THE SILENT WAR Page 19

  She grinned at them. "I guess you're wondering why I dropped in on y'all like this," Pancho said, reverting to her west Texas drawl to put them at their ease.

  "It's not every day that the chief of the corporation comes to see us," the base director replied. A few people tittered nervously.

  "Well," said Pancho, "to tell the truth, I'm curious 'bout what your new neighbors are up to. Any of you know how to get me invited over to the Nairobi complex?"

  SELENE NEWS MEDIA CENTER

  Despite its rather glitzy title, the news media center was little more than a set of standard-sized offices—most of them crammed with broadcasting equipment—and one cavernous studio large enough to shoot several videos at the same time.

  Edith Stavenger stood impatiently just inside the studio's big double doors, waiting while the camera crew finished its final take on a training vid for the new softsuits. A young woman who actually worked a tractor on the surface was serving as a model, showing how easy it was to pull the suit on and seal its front.

  Many years earlier Edith Stavenger had been Edie Elgin, a television news reporter in Texas, back in the days when the first human expedition to Mars was in training. She had come to the Moon as a reporter during the brief, almost bloodless lunar war of independence. She had married Douglas Stavenger and never returned to Earth. She still had the dynamic, youthful good looks of a cheerleader, golden blonde hair and a big smile full of strong bright teeth. She was still bright-eyed and vigorous, thanks to rejuvenation therapies that ranged from skin-cell regeneration to hormone enhancement. Some thought that she had taken nanomachines into her body, like her husband, but Edith found no need for that; cellular biochemistry was her fountain of youth.

  She had served as news director for Selene for a while but, at her husband's prodding, semi-retired to a consultant's position. Doug Stavenger wanted no dynasties in Selene's political or social structure and Edith agreed with him, almost completely. She clung to her consultant's position, even though she barely ever tried to interfere with the operation of the news media in Selene.

  But now she had a reason to get involved, and she waited with growing impatience for the head of the news department to finish the scene he was personally directing.

  The young model took off her fishbowl helmet and collapsed the transparent inflatable fabric in her hands. Then she unsealed her soft-suit, peeled it off her arms and wriggled it past her hips. She'd be kind of sexy, Elgin thought, if she weren't wearing those coveralls.

  At last the scene was finished, the crew clicked off their handheld cameras, and the news director turned and headed for the door.

  "Edie!" he exclaimed. "I didn't know you'd come up here."

  "We've got to talk, Andy."

  The news director's name was Achmed Mohammed Wajir, and although he traced his family roots back to the Congo, he had been born in Syria and raised all over the Middle East. His childhood had been the gypsy existence of a diplomat's son: never in one city for more than two years at a time. His father sent him to Princeton for an education in the classics, but young Achmed had fallen in love with journalism instead. He went to New York and climbed through the rough-and-tumble world of the news media until a terrorist bomb shattered his legs. He came to Selene where he could accept nanotherapies that rebuilt his legs, but he could never return to Earth while he carried nanomachines inside him. Wajir soon decided he didn't care. The Moon's one-sixth g made his recovery easier, and at Selene the competition in the news business was even gentler than the gravity.

  As they pushed through the studio's double doors and out into the corridor, Wajir began, "If it's about this Starlight accident—"

  "Accident?" Elgin snapped. "It's a tragedy. Seven innocent people killed, one of them a baby."

  "We played the story, Edie. Gave it full coverage."

  "For a day."

  Wajir had once been slim as a long-distance runner, but years behind a desk—or a restaurant table—had thickened his middle. Still, he was several centimeters taller than Elgin and now he drew himself up to his full height.

  "Edie," he said, "we're in the news business, and Starlight is old news. Unless you want to do some sob-sister mush. But even there, there's no relatives left to cry on camera for you. No funeral. The bodies have drifted to god knows where by now."

  Edith's normal cheerful smile was long gone. She was dead serious as they walked along the corridor past glass-walled editing and recording studios.

  "It's not just this one terrible tragedy, Andy," she said. "There's a war going on and we're not covering it. There's hardly a word about it anywhere in the media."

  "What do you expect? Nobody's interested in a war between two corporations."

  "Nobody's interested because we're not giving them the news they need to get interested!"

  They had reached Wajir's office. He opened the door and gestured her inside. "No sense us fighting out in the hallway where everybody can hear us," he said.

  Edith walked in and took one of the big upholstered chairs in front of his wide, expansive desk of bioengineered teak. Instead of going to his swivel chair, Wajir perched on the edge of his desk, close enough to Edith to loom over her.

  "We've been over this before, Edie. The news nets Earthside aren't interested in the war. It's all the way to hell out in the Asteroid Belt and it's being fought by mercenaries and you know who the hell cares? Nobody. Nobody on Earth gives a damn about it."

  "But we should make them care about it," she insisted.

  "How?" he cried. "What do we have to do to get them interested? Tell me and I'll do it."

  Edith started to snap out a reply, but bit it back. She looked up at Wajir, who was leaning over her, his ebony face twisted into a frown. He's been a friend for a long time, she told herself. Don't turn him into an enemy.

  "Andy," she said softly, "this disaster of the Starlight is only the tip of the iceberg. The war is spreading out of the Belt. It's coming here, whether we like it or not."

  "Good. Then we can cover it."

  She felt her jaw drop with surprise, her brows hike up.

  "I'm not being cynical," he quickly explained. "We can't get news coverage from the Belt."

  "If it's the expense, maybe I could—"

  Shaking his head vigorously, Wajir said, "It's not the money. The Belt's controlled by the corporations. Astro and HSS have it sewn up between them."

  "There are independents."

  "Yeah, but the war's between Astro and HSS and neither one of them wants news reporters snooping around. They won't talk to us here and they won't ferry us out to the Belt."

  "Then I'll go," Edith heard herself say.

  Wajir looked genuinely shocked. "You?"

  "I used to be a reporter, back in the Stone Age," she said, smiling for the first time.

  "They won't take you, Edie."

  "I'll fly out on an independent ship," she said lightly. "I'll go to Chrysalis and interview the rock rats there."

  He pursed his lips, rubbed at his nose, looked up at the ceiling. "The big boys won't like it."

  "You mean the big corporations?"

  Wajir nodded.

  "I don't really care whether they like it or not. I'll go out on an independent ship. Maybe Sam Gunn will give me a ride on one of his vessels."

  "If he's got any left," Wajir muttered. "This war is bankrupting him."

  "Again? He's always going bankrupt."

  "Seriously, Edie," he said, "this could be dangerous."

  "Nobody's going to hurt Douglas Stavenger's wife. There are some advantages to being married to a powerful man."

  "Maybe," Wajir admitted. "Maybe. But I don't like this. I think you're making a mistake."

  Damned if it isn't the same guy who came to see me in my office, Pancho thought as she looked at the holographic image of the handsome Nairobi executive. She was in the office of the Astro base's director, which he had lent her for the duration of her visit to the south polar facility. Leaning back in the creak
ing, stiffly unfamiliar chair, Pancho saw the man's name spelled out beneath his smiling, pleased image: Daniel Jomo Tsavo.

  "Ms. Lane," he said, looking pleasantly surprised, "what an unexpected pleasure."

  He was just as good-looking as she remembered him, but now instead of wearing a conservative business suit he was in well-worn coveralls, with the edge of a palmcomp peeping out from his breast pocket. He gets his hands dirty, Pancho thought, liking him all the more for it.

  "You're the head of the Nairobi base?" Pancho asked him.

  His smile turned brighter. "After my visit with you, my superiors assigned me to managing the construction of our facilities here."

  "I didn't know," said Pancho.

  "I suppose they thought it was cheaper to keep me here than fly me back home," he said, self-deprecatingly.

  "So you've been down here at the south pole all this time."

  "Yes, that's true. I had no idea you had come to the Mountains of Eternal Light," Tsavo said.

  "Came down to check out how my people are doing here," she lied easily, "and thought maybe I could take a peek at how you're getting along."

  "By all means! It would be an honor to have you visit our humble facility, Ms. Lane."

  She arched a brow at him. "Don't you think you can call me Pancho by now?"

  He chuckled and looked away from her, seemingly embarrassed. 'Yes, I suppose so ... Pancho."

  "Good! When can I come over, Daniel?"

  For a moment he looked almost alarmed, but he quickly recovered. "Urn, our facilities are not very luxurious, Pancho. We weren't expecting illustrious visitors for some time, you see, and—"

  "Can it, Danny boy! I can sleep on nails, if I have to. When can I come over?"

  "Give me a day to tidy up a bit. Twenty-four hours. I'll send a hopper for you."

  "Great," said Pancho, recognizing that twenty-four hours would give him time to check with whoever his bosses were and decide how to handle this unexpected visit.

  "By the way," she added, "are you folks still interested in a strategic partnership with Astro Corporation?"

  Now his face went almost totally blank. Poker-playing time, Pancho realized.

  "Yes," he said at last. "Of course. Although, you realize, with this war going on, the financial situation has changed a good deal."

  "Tell me about it!"

  He smiled again.

  "Okay, then, we can talk about it when I get to your base."

  "Fine," said Daniel Jomo Tsavo.

  DATA BANK: SOLAR FLARE

  The minor star that humans call the Sun is a seething, restless million-kilometer-wide thermonuclear reactor. Deep in its core, where the temperature exceeds thirty million degrees, intact atoms cannot exist. They are totally ionized, their electrons stripped from their nuclei. Under those immense temperatures and pressures hydrogen nuclei—bare protons—are forced together to create nuclei of helium. This process of fusion releases particles of electromagnetic energy called photons, which make their tortuous way through half a million kilometers of incredibly dense ionized gas, called plasma, toward the Sun's shining surface.

  Furiously boiling, gigantic bubbles of plasma rise and sink again, cooling and reheating, in an endless cycle of convection. Immense magnetic fields play through the plasma, warping it, shredding it into slender glowing filaments longer than the distance between the Earth and its Moon. Vast arches of million-degree plasma form above the solar surface, expanding, hurling themselves into space or pouring back down into the Sun in titanic cascades.

  Over cycles of roughly eleven years the Sun's violence waxes and wanes. During periods of maximum solar activity the Sun's shining face is blotched with sunspots, slightly cooler regions that look dark compared to the surrounding chromosphere. Solar flares erupt, sudden bursts of energy that can release in a few seconds the equivalent of a hundred million billion tons of exploding TNT: more energy than the entire human race consumes in fifty thousand years.

  The electromagnetic radiation from such a flare—visible light, radio waves, ultraviolet and X-rays—reaches the Earth's vicinity in about eight minutes. This is the warning of danger to come. Close behind, a few minutes or a few hours, comes the first wave of extremely energetic protons and electrons, traveling at velocities close to the speed of light.

  The energy in these particles is measured in electron volts. One electron volt is a minuscule bit of energy: It would take five million electron volts to light a fifty-watt lamp. But protons with energies of forty to fifty million electron volts can easily penetrate a quarter-inch of lead, and particles from solar flares with energies of more than fifteen thousand billion electron volts have reached the Earth.

  Yet the most violent effects of the solar flare are still to come.

  The flare has ejected a gigantic puff of very energetic plasma into interplanetary space. The cloud expands as it moves outward from the Sun, soon growing to dimensions larger than the Earth. When such a cloud hits the Earth's magnetosphere it rattles the entire geomagnetic field, causing a magnetic storm.

  The auroras at Earth's north and south poles flare dramatically, and the "northern lights" (and southern) are seen far south (and north) of their usual haunts. The ionosphere—the belt of ionized particles some eighty kilometers above Earth's surface—runs amok, making a shambles of long-range radio transmissions that are normally reflected off its ionized layers.

  On the Moon and even out in the Asteroid Belt all surface activity is halted when a solar flare bathes the region in lethal radiation. All spacecraft that operate beyond the Moon carry protective electromagnetic shielding to divert the energetic particles of the flare's cloud. Otherwise the people in those spacecraft would swiftly die, killed by the invisible bullets of ionizing radiation.

  Within a few days the deadly cloud wafts away, dissipates in interplanetary space. Earth's ionosphere settles down. The auroras stop flaring. Space-suited workers can return to the surface of the Moon and the asteroids. The solar system returns to normal. Until the next solar flare.

  WEATHER FORECAST

  Jersey Zorach was a dour, dark, stolid astrophysicist who studied the weather in space. Despite his being a third-generation American, born and raised just outside Chicago, he had never outgrown his Latvian heritage of being burdened with a sense of impending doom.

  He sat in his messy little cubbyhole of an office, a squat, untidy man built rather like a fireplug, with a thick thatch of unruly prematurely gray hair flopping down over his forehead, surrounded by beeping display screens, stacks of books, reports, video chips and the scattered remains of many meals he had eaten at his desk.

  Since interplanetary space is a nearly perfect vacuum, most people smiled or even laughed when Zorach told them his profession, waiting for a punch line that never came. There was no rain or snow in space, true enough. But Zorach knew there was a wind of ghostly microscopic particles blowing fitfully from the Sun, a solar wind that sometimes reached hurricane velocities and more. There was a constant drizzle of cosmic particles sleeting in from the distant stars as well.

  And there were clouds, sometimes. Invisible but quite deadly clouds.

  For years he had worked to make precise predictions of solar flares. He studied the Sun until his eyes burned from staring at its seething, roiling image. He made mountains of statistical analyses, trying to learn how to forecast solar flares by matching existing data on earlier flares and making "backcasts" of them. He spun out holographic maps of the interplanetary magnetic field, knowing that those invisible threads of energy steered the radiation clouds that were thrown out by solar flares.

  Nothing worked. His predictions were estimates at best. Everyone praised him and the results he was obtaining, but Zorach knew he had yet to predict a single flare. Not one, in all the years he had been working on them.

  So he wasn't surprised when one of the display screens in his cluttered office suddenly pinged. Turning to it, he saw nothing unusual to the unaided eye. But the alphanumerics strung
along the bottom of the screen told him clearly that a new solar flare had just erupted.

  A big one, he saw. Big and nasty. He knew the automated system was already sending warnings to every human habitat and outpost from Selene to the colony in orbit around distant Saturn. But he pecked at his own phone and called Selene's safety office to make certain they started bringing everybody in from the surface. It was a point of honor with him. If I can't predict the bloody storms, he said to himself, at least I can make certain no one is killed by them.

  Deep below the Moon's surface in his private grotto, Martin Humphries had no worries about solar flares or the radiation clouds that accompanied them.

  He was ambling slowly through the colorful garden in the patio outside the elaborately carved front door of his mansion, with Victoria Ferrer at his side. The heady aroma of solid beds of roses and peonies filled the air, and he felt victory was close enough almost to touch.

  "We're winning," Humphries said happily. "We've got Astro on the run."

  Ferrer, walking slowly alongside him, nodded her agreement. But she warned, "This latest move of Astro's could cut off the ore shipments coming in from the Belt."

  Humphries disagreed with a wave of his hand in the air. "Drones attacking our automated freighters? I'm not worried about that."

  "You should be. This could be serious."

  "Don't be stupid," Humphries sneered. "This fiasco with that Starlight vessel has brought Pancho's little scheme out into the open."

  "But they could strangle your profits if—"

  "I'm going to get rid of Astro's drones at one stroke," Humphries said confidently.

  Ferrer looked at him questioningly.

  "Set up a meeting for me with Doug Stavenger."

  "Stavenger?"

  "Uh-huh. Once Stavenger has his nose rubbed into the fact that Astro's controlling those birds from inside Selene, he'll close down their operation."

  "He will?"