THE SILENT WAR Read online

  She tried to clear her mind of worries about Levinson and concentrate on the unemployed miner sitting on the other side of her desk. The clean-cut young man was trying his best not to ogle, but his eyes kept returning to the front of her shapeless turtleneck sweater. Momma and her damned genetic engineering, Ferrer thought. I should have brought sloppy old sweatshirts, or, better yet, a space suit.

  She kept their discussion strictly on business, without a hint of anything else. Humphries had sent her here to recruit crews for HSS ships and she had no interest in anything else.

  "I don't understand your reluctance," she said to the miner. "We're offering top salary and benefits."

  He looked a decent-enough fellow, Ferrer thought: freshly shaved and wearing well-pressed slacks and an open-necked shirt. His dossier, on her desktop screen, showed he had an engineering degree and had spent the past four years working as a miner under contract to Astro Corporation. He'd quit a month ago and hadn't found a new job yet.

  Fidgeting nervously in his chair, he answered, "Look, Ms. Ferrer, what good will all that salary and benefits do me when I'm dead?"

  She knew what he meant, but still she probed, "Why do you say that?"

  Making a sour face, the miner said, "You want to hire me as a crewman on one of your HSS ships, right? Everybody knows HSS and Astro are fighting it out in the Belt. People are being killed every day, just about. I'd rather bum around here on Chrysalis and wait for a real job to open up."

  "There are a lot of unemployed miners here," Ferrer said.

  "Yeah, I know. Some got laid off, like me. Some just quit, 'cause it's getting too blamed dangerous out in the Belt. I figure I'll just wait until you guys have settled your war. Once the shooting stops, I'll go back to work, I guess."

  "That could be a long wait," she pointed out.

  With a frowning nod, he replied, "I'd rather starve slowly than get killed suddenly."

  Ferrer admitted defeat. "Very well. If you change your mind, please contact us."

  Getting up from the chair in a rush, as if happy to be leaving, the miner said, "Don't hold your breath."

  Ferrer conducted two more interviews that afternoon with exactly the same results. Miners and prospectors were abandoning their jobs to get away from the fighting. Chrysalis was filling up with unemployed rock rats. Most of them had run through what little savings they had accumulated and were now depending for their living on the scanty largesse of Chrysalis's governing board. Hardly any of them accepted employment aboard HSS ships. Or Astro's, Ferrer found with some satisfaction. Of the fourteen men and women she had personally interviewed, only two had signed up, both of them women with babies to support. All the others had flatly refused her offers.

  I'd rather starve slowly than get killed suddenly. That was their attitude.

  Sitting alone in her office as the day waned, Ferrer sighed heavily. I'm going to have to report to Humphries, she told herself. He's not going to like what I have to tell him.

  Levinson was glad to be out of the space suit. In fact, he was whistling cheerily as he made his way from the airlock of the torch ship toward the compartment they had given him. In two days we'll be back at Ceres, and then Vickie and I ride a torch ship back to Selene. I'll bet we spend the whole journey shacked up together.

  "Shouldn't whistle aboard ship," said one of the technicians, coming up the passageway behind him. "It's considered bad luck."

  Levinson grinned at her. "That's an old superstition," he said.

  "No it's not. It dates back to sailing days, when orders were given by playing a whistle. So they didn't want anybody whistling and messing up the signaling system."

  "Doesn't apply here," Levinson said loftily.

  "Still, it's considered—"

  "EMERGENCY," the overhead speaker blared. "PRESSURE LOSS IN MAIN AIRLOCK COMPARTMENT."

  The blood froze in Levinson's veins. The airtight hatch up the passageway slammed shut. His knees went rubbery.

  "Don't piss yourself," the technician said, smirking at him. "It's probably something minor."

  "But the hatch. We're trapped here."

  "Naw. You can open the hatch manually and get to your quarters. Don't sweat it."

  At that instant the hatch swung open and two of the ship's crew pushed past them, heading for the airlock. They looked more irritated than frightened.

  Feeling marginally better, Levinson followed the tech through the hatch and toward his own compartment. Still, when the hatch automatically slammed shut again, he jumped like a startled rabbit.

  He was opening the accordion-pleated door to his compartment when the overhead speaker demanded, "DR. LEVINSON REPORT TO THE BRIDGE IMMEDIATELY."

  Levinson wasn't exactly certain where the bridge was, but he thought it was farther up the passageway that ran the length of the habitation module. With his pulse thumping nervously in his ears, he made his way past two more closed hatches and finally stepped into what was obviously the bridge. The ship's captain was standing with his back to the hatch, half bent over between the backs of two side-by-side chairs, both occupied by crew members. All three men were peering at readouts on the instrument panel.

  The hatch slammed behind him, making him flinch again. The captain, grim-faced, whirled on him.

  "It's those goddamned bugs of yours! They're eating up my ship!"

  Levinson knew it couldn't be true. Pea-brained rocket jocks! Anything goes wrong, they blame the nearest scientist.

  "The nanomachines are on the asteroid," he said, with great calm and dignity. "Or what's left of it. They couldn't possibly be aboard your ship."

  "The hell they're not!" roared the captain, jabbing an accusing finger at the displays on the instrument board. Levinson could see they were swathed in red.

  "They couldn't—"

  "They were in that dust cloud, weren't they?"

  "Well, yes, perhaps a few," he admitted.

  "And the loose end of your fucking tether was flapping around in the cloud, wasn't it?"

  Levinson started to reply, but his mouth went so dry he couldn't form any words.

  "You brought the mother-humping bugs aboard my ship, damn you!"

  "But... but..."

  "They're eating out the airlock compartment! Chewing up the metal of the hull, for chrissakes!" The captain advanced toward Levinson, hands clenched into fists, face splotched with red fury. "You've got to stop them!"

  "They'll stop themselves," said Levinson, backing away a step and bumping into the closed hatch. "I built a time limit into them. Once the time limit is reached they run out of power and shut themselves down."

  The captain sucked in a deep breath. His face returned almost to its normal color. "They'll stop?"

  "Yessir," Levinson said. "Automatically."

  "How soon?"

  Levinson swallowed and choked out, "Forty-eight hours."

  "Forty-eight hours?" the captain bellowed.

  Levinson nodded, cringing.

  The captain turned back toward the two crewmen seated at the instrument panel. "Contact Chrysalis. Report our situation to them."

  The crewman in the left-hand seat asked, "Anything else to tell them, sir?"

  The captain fumed in silence for a moment, then muttered, "Yeah. Read them your last will and testament. We're going to die here. All of us."

  Levinson wet his pants.

  LAST RITES

  Levinson had never been so terrified. He stumbled back to his compartment, slid the door shut after three trembling tries, then yanked his palmcomp out of his coveralls, tearing the pocket slightly, and called up the numbers he needed to calculate how long the torch ship would last.

  The tiny corner of his mind that still remained rational told him the calculation was meaningless. He had no firm idea of how fast the nanomachines were disassembling the ship, and only the haziest notion of how massive the ship was. You're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, he told himself. But he knew he had to do something, anything, to try to stave of
f the terror that was staring him in the face.

  We could make it to Ceres in less than forty-eight hours, he thought, if the captain pushes the engines to their max. If the nanomachines don't destroy the engines first. Okay, we get to Ceres, to the habitat Chrysalis. They won't let us in, though, because they'd be afraid of the nanos damaging them.

  But the machines will shut themselves down in forty-eight hours, Levinson reminded himself. Less than that, now; it was about two hours ago that we dispersed them on the asteroid.

  How fast are they eating up the ship? he asked himself. Maybe I can make some measurements, get at least a rough idea of their rate of progress. Then I could—

  He never finished the sentence. The curving bulkhead of his compartment, formed by the ship's hull, suddenly cracked open. Levinson watched in silent horror as a chunk of metal dissolved before his goggling eyes. The air rushed out of the compartment with such force that he fell to his knees. His lungs collapsed as he sank to the metal deck of the compartment, blood gushing from every pore. He was quite dead by the time his nanomachines began taking him apart, molecule by molecule.

  Martin Humphries was talking with his six-year-old son, Alex, in the family's estate in Connecticut.

  "Van cries all the time," Alex said, looking sad. "The doctor says he's real sick."

  "Yes, that's true," said Humphries, feeling nettled. He wanted to talk about other things than his stunted younger son.

  "Can I come to see you?" Alex asked, after the three-second lag between Earth and Moon.

  "Of course," Humphries replied. "As soon as your school year ends you can come up here for a week or so. You can take walks on the Moon's surface and learn how to play low-games."

  He watched his son's face, so like the pictures of himself at that age. The boy blossomed into a huge smile when he heard his father's words.

  "With you, Daddy?"

  "Sure, with me, or one of my staff. They can—"

  The amber light signaling an incoming call began blinking. Humphries had given orders that he was not to be disturbed except for cataclysms. He glared at the light, as if that would make it stop claiming his attention.

  "I've got to go now, Alex. I'll call you again in a day or so."

  He clicked off the connection, and never saw the hurt disappointment on his son's face.

  Whoever was calling had his private code. And the message was scrambled as well, he saw. Scowling with impatience, Humphries instructed the computer to open the message. Victoria Ferrer's features appeared in three dimensions in the hologram above his desk. She looked tired, depressed.

  "I'm on a torch ship on my way back to Selene," she said. "Still too far out for a two-way conversation, but I know you'll want to hear the bad news right away."

  He started to ask what she was talking about, then realized that she wouldn't hear his question for a good twenty minutes or more.

  "The nanomachine experiment backfired. The bugs got loose on the ship and totally destroyed it. Nothing left but a cloud of atoms. Everybody killed, including Levinson."

  She gave a few more details, then added, "Oh, by the way, the recruiting was pretty much a flop, too. Those rock rats are too smart to volunteer for cannon fodder."

  Her message ended.

  Humphries leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the wall screen that displayed a hologram of Jupiter's colorful swirling clouds.

  Completely destroyed the ship and killed everybody aboard, he repeated to himself. What a weapon those little bugs could make!

  ORE CARRIER STARLIGHT

  Starlight was an independent freighter. For years it had plied between Ceres and Selene, taking on cargoes of ore in the Belt and carrying them on a slow, curving ellipse to the waiting factories on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Its owners, a married couple from Murmansk, had kept strictly aloof from the big corporations, preferring to make a modest living out of carrying ores and avoiding entanglements. Their crew consisted of their two sons and daughters-in-law. On their last trip to Selene they had tarried a week longer than usual so that their first grandchild—a girl—could be born in the lunar city's hospital. Now, after a trip with the squalling new baby to the Belt, they were returning to Selene, happy to be away from the fighting that had claimed so many Astro and HSS ships.

  The Astro drone had no proper name, only a number designation: D-6. The D stood for "destroyer." It was an automated vessel, remotely controlled from Astro's offices in Selene. The controllers' assignment was to attack any HSS vessels approaching the Moon. The particular controller on duty that morning had a list of HSS ships in her computer, complete with their names, performance ratings, and construction specifications. She suspected that Starlight was a disguised version of a Humphries freighter and spent most of the morning scanning the vessel with radar and laser probes.

  Astro's command center was kept secret from Humphries's people, of course; it was also kept secret from the government of Selene, which insisted that no hostilities should take place in its jurisdiction. So the controller watched Starlight passively, without trying to open up a communications link with the freighter or even asking the International Astronautical Authority offices about the ship's registration and identity.

  To her credit, the Astro controller instructed D-6 to obtain close-up imagery of the approaching freighter. Unfortunately, the destroyer's programming was new and untried; the drone had been rushed into use too soon. The onboard computer misinterpreted the controller's order. Instead of a low-power laser scan, the destroyer hit Starlight with a full-intensity laser beam that sawed the vessel's habitation module neatly in half, killing everyone aboard.

  Pancho was heading for the Moon's south pole when the news of the Starlight fiasco reached her.

  She was flying in a rocket on a ballistic trajectory to the Astro power station set on the summit of the highest peak in the Malapert Mountains. Taller than Everest, Mt. Dickson's broad, saddle-shaped summit was always in sunlight, as were its neighboring peaks. Astro workers had covered its crest with power towers topped by photovoltaic cells. The electricity they generated was carried back to Selene by cryogenically cooled cables of lunar aluminum that ran across the rugged, crater-pocked highlands for nearly five thousand kilometers.

  For the few brief minutes of the rocket's arcing flight southward, the handful of passengers hung weightlessly against their seat restraint straps. To her surprise, Pancho actually felt a little queasy. You've been flying a desk too long, girl. She thought about how the future growth of the Moon would almost certainly be in the polar regions. Water deposits were there, she knew, and you could build power towers that were always in sunlight, so you got uninterrupted electricity, except for Earth eclipses, but that was only a few minutes out of the year. It was a mistake to build Selene near the equator, she thought.

  Back in those days, though, it started as a government operation. Moonbase. Some bean-counting sumbitch of a bureaucrat figured it'd be a couple of pennies cheaper in propellant costs to build near the equator than at either polar region. They picked Alphonsus because there were vents in the crater floor that outgassed methane now and then. Big lollapalooza deal! Water's what you need, and the ice deposits at the poles are where the water is. Even so, it isn't enough. We have to import water from the rock rats.

  As the rocket vehicle fired its retros in preparation for landing at the Astro base, Pancho caught a glimpse through her passenger window of the construction already underway at Shackleton Crater, slightly more than a hundred kilometers distant. Nairobi's found the money they needed, she told herself. She had followed their progress in the weekly reports her staff made, but seeing the actual construction sprawling across the floor of Shackleton impressed her more than written reports or imagery. Where's their money coming from? she asked herself. Her best investigators had not been able to find a satisfactory answer.

  She had brought one of the new nanomachine space suits with her, folded and packed in her travel bag. Stavenger had even supplied her with
a nanofabric helmet that could be blown up like a toy balloon. Pancho packed it but firmly decided that if she had to use the softsuit she'd find a regular bubble helmet to go with it.

  There was no need for a space suit. Once the ballistic rocket touched down, a flexible tunnel wormed from the base's main airlock to the ship's hatch. Pancho walked along its spongy floor to the airlock, where the director of the base was waiting for her, looking slightly nervous because he wasn't entirely sure why the company's CEO had suddenly decided to visit his domain.

  Pancho allowed him to tour her through the base, which looked to her a lot like most of the other lunar facilities she had seen. It was almost entirely underground; the work on the surface of maintaining the solar cells and building new ones was done by robotic machines tele-operated from the safety of the underground offices.

  "Of course, we're not as luxurious down here as Selene," the base director explained in a self-deprecating tone, "but we do have the basic necessities."

  With that, he ushered Pancho into a tight, low-ceilinged conference room that was crowded with his senior staff people, all of them anxious to meet the CEO and even more anxious to learn why she had come to see them. The conference table was set with sandwiches and drinks, with a scale model of the base sitting in the middle of the table.

  There weren't enough chairs for everyone, so Pancho remained standing, munched on a sandwich, sipped at a plastic container of fruit juice, and chatted amiably with the staff—none of whom dared to sit down while the CEO remained standing.

  At last she put her emptied juice container back on the table. As if on signal, all conversations stopped and everyone turned toward her.