THE SILENT WAR Page 28

  The senior safety officer looked up from the chess board with a malicious grin. "Mate in three."

  "The hell you will," said the other, reaching for a rook.

  Alarms began shrilling and lurid red lights started to flash across several of the consoles. The rook fell to the floor, forgotten, as the men stared goggle-eyed, unbelieving, at the screens. Everything looked normal, but the alarms still rang shrilly.

  Running his fingers deftly across the master console's keyboard, the senior of the two shouted over the uproar, "It's down at the bottom level. Temp sensors into overload."

  "That's Humphries's area," said his junior partner. "We got no cameras down there."

  Shaking his head, the other replied, "Either the sensors are whacked out or there's a helluva fire going on down there."

  "A fire? That's im—"

  "Look at the readings! Even the oxygen level's starting to go down!"

  "Holy mother of god!"

  The senior man punched at the emergency phone key. "Emergency! Fire on level seven. I'm sealing off all the hatches and air vents."

  "There's people down there!" his assistant pointed out. "Martin Humphries himself! If we seal them in, they'll all die!"

  "And if we don't seal them in," the senior man snapped, his fingers pecking furiously across the keyboard, "that fire'll start sucking the oxygen out of the rest of the city. You want to kill everybody?"

  LUNAR HOPPER

  Hoppers are meant for short-range transportation on the Moon. They are ungainly looking vehicles, little more than a rocket motor powered by powdered aluminum and liquid oxygen, both scraped up from the lunar regolith. Atop the bulbous propellant tanks and rocket nozzle is a square metal mesh platform no more than three meters on a side, surmounted by a waist-high podium that houses the hopper's controls. The entire craft sits on the ground on a trio of spindly legs that wouldn't be strong enough to hold its weight in normal Earth gravity.

  Pancho felt bone-weary as she slowly climbed the flimsy ladder up to the hopper's platform. She felt grateful that this particular little bird had a glassteel bubble enclosing the platform. It'll gimme some protection against the radiation, she told herself. She got to the top, pulled herself up onto the aluminum mesh and let the trapdoor hatch slam shut. All in the total silence of the airless Moon.

  There were no seats on the hopper, of course. You rode the little birds standing up, with your boots snugged into the fabric loops fastened to the platform.

  The radiation sensor display on the side of her helmet had gone down to a sickly bilious green and the automated voice had stopped yakking at her. Pancho felt grateful for that. Either the radiation's down enough so the warning system's cut out or I've got such a dose the warning doesn't matter anymore, she thought.

  She felt bilious green herself: queasy with nausea, so tired that if there had been a reclining seat on the hopper she would've cranked it back and gone to sleep.

  Not yet, she warned herself. You go to sleep now, girl, and you prob'ly won't wake up, ever.

  Hoping the radiation hadn't damaged the hopper's electronic systems, Pancho clicked on the master switch and was pleased to see the podium's console lights come on. A little on the weak side, she thought. Fuel cells are down. Or maybe my vision's going bad.

  Propellant levels were low. Nairobi hadn't refueled the bird after it had carried her here to their base. Enough to make it back to the Astro base? Despite her aches and nausea, Pancho grinned to herself. We'll just hafta see how far we can go.

  Nobuhiko had followed one of the engineers to the base flight control center, a tight little chamber filled with consoles and display screens, most of them dark, most of the desks unoccupied. Still the room felt overly warm, stifling, even with Yamagata's retinue of bodyguards stationed outside in the corridor.

  One console was alight, one screen glowing in the shadows of the control center. Nobu bent over the Nairobi flight controller seated at that console. He saw Pancho's lanky figure slowly climbing the ladder of the green-anodized hopper.

  The Yamagata engineer standing at his side gasped. "She's not wearing a space suit!"

  "Yes she is," Nobu replied. "A new type, made of nanomachines."

  To the flight controller he asked, "Can you prevent her from taking off?"

  Looking up briefly, the controller shook his head. "No, sir. She can control the vehicle autonomously. Of course, without a flight plan or navigational data, she won't be able to find her destination. And the vehicle's propellant levels are too low for anything but a very short flight."

  "We could send a team out to stop her," suggested the Yamagata engineer.

  Nobuhiko took a breath, then replied, "No. Why send good men out into that radiation storm?"

  "The storm is abating, sir."

  "No," he repeated. "Let her take off. If she is to die, let it be a flight accident. I'll have the Nairobi public relations people make up a plausible story that keeps Yamagata Corporation out of it."

  Nobuhiko straightened up and watched the little lunar hopper take off in a sudden spurt of stark white gas and gritty dust, all in total silence.

  He almost wished Pancho good fortune. An extraordinary woman, he thought. A worthy opponent. Too bad she's going to die.

  As soon as the hopper jerked off the ground Pancho turned on its radio, sliding her finger along the frequency control to search for Malapert's beacon. She knew roughly which direction the Astro base lay in. The hopper had only limited maneuverability, however; it flew mainly on a ballistic trajectory, like an odd-looking cannon shell.

  "Pancho Lane calling," she spoke into her helmet microphone. She wanted to yell, to bellow, but she didn't have the strength. "I'm in a hopper, coming up from the Nairobi Industries base at Shackleton crater. I need a navigation fix, pronto."

  No reply.

  She looked down at the bleak lunar landscape sliding by, trying to remember landmarks from her flight in to Shackleton. Nothing stood out. It all looked the same: bare rock pitted by innumerable craters ranging from little dimples to holes big enough to swallow a city. Rugged hills, all barren and rounded by eons of meteors sandpapering them to worn, tired smoothness. And rocks and boulders strewn everywhere like toys left behind by a careless child.

  Pancho felt worn and tired, too. Her mind was going fuzzy. It would be so good to just fold up and go to sleep. Even the hard metal deck of the hopper looked inviting to her.

  Stop it! she commanded herself. Stay awake. Find the base's radio beacon. Use it to guide you in.

  She played the hopper's radio receiver up and down the frequency scale, seeking the automated homing beacon from the Malapert base. Nothing. Feeling something like panic simmering in her guts, Pancho thought, Maybe I'm heading in a completely wrong direction. Maybe I'm so way off that—

  A steady warm tone suddenly issued from her helmet earphones. Pancho couldn't have been more thrilled if the world's finest singer had begun to serenade her.

  "This is Pancho Lane," she said, her voice rough, her throat dry. "I need a navigational fix, pronto."

  A heartbeat's hesitation. Then a calm tenor voice said to her, "Malapert base here, Ms. Lane. We have you on our radar. You're heading seventeen degrees west of us. I'm feeding correction data to your nav computer."

  Pancho felt the hopper's tiny maneuvering thruster push the ungainly bird sideways a bit. Her legs felt weak, rubbery. Bird's on automatic now, she thought. I can relax. I can lay down and—

  A red light on the control console glared at her like an evil eye and the hopper's computer announced, "Propellant cutoff. Main engine shutdown."

  Pancho's reply was a heartfelt, "Shit!"

  BRUSHFIRE

  Fuchs backed slowly along the brick path, a nearly spent laser pistol in each hand, his eyes reflecting the lurid flames spreading across the wide garden that filled the grotto. Burn! he exulted. Let everything burn. His garden. His house. And Humphries himself. Let the fire burn him to death, let him roast in his own hell.


  Coughing, he finally turned and sprinted heavily up the path toward the airlock hatch that they had come in through. The others were already there; Nodon was even standing on his own feet, although he looked pale, shaky.

  Fuchs was panting as he came up to them. "Hard ... to breathe," he gasped.

  Amarjagal wasted no time on the obvious. "The airlock is sealed. The emergency code doesn't work."

  Fuchs stared at her flat, normally emotionless face. Now she was staring back at him, cold accusation in her eyes.

  Sanja said, "The fire ... it's eating up the oxygen."

  "Get the airlock open!" Fuchs commanded. "Nodon, try all the emergency codes."

  "I have," Nodon said, almost wailing. "No use ... no use..."

  Fuchs leaned his back against the heavy steel hatch and slid down onto his rump, suddenly exhausted. Most of the garden was ablaze now, roaring with flames that crawled up the trees and spread across the flowering bushes, burning, destroying everything as they advanced. Gray smoke billowed up and slithered along the rough rock ceiling as if trying to find an opening, the slightest pore, a way to escape the inferno of this death trap.

  Humphries was coldly logical now. The closet in his bedroom was built to serve as an emergency airlock. There was even a space suit stashed in there, although Humphries had never put it on. The Earthbound architect who had designed the mansion had been rather amused that Humphries insisted on such precautions, but the knowing smirk on his face disappeared when Humphries bought out his firm, fired him, and sent him packing back to Earth.

  The mansion had been completed by others, and the emergency airlock built to the tightest possible specifications.

  Knowing that there were two extra tanks of breathable air in there, Humphries headed for his closet.

  "What are you doing?" Ferrer screamed at him. "We've got to get out!"

  "You get yourself out," he said icily, remembering the slap she had given him. "I'll stay here until this all blows over."

  He slid open the door to his closet. All that Ferrer could see was a row of clothing neatly arrayed on hangers.

  "What've you got in there?" she demanded from the other side of the bedroom. She no longer looked smoothly sultry, enticing. Her dark hair was a disheveled tumble, her white robe rumpled, hanging half open. She seemed frightened, confused, far from alluring.

  "Enough air to last for a day or more," he said, smiling at her.

  "Oh thank god!" she said, rushing toward the closet.

  Humphries touched the stud set in the closet's interior door frame and an airtight panel slid quickly shut. He saw the shocked surprise on her face just before the panel shot home and closed her off from his view.

  He heard her banging on the steel panel. "Martin! Open the door! Let me in!"

  He walked back deeper into his closet, trying to shut out her yammering. Pushing a row of slacks aside he saw the space suit standing against the closet's back wall like a medieval suit of armor.

  "Martin! Please! Let me in!"

  "So you can slap me again?" he muttered. "Go fry."

  The chief of the emergency crew nearly dropped his handheld when he recognized who was coming up the corridor toward them.

  "Mr. Stavenger!"

  "Hello ... Pete," Stavenger said, after a quick glance at the crew chief's nametag. "What's the situation here?"

  Stavenger could see that a team of three men and four women were assembling a portable airlock and sealing it over the hatch that opened onto the grotto. The crew chief said as much.

  "How long will this take?" Stavenger asked.

  "Another ten minutes. Maybe twelve."

  "Once it's ready, how many people can you take through it at one time?"

  The crew chief shook his head. "It's only big enough for two."

  "There are at least thirty people in there," Stavenger said. "They're running out of oxygen pretty quickly."

  "We got another crew working on the water lines. If we can get the sprinklers working we oughtta be able to put the fire out pretty quick."

  "But those people need air to breathe."

  "I know," said the crew chief. "I know."

  Fuchs saw dark-clad figures stumbling up the path, coughing, staggering. He scrambled to his feet and picked up one of the nearly spent pistols.

  "Stop where you are!" he shouted, coughing himself.

  The closest man tossed his pistol into the bushes. "Let us out!" he yelled. "The fire..."

  The others behind him also threw their guns away. They all lurched toward Fuchs, coughing, rubbing at their eyes. Behind them the flames inched across the flowers and grass, climbed nimbly up the trunk of a tree. Its crown of leaves burst into flame.

  "The hatch is locked," Fuchs told them. "We're all trapped in here."

  The security guards didn't believe him. Their leader rushed to the hatch, tapped frantically at the keyboard panel.

  "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," he growled. "Of all the sonofabitch fuck-ups..."

  "It's automatic, I imagine," said Fuchs, resignedly. "Nothing we can do about it."

  The security guard stared at him. "But they should have emergency teams. Something—"

  At that moment a voice rumbled through the heavy hatch, "This is Selene emergency services. Is anybody there? Rap on the hatch."

  Fuchs almost leaped with sudden joy and hope. He banged the butt of his pistol against the steel hatch.

  "Okay. We're setting up an airlock. Once it's ready we'll be able to start taking you out. How many of you are there?"

  Fuchs counted swiftly and then rapped on the hatch eleven times, thinking, We might live through this after all. We might get out of this alive.

  FLIGHT PLANS

  Pancho knew she had to think swiftly, but the fog of fatigue and radiation sickness made her feel as if she were wrapped in heavy wet blankets.

  Propellant bingo, she said to herself. There's still enough juice for an automated landing. But not enough to reach the base. Override the automatics and push this bird as far as she'll go? Do that and you won't land, you'll crash on the landing pad—if you get that far. Let the bird coast and come down wherever it reaches? Do that and you'll land in the middle of nowhere. No, you won't land, you'll crash on the rocks.

  "We have a good track on you, Ms. Lane, and we're getting some satellite imagery, as well," said the Malapert controller's voice. "You're not going to reach the base, I'm afraid. We're gearing up a search and rescue team. If you can find a reasonably flat place to set down, we'll come out and get you."

  "Copy search and rescue operation," Pancho said, her throat painfully dry. "I'll set her down as close to the base as I can."

  If I can stay on my feet long enough, she added silently.

  "Malapert?" she called, her voice little more than a croak now. "Malapert here, Ms. Lane."

  "Better include some medics in the S&R team. I got me a healthy dose of radiation."

  The barest fraction of a second's hesitation. Then, "Understood, Ms. Lane."

  Okay, Pancho said to herself. Now all you gotta do is stay awake long enough to put this bird on the ground without breaking your neck. She wanted to smile. If I wasn't so pooped-out tired, this would be kinda fun.

  Some half a billion kilometers away, Dorik Harbin decided to leave Samarkand's bridge and inspect the ship personally. They were fully enveloped by the radiation storm now, and although all the ship's systems were performing adequately, Harbin knew that the crew felt edgy about flying blind and deaf inside a vast cloud of high-energy particles that could kill an unshielded man in moments.

  The monitors on the control panels were all in the green, he saw, except for a few minor pieces of machinery that needed maintenance. I'll get the crew working on them, Harbin thought as he got up from his command chair. It will be good for their morale to have something to do instead of just waiting for the radiation level to back down to normal.

  He gave the con to his pilot and stepped to the hatch. Turning back for a moment, he glanced once m
ore at the radiation shielding monitors. All green. Good.

  Aboard Cromwell the skipper awoke minutes before his number one called on the intercom. He hauled himself out of his bunk, washed his face and pulled on a fresh set of coveralls. No need to brush his hair: It was shaved down to within a centimeter of his scalp.

  He entered the bridge and saw that all the ship's systems were operating within nominal limits. And they were still sailing inside the cloud of ionized particles. Its radiation intensity had diminished, though, he noted. The cloud was thinning out as it drifted outward from the Sun.

  "Are we still shielded against radar?" he asked his communication technician.

  "Theoretically, sir," the man answered with a nod.

  "I'm not interested in theory, mister," snapped the skipper. "Can the radars on Vesta spot us or not?"

  The technician blinked once, then replied, "No, sir. Not unless they pump up their output power to two or three times their normal operational mode, sir."

  Not unless, the captain grumbled to himself.

  "You holler out loud and clear if we get pinged," he told the commtech.

  "Yes, sir. Loud and clear."

  Pointing at the weapons technician, the skipper said, "Time for a skull session. In my quarters."

  The weapons tech was actually a physicist from Astro Corporation's nanotechnology department, so tall he was continually banging his head on the hatches as he stepped through them, so young he looked like a teenager, but without the usual teenaged pose of sullen indifference. Instead, he was bright, cheerful, enthusiastic.

  Yet he looked somber now as he ducked low enough to get through the hatch without thumping his straw-thatched head against the coaming.

  "We'll be at the decision point in a few minutes," the captain said as he sat on his bunk and gestured the younger man to the only chair in the compartment.