THE SILENT WAR Read online

  Nobuhiko felt sorry for Daniel Tsavo. The man sat in a little folding chair in the base's infirmary, hunched almost into a fetal position, his fists balled up on his lap, his unseeing eyes aimed at the floor. It must be terrible to be blind, Nobu thought, even if it's only temporary.

  A pair of doctors and three nurses were finishing their ministrations, taping a bandage across Tsavo's eyes while the man kept up a low angry mumble about what Pancho had done to him.

  Keeping his face impassive as he listened to Tsavo's muttered story, Nobu couldn't help feeling some admiration for Pancho. She walked into the lion's den knowingly, he realized. She came here to learn what Nairobi is doing. I wonder if she understands now that Nairobi is a tool of Yamagata Corporation? And if she does, what should I do about it?

  I should call my father, Nobuhiko thought. But not here. Not now. Not in front of these aliens. Wait. Have patience. You've come all the way to the Moon, be patient enough to wait until they capture Pancho. Then we'll find out how much she knows. Once we determine that, it will be time to decide what to do with her.

  Pancho was thinking of Yamagata as she toted the laser from the back of the minitractor to the base of the dome's curving metal wall. This topmost level of the base was quieter than the lower levels. Construction here was nearly complete, except for small groups scattered across the dome's floor, painting and setting up partitions. There were guards at all the airlocks, though, and more guards stationed along the lockers where space suits were stored.

  She kept low and stayed behind the tractor, hoping that anyone searching for her up at this level would see nothing more than a tractor parked near an empty section of the wall. Until the laser starts flashing sparks of molten metal, and by then it'll be too late to stop me. I hope.

  Why is Yamagata backing Nairobi? she asked herself as she plugged the power cable into the tractor's thermionic generator. Nobuhiko told me Yamagata's not involved in space operations, they're concentrating all their efforts on Earth. Yeah, sure. What was it Dan Randolph used to say: "And rain makes applesauce." Nobu was lying through his teeth at me. Sumbitch is using Nairobi to get established on the Moon. But why?

  It wasn't until she had the laser ready to go and was pulling the soft-suit out of her travel bag that the answer hit Pancho. Yamagata's getting ready to take over the Belt! They're letting Astro and Humphries slaughter each other and they'll step over the bloody corpses and take control of everything! They're even helping us to fight this damned stupid war!

  Suddenly Pancho felt angry. At herself. I should've seen this, she fumed silently. If I had half the smarts god gave a warty toad I would have figured this out months ago. Damn! Double damn it all to hell and back! I've been just as blind as I made those people downstairs.

  Okay, she told herself. So you've been outsmarted. Just don't go and kill yourself. Check out this suit carefully.

  The softsuit was easy to put on. You just stepped into it the same way you stepped into a pair of coveralls, put your arms through the sleeves, and sealed up the front like it was Velcro. The nanomachines are activated by the body's heat, she knew. Wriggling her fingers inside the skin-thin gloves, she wondered all over again how the virus-sized nanobugs could keep her safe from the vacuum of space without stiffening up the way normal gloves and fabric suits did.

  She had never worn a nanotech helmet before. It hung limply in her gloved hands, like an empty plastic sack. Reading the illustrated instructions off her palmcomp, Pancho blew it up like a kid's balloon. It puffed out to a rigid fishbowl shape. It felt a little spongy to her, but Pancho pulled the helmet over her head and sealed it to the suit's collar by running two fingers along the seam. Same as sealing a freezer bag, she thought.

  No life-support pack; only a slim green cylinder of oxygen, good for an hour. Or so the instructions said.

  Okay, she told herself. You got one hour.

  It was difficult for the Nairobi security woman to understand what the nearly hysterical Japanese woman was saying. She kept pawing at her eyes and sobbing uncontrollably. The two African guards, both men, were still sprawled on the concrete floor, unconscious.

  She called her boss on her handheld and reported her finding: one tractor driver and two guards, all three of them incapacitated, blinded.

  "Where's the tractor?" Her boss's face, even in the handheld's minute screen, scowled implacably at her.

  "Not here," she replied.

  The boss almost smiled. "Good. All tractors have radio beacons. Get the number of the tractor out of the driver, then we can track its beacon and find out where the fugitive is."

  "Assuming the fugitive is with the tractor," she said, before thinking.

  His scowl deepened. "Yes, assuming that," he growled.

  It wasn't wise to second-guess the boss, she remembered too late.

  Pancho hesitated as she held the laser's cutting head next to the curving metal wall. I cut a hole and the air whooshes out. None of the people up here are in suits. They could get killed.

  Then she shook her head. This dome's too big for that. The air starts leaking out, they'll pop some emergency sheets that'll get carried to the hole and plug it up long enough for them to get a repair crew to fix it. Nobody's going to get hurt except you, she said to herself, if you don't get your butt in gear.

  She thumbed the laser's control switch. Its infrared beam was invisible, but a thin spot of cherry-red instantly began glowing on the metal wall. Holding the laser head in both her gloved hands like an old-fashioned power drill, Pancho slowly lifted it in an arc-like shape. She felt nothing inside the softsuit, but noticed that dust was swirling along the floor and disappearing into the thin, red-hot cut. Punched through, she thought. Nothing but vacuum outside.

  The wall was thick, and the work went slowly, but finally Pancho cut a hole big enough for her to crawl through. Dust and scraps of litter were rushing through it now. But as she turned off the laser and ducked the hole, she saw there was another wall beyond it. Drat-damn it! Meteor shield.

  It was a flimsy wall of honeycomb metal set up outside the actual dome structure to absorb the constant hail of micrometers that rained down on the Moon's surface. Grumbling to herself, Pancho took up the laser again and started cutting once more. This one'll go a lot faster, she told herself.

  She heard a voice bellowing in Japanese, very close, but ignored it, sawing frantically with the laser to cut through the meteor shield and get outside.

  "You there!" a man's voice yelled in English. "Stop that or I'll shoot!"

  ORE CARRIER CROMWELL

  Despite his outward show of confidence as he sat in the command chair on the bridge, Cromwell's skipper felt decidedly nervous as the creaking old ore ship cruised toward Vesta inside the radiation cloud. As surreptitiously as he could, he kept an eye on the console that monitored the radiation levels inside and outside his ship. A glaring red light showed that the sensors outside were reporting lethally high radiation, enough to kill a man in minutes. Next to that baleful red glow on the control panel a string of peaceful pale green lights reported that radiation levels inside the ship were close to normal.

  Good enough, the captain said to himself. So far. We still have a long way to go.

  He had worked out with the special weapons tech how close they would have to be to Vesta before releasing the twin missiles that contained the nanomachines. They had developed three possible scenarios. The first one was the basic plan of attack, the flight path they would follow if everything went as planned and they were not detected by Humphries's people. That was the trajectory they were following now, sneaking along inside the radiation cloud until they reached the predetermined release point.

  If they were detected on their way in to Vesta, or if the ship developed some critical malfunction such as a breakdown of its radiation shielding (a possibility that made the skipper shudder) then they would release the missiles early and hope that they would not be seen or intercepted by Vesta's defense systems. The skipper and the weapons te
ch had worked out a release point for that contingency. It was only six hours from where they now were.

  Their third option was to call off the attack altogether. That decision would be entirely—and solely—up to the captain. Only a major disaster would justify abandoning the attack, such as a serious malfunction of the ship's systems or an interception by HSS vessels.

  Cruising blind and deaf inside the radiation cloud, watching the sensor readings on the control panel, the skipper thought that of the three options before him he much preferred number two. Let's get to the early release point, fire the damned missiles at Vesta, and get the hell out of here before something goes wrong.

  He got up from the command chair. All four of his crew turned from their consoles toward him.

  "I'm going to catch some zees," he said gruffly. "You take your normal relief, one at a time. Ms. Yamaguchi, you have the con. Wake me in five hours."

  "Yes, sir. Five hours."

  The captain ducked through the hatch. His quarters were immediately aft of the bridge. Five hours, he thought. I'll make my decision after a good nap, when my mind is fresh.

  He knew what he wanted that decision to be.

  HUMPHRIES MANSION

  In his basement office, Humphries's security chief watched the screens on the wall to one side of his desk with growing dismay. Four guys are holding off two dozen of my people. The dumb bozos are just sitting there like a bunch of petrified chipmunks. And now the back staircase is on fire. Humphries is gonna fry my ass for this.

  Angrily he punched the keyboard on his desk. "What the hell are you punks doing, waiting for hot dogs so you can have a fuckin' barbecue?"

  He had only a voice link with his team upstairs, no video. "I got six people wounded here."

  "You got a dozen and a half untouched! Go get the intruders!"

  "Why should we rush 'em and take more casualties? They're not goin' anywhere. We can wait 'em out."

  "While the fuckin' house burns down?" the chief yelled.

  "Then we'll burn 'em out!"

  The chief thought it over swiftly. Humphries is sealed into his master suite. They can't get to him. The fire's triggered the automatic alarms. That upstairs hallway is closed off by airtight doors. Windows are already sealed. Okay. We'll let the fire do the job.

  It was getting smoky in the upstairs hall. Leaning his back against the overturned table Fuchs peered down the hallway and saw flames licking at the carpet, spreading toward them.

  "We must get out," Amarjagal repeated.

  The flames reached the drapes on the farthest window. They began smoldering.

  Coughing, Sanja added, "It is useless to die here, Captain."

  Fuchs wanted to pound his fists on the floor. Humphries was a few meters away, cowering behind his protective cermet barrier. The coward! Fuchs raged. The sniveling coward. But he's smarter than I am. He's prepared for this attack, while I've led my people into a stupid assault that will gain us nothing even if we live through it. He pictured Humphries's smirking face and felt the rage rising inside him even hotter than the flames creeping toward them.

  "THE ENTIRE HALLWAY AREA IS SEALED OFF," the loudspeaker voice declared. "THE FIRE'S GOING TO SUCK ALL THE OXYGEN OUT OF YOUR AIR. YOU HAVE THREE CHOICES: SUFFOCATE, ROAST, OR SURRENDER."

  Sitting cross-legged on his oversized bed, Humphries yelled at the wallscreen image of his security chief, "You're letting them burn up the second-floor hallway? Do you have any idea of the value of the artwork on those walls? The furniture alone is worth more than your salary!"

  The security chief looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Sir, it's the only way to get them. They've wounded six of my people already. No sense getting more of them hurt."

  "That's what I pay them for!" Humphries raged. "To protect me! To kill that sonofabitch Fuchs! Not to burn my house down!"

  Ferrer was sitting on an upholstered chair on the far side of the spacious room, her robe demurely pulled down below her knees.

  The security chief was saying, "You're perfectly safe inside your suite, Mr. Humphries. The walls are concrete and your door is fireproof reinforced cermet."

  "And my hallway's going up in flames!"

  "They started the fire, sir, my people didn't. And now they either surrender or the fire kills them."

  "While your people sit on their asses."

  Stiffly, the security chief replied, "Yessir, while my people keep the rest of the house secure and wait for the intruders to give themselves up."

  Humphries stared at the chief's image for a long moment, panting with frustrated rage. Then he snarled, "Don't look for a bonus at Christmas."

  "We're trapped here," Amarjagal said, still as unemotional as a wood carving.

  Fuchs saw the flames licking up the window draperies, heard them hissing, edging along the carpeting toward them. But the smoke was no worse than it had been before: annoying, but not suffocating.

  "Where's the smoke going?" he muttered.

  "Captain, we must do something," said Sanja, his voice tense. "We can't stay here much longer."

  Fuchs scrambled to his feet and took a few steps along the hall. He saw the smoke curling up from the blazing drapes and streaming across the ceiling in a thin, roiling layer. It grew noticeably thinner halfway along the hall.

  "Help me," he called to Sanja as he grabbed a heavy chest of inlaid ebony. The two men wrestled it into the middle of the hall and Fuchs clambered up onto it.

  A ventilator, he saw, its grillwork cleverly disguised to look like an ornamental design on the ceiling. It was closed, he realized, but not completely. Some of the smoke was being sucked up through it. He pushed against it with both hands. It gave, but only slightly.

  Sanja immediately understood. He took a copper statuette from the nearest table and handed it up to Fuchs, base first. Fuchs pounded at the ventilator grill with the fury of desperation. It dented, buckled. With an animal roar he smashed at it again and the ventilator gave way with a screech of metal against metal. Immediately, the smoke slithering along the ceiling began pouring into the opening.

  "It's big enough to crawl through!" he shouted.

  "Nodon," said Amarjagal, on her feet now. "He's unconscious."

  "Carry him. Come on."

  Fuchs hauled himself up into the ventilator shaft. It was filled with smoke and utterly dark inside. Coughing, he reached down for Nodon's still-unconscious body. This shaft can't be too long, he thought. We're up near the roof. There must be an outlet nearby.

  Crawling, coughing, eyes streaming with burning tears, he dragged Nodon's limp body through the shaft. Its metal walls felt hot to his fingers, but he slithered along, knowing that either he found his way out of the building or he would soon die.

  The security chief was peering at his display screens, straining to see what was going on in the dim shadows of the upstairs hall. The only light came from the flickering flames. The intruders were moving around, he felt sure, but it was almost impossible to make out anything definite in the smoke. Even the infrared cameras were virtually useless now. Several of the window draperies were blazing; the flames overloaded the surveillance cameras' light sensitive photocells. All he could see was overexposed flickers of flame and inky black shadows shambling around.

  The fire's contained to the upstairs hall, he saw, checking the other screens. Thank god for small miracles. I'll probably have to resign after this. If Humphries doesn't fire me outright.

  Pacing the length of the big bedroom, Humphries muttered, "I don't like this. I don't like being cooped up in here."

  Victoria Ferrer suppressed an incipient smile. He's really frightened, she thought. Normally, if we were locked in his bedroom together he'd peel this robe off me and pop me between the sheets.

  "I don't like waiting," he said, louder.

  "Think of it this way," she suggested, not moving from the chair where she sat, "Fuchs is dying out there. When those fireproof doors open again you can go out and stand over his dead body."

  He
nodded, but it was perfunctory. The thought of victory over Fuchs obviously didn't outweigh his innate fear for his own life.

  Fuchs's lungs were burning. The metal walls of the ventilator shaft were scorching hot now as he crawled along blindly, dragging Nodon's inert body with one pain-cramped hand. He couldn't see Amarjagal or Sanja behind him. He didn't even know if they were still there. His entire world had narrowed down to this smoke-filled, blistering hot purgatory.

  Through tear-filled eyes he saw a light up ahead. It can't be, he told himself. I'm starting to hallucinate. The garden outside is still in its nighttime lighting mode. There can't be bright lighting out there—

  His heart clenched in his chest. Unless the guards have turned up all the outdoor lights! Like a badger, Fuchs scuttled along the upward-slanting shaft, leaving Nodon and the others behind. Light! Air! He bumped his head against a metal grill, feeling blessedly cool air caressing his hot, sooty face. The smoke was streaming out. Fresh air was seeping in.

  With his bare hands Fuchs battered the grill, punched it until his knuckles were raw and bleeding, butted it with his head, finally forced it open by wedging his feet against the sides of the shaft and leaning one powerful shoulder against the thin metal and pushing with all his strength. It gave way at last.

  He took one huge gulp of fresh air, wiped at his eyes with grimy hands, then ducked back down the shaft to grab Nodon by the collar of his coveralls and haul him up onto the roof. Amarjagal's head popped up behind Nodon's booted feet. She too was grimy, soot-streaked. But she smiled and pulled herself out of the shaft.

  "Stay low," Fuchs hissed. "The guards must be patrolling the grounds."