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

M-type rocks. Only this time, we will be extracting iron.”
    The boss-man arrived. Someone must have told him Kiyoshi was wandering around, possibly undermining morale.
    All the Pashtuns bowed low. In zero-gee, this meant doubling over so their turbans brushed their socks. The boss-man doffed his helmet. “Stinks like a fucking hab in here,” he bellowed—a joke that hadn’t gotten old yet. It would, Kiyoshi judged, after they’d all been living in habs for another couple of weeks. Living in a hollowed-out asteroid, you were at the top of the property ladder in the Belt. This might feel like an adventure at the moment, slumming it in Bigelows. But it sounded like the women, at least, were getting fed up with the lack of gravity and the goat feces floating around mucking up everything from their hair to their sleeping squats to the food prep areas.
    Accepting a pouch of tea, the boss-man turned to Kiyoshi. “Glad I tracked you down! I need you to go and pick a cargo up from Laetitia. Liquid hydrogen. Seeds. Splart, we always need splart.”
    Kiyoshi was wise to this trick by now. The boss-man started off by asking you to do something reasonable. And before you knew it, you were helping to build geodesic spheres of goat silk for a goddamn Bussard ramjet.
    “Get Zygmunt or Brian to do it,” he said. “I have five hundred and sixty-four people living on the Monster right now. I can’t schlep cargoes.”
    “Ah well, it can wait,” the boss-man said. And then the trap closed. “I’ll make sure your people are the first to move in, when Salvation is operable.”
    Salvation.
    The boss-man had named his soon-to-be-built 7,000-person getaway truck Salvation.
    It was not at all a given that he had a sense of irony about it.
    “I appreciate that,” Kiyoshi said. What else could he say, with the Pashtun men staring at him, waiting for him to show appropriate gratitude for this mark of favor? They carried knives. Peshkabz had needle-sharp points, as well as symbolizing the cultural heritage of the Pashtunwali. Kiyoshi wondered for just a second if coming in here had been a bad idea. But, no—he was the boss’s right-hand man. Their partnership went back sixteen years. He deserved to be first in line for living space in Salvation , deserved to be honored in front of these roughnecks, would have felt slighted by anything less …
    Jesus.
    The way the man worked on your head.
    “So,” Kiyoshi said, with an expression of brow-furrowed concern. “Scanners picked up a ship heading this way. It’s a long way out. Could be making for Laetitia. But you think it might be the ISA?”
    This was a calculated low blow.
    “Nope,” the boss-man said. “It’s just some stuff I ordered from Ceres. Soil matrix. Bamboo seeds. Spare parts.”
    “That’s good to hear. Because it kinda looks like there are two ships coming—one shadowing the other. I thought the second one might be … you know.”
    The ISA. The spooks. The information police of the solar system, who dabbled in other kinds of policing, too. The boss-man was wanted for murder, ship theft, IP theft, and God knows what else. Not many people were aware of this. Kiyoshi had taken a risk by alluding to it.
    “As soon as I know they’re coming,” the boss-man said, “you’ll know it.” He reached over and slapped Kiyoshi on the shoulder. His black eyes were hard. “You’ve got that nice hypervelocity coilgun; you never use it.”
    The Pashtun men laughed. It had definitely been a mistake to come in here.
    “I’m just wondering,” Kiyoshi murmured.
    “Like I said, when I know, you’ll know.”
    “My sources say there’s a lot of chatter on Ceres. All those procurement trips. People aren’t gonna not notice when someone buys sixteen antimatter generators.”
    “Your sources?” The boss turned to the other men. “His brother.”
    “Better source than your brother,” Kiyoshi said, keeping his anger in check.
    Right on cue, Dr. Abdullah Hasselblatter, Ph.D.,