The Phobos Maneuver Read Online Free PDF Page A

Occator, on the surface, because it would disturb the seaweed.
    “This is so cool,” Michael said to their navigator.
    “It’s just a big fish farm.” She waved at one of the nearby boats. Its two-man crew rowed it back to the wharf. “These guys will take you the rest of the way.”
    The boat was flat-bottomed, crudely welded together from sheet aluminum. Michael perched amidships on a cooler sticky with fish scales. The rowers’ backs bent and straightened in perfect synchrony. The boat skimmed over the water. Michael remembered the Harrow brochures his father had made him look at. There’d been vid of boys like him rowing sculls, on an actual river, on Earth … But no. He had a mission of far greater import than that.
    The wharf receded out of sight. That did not mean they’d come very far, since Ceres was so small the horizon was rarely more than a kilometer away. Michael started to see sheets of ice floating on the water. “The lake stays liquid because of the habs underneath it,” said one of the rowers. “We’re technically on Fifteen Below—”
    “Fourteen Below,” disagreed the other.
    “—so there’s a lot of hot stuff down there. We also have some dedicated generators warming up the hatcheries on the bottom of the lake.”
    “So why does the lake stay up?” Michael said. “It should be flooding everything under it.”
    “Splart,” the first rower said.
    Michael nodded. “I love splart.”
    “Everyone loves splart.”
    The boat’s prow ran up on an ice floe. Hammering noises echoed out of the dark. “That way,” the rowers said. “Bye.”
    In pitch darkness broken only by the beams of their headlamps, half a dozen excavator bots were enlarging the cavern. They looked like heavy-duty versions of Michael’s mecha, with the addition of circular-bladed ice saw attachments. People in snowsuits dragged sledges heaped with spoil.
    Michael and his friends fell in with the miners. They were all going the same way: up a sloping tunnel that narrowed as they climbed, up and up, to a steel-floored lobby with an airlock on the far side.
    “Wow!” Michael said to his friends. “See what this is? It’s a spaceship!” The Belowsers had crashed the ship into the floor of the crater and bored in.
    While they waited to use the airlock, Michael and his friends inflated their helmets and checked their seals. They were all wearing EVA suits under their coats so they didn’t really need the coats for warmth. But it was inadvisable to walk through the Belows in a spacesuit. It marked you as a tourist and could set you up for an uncomfortable encounter or three if you were unlucky.
    They stumbled out onto the top of a landslide. The tunnel emerged halfway down the west side of a wrinkle ridge on the floor of Occator Crater. In the weak light of noon, they slid and bounced to the bottom. The miners kept dumping spoil out of the airlock above them, so they finished their pell-mell descent in a hail of ice and clay chips.
    The bottom of the spoil dump fanned out across the wrinkled gray landscape. It resembled the salt-ice landslides that some early observers of the dwarf planet had taken for alien installations. Adulterated with clay, the ice was brownish rather than pure white, but that was still a lot paler than the dusty surface, so the landslide stuck out like a scar.
    The five of them seemed to be completely alone: microscopic specks in the 90-kilometer bowl of Occator Crater. The crater’s south wall, almost five kilometers high, caught the sun. To the north and west rose knife-edged terrain folds, reminiscent of the ripples when a stone is dropped into a puddle.
    Michael whistled. His skimmer bounced around the shoulder of the landslide. The little blue vehicle was just an electric buggy with simple controls … but it was his. His father couldn’t remote-control it. This morning, Michael had commanded it to come here and wait for him.
    Kelp and Coral ended up riding on the roof, holding onto the