by Ben Bova
The Sudanese executive officer noted with some relief that the three fleeing enemy ships had turned away from the sprinkling of small rocks that they had been approaching. They want no more to do with that danger than I do, he said to himself.
“We’re well within range,” said the weapons officer.
“Locked on?”
Without even glancing at her console, the weapons officer said, “Five lasers are locked onto each of the enemy’s vessels, sir.”
“Get on their tails,” Gormley said. “They may be armored, but they can’t armor their thruster nozzles. Hit their thrusters and we’ve got them crippled.”
Of course, thought the Sudanese. But his attention was still on those small rocks off to their starboard. Strange to see such small objects without a larger asteroid that gave birth to them. They’re like a reef in the ocean, a danger lurking, waiting to smash unsuspecting ships. Then he thought, For a man who was brought up far from the sea, you’ve become quite a mariner.
Harbin heard the alarm in the voice of his pilot. “They’re firing at us! Firing at all three of us.”
“They can’t do much damage at this range,” he said calmly.
“If they hit our thrusters…” The pilot turned in his chair and saw the set of Harbin’s jaw. “Sir,” he added lamely.
“All ships,” Harbin commanded, “increase elevation three degrees, now.”
To his exec he said, “Activate the rocks.”
“They’re maneuvering!” sang out the weapons officer.
Gormley saw it on the nav screen. “Keep locked onto them. Don’t let them get away!”
Even the Sudanese had turned his attention away from the small rocks that were now fairly far off to their starboard to concentrate on the battle action. The enemy ships were maneuvering in unison, which was foolish. Far better, when being chased, to maneuver independently and set up a more difficult targeting problem for the attackers.
The collision-avoidance radar began to bong loudly.
“What in blazes is that?” Gormley shouted.
The navigation screen automatically switched to show several dozen meter-sized rocks hurtling toward Gormley’s ships. The Sudanese could see glowing plumes of exhaust plasma thrusting the rocks toward them.
How simple! he realized. Set up small rocks with plasma thrusters and guidance chips, lure your enemy toward them, and then fire the rocks into your enemy’s ships. How simple. And how deadly.
The rocks were moving at high velocity when they smashed into the Astro Corporation ships. They tore the ships apart, like high-speed bullets fired through tin cans. One of them blasted through the bridge of Antares, ripped through the helmeted head of the ship’s pilot and plowed out the other side of the bridge while the woman’s decapitated body showered blood everywhere. Screams and cries of horror filled the Sudanese’s helmet earphones. Cursing wildly, he cut off the suit radio as his chair ripped free of its mounting on the ship’s deck and crashed through the gaping hole in the bridge where the rock had gone through. He felt his left arm snap, and a dizzying wave of excruciating pain shot down his spine. Then he felt and heard nothing.
He was spinning slowly, slowly through empty space, still strapped into his broken chair. He could feel nothing below his neck. He could hardly breathe. Through tear-filled eyes he saw the shattered remnants of Gormley’s fleet, broken and smashed pieces of spacecraft, bodies floating in their space suits, a proud armada reduced in a few seconds to a slowly spreading patch of debris. Flotsam, he thought idly. We are going to die in this empty wilderness.
“My god,” whispered someone on the bridge of Samarkand.
Harbin also stared at the destruction. The Astro fleet looked as if it had gone through a shredder. A meatgrinder. Bodies and wreckage were strewn everywhere, spinning, tumbling, coasting through space.
“Should we pick up the survivors?” his pilot asked, in a hushed voice.
Harbin shook his head. “There are no survivors.”
“But maybe some—”
“There are no survivors,” he repeated harshly. But his eyes lingered on the display screen. A few hundred new asteroids have been added to the Belt, he told himself. Some of them were once human beings.
ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS
“Wiped out?” Pancho asked, her insides suddenly gone hollow.
“Every ship,” said Jake Wanamaker. “No survivors.” He looked grim, beaten.
“What happened?”
Wanamaker was standing before her desk like a man facing a firing squad. Pancho pushed herself to her feet and gestured him to one of the comfortably padded chairs arranged around the small oval table in the corner of her office. Feeling shaky, her knees rubbery, she went to the table and sat next to her military commander. “We’re not certain. We got a brief signal that they used small asteroids—some of them no bigger than a man’s fist—and rammed them into Gormley’s ships.”
“How could they do that?” Pancho asked.
“Attach a plasma rocket and a simple guidance system to the rock,” said Wanamaker. “It doesn’t have to be fancy. Just juice the rocks up to very high velocity and ram them into our ships. Like buckshot hitting paper bags.”
“And they’re all dead?”
Wanamaker nodded bleakly.
Jesus sufferin’ Christ, Pancho thought. Thirteen ships. A hundred and fifty people, just about.
“I think I should tender my resignation,” said Wanamaker.
Pancho glared at him. “Giving up?”
He flinched as though she’d slapped him. “No. But a defeat like this… you’ll probably want a better man to head your war.”
Shaking her head slowly, Pancho said, “No, I want you, Jake. One battle doesn’t mean we’ve lost it all.”
But inwardly she thought, I want you to keep on heading the military operations. But I’ll take charge of this goddamned war. Humphries might have the edge on us militarily, with more mercenaries and more ships and better experience. But there’s more than one way to fight a war.
To Wanamaker, she said, “I’m not giving up. Far as I’m concerned, this war’s just started.”
“ ‘I have not yet begun to fight,’ ” he muttered.
“I heard that one,” Pancho said. “John Paul Jones, wasn’t it?”
Wanamaker nodded.
“Okay. You recruit more mercenaries, I’ll buy more ships. For the time being, Humphries has the run of the Belt. He’s gonna attack any Astro vessels he can find out there, try to drive us out of the Belt altogether.”
“Convoy them.”
“Convoy?”
“Don’t let them sail alone. Put them in groups. It’s harder to attack a formation of armed ships than a single ship.”
“Makes sense,” Pancho agreed. “I’ll send out the word right away.”
“I think Yamagata Corporation can provide us with reliable mercenaries.”
“Good. Go get ’em.”
It took a moment for Wanamaker to realize he’d been dismissed. It only hit him when Pancho pushed her chair back from the conference table and got to her feet. He shot up and started to salute, then caught himself and reddened slightly.
“I’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said, as if excusing himself for leaving the room.
“Me too,” said Pancho.
Wanamaker left, and Pancho returned to her desk. She called up reports on where the Astro ships were, and where Humphries’s vessels were. A holographic representation of the vast space between Earth and the Belt took form in the air beyond her desk, a huge dark expanse with flickering pinpoints of light showing the positions of the ships, Astro’s in blue, HSS’s in red. There was a cluster of ships between the Earth and Moon; Pancho blanked them out to simplify the three-dimensional picture.
Cripes, there’s a lot of red ones out in the Belt, she said to herself. And those are just the ones we know about. The Humper’s prob’ly got a lot more out there, moving around the Belt without any telemetry or identification b
eacons for the IAA to pick up.
She had the computer identify the ore freighters, logistics carriers, and ships carrying miners to specific asteroids. Then she added the freelancers, the prospectors and miners who worked on their own, independent of the big corporations.
Minutes ticked into hours as she studied the situation. We’re outnumbered in the Belt two, three to one, Pancho saw. The Hump’s been building up his fleet out there for years now. We’ve gotta play catch-up.
But why should we play their game? she asked herself. That’s what we were doing with Gormley and look what it got us.
She leaned back in her softly yielding desk chair and closed her eyes briefly. What’s the point of all those ships out in the Belt? To bring ores to the factories on Earth, or in Earth orbit, or here at Selene, she answered her own question.
She stared at the hologram imagery again. Flickering red dots representing HSS ships were spread through the Belt, with a particular clustering around Vesta. But a thinner trickle of red dots was plying the lanes between the Belt and the Earth/Moon vicinity.
They’ve gotta bring the goods back here, Pancho saw. That’s the whole point of mining the rocks. If we can knock off their ships coming Earthward, we can hit Humphries in the pocketbook, strangle his cash flow, cut his profits down to nothing.
She sat up straight in the desk chair and said aloud, “That’s the way to do it! Let him have the Belt for now. Stop him from bringing the ores to market.”
We don’t need naval tactics, she realized. We don’t need battles between fleets of warships. What we need is more like a gang of pirates. Like the old Sea Hawks from Queen Elizabeth I’s time. Privateers. Pirates.
And she knew just the man who could lead such a campaign. Lars Fuchs.
“All of them?” Humphries asked, as if the news was too good to be true.
Vicki Ferrer was not smiling, but it was clear from the pleased expression on her face that she was happy to be able to bring her boss a positive report.
“Every Astro ship was destroyed,” she repeated.
They were in the big library/bar on the ground floor of Humphries’s mansion, alone except for the robot bartender, which stood at its post, gleaming stainless steel reflecting the ceiling lights.
“You’re sure?” Humphries asked.
“The report came directly from the Yamagata team. Their idea about using the rocks worked perfectly. The Astro fleet charged right into them. No survivors.”
“This calls for champagne!” Humphries strode to the bar. The robot did not move. Nettled slightly at the machine’s obtuseness, Humphries called out, “Bartender! Champagne!” The gleaming dome-topped robot trundled sideways along the bar and stopped precisely at the wine cooler. Two slim arms extruded from its cylindrical body, opened the cooler, and pulled out a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. It trundled back to Humphries and held up the bottle so he could inspect the label.
“Fine,” said Humphries. “Open it and let me sample it.”
“How does it find the right bottle?” Ferrer asked, coming over to sit on the stool next to him. Even though it was dinner time for most people, she was still in her office attire, a miniskirted baby pink suit that hugged her curves artfully.
“There’s a sensor in each hand,” said Humphries, watching the dumb machine gripping the cork. If he drops that bottle, Humphries thought, I’ll run him through the recycler.
The cork came out with a satisfactorily loud pop and the robot set two champagne flutes on the bar top in front of Humphries, then poured a thimbleful of wine for him to taste.
Humphries tasted, nodded, told the robot to pour. Once it had, he lifted his glass to Ferrer and toasted, “To victory!”
She made a smile and murmured, “To victory.”
“We’ve got them on the run now,” Humphries said happily. “I’m going to drive Astro completely out of the Belt!”
Ferrer smiled again and sipped. But she was thinking, Thirteen ships destroyed. How many people did we kill? How many more have to die before this is over?
HOTEL LUNA: RESIDENTIAL SUITE
Pancho could not locate Fuchs. For two days she had her people search for him. They learned that under the false identity she had provided, Fuchs had spent a few days in his native Switzerland, then flown to Selene.
“He’s here in Selene?” she asked her security chief.
The man looked uncomfortable. “Apparently.”
“Find him,” she snapped. “Wherever the hell he is, find him. You got twenty-four hours.”
She had just returned to her suite when the phone told her the report on Fuchs came in. She glanced at her wristwatch. Eight minutes before midnight, Pancho saw. They’re working overtime.
The suite’s decor was set to Camelot, Pancho’s fantasy of what King Arthur’s fabled castle might have been like. She sat herself on one of the sofas in her bedroom and told the phone to play the report. Through a mullioned window she could see knights jousting on a perfect greensward beneath a cloudless blue sky, watched by a cheering throng standing before tented pavilions complete with colorful pennants that fluttered in the breeze of an eternal springtime.
The young man whose hologram image appeared in the middle of the room might have been one of knights of the Round Table, Pancho thought idly. He was a good-looking blond, strong shoulders, honest open face with sky-blue eyes, his hair stylishly long enough for ringlets to curl around the collar of his jacket. He was sitting at a desk in what appeared to be a smallish office somewhere in the Astro headquarters. The data line hovering to one side of the image identified him as Frederic Karstein, Astro security department.
Pancho listened to the brief report with growing incredulity. And annoyance.
“You mean he was right here in the Hotel Luna?” she asked the image.
The image flickered momentarily. Then the handsome Frederic Karstein said, “Ms. Lane, I’m live now. I can answer your questions in real time, ma’am.”
“Are you telling me that Fuchs was living just a couple hundred meters from my own quarters?” she demanded.
“Yes, ma’am, apparently he was.”
“And where is he now?” Karstein shrugged his broad shoulders. “We don’t know. He seems to have disappeared.”
“Disappeared? How can he disappear?”
“If we knew that, Ms. Lane, we’d probably know where he is.”
’You can’t just disappear! Selene’s not that big, and the whole doggone place is under surveillance all the time.”
Karstein looked embarrassed. “We’re certain he hasn’t left Selene. We’ve checked the passenger lists for all the outgoing flights for the past two weeks, and examined the surveillance camera records.”
“So he’s someplace here in Selene?”
“It would appear so.”
Pancho huffed. “All right. Stay on this. I want him found, and right away, too.”
“We’ll do our best, Ms. Lane.”
She cut the connection and Karstein’s image winked out. Dumb blond, Pancho groused to herself.
“Privateers?” Jake Wanamaker asked, his rasping voice croaking out the word. “You mean, like pirates?”
Pancho had invited him to a breakfast meeting in her suite. They sat in the tight little alcove off the kitchen, but the holowalls made it seem as if they were outdoors, beneath a graceful elm tree, with softly rolling grassy hills in the distance and the morning sun brightening a clear sky. She could hear birds chirping happily and almost felt a cool breeze ruffling their table linen.
Pancho took a sip of grapefruit juice, then replied, “Yep. Yo-ho-ho and all that stuff. Cut off Humphries’s ships as they’re bringing their payloads here to the Moon. Or to Earth.”
Wanamaker took a considerable bite out of the sticky bun he was holding in one big hand, chewed thoughtfully for a few moments, then swallowed. “They’ve beaten the crap out of us in the Belt, sure enough. It’ll be some time before we can build up enough forces to challenge them again.”
&nbs
p; “But a few ships operating closer to home, outside the Belt…” Pancho let the suggestion hang in the air between them.
Wanamaker muttered, “Cut HSS’s pipeline to the market. Hit Humphries in the pocketbook.”
“That’s where it’d hurt him the most.”
After washing down his cake with a gulp of black coffee, Wanamaker said, “Set up a blockade.”
“Right.”
Absently wiping his sticky fingers with his napkin, Wanamaker broke into a wicked grin. “We wouldn’t even need crewed ships for that. Just automate some small birds and park them in wide orbits around the Earth/Moon system.”
“You can do that?”
He nodded. “They’d be close enough to be remotely operated from here at Selene. It’d be cheaper than using crewed ships.”
Pancho had only one further question. “How soon can we get this going?”
Wanamaker pushed his chair back from the table and got to his feet. “Real soon,” he said. “Very damned real soon.”
Pancho watched him hurry away, thinking, So I won’t need Lars after all. Doesn’t matter where he’s hiding. I won’t need him now.
Later that morning, with some reluctance, Pancho slipped on the soft-suit and sealed the opening that ran the length of the torso’s front. Doug Stavenger was already in his suit. To Pancho he looked as if he’d been packed into a plastic-wrap food container, except for the fishbowl helmet he held cradled in his arms.
“This thing really works?” she asked, picking up her helmet from the shelf in the locker.
Stavenger nodded, smiling at her. “It’s been tested for months now, Pancho. I’ve worn it outside myself several times. You’re going to love it.”
She felt totally unconvinced. Never fly in a new airplane, she remembered from her first days as a pilot. Never eat in a new restaurant on its opening day.
Plucking at the transparent nanomachined fabric with gloved fingers, she said, “Kinda flimsy.”
“But it works like a charm.”
“That mean you gotta say prayers over it?”
