The Silent War gt-11

by Ben Bova

  “That is the story. Some say she has run off with a lover.”

  “Pancho wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t have to. If she wanted a lover she’d do it right here in Selene, where she’s safe.”

  Nodon said nothing.

  “It’s got to be Humphries,” Fuchs muttered, as much to himself as his companion. “He’s probably having her taken to his mansion, down below.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Even if he hasn’t, that’s where he is. We’ve got to get in there. And quickly.”

  Daniel Tsavo tried to hide his nervousness as he toured Pancho through the construction areas and finally down into the finished section of the Nairobi base, where he and the other corporate executives resided. It was blessedly quiet down at this lowest level; the constant battering noise of the twenty-four-hour-a-day construction was muffled by thick airtight hatches and acoustical insulation. As they walked along the carpeted corridor toward the executive dining room, Tsavo kept Pancho on his right, as he had done all through the brief tour, so that he could hear the microreceiver embedded in his left ear without being obvious about it.

  It troubled him that Nobuhiko Yamagata himself was speeding to the base on a high-g rocket from Japan. The interrogation team had already arrived, but their work was suspended until Yamagata arrived.

  Pancho, meanwhile, was trying to sort out in her mind everything she had seen in this brief tour of the unfinished base. It’s enormous! she thought. They’re not just building a phase-one facility here, they’re putting up a whole city, all in one shot. This place’ll be just as big as Selene.

  Tsavo tried hard not to hold his left hand up to his ear. He was waiting for news that Yamagata had arrived, waiting for his instructions on what to do with Pancho.

  “Pretty fancy setup you guys have for yourselves,” Pancho teased as they walked along the corridor. Its walls were painted in soothing pastels. The noise of construction was far behind them. “Nice thick carpets on the floor and acoustic paneling on the walls.”

  “Rank has its privileges,” Tsavo replied, making himself smile back at her.

  “Guess so.” Where are they getting the capital for all this, Pancho wondered. Nairobi Industries doesn’t have this kind of financial muscle. Somebody’s pouring a helluva lot of money into this. Humphries? Why would the Humper spend money on Nairobi? Why invest in a competitor? ’Specially when he’s sinking so much into this goddamn war. I wouldn’t be able to divert this much of Astro’s funding; we’d go broke.

  “Actually,” Tsavo said, scratching at his left ear, “all this was not as expensive as you might think. Most of it was manufactured at Selene.”

  “Really?”

  “Truly.”

  Pancho seemed impressed. “Y’know, back in the early days of Moonbase they thought seriously about putting grass down in all the corridors.”

  “Grass?”

  “Yep. Life-support people said it’d help make oxygen, and the psychologists thought it’d make people happier ’bout having to live underground.”

  “Did they ever do it?”

  “Naw. The accountants ran the numbers for how much electricity they’d need to provide light for the grass. And the maintenance people complained about the groundskeeping they’d have to do. That killed it.”

  “No grass.”

  “Except up in the Main Plaza, of course.”

  Tsavo said, “We plan to sod our central plaza, too. And plant trees.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Pancho. But she was thinking, If Humphries isn’t bankrolling Nairobi, who is? And why?

  The receiver in Tsavo’s ear buzzed. “Mr. Yamagata is expected in two hours. There is to be no interrogation of Ms. Lane until after he has arrived. Proceed with dinner as originally planned.”

  At that precise moment, Pancho asked, “Say, when’s dinner? I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast.”

  “Perfect timing,” Tsavo murmured, stopping at a set of double doors. Using both hands, he pushed them open. Pancho saw a conference room that had been transformed into a dining room. The central table was set for eight, and there were six people standing around the sideboard at the far end of the oblong room, where drinks had been set up. Two of them were women, all of them dark-skinned Africans.

  Tsavo introduced Pancho to his Nairobi Industries colleagues, then excused himself to go to the next room for a moment, where the servers waited with a group of six Japanese men and women.

  “No drugs,” Tsavo told their chief. “We’ll have a normal dinner. We can sedate her later.”

  TORCH SHIP ELSINORE

  Doug Stavenger rode with Edith all the way up to the torch ship, waiting in a tight orbit around the Moon. He went with her through Elsinore’s airlock as the ship’s captain personally escorted his passenger to her quarters, a comfortable little cabin halfway down the passageway that led to the bridge.

  Once the captain had left them alone and had slid the passageway door shut, Stavenger took his wife in his arms.

  “You don’t have to do this, Edie,” he said.

  “Yes I do,” she replied. She was smiling, but her eyes were steady with firm resolve.

  “You could send someone else and have him report what he finds to you. You could stay here at Selene and produce the news show or documentary or whatever—”

  “Doug,” she said, sliding her arms around his neck, “I love you, darling, but you have no idea of how the news business works.”

  “I don’t want you risking your neck out there.”

  “But that’s the only way to get the story!”

  “And there’s a solar storm approaching, too,” he said.

  “The ship’s shielded, darling.” She nuzzled his nose lightly, then said, “You’d better be getting back to Selene before the radiation starts building up.”

  He frowned unhappily. “If something should happen to you…”

  “What a story it would make!” She smiled as she said it.

  “Be serious.”

  Her smile faded, but only a little. “I’m being serious, Doug. The only way to break this conspiracy of silence is for a major news figure to go to Ceres and report on the situation firsthand. If Selene broadcasts my story it’ll be picked up by independents on Earth. Then the Earth-side nets will have to cover it. They’ll have no choice.”

  “And if you get killed in the process?” “I won’t,” she insisted. “I’m not going to go out into the Belt. I’ll stay at Ceres, on the habitat the rock rats have built for themselves, where it’s perfectly safe. That’s one of the tricks of this business: Give the appearance of being on the front line, but stay at headquarters, where it’s safe.”

  Stavenger tightened his grip around her waist. “I really don’t want you to go, Edie.”

  “I know, dearest. But I have to.”

  Eventually he gave up and released her. But all the way back to Selene on the little shuttle rocket, all the way back to his home in the underground city’s third level, Doug Stavenger could not shake the feeling that he would never see his wife again. He told himself he was being a foolish idiot, overly protective, overly possessive, too. Yet the feeling would not leave him.

  Two ships left Selene, heading toward the Belt. Elsinore, carrying Edith Elgin, was going to the habitat Chrysalis, in orbit around the asteroid Ceres. Cromwell, an Astro Corporation freighter, was ostensibly going to pick up a load of ores that she would tote back to Selene.

  Both ships turned on their electromagnetic radiation shielding as soon as they broke orbit around the Moon. The vast and growing cloud of energetic ionizing radiation that had been spewed out by the solar flare soon engulfed them both. Aboard Elsinore, the ship’s crew and her sole passenger watched the radiation count climb with some unavoidable trepidation. Aboard Cromwell, the crew counted on the radiation cloud to shield their approach to Vesta. Cromwell carried no human passengers, of course. Its cargo was a pair of missiles that carried heavily insulated warheads of nanomachines, the type commonly
called gobblers.

  Unable to communicate with Cromwell, and equally unable to contact Pancho, Jake Wanamaker had nothing better to do but pace the communications center and glower at the technicians working the consoles. At last he thumped himself down at an empty console and pulled up Pancho’s messages. Maybe there’s something in here that can tell me what she thinks she’s up to, he told himself, knowing it was just an excuse to engage in some busywork before he started smashing the furniture.

  A long string of routine calls, mostly from Astro offices or board members. But one of the messages was highlighted, blinking in red letters. A Karl Manstein. No identification; just a call with no message attached. Yet it was highlighted. Wanamaker routed the call through Astro’s security system, and the Mainstein name dissolved before his eyes, replaced by the name Lars Fuchs.

  Lars Fuchs had called Pancho, Wanamaker realized. He remembered that she had wanted to contact Fuchs and was chewing out her security people because they couldn’t find him.

  The man’s right under their noses, Wanamaker said to himself. Right here in Selene. But he left no callback number.

  Wanamaker had the computer trace the origin of Fuchs’s call. It had come from a wall phone up in the equipment storage area. Is he hiding up there? Wanamaker wondered.

  He picked up the console microphone and instructed the communications computer to put through any call from Fuchs or Karl Manstein directly to him.

  Nothing to do but wait, Wanamaker thought, leaning back in the console’s little wheeled chair. Wait to see what’s happening with Pancho. Wait to find out how Cromwell’s mission to Vesta turns out. Wait for Fuchs to call again.

  He hated waiting.

  Then he realized that someone was standing behind him. Swiveling the chair he saw it was Tashkajian, looking just as somber and apprehensive as he felt.

  Martin Humphries was strolling through his expansive underground garden when Victoria Ferrer hurried along the curving brick path, breathless with news of the rumors about Pancho.

  “Who the hell would kidnap Pancho?” Humphries snickered.

  Walking alongside him through the wide beds of colorful flowers, Ferrer said, “The betting upstairs is that you did.”

  “Me? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind having her assassinated. But why kidnap her?” Ferrer shrugged slightly. “She might have run off with some guy. They say this man running the Nairobi operation is quite a slab of beefcake.”

  “Pancho wouldn’t do that,” Humphries said, shaking his head.

  “Well, the Astro security people are floundering around, wondering where she is.”

  Humphries stopped in the middle of the path and took in a deep breath of flower-fragrant air. “Well, let’s hope that she’s dead. But I doubt it. Pancho’s a tough little guttersnipe.”

  SELENE: STORAGE CENTER FOURTEEN

  Fuchs paced along the dimly lit walkway between storage shelves and humming, vibrating equipment, trying to avoid the scattering of renegades and outcasts that lived among the shadows, turning aside whenever he saw the flashing red light of an approaching maintenance robot. He rubbed at the back of his neck, which was tight with tension. Absently, his hand moved to massage the bridge of his nose. His head ached and he felt frustrated, angry, aching, and—worst of all—uncertain.

  What to do? What to do? Humphries must have had Pancho kidnapped. Who else would do it? Right at this moment they’re probably flying Pancho back here to his mansion. If they haven’t killed her already. What can I do? How can I help her?

  He knew the answer. Get to Humphries and kill him. Kill the murdering bastard before he kills Pancho. Kill him for Amanda. For all the rock rats he’s killed out in the Belt. Execute him, in the name of justice. He snorted at his own pretensions. Justice. No, what you want is vengeance. Don’t talk of justice; you want revenge, nothing less.

  Alone as he paced the walkway, he nodded his aching head fiercely. Vengeance. Yes. I will have vengeance against the man who destroyed my life. Who destroyed everything and everyone I hold dear. And what risks are you willing to take for your vengeance? he asked himself. You have three people with you; Humphries has a small army of security guards down there in his mansion. How can you even think of getting to him? There is no one in Selene who will help you. No one in the entire solar system would lift a finger for you, except Pancho and she’s a prisoner or perhaps already dead.

  Fuchs abruptly stopped his pacing. He found himself in front of a large wall screen, set up against the side of a massive, chugging water pump that was painted bright blue. The screen was mounted on rubberized shock absorbers, to separate it from the pump’s constant vibration. In the faint light from a distant overhead lamp Fuchs saw his reflection in the blank screen: a short, stocky man with a barrel chest, stubby arms and legs, a bristling black beard and deep-set eyes that glowed like twin lasers. He was dressed in shapeless black slacks and a pullover shirt, also black as death.

  No more thinking, he told himself. No more planning. Get Sanja and the others and strike. Tonight. Humphries dies tonight or I do. He almost smiled. Possibly both of us.

  His headache disappeared along with his uncertainty.

  “It was a really great dinner,” Pancho said as Tsavo walked her along the corridor. “You got some sharp people working for you. I enjoyed talking with them.”

  Tsavo beamed at her compliments. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  During dinner he had learned that Nobuhiko Yamagata had landed, scant minutes ahead of the leading edge of the solar storm, and had gone immediately to his interrogation team. Now the voice whispering electronically in his left ear told him to take Pancho to her quarters and let her fall asleep. To help make her sleep, Yamagata’s people had injected a strong sedative in the bottle of wine that waited on Pancho’s bedside table.

  “It’s been a really good visit,” Pancho was saying. “I’m glad I came.”

  Still smiling for her, Tsavo said, “You’ll stay the night, of course.”

  Pancho grinned back at him. He was a centimeter or so taller than her own lanky height, and she liked tall men.

  “I’d love to, Dan, but I’ve got to get back to my own people. They’re expecting me.”

  “But the storm,” he said earnestly. “All surface activities are suspended until the radiation goes down to normal.”

  Pancho teased, “Is that what your dinner was for? To keep me here long enough for the storm to hit?”

  He looked shocked. “No! Not at all. But now that it’s hit, you’ll have to stay the night.”

  She said nothing as he led her a few more paces down the carpeted corridor and stopped at an unmarked door. Sliding it open, he ushered her into a spare but comfortable-looking bedroom, with a small desk set in one corner and a wallscreen that showed the view outside the base. Pancho saw several hoppers standing out there, including the green one she had flown in on. And a transfer vehicle, the kind that brought people in from ships in orbit; that hadn’t been there when she’d landed. In the bright sunlight outside she could see that it was anodized sky blue.

  Then she noticed that her travel bag had been placed on the bed, unopened. And there was a bottle of wine sitting tilted in a chiller bucket on the low table in front of the cushioned sofa.

  “Champagne,” she noted. “And two glasses.”

  Tsavo put on a slightly sheepish look. “Even before the storm came up I had hoped you’d stay the night.”

  “Looks like I’ll have to. I ought to call my people at Malapert, though, and let them know I’m okay.”

  He hesitated, as if debating inwardly with himself. Pancho couldn’t hear the whispered instructions he was getting.

  “All right,” he said, flashing that killer smile again. “Let me call my communications center.”

  “Great!”

  He went to the phone on the desk and the wallscreen abruptly switched to an image of a man sitting at a console with a head
set clipped over his thick dark hair.

  “I’m afraid, sir, that the solar storm is interfering with communications at this time.” Tsavo seemed upset. “Can’t you establish a laser link?”

  Unperturbed, the communications tech said, “Our laser equipment is not functional at this time, sir.”

  “Well get it functioning,” Tsavo said hotly. “And let me know the instant it’s working.”

  “Yes, sir.” The wallscreen went dark.

  Pancho pursed her lips, then shrugged. “Guess my people at Malapert will have to get along without me till the storm lets up.”

  Tsavo looked pleased. Smiling, he asked, “Would you like some wine?”

  COMMAND SHIP SAMARKAND

  Harbin was heading back to the HSS base at Vesta. Samarkand had not escaped its one-sided battle against the Astro freighter unscathed. The loosed rocks and pebbles of his ship’s armor shield had dented and buckled parts of the hull, and now Samarkand was totally unarmored, easy prey for any warship it should happen to meet.

  He was worried about the ship’s radiation shielding. Even though the diagnostics showed the system to be functioning properly, with a solar storm approaching he preferred to be safely underground at Vesta.

  Still, he left his two other vessels to continue their hunt through this region of the Belt while he made his way back to Vesta for refurbishment.

  It will be good to have a few days of R R, he thought as he sat in the command chair. Besides, my medicinals are running low. I’ll have to get the pharmacy to restock them.

  He turned the con over to his executive officer and left the bridge, ducking through the hatch and down the short passageway to his private quarters. Making his way straight to his lavatory, he opened the medicine chest and surveyed the vials and syringes stored there. Running low, he confirmed. But there’s enough here to get me through the next few nights. Enough to let me sleep when I need to.

  He reached for one of the vials, but before he could take it in his fingers the intercom buzzed.