Free The Phobos Maneuver by Felix R. Savage Page B

about our own solar system! You feel the same way, right? You’ve always had that wanderlust.
    The plan had been for Elfrida to come out and join him here. They’d got as close as shopping for flights to 6 Hebe, the nearest major asteroid colony. And then … this stupid goddamn war.
    I wish you were here. It’s so damn exciting, and I want to share it with you. And even apart from my own selfish wants, smile, you’re NEEDED here. You’ve got expertise in life-support systems, hydroponics, micro-gee health care, all that stuff. You’re EXACTLY the kind of person we need. I’ve actually talked to the boss about you. He says, tell her to get her ass out here! Smile. That’s the way he talks.
    He reread that paragraph. Decided, sadly, that it gave too much away. Deleted it and started again.
    Wish you were here …
    In the end, his email consisted of that, plus a Bible verse. John 15:13. He always included a Bible verse. It was a way of communicating with her without flapping his lips, and also a nudge. He worried she might be falling away from the Church in his absence. She was a recent convert, and Mendoza secretly suspected she was not 100% committed to the Faith.
    He hit send, and then glanced at the display on the air recirculation unit.
    “Shit!”
    On the far side of the sphere, Bridget Williams, a Mormon, was monitoring the second air recirculation unit.
    Mendoza radioed her. “Bridget, my unit’s stopped venting. I, uh, don’t know how long …”
    She laughed. “Venting’s finished, dude! I was about to radio you. Shut down your unit and c’mon over. We’re just waiting for the boss, then we’re going in.”
    Mendoza flew around the sphere on his mobility pack. He’d gotten used to spacewalking without a tether, although he still felt a reflexive twinge of fear every time he unclipped. The spaceborn knew no such fears. There was a whole crowd of them buzzing around the far side of the sphere. Parents towed small children in transparent papooses. They were coming over from the Bigelows. The Queen of Persia drifted about a klick away, status lights blinking on her slabby 1,500-meter hull.
    The colonists wore self-luminescent spacesuits, or old ones painted to glow in gaudy patterns. They were bright fireflies flitting around in the twilight of the distant sun. Some went for culturally symbolic designs. Mendoza liked the Amazonians’ logo of a hammer, with the jokey slogan Everything Is A Nail. He looked for Kiyoshi’s non-glowing, patched and re-patched black EVA suit, and did not see it. A pall fell on his mood.
    The boss-man arrived, riding a D&S bot shaped like a metal shark, with a polyfoam saddle. He looked like some kind of dorky space cowboy. Mendoza knew he carefully calculated these things for full effect, but it worked. It made people laugh as well as cheer.
    The boss-man nosed his D&S steed up to the sphere. Bridget Williams had chalked a circle around her air recirculation unit. An industrial-power cutter laser shot out from the D&S bot’s nose and cut it out.
    A two-meter disk of metal popped free, spinning like a giant coin with an air recirculation unit stuck on one side. Williams caught it, pulsing her mobility pack so it didn’t carry her away. She measured its thickness. “Eleven point one five centimeters!”
    Whoops broke out. Mendoza cheered with the rest, cracking his lungs. Despite the Pashtuns’ confidence in the procedure, no one had known until this moment whether it would work.
    They’d built a flimsy scaffolding on an asteroid fragment.
    Covered said scaffolding with the mylar used for solar sails, the thinnest and strongest fabric in existence.
    Inflated the balloon with carbon monoxide.
    And heated it up, using one of the thorium breeder reactors, until chemistry took over …
    … and the asteroid fragment vaporized, to coat the inside of the bubble with a not-found-in-nature nickel-steel alloy containing trace amounts of platinum and palladium.
    Hey presto, instant