THE SILENT WAR Page 11

  He had walked out of the nursery and hadn't seen the baby since that moment. He knew that if he did, if he went back into the nursery, he'd want to kill the brat. Smother it in its incubator. Turn off its air. Get rid of it.

  He couldn't do it. There were too many nurses and pediatricians and servants constantly hovering over the little monster.

  Besides, it wasn't really the baby's fault, Humphries told himself. It's Fuchs. Remember that. It's his fault. He's killed Amanda. He drove her to use the drugs that killed her and ruined my son. He's hidden behind her protection all these years. Well, that's over now. Over and done with.

  "... and later on, in a year or two, we can attempt gene replacement therapy," the doctor was saying. "Or even nanotherapy, since it's legal up here."

  Ferrer was nodding as if she were interested.

  "Thank you so much for explaining everything, doctor," Humphries said, getting to his feet.

  The physician looked startled, then a flash of anger crossed his face momentarily, but he quickly recovered and got up from his chair.

  "Please feel free to call on me at any time, Mr. Humphries. The entire services of the hospital are at your disposal."

  "Certainly."

  Neither man extended his hand to the other.

  Once the physician left the office, Ferrer turned to Humphries. "Should I arrange a christening ceremony?"

  "Christening?"

  "It's expected for a newborn baby."

  "Which comes first," Humphries asked bleakly, "her funeral or the brat's christening?"

  Ferrer took a deep breath. Normally it would have roused Humphries but at the moment he ignored it.

  "I'll make the arrangements for both," she said softly. "What do you want to name the baby?"

  "Name?"

  "He's got to have a name."

  "Van. It's an old family name. My great-grandfather was named Van. He ran off to South America to avoid being drafted by the U.S. Army. A coward. That's an appropriate name for the little runt, don't you think?"

  "I still don't see why you've gotta meet Lars face to face," said Big George.

  Pancho swung her legs off the recliner's armrest and got to her feet. "Got something to tell him. Something personal."

  "Somethin' more than Amanda's death?"

  "Yep."

  "Must be fookin' important."

  "It is."

  "Well," George said, getting up from his chair to stand beside her, "I can try gettin' a message to him. Dunno if he'll respond, though."

  "He knows me."

  "He knew you," George corrected. "Ol' Lars isn't the same man he was back then."

  Pancho gave him a long unhappy look, then muttered, "Who the hell is?"

  ASTEROID VESTA

  Harbin studied the image of Grigor on the wallscreen of his private quarters. A Russian, Harbin said to himself, recalling the way the village elders had spoken of the Russians when he'd been a lad. The Russians are our friends, they intoned, as long as they stay far away from our village.

  Grigor's normally dour, downcast features looked almost happy as he gave Harbin the latest orders from Selene. An important executive of the rival Astro Corporation was at Ceres. Probably she would go deeper into the Belt, seeking a meeting with the renegade Fuchs.

  "We will receive tracking data from our informant in the IAA facility at Ceres. You will intercept her vessel and eliminate it. Quite possibly you'll be able to eliminate Fuchs at the same time. You are to take as many ships as you deem necessary, but in any event no fewer than five. Humphries wants this job done without fail."

  Harbin wanted to answer, "Then let Humphries come out here and do it himself." But he knew that it would take more than half an hour for any reply from him to reach the Moon. Besides, it wouldn't be wise to be so disrespectful to the man who pays all the bills.

  So he wiped Grigor's image from his wallscreen and replied merely, "Message received. Will comply."

  Five ships. Grigor thinks that more ships will guarantee success. He has no idea of how difficult it is to coordinate a multiship attack out here. And the more ships we use, the sooner the prey will realize it's being tracked.

  Harbin shook his head in mild disgust. I could do it alone, one ship with a crew of one. Give me the coordinates of the Astro vessel's course and I'll intercept it and terminate it. And if Fuchs is in the area I'll handle him, too.

  Leaning back in his padded chair, Harbin locked his fingers behind his head and thought it over. Fuchs is smart, though. Wily, like a badger. He can sniff out danger a thousand kilometers away. Five ships might make sense. Maybe a few more, to go out ahead of me and take up stations that will cut off his line of retreat. Then I'd have him, finally.

  He sat up straight, nodded once at the blank wallscreen, then got to his feet and headed for the command center. He needed the latest tracking data on the Astro vessel.

  Big George was staring at a wallscreen, too. Pancho sat beside him in his informal office, her eyes glued to the grainy image of Lars Fuchs.

  "I received Pancho's message," Fuchs said, his broad, jowly face downcast, sour-looking. "Unfortunately, I can't risk a meeting. Too many of Humphries's spies might learn of it. Whatever you have to tell me, Pancho, send it in a message."

  The image winked off.

  Pancho blinked, then turned to George. "That's it? That's his whole message?"

  "He doesn't waste words," George replied. " 'Fraid somebody might intercept the beam and get a fix on his location."

  "I've got to talk to him," Pancho said, feeling frustrated. "Face to face."

  George said, "Lots o' luck."

  Getting to her feet, Pancho said, "I can't tell him Mandy's dead over a comm link."

  Shaking his unshorn head, George replied, "He's not gonna meet with you, Pancho. I di'n't think he would."

  "I'm not going to lead him into a trap, for cripes sake!"

  "Not knowingly."

  She frowned at him.

  "Lars hasn't survived out there for so long by bein' naive," George said. "Humphries has had mercenaries tryin' to bag him. Freelancers, too; the word's gone 'round the Belt that Humphries'll pay a bounty for Lars's head."

  Pancho grimaced. "Mandy told me he promised to leave Lars alone."

  "Sure he did," George replied, scorn dripping from each syllable.

  "I've got to see him."

  "It's not gonna happen, Pancho. Face it. Lars is cautious, and I can't say I blame him."

  Pancho took a deep breath, telling herself, When you're faced with a stone wall, find a way around it. Or over it. Or tunnel under it, if you have to. What did Dan Randolph always say: When the going gets tough, the tough get going—to where the going's easier.

  "George," she asked, sitting down next to him again, "how do you get messages to Lars?"

  He hesitated a moment. Then, "He's got a half-dozen or so miniaturized transceivers scattered around on minor asteroids out there. When I squirt a message to one of 'em, I tell him which one I'll be aimin' at on the next message."

  "And the transceivers stay on the same 'roids all the time?"

  "Naw. Lars moves 'em around. He tells me where they'll be next when he answers me back."

  Pancho was silent for a few moments, thinking. At last she said, "So you could send him a message and tell him where you'll be sending the next one."

  "And when," George added.

  "And then he goes to that rock to pick up your message."

  "Right."

  "I could be waiting for him at the asteroid where the transceiver is. When Lars shows up, I'll be there to greet him."

  George huffed. "And he'll blow you to bits before you can say hello."

  "Not if—"

  "Count on it," George said.

  "I'll take that chance."

  Shaking his head, George replied, "Pancho, I can't give you the fookin' coordinates! Lars'll think I betrayed him, for cryin' out loud!"

  "I've got to see Lars face to face. I'm willing to take the c
hance that he'll attack my ship. It's on my head."

  George remained adamant for hours. Pancho wheedled, pleaded, begged.

  "What's so fookin' important?" George asked. "What is it you've got to tell him to his face?"

  Pancho hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then she answered, "George, if I could tell you, I would. But it's for Lars's ears only."

  He scratched at his thick beard. "That big, huh?"

  Pancho nodded wordlessly.

  "All right," he said uneasily. "Tell you what I'll do. I'll go out on the ship with you."

  "But you said it'd be dangerous!"

  "Yeah. And it will be, believe it. But I think I can work out a scheme that'll keep Lars from blasting us on sight. Besides, I'd rather be there to face him than have him think I ratted him out."

  TORCH SHIP SAMARKAND

  Harbin sat in Samarkand's command chair, his pilot and navigator seated on a level of the bridge slightly below his. The data screens showed a confusing array of ship trajectories heading toward Ceres and away from the asteroid. The ship's computer was sorting out all the information, seeking the one ship that carried Pancho Lane.

  She's too clever to use her own vessel, Harbin thought, as one by one the curving lines indicating individual ships' courses winked out. She'll hitch a ride aboard some prospector's ship, or maybe an Astro logistics vessel.

  The tracking information came straight from the IAA controllers in the Chrysalis habitat orbiting Ceres. Harbin wished that Humphries had enough spies aboard the habitat to watch Pancho Lane and see which vessel she entered, but that kind of information was not available to him. So he dispatched three armed ships out into the Belt, and kept three more in a very loose formation centered on his own vessel. To an untrained eye it looked like a few more prospectors' ships heading outward. Harbin hoped that's what Fuchs would see.

  The welter of curving lines slowly diminished on the screen until only one ship's planned trajectory was displayed. Harbin shook his head, muttering, "Stupid computer." The ship's manifest said it belonged to the government of Ceres and carried none other than their chief administrator, who was going out on an inspection tour of various mining operations in the Belt. The chief rock rat going to visit his little rock rat brethren, Harbin thought.

  Then his eyes narrowed. Why is their chief administrator traipsing through the Belt? Has he ever done that before? he asked the computer. The answer returned almost before he finished uttering the question. Never. This was the first inspection tour on record.

  Harbin smiled grimly. Maybe the computer isn't so stupid, after all. He sent a message to Grigor, all the way back at Selene. "Do you have any way of finding out who's on the torch ship Mathilda II with the rock rats' chief administrator?"

  Grigor replied in little more than an hour. "No passenger list is available. Apparently the vessel carries only its crew of three, and the man Ambrose."

  Harbin nodded and remembered that Pancho Lane had once been a professional astronaut. She could probably take the place of a crewman on Ambrose's ship.

  To his own navigator he commanded, "Set a course to follow the vessel shown on the computer display. Stay well behind it. I don't want them to know we're following them."

  Mathilda II was a great deal more comfortable than the original Waltzing Matilda. That old bucket had been a mining ship before it was shot to shreds in the first asteroid war. Mathilda II was a comfortably fitted torch ship capable of carrying important passengers while serving as a mobile office for the chief administrator of the Ceres settlement.

  Sitting in a swivel chair in the galley, George was explaining, "I left the message for Lars and told him where we'll be waitin' for him. This way we don't surprise him."

  Pancho was seated across the galley table from George. They were in the middle of dinner, Pancho picking at a salad while George wholeheartedly attacked a rack of ribs.

  "And the spot you picked to rendezvous with him isn't where one of the transceivers is stashed?" she asked.

  "Naw," said George, dabbing at his sauce-soaked beard with a napkin. "We'll rendezvous in dead-empty space. I gave him the coordinates. If anybody's followin' us we'll both be able to see 'em long before they can cause any trouble."

  Pancho nodded. "And you send all your messages to Lars over a tight laser link?"

  "Yup. Just about impossible for anybody to intercept 'em or eavesdrop. If somebody does get into the beam we see it right away as a drop in received power."

  "Pretty cute."

  "Pretty necessary," George said, picking up another sauce-dripping barbecued rib.

  In the weeks since his encounter with the disguised logistics ship Roebuck, Lars Fuchs had added a new wrinkle to his Nautilus.

  Ships operating in deep space required radiation shielding. When solar flares erupted and spewed planet-engulfing clouds of deadly ionizing particles through interplanetary space, a ship without shielding was little more than a coffin for its crew. The powerful protons in such clouds were particularly dangerous, capable of killing humans and frying electronics systems within minutes unless they were properly protected.

  Most spacecraft shielded themselves by charging their outer skins to a very high positive electrical potential. This diverted the deadly high-energy protons of the radiation cloud. The cloud also contained electrons, however, which were less energetic but capable of discharging the ship's positive electrical field. To keep the electrons at bay, the ships surrounded themselves with a magnetic field, generated by lightweight superconducting wires. Thus spacecraft operating beyond the Earth/Moon system were wrapped in an invisible but powerful magnetic field of their own, and charged their outer skins to high positive potential when a solar storm broke out.

  Fuchs, once a planetary geochemist, used Nautilus's electron guns to charge up his craft's skin, then covered the spacecraft with pebbles and dust from a loosely aggregated chondritic asteroid. A radar probe of his spacecraft gave a return that looked like the pebbly surface of a small "beanbag" type of chondritic asteroid. Moreover, the dust and pebbles would scatter a laser beam and absorb its energy even better than the copper shields he had affixed earlier to Nautilus's hull.

  If he let his ship drift in a Sun-centered orbit, Fuchs felt confident that Nautilus would look to a casual probe just like a small, dumbbell-shaped asteroid. He felt less confident, though, about responding to Big George's latest message.

  Pancho wants to meet me face to face, he mused. Why? What's so important that she's coming out here into the Belt to find me?

  "I don't like it," he muttered to himself.

  Sanja, on duty in the pilot's chair, the son of a former Mongol tribesman, turned his shaved head toward Fuchs and asked, "Sir?"

  "Nothing, Sanja," said Fuchs. "Nothing. Once you've reached orbital velocity, cut power and let the ship coast."

  MATHILDA II

  "We have arrived at the designated position," said the pilot.

  Pancho was sitting in the copilot's chair of Mathilda II's snug, efficiently laid-out bridge. The pilot, seated on her left, was a youngster she had met when she'd come aboard for this flight. He looked like a kid to Pancho, blond and soft-cheeked and scrubbed pink, but he ran the vessel well enough. Good square shoulders, she noticed. Pancho's piloting skills were rusty, she knew, but inwardly she longed for a chance to fly this bucket, just for a little larking around. She couldn't ask, of course. The chairman of the board of Astro Corporation isn't supposed to be a fly-girl. One of the epithets that Humphries often threw at her was "greasemonkey." Pancho had no intention of giving the Humper any ammunition.

  Still, she thought as she watched the young man play his fingers over the control panel's keyboard, it'd be fun to goose up the engines and see what this flying machine can do.

  "This is the spot, is it?" George asked. Standing behind the pilot's seat, he bent forward slightly to peer out the forward window. Nothing visible except the desert of dark empty space spangled with solemn, unblinking stars.

  The pi
lot's name was Oskar Johannson. Despite his youthful appearance, he was stiffly formal with George and Pancho.

  "Yes, sir," he said, pointing to the control panel's main display screen. "These are the coordinates, in yellow, and this is our position, the blinking red cursor. As you can see, sir, they overlap. We are at the proper position."

  George nodded. Pancho admired Johannson's strong jaw and gleaming white teeth. Wish he'd smile, she thought. I wonder what it'd take to ruffle his composure a bit.

  "No ships in sight?"

  "Nothing in view, sir, except a small asteroid about five hundred klicks off, in about the four o'clock position." He tapped the keyboard once. "Five hundred seventeen kilometers, one hundred twenty-two degrees relative to our position, eight degrees elevation."

  Pancho grinned at the kid's earnestness. "I thought this position was clear of rocks for at least a thousand klicks all round," she said.

  George scratched at his beard, answering, "Rocks get kicked into new orbits all the time, Pancho. Gravity resonances from Jupiter and the other planets are always scrambling the smaller chunks."

  Resisting the urge to run the display herself, she said, "An unnumbered rock. Might's well claim it."

  "To do that one of us would hafta suit up and go out there and plant a marker on it."

  "Why not?" Pancho said, pushing herself up from her seat. "I'll do it. Claim it for Astro."

  "Gimme a closer look at it, Oskar," George said.

  The radar image showed a dumbbell-shaped chondritic asteroid, slowly tumbling end over end.

  "A peanut," George said. "Just like what's-'is-name."

  "Ida," said Johannson. "Asteroid number 243."

  "Showin' off your college education, Ossie?" asked George.

  Johannson actually blushed.

  Pushing past George, Pancho said, "I'll go out and claim it. Give me something to do while we're waiting for Lars to show up."