THE SILENT WAR Page 9

  George led her almost halfway through the rotating complex of connected spacecraft bodies. Pancho enjoyed teasing George about how the habitat looked like a floating junkyard, but once inside the linked vessels she had to admit that the habitat was clean, comfortable, and even attractive. Each interconnected craft was painted in a distinctive color scheme, mostly restful pastels, although there were some bolder, brighter hues here and there, and striking designs decorating some of the bulkheads. The place smelled new, fresh, a far cry from the dust-choked caves and tunnels of Ceres.

  As they stepped through the hatches from one spacecraft to another, George proudly showed Pancho the living quarters, common rooms, laboratories, workshops, warehouses and business offices that made up the growing complex.

  "Got nearly a thousand people livin' here now," he declared, "with more comin' every week."

  "I'm impressed," Pancho said. "I really am. You guys've done a terrific job."

  George smiled boyishly behind his thick red beard. The tour ended at a closed metal door marked NANOTECH LAB. Pancho felt a pang of hopeful surprise.

  "Don't tell me Kris is back!"

  "Nah," George replied, tapping out the combination on the door's security keypad. "Dr. Cardenas is still off on the Saturn expedition."

  As he pushed the door open he added, "But she's not the only nanotech genius in the world, y'know. We've got a few of our own, right here."

  The nanotechnology lab was eerily quiet. Pancho saw gleaming cabinets of white and stainless steel lining the walls, and a double row of workbenches that held more metal boxes and instruments. She recognized the gray metal tubing of a scanning field microscope off in one corner, but the rest of the equipment was unfamiliar to her.

  "Is anybody working here?" she asked. The lab seemed empty of people, except for the two of them.

  "Should be," George said, frowning slightly. "I told 'im we'd be here."

  "Excuse me," said a soft voice behind them.

  Pancho turned to see an overweight young man with dark hair tied back in a ponytail, a neatly trimmed beard, and a slightly bemused expression on his roundish face. His thick dark brows were raised, as if he were puzzled. His lips were curled slightly into a half smile that seemed apologetic, defensive. He was wearing plain gray coveralls, but had a bright plaid vest over them. No tattoos or jewelry, except for a heavy square gold ring on his right hand.

  "I had to take a break," he said in a gentle, almost feminine voice. "I'm sorry I wasn't here when you came in."

  George clapped him on the shoulder lightly, but it was enough to make the young man totter. "That's okay, Lev. When you gotta go, you gotta go."

  He introduced Pancho to Levi Levinson, then added, "Lev here's from MIT. Brightest lad we've got. Boy genius and all that."

  Levinson didn't seem at all embarrassed by George's praise. "I learned a lot from Dr. Cardenas before she left."

  "Such as?" Pancho challenged.

  Levinson's smile turned slightly superior. "I'll show you. I've got a demonstration all set up." He gestured toward the nearer of the two workbenches.

  George dragged over a couple of high stools and offered one to Pancho as he explained, "I was after Kris for years to figure out how we could use nanomachines to separate metals from the ores in the asteroids. Lev here thinks he's solved the problem."

  Pancho felt impressed. Turning to Levinson, she asked, "Have you?"

  He looked quietly confident, almost smug. All he said was, "Watch."

  Pancho watched. Levinson took a dark, lumpy, potato-sized chunk of a metallic asteroid and deposited it into one of the big metal cubicles on the workbench. Half a dozen transparent plastic tubes led from the container to smaller bins farther down the bench. Pancho saw that a digital timer started counting seconds when Levinson clicked the lid closed.

  "It's not much of a trick to program nanomachines to separate a specific element from a gross sample," he said. "Nanos are quite capable of taking specific atoms from a sample of material. It's just a matter of programming them properly."

  "Uh-huh," said Pancho.

  "The problem's always been to separate all the different elements in a Void simultaneously, without the nanos interfering with one another."

  "And in a high-UV environment," George added.

  Levinson shrugged his rounded shoulders. "That part was easy. Just harden the nanos so UV won't dissociate them."

  Pointing to the sealed container, Pancho asked, "You mean these nanomachines won't be knocked out by ultraviolet light?"

  "That's why I keep them sealed inside the container," Levinson answered. "If they got loose they'd start taking the habitat apart, atom by atom."

  "Jeeps," Pancho muttered.

  "It's perfectly safe," Levinson calmly assured her. "The container is lined with diamond surfaces and none of the nanos are programmed to separate carbon."

  "So they can't attack people," George said.

  Levinson nodded, but Pancho thought that people also contain iron, phosphorus and a lot of other elements that those nanomachines were programmed to separate. Maybe that's why Kris dragged her feet on this project, she thought.

  A bell pinged. An electric motor whirred. Pancho saw little trickles of what looked like dirt or dust sliding down the six transparent tubes toward the bins on the workbench. As she looked closer, though, several of the growing piles seemed to glitter in the light from the overhead lamps.

  "The transport tubes are also pure diamond," Levinson said. "Just a precaution, in case a few of the nanomachines are still present in the differentiated samples."

  Pancho nodded wordlessly.

  Levinson applied a handheld mass spectrometer to each of the piles of dirt, in turn. Pure iron, pure nickel, gold, silver, platinum and lead.

  With a wave of one hand, he said, "Voila!"

  George clapped his beefy hands together. "Y'see, Pancho? With nanomachines we can mine the metals outta the 'roids easy as pie. All the slugwork gets done by the nanos. All the miners hafta do is sit back and let the little buggers do all the fookin' work!"

  "It can be done for minerals, too," Levinson said, in an offhand manner. "Easier, in fact. The nanos work at the molecular level there, rather than atomic."

  Pancho looked at each of them in turn. She stood up and planted her hands on her hips. "Fine work," she said. "Only one problem I can see."

  "What's that?"

  "This'll knock the price of metals and minerals down pretty close to zero."

  "Huh?" George grunted.

  "You're gonna make it so easy to mine the asteroids that we'll get a glut on the market," Pancho said. "And most of the miners will be thrown out of work, to boot."

  George frowned. "I didn't think of that. I was just tryin' t'make their work easier."

  "Too easy," said Pancho.

  Levinson looked completely unconcerned. "New technology always brings some economic dislocations. But think of the benefits of cheaper raw materials."

  "Yeah, sure," said Pancho. Then it hit her with the force of a body blow. "Holy cripes! Once Humphries finds out about this there's gonna be hell to pay!"

  "Whattaya mean?" George asked.

  "Once this nanotechnology starts being used, there won't be room for two competing companies in the Belt. The only way to make economic sense out of this is for one company to run the whole damned Belt, keep production of raw materials under control and set prices for the buyers. That's what he's after!"

  "But Humphries doesn't know anything about this," George said.

  "Wanna bet?" Pancho snapped.

  HUMPHRIES MANSION

  "It really works?" Humphries asked. "They've done it?"

  "It really works," said Victoria Ferrer, his latest administrative assistant. "Their top nanotech expert, this man Levinson, demonstrated it to Ms. Lane two days ago. She's on her way back here with him now."

  Ferrer was a small, light-boned young woman with large, limpid eyes, full sensuous lips and lovely large breasts. When he ha
d first interviewed her for the job, Humphries had wondered if her breasts were siliconed. They seemed oversized for the rest of her. Soon enough he found that they were natural, although enhanced by a genetic modification that Victoria's stagestruck mother had insisted upon when she was pushing her teenaged daughter into a career in show business. Young Vickie went to university instead, and earned honors in economics and finance. Eventually Humphries learned that, as good as Victoria was in bed, she was even better in the office. Ferrer's best asset, he eventually realized, was her brain. But that didn't prevent Humphries from bedding her now and then.

  At the moment, though, she was bringing him disturbing news about the nanotechnology work going on at the rock rats' habitat in the Belt.

  "That tears it," he said thoughtfully, leaning back in his self-adjusting desk chair. "I should have seen it coming. It's going to knock the bottom out of the market for asteroidal commodities."

  "Not necessarily," said Ferrer. She was seated in the plush chair in front of his desk, looking very trim and businesslike in a tailored off-white blouse and charcoal gray slacks.

  His brows knitting, Humphries said, "Don't you see? Once they start using nanomachines to get pure metals out of the asteroids, the price for those metals will sink out of sight. Minerals, too. Same thing. The major price factor will be the cost of transportation."

  "Only if the rock rats actually use nanos," Ferrer countered.

  Humphries sat up a little straighter. "You think they won't?"

  With a slight smile, she replied, "I think Ambrose is smart enough to realize that nanomachines could throw most of the miners out of work. I think he'll suppress the idea."

  "Buy off the scientist? What's his name, this kid from MIT."

  "Levinson," said Ferrer. "I doubt that he can be bought off. He's the kind who'll want the whole world to know how brilliant he is. But Ambrose and the rest of the governing council at Ceres could easily claim that nanomachines are too dangerous to use on the asteroids."

  "That sounds farfetched."

  She shook her head, just slightly, but enough to let Humphries see that she thought he was wrong. "To operate on the asteroids the nanos would have to be hardened against ultraviolet light. That means the main safety feature that Cardenas built into the nanos years ago would be disabled. Ambrose could argue that the nanos are too dangerous to use."

  "And let the rock rats keep on operating the way they have been since the beginning."

  "Exactly."

  Humphries drummed his fingers on the desktop. "That would avoid a collapse of the market."

  "Which is to the rock rats' best interests."

  "Sort of like the Luddites smashing the steam-powered looms, back at the beginning of the first industrial revolution."

  Ferrer looked puzzled for a moment, and Humphries smiled inwardly. Score one for the boss, he said to himself. I know more than you do.

  Aloud, he asked, "You really think Ambrose and the others will suppress this?"

  "My information is that he and Ms. Lane have already discussed it. I'm sure he will."

  "And use safety precautions as the excuse."

  "It's a very good excuse."

  Humphries glanced up at the ceiling's smooth cream-colored expanse, then at the holowindow on the far wall that displayed a view of Mount Kilimanjaro when it still had snow on its summit.

  "Doesn't matter," he said at last. "In the long run, this development of nanotech mining will be the last straw. I've got to get control of Astro now, before that greasemonkey Pancho realizes she can use the nanomachines to undercut my prices and—"

  "But if Astro starts using nanomachines for mining the asteroids," Ferrer interrupted, "we could do the same."

  "Yeah, and drive the price for asteroidal commodities down to nothing, or close to it," Humphries snapped. "No, I've got to get Astro into my hands now, no more delays or hesitations. Once I've got Astro we can use nanomachines to drive down the cost of mining, but we'll have a monopoly in the damned Belt so we can fix the selling prices!"

  Ferrer started to nod, then thought better of it. "What about this new company, Nairobi Industries?"

  "They don't have anything going in the Belt."

  "They might move that way, eventually."

  Humphries made a snorting, dismissive laugh. "By the time they get their base built here on the Moon and start thinking about expanding to the Belt, I'll have the whole thing in my hands. They'll be shut out before they even start."

  She looked dubious, but said nothing.

  Humphries smacked his hands together. "Okay! The gloves come off. All the preparations are in place. We knock Astro out of the Belt once and for all."

  Ferrer still looked less than enthusiastic. She rose from her chair and started for the door.

  Before she got halfway across the office, though, Humphries said, "Tell Grigor I want to see him. In half an hour. No, make it a full hour."

  And he crooked his finger at her. Dutifully, she turned around and headed back to him.

  TORCH SHIP STARPOWER III

  Like most torch ships, Starpower III was built like a dumbbell, bulbous propellant tanks on one end of a kilometer-long bucky-ball tether, habitation module on the other, with the fusion rocket engine in the center. The ship spun lazily on the ends of the long tether, producing a feeling of gravity for the crew and passengers.

  Pancho's quarters aboard her personal torch ship were comfortable, not sumptuous. The habitation module included the crew's quarters, the bridge, work spaces and storage areas, as well as Pancho's private quarters plus two more compartments for guests.

  Pancho was afraid that her lone guest on this trip from Ceres to Selene would become obstreperous. Levi Levinson was flattered almost out of his mind when Pancho told him she wanted to bring him to Selene to meet the top scientists there. "Two of 'em are on the Nobel committee," Pancho had said, with complete truthfulness and a good deal of artful suggestion.

  Levinson had immediately packed a travel bag and accompanied her to the torch ship.

  Now, though, as they approached Selene, Pancho broke the unpleasant news to him. She invited him to dinner in her private quarters and watched with secret amusement as he goggled at the array of food spread on the table between them by the ship's two galley servers.

  "You've made a terrific scientific breakthrough," she told Levinson, once the servers had left. "But I'm not sure the rock rats are gonna take advantage of it."

  Levinson's normal expression reminded Pancho of a deer caught in an automobile's headlights. Now his brows shot even higher than usual. "Not take advantage of it?" he asked, a spoonful of soup trembling halfway between the bowl and his mouth. "What do you mean?"

  Pancho had spent most of the day talking with Big George via a tight-beam laser link. George had hammered it out with the rock rats' governing council. They were dead-set against using anything that would drop the prices of the ores they mined.

  "Fookin' prices are low enough," George had growled. "We'll all go broke if they drop much more."

  Now Pancho looked into Levinson's questioning eyes and decided to avoid the truth. The kid's worked his butt off to make this breakthrough, she told herself, and now you've got to tell him it was all for nothing.

  "It's the safety problem," she temporized. "The rock rats are worried about using nanos that can't be disabled by ultraviolet light."

  Levinson blinked, slurped his soup, then put the spoon back into the bowl. "I suppose some other safety features could be built into the system," he said.

  "You think so?"

  "Trouble is, the nanos have to work in a high radiation environment. They've got to be hardened."

  "And that makes them dangerous," said Pancho.

  "Not really."

  "The miners think so."

  Levinson took a deep, distressed breath. "But if they handle the nanos properly there shouldn't be any problems."

  Pancho smiled at him like a mother. "Lev, they're miners. Rock rats. Sure, m
ost of 'em have technical degrees, but they're not scientists like you."

  "I could work out protocols for them," he mumbled, half to himself. "Safety procedures for them to follow."

  "Maybe you could," Pancho said vaguely.

  He stared down into his soup bowl for several moments, then looked back up at her. "Does this mean I can't publish my work?"

  "Publish?"

  "In The Journal of Nanotechnology. It's published in Selene and I thought I'd meet the editors while I'm there."

  Pancho thought it over for all of a half-second. A scientific journal. Maybe a hundred people in the whole solar system read it. But one of them will bring the news to Humphries, she was sure. Hell, she said to herself, the Hump prob'ly knows about it already. Not much goes on anywhere that he doesn't know about.

  "Sure you can publish it," she said easily. "No problem." Levinson broke into a boyish smile. "Oh, that's okay then. As long as I can publish and get credit for my work, I don't care what the stupid rock rats do."

  Pancho stared at him, struggling to hide her feelings. Like so many scientists, this kid's an elitist. She felt enormously relieved.

  Dorik Harbin knew all about addiction. He'd started taking narcotics when he was a teenager, still in his native Balkan village. The elders fed a rough form of hashish to the kids when they sent the youths out on missions of ethnic cleansing. As he progressed up the ladder of organized murder and rape, his need for drugs became deeper, more demanding. As a mercenary in the employ of Humphries Space Systems he had been detoxed several times, only to fall back into his habit time and again. Ironically, HSS medics supplied the medications as part of the corporation's "incentive program."

  Their meds were much better, too: designer drugs, tailored for specific needs. Drugs to help you stay awake and alert through long days and weeks of cruising alone through the Belt, seeking ships to destroy. Drugs to enhance your battle prowess, to make you fiercer, angrier, bloodier than any normal human being could be. Most of all, Harbin needed drugs to help him forget, to blot out the images of helpless men and women screaming for mercy as they floated into space from their broken spacecraft to drift in their survival pods or even alone in their spacesuits, drift like flailing, begging, terrified dust motes until at last death quieted their beseeching voices and they wafted through space in eternal silence.