by Ben Bova
“Could we finish the habitat on that kind of income?” asked the next caller.
Amanda replied, “Yes. With that kind of assured income, we could get loans from the banks back on Earth to finish the habitat, just the same as any government secures loans to finance its programs.”
The meeting dragged on until well past one A.M., but when it was finished, Amanda thought tiredly that she had accomplished her objective. The people of Ceres were ready to vote to form some kind of a government.
As long as Martin Humphries doesn’t move to stop us, she reminded herself.
CHAPTER 44
Lars Fuchs stood spraddle-legged behind the pilot’s chair on the bridge of Nautilus, carefully studying the screen’s display of what looked like an HSS freighter.
According to the communications messages to and from the ship, she was the W. Wilson Humphries, the pride of Humphries Space Systems’ growing fleet of ore carriers, named after Martin Humphries’s late father. She was apparently loaded with ores from several asteroids, heading out of the Belt toward the Earth/Moon system.
Yet Fuchs felt uneasy about approaching her. Fourteen months of hiding in the Belt, of taking his supplies and fuel from ships he captured, of sneaking quick visits aboard friendly independent ships now and then, had taught him wariness and cunning. He was leaner now, still built like a miniature bull but without a trace of fat on him. Even his face was harder, his square jaw more solid, his thin slash of a mouth set into a downturned scowl that seemed permanent.
He turned to Nodon, who was handling the communications console on the bridge.
“What’s the traffic to and from her?” he asked, jabbing a thumb toward the visual display.
“Normal telemetry,” Nodon replied. “Nothing more at present.”
To the burly young woman in the pilot’s chair Fuchs said, “Show me the plot of her course over the past six weeks.” He spoke in her own Mongol dialect now; haltingly, but he was learning his crew’s language. He did not want them to be able to keep secrets from him.
One of the auxiliary screens lit up with thin, looping curves of yellow set against a sprinkling of green dots.
Fuchs studied the display. If it was to be believed, that yellow line represented the course that the Humphries ship had followed over the past six weeks, picking up loads of ore at five separate asteroids. Fuchs did not believe it.
“It’s a fake,” he said aloud. “If she’d really followed that plot she’d be out of propellant by now and heading for a rendezvous with a tanker.”
Nodon said, “According to their flight plan, they will increase acceleration in two hours and head inward to the Earth/Moon system.”
“Not unless they’ve refueled in the past few days,” Fuchs said.
“There is no record of that. No tankers in the vicinity. No other ships at all.”
Fuchs received brief snippets of intelligence information from the friendly ships he occasionally visited. Through those independent prospectors he arranged a precarious line of communications back to Ceres by asking them to tell Amanda what frequency he would use to make his next call to her. His calls were months apart, quick spurts of ultracompressed data that told her little more than the fact that he was alive and missed her. She sent similar messages back by tight laser beam to predesignated asteroids. Fuchs was never there to receive them; he left a receiving set on each asteroid ahead of time that relayed the message to him later. He had no intention of letting Humphries’s people trap him.
But now he felt uneasy about this supposed fat, dumb freighter. It’s a trap, he heard a voice in his mind warning him. And he remembered that Amanda’s latest abbreviated message had included a piece of information from Big George to the effect that Humphries’s people were setting up decoy ships, “Trojan horses,”
George called them, armed with laser weapons and carrying trained mercenary troops whose mission was to lure Fuchs into a fatal trap.
“George says it’s only a rumor,” Amanda had said hastily, “but it’s a rumor that you should pay attention to.”
Fuchs nodded to himself as he stared at the image of the ship on the display screen. Some rumors can save your life, he thought.
To the woman piloting the ship he commanded, “Change course. Head back deeper into the Belt.”
She wordlessly followed his order.
“We leave the ship alone?” Nodon asked.
Fuchs allowed the corners of his mouth to inch upward slightly into a sour smile, almost a sneer. “For the time being. Let’s see if the ship leaves us alone once we’ve turned away from it.”
Sitting in the command chair on the bridge of W. Wilson Humphries, Dorik Harbin was also watching the display screens. He clenched his teeth in exasperation as he saw the ship that had been following them for several hours suddenly veer away and head back into the depths of the Belt.
“He suspects something,” said his second-in-command, a whipcord-lean Scandinavian with hair so light she seemed almost to have no eyebrows. She had a knack for stating the obvious.
Wishing he were alone, instead of saddled with this useless crew of mercenaries, Harbin muttered, “Apparently.”
The crew wasn’t useless, exactly. Merely superfluous. Harbin preferred to work alone. With automated systems he had run his old ship, Shanidar, by himself perfectly well. He could go for months alone, deep in solitude, killing when the time came, finding solace in his drugged dreaming.
But now he had a dozen men and women under his command, his responsibility, night and day. Diane had told him that Humphries insisted on placing troops in his decoy ships; he wanted trained mercenaries who would be able to board Fuchs’s ship and carry back his dead body.
“I tried to talk him out of it,” Diane whispered during their last night together, “but he won’t have it any other way. He wants to see Fuchs’s dead body. I think he might have it stuffed and mounted as a trophy.”
Harbin shook his head in wonder that a man with such obsessions could direct a deadly, silent war out here among the asteroids. Well, he thought, perhaps only a man who is obsessed can direct a war. Yes, he answered himself, but what about the men who do the fighting? And the women? Are we obsessed, too?
What difference? What difference does any of it make? How did Kayyam put it?
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty face Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone.
What difference do our own obsessions make? They turn to ashes or prosper. Then they melt like snow upon the desert. What difference? What difference?
He heard his second-in-command asking, “So what are we going to do? He’s getting away.”
He said calmly, “Obviously, he doesn’t believe that we’re carrying ores back to Earth. If we turn around and chase him we’ll simply be proving the point.”
“Then what do we do?” the Scandinavian asked. The expression on her bony, pale face plainly showed that she wanted to go after the other ship.
“We continue to behave as if we are an ore-carrier. No change in course.”
“But he’ll get away!”
“Or come after us, once we’ve convinced him that we’re what we pretend to be.”
She was clearly suspicious of his logic, but murmured, “We play cat and mouse, then?”
“Yes,” said Harbin, glad to have satisfied her. It didn’t seem to matter to her which one of the two ships was the cat and which the mouse.
In Selene, Douglas Stavenger stood by his office window, watching the kids out in the Grand Plaza soaring past on their plastic wings. It was one of the thrills that could only be had on the Moon, and only in an enclosed space as large as the Grand Plaza that was filled with breathable air at normal Earthly pressure. Thanks to the light gravity, a person could strap wings onto her arms and take off to fly like a bird on nothing more than her own muscle power. How long has it been since I’ve done that? Stavenger asked himself. The answer came to him im
mediately: too blasted long. He chided himself, For a retired man, you don’t seem to have much fun.
Someone was prodding the council to allow him to build a golf course out on the floor of Alphonsus. Stavenger laughed at the idea, playing golf in space suits, but several council members seemed to be considering it quite seriously.
His desk phone chimed, and the synthesized voice announced, “Ms. Pahang is here.”
Stavenger turned to his desk and touched the button that opened his door. Jatar Pahang stepped through, smiling radiantly.
She was the world’s most popular video star, “The Flower of Malaya,” a tiny, delicate, exotic woman with lustrous dark eyes and long, flowing, midnight-black hair that cascaded over her bare shoulders. Her dress shimmered in the glareless overhead lights of Stavenger’s office as she walked delicately toward him.
Stavenger came around his desk and extended his hand to her. “Ms. Pahang, welcome to Selene.”
“Thank you,” she said in a voice that sounded like tiny silver bells.
“You’re even more beautiful than your images on-screen,” Stavenger said as he led her to one of the armchairs grouped around a small circular table in the corner of his office.
“You are very gracious, Mr. Stavenger,” she said as she sat in the chair. Her graceful frame made the chair seem far too large for her.
“My friends call me Doug.”
“Very well. And you must call me Jatar.”
“Thank you,” he said, sitting beside her. “All of Selene is at your feet. Our people are very excited to have you visit us.”
“This is my first time off Earth,” she said. “Except for two vids we made in the New China space station.”
“I’ve seen those videos,” Stavenger said, grinning.
“Ah. I hope you enjoyed them.”
“Very much,” he said. Then, pulling his chair a bit closer to hers, he asked, “What can I do, personally, to make your visit more… productive?”
She glanced at the ceiling. “We are alone?”
“Yes,” Stavenger assured her. “No listening devices here. No bugs of any kind.”
She nodded, her smile gone. “Good. The message I carry is for your ears alone.”
“I understand,” said Stavenger, also fully serious.
Jatar Pahang was not only the world’s most popular video star; she was also the mistress of Xu Xianqing, chairman of the world government’s inner council, and his secret envoy to Stavenger and the government of Selene.
CHAPTER 45
The art of governing, thought Xu Xianqing, is much like the art of playing the piano: never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
It had been a long, treacherous road to the leadership of the world government. Xianqing had left many friends, even members of his own family, by the wayside as he climbed to the shaky pinnacle of political power. The precepts of K’ung Fu-Tzu had been his nominal moral guide; the writings of Machiavelli his actual handbook. During his years of struggle and upward striving, more than once he marveled inwardly that he—or anyone—bothered even to try. Why am I driven to climb higher and higher? he asked himself. Why do I take on such pains, such risks, such unending toil?
He never found a satisfactory answer. A religious man might have concluded that he had been chosen for this service, but Xianqing was not a man of faith. Instead, he considered himself a fatalist, and reasoned that the blind forces of history had somehow pushed him to his present pinnacle of authority and power.
And responsibility. Perhaps that was the true, ultimate answer. Xianqing understood that with the power and authority came responsibility. The planet Earth was suffering a cataclysm unmatched in all of human history. The climate was changing so severely that no one could cope with the sudden, disastrous floods and droughts. Earthquakes raged. Cities were drowned by rising waters. Farmlands were parched by shifting rainfall patterns, then washed away by savage storms. Millions had already died, and hundreds of millions more were starving and homeless.
In many lands the bewildered, desperate people turned to fundamentalist faiths for help and strength. They traded their individual liberties for order and safety. And food.
Yet, Xianqing knew, the human communities on the Moon and in the Asteroid Belt lived as if the travails of their brethren on Earth meant nothing to them. They controlled untold wealth: energy that Earth’s peoples desperately needed, and natural resources beyond all that Mother Earth could provide its wretched and despairing children.
The giant corporations sold fusion fuels and solar energy to the wealthy of Earth. They sold metals and minerals from the asteroids to those who could afford it. How can I convince them to be more generous, to be more helping? Xianqing asked himself every day, every hour.
There was only one way that he could see: Seize control of the riches of the Asteroid Belt. The fools who plied that dark and distant region, the prospectors and miners and their corporate masters, were fighting among themselves. The ancient crime of piracy had reappeared out there among the asteroids. Murder and violence were becoming commonplace.
The world government could send an expedition of Peacekeepers to Ceres to restore order, Xianqing thought. We could stop the mayhem and bring peace to the region. And thereby, we could gain control of those precious resources. The prospectors and miners would grumble, of course. The corporations would howl. But what could do they do in the face of a fait accompli? How could they protest against the establishment of law and peace along that murderous frontier?
One thing barred such a prospect: Selene.
The people of the lunar community had fought for their independence and won it. They would not sit back and allow the world government to seize the Asteroid Belt. Would they fight? Xianqing feared that they would. It would not be difficult for them to attack spacecraft that were launched from Earth. We live in the bottom of a gravity well, Xianqing knew. While our vessels fight their way into space, Selene could destroy them, one by one. Or worse yet, cut off all supplies of energy and raw materials from space. Earth would be reduced to darkness and impotence.
No, direct military intervention in the Belt would be counterproductive—unless Selene could be neutralized.
So, Xianqing decided, if I cannot be a conqueror, I will become a peacemaker. I will lead the effort to resolve the fighting in the Asteroid Belt and gain the gratitude of future generations.
His first step was to contact Douglas Stavenger, in secret, through his beautiful mistress.
CHAPTER 46
“This isn’t going to work, Lars,” said Boyd Nielson. Fuchs muttered, “That’s my worry, not yours.”
“But some of those people down there are just construction workers,” Nielson pleaded. “Some of them are friends of ours, for god’s sake!”
Fuchs turned away. “That can’t be helped,” he growled. “They shouldn’t be working for Humphries.”
Nielson was an employee of Humphries Space Systems, commander of the ore freighter William C. Durant, yet he had been a friend of Fuchs’s in the early days on Ceres, before all the troubles began. Fuchs had tracked the Durant as the ship picked its way from one asteroid to another, loading ores bound back to the Earth/Moon system. With a handful of his crew, Fuchs had boarded Nielsen’s ship and taken it over. Faced with a half-dozen fierce-looking armed men and women, there was no fight, no resistance from Nielson or his crew. With its tracking beacon and all other communications silenced, Fuchs abruptly changed Durant’s course toward the major asteroid Vesta.
“Vesta?” Nielson had asked, puzzled. “Why there?”
“Because your employer, the high-and-mighty Mister Martin Humphries, is building a military base there,” Fuchs told him.
Fuchs had heard the rumors in the brief flurries of communications he received from Amanda, back at Ceres. HSS people were building a new base on Vesta. More armed ships and mercenaries were going to use the asteroid as the base from which they would hunt down Lars Fuchs and kill him.
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sp; Fuchs decided to strike them first. He ordered the compliant Nielson to contact Vesta and tell them that Durant had been damaged in a fight with Fuchs’s ship and needed to put in for repairs.
But now, as the two men stood at the command console on Durant’s bridge and Nielson finally understood what Fuchs was going to do, he began to feel frightened. He was a lean, wiry redhead with a pointed chin and teeth that seemed a size too big for his jaw. Nielsen’s crew were all locked in their privacy cubicles. Nodon and the other Asians were at the ship’s controls. Nielson was not the nervous type, Fuchs knew, but as they approached Vesta he started to perspire visibly.
“For the love of mercy, Lars,” he protested.
“Mercy?” Fuchs snapped. “Did they show mercy to Niles Ripley? Did they show mercy to any of the people in the ships they destroyed? This is a war, Boyd, and in a war there is no mercy.”
The asteroid looked immense in the bridge’s main display screen, a massive dark sphere, pitted with numberless craters. Spreading across one of the biggest of the craters, Fuchs saw, was a tangle of buildings and construction equipment. Scorch marks showed where shuttlecraft had landed and taken off again.
“Three ships in orbit,” Fuchs noted, eyes narrowing.
“Might be more on the other side, too,” said Nielson.
“They’ll all be armed.”
“I imagine so.” Nielson looked distinctly uncomfortable. “We could all get killed.”
Fuchs nodded, as if he had made a final calculation and was satisfied with the result.
To Nodon, sitting in the pilot’s chair, Fuchs said, “Proceed as planned.”
Turning to Nielson, “You should ask them for orbital parameters.”