The Phobos Maneuver by Felix R. Savage Read Free Book Online

metallic shrapnel that could go straight through a Bigelow—it was a wonder they hadn’t lost any of the habs yet.
    The Bigelows trailed on tethers, like a disorganized flock of ducklings, behind the boss-man’s own ship, the Queen of Persia.
    Queen of Persia.
    Give me a break.
    The ship was a former ITN hauler. It hadn’t gone anywhere since the boss-man stole it, in his final act of piracy before reinventing himself as an underground space colonization guru.
    Kiyoshi made the rounds of the Bigelows, talking to people, gauging how they really felt about the destruction of 99984 Ravilious. Depressingly, they all trusted the boss-man to deliver on his promises of better things to come. Guru didn’t come close. These people, exiled from the UN, by choice or not, had accepted the boss as their god.
    And why shouldn’t they, when the Queen of Persia contained the supplies of water and oxygen they needed to survive, as well as the farms, bottled up and transported to the old hauler before the big boom, in the holds of the boss-man’s fleet?
    That fleet: two old Startractors, a Steelmule, a couple of fifth-hand Hyperponys, and a refinery bought on the cheap from a bankrupt mining operation out Eros way. Plus, of course, the Monster.
    The captains of these ships, like Kiyoshi himself, had served the boss-man faithfully for years, running his errands throughout the solar system, stockpiling the stuff he wanted.
    For what? they’d often wondered.
    Now they knew.
    “Creative destruction, man!” said the captain of the Steelmule. He was the thirty-first person who’d used that phrase to Kiyoshi today. “We’re gonna show the UN who’s got balls!”
    Kiyoshi didn’t even bother to talk to the other pilots.
    He went to have a chat with the Pashtuns, precisely because they were the boss’s own people. They would know what he was really thinking.
    The Pashtuns—the men, anyway—were outside, in spacesuits bought as a job lot from the same mining company that sold them the refinery. Galactic Endeavors, said the logos on their mobility packs. They were building some scaffolding on a medium-sized fragment of 99984 Ravilious. A few kilometers off, the other fragments waltzed around in a lethal dance.
    Kiyoshi helped to build the scaffolding. It was made of goat silk—a fiber that the boss-man’s gengineered goats produced in their milk. Stronger than spider silk, stickier than duct tape. They sprayed splart on the filaments to stiffen them into rods, and connected these with more splart. Gradually, they were building a geodesic sphere around the fragment.
    “How big are you going for?” Kiyoshi asked.
    “Two hundred meters in diameter.”
    “And we’re making how many of these?”
    “Eight.”
    “We could have just chipped pieces off the end.”
    “You’re undermining morale,” said a Pashtun elder, whose beard almost filled his faceplate with gray curls. “Go away.”
    That was fairly blunt, as was the custom of the Pashtuns, elder or not. Kiyoshi went and sat in the Bigelow they had tethered to the fragment. It was one of the Pashtuns’ home habs. Divided by a curtain down the middle, so that the women could have privacy, it reeked of body odor, curry, and goats—some of the wretched creatures had ended up in here, goat-napped by the Pashtun children, who treated them as pets. Bleating drifted from behind the curtain. Female voices argued in Pashto-English creole. On the men’s side, half a dozen exhausted construction workers floated, sipping tea from pouches. Kiyoshi copied their pose, crosslegged in the air, and talked to them about the technicalities of the project.
    The Pashtuns had once worked in the oil industry, long ago and far away on Earth. After the oil industry died its long-overdue death in the early 23 rd century, they had moved into space as asteroid miners. They gave the impression that this process was old hat to them.
    “It’s the same procedure we use to extract platinum-group metals from