THE SILENT WAR Page 27

  Sanja came up, and crawled on his belly to lay beside Fuchs. They looked out onto the splendid garden just beyond the mansion's wall and, farther, to the trees and green flowering shrubbery of this artificial Eden planted deep below the surface of the Moon.

  And there were guards standing out there, armed with assault rifles, ready to shoot to kill.

  SHINING MOUNTAIN BASE

  You there!" the guard yelled. "Stop that or I'll shoot!"

  Pancho realized that her necklace was tucked inside the dratted softsuit. She couldn't reach it. Couldn't whip it off her neck and toss it at the goon. Prob'ly wouldn't have time to do it before he drilled me, anyway, she thought as she slowly climbed to her feet and raised both gloved hands over her helmeted head. She nudged the laser slightly with her boot. It was still on, still cutting away at the honeycomb shield outside the dome's wall.

  "Who the devil are you?" the guard demanded, walking slowly around the minitractor, a pistol leveled at Pancho's navel. He looked African but spoke like an Englishman. "And what the devil do you think you're doing?"

  Pancho shrugged inside the softsuit. "Nothin'," she said, trying to look innocent.

  "My god!" the guard yelped, seeing that hole cut into the dome wall and the bright red hot spot the laser was making on the honeycomb shield. "Turn that thing off! Now! Don't you realize you could—"

  At that instant the honeycomb cracked open and a rush of air knocked Pancho flat against the curving dome wall. The guard was staggered but kept his senses enough to realize what was happening. He turned and ran as fast as he could, which wasn't very fast because he was leaning against a gale-force wind trying to rush out of the hole Pancho had cut.

  The loudspeakers started yammering in Japanese, then in another language Pancho didn't understand. She slid down to the floor and slithered out of the break, hoping the softsuit wouldn't catch or tear on the broken edges of the holes the laser had made.

  Outside, she looked around the barren lunar landscape. The dome was on the crest of the ringwall mountains that surrounded Shakleton. The ground sloped away, down toward the floor of the crater. Nothing to see but rocks and minicraters, some of them no bigger than a finger-poke into the stony ground. Damn! Pancho thought. I'm on the wrong side of the dome.

  Without hesitation she began sprinting, looking for the launchpads, happy to be able to run inside a space suit. Inside the old hardshell suits it was impossible to do anything more than lumber along like Frankenstein's monster.

  That guard'll be okay, she told herself. There's plenty of air inside the dome. They'll get the leak plugged before anybody's in any real danger. Jogging steadily, she grinned to herself. Meantime, while they're chasing around trying to fix the damage I've done, I'll get to one of the hoppers and head on home.

  A sickly pale green splotch of color appeared on the left side of her helmet. The earphones said, "Radiation warning. Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately."

  "I'm trying!" Pancho said, surprised at the suit's sophistication.

  Before she took another dozen strides the color went from pastel green to bright canary yellow.

  "Radiation warning," the suit said again. "Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately."

  Pancho gritted her teeth and wondered how she could shut off the suit's automated voice synthesizer. The launchpads were still nowhere in sight.

  Nobuhiko was back at the base's infirmary, this time in a screened-off cubicle barely large enough to hold a bed, looking down on a heavily sedated Daniel Tsavo. A spotless white bandage covered the upper half of the Kenyan's black face. He was conscious, but barely so, as the tranquillizing drug took effect.

  "... she blinded me," he was mumbling. "Blind ... can't see..."

  Yamagata glanced impatiently at the African doctor standing on the other side of Tsavo's bed. "It's only temporary," the doctor said, trying to sound reassuring. He seemed to be speaking to Yamagata, rather than his patient. "The retinal burns will heal in a few days."

  "Failed," Tsavo muttered. "Failure ... blind ... nowhere to go ... career ruined..."

  Bending slightly over the bed, Nobuhiko said, "You haven't failed. You'll be all right. Rest now. Everything will be fine in a day or two."

  Tsavo's right hand groped toward the sound of Yamagata's voice. Nobuhiko instinctively backed away from it.

  "Did you find her?" the Kenyan asked, his voice suddenly stronger. "Did you get what you wanted from her?"

  "Yes, of course," Nobuhiko lied. "You rest now. Everything has turned out very well."

  Tsavo's hand fell back to the sheets and he breathed a heavy sigh. The doctor nodded as if satisfied that the drugs had finally done their job. Then he made a small shooing gesture.

  Nobuhiko understood. He turned away from the bed and stepped out of the tiny cubicle. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of antiseptics that pervaded this part of the infirmary. He had spent many hours in hospitals, when his father was dying. The odor brought back the memory of those unhappy days.

  The pair of aides waiting for him out in the corridor snapped to attention almost like elite-corps soldiers, even though they wore ordinary business suits.

  "Have they found her?" Nobuhiko asked in Japanese.

  "Not yet, sir."

  Nobu frowned as he started walking toward the exit, allowing his aides to see how displeased he was. To come all this way to the Moon, he thought, and have her slip away from us. Hot anger simmered through him.

  The senior of the two assistants, noting the obvious displeasure on his master's face, tried to change the subject:

  "Will the black man recover his sight?"

  "Apparently," Nobuhiko snapped. "But he is not to be trusted with any important tasks. Never again."

  Both aides nodded.

  As they reached the double doors of the infirmary the handheld of the senior aide beeped. He flicked it open and saw a Yamagata engineer in a sky-blue hard hat staring wide-eyed in the miniaturized screen.

  "The dome has been penetrated!" the engineer blurted. "We have sent for repair crews."

  The aide looked stricken. He turned to Yamagata, wordlessly asking him for instructions.

  "She did this," Nobu said. "Despite all our guards and precautions, Pancho has gotten away from us. She's outside."

  "But the radiation storm!" the junior aide said, aghast. "She'll be killed out there."

  Suddenly Nobu felt all his anger dissolve; all the tension that had held him like a vise for the past several hours faded away. He laughed. He threw his head back and laughed aloud, while his two aides gaped at him.

  "Killed out there?" he said to them. "Not likely. Not Pancho. We couldn't hold her in here with a thousand guards. Don't think that a little thing like a solar storm is going to stop her."

  His two aides said nothing even though they both thought that their master had gone slightly insane.

  "Radiation warning," the suit repeated for the umpteenth time. "Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately."

  Pancho made a silent promise to herself that when she got back to Selene she would rip the voice synthesizer out of this goddamned suit and stomp on it for an hour and a half.

  The color splashed across the left side of her bubble helmet was bright pink now. I'm absorbing enough radiation to light a concert hall, she thought. Unbidden, the memory of Dan Randolph's death from radiation poisoning rose in her mind like a ghostly premonition of things to come. She saw Dan lying on his bunk, too weak even to lift his head, soaked in sweat, gums bleeding, hair coming out in bunches, dying while Pancho looked on, helpless, unable to save him.

  You got a lot to look forward to, she growled to herself.

  Her loping stride had slowed to a walk, but she was still doggedly pressing forward across the outer perimeter of the dome. You don't really appreciate how big something is until you have to walk around it, she told herself. Everything always looks bigger on foot.


  And there it was! Around the curve of the dome she saw one, then two and finally three spacecraft sitting on concrete launchpads. She recognized the little green one that had brought her here from the Astro base, about a hundred klicks away.

  Would they have guards placed around those birds? Pancho asked herself, without slowing her pace toward the launchpads.

  Naw, she answered. Not in this storm. That'd be suicide duty. Not even Yamagata would ask his people to do that. Then she added, I hope.

  Aside from the splotch of color in her helmet and the automated voice's irritating, repetitive warning, there was no visible, palpable sign of the radiation storm. Pancho was striding along the rocky, barren lunar crest, kicking up slight plumes of dust with each step. Outside the nanomachined fabric of her softsuit was nothing but vacuum, a vacuum thousands of times rarer than the vacuum just above Earth's atmosphere, nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away. Instinctively she glanced up for a sight of Earth, but the black sky was empty. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the heavy tinting of her helmet. You can always see Earth from Selene, she said to herself. Maybe that's an advantage over this polar location that we hadn't realized before.

  She started to hurry her pace toward the rocket hopper but found it was too tiring. Uh-oh, she thought. Fatigue's one of the first signs of radiation sickness.

  She knew the vacuum out here wasn't empty. A torrent of subatomic particles was sleeting down upon her, mostly high-energy protons. The suit absorbed some of them, but plenty of others were getting through to smash into the atoms of her body and break them up. When she glanced at the color swatch in her helmet, though, it had gone down from bright pink to a sultry auburn.

  Jeeps, Pancho exclaimed silently, the radiation level's going down.

  "Radiation warning," the suit repeated yet again. "Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately."

  "I'm goin'," Pancho groused. "I'm goin'."

  Radiation's decreasing. The storm's ending. Maybe I'll make it through this after all. But then she thought that Yamagata might send some goons out to the launchpads if the radiation level's gone down enough. Despite the aches in her legs and back, she pushed herself to walk faster.

  HUMPHRIES MANSION: ON THE ROOF

  Smoke was billowing up through the ventilator that Fuchs had smashed open. The guards down in the garden below pointed to it. One of them pulled a handheld from his tunic pocket and started talking into it.

  We've got to get off this roof and out to the exit hatch, Fuchs thought. And quickly, before they get all their guards out here and we're hopelessly surrounded.

  Turning, he saw that Nodon was sitting by himself, his eyes open. He looked groggy, but at least he was conscious.

  "Nodon," Fuchs whispered, hunkering down beside the wounded man, "can you walk?"

  "I think so, Captain." Nodon's right shoulder had stopped bleeding, but the charred spot on his coveralls showed where the laser beam had hit him. The arm hung limply by his side.

  Turning to Amarjagal, Fuchs gestured toward the two guards below. "Get those two when I give the word. Sanja, help me carry Nodon."

  Sanja nodded wordlessly while Amarjagal checked the charge on the pistol in her hand. As Fuchs slid one beefy arm around Nodon's slim waist he saw the two guards looking up in their direction. One of them was still speaking into his handheld.

  "Now!" he shouted, hauling Nodon to his feet.

  Amarjagal shot the one with the handheld squarely in the forehead, then swung her aim to hit his companion in the chest. They both tumbled into the bushes that lined the garden walkway.

  With Sanja helping to support Nodon, Fuchs yelled, "Jump!" and all four of them leaped off the roof to land with a thump amid the shrubbery that lined the mansion's wall. Lunar gravity, Fuchs thought gratefully. On Earth we would have broken our bones.

  Half-dragging Nodon, they started up the bricked path, hobbling toward the heavy airtight hatch that was the only exit from the grotto. Fuchs heard shouts from behind them. Turning his head, he saw a trio of guards boiling out of the mansion's front door, pistols in their hands. A tendril of pale gray smoke drifted out of the open door.

  "Stop while you're still alive," one of the guards shouted. "There's no way you can get out of here."

  "Amarjagal, help Sanja," Fuchs commanded, slipping the wounded man out of his grasp and dropping to one knee. He snapped a quick shot at the three guards, who scattered to find shelter in the shrubbery. Fuchs fired at them until his pistol ran out of power. One of the flowering shrubs burst into flame and a guard leaped out from behind it.

  Running back to the others Fuchs yelled, "Give me your guns! Quick!"

  They obediently dropped their pistols onto the path, hardly breaking stride as they carried the wounded Nodon toward the hatch. Nodon's the only one who knows the emergency codes to open the hatch, Fuchs thought. He'd better be conscious when we get there or we're all dead.

  He ducked behind the sturdy bole of a tree and peered up the pathway. No one in sight. They could be crawling through the shrubbery, Fuchs realized. He checked the three guns at his feet. Picking the one with the fullest charge, he began spraying the greenery, hoping to ignite it. Some of the plants smoldered but did not flame. Fuchs growled a curse as his pistol died; he picked up the next one.

  In his bedroom, Humphries was screaming at his security chief.

  "What do you mean, the whole house is burning? It can't burn, you stupid shit! The firewall partitions—"

  "Mr. Humphries," the chief snapped stiffly, "the partitions have failed. The intruders opened a ventilator shaft and the fire is spreading through the eaves beneath the roof. You'll have to abandon your suite, sir, and pretty damned quick, too."

  Humphries glared at the screen.

  "I'm leaving," said the chief. "If you want to roast, go right ahead."

  The phone screen went blank. Humphries look up at Ferrer. "This can't be happening," he said. "I don't believe it."

  She was at the door, ready to make a break for it. "At least Fuchs and his crew have left the house," she said, trying to stay calm.

  "They have?"

  "That's what the guards outside reported. Remember? They're having a firefight out there right now."

  "Firefight?" Humphries couldn't seem to get his mind working properly. Everything was happening too fast, too wildly.

  "We've got to get out, Martin," she insisted, almost shouting.

  Humphries thought it was getting warm in the bedroom. That's my imagination, he told himself. This whole suite is insulated, protected. They can't get to me in here.

  Something creaked ominously overhead. Humphries shot a glance at the ceiling, but it all looked normal. He looked around wildly. The whole building's on fire, he heard the security chief's voice in his mind. I pay that stupid slug to protect me, Humphries said to himself. He's finished. I'll get rid of him. Permanently.

  "How do you open this hatch?" Ferrer asked. She was standing at the bedroom doorway, the door itself flung open but the protective cermet partition firmly in place.

  Humphries eyes were on the window, though. "My garden!" he howled, staring at the flames licking across the branches of several of the trees.

  "We've got to get out—" Ferrer put a hand on the cermet hatch and flinched back. "It's hot!"

  The phone was dead, Humphries realized. The controls for the fireproof partitions were automated. As long as the sensors detected a fire, the hatches would remain closed unless opened manually. But the controls are down in the security office, in the basement, Humphries realized. And that yellow little bastard has run away.

  I could override the controls from my computer, he thought. But that's in the sitting room, and we're shut off from it!

  He could feel the panic bubbling inside him, like the frothing waves of the sea rising over his head to drown him.

  Ferrer was standing in front of him, shouting something, her eyes wide with fear. Humphries couldn't hear what she was
saying. His mind was repeating, The whole house is on fire! over and over again. Glancing past her terrified face through the bedroom window he saw that the garden was blazing as well.

  Ferrer slapped him. Hard. A stinging smack across his face. Instinctively Humphries slapped her back as hard as he could. She staggered back, the imprint of his fingers red against her skin.

  "You little bitch! Who do you think you are?"

  "Martin, we've got to get out of here! We've got to get through the window and outside!"

  Perhaps it was the slap, or perhaps the sight of the always cool and logical Ferrer looking panicked, terrified. Whatever the reason, Humphries felt his own panic subside. The fear was still there, but he could control it now.

  "It's burning out there," he said, pointing toward the window.

  Her face went absolutely white. "The fire will consume all the oxygen in the air! We'll suffocate!"

  "They'll suffocate," Humphries said flatly. "Fuchs and whatever riffraff he's brought with him."

  "And the guards!"

  "What of it? They're a useless bunch of brain-dead shits."

  "But we'll suffocate too!" Ferrer shouted, almost screaming.

  "Not we," he said. "You."

  The six-hundred-meter-long concrete vault of Selene's Grand Plaza is supported, in part, by two towers that serve as office buildings. Selene's safety office is located in one of those towers, not far from Douglas Stavenger's small suite of offices.

  This late at night, the safety office was crewed by only a pair of men, both relaxed to the point of boredom as they sat amid row after row of old-fashioned flat display screens that showed every corridor and public space in the underground city. On the consoles that lined one wall of their sizeable office were displayed the readouts from sensors that monitored air and water quality, temperature, and other environmental factors throughout the city.

  They were playing chess on an actual board with carved onyx pieces, to alleviate their boredom. The sensors and displays were automated; there was no real need for human operators to be present. There was hardly ever any problem so bad that a plumber or low-rate electrician couldn't fix it in an hour or less.