THE SILENT WAR Read online

  They could operate on the fetus while it's in my womb, Amanda was told. But that would mean a major medical procedure and I'd never be able to keep that secret from Martin. Just getting the genetic screening tests done was difficult enough. If it weren't for Doug Stavenger's help I wouldn't have been able to do it.

  "It might be just a random mutation," said the doctor, trying to look optimistic. "Or perhaps there was some chromosomal damage due to the zygote's long immersion in liquid nitrogen. We just don't know enough about the long-term effects of cryogenic temperatures."

  It's the drugs, she knew. All those years and all those uppers and aphrodisiacs and designer specials. They must have done the damage, carried to the poor helpless embryo through my bloodstream. My son will pay for my weakness.

  So the baby will be born with chronic anemia, Amanda thought. Martin will just have to accept that. He'll be unhappy about it, but he'll have to accept it. As long as he believes it's his son he'll do whatever is necessary for the baby.

  The doctor had hesitated and stammered until he finally worked up the courage to suggest, "There's nanotechnology, of course, should you choose to use it. It's banned on Earth, and I couldn't recommend it there. But here on the Moon you might be able to use nanotherapy to correct the baby's faulty gene. And your own."

  Amanda thanked him for being so open. But she knew that nanotherapy was impossible for her. Martin would find out about it. Not even Doug Stavenger could keep it a secret if she went to the nanotech lab in Selene. The news that Martin Humphries's wife wanted nanotherapy for her unborn child would flash to Martin's ears with the speed of light. The only nanotechnologist Amanda could trust was Kris Cardenas, and she'd been living in Ceres for years in self-imposed exile from Selene. Now she was on the Saturn mission, going even farther away. No, nanotherapy is out, Amanda swiftly decided. I've got to handle this without using nanotech.

  I've got to protect my baby, she said to herself as she lay in the darkness next to her sleeping, dreaming husband. I've got to protect him from Martin.

  Which means I've got to live through the birth. Unconsciously, Amanda clenched her fists. Women don't die in childbirth. That hasn't happened in years, not in a century or more. Not in a modern medical facility. Not even women with weak hearts.

  She had known that the years of living in low-gravity environments had taken a toll on her heart. All those years living in Ceres, practically zero gravity. Even here on the Moon it's only one-sixth g. Bad for the heart. Deconditions the muscles. It's so easy to enjoy low g and let yourself go.

  Amanda had exercised regularly, mainly to keep her figure. Martin had married a beautiful woman and Amanda worked hard over the years to remain youthfully attractive. But it wasn't enough to strengthen her heart.

  "Perhaps you should consider aborting this pregnancy," the doctor had suggested, as tentatively as a man suggesting heresy to a bishop. "Work to get your heart into proper condition and then try to have a baby again."

  "No," Amanda had replied softly. "I can't do that."

  The doctor had thought she had religious scruples. "I know abortion is a serious issue," he had told her. "But even the Catholics permit it now, as long as it's not simply to terminate an illegitimate pregnancy. I can provide medical justification—"

  "Thank you," Amanda had said, "but no. I can't."

  "I see." The doctor had sighed like a patient father faced with an intractable child. "All right, then we can use an auxiliary heart pump during the delivery."

  It's very simple, he had explained. Standard procedure. A temporary ventricular assist pump, a slim balloon on the end of a catheter is inserted into the femoral artery in the thigh and worked up into the lower aorta. It provides extra cardiovascular pumping power, takes some of the workload off the heart during labor.

  Amanda had nodded. When I go for my prenatal checkup at the hospital here in Selene, they'll find out about my heart and make the same recommendation. Martin will know about it but that's perfectly all right. He'll call in the best cardiovascular experts. That's fine, too. As long as no one realizes I've switched Martin's genetic profile for Lars's. That's what I've got to avoid. Martin thinks his genes are perfect. He's got a six-year-old son to prove it.

  We've already done a genetic screen on me, of course. I passed that test. It's just the baby, my poor helpless little baby, that has a problem.

  I've got to make certain that Martin doesn't know. He mustn't find out.

  Amanda lay in her bed for hours while Humphries thrashed and moaned in his sleep next to her. She stared at the darkened ceiling, watched the digital clock count the minutes and hours. At last, well after four a.m., still wide awake, she sat up and softly slipped out of bed. On bare feet she tiptoed across the thick carpeting past the lavatory, into the walk-in closet that was lined with the finest clothes money could buy. Only after she had gently closed the closet door did she grope for the light switch on the wall. Months earlier she had disconnected the sensor that automatically turned on the overhead lights. Squinting in the sudden brightness, she stepped deeper into the closet, ignoring the gowns and frocks and slacks and precious blouses. She went to one of the leather handbags hanging in the rear of the closet and, after rummaging in it for a few moments, came out with a handful of soft blue gelatin capsules.

  Tranquilizers, Amanda told herself. They're nothing more than good, strong tranquilizers. I need them, if I want to get any sleep at all. She stared at the capsules in her palm; her hand was shaking so hard she feared she would drop them. She closed her fingers around them. They won't hurt the baby. They can't, that's what the chemist told me. And I need them. I need them badly.

  ASTEROID VESTA

  Dorik Harbin hid the discomfort he felt from all the others, but he could not hide it from himself. A man who preferred solitude, a lone wolf who tracked his prey silently, without help, he now was in command of nearly five hundred men and women, mercenaries hired by Humphries for the coming assault against Astro Corporation.

  Most of them were engineers and technicians, not warriors. They were building a base on Vesta, burrowing deep into the asteroid's rocky body, tunneling out hardened silos to hold missiles that could blast approaching ships out of the sky. Harbin remembered HSS's first attempt to build a base on Vesta's surface. Fuchs had wiped it out with a single blow, dropping a freighter's load of asteroidal ores that smashed buildings and people in a deadly avalanche of falling rocks.

  So now we dig, Harbin said to himself as he glided down one of the dusty tunnels toward the smoothed-out cave that would be his headquarters. He wore a real uniform now, complete with epaulets on his shoulders and an uncomfortable high choke of a collar. And insignias of rank. Harbin was a colonel now, with four-pointed stars at his throat and cuffs to show it. The emblems disturbed Harbin. They reminded him of crosses. He'd seen too many crosses over the years, in churches and more often in cemeteries.

  Humphries paid someone to design these stupid uniforms, he knew. He also knew that a man's ability to command comes from what is in his head and in his guts, not from fancy uniforms and polished boots.

  But Humphries pays the bills, Grigor constantly reminded him. And Humphries is in a sweat to complete this base and begin the assault that will wipe Astro out of the Belt.

  But Fuchs is still out there, somewhere, hiding himself deep in the dark emptiness of the Belt. It's a mistake to stop hunting him, Harbin thought. Humphries thinks that once he's eliminated Astro, Fuchs will fall into his lap easily enough. But I wonder. The man is wily, tough, a survivor. He's dangerous, too dangerous to be permitted to live.

  Despite its being the third-largest of all the asteroids, Vesta is still only slightly more than five hundred kilometers across. Its gravity is minuscule. Harbin and all the others working inside the tunnels and caves had to wear uncomfortable breathing masks and goggles clamped to their faces constantly because every step they took stirred up fine powdery dust that hung in the air endlessly, floating in the infinitesimal gravity like a
n eternal, everlasting mist. Still, the people he passed as he glided along the tunnel all snapped salutes at the stars on his uniform. Harbin dutifully returned each salute even though he loathed the necessity.

  At least his office was clean. It was a small chamber carved by plasma torches out of the metallic rock and then sprayed with thick layers of plastic to hold down the dust. With the air blowers working, Harbin could take off his goggled mask and breathe normally once the door to the tunnel outside was shut.

  The office was little more than a bare cubicle containing a desk and a few chairs. No decorations on the walls. Nothing to remind Harbin of his past. Even the desk drawers were mostly empty, except for the locked one that contained his medications. He slumped tiredly onto his desk chair and commanded his computer to display the day's incoming messages. I shouldn't be sitting behind a desk, he told himself. I should be in a ship, tracking down Fuchs. It's a mistake to let him live.

  Then he smiled bitterly at himself. Not that I've been so successful at getting him. Fuchs is a wily old badger, Harbin admitted to himself. Almost, he admired the man.

  The list of incoming messages took form in the air above Harbin's desk. Most of them were routine, but there was one from Grigor, Harbin's direct superior in the HSS chain of command, the only man between him and Martin Humphries himself.

  Harbin told the computer to display Grigor's message.

  Grigor's gloomy image appeared immediately. He was seated at his own desk. It was as if Harbin were looking into the man's office. To his surprise, the dour, cold-eyed chief of HSS security was actually smiling; it looked as if it pained him to stretch his thin lips that way.

  "I have good news for you, Dorik," said Grigor, almost jovially. "A dozen attack ships are on their way to you, plus supply and logistics vessels. They are not sailing together, of course. That would attract unwelcome attention from Astro and even from the International Astronautical Authority. But they will start arriving at your base within the week. A detailed schedule of their courses, cargoes and arrival times are attached to this message."

  Harbin stopped Grigor's message and checked the attachment. Impressive. Within two weeks he would have a small armada of warships, ready to ravage the Belt.

  He turned Grigor back on. "From the reports you've been sending, I can see that the base will be fully operational within three weeks or less. Mr. Humphries wants to make absolutely certain that the base is protected properly. He wants to take no chances that Fuchs or anyone else will attack it before it is completed. Therefore, you are to use the attack vessels as a defensive screen around Vesta. Keep them in orbit around the asteroid and keep them on high alert, prepared to intercept any unauthorized vessel. Is that clear?"

  The question was rhetorical, of course. Harbin wouldn't be able to get a reply to Grigor at Selene for a half-hour or more.

  "One final order," Grigor went on, without waiting for a reply. "Once the entire battle fleet has been assembled, you will hold it in readiness until an attack plan is sent to you through me. Mr. Humphries wants no moves made until he has approved a complete campaign plan."

  Then Grigor smiled again, obviously forced. "Of course, we will expect your inputs for the plan. We won't finalize it until you have made your contribution."

  The image winked off and Harbin was staring at the empty chairs in front of his desk once again.

  "A plan of campaign," he muttered to himself. Humphries thinks he's a field marshal now, planning battle strategy. Harbin groaned inwardly. He's amassing all these weapons, all these people, and he's sitting back in the safety of that underground mansion of his, playing armchair general. I'll have to follow his orders, no matter how stupid they might be.

  Harbin scrupulously avoided sexual liaisons with any of the people under his command. A commander doesn't take advantage of his troops, he told himself sternly. Besides, he had medications and virtual reality simulations that satisfied his needs, in part. In some ways they were better than sex; he didn't have to deal with a real, living person. Better to be alone, he told himself. Better to avoid entanglements.

  Yet there was one slim young woman among the engineering staff who attracted him. She looked almost Asian, but not quite: tall, willowy, soft of speech, her skin smooth and the color of burnt gold, with high sculpted cheekbones and almond eyes that he caught, several times, watching him through lowered lashes.

  She reminded him of someone, someone he had taken months of rehabilitation treatments to forget. Someone who haunted the edges of his dreams, a woman that not even his drugs could erase completely from his memory. A woman who had claimed to love him, a woman who had betrayed him. A woman he had murdered, ripping the lying tongue out of her throat with his bare hands.

  Harbin woke nights sobbing over her. And now this Eurasian engineer watched him furtively when they were in the same room together, smiled at him seductively when he caught her staring at him.

  Harbin tried to ignore her, but he couldn't. Over the weeks and months of building the base, he could not avoid her. And every time he saw her, she smiled and watched him in silence, as if waiting for him to smile back at her, to speak to her, to ask her what her name was or where she was born or why she was here on this godforsaken outpost in the depths of nothingness.

  Instead of speaking to her, Harbin brought up her personnel dossier on his office computer. Her name was Leeza Chaptal, born in Selene, her father a French medical doctor, her mother a Japanese-American biologist. She herself was a life-support engineer, and had a year-to-year contract with Humphries Space Systems. She had not volunteered for this job at Vesta; she had been faced with accepting the position or being fired for breach of contract.

  She's not happy here, Harbin thought, scanning her dossier. Yet she seems pleasant enough. Her supervisor rates her work highly, he saw.

  It wasn't until his phone buzzed that Harbin realized he'd been staring at her dossier photograph for more than fifteen minutes.

  HUMPHRIES'S DREAMS

  He was a child again, being led by the hand through the majestic marble-walled building where people stood in quiet little groups gazing at the pictures on the walls and speaking in hushed murmurs. The paintings meant nothing to him, nor did the names that his tutor whispered to him: da Vinci, Raphael, Degas, Renoir. Then he saw the picture of the beautiful sailboats gliding across a calm blue sea beneath the summer sun. When he refused to leave it, his tutor sniffed, "Monet. Quite overly popular."

  Suddenly it was Christmas, and instead of the painting he wanted, his father presented him with a new computer. When he started to cry with disappointment, his father loomed over him and said sternly, "You can look at all the paintings you want through the web."

  And then he was on the boat, the trimaran, and the storm was coming up fast and the boat was heaving wickedly in the monstrous waves and one of the waves broke over the bow and swept him off his feet. He felt the numbing cold water clutching at him, dragging him under, while his father watched from the tossing deck, his arms folded sternly across his chest, his face set in a scowl of disappointment. He doesn't care if I drown! young Martin realized as he thrashed helplessly in the icy water. He doesn't care if I live or die.

  "That was foolish of you, Marty," his father growled at him after a crewman had fished him out of the ocean. "Nine years old and you still don't have the brains that god gave to a rabbit."

  Martin Humphries, aged nine, dripping wet and shivering with cold, understood from that moment onward that he had no one on Earth to protect him, no one to help him, no one that could ever love him. Not even his mother, drunk most of the time, gave a damn about him. He was alone, except for what and who he could buy.

  "This is a dream," he told himself. "This all happened long ago. Mother's been dead for ages and father died years ago. It's all over. He can't humiliate you anymore."

  But others could. He saw himself at the board meeting of the Astro Corporation, everyone seated at the long table staring at him.

  Sitting at th
e head of the table in the chairman's seat to which she'd just been elected, Pancho Lane was pointing her accusing finger at him.

  "How long are we going to allow the head of our biggest rival to sit on our board of directors?" she demanded. "How long are we going to let Judas sit among us? All he wants is to take control of Astro Corporation, and he'll keep on screwing us every chance he gets, if we don't get rid of him here and now."

  The vote was close, but not close enough.

  "That's it, then," said Pancho, barely able to conceal the satisfied smirk that played at the corners of her lips. "Martin, you've been kicked off this board. And high time, too."

  He saw how white his face was, how his hands trembled no matter how hard he struggled to control them. The others tried to hide their emotions, but he could see they were secretly laughing at him. All of them, even the ones he had thought were on his side.

  Feeling cold sweat beading his forehead, his upper lip, he rose shakily to his feet, the blood thundering in his ears, his mind pulsing with ringing, defiant declarations.

  But all he could manage to choke out was, "You haven't seen the last of me."

  As he stumbled out of the richly carpeted boardroom he could hear muffled laughter behind his back. I'll get them, he swore to himself. Each and every one of them. Especially Pancho, that guttersnipe. I'll get her if it takes every penny, every ounce of sweat, every drop of blood that I've got. I'll get her. I'll see her dead. I'll dance on her grave.

  HABITAT CHRYSALIS

  Big George was at the airlock to greet her when Pancho left her private torch ship Starpower III and stepped aboard the rock rats' habitat in orbit about Ceres.

  "Welcome to our humble home," George said, with an exaggerated flourish.

  Pancho grinned at him. "Good to be here, Georgie. Gonna give me the ten-dollar tour?"

  "Sure will."