THE SILENT WAR Page 22

  Many of the workers were Asians, Pancho saw.

  "Contract labor," Tsavo explained, his voice getting rougher with each word. "They have the experience and skills, and they are cheaper than training our own people."

  Deeper and deeper into the base they walked, down inclined ramps marked TEMPORARY ACCESS and through tunnels whose walls were still bare rock.

  Jeeps, Pancho thought, this place is huge. They're really building a city here, sure enough.

  She hoped that the minibeacon her communications people had planted under the skin of her left hip would be able to send its coded signal through the rock. Jake's put up a set of six of polar orbiting satellites to keep track of me, she reminded herself; there'd be one close enough to pick up my signal all the time. I'll be okay. They'll know exactly where I am.

  Yet for the first time in years she found herself thinking about Elly. Pancho had always felt safe with Elly tucked around her ankle. The gengineered krait had been her faithful bodyguard. Nobody messed with her once they realized she had a lethally poisonous snake to protect her. No matter that Elly's venom had been replaced with a strong sedative. Very few people had enough nerve to push things to the point where the snake would strike. Little Elly had been dead for more than ten years now, and Pancho had never worked up the resolve to get another such companion. Blubbery fool, she chided herself. Sentimental over a slithering snake, for cripes sake.

  She tugged at the asteroidal sapphire clipped to her left earlobe. Like the rest of her jewelry, Pancho's earrings held surprises, weapons to defend her, if need be. But damn, she thought, there's a miniature army down here. I'd never be able to fight my way through all these bozos.

  Sitting in the little wheeled chair in her office, just off the master bedroom of her home in Selene, Edith Elgin Stavenger used the three-second lag between Earth and Moon to catch up on the dossier of the woman she spoke with. For more than a week she had been chasing down executives in the news media on Earth, trying to stir their interest and support for her upcoming flight to Ceres.

  Edith's cozy office seemed to be split in two, and the head of the North American News Syndicate appeared to be sitting behind her massive, gleaming cherrywood desk, talking with Edith as if they were actually in the same room—except for that three-second lag. Edith had the woman's dossier up on the wallscreen to one side of her own petite, curved desk.

  "It's not a story, Edie," the media executive was saying. "There's no news interest in it."

  The executive's name was Hollie Underwood, known in the industry as Holy Underhand or, more often, Queen Hollie. Thanks to rejuvenation therapies, she looked no more than thirty: smooth skin, clear green eyes, perfectly coiffed auburn hair. Edith thought of The Picture of Dorian Gray and wondered how withered and scarred with evil her portrait might be. Her reaction to Edith's idea was typical of the news media's attitude.

  "There's no interest in it," Edith replied smoothly, "because no one's telling the story to the public."

  Then she waited three seconds, watching Underwood's three-dimensional image, wondering how much the woman's ruffled off-white blouse must have cost. Pure silk, she was certain.

  "Edie, dear, no one's telling the story because there's no story there. Who cares about a gaggle of mercenaries fighting each other all the way out there in the Asteroid Belt?"

  Edith held her temper. Very sweetly, she asked, "Does anyone care about the cost of electrical power?"

  Underwood's face went from mild exasperation to puzzled curiosity. At last she asked, "What's the price of electricity got to do with this?"

  Feeling nettled that an executive of Underwood's level didn't understand much of anything important, Edith replied patiently, "The greenhouse flooding knocked out more than half of the coastal power plants around the world, didn't it?"

  Without waiting for a reply, she went on, "Most of the loss in generating capacity is being taken up by solar power satellites, right? And where do you think the metals and minerals to build those satellites come from?"

  Before Underwood could reply, Edith added, "And the fuels for the fusion generators that the power companies are building come from Jupiter, you know. This war is driving up their prices, too."

  By the time she answered, Underwood was looking thoughtful. "You're saying that the fighting out in the Asteroid Belt is affecting the price of metals and minerals that those rock rats ship back to Earth. And the price of fusion fuels, as well."

  "And the price of those resources affects the ultimate price you flatlanders pay for electricity, yes." Edith grimaced inwardly at her use of the derogatory flatlanders, but Underwood seemed to pay it no attention.

  "So it costs us a few cents more per kilowatt hour," she said at last. "That's still not much of a story, is it."

  Edith sat back in her little desk chair. There's something going on here, she realized. Something circling around below the surface, like a shark on the hunt.

  She studied Underwood's face for a few silent moments. Then she asked, "How much advertising is Astro Corporation buying from you? Or is it Humphries?"

  Once she heard the question Underwood reddened. "What do you mean? What are you implying?"

  "The big corporations don't want you to go public about their war, do they? They're paying for this cover-up."

  "Cover-up?" Underwood snapped, once she heard Edith's accusation. "There isn't any cover-up!"

  "Isn't there?"

  Underwood looked furious. "This conversation is over!" Her image winked out, leaving Edith alone in her snug little office.

  She nodded to herself and smiled. That hit a nerve, all right. The big boys are paying off the news media to keep the war hushed up. That's what's going on.

  Then Edith's smile faded. Knowing the truth would be of little help in getting the story to the public.

  How to break through their wall of silence? Edith wished she knew.

  ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS

  Jake Wanamaker actually banged his fist against the wall. He stomped past the row of consoles in the communications center and punched the wall hard enough to dent the thin metal paneling.

  "She just waltzed in there all by herself and now you can't even make contact with her?"

  The communications technicians looked scared. Old as he was, Wanamaker was still a formidable figure, especially when he was radiating anger. For several heartbeats no one in the comm center said a word. Console screens blinked and beeped softly, but everyone's attention was focused on the big admiral.

  "Sir, we got good tracking data on her until she got to the Nairobi base."

  "Those minibeacons are supposed to be able to broadcast through solid rock," Wanamaker snarled. "We hung a half-dozen satellites in polar orbits, didn't we? Why aren't they picking up her signal?"

  "It must be the solar flare, sir," said another of the technicians. "It's screwing up communications."

  Glowering, Wanamaker said, "You people assured me that the frequency the system uses wouldn't be bothered by a flare."

  The chief comm tech, a cadaverous, sunken-eyed old computer geek, called across the room, "Their base must be shielded. Faraday cage, maybe. Wouldn't be too tough to do."

  "Great!" Wanamaker snapped. "She's in a potential enemy's camp and we can't even track her movements."

  "If she gets outside again the satellites'll pick up her signal," said the chief tech, hopefully.

  "If she gets outside again," Wanamaker muttered.

  "Not while the solar storm's in progress," said one of the younger techs, wide-eyed with worry. "Radiation level's too high. It'd be suicide."

  Rumors spread through a tightly knit community such as Selene like ripples widening across a pond. One comm tech complained to a fellow Astro employee about the tongue-lashing Wanamaker gave to everyone in the communications center. The Astro employee mentioned to her husband that Pancho Lane had disappeared down at the Astro base near the south pole. Her husband told his favorite bartender that Pancho Lane had gone missin
g. "Probably shacked up with some guy, if I know Pancho," he added, grinning.

  At that point the rumor bifurcated. One branch claimed that Pancho had run off with some guy from Nairobi Industries. The other solemnly insisted that she had been kidnapped, probably by Martin Humphries or some of his people.

  Within hours, before Wanamaker or anyone in the Astro security office could even begin to clamp down a lid on the story, Selene was buzzing with the rumor that Pancho was either off on a love tryst or kidnapped and probably dead.

  Nodon heard the story during his first hours of work as a maintenance technician in the big, echoing garage that housed the tractors and tour busses that went out onto the surface of Alphonsus's crater floor. He went through the motions of his new job and, as soon as his shift ended, hurried up into the "basement" to find Fuchs.

  Fuchs was not at the stacks of shelving where Nodon and the others had met him before. Nodon fidgeted nervously, not knowing whether he should start searching through the dimly lit walkways or wait where he was for Fuchs to return. A maintenance robot came trundling along the walkway, its red dome light blinking. Nodon froze, plastering his back against the storeroom shelves. The robot rolled past, squeaking slightly. The maintenance robot needs maintenance, Nodon thought.

  Half a minute behind the robot came Lars Fuchs, in his usual black pullover and slacks, and the usual dark scowl on his face.

  "Kidnapped?" Fuchs gasped when Nodon told him the tale.

  "Perhaps dead," the Mongol added.

  "Humphries did this?"

  To his credit, Nodon admitted, "I don't know. No one seems to know."

  "It couldn't be anybody else," Fuchs growled.

  Nodon agreed with a nod.

  "Down at the south pole, you say? They captured her down there?"

  "That is the story. Some say she has run off with a lover."

  "Pancho wouldn't do that. She wouldn't have to. If she wanted a lover she'd do it right here in Selene, where she's safe."

  Nodon said nothing.

  "It's got to be Humphries," Fuchs muttered, as much to himself as his companion. "He's probably having her taken to his mansion, down below."

  "Do you think so?"

  "Even if he hasn't, that's where he is. We've got to get in there. And quickly."

  Daniel Tsavo tried to hide his nervousness as he toured Pancho through the construction areas and finally down into the finished section of the Nairobi base, where he and the other corporate executives resided. It was blessedly quiet down at this lowest level; the constant battering noise of the twenty-four-hour-a-day construction was muffled by thick airtight hatches and acoustical insulation. As they walked along the carpeted corridor toward the executive dining room, Tsavo kept Pancho on his right, as he had done all through the brief tour, so that he could hear the microreceiver embedded in his left ear without being obvious about it.

  It troubled him that Nobuhiko Yamagata himself was speeding to the base on a high-g rocket from Japan. The interrogation team had already arrived, but their work was suspended until Yamagata arrived.

  Pancho, meanwhile, was trying to sort out in her mind everything she had seen in this brief tour of the unfinished base. It's enormous! she thought. They're not just building a phase-one facility here, they're putting up a whole city, all in one shot. This place'll be just as big as Selene.

  Tsavo tried hard not to hold his left hand up to his ear. He was waiting for news that Yamagata had arrived, waiting for his instructions on what to do with Pancho.

  "Pretty fancy setup you guys have for yourselves," Pancho teased as they walked along the corridor. Its walls were painted in soothing pastels. The noise of construction was far behind them. "Nice thick carpets on the floor and acoustic paneling on the walls."

  "Rank has its privileges," Tsavo replied, making himself smile back at her.

  "Guess so." Where are they getting the capital for all this, Pancho wondered. Nairobi Industries doesn't have this kind of financial muscle. Somebody's pouring a helluva lot of money into this. Humphries? Why would the Humper spend money on Nairobi? Why invest in a competitor? 'Specially when he's sinking so much into this goddamn war. I wouldn't be able to divert this much of Astro's funding; we'd go broke.

  "Actually," Tsavo said, scratching at his left ear, "all this was not as expensive as you might think. Most of it was manufactured at Selene."

  "Really?"

  "Truly."

  Pancho seemed impressed. "Y'know, back in the early days of Moonbase they thought seriously about putting grass down in all the corridors."

  "Grass?"

  "Yep. Life-support people said it'd help make oxygen, and the psychologists thought it'd make people happier 'bout having to live underground."

  "Did they ever do it?"

  "Naw. The accountants ran the numbers for how much electricity they'd need to provide light for the grass. And the maintenance people complained about the groundskeeping they'd have to do. That killed it."

  "No grass."

  "Except up in the Main Plaza, of course."

  Tsavo said, "We plan to sod our central plaza, too. And plant trees."

  "Uh-huh," said Pancho. But she was thinking, If Humphries isn't bankrolling Nairobi, who is? And why?

  The receiver in Tsavo's ear buzzed. "Mr. Yamagata is expected in two hours. There is to be no interrogation of Ms. Lane until after he has arrived. Proceed with dinner as originally planned."

  At that precise moment, Pancho asked, "Say, when's dinner? I haven't had anything to eat since breakfast."

  "Perfect timing," Tsavo murmured, stopping at a set of double doors. Using both hands, he pushed them open. Pancho saw a conference room that had been transformed into a dining room. The central table was set for eight, and there were six people standing around the sideboard at the far end of the oblong room, where drinks had been set up. Two of them were women, all of them dark-skinned Africans.

  Tsavo introduced Pancho to his Nairobi Industries colleagues, then excused himself to go to the next room for a moment, where the servers waited with a group of six Japanese men and women.

  "No drugs," Tsavo told their chief. "We'll have a normal dinner. We can sedate her later."

  TORCH SHIP ELSINORE

  Doug Stavenger rode with Edith all the way up to the torch ship, waiting in a tight orbit around the Moon. He went with her through Elsinore's airlock as the ship's captain personally escorted his passenger to her quarters, a comfortable little cabin halfway down the passageway that led to the bridge.

  Once the captain had left them alone and had slid the passageway door shut, Stavenger took his wife in his arms.

  "You don't have to do this, Edie," he said.

  "Yes I do," she replied. She was smiling, but her eyes were steady with firm resolve.

  "You could send someone else and have him report what he finds to you. You could stay here at Selene and produce the news show or documentary or whatever—"

  "Doug," she said, sliding her arms around his neck, "I love you, darling, but you have no idea of how the news business works."

  "I don't want you risking your neck out there."

  "But that's the only way to get the story!"

  "And there's a solar storm approaching, too," he said.

  "The ship's shielded, darling." She nuzzled his nose lightly, then said, "You'd better be getting back to Selene before the radiation starts building up."

  He frowned unhappily. "If something should happen to you..."

  "What a story it would make!" She smiled as she said it.

  "Be serious."

  Her smile faded, but only a little. "I'm being serious, Doug. The only way to break this conspiracy of silence is for a major news figure to go to Ceres and report on the situation firsthand. If Selene broadcasts my story it'll be picked up by independents on Earth. Then the Earth-side nets will have to cover it. They'll have no choice."

  "And if you get killed in the process?"

  "I won't," she insisted. "I'm not going
to go out into the Belt. I'll stay at Ceres, on the habitat the rock rats have built for themselves, where it's perfectly safe. That's one of the tricks of this business: Give the appearance of being on the front line, but stay at headquarters, where it's safe."

  Stavenger tightened his grip around her waist. "I really don't want you to go, Edie."

  "I know, dearest. But I have to."

  Eventually he gave up and released her. But all the way back to Selene on the little shuttle rocket, all the way back to his home in the underground city's third level, Doug Stavenger could not shake the feeling that he would never see his wife again. He told himself he was being a foolish idiot, overly protective, overly possessive, too. Yet the feeling would not leave him.

  Two ships left Selene, heading toward the Belt. Elsinore, carrying Edith Elgin, was going to the habitat Chrysalis, in orbit around the asteroid Ceres. Cromwell, an Astro Corporation freighter, was ostensibly going to pick up a load of ores that she would tote back to Selene.

  Both ships turned on their electromagnetic radiation shielding as soon as they broke orbit around the Moon. The vast and growing cloud of energetic ionizing radiation that had been spewed out by the solar flare soon engulfed them both. Aboard Elsinore, the ship's crew and her sole passenger watched the radiation count climb with some unavoidable trepidation. Aboard Cromwell, the crew counted on the radiation cloud to shield their approach to Vesta. Cromwell carried no human passengers, of course. Its cargo was a pair of missiles that carried heavily insulated warheads of nanomachines, the type commonly called gobblers.

  Unable to communicate with Cromwell, and equally unable to contact Pancho, Jake Wanamaker had nothing better to do but pace the communications center and glower at the technicians working the consoles. At last he thumped himself down at an empty console and pulled up Pancho's messages. Maybe there's something in here that can tell me what she thinks she's up to, he told himself, knowing it was just an excuse to engage in some busywork before he started smashing the furniture.