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

they probably believed they were signing her death warrant.
    “Is that all?” Dad Ezra said.
    “Actually, there’s one more thing …”
    “What?”
    She’d spent the morning standing in line at the recruiting office in Boise, fresh off the spaceplane, disoriented by the gravity and the brightness. Her neighbors in the queue were young men, mostly. A few old foilhats. Not everyone in Idaho wanted to pretend the war wasn’t happening. Sweating in the heat, taking turns to go buy sodas from the Kwikstop, they’d traded scuttlebutt about the recruiting process, and that was how Petruzzelli had learned the following:
    At this stage, Star Force was being very selective.
    They’d take you all right, but if you got recruited as a ground-pounder, that’s where you’d stay for the rest of the war. Same went for specialties such as telepresence, IT, demolitions, and so forth. Everyone wanted to go into battle, really into battle, not just remotely from a couch in low earth orbit, but only a few of these Johnny-come-lately volunteers would ever set foot on a spaceship. Those with the best of the best qualifications … and those who knew how to work the system.
    Petruzzelli had all the desirable qualifications. Everyone in line had murmured enviously when she mentioned captaining a recycling barge in the Belt. But she also, unbeknownst to them, had an ISA dossier. It was now clear she had to do something about that if she was going to end up where she wanted in this war. She needed a definite, non-disputable gold star to balance out the black mark against her. Something so bright and shiny it would literally obscure the black mark from view.
    So she’d left the queue and hopped on the bus to Murtaugh.
    “I need a testimonial,” she said to her parents. “Testimonials, plural. The more the better.” She knew this from the guys in line who had researched ‘the system’ to death. “Real endorsements from real people. It’s the new fad.”
    “That’s not a new fad, it’s an old one,” Mom Gretchen said. “They used to call them character references.”
    “I guess everything that goes around comes around.” She looked at Dad Ezra—the only one of these people she’d met before today. “So could you do a testimonial for me?”
    “Well, honey, I hardly know you,” he demurred.
    “All you have to do is say I’m a good person!”
    “And I’m sure you are, but I don’t feel qualified to say so. It would be unethical.”
    “Oh, come on,” she said hopelessly. She knew what he was really saying: I’m not gonna lift one finger to help the UN fight their war.
    She left soon after that. Tempest followed her out, gushing about how nice it had been to meet her. Halfway down the drive, she got around to asking Petruzzelli to pay for the eggs. Biting back tears, Petruzzelli paid up. She knew her family was financially strapped. Small farmers always were. Not much different, actually, from asteroid colonists. Maybe this was happening to her because she’d treated all those settlers in the Belt unfairly. Sure, she’d only been doing what Adnan Kharbage told her to, but still. She held some responsibility for it. Maybe it was only fair that she, now, should be deprived of her one true dream.
    Out of sight of the farm, she sat down in the middle of the road. The silence of the countryside cocooned her. The Dirtglue® felt springy under her butt. She watched an army of ants dragging a cicada’s carcass away. She rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, inadvertently making her retinal implants flex. IS THERE AN EMERGENCY? they enquired in large text.
    “Why, yes,” Petruzzelli muttered. “Humanity is in real danger of extinction, and now that we’re finally doing something about it, my freaking family doesn’t want to know.”
    She scrolled through her address book, trying to think of anyone else who might provide a testimonial for her. She fired off emails to Martin Okoli and a few of her other old colleagues