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

entered the Bigelow. He came in through the airlock, darted into the changing cubicle, and exchanged his spacesuit liner for a traditional Pashtun tunic, loose trousers, and turban. He floated around the curtain into the women’s side. Cue screeches. A late convert to Islam—as opposed to the politically advantageous pretense of Islam—Dr. Hasselblatter simply could not get it through his head that the Pashtuns took purdah seriously.
    He returned to the men’s side, not at all embarrassed by his faux pas, towing his newly-wedded wife, one of the spaceborn Pashtun girls. His seven-year-old son followed, riding on his pet goat.
    The boss-man looked unamused. Kiyoshi’s smile, by contrast, was genuine. Dr. Hasselblatter was good for the Pashtuns, in his opinion. Dr. Hasselblatter had once been a famous politician, the director of the Space Corps, and a prominent member of the President’s Advisory Council; now he was a construction worker in the asteroid belt. He was much happier. And his absent-minded insouciance was a useful corrective to the Pashtun community, who tended to be too uptight, Kiyoshi thought, about shariah-related stuff.
    Yet the boss-man begrudged his brother his happiness. Before he lost his job, Dr. Hasselblatter had not only provided 99984 Ravilious with priceless inside information, he had kept the ISA off the boss-man’s back. For twenty years, he’d singlehandedly made sure those charges stayed stuffed in the back of some virtual filing cabinet. Highly-ranked UN bureaucrats wielded amazing powers. But when a person fell from that high, they fell hard. Dr. Hasselblatter had ‘resigned’ last year amid a sex scandal. And when he lost his job, the boss-man had lost his protection.
    The Salvation project had started the day Kiyoshi brought Dr. Hasselblatter out here, shorn of all his clout and connections.
    No wonder the boss-man greeted his younger brother with a grin that could have sliced through splart.
    “Get that kid out of here,” he said.
    He might have meant the goat, but he probably meant Junior Hasselblatter. Dr. Hasselblatter’s son was the bane of his uncle’s existence. Actually, he was the bane of everyone’s existence. Today he had harnessed his goat into a pair of homemade wings, which flapped at the pull of a lever.
    Dr. Hasselblatter ignored the command. Kiyoshi noticed for the first time that he looked alarmed. He wrapped his arms around his wife. “I just heard!” he exclaimed.
    “What?” everyone shouted. They had not got completely out of the habit of thinking that Dr. Hasselblatter had privileged access to information.
    “War! We’ve declared war on Mars!”
    The Pashtun men roared. Even Kiyoshi snickered.
    “We know,” they all chorused.
    Out here, they had no internet access. The boss-man used to have a slick system of redirects involving dark pools of privately-owned servers, but he’d cut the cord during the sex scandal slash ISA panic. Six months had passed since then, so if the ISA were coming to arrest him, they weren’t burning metal to get here. But he’d never renewed their internet connection. It turned out they could get along just fine without it. Ship radios picked up the feeds, and news items percolated through the colony fast enough, depending on how interesting they were.
    It said a good deal about the priorities of the colony—and the boss-man’s success in alienating his followers from the rest of the solar system—that war between the UN and the PLAN was not considered very interesting. This also explained why Dr. Hasselblatter had only just heard about it.
    “But this is a historical event,” he insisted. “Humanity is taking a stand! Finally, finally we’re striking back at the PLAN! What a day! A watershed moment in the history of human civilization …”
    This was too much for Kiyoshi. “Ten to one, it’s disinformation,” he said sharply. “And if it isn’t? They’ll pull back as soon as Star Force gets their delicate