THE SILENT WAR Read online

So despite the purely perfunctory guards stationed at the double doors of the command center, armed with nothing more than sidearms, Wanamaker had little fear of being attacked here in Selene. He went through the doors and down the central corridor, heading for his own office to a chorus of "Good morning, Admiral" accompanied by military salutes. Wanamaker returned each salute scrupulously: good discipline began with mutual respect, he felt.

  Wanamaker's office was spartan. The battleship-gray metal furniture was strictly utilitarian. The only decorations on the walls were citations he had garnered over his years of service. The wallscreens were blank as his staff filed in and took their chairs along the scuffed old conference table that butted against his desk. Wanamaker had salvaged them both from his last sea command, an amphibious assault command vessel.

  He spent the morning outlining Pancho's idea of setting up a blockade against incoming HSS ore carriers.

  "Unmanned craft?" asked one of his junior officers.

  "Uncrewed," Wanamaker corrected, "remotely operated from here."

  One of the women officers asked, "Here in Selene? Won't that get Stavenger and the governing council riled up?"

  "Not if we don't commit any violent acts here in Selene," Wanamaker replied, smiling coldly. Then he added, "And especially if they don't know about it."

  "It won't be easy to build and launch the little robots without Stavenger's people finding out about it."

  "We can build them easily enough in Astro's factories up on the surface and launch them aboard Astro boosters. No need for Selene to get worked up over this."

  The younger officers glanced at each other up and down the conference table, while Wanamaker watched from behind his desk. They get the idea, he saw. I'm not asking for their opinions about the idea, I'm telling them that they've got to make it work.

  "Well," his engineering chief said, "we can build the little suckers easily enough. Nothing exotic about putting together a heavy laser with a communications system and some station-keeping gear."

  "Good," said Wanamaker.

  Gradually the rest of the staff warmed to the idea.

  At length he asked, "How long will it take?"

  "We could have the first ones ready to launch in a couple of weeks," said the engineer.

  Wanamaker silently doubled the estimate.

  "Wait," cautioned the intelligence officer, a plump Armenian with long, straight dark hair and darker eyes. "Each of these birds will need sensors to identify potential targets and aim the lasers."

  "No worries," said the Australian electronics officer. "We can do that in two shakes of a sheep's tail. Piece of cake."

  "Besides," pointed out the engineer, "the birds will be operated from here, with human brains in the loop."

  The intelligence officer looked dubious, but voiced no further objections.

  "All right, then," said Wanamaker at last. "Let's get to work on this. Pronto. Time is of the essence."

  That broke up the meeting. But as the staff officers were shuffling toward the door, Wanamaker called the intelligence officer back to his desk.

  "Sit down, Willie," he said, gesturing to the chair on the desk's left side. He knew she disliked to be called by her real name, Wilhelmina. The things parents do to their kids, Wanamaker thought.

  She sat, looking curious, almost worried.

  Wanamaker took a breath, then said, "We need a diversion."

  "Sir?"

  "Humphries has beat the hell out of us in the Belt, and it's going to be months before we can start fighting back."

  "But Jess said he'd have the first robots on station in two weeks," the intelligence officer countered.

  "Two weeks plus Murphy's Law," Wanamaker said.

  Her dark eyes lit with understanding. "If anything can go wrong, it will."

  "Especially in a wartime situation. I know the staff will push as hard as they can, but I don't expect to be able to hit back to HSS with these robot systems for at least a month, maybe more."

  "I see," she said.

  "Meanwhile, we need a diversion. Something to knock the HSS people off their feet a little, shake them up, make them realize we're not going to lay down and die."

  "Such as?"

  He grinned lopsidedly at her. "That's what I want you to figure out, kid."

  She did not smile back. "I'll do my best, sir."

  ASTEROID 73-241

  Levinson felt distinctly uneasy in the space suit. It was bad enough to have to fly out to this remote piece of rock in the middle of nowhere, carrying the heavily armored flask of nanomachines he had produced in the HSS lab at Selene. Now he had to actually go out of the ship like some superjock astronaut and supervise the crew he had brought with him.

  "Me?" he had asked, alarmed, when Vickie Ferrer had told him that Martin Humphries himself wanted Lev to personally supervise the experiment.

  "You," she had replied, silky smooth. "It's to your advantage to handle the job yourself. Why let someone else take the credit for it?"

  As he hung weightlessly between the slowly spinning torch ship and the lumpy dark asteroid, clipped to the tether that was anchored to the ship's airlock, Lev realized that Vickie had played him like a puppet. Her alluring smiles and promising cleavage, her smoky voice and tantalizing hints of what would be possible after he had succeeded with his nanomachines had brought him out here, to this dark and cold emptiness, face to face with a pitted, ugly chunk of rock the size of a football field.

  Well, he told himself, when I get back she'll be waiting for me. She said as much. I'll be a big success and she'll be so impressed she'll do whatever I want her to.

  Prodded by Ferrer's implicit promises, Levinson had rushed through the laboratory work. Producing nanomachines that were not damaged by ultraviolet light was no great feat; the trick was to keep them contained so they couldn't get loose and start eating up everything in sight. It was after he'd accomplished that that Ferrer had told him he must go out to the Belt and personally supervise the experiment.

  So here I am, he said to himself, shuddering inside the space suit. It's so absolutely empty out here! Despite his cerebral knowledge that the Asteroid Belt was mostly empty space, he found the dark silence unsettling. It's like being in a football stadium with only one seat occupied, he thought. Like being all alone in an empty city.

  There were the stars, of course, but they just made Levinson feel spookier. There were millions of them, countless myriads of them crowding the sky so much that the old friendly constellations he knew from Earth were blotted out, swamped in the multitudes. And they didn't twinkle, they just hung up there as if they were watching, solemn unblinking eyes staring down at him.

  "We're ready to unseal the bugs." The voice of one of his technicians grated in his earphones, startling Levinson out of his thoughts.

  "They're not bugs," he replied automatically. "They're nanomachines."

  "Yeah, right. We're ready to open the jug."

  Levinson pulled himself slowly along the tether to its other end, anchored in the solid rock of the little asteroid. His two technicians floated above the rock, able to flit back and forth on the minijet thruster units attached to their backpacks. Levinson, a novice at extravehicular activities, kept himself firmly clipped to the tether. He carried the "jug," a sealed bottle made of pure diamond, on the utility belt around the waist of his space suit.

  He planted his feet on the asteroid and, much to his consternation, immediately bounced off. In his earphones he heard one of his techs snicker softly.

  "Newton's laws work even out here," he said, to cover his embarrassment.

  He approached the rock more slowly and, after two more tries, finally got his boots to stay on the surface. He could see the puffs of dust where he first landed still hanging in the asteroid's minuscule gravity.

  The technicians had marked concentric fluorescent circles across the surface of the rock, like a glowing bull's-eye. Cameras back in the ship would record how quickly the nanomachines spread from the release p
oint, chewing up the rock as they went. Levinson went to the center of the circles, tugging on his tether, bobbing up and off the asteroid's surface with each step he took. He heard no giggling from his technicians this time. Probably they've turned their transmitters off, he thought.

  It was clumsy working in the space suit's gloves, even with the tiny servomotors on the backs to help him flex the fingers. Finally Levinson unsealed the bottle and placed it, open end down, on the exact center of the bull's-eye. Again, the light gravity worked against him. The bottle bobbed up from the surface as soon as he took his hand off it. Frowning, he pushed it down and held it for a moment, then carefully removed his hand. The bottle stayed put.

  Looking up, he saw that both his technicians were hovering well clear of the rock. Scared of the nanomachines, Levinson thought. Well, better to be safe than sorry. He grabbed the tether with both hands and hauled himself off the asteroid, then started his hand-over-hand return to the ship.

  The tether suddenly went slack, and for a fearful moment Levinson thought something had gone wrong. Then he saw that it was still fastened to the ship's airlock and remembered that the techs were supposed to set off an explosive charge that released the end of the tether attached to the asteroid. In the vacuum of space he couldn't hear the pop of the explosive bolt. It took a surprisingly tough effort to turn around, but once he did he saw the other end of the tether hanging limply in empty space.

  And the asteroid was vanishing! Levinson's eyes goggled at how fast the nanomachines were chewing up the asteroid, leaving a rising cloud of dust that grew so rapidly the solid rock itself was quickly obscured. It's like piranhas eating up a chunk of meat, he thought, recalling videos he had seen of the voracious fish setting a South American stream a-boil as they attacked their prey.

  "Start the spectrometer!" Levinson called excitedly as he resumed tugging his way back to the ship.

  In less than a minute he could see the sparkling dazzle of a laser beam playing over the expanding dust cloud.

  Puffing with exertion, he saw as he approached the airlock that its hatch was closed. His two assistants had jetted to the ship ahead of him, he realized.

  "What're you getting?" he asked into his helmet microphone.

  The technician running the spectrometer aboard the ship answered, "Iron, lead, platinum, silver—"

  "Pure elements or compounds?" Levinson demanded, watching the asteroid dissolve like a log being chewed up by a wood chipper.

  "Atomic species mostly. Some compounds that look pretty weird, but most of it is pure atomic species."

  The weird stuff must be the nanos, Levinson thought. He had programmed them to shut down after forty-eight hours. At this rate there wouldn't be anything left of the asteroid in forty-eight hours except a cloud of individual atoms.

  Wow! he thought. It works even better than I expected. Vickie's going to be impressed, all right.

  ADMIRAL WANAMAKER'S OFFICE

  The spare, austere office was empty except for Wanamaker himself and Wilhelmina Tashkajian, his intelligence officer. She was short, round, dark, and, according to the scuttlebutt that floated around the office, a pretty good amateur belly dancer. All Wanamaker knew for certain was that she had a fine, sharp mind, the kind that can analyze information and draw valid conclusions more quickly than anyone else on his staff. That was all he wanted to know about her.

  They sat on opposite sides of the conference table that extended from the admiral's desk. Like all of Wanamaker's officers, Tashkajian wore plain gray coveralls with her name and rank spelled out on a smart-chip badge clipped to the flap of her breast pocket. Wanamaker himself wore the same uniform.

  He looked up from the report on the display screen built into the table's top. "They're testing nanomachines?"

  She nodded, her dark eyes somber. "Humphries recruited the scientist that Pancho brought back here from Ceres. Snatched him right out from under our noses."

  Wanamaker grimaced. "She should have kept him on Astro's payroll."

  "Too late for that, sir."

  "And they're already in test phase?"

  Another nod. "From the information we've gathered, they went through the laboratory phase very quickly, and then sent this Dr. Levinson and a crew of technicians out to the Belt. Conclusion: They're testing nanomachines on an asteroid."

  "Does Pancho know this yet?"

  "She gets a copy of my reports automatically."

  "Any response from her?"

  "Not yet, sir. I just put out the report this morning. Not everyone reacts as fast as you." She smiled slightly, then added, "Sir."

  He allowed himself to smile back at her a little.

  "The real question," she said, "is whether HSS is developing nanomachines for processing ores out of the asteroids or as weapons."

  "Weapons?" Wanamaker's gray brows rose.

  "If they can chew up rocks, they can chew up spacecraft, buildings, even people."

  He sank back in the stiff metal chair. "Weapons," he muttered. "My god."

  "It's a possibility, isn't it?" she asked.

  "I suppose it is."

  Tashkajian waited a heartbeat, then said, "I've been thinking about your request for a diversion, sir."

  "Is this a change of subject?"

  "Not entirely, sir."

  Looking slightly puzzled, Wanamaker said, "Go ahead."

  "Suppose we attacked HSS's base at Vesta," she began.

  "Most of it's underground," said Wanamaker. "They're well dug in. And well defended."

  "Yes, sir, I understand. But they have certain facilities on the surface of the asteroid. Communications antennas. Launchpads. Airlocks to the interior. Even their defensive laser weapons. They're all up on the surface."

  "So?"

  "So we strew the surface with nanomachines that eat metals."

  Wanamaker's eyes flickered. She couldn't tell from his stony expression whether he was impressed or disgusted.

  She plunged on, "The nanomachines would destroy metal structures, even eat into the asteroid itself. It might not wipe out the base but it would certainly disrupt their operations. It would be the diversion you've asked for."

  He was silent for several moments. Then he asked, "And how do you get a ship close enough to Vesta to accomplish this raid? They'd blast the ship into molecules before it got close enough to be dangerous to them."

  "I think I've got that figured out, too, sir."

  He saw that she was deadly serious. She wouldn't bring this up unless she thought she had the entire scheme in hand, he realized.

  "Go ahead," he said.

  "We send the ship in when there's a solar flare."

  Wanamaker blinked. "Do you think..." His voice trailed off.

  "I've checked out the numbers, sir." With growing confidence she went on, "A category four solar flare emits a huge cloud of ionized particles. Scrambles communications on all frequencies, including radar! A ship could ride inside the cloud and get close enough to Vesta to release the nanomachines."

  Immediately, he countered, "Solar flare clouds don't block laser beams."

  "Yessir, I know. But laser sweeps aren't generally used for spotting spacecraft unless the radar scans have found a bogie. They use laser scans to identify an unknown radar blip."

  "Riding inside a radiation cloud is pretty damned hazardous."

  "Not if the ship is properly shielded, sir."

  He fell silent once again, thinking.

  "The radiation storm would drive all HSS personnel off the surface of Vesta. They'd all be deep underground, so our nanomachines would destroy their surface facilities without killing any of their personnel."

  Wanamaker tried to scowl and wound up almost smiling, instead. "A humane attack on the enemy."

  "A diversion that could cripple the HSS base on Vesta, at least temporarily, and check their domination of the Belt, sir."

  "If there's a big enough flare to give you the cloud you need," he cautioned.

  "That's what got me thinkin
g about this idea in the first place," she said, clearly excited. "We're in the middle of a solar maximum period. Plenty of sunspots and lots of flares."

  He nodded curtly. "Let me see the numbers."

  "Yes, sir!"

  HABITAT CHRYSALIS

  Victoria Ferrer felt distinctly uneasy in the rock rats' habitat, in orbit around the asteroid Ceres. Although she dressed as modestly as she could, she still felt that every move she made was being watched by men—and women—who focused on her the way a stalking leopard stares at its prey.

  The habitat itself was comfortable enough. The gravity was the same as the Moon's, or so close that she couldn't notice any difference. As a visitor Ferrer had a small but well-appointed compartment to herself, and the adjoining cabin to use as an office. There was a galley in the next segment of the structure, and even a passably decent restaurant on the other side of the wheel-shaped assemblage. With her expense account, she could afford to take most of her meals in the restaurant.

  Ferrer had expected the rock rats to be scruffy, feisty, hard-rock types. Prospectors and miners, existing at the edge of human civilization, independent individualists eking out their living in the vast dark emptiness of the Belt, surviving in a world of danger and loneliness. To her surprise, she found that most of the residents of Chrysalis were shopkeepers, accountants, technicians employed in the service industries. Even the actual miners and prospectors had technical educations. They operated complex equipment out in the Belt; they had to know how to keep a spacecraft functioning when the nearest supply or maintenance depot was millions of kilometers away.

  But they stared at her. Even in plain coveralls buttoned up to her chin, she felt their eyes on her. Fresh meat, she thought. A new face. A new body.

  Her mission at Ceres was twofold. She was recruiting more hands for the army of mercenaries that the war demanded out of the growing numbers of unemployed miners and prospectors. And she was waiting for the return of Levinson and his nanotech team, to see firsthand the results of their experiment on an actual asteroid.

  It had been pathetically easy to keep Levinson on a string. Every time they met he stared at her with hungry puppy eyes. If he comes back with a success he'll expect me to reward him, Ferrer thought. It won't be so easy to put him off then. But if he's successful I can let him down gently and maneuver him off to some other woman. God knows there are plenty here at Ceres who would be happy to get connected with a scientist who can take her back to Earth.