The Silent War gt-11

by Ben Bova

  One of the screens lit up to show Pancho and Tsavo in the bedroom. Nobu watched Pancho spill her champagne, go to the lavatory—and then the screen flared with painful brilliance.

  Blinking, a red afterimage burning in his eyes, Yamagata said through gritted teeth, “I don’t want to know where she was. I want to know where she is now.”

  The security chief wiped at his tearing eyes. “She must have gone up into the construction area. The surveillance cameras on those levels haven’t been activated yet.”

  Before the exasperated Yamagata could say anything, the security chief added, “I’ve ordered all the airlocks sealed and placed guards at all the space suit storage areas. She can’t get outside.”

  Nobu thought, That’s something, at least. She’s trapped inside the base. We’ll find her, then. It’s only a matter of time.

  We make an unlikely invasion force, Fuchs thought as he and his three crew members walked purposively through the flowering garden toward Humphries’s mansion.

  But that might be a good thing, he realized. The more unlikely we appear, the less seriously the guards will take us. We might still have surprise on our side.

  Not for long, he saw. A pair of men were striding down the winding path toward them, both of them tall, broadshouldered, with the hard-eyed look of professional security guards. They were clad in identical slate-gray tunics and slacks: not quite uniforms, but close enough. Fuchs wondered what kinds of weapons they carried. “What are you doing here?” the one on the left called, raising a hand to stop Fuchs and his people.

  “Emergency maintenance,” said Fuchs, slowing but not stopping. “Water stoppage.”

  “We didn’t get any emergency call,” said the other one. He was slightly shorter, Fuchs saw, and looked somewhat younger.

  “It registered on our board,” Fuchs lied. Stretching out an arm to point, he said, “You can see the problem from here, up on your roof.”

  The shorter one turned almost completely around. The other glanced over his shoulder. Fuchs launched himself at the older one, ramming his head into the man’s midsection. He heard a satisfying “Oof!” and the two of them went down, Fuchs on top. Nodon kicked the man in the head and he went limp. Getting to his feet, Fuchs saw that Amarjagal and Sanja had knocked the other one unconscious as well.

  Swiftly, they tied the two men with their own belts and dragged them into the bushes, but not before taking their guns and communicators.

  Fuchs looked over one of the pistols as they ran toward the mansion. Laser pistols. Fuchs remembered how the rock rats had turned their handheld tools into makeshift weapons, years ago. These were specifically designed as sidearms. Nodon held the other gun.

  “STOP WHERE YOU ARE!” boomed an amplified voice.

  Fuchs yelled back, “This is an emergency! Quick! We haven’t a moment to lose!”

  The front door of the mansion opened as they raced up to it, and another pair of guards in identical slate-gray outfits—one of them a woman—stepped out, looking puzzled.

  “What’s going-”

  Fuchs shot the man and before she could react Nodon shot the woman. The infrared laser beams were invisible but Fuchs saw the smoking little circular wound in his man’s forehead as he slumped to the ground.

  “Come on,” Fuchs said, waving his crew forward. Amarjagal and Sanja stopped long enough to take the guns from the unconscious guards, then they stepped over their inert bodies and into the mansion’s entryway. I’m in his house! Fuchs marveled. I’m actually in Humphries’s home! He realized he hadn’t expected to get this far.

  A woman in a black servant’s dress came out of a door down the hall, carrying a silver tray laden with covered dishes. Fuchs rushed toward her. When she saw the gun in his hand she gave out a frightened squeak, dropped the tray with a loud crash, and fled back into the kitchen.

  “Never mind her,” Fuchs snarled. “Find Humphries.”

  Finally ending her video tour of the ship, Edith returned to her cabin. She felt tired, but decided to review what she had shot and mark the scenes for future editing.

  Once her face appeared on the cabin’s wallscreen, though, she studied it minutely for signs of aging. To her relief, she could find none. The rejuvenation therapies were still working.

  Then she wondered if that might not be counted against her, back on Earth. They might think I’m filled with nanomachines, like Doug. That would prejudice them against me, maybe.

  She shrugged to herself and shut down the display. Faced with a choice between flatlander prejudices and physical youth, she opted for youth. With a yawn she looked toward her bed. Time for some beauty sleep, Edith said to herself, wishing that Doug were here with her.

  HUMPHRIES MANSION

  The house was huge, Fuchs realized, and divided into two sections. On one side of the hallway that extended from the entrance there seemed to be a warren of offices and laboratories. Fuchs and his crew glanced into a few of them; they were unoccupied, quiet, dark. Offices for his staff, Fuchs guessed, empty at this time of night.

  Impatiently he waved his three aides back to the hallway.

  “Sanja,” he directed, pointing down the hall, “you find that woman. She must know where Humphries is. “We’ll look through the other side of the house.”

  Humphries was upstairs, in the master bedroom suite, sitting at his computer desk. The war is going well, he said to himself as he studied the latest figures on battle casualties. In another couple of months we’ll have booted Astro out of the Belt altogether.

  Yet when he turned to his intelligence department’s latest assessment, his face contorted into a frown. Astro’s building more ships, gearing up for a counterattack. That damned greasemonkey doesn’t know when she’s beaten.

  He heard a muffled clatter from downstairs. One of the servants must have dropped something. Leaning back in his yielding desk chair he realized that he had ordered a snack more than half an hour ago. Where the hell was it?

  With a shake of his head he returned to his musings about the war. They claim Pancho’s disappeared. More likely she’s down at that Nairobi base trying to get their support. And I’ve got a board of directors meeting coming up. They’ll yell bloody murder about the p-and-l figures. This war’s bleeding us. But once we win it, they’ll all shut up. They’ll have to.

  His thoughts returned to Pancho. The little guttersnipe. If she’s building a new fleet of warships here at Selene it makes sense to attack the factories where they’re being built. But that would bring Stavenger into the war on her side. I don’t want Selene coming in against—

  “The water turned off.”

  Annoyed, Humphries turned to see Victoria Ferrer standing in the doorway to his office, wrapped in a white full-length robe, its sash cinched around her waist. Her hair was glistening wet.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “The water turned off,” she repeated, “right in the middle of my shower.”

  At that moment the report hovering above his desk abruptly disappeared, replaced by the intense face of his chief security guard.

  “Sir, we have intruders on the premises.”

  “Inside the house?”

  “Yessir. Downstairs. I suggest you go to top security mode immediately.”

  “Damned right! And you get them! Call everyone you’ve got. Get them!”

  Down in his basement office, the security chief clicked off his phone, thinking furiously. Only twelve guards on night duty, he knew. Still, he glanced at the screen showing the duty roster. They’ve already knocked out four of them. He told the phone to call up every guard on the payroll —another two dozen of them—and get them to the mansion immediately.

  Humphries has his suite sealed off, so they can’t get to him unless they can cut through three centimeters of reinforced cermet, he thought. Even with laser pistols that will take some time. The boss is safe enough. He called for a view of the master suite and saw that Ferrer was in there with Humphries. He grinned to himself. Hell, he might eve
n enjoy this, as long as she’s sealed into the bedroom with him.

  Then he turned his attention to the screen showing three of the four intruders making their way up the main staircase to the upper floor.

  Fuchs was leading Nodon and Amarjagal cautiously up the main stairway, peering intently at the upper landing to see if any more security guards were up there. Suddenly he heard the heavy slamming of doors. A voice blared from speakers hidden in the ceiling:

  “WE HAVE YOU ON CAMERA AND ARE AUTHORIZED TO USE LETHAL FORCE IF NECESSARY. THE HOUSE IS SEALED AND THERE IS NO WAY FOR YOU TO ESCAPE. DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND PUT YOUR HANDS ON TOP OF YOUR HEADS.”

  Fuchs hesitated for barely a fraction of a second, then rushed up the stairs, the two others behind him. As they reached the landing, Sanja started up the steps behind them.

  “The front doorway has been sealed with a metal slab!” he called.

  The windows, too, were covered with heavy metal grillwork, Fuchs saw as he glanced around the upstairs hallway. The hall was lined with real wooden furniture: tables and chests and sideboards. Actual paintings hung along the walls.

  They think we’re burglars or thieves, Fuchs thought. They’re trying to make certain we can’t get away. But I don’t want to get away, I want to find Humphries.

  “Where are you, Humphries?” he shouted at the ceiling. “Show yourself, coward!”

  Nodon, his eyes so wide that Fuchs could see white all around the pupils, said in a tight whisper, “They must be sending more guards. We’re trapped!”

  All the lights went off, plunging them into almost total darkness. Within an instant, though, Nodon pulled a hand torch from his coverall pocket. Its feeble beam made the hallway look eerie, mysterious.

  Fuchs rushed to a heavy walnut table against the wall. With one sweep of his arm he sent the flower vase and smaller porcelain pieces atop it crashing to the carpeted floor.

  “Help me turn this thing over and drag it over to the top of the stairs. We can stop them from getting up here.”

  Sanja and Amarjagal tipped the table over with a heavy thud, and the four of them pushed it to the head of the stairs and wedged it there between the wall and the staircase railing. Down below they heard the pounding of running feet and saw the shadowy figures of security guards coming along the downstairs hall. They must have been stationed in the basement, Fuchs thought, straining to make out how many of them there were. No more than six, he estimated.

  He whispered to the two men, “Get the statues, the chairs, anything you can lift and bring them here. Amarjagal, go down the hallway a few meters so you can fire on them as they come up the stairs.”

  If they think we’re going to surrender, they have a big surprise coming, Fuchs thought grimly. I’m not leaving this house until I see Humphries dead at my feet.

  SHINING MOUNTAIN BASE

  Pancho jogged up the rampway, long legs pumping easily as she made her way to the top level of the base. Trotting along the final section of ramp she could see the ribbed vaulting of the surface dome overhead. Almost there, she said to herself.

  But she skidded to a halt when she spotted a quartet of men standing by the row of space suits that hung next to the airlock. They were all Japanese, their coveralls sky blue and bearing the white flying crane emblem of Yamagata Corporation. Each of them had an ugly-looking sidearm strapped to his waist.

  They saw her, too. Two of them started to sprint toward her as Pancho reversed her course and started back down the ramp, back toward the noisy, bustling construction crews and the minitractors that were hauling loads of steel beams and drywall sheeting. She swung her legs over the ramp’s railing and jumped lightly to the dusty floor several meters below.

  The noise was an advantage to her, she thought. Nobody’s going to hear those guards yelling, and these construction guys don’t have comm units in their ears. She loped alongside one of the electric-powered minitractors and hopped into the cart it was towing, landing with a plop amidst coils of wire and bouncing, flexing lengths of plastic piping.

  She lay flat, hoping that the guards didn’t see her hitchhike maneuver. The minitractor trundled on for several minutes; all Pancho could see was the bare beams supporting the ceiling overhead.

  She was thinking as hard and fast as she could. Airlocks are up on the next level, but they’re all guarded. So are the suits. Even if I could grab a space suit the guards would grab me before I had time to put one on. And there’s the damn-dratted solar storm outside, too. Not the best time for a walk on the surface.

  I could use the softsuit, she reminded herself. It’s right here, tucked into my travel bag. Never used the blow-up helmet before but Doug said it works okay. Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. What choice do I have?

  The big problem was to get to an airlock without being seen. Suddenly Pancho broke into a fierce grin. No, the problem is how do I get some explosives so I can make a new airlock for myself!

  Doug Stavenger tried to busy himself with catching up on the minutes of Selene’s governing council meetings. But as he read the reports of the water board and the maintenance department and the safety office, the words blurred into meaningless symbols before his eyes. Irritated, nervous, he told his computer to show him the latest report on the solar storm.

  One wall of the office in his home seemingly dissolved into a three-dimensional image of the Earth/Moon system. It was bathed in a hot pink glow that represented the radiation cloud. Stavenger muted the sound, preferring to read for himself the figures on radiation intensity and predicted time duration of the storm displayed across the bottom of the holographic image.

  “Add traffic,” he said quietly.

  Several yellow dots appeared in the image. One of them was identified as Elsinore, the ship Edith was aboard.

  “Project trajectories.”

  Slim green curving lines appeared, the one attached to Elsinore arcing out to the right and out of the cloud.

  “Add destinations.”

  Elsinore’s projected path ended at a dot labeled “Ceres.” Stavenger noted almost subliminally that of all the ships in the region, there was one named Cromwell but that had no projected destination visible. No course vector for it showed at all. It was deep inside the radiation cloud, too.

  As he watched, Cromwell’s dot winked out. Stavenger stared at the display. Either the ship’s suddenly been destroyed or they’ve turned off all their tracking and telemetry beacons. There were no other ships near it, as far as the imagery showed. So it can’t have been attacked by somebody.

  Why would they turn off all their beacons? Stavenger asked himself. It took only a moment’s thought for him to understand.

  Pancho jumped off the cart as the minitractor rolled past a jumbled pile of equipment and crates of supplies lying in what seemed a haphazard disorder on the dusty concrete floor. The driver saw her and yelled at her over his shoulder in Japanese as the tractor trundled away from her.

  “Same to you, buddy,” Pancho hollered back, bowing politely to the driver.

  Slinging her travel bag over one shoulder, she ducked behind the nearest pile of crates and started searching through the trove. No explosives, but in the midst of the scattered pieces of equipment she saw something that might be almost as good: a welding laser. Kneeling beside the laser’s finned barrel, she clicked its on switch and felt her heart sink. The power supply’s battery indicator was way down in the red. I need a power source, she told herself.

  Suddenly the loudspeakers hanging on poles every fifty meters or so blared into harsh, rapid Japanese. Pancho didn’t understand the words but she knew the tone: There’s an intruder sneaking around here. Find her!

  All the construction noise stopped. It was eerie, Pancho thought. The banging, buzzing, yelling construction site went absolutely still. It was as if everybody froze.

  But only for a moment. Hunkered behind a crate, Pancho saw the blue-clad construction workers looking around uncertainly. Foremen and women strode out among them, snapping orders. The workers ga
thered themselves into parties of four, five and six and began methodically searching the entire floor. Pancho figured they were doing the same on the other levels, too.

  Feeling like a mouse in a convention hall filled with cats, Pancho knelt behind the crate. The laser was within reach, but without a power supply it was useless. And even if I get outside, she told herself, I’ll have to sprint through the storm to get into one of the hoppers sitting out on the launchpad. The outlook ain’t brilliant.

  Then she saw the same minitractor she had ridden on heading across the cement-dusty floor toward her. Two men were squeezed into its cab alongside the driver.

  He remembers me hitching the ride, Pancho realized, and he’s bringing the goons to search the area. She smiled. The tractor could serve as a power supply for the laser, she thought. All I have to do is get rid of those three guys. She unclipped her other earring and held it tightly in her palm.

  Sitting on the bare concrete floor, her back pressed against the plastic crate, Pancho listened to the tractor coming up and stopping. Voices muttering in Japanese. They’re getting out, she knew. Poking around.

  She clambered to her feet. The three saw her immediately. Pancho noticed with some surprise that the hard-hatted driver was a young woman. The other two, bareheaded, were stony-faced men. And armed with guns.

  “You!” one of the men shouted in English, pointing a pistol at her. “Don’t move!”

  Pancho slowly raised both hands above her head, the earring still clutched in her right palm. Wait, she said to herself, flicking the catch of the earring with her thumb. Let them get just a little closer.

  Now! She tossed the earring at them and flung both arms over her eyes. The flash of light still seared through her closed lids and burned a red afterimage on her retinas. But once she opened her eyes she found that she could see well enough. The two goons were writhing on the ground, screeching in Japanese. The woman driver was staggering around blindly. Blinking painful tears, Pancho grabbed the laser in both hands, pushed past the dazed and groping driver, and dumped it into the back of the tractor. Even in one-sixth g, it was heavy.