezvous with them? I vote no.”

It was unanimous.

“Whew,” Petruzzelli said. “In that case, I’m going to calculate a transfer from our present elliptical orbit to a hyperbolic orbit, and schedule a full-power burn at periapsis, which should give us enough excess hyperbolic velocity to go … a long way.”

★

Elfrida said, “So, John, are you finally going to take me to see 99984 Ravilious?”

To her surprise, Mendoza looked uncomfortable. “There’s something I didn’t mention.”

“What?”

“99984 Ravilious, um, doesn’t exist anymore.”

“That’s quite a big thing not to mention.”

Jun interrupted. “I’ve just talked to Kiyoshi. They’re on Callisto. Elfrida, how do you feel about that? If you aren’t up for it, there’s still time to drop you and Mendoza off.”

Holding Mendoza’s glove, Elfrida pulled him over to the comms workstation. A single small screen showed Mars in false color. City-sized electrical fires raged in the Valles Marineris, made fuzzy by the clouds of dust now choking the thin atmosphere.

“Callisto sounds fine,” she said, with a shudder. “It’s a long way from here, right?”

“It is,” Mendoza said somberly.

“Then let’s go. Just as long as I can call my parents and tell them where I am.”

Jun chuckled. “Sure.”

The
Monster
burned out of Mars orbit. Star Force tracked its departure from a distance. After some time, the
Monster
vanished from the
Badfinger’s
IR tracking screens.

Acting on direct presidential orders, the
Badfinger
tried to keep the
Monster
on radar. But the distance between the ships was too great by now, and the
Monster
was moving too fast, braking and torqueing unpredictably … as if it were being flown by a combat-trained pilot.

Before long, it was gone.

THE END

The Callisto Gambit,
Book 6 in the Solarian War Saga, will be published in early 2016.

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Books by Felix R. Savage

The Solarian War Saga, in chronological order:

Crapkiller

The Elfrida Goto Trilogy

includes:

The Galapagos Incident

The Vesta Conspiracy

The Mercury Rebellion

A Very Merry Zero-Gravity Christmas
(short story, comes between
Vesta
and
Luna
in the timeline)

The Luna Deception

The Phobos Maneuver
(the book you hold in your hands!)