The Silent War gt-11 Page 28

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.

  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.