by Ben Bova
Harbin could see the Astro warships deploying to meet his solo attack. He felt sweat trickling down his ribs, cold and annoying. Once we let loose the rocks we’ll have no protection against their lasers, he knew. But they’ll be too busy to fire on us. He hoped.
“Decelerate,” he ordered. “Reduce to one-half g.”
The pilot tried to slow the ship smoothly, but still Harbin felt as if his insides were being yanked out of him. The comm tech moaned like a wounded creature and the entire ship seemed to creak and complain, metal screeching against metal.
As the ship slowed, though, the thousands of rocks of her rubble shield—fist-sized and smaller— kept on moving in a straight line, blindly following their own inertia as they hurtled toward the Astro vessels.
“Turn one hundred eighty degrees,” Harbin snapped.
The sudden lurching turn was too much for the comm tech; she retched and slumped over the armrest of her chair. Samarkand was no racing yacht. The ship turned slowly, slowly toward the right. Some of the remaining rocks ground against the hull, a dull grating sound that made even the pilot look up with wide, frightened eyes.
Harbin paid no attention to anything but the main screen. The Astro vessels were in the path of a speeding avalanche of stones as most of Samarkand’s erstwhile shielding came plunging toward them.
“Keep the stones between us and them,” Harbin told the pilot. “We can still use them to shield us.”
The display screen was filled with the rubble now. Harbin saw a brief splash of laser light as one of the Astro warships fired into the approaching avalanche. With his armrest keyboard he widened the scope of the display.
The Astro captains knew what had happened to Gormley, too. For a heartstopping few seconds they maintained their formation, but then their nerve broke and the two escorting warships scattered, leaving the bigger, more ponderous freighter squarely in the path of the approaching stones.
The freighter tried to maneuver away from the avalanche but it was too slow, too cumbersome to escape. Its captain did manage to turn it enough so that its bulky cargo of asteroidal ores took the brunt of the cascade.
Harbin watched, fascinated, as the blizzard of rocks struck the freighter. Most of them hit the massive cargo of ores that the ship carried in its external grippers. Harbin saw sparks, puffs of dust, as the stones struck in the complete silence of airless space.
“I wouldn’t want to be in that shooting gallery,” the executive officer muttered. Harbin glanced away from the screen momentarily, saw that the weapons tech was tending to the comm technician, who was sitting up woozily in her chair.
The rocks continued to pound the freighter. Harbin saw a flash of glittering vapor that quickly winked out. Must have hit part of the crew module, he thought. That was air escaping.
“Where are those two escort ships?” he asked aloud.
The pilot chuckled. “On their way back to Selene, from the looks of it.”
Why not? Harbin thought. They don’t have a ship to escort anymore. Why risk their butts in a three-against-two engagement?
He called his two other ships and told them to stand by in case the two Astro warships returned. Then he commanded his pilot to move Samarkand closer to the crippled freighter.
“We’ve got to finish her off,” he said.
The pilot asked, “Do you want me to open a frequency to her? I can take over the comm console, sir.”
Harbin shook his head. He had no desire to talk with the survivors, if there were any still alive aboard the freighter. His job now was to complete the destruction of the ship, which meant that anyone still breathing aboard her was going to die.
“No need to talk to them,” he said to the pilot. Then, to the weapons tech, “Get back to your post and arm the lasers. Time to finish this job.”
SELENE: ASTRO COMMAND CENTER
Admiral Wanamaker had expected his intelligence officer to be excited, or perhaps worried. Instead, she looked deadly calm. And determined.
“Willie,” he said, “I can’t let you go on this mission. I’m sure you understand why.”
Tashkajian remained standing in front of his desk, her dark eyes unwavering. “This mission is my idea, sir. I don’t think I should expect others to take risks that I’m not prepared to take myself.”
Gently, trying not to injure her pride, Wanamaker said, “But I need you here, Willie. You’re my intelligence officer, and a damned good one. I can’t afford to risk you.”
Her steadfast pose faltered just a little. “But, sir, it’s not right for me to stay here while the crew dashes out to the Belt inside that radiation cloud.”
He smiled slightly. “You assured me it was perfectly safe, Willie.”
“It is!” she blurted. “But… well, you know, there’s always a chance…” Her voice trailed off for a moment, then she snapped, “Dammit, sir, you know what I mean!”
“Yes I do,” he admitted. “But you’re not going. You’ve picked a crew and the ship is ready to go out inside the radiation cloud to attack the HSS base at Vesta. You are staying here, where you belong. Where I need you to be.”
“That’s not fair, sir!”
“I have no intention of being fair. This is a war we’re fighting, not some playground game.”
“But—”
“The ship goes without you,” Wanamaker said, as firmly as he could manage. “That is final.”
“Welcome to Shining Mountain Base,” said Daniel Tsavo, beaming so widely Pancho thought she could see his molars.
He was standing at the end of the flexible tube that had been snaked out to the hopper from the airlock of the base structure.
Shifting the travel bag on her shoulder, Pancho took his extended hand, smiling back at him, and looked around. The interior of the Nairobi facility looked bare-bones, no-nonsense efficiency. Undecorated metal walls. Ribbed dome overhead. Tractors scuffed and grimy with lunar dust.
“Nice of you to invite me,” Pancho said, knowing that she had actually invited herself.
“I’m glad you got here before the solar storm strikes. We’ll be safely underground before the radiation begins to mount.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Pancho.
Tsavo led her to a pair of gleaming metal doors. They slid open to reveal an elevator.
“Most of our base is underground, of course,” he said as he gestured her into the cab.
“Just like Selene.”
“Just like Selene,” he agreed as the doors slid shut and the cab began dropping so fast Pancho’s stomach lurched.
Wanamaker had been dead-set against this visit. When Pancho had told him she was going to look over the Nairobi base, his holographic image had turned stony.
“Pancho, the head of the corporation shouldn’t walk into a potential enemy base all by herself.”
“Enemy?” Pancho’s brows had shot up. “Nairobi’s not an enemy of ours.”
“How do you know?” Wanamaker had demanded. “You’re at war, Pancho, and anybody who isn’t an ally is potentially an enemy.”
Pancho didn’t believe it.
“At least take a security team with you,” Wanamaker insisted.
“I can take care of myself.”
As Tsavo guided her along the tunnels of the Nairobi base, though, Pancho began to wonder about her bravado. The place was larger than she had expected, much larger. Construction crews in dark blue coveralls seemed to be everywhere, drilling, digging, hauling equipment on electrically powered minitractors, yelling to each other, lifting, banging. The noise was incredible and incessant. Tsavo had to shout to make himself heard. And everything smelled brand new: fresh paint, concrete dust, sprays of lubricants and sealants in the air.
Pancho smiled and nodded as Tsavo shouted himself hoarse explaining what they were walking through. Living quarters would be there, offices on the other side of that corridor, laboratories, storerooms, a big conference room that could be converted into a theater, the base control center: all still unfinished,
raw concrete and lunar rock and plans for the future.
Many of the workers were Asians, Pancho saw.
“Contract labor,” Tsavo explained, his voice getting rougher with each word. “They have the experience and skills, and they are cheaper than training our own people.”
Deeper and deeper into the base they walked, down inclined ramps marked TEMPORARY ACCESS and through tunnels whose walls were still bare rock.
Jeeps, Pancho thought, this place is huge. They’re really building a city here, sure enough.
She hoped that the minibeacon her communications people had planted under the skin of her left hip would be able to send its coded signal through the rock. Jake’s put up a set of six of polar orbiting satellites to keep track of me, she reminded herself; there’d be one close enough to pick up my signal all the time. I’ll be okay. They’ll know exactly where I am.
Yet for the first time in years she found herself thinking about Elly. Pancho had always felt safe with Elly tucked around her ankle. The gengineered krait had been her faithful bodyguard. Nobody messed with her once they realized she had a lethally poisonous snake to protect her. No matter that Elly’s venom had been replaced with a strong sedative. Very few people had enough nerve to push things to the point where the snake would strike. Little Elly had been dead for more than ten years now, and Pancho had never worked up the resolve to get another such companion. Blubbery fool, she chided herself. Sentimental over a slithering snake, for cripes sake.
She tugged at the asteroidal sapphire clipped to her left earlobe. Like the rest of her jewelry, Pancho’s earrings held surprises, weapons to defend her, if need be. But damn, she thought, there’s a miniature army down here. I’d never be able to fight my way through all these bozos.
Sitting in the little wheeled chair in her office, just off the master bedroom of her home in Selene, Edith Elgin Stavenger used the three-second lag between Earth and Moon to catch up on the dossier of the woman she spoke with. For more than a week she had been chasing down executives in the news media on Earth, trying to stir their interest and support for her upcoming flight to Ceres.
Edith’s cozy office seemed to be split in two, and the head of the North American News Syndicate appeared to be sitting behind her massive, gleaming cherrywood desk, talking with Edith as if they were actually in the same room—except for that three-second lag. Edith had the woman’s dossier up on the wallscreen to one side of her own petite, curved desk.
“It’s not a story, Edie,” the media executive was saying. “There’s no news interest in it.”
The executive’s name was Hollie Underwood, known in the industry as Holy Underhand or, more often, Queen Hollie. Thanks to rejuvenation therapies, she looked no more than thirty: smooth skin, clear green eyes, perfectly coiffed auburn hair. Edith thought of The Picture of Dorian Gray and wondered how withered and scarred with evil her portrait might be. Her reaction to Edith’s idea was typical of the news media’s attitude.
“There’s no interest in it,” Edith replied smoothly, “because no one’s telling the story to the public.”
Then she waited three seconds, watching Underwood’s three-dimensional image, wondering how much the woman’s ruffled off-white blouse must have cost. Pure silk, she was certain.
“Edie, dear, no one’s telling the story because there’s no story there. Who cares about a gaggle of mercenaries fighting each other all the way out there in the Asteroid Belt?”
Edith held her temper. Very sweetly, she asked, “Does anyone care about the cost of electrical power?”
Underwood’s face went from mild exasperation to puzzled curiosity. At last she asked, “What’s the price of electricity got to do with this?”
Feeling nettled that an executive of Underwood’s level didn’t understand much of anything important, Edith replied patiently, “The greenhouse flooding knocked out more than half of the coastal power plants around the world, didn’t it?”
Without waiting for a reply, she went on, “Most of the loss in generating capacity is being taken up by solar power satellites, right? And where do you think the metals and minerals to build those satellites come from?”
Before Underwood could reply, Edith added, “And the fuels for the fusion generators that the power companies are building come from Jupiter, you know. This war is driving up their prices, too.”
By the time she answered, Underwood was looking thoughtful. “You’re saying that the fighting out in the Asteroid Belt is affecting the price of metals and minerals that those rock rats ship back to Earth. And the price of fusion fuels, as well.”
“And the price of those resources affects the ultimate price you flatlanders pay for electricity, yes.” Edith grimaced inwardly at her use of the derogatory flatlanders, but Underwood seemed to pay it no attention.
“So it costs us a few cents more per kilowatt hour,” she said at last. “That’s still not much of a story, is it.”
Edith sat back in her little desk chair. There’s something going on here, she realized. Something circling around below the surface, like a shark on the hunt.
She studied Underwood’s face for a few silent moments. Then she asked, “How much advertising is Astro Corporation buying from you? Or is it Humphries?”
Once she heard the question Underwood reddened. “What do you mean? What are you implying?”
“The big corporations don’t want you to go public about their war, do they? They’re paying for this cover-up.”
“Cover-up?” Underwood snapped, once she heard Edith’s accusation. “There isn’t any cover-up!”
“Isn’t there?”
Underwood looked furious. “This conversation is over!” Her image winked out, leaving Edith alone in her snug little office.
She nodded to herself and smiled. That hit a nerve, all right. The big boys are paying off the news media to keep the war hushed up. That’s what’s going on.
Then Edith’s smile faded. Knowing the truth would be of little help in getting the story to the public.
How to break through their wall of silence? Edith wished she knew.
ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS
Jake Wanamaker actually banged his fist against the wall. He stomped past the row of consoles in the communications center and punched the wall hard enough to dent the thin metal paneling.
“She just waltzed in there all by herself and now you can’t even make contact with her?”
The communications technicians looked scared. Old as he was, Wanamaker was still a formidable figure, especially when he was radiating anger. For several heartbeats no one in the comm center said a word. Console screens blinked and beeped softly, but everyone’s attention was focused on the big admiral.
“Sir, we got good tracking data on her until she got to the Nairobi base.”
“Those minibeacons are supposed to be able to broadcast through solid rock,” Wanamaker snarled. “We hung a half-dozen satellites in polar orbits, didn’t we? Why aren’t they picking up her signal?”
“It must be the solar flare, sir,” said another of the technicians. “It’s screwing up communications.”
Glowering, Wanamaker said, “You people assured me that the frequency the system uses wouldn’t be bothered by a flare.”
The chief comm tech, a cadaverous, sunken-eyed old computer geek, called across the room, “Their base must be shielded. Faraday cage, maybe. Wouldn’t be too tough to do.”
“Great!” Wanamaker snapped. “She’s in a potential enemy’s camp and we can’t even track her movements.”
“If she gets outside again the satellites’ll pick up her signal,” said the chief tech, hopefully.
“If she gets outside again,” Wanamaker muttered.
“Not while the solar storm’s in progress,” said one of the younger techs, wide-eyed with worry. “Radiation level’s too high. It’d be suicide.”
Rumors spread through a tightly knit community such as Selene like ripples widening across a pond. One comm tech compla
ined to a fellow Astro employee about the tongue-lashing Wanamaker gave to everyone in the communications center. The Astro employee mentioned to her husband that Pancho Lane had disappeared down at the Astro base near the south pole. Her husband told his favorite bartender that Pancho Lane had gone missing. “Probably shacked up with some guy, if I know Pancho,” he added, grinning.
At that point the rumor bifurcated. One branch claimed that Pancho had run off with some guy from Nairobi Industries. The other solemnly insisted that she had been kidnapped, probably by Martin Humphries or some of his people.
Within hours, before Wanamaker or anyone in the Astro security office could even begin to clamp down a lid on the story, Selene was buzzing with the rumor that Pancho was either off on a love tryst or kidnapped and probably dead.
Nodon heard the story during his first hours of work as a maintenance technician in the big, echoing garage that housed the tractors and tour busses that went out onto the surface of Alphonsus’s crater floor. He went through the motions of his new job and, as soon as his shift ended, hurried up into the “basement” to find Fuchs.
Fuchs was not at the stacks of shelving where Nodon and the others had met him before. Nodon fidgeted nervously, not knowing whether he should start searching through the dimly lit walkways or wait where he was for Fuchs to return. A maintenance robot came trundling along the walkway, its red dome light blinking. Nodon froze, plastering his back against the storeroom shelves. The robot rolled past, squeaking slightly. The maintenance robot needs maintenance, Nodon thought.
Half a minute behind the robot came Lars Fuchs, in his usual black pullover and slacks, and the usual dark scowl on his face.
“Kidnapped?” Fuchs gasped when Nodon told him the tale.
“Perhaps dead,” the Mongol added.
“Humphries did this?”
To his credit, Nodon admitted, “I don’t know. No one seems to know.”
“It couldn’t be anybody else,” Fuchs growled.
Nodon agreed with a nod.
“Down at the south pole, you say? They captured her down there?”
