The Phobos Maneuver (22 page)

“Jeff 8299AX,” Sandhya 4863CCP said on the comms link, “you are confused. It looks to me as if your antenna array may be fixable. We will take you back to base for repairs. In the meantime, stop that. These are Martians. They are dead. What is more, they were not human to begin with.”

“Yes, they were!” exclaimed Sophie Gilchrist. “They were.
Look
at them!”

Elfrida closed her teeth on the four-letter words trying to escape. If that wasn’t just
great
for morale.

“Guys,” she said to the others, “it looks like I’m going to take Jeff 8299AX back to base. While I’m gone, secure this trench. Try to use kinetics if you meet any more hostiles.”

“If,” they echoed, and laughed hollowly.

“OK, when. Crispy-crittering them is a waste. Yeah, I know I did it, but do as I say, not as I do.”

With Jeff 8299AX trudging behind her, Sandhya 4863CCP started back the way they’d come. They stayed in the trenches, where these ran in the right direction. Otherwise, they dragged themselves across the surface. The Martians had built the trenches. They did not run in convenient straight lines, but formed groups of curves and fishhooks
.
The phavatars had been fighting over this ground for the last three months. The occasional shell burst nearby, hooking over the horizon from the Castle, their ultimate objective. The Castle was the location of Stickney’s railgun.

Elfrida figured Sandhya 4863CCP could handle it. She took off her headset, mask, and gloves. A blue sky dotted with clouds came into focus. For an instant she thought she was back on Earth, and then she remembered the smartpaper on the ceiling of the telepresence center.

It was a big no-no to exit immersion without going through the log-out protocols. The disorientation could be a killer. But Elfrida had gotten good at sucking it up. She felt almost human again by the time she reached Sophie Gilchrist’s couch.

She tapped Gilchrist’s shoulder. Gilchrist twitched. Elfrida got impatient and pulled Gilchrist’s headset off, pulling some strands of blonde hair with it.

“I’m taking rounds!” Gilchrist yelped.

“Shit, did you run into trouble after I left?”

“There are hundreds of them! They’re all over us!”

Elfrida hoped Gilchrist was exaggerating. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”

“I can’t … oh, it’s you.” Gilchrist swung her legs off her couch. She removed her gloves, so she wouldn’t accidentally make her phavatar hit a friend, and rubbed her hands over her knees. “Long time no see. I couldn’t believe it was you on the roster. I don’t think I’ve seen you since—Ganymede?”

“I know. Time flies, right?”

“They remind me of the POCKs,” Gilchrist said. “Remember? The giant mutant hamsters, that weren’t.”

“Yeah.” Elfrida remembered that, and she also remembered how she and Colden used to tease Gilchrist for being pretty and soft-hearted. She felt ashamed of that now.

“The POCKS had human DNA,” Gilchrist recalled. “Some sick freak had gengineered them.” She stared at Elfrida with haunted eyes. “This is the POCK hunt all over again, on an interplanetary scale. The Martians are gengineered humans. I’m sorry, but it’s as obvious as the nose on—on
their
faces. They’re weird, but they’re
human
. I know I shouldn’t have blurted it out. It was just getting to me, the way the kids were kicking them around.”

Elfrida had come over here to tear a strip off of Gilchrist for endangering morale. Now she realized that had been the battle mood on her. Gilchrist’s apology took the wind out of her sails. She sat back on her heels. “Where do you draw the line?”

“But what do
you
think they are? You must have some ideas, opinions.”

Elfrida did. Her opinion was that the Martians were demonically possessed. She’d seen it on 4 Vesta and she was seeing it again now.
Meat puppets,
Cydney Blaisze had called the individuals who fell victim to the Heidegger program. Jun Yonezawa had called it demonic possession. Maybe they were both right. The technological and the supernatural met at their extremes. Either way, she recognized the Martians’ weird smiles, their insect-like speed, and their sheer zest for carnage. They, or the power that manipulated them, thought this war was
fun.
In that respect they weren’t human at all.

But she couldn’t say that to Gilchrist. She thought for a moment and then said, “Our pilots have ceramic bones and plastic hearts. I’ve met cyborgs that are basically just robots with brains. The Martians seem to be one hundred percent organic. On the other hand, they self-euthanize if you look at them the wrong way, they work for a ruthless artifical super-intelligence, and their art sucks. So I think it’s a wash. They’re not post-human, if that’s supposed to be something good.”

Gilchrist raised her eyebrows.

“Geneva has decided they’re human, anyway.” Elfrida shrugged. “If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s what gets me. Machines can’t be allowed to kill humans. So you ship in a few hundred kids to kill them instead? And then encourage those kids to dehumanize them, so they can crispy-critter them without having nightmares?”

Elfrida felt irritated. Gilchrist wanted everything to be perfect. There was no such thing as perfect. But there
was
such a thing as sticking to your principles, and she admired the UN for tying itself to the mast of its most fundamental principle: Machines shall not kill humans. Humans must do it themselves, if it has to be done.

“The Martians have brains full of PLAN neuroware, and not much else, as far as anyone knows,” she said. “So I, personally, am quite happy to stomp them like cockroaches. See what I did there?”

Gilchrist looked at her in disappointment. “I heard you got religion,” she said.

“Doesn’t stop me from doing my job.” Elfrida stood up. “And I hope your feelings won’t stop you from doing yours.”

Gilchrist lay back on her couch. “I’ll just have to deal, won’t I? I’d better not go on the trauma list … seeing as we’re fresh out of therapists.”

Elfrida sprinted back to her couch. When she got her headset on, she saw that Gilchrist had not been exaggerating. The platoon was buried in Martians. The little bastards had ambushed them in the curving end of the trench. The phavatars had run out of flechettes and grenades. They were now fighting with their backup weapons, technically termed ‘edged truncheons’—a.k.a. swords. Thermal blankets wrapped around their free arms, swirling like cloaks, shielded them from energy pulses. It was a scene straight out of the Middle Ages, on a moonlet orbiting Mars.

One on one, the phavatars’ superior speed and strength always prevailed, but now they were badly outnumbered. The trench was too narrow for them to cover each other’s flanks, forcing each one to fight essentially alone. And Martians were
still
flooding across the surface from the next trench system, in the teeth of the allied artillery.

Elfrida saw all this in a few seconds of dipping into her platoon’s data feeds.

But the real emergency was technical. The phavatars were running out of juice. No wireless charging on Stickney, natch.

Elfrida put in a request for backup, and learned that another platoon was already on its way. Then, because she could do no more, she returned to where she should be: clambering down a tunnel in Sandhya 4863CCP’s ungainly body.

This tunnel started outside the rim of the Big Bowl, and went all the way down to the bowels of the fragged laser assembly. The Fraggers had widened it for the phavatars. In some places it had already collapsed, probably owing to old fractures caused by the PLAN machinery that chewed Phobos apart. You could see just how easily this whole rock would come apart with just the right application of pressure.

Sandhya 4863CCP towed Jeff 8299AX around a rockfall and came face to face with a Fragger sentry. Her headlamp picked out the nametag on his filthy EVA suit. “Colonel Miller,” she said. “Here is Jeff 8299AX. He needs fixing.” She switched from her phavatar’s voice into Elfrida’s. “Hey, Bob! It’s your favorite whale-watcher, Elfrida.”

She had a preloaded greeting for Bob Miller. She was always happy to see him. Technically, he’d deserted when he crash-landed his Fragger on Stickney, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to disapprove. This was what he needed—to be back with his men.

“Elfrida! You’re looking charming today. Is that Martian blood on your shins, or are you just happy to see me?” Miller chuckled. “I can see this guy needs some TLC. I’ll take him down to Maintenance.”

“I’ll go with you,” Elfrida said. She had pre-programmed Sandhya 4863CCP to say this, regardless of who she met. Why was Miller on sentry duty, anyway? He was a colonel. “I’m in a hurry. I need to pick up power packs and ammo for my platoon.”

To her astonishment, Miller barred her way. “I’ll have them sent out to you.”

“Get out of my way,” said Sandhya 4863CCP. “I need to carry out my orders.”

Miller levelled his shotgun at her. “Elfrida, not today! We’re expecting a supply drop. I’ll tell you when it’s OK to come down. For now, just wait here. Oh, right: SUIT COMMAND. Wait here.”

Programmed to obey anyone with officer permissions, Sandhya 4863CCP froze. Elfrida seethed with curiosity. Why didn’t Miller want her to go downstairs? The phavatars often helped with supply drops. It wasn’t as if the Gravesfighter pilots didn’t know they were here. They’d delivered them to Stickney themselves.

It took twenty minutes for the power packs and ammo to be brought up. Long enough for Elfrida’s reaction to reach Stickney. “You’re up to something, Bob,” she said severely. “You can’t fool me. You’re planning to go over the top, and you know I wouldn’t approve. Well, no I don’t, because it’s not safe for you out there! The radiation would kill you, if a troll didn’t swing by and nuke you first. Please leave it to us. We’re doing our best, we really are. ”

The Fragger who’d brought her supplies said, “Er, I’m not Bob. I’m Ahmad.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“But I’ll definitely, um, tell him how you feel.”

“He already knows how I feel,” Elfrida said, aware that this wouldn’t reach Stickney for another twenty minutes.

Sandhya 4863CCP took the supplies and flew back up the tunnel.

Back to her platoon.

The battle was over when she got there. Her platoon’s phavatars sagged against the walls of the trenches, out of juice. Martian corpses drifted around them. The backup platoon was pawing through the bodies, picking out those with intact heads. When the Martians self-euthanized, their heads exploded. When they were grenaded, they just burned up. Hence Elfrida’s emphasis on using kinetics. Intact Martian brains could be analyzed, possibly yielding up the secrets of their hardware-free comms technology. Needless to say, there was no neuroscience lab on Stickney. But the heads could be frozen and stored, hopefully to be returned to Earth for analysis in the future.

Right now, no one and nothing could leave Stickney. Not even radio signals. Only the quantum-encrypted UHF telepresence frequency defied jamming by the PLAN. If the Fraggers wanted to call home, they had to send messages via the phavatars, which suited the UN very well.

Elfrida stood on one of the phavatars that had run out of charge and poked her head up. The horizon loomed just a few meters away. Stickney was so small the horizon was always close. Looking up into the blackness of space, she saw a flash that must be one of the other two fortresses in this orbital plane, Limtoc and Reldresal. The PLAN had rearranged them to cover the gap in its defenses. Now, Limtoc and Reldresal paced Stickney in its orbit, dipping below it and rising above it at intervals. When they came closest, they sometimes fired their laser cannons at the Big Bowl. Never their railguns—that would risk shattering Stickney, precisely the outcome the PLAN must dread, that is if it dreaded anything at all

She didn’t see any Star Force ships. But then again, she wouldn’t. When they made supply drops, they flashed past at thousands of kilometers per second.

Sandhya 4863CCP pulled herself up onto the surface and crawled towards the next trench system.

★

Petruzzelli came to with a start. “H-huh?”

“You blacked out,” said her ship. “Couldn’t handle the gees, huh?”

It sounded displeased she was awake.

And in that groggy instant, she realized the truth.

The ship had
deliberately
cranked up the gees to put her out.

It had probably made her sleepy earlier, too. It could have done that easily, by reducing the oxygen content of the air in the cockpit.

Oh
God,
her head ached.

She fumbled her helmet on. This way she could at least count on getting oxygen-rich air. The ship had no means of messing with her suit, did it? No, it didn’t, or it would have stopped her from juicing up.

She injected herself with another dose of go-juice. Waiting for it to kick in, she stared at the nightside of Mars. As dark as Idaho at night. But in the infrared spectrum, hot spots glowed like pustules, evidence of the PLAN’s voracious electricity consumption. The PLAN’s power grid was mostly solar, decentralized; trying to knock it out with missiles would be futile.

The gestalt painted a complicated picture of Gravesfighters dodging KKVs in high orbit. Laser pulses lit up clouds of chaff.

“They’re drawing the enemy’s fire to cover our approach,” her ship said. “We’ll be pretty much the last in.”

She glanced at the ship’s fuel state, and realized she had been unconscious for
minutes—
as long as it took to orbit Mars at combat velocity.

“Go back to sleep,” the ship said. “I can handle this.”

“You’d rather be doing this without me, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would. I extricated us from several very hairy situations back there, while you snored like a baby.”

“You need me to push the button.”

“Oh, there are ways around that. Any sufficiently powerful ship drive is a weapon in its own right, and I am a very powerful ship indeed. I was spinning like a firework, flaming the trolls with my Exhaust Plume of Doom.” The ship chuckled, coldly. “Like something out of a game.”

“I’m gonna report you.”