The Silent War gt-11

by Ben Bova

Stavenger laughed. “Come on, Pancho. Once we’re outside you’ll wonder how you were ever able to stand those clunky cermet suits.”

  “Uh-huh.” She could see the enthusiasm in his eyes, his smile, his whole demeanor. He’s like a kid with a new toy, she thought.

  But he was right. It took roughly ten minutes to walk from the airlock at Selene to Factory Number Eleven, out on the floor of the giant crater Alphonsus. Before even five minutes were up, Pancho had fallen in love with the softsuit.

  “It’s terrific,” she said to Stavenger, shuffling along beside her, his boots kicking up gentle clouds of dust. “It’s like being without a suit, almost.”

  “I told you, didn’t I?”

  Pancho held both hands before her and flexed her fingers. “Hot spit! Even the gloves are easy to work. This is like magic!”

  “Not magic. Just nanotechnology.”

  “And the radiation protection?”

  “About the same as a hard-shell suit,” Stavenger said. “We could add electromagnetic shielding, but that would probably attract a lot of dust from the ground.”

  She nodded inside her helmet.

  “You’re okay for short time periods on the surface,” Stavenger went on. “Off the Moon an electromagnetic system can be added to the suits easily enough.”

  Pancho asked, “Doug, ol’ pal, how’d you like to sign a contract with Astro to manufacture and distribute these softsuits?”

  He laughed. “No thanks, Pancho. Selene’s going to develop this product. We’ll sell them at pretty close to cost, too.”

  Pancho understood the meaning behind his words. If Selene signed up with Astro for selling the suits, Humphries would complain. If Selene gave a contract to HSS, Astro would fight it. She nodded again inside the fishbowl helmet. Better to keep this out of either corporation’s hands. Better to let Selene handle this one themselves.

  The low curving roof of the factory loomed before them. Stavenger and Pancho climbed the stairs to the edge of the factory’s thick concrete slab, then stepped through the “car wash,” the special airlock that scrubbed their suits free of dust and other contaminants before they were allowed to enter the ultra-pure domain of the factory itself. Pancho felt the jets and scrubbers pummeling her brutally.

  “Hey Doug,” she gasped. “You gotta reset these things to go easier.”

  His voice in her helmet earphones sounded bemused. “We did reset them, Pancho. They would’ve knocked you flat if we’d left them at the same power level we used for the hard-shell suits.”

  It took Pancho a few moments to catch her breath once she had stepped out of the “car wash” and onto the factory floor. As Stavenger came up beside her, also breathing heavily, she looked out at the two completed spacecraft. Their diamond hulls looked dark, like ominous shadows lurking beneath the curved roof of the factory.

  “There they are,” Stavenger said tightly. “One for you and one for Humphries.”

  She understood the tension in his voice. “Two brand-new warships. So we can go out and kill some more mercenaries.”

  Stavenger said nothing.

  “We’ve got six more under contract, right?” she asked.

  After several heartbeats, Stavenger said, “Yes. And we’re building the same number for Humphries.”

  “So no matter who wins, Selene makes money.”

  “I don’t like it, Pancho. I don’t like any of this. If I could convince the governing council to renege on these contracts, I would.”

  “I don’t like it either, Doug. But what else can we do? Let the Humper take over the whole danged solar system?”

  He fell silent again.

  As they trudged back in silence toward the airlock at Selene, Pancho said to herself: Deadlock. Selene doesn’t want either one of us to win. They don’t want one side to beat the other and become master of the whole solar system. Even if Astro wins, if I win, Selene’s scared shitless that they’ll be under my thumb. Doug wants to see Humphries and Astro fight ourselves into exhaustion, and then he’ll step in and be the peacemaker again.

  So they’re doing their best to keep us even. They won’t make a warship for Humphries without making one for Astro. Keeps them neutral, Doug says. Keeps us in a deadlock, that’s what it keeps.

  There’s gotta be some way out of this, some way to break through and beat the Humper before we’re both so broke and dead-flat exhausted that both our corporations go bust.

  If I could get Lars to help us, she thought. He might just be able to tip the scales in our favor. But the l’il bugger has disappeared. What’s he up to? Why’s he gone to ground on me?

  Shaking her head inside the fishbowl helmet, Pancho considered: We need an outside force, a partner, an ally. Somebody who can tip the scales in Astro’s favor. Outmaneuver Humphries. Overpower him. Some way to outflank HSS.

  Then it hit her. Nairobi! That guy from Nairobi Industries wanted a strategic alliance with Astro. I wonder if he’s still interested? I’ll have to look him up soon’s I get back to the office, whatever his name was.

  ASTRO CORPORATION COMMAND CENTER

  Jake Wanamaker’s command center was a cluster of offices set slightly apart from the rest of Astro Corporation’s headquarters. With wry humor, Wanamaker mused that Humphries could do more damage to Astro, at far less cost, by attacking these offices and wiping out the corporation’s military command. But even war has its rules, and one of the fundamental rules of this conflict was that no violence would be tolerated anywhere on the Moon. The side that broke that rule would bring Selene and its considerable financial and manufacturing clout into the battle as an enemy.

  So despite the purely perfunctory guards stationed at the double doors of the command center, armed with nothing more than sidearms, Wanamaker had little fear of being attacked here in Selene. He went through the doors and down the central corridor, heading for his own office to a chorus of “Good morning, Admiral” accompanied by military salutes. Wanamaker returned each salute scrupulously: good discipline began with mutual respect, he felt.

  Wanamaker’s office was spartan. The battleship-gray metal furniture was strictly utilitarian. The only decorations on the walls were citations he had garnered over his years of service. The wallscreens were blank as his staff filed in and took their chairs along the scuffed old conference table that butted against his desk. Wanamaker had salvaged them both from his last sea command, an amphibious assault command vessel.

  He spent the morning outlining Pancho’s idea of setting up a blockade against incoming HSS ore carriers.

  “Unmanned craft?” asked one of his junior officers.

  “Uncrewed,” Wanamaker corrected, “remotely operated from here.”

  One of the women officers asked, “Here in Selene? Won’t that get Stavenger and the governing council riled up?”

  “Not if we don’t commit any violent acts here in Selene,” Wanamaker replied, smiling coldly. Then he added, “And especially if they don’t know about it.”

  “It won’t be easy to build and launch the little robots without Stavenger’s people finding out about it.”

  “We can build them easily enough in Astro’s factories up on the surface and launch them aboard Astro boosters. No need for Selene to get worked up over this.”

  The younger officers glanced at each other up and down the conference table, while Wanamaker watched from behind his desk. They get the idea, he saw. I’m not asking for their opinions about the idea, I’m telling them that they’ve got to make it work.

  “Well,” his engineering chief said, “we can build the little suckers easily enough. Nothing exotic about putting together a heavy laser with a communications system and some station-keeping gear.”

  “Good,” said Wanamaker.

  Gradually the rest of the staff warmed to the idea.

  At length he asked, “How long will it take?”

  “We could have the first ones ready to launch in a couple of weeks,” said the engineer.

  Wanamaker silently d
oubled the estimate.

  “Wait,” cautioned the intelligence officer, a plump Armenian with long, straight dark hair and darker eyes. “Each of these birds will need sensors to identify potential targets and aim the lasers.”

  “No worries,” said the Australian electronics officer. “We can do that in two shakes of a sheep’s tail. Piece of cake.”

  “Besides,” pointed out the engineer, “the birds will be operated from here, with human brains in the loop.”

  The intelligence officer looked dubious, but voiced no further objections.

  “All right, then,” said Wanamaker at last. “Let’s get to work on this. Pronto. Time is of the essence.” That broke up the meeting. But as the staff officers were shuffling toward the door, Wanamaker called the intelligence officer back to his desk.

  “Sit down, Willie,” he said, gesturing to the chair on the desk’s left side. He knew she disliked to be called by her real name, Wilhelmina. The things parents do to their kids, Wanamaker thought.

  She sat, looking curious, almost worried.

  Wanamaker took a breath, then said, “We need a diversion.”

  “Sir?”

  “Humphries has beat the hell out of us in the Belt, and it’s going to be months before we can start fighting back.”

  “But Jess said he’d have the first robots on station in two weeks,” the intelligence officer countered.

  “Two weeks plus Murphy’s Law,” Wanamaker said.

  Her dark eyes lit with understanding. “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

  “Especially in a wartime situation. I know the staff will push as hard as they can, but I don’t expect to be able to hit back to HSS with these robot systems for at least a month, maybe more.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Meanwhile, we need a diversion. Something to knock the HSS people off their feet a little, shake them up, make them realize we’re not going to lay down and die.”

  “Such as?”

  He grinned lopsidedly at her. “That’s what I want you to figure out, kid.”

  She did not smile back. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  ASTEROID 73-241

  Levinson felt distinctly uneasy in the space suit. It was bad enough to have to fly out to this remote piece of rock in the middle of nowhere, carrying the heavily armored flask of nanomachines he had produced in the HSS lab at Selene. Now he had to actually go out of the ship like some superjock astronaut and supervise the crew he had brought with him.

  “Me?” he had asked, alarmed, when Vickie Ferrer had told him that Martin Humphries himself wanted Lev to personally supervise the experiment.

  “You,” she had replied, silky smooth. “It’s to your advantage to handle the job yourself. Why let someone else take the credit for it?”

  As he hung weightlessly between the slowly spinning torch ship and the lumpy dark asteroid, clipped to the tether that was anchored to the ship’s airlock, Lev realized that Vickie had played him like a puppet. Her alluring smiles and promising cleavage, her smoky voice and tantalizing hints of what would be possible after he had succeeded with his nanomachines had brought him out here, to this dark and cold emptiness, face to face with a pitted, ugly chunk of rock the size of a football field.

  Well, he told himself, when I get back she’ll be waiting for me. She said as much. I’ll be a big success and she’ll be so impressed she’ll do whatever I want her to.

  Prodded by Ferrer’s implicit promises, Levinson had rushed through the laboratory work. Producing nanomachines that were not damaged by ultraviolet light was no great feat; the trick was to keep them contained so they couldn’t get loose and start eating up everything in sight. It was after he’d accomplished that that Ferrer had told him he must go out to the Belt and personally supervise the experiment.

  So here I am, he said to himself, shuddering inside the space suit. It’s so absolutely empty out here! Despite his cerebral knowledge that the Asteroid Belt was mostly empty space, he found the dark silence unsettling. It’s like being in a football stadium with only one seat occupied, he thought. Like being all alone in an empty city. There were the stars, of course, but they just made Levinson feel spookier. There were millions of them, countless myriads of them crowding the sky so much that the old friendly constellations he knew from Earth were blotted out, swamped in the multitudes. And they didn’t twinkle, they just hung up there as if they were watching, solemn unblinking eyes staring down at him.

  “We’re ready to unseal the bugs.” The voice of one of his technicians grated in his earphones, startling Levinson out of his thoughts.

  “They’re not bugs,” he replied automatically. “They’re nanomachines.”

  “Yeah, right. We’re ready to open the jug.”

  Levinson pulled himself slowly along the tether to its other end, anchored in the solid rock of the little asteroid. His two technicians floated above the rock, able to flit back and forth on the minijet thruster units attached to their backpacks. Levinson, a novice at extravehicular activities, kept himself firmly clipped to the tether. He carried the “jug,” a sealed bottle made of pure diamond, on the utility belt around the waist of his space suit.

  He planted his feet on the asteroid and, much to his consternation, immediately bounced off. In his earphones he heard one of his techs snicker softly.

  “Newton’s laws work even out here,” he said, to cover his embarrassment.

  He approached the rock more slowly and, after two more tries, finally got his boots to stay on the surface. He could see the puffs of dust where he first landed still hanging in the asteroid’s minuscule gravity.

  The technicians had marked concentric fluorescent circles across the surface of the rock, like a glowing bull’s-eye. Cameras back in the ship would record how quickly the nanomachines spread from the release point, chewing up the rock as they went. Levinson went to the center of the circles, tugging on his tether, bobbing up and off the asteroid’s surface with each step he took. He heard no giggling from his technicians this time. Probably they’ve turned their transmitters off, he thought.

  It was clumsy working in the space suit’s gloves, even with the tiny servomotors on the backs to help him flex the fingers. Finally Levinson unsealed the bottle and placed it, open end down, on the exact center of the bull’s-eye. Again, the light gravity worked against him. The bottle bobbed up from the surface as soon as he took his hand off it. Frowning, he pushed it down and held it for a moment, then carefully removed his hand. The bottle stayed put. Looking up, he saw that both his technicians were hovering well clear of the rock. Scared of the nanomachines, Levinson thought. Well, better to be safe than sorry. He grabbed the tether with both hands and hauled himself off the asteroid, then started his hand-over-hand return to the ship.

  The tether suddenly went slack, and for a fearful moment Levinson thought something had gone wrong. Then he saw that it was still fastened to the ship’s airlock and remembered that the techs were supposed to set off an explosive charge that released the end of the tether attached to the asteroid. In the vacuum of space he couldn’t hear the pop of the explosive bolt. It took a surprisingly tough effort to turn around, but once he did he saw the other end of the tether hanging limply in empty space.

  And the asteroid was vanishing! Levinson’s eyes goggled at how fast the nanomachines were chewing up the asteroid, leaving a rising cloud of dust that grew so rapidly the solid rock itself was quickly obscured. It’s like piranhas eating up a chunk of meat, he thought, recalling videos he had seen of the voracious fish setting a South American stream a-boil as they attacked their prey.

  “Start the spectrometer!” Levinson called excitedly as he resumed tugging his way back to the ship.

  In less than a minute he could see the sparkling dazzle of a laser beam playing over the expanding dust cloud.

  Puffing with exertion, he saw as he approached the airlock that its hatch was closed. His two assistants had jetted to the ship ahead of him, he realized.

&nbs
p; “What’re you getting?” he asked into his helmet microphone.

  The technician running the spectrometer aboard the ship answered, “Iron, lead, platinum, silver —”

  “Pure elements or compounds?” Levinson demanded, watching the asteroid dissolve like a log being chewed up by a wood chipper.

  “Atomic species mostly. Some compounds that look pretty weird, but most of it is pure atomic species.”

  The weird stuff must be the nanos, Levinson thought. He had programmed them to shut down after forty-eight hours. At this rate there wouldn’t be anything left of the asteroid in forty-eight hours except a cloud of individual atoms. Wow! he thought. It works even better than I expected. Vickie’s going to be impressed, all right.

  ADMIRAL WANAMAKER’S OFFICE

  The spare, austere office was empty except for Wanamaker himself and Wilhelmina Tashkajian, his intelligence officer. She was short, round, dark, and, according to the scuttlebutt that floated around the office, a pretty good amateur belly dancer. All Wanamaker knew for certain was that she had a fine, sharp mind, the kind that can analyze information and draw valid conclusions more quickly than anyone else on his staff. That was all he wanted to know about her.

  They sat on opposite sides of the conference table that extended from the admiral’s desk. Like all of Wanamaker’s officers, Tashkajian wore plain gray coveralls with her name and rank spelled out on a smart-chip badge clipped to the flap of her breast pocket. Wanamaker himself wore the same uniform.

  He looked up from the report on the display screen built into the table’s top. “They’re testing nanomachines?”

  She nodded, her dark eyes somber. “Humphries recruited the scientist that Pancho brought back here from Ceres. Snatched him right out from under our noses.”

  Wanamaker grimaced. “She should have kept him on Astro’s payroll.”

  “Too late for that, sir.”

  “And they’re already in test phase?”

  Another nod. “From the information we’ve gathered, they went through the laboratory phase very quickly, and then sent this Dr. Levinson and a crew of technicians out to the Belt. Conclusion: They’re testing nanomachines on an asteroid.”