Free The Phobos Maneuver by Felix R. Savage Page A

opening Elfrida’s mother’s foilpack of Wiener Schnitzel. Her eyes reflected Elfrida’s fears. But what she said was, “Your parents are great.”
    “I know.” Elfrida decided not to complain about her mother’s over-protectiveness. She was thirty years old, not six. She could understand why her mother was worried. She changed the subject. “That woman I did the testimonial for, Petruzzelli? She has like four mothers and five fathers.”
    “How does that even work?”
    “I dunno. It’s all legal. I think it’s quite common, actually.”
    “Suddenly, I don’t feel so weird anymore.”
    Elfrida shook her head. “No, Colden, we’re the weird ones.” She gestured to include the other Space Corps agents yelling back and forth as the jet queued to take off. “We have or had married parents, we graduated from college, we’ve got full-time jobs … that’s weird. It’s because we’re UN. You’re second-generation, I’m third-generation—my mother used to work for the UN, and three of my grandparents did. We live in a bubble.”
    “That’s really interesting,” Colden said. “I never thought of that, but now that you say it, it’s obvious.”
    “I never noticed it, either, until someone pointed it out to me.”
    “Maybe that’s why everyone hates the UN. Because we’re normal.”
    “You’re probably onto something. Although, I dunno about normal. Is it normal to get on a jet in Amsterdam, with no clue where you’re going, in the knowledge that your employer has just declared war on a hostile AI with better technology?”
    Colden snorted. She clearly did not want to think about their destination. “The person who pointed that out to you. Would that be a certain person who keeps sending you Bible verses?”
    Elfrida threw an elbow into Colden’s ribs. “How’d you know?”
    “Because you always go pink when you talk about him.”
     

vi.
     
    John Mendoza floated in space, in a rather smelly third-hand miner’s spacesuit. He seemed to be alone in the star-sprinkled abyss, except for the object behind him. This was an oblate sphere 200 meters in diameter, made of asteroid iron.
    The sphere blocked out the sun. A single feature rose above its surface: a shack-sized industrial air circulation unit rated for 10 5 cubic meters. The unit had been jugaaded—manually upgraded—to cleanse and process the atmosphere within the sphere, which was a human- un friendly mixture of carbon monoxide and toxic metallic vapors.
    Mendoza had done the majority of the work on the air circulation unit and now he was monitoring it. But there wasn’t much to monitor. The unit was venting carbon monoxide to space at a controlled rate, which was exactly what it had been doing for the last five hours.
    So, oblivious to the miracle of industrial chemistry behind him, equally blind to the jeweled sweep of the heavens, Mendoza concentrated on his email. He was writing to Elfrida, his one true love, and he wanted to get every word right.
    I’m having a great time out here.
    Had there ever been a more boring opener in the history of email? It didn’t help that it was wholly accurate and true. The trouble was that he couldn’t say anything about the Salvation project. Mendoza sent his emails via the Monster, so nobody censored them, but he censored himself, having fully taken on board the boss-man’s concerns about the ISA. He himself had tangled with the ISA before and was not keen to repeat the experience, ever.
    So: having a great time out here.
    Elfrida knew that 99984 Ravilious existed. But she didn’t know that it no longer existed. Every day they were apart, more stuff happened, deforming the Venn diagram of their lives. The overlap was getting smaller and smaller. Mendoza was desperately trying to retard that process in ever more creative ways.
    It’s weird, but I feel at home in space now. In fact, every day I look at the stars, and I wonder: what’s out there? There’s so much we still don’t know, even