The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Read online

  She let him go. He floundered to the deck. Bounding high in the Kharbage Collector’s maximum 0.15 gees of thrust gravity, he circled the mound of sacks, poking and prodding until he found the ripped one. He pulled out a double handful of e-waste: crushed screens, fried circuit boards.

  The recycling they picked up from remote colonies, as a rule, was split between e-waste, radioactive waste such as spent fuel pellets, and empty food and drink pouches. No matter how far from civilization they lived—or maybe, because they lived so far from civilization—asteroid colonists seldom attempted to grow all their own food. They depended on nutritionally fortified prepackaged foods to round out their diet. The Kharbage Collector’s Cargo Bay 1 was chock-a-block with that stuff. The company made bank on the markup.

  The radioactive waste was self-explanatory: this far from the sun, you couldn’t make do with solar energy alone. You needed some kind of reactor-based supplement.

  Then there was the e-waste. The colony on 159848 Redmayne had mining bots, agricultural bots, medibots, and a smart hub whose mechanical intelligence monitored their air quality, mineral toxicity, and other crucial life-support metrics. They also had comms, games, and screens. But modern electronic gizmos were designed to be disposable. Their crystal processors never stood up for long to the cosmic ray bombardment that was part and parcel of living in space. So, when colonists needed their bots and tools to function outside, they often rad-hardened them by replacing their crystals with DIY circuit boards that harkened back to the dawn of the space age. Hence Petruzzelli’s comment to the 159848 Redmayne settlers about printing integrated circuit components.

  She watched Michael carry crisped electronics to the Gravimetric Upcycler. A smaller version of the units used in big recycling facilities, it could granulate and separate metals from plastics. They generally used it for making print-on-demand machine parts for sale to settlers. Michael dumped the e-waste into the hopper, lowered the lid, and punched a series of buttons. The Upcycler chattered and shook. After several minutes, its array of nozzles spewed granules as fine as sand into labeled containers. Michael left the metals, which contained lanthanides worth a lot of money, and took a container full of multicolored plastic granules over to his Metamaker printer. Petruzzelli figured he was going to fab replacements for the connectors he’d messed up on the bridge. He was a conscientious kid, in his way.

  “If those colonists had an upcycler like this,” he said, “they could recycle their own stuff. Most of it, anyway.”

  “Hey, good idea.” She was being ironic. “You should suggest it to your dad.”

  “But then we wouldn’t make as much money.”

  So, she wasn’t going to miss him that much.

  ★

  Back on Ceres, Petruzzelli had a face-to-face interview with Adnan Kharbage. He questioned her about her reasons for wanting to join Star Force, and shook his head pityingly at her insistence that she wanted to serve. The conversation devolved into an argument about Kharbage, LLC’s predatory business model.

  “Your son is starting to notice things,” Petruzzelli said. “He pointed out recently that if the colonists had upcyclers and multimaterial 3D printers, our role in their lives would be greatly reduced.”

  “That equipment is far too expensive for them to even consider purchasing,” Adnan said. “They are all stony broke.”

  “And whose fault is that? Anyway, you could sell it to them on layaway with astronomical interest.”

  “Teach a man to fish,” Adnan said, “and he will not buy any fish from you in the future.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got that quote right,” Petruzzelli replied dryly.

  It was kind of fun speaking honestly to her boss. She was also enjoying the well-scrubbed air of Ceres, blowing cold and moist off the salt lake in front of the Kharbages’ villa. She accepted a refill of arak.

  “About Michael,” she said. “Why did you send him out with me?”

  “Maybe I wanted to teach him to fish,” Adnan said.

  “Ha, ha. In that case, he should be in school.”

  “As you know, he has been expelled from every school on Ceres.” When Adnan said every school he meant the top private schools. A free UN education was no education at all, in his opinion.

  “And I’m supposed to be the next best option? All I’ve taught him is how to beat the Fuglies in Existential Threat.”

  “He has also learned about spaceships and their operation. That’s important if he will join the company someday.”

  “He didn’t need much teaching there,” Petruzzelli admitted. “He’s a whiz with mechanical systems. Pretty damn good with IT, too.”

  “I know!” Adnan glowed. “My boy is a prodigy.”

  “Still, I’d rather have had a crew.”

  “Our margins are very, very slim.”

  “Not that slim,” Petruzzelli said thoughtlessly, gesturing at the deluxe spread behind them. Adnan Kharbage’s ski chalet stood on stilts at the edge of a viridian expanse of planktonic seaweed, the largest body of liquid water on the surface of Ceres. Near the deck where they were sitting, sea otters frolicked, leaving black wakes in the sargassum. The sound of safety bells drifted from the slopes to the east of the lake, where people were skiing moguls. Clouds of snow rose like explosions. An oversized, rectangular ‘sun’ shone upon this mash-up of an Alpine lake and an Antarctic nature preserve. Most Ceresites never got to see the horizon from one year’s end to the next, but Adnan lived in an asteroid-belt paradise. He was doing nicely for himself—at the expense of Belter pioneers who made a living by running filthy, poisonous He3 factories.

  His brows drew together; he was clearly remembering why he had fired her. She stuck her arms into the sleeves of her coat. “But about Mikey. Why? Really, sir, why? I mean, if there’s something I was meant to teach him, and didn’t, I would feel bad about that.”

  Adnan Kharbage sagged like a sack of trash. “Ms. Petruzzelli, I hoped you would teach my son something he has not learned at home or at school: how to be a good person. Whether you succeeded or not remains to be seen.”

  ★

  The next day, Petruzzelli got on a flight back to Earth. UNSA, the UN’s commercial spaceflight regulator, was commandeering private passenger ferries to redistribute personnel and equipment throughout the solar system in support of the coming war effort. Berths were scarce. Petruzzelli spent nearly all her severance pay on a first-class ticket, and still ended up sharing her cabin with two geologists who had suddenly received job offers from Star Force. She shared her black-market tequila with them and tried to suppress pangs of envy. At least they had job offers. What if, after all this, Star Force didn’t take her? What if she’d thrown her career away to chase a hopeless dream? That would be almost as humiliating as throwing everything away for a man.

  ii.

  The Kharbage Collector remained parked at Occator Spaceport, in the equatorial region of Ceres known as the Alps, while Adnan Kharbage hunted for someone to replace Petruzzelli. She had really left him up the creek. Good pilots were hard to find. Among professional astronauts, the ability to pilot a large commercial spacecraft was commonplace. Giving orders to the ship’s hub was all there was to it. A child could do that. What Adnan Kharbage—and every other ship-owner—sought in a pilot was something less easily quantified: a retentive mind stocked with general knowledge about how ships worked, to be drawn on when—not if—something went wrong … and above all, the psychological toughness to thrive on long, lonely journeys through sectors that subtended as much as 15% of the asteroid belt. Petruzzelli had all those qualities and then some.

  One obvious way to circumvent the risk of pilot failure was to hire more people. Human beings did better in groups as a rule. That’s just how it was. A ship like the Kharbage Collector would optimally carry a crew of fifteen to twenty. Kharbage, LLC had fielded crews that size in the days of the United Nations Venus Remediation Project (UNVRP), when the dream of terraforming Venus had unlocked a flood of taxpayer mone
y for subcontractors to wallow in. But nowadays? Forget about it.

  So Adnan Kharbage was looking for a steely-eyed flyboy—or flygirl—who dreamed of nothing more glorious than driving a garbage truck through vast empty volumes of space. He was having no luck, because half the other ship-owners on Ceres were also hiring. There’d been an extraordinary spate of resignations after the UN’s declaration of war.

  Adnan had no opinion on that. None he was willing to voice openly, in any case. But he hadn’t gotten this far in life by failing to anticipate disasters, and expediently coming up with ways to mitigate said disasters and still turn a tidy profit.

  He made arrangements to send his son to boarding school on Earth.

  ★

  “He’s bribed the government of the Former United Kingdom to get me into some dump called Harrow,” Michael said to his friends. “I’m not going, of course.”

  “School is for losers,” they agreed.

  “I already know everything.”

  Michael uttered this sentence with the simplistic confidence of a child. It was pretty much true, with regard to the kind of stuff they taught in school these days. Michael had an IQ of 174—the result of a pre-birth genetic procedure done illegally and at great expense on Ganymede. These procedures tended to have unforeseen consequences, and Michael was no exception. He had a drugstore implant to manage his autism spectrum disorder. Nothing could be done about his extremely low boredom threshold.

  They were sitting in a bar at the bottom of the Belows, so far down that the floor was awash in salty water. The bar’s radioisotope electric generator provided heat as well as power for the lights, air circulation, and sound system. This kept the booze in the optics liquid, but it was still so cold everyone was breathing fog, their self-heating coats zipped up to the chin. You basically lived in your coat in the Belows.

  The first colonists on Ceres, 120 years ago, had dug in. This was standard practice in the Belt. Whether you were living on a tiny asteroid or a dwarf planet, you needed protection from radiation and impacts. A few meters of regolith above your head took care of that. Digging in also meant digging out rock and nickel iron that could be used as construction materials, so it made sense twice over.

  The trouble was that Ceres was a watery little world. Its mantle of mixed ice and rock contained more water than all the fresh water on Earth put together, and that was a lot considering that Ceres was only 3% Earth’s size. A liquid ocean sloshed around the dwarf planet’s molten core.

  Of course, the crust was frozen solid. Average surface temperature: anywhere from -100° to -150°. Step out on the surface unprotected and you’d turn into a human popsicle in a nanosecond.

  But habitats generated heat. Whether they were inflatable mining camps, or rigid bunkers constructed from local cryocrete and magnesium silicate, the people and machinery inside got hot. The excess heat had to be dumped via tangles of coolant pipes.

  Thus, anything you put down on the surface of Ceres would eventually sink, like a hot spoon stuck into a tub of ice cream.

  For the crust was not quite solid. Active hydrological processes in the mantle drove resurfacing, most often at a glacial pace, sometimes in the form of spectacular mudslides. The high salt content of the dwarf planet’s water lowered its freezing point, making it even more prone to melt into slush.

  Into this slush the first generation of habitats had been sinking for more than a century. A logical response to the problem might have been to abandon the whole idea of digging in, but the sunk costs fallacy had prevailed, together with dread of the PLAN. Underground habitats were relatively safe from orbital bombardment. So those early colonists had doubled down, building new habs on top of their first ones in Occator, Dantu, Nawish, and Kerwan craters, while continuing to use the old ones.

  Those original structures now lay far below the floors of their respective craters, like the bottom layers of 800-meter sponge cakes. It had been confidently predicted that people would move out once they got tired of living so far underground. Psychologists imagined that human beings could not thrive without going outside sometimes. The psychologists turned out to have underestimated the ability of Homo sapiens to stay cheerful under empirically dire conditions. Also, no one had predicted the sheer number of people wishing—or being forced—to move in, from all corners of the solar system. So those habs stayed full, and expanded sideways as well as down.

  From a life-support standpoint, Ceres was the asteroid belt’s Goldilocks destination: enough gravity to grow healthy plants, a surface area the size of India, and all that water, which could be consumed, or split into hydrogen and oxygen. The Ceres PR department claimed the dwarf planet had become humanity’s first 100% self-sufficient colony—though in some circles this claim was considered dubious at best.

  The patrons of the Galaxy’s Best Bar, deep beneath Occator Crater, would have described it in less glowing terms, if they hadn’t all been drunk.

  Except for Michael. He was on orange juice. Kicking the heels of his wellies against his bar stool, he said, “I wonder if Codfish is there yet?”

  ★

  “Tell me more about your piloting experience,” Adnan Kharbage said to Min-Joon Park.

  Adnan had left the first round of interviews to his secretary, who’d eliminated the no-hopers and forwarded him a list of possibles. There were only three people on it. One had been a foilhat who’d bored Adnan for half an hour about the Fermi Paradox. Another had already accepted a different job. That left Min-Joon Park, who seemed too good to be true.

  “Oh, I’ve piloted pretty much every kind of ship out there,” Park said with a smile. He was a slender Earthborn man of medium height. His dark eyes radiated honesty.

  “The Kharbage Collector is a twin-module StarTractor.”

  “Yes, I’m very familiar with that ship. I mean that type of ship.”

  Perhaps English was not Park’s first language. “I am sorry for this personal question …” It was rude to ask people about their ethnic background, even when it was literally as obvious as the nose on their face. “You were born in Korea?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What brought you into space?”

  “Oh, you know! I wanted to see the solar system. My family has always travelled extensively.”

  “You wouldn’t by any chance be a namsadang?”

  “A namsadang? Certainly not!”

  It was understandable that Park should take offense. The namsadang were a nomadic community with roots in the Korean peninsula, created when the reunification of North and South Korea had thrown thousands of North Korean black marketeers, wheeler-dealers, snakeheads, scammers, and grifters out of a job. They had drifted all over the world and eventually into outer space, staying networked, and mostly keeping to their old trades.

  Adnan apologized for raising the topic. Park almost certainly wasn’t a namsadang. If he was, he’d have better prospects—now that war had broken out—than driving the Kharbage Collector for the kind of money Adnan was offering.

  Just to make sure, Adnan said, “I have had problems in the past with captains who used my ships for independent, and actually sometimes illegal, enterprises.” Even Petruzzelli had gotten mixed up at one point with a scheme to extort compensation payments from UNVRP. Adnan hadn’t punished her for it, since in principle he approved. But now they were all living a lot closer to the edge. “That kind of thing is strictly prohibited. It could get us into a lot of trouble, the kind that no one needs.”

  “I understand.”

  “Each of my ships is equipped with a transponder that continually transmits its location,” Adnan mentioned, “as well as a full suite of onboard recording devices. All transmissions are monitored by a compliance lawyer, for safety and insurance purposes.”

  “I understand.”

  Petruzzelli had induced Michael to jark the recording devices while she was up to her hijinks. That wouldn’t be a problem in future, since Michael would soon be on his way to Earth. Speaki
ng of which, he had to track the boy down. Whenever Michael came home to Ceres, he vanished like a rabbit down a hole.

  “That’s about it,” Adnan concluded. “Do you have any questions for me at this time, Mr. Park?”

  Park looked worried. “Could you give me some indication of when I might hear—”

  “Hear what?”

  “About the job?”

  “You’ve already got the job!” Adnan laughed. He reached across the table and slapped Park on the bicep, nearly knocking the smaller man out of his ergoform in the low gravity. “You were the only candidate who wasn’t either a lunatic or unavailable. So I made the decision to hire you as soon as you turned out to be a normal human being!”

  “Ha, ha,” said Park, looking relieved.

  “I am honored to welcome a pilot of your caliber to Kharbage, LLC. My secretary will be in touch shortly. And now, if you will excuse me …”

  ★

  A text popped up on Michael’s contacts. “Got the job.” It came from Min-Joon Park, better known to his family, friends, and enemies as Codfish. It reached the others around the bar table at the same time.

  “Arrr! There was never any doubt,” said Codfish’s brother, Min-Jae, who went by the alias Captain Haddock. “That profile you cooked up for him was a thing of beauty, Michael. Testimonials from nonexistent employers, and even a CSR award!”

  Michael grinned. It was nice when your efforts paid off.

  But now they would have to move fast. He slipped off his bar stool, landing with a splash in the three centimeters of water on the floor.

  “What worries me,” said Codfish’s wife, Coral, “is that Cod’s never actually flown a spaceship in his life.”

  “Cease your funning, wench,” Haddock said. “He won’t be flying this one, either. I will.”

  While they spoke, Anemone, Haddock’s wife, had paid their tab. The last to slide off his stool was Haddock and Anemone’s son, Kelp, who’d had his nose in a book the entire time. He dawdled after them, rolling up his tablet and stuffing it in his coat pocket. Kelp was two years older than Michael. Spaceborn, he looked like a long, wavering piece of the seaweed he was named after. He was always reading books—not useful ones, either, but fiction. Michael didn’t have much time for him.