THE SILENT WAR Page 14

  "How many orders for ships do you have?" he asked the factory manager.

  "Six," she replied. "Three from Astro and three from HSS." She hesitated a beat, then added, "Funny how the orders always come paired up. We never make a ship for one of the corporations without making a ship for the other at the same time."

  That had been Stavenger's doing. He had exerted every gram of influence he possessed to keep both Humphries and Pancho from outproducing the other. If they want to fight, Stavenger had reasoned, it's up to us to keep the competition equal. As soon as one of them gets the upper hand they'll be able to dictate the prices for raw materials to us. Selene will have to pay whatever the winner asks for its natural resources. Whoever wins this war in the Belt will win control of Selene as well.

  That, Stavenger was determined, would not be allowed to happen.

  To the factory manager, he asked as casually as he could manage, "Suppose a third party started ordering spacecraft. Could you supply them on the same schedule you're working now?"

  He couldn't see her face through the visor of her hard-shell helmet, but he could sense her nodding. "Sure. We'd have to set up another facility, but that's easy to do: Just pour another concrete pad and roof it over. The nanos do all the real work."

  Stavenger nodded. "I see."

  Curiosity got the better of the manager. "But who'd be ordering more ships? Who'd this third party be?"

  With a soft shrug, he replied, "Oh, I don't know. Maybe Selene."

  The manager could not have been more surprised if Stavenger had actually turned a handspring there on the factory floor.

  Less than twenty kilometers from the new lunar factory, Lars Fuchs was passing through customs at Selene's Armstrong Spaceport.

  He had come to the Moon by a circuitous route, leaving the Belt weeks earlier to return to his native Switzerland, using the passport that Pancho had sent to him through Big George. Although exiled from Ceres and persona non grata at Selene, neither Switzerland nor any other nation of Earth had outlawed Fuchs. Customs officials at the spaceport in Milan had subjected him to a quick but thorough medical examination, including a full-body scan and a blood sample to make certain he did not bear nanomachines.

  Thus Lars Fuchs, citizen of Switzerland, returned to his native land. He had spent weeks working out in a centrifuge he'd built aboard Nautilus, but still the heavy gravity of Earth made him feel tired, depressed. Even worse was the sight of the sprawling tent city that he glimpsed outside of Milan from the high-speed train as it raced toward the Alps. From the city's newly walled and guarded borders, past Brescia and all the way to the shores of Lake Garda he could see nothing but the shacks and shanties of the homeless, the dispossessed, the haunted, hopeless victims of the greenhouse warming.

  After all these years, Fuchs thought, staring through the train window, and still they live like animals.

  Then he caught his first glimpse of the Alps. Bare rock, stark and barren as the Moon. Where's the snow? he asked himself, knowing that it was gone, perhaps for centuries, perhaps forever.

  His world, the world he had known, was gone also. He didn't realize how much he had loved it, how much he missed it, until he realized that he would never see it again.

  As the train plunged into the tunnel at the Brenner Pass, Fuchs stared at his own grim reflection in the window. He looked away, squeezed his eyes shut, and determined to stop thinking about the past. Only the future. Think only of the day when you kill Martin Humphries.

  To do that he had to return to Selene, and to accomplish that he had to change his identity. Pancho thought she was saving Fuchs's life, protecting the man she had known since he'd first left Earth as an eager graduate student more than a decade earlier. She had provided Fuchs with a new identity and enough money to live comfortably for a few years. At his insistence, she had also done as much for the nine men and women of his crew. Nautilus was parked in a Sun-circling orbit deep in the Belt, still disguised to resemble a smallish asteroid. It will be waiting for me when I finish my business with Humphries, Fuchs thought.

  He knew what that business was, what it had to be. Pancho hasn't brought me to Earth merely out of friendship. She wants me to get back to Selene. She can't trust any communications link to say it in so many words, but her intention is clear. She wants me to kill Humphries. She knows that's what I want to do, and she's willing to help me do it. It will be a great help to her, of course. But it will be a joy to me. Even if it costs my own life, I will snuff out Humphries.

  His thirst for vengeance kindled him for the remainder of his train ride to Bern.

  But once in his native Bern he became sad and dispirited, depressed at how the old city had become so shabby, so filled with aimless, homeless men and women, even children, wandering the streets, begging for handouts when the police weren't looking. Fuchs was shocked that the streets were littered with trash; the city that had once sparkled was now grimy, obviously decaying. And at night the streets could even be dangerous, he was warned by the weary-eyed concierge at his hotel.

  A week was more than enough for him. Fuchs used the identity Pancho had provided for him to book passage back to Selene. He rented a modest suite for himself at the Hotel Luna, with an expense account to be paid by Astro Corporation. Closer to Humphries, he told himself. Within arm's reach, almost. Close enough to kill. But you must be patient, he thought. You must be careful. Humphries is surrounded by guards and other employees. Pancho can't openly help me to reach him; she can't allow herself to be seen as aiding an assassin. I'll have to act alone. I'll have to get through to Humphries on my own. I don't know how, not yet, but I will do it. Or die in the trying.

  He had to disguise his appearance, of course. Lifts in his shoes made him slightly taller. Rigid, spartan dieting had slimmed him somewhat, but no fasting could reduce his barrel chest or thickly muscled limbs. He had grown a thick black beard and wore molecule-thin contact lenses that Astro's people had clandestinely sent him; they altered his retinal pattern enough to fool a computer's simple comparison programming.

  Still, Fuchs could not help sweating nervously as he shuffled through the line leading to the customs inspection booth at Selene's Armstrong Spaceport. He had taken a mild tranquillizer but it didn't seem to be helping to calm his growing apprehension.

  When he came to the inspection station the computer's synthesized German sounded slightly strange to him, until he realized the machine was not programmed to speak in his own Swiss dialect. He answered its questions as briefly as he could, knowing that the system did not have the voice print of Lars Fuchs in its memory, yet still worried that somehow it might. It didn't. He followed instructions and looked into the retinal scanner for the required five seconds, slowly counting them off in silence.

  The automated systems built into the archway directly in front of the inspector's booth scanned his one travel bag and his body without a problem. Fuchs had nothing with him or on him that would trigger an alarm. The human inspector sitting in the booth behind the automated machinery looked bored, his thin smile forced. Fuchs handed him his falsified identity chip and the inspector slipped it into his desktop.

  "Karl Manstein?"

  "Ja," Fuchs answered.

  The inspector asked, "Purpose of your visit?" in standard English; the booth's synthesized computer voice translated his words into German.

  "Vacation."

  For a heart-stopping moment the inspector studied his screen display, his eyes narrowing. Then he popped Fuchs's thumbnail-sized chip out of his computer and slid it over the countertop to him.

  "Welcome to Selene, Herr Manstein. Enjoy your vacation."

  "Thank you," Fuchs replied gratefully, scooping up the chip in one meaty hand and hurrying past the inspector, toward the electric-powered cart that would carry him into Selene.

  His first task, once he was safely in his suite at the Hotel Luna, would be to send innocuous-seeming messages to his three most trusted crew members, waiting at Ceres. "I have arrived at Selene, a
nd everything is fine." That was the code phrase that would tell them to head for Selene also. Fuchs intended to kill Humphries, and he knew he could not do it alone.

  ORE FREIGHTER SCRANTON

  Chick Egan was mildly surprised to find a ship approaching Scranton at high speed. The ore freighter was almost clear of the inner fringe of the Belt, heading toward Selene, carrying a full load of asteroidal metals under contract to Astro Corporation. Astro's people were busily auctioning off the metals on the commodities market at Selene, desperately hoping to get prices high enough to make a minimal profit.

  Sitting sideways in the pilot's seat, his legs dangling over the armrest, Egan had been talking with his partner, "Zep" Zepopoulous, about the advisability of getting a laser weapon for the old, slow Scranton.

  "Makes about as much sense as giving Santa Claus a six-shooter," Zep argued. He was a lean, wiry Greek with thick jet black hair and a moustache to match. "We're in the freight-hauling business, we're not fighters."

  Egan's strawberry-blond hair was shorn down to a military buzz cut. "Yeah, but all the other ships are puttin' on lasers. For self-defense."

  "This tub isn't worth defending," Zep replied, gesturing around the cramped, shabby cockpit with its scuffed bulkheads and worn-shiny seats. "Somebody wants what we're carrying, we just give it to them and let the insurance carrier worry about it."

  "HSS is going after Astro ships," Egan said. "And vice versa."

  "We're only under contract to Astro for this one flight. We could sign up with HSS next time out."

  "Sam Gunn's arming all his ships," Egan countered. "Astro, HSS, a lot of the independents, too."

  "Let 'em," said Zepopoulous. "The day I start carrying weapons is the day I quit this racket and go back to Naxos."

  "What's left of it."

  "The flooding's stabilized now, they say. I'll be a fisherman, like my father."

  "And starve like your father."

  That was when the radar pinged. Both men looked at the screen and saw a ship approaching at high speed.

  "Who the hell is that?" Zep asked. The display screen showed only blanks where a ship's name and ownership would normally appear.

  "Lars Fuchs?" Egan suggested.

  "What would he want a load of ores for? We're not an HSS ship, and we don't have any supplies he'd want to take."

  Feeling decidedly nervous, Egan turned to the communications unit. "This is Scranton. Independent inbound for Selene. Identify yourself, please."

  The answer was a laser bolt that punched a hole through the skin of the cockpit. Egan's last thought was that he wished he had armed Scranton so he could at least die fighting.

  George Ambrose listened to the reports in gloomy silence. The six other members of Ceres's governing council sitting around the oval conference table looked even bleaker.

  Eight ships destroyed in the past month. Warships being built at Selene and sent to the Belt by Astro and Humphries Space Systems.

  "The HSS base on Vesta has more than two dozen ships orbiting around it," said the council member responsible for relations with the two major corporations. She was a Valkyrie-sized woman with sandy hair and a lovely, almost delicate fine-boned face that looked out of place on her big, muscular body.

  "Everybody's carrying weapons," said the councilman sitting beside her.

  "It's damned dangerous out there," agreed the woman on the other side of the table.

  "What's worrying me," said the accountant, sitting at the table's end, "is that this fighting is preventing ships from delivering their ores to the buyers."

  The accountant was a red-faced, pop-eyed overweight man who usually wore a genial smile. Now he looked apprehensive, almost grim.

  "Our own economy," he went on, "is based on the business that the miners do. With that business slumping, we're going to be in an economic bind, and damned soon, too."

  "Worse than that," said the Valkyrie. "It's only a matter of time before one of the corporations—either Astro or HSS—tries to take over our habitat and make it a base of their own."

  "And whichever one takes Chrysalis," said the accountant, "the other one will try to take it from them."

  "Or destroy us altogether."

  Big George huffed out a heavy sigh. "We can't have any fighting here. They'll kill us all."

  All their faces turned to him. They didn't have to say a word; George knew the question they wanted answered. What can we do about it?

  "All right," he said. "I'm gonna send a message to Astro and Humphries. And to Selene, too." Silently he added, With a copy to Doug Stavenger.

  "A message?"

  "What are you going to say?"

  "I'm gonna tell them all that we're strictly neutral in this war they're fightin'," George replied. "We want no part of it. We'll keep on sellin' supplies and providin' R&R facilities for anybody who wants 'em, HSS, Astro, independents, anybody."

  The others glanced around the table at one another.

  George went on, "But we won't deal with warships. Not from anybody. Only mining ships, prospectors, logistics vessels and the like. We will not supply warships with so much as a toilet tissue."

  "A declaration of neutrality," said the accountant.

  "Do you think that will be enough?"

  "What else can we do?"

  "Arm the habitat. Be ready to fight anybody who tries to take us over."

  George shook his head ponderously. "This habitat is like an eggshell. We can't fight. It'd just get us all killed."

  "We could armor the habitat," the Valkyrie suggested. "Coat the outer hulls with powdered rock, like some of the warships do."

  "That'd just postpone the inevitable," George said. "A half-dozen ships could sit out there and pound us into rubble."

  "A declaration of neutrality," someone repeated.

  "Do you think it would work?"

  George spread his big hands. "Anybody got a better idea?"

  Silence fell over the conference room.

  George drafted his declaration over the next twenty-four hours, with the help of an assistant who had been a history major before coming out to the Belt. The council met again in emergency session, tore the draft to tatters and rewrote it extensively, then—sentence by sentence, almost—wrote a final draft that was quite close to George's original. Only after that did they agree to allow George to send the declaration to Pancho Lane at Astro, Martin Humphries of HSS, and the governing board of Selene. George added a copy for Douglas Stavenger, and then released the statement to the news media of the Earth/Moon region.

  For the next several days Big George Ambrose was a minor media attraction. Ceres's neutrality was the first realization for most of the people on battered old Earth that there was a war going on in the Belt: a silent, furtive war taking place far, far away in the dark and cold depths of the Asteroid Belt.

  For a few days the Asteroid War was a trendy topic on the news nets, even though no executive of Humphries Space Systems or Astro Corporation deigned to be interviewed or even offer a comment. Sam Gunn, the fast-talking independent entrepreneur, had a lot to say, but the media was accustomed to Gunn's frenetic pronouncements on the evildoings of the big corporations. Nobuhiko Yamagata agreed to a brief interview, mainly to express his regrets that lives were being lost out in the Belt.

  Then a major earthquake struck the California coast, with landslides that sent a pair of tsunamis racing across the Pacific to batter Hawaii and drown several Polynesian atolls. Japan braced for the worst, but the hydraulic buffers that Yamagata had built—and been ridiculed for—absorbed enough of the tsunamis' energy to spare the major Japanese cities from extensive destruction. The Asteroid War was pushed to a secondary position in the news nets' daily reporting. Within a week it was a minor story, largely because it was taking place far from Earth and had no direct impact on the Earthbound news net producers.

  George Ambrose, however, received a personal message from Douglas Stavenger. It was brief, but it was more than George had dared to hope
for.

  Seated at the desk in his comfortable home in Selene, Stavenger said simply, "George, I agree that Chrysalis could be endangered by the fighting in the Belt. Please let me know what I—or Selene—can do to help."

  COMMAND SHIP ANTARES

  Reid Gormley was a career soldier. He had served with the International Peacekeeping Force in Asia and Africa and had commanded the brilliant strike that had wiped out the paramilitary forces of the Latin American drug cartel. He was widely known in military circles as an able commander: a tough, demanding bantam cock who instilled a sense of pride and invincibility in his troops. He was also vain, cautious, and unwilling to move until he was certain he had an overwhelming superiority of force on his side.

  He had come out of retirement to accept a commission with Astro Corporation. Fighting in space was new to him, but then it was new to every commander that the big corporations were hiring. The only experienced space fighters were a handful of mercenaries and renegades like Lars Fuchs. Like most of the other experienced officers who were suddenly finding new careers for themselves, Gormley was certain that a well-motivated, well-trained and well-equipped force could beat mercenaries, who were fighting only for money. As for lone renegades, well, they would be rounded up and dealt with in due time.

  It took him nearly six months to bring his force up to the peak of efficiency that he demanded. Like himself, most of the men and women in this Astro Corporation task force were either retired military or younger types who had taken a leave of absence from their regular duties to take a crack at the better pay and more exciting duty offered by the Asteroid War.

  Gormley stressed to his troops that while the HSS people were mercenaries, fighting for nothing more than money, they themselves were serving in the best traditions of the military, going into battle to keep the Asteroid Belt free from the dictatorship of one corporation, fighting to save the miners and prospectors scattered through the Belt from virtual slavery. It never occurred to him that Humphries's mercenaries could say the same thing about him and his troops, with the same degree of truth.