by Ben Bova
“One-third of our profits go to Humphries,” Nobu reminded his father.
The hardest thing that Nobuhiko had been forced to tell his father was that Humphries had bought into Yamagata Corporation back in the days when the greenhouse cliff had struck so hard that the corporation was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Humphries owned a third of Yamagata Corporation, and was constantly scheming to gain more. It had taken every gram of Nobu’s courage to tell his father that. He feared it would break the old man’s heart.
Instead, Saito had accepted the news stoically, saying only, “Humphries took advantage of the situation.”
With some heat, Nobu growled, “He took advantage of the catastrophes that struck Japan.”
“Yes,” Saito said, his voice a low rumble. “We’ll have to do something about that, eventually.”
Nobu had never felt so relieved, so grateful.
Now, Saito sat back on his heels and gazed out at the snowy mountains.
“Our first objective is to make certain that neither Humphries nor Astro Corporation learns that we aim to establish ourselves in the Belt.”
Nobu nodded his acknowledgment.
“The best way to accomplish that,” Saito went on, “is to keep them both busy fighting each other.”
“We’ve already destroyed a few automated freighters of both corporations, as you suggested. Pancho Lane blames Humphries, of course, and he blames her.”
“Good,” Saito grunted.
“But they’re not actually fighting. There’s a bit of piracy in the Belt, mainly by the man Fuchs, but he is one lone madman, without support from anyone except a few of the rock rats.”
“He may be the key to the situation, then.”
“I don’t understand how,” said Nobu.
“Let me think about it,” Saito replied. “Our objective remains to keep HSS and Astro focused on each other. Fuchs could be an important element in this. Properly exploited, he could help us to stir this simmering enmity between Pancho Lane and Martin Humphries into a major conflict.”
“A major conflict?” Nobu asked, alarmed. “You mean actual fighting? War?”
“Business is a form of warfare, son. If Astro and Humphries fight each other out there in the Belt, it can only be to our benefit.”
Nobuhiko left his father with his mind whirling. Set Humphries and Astro against each other. Yes, he decided, it would be in Yamagata Corporation’s best interest to do so. And this exile Fuchs could be the pivot that moves the stone.
By the time he landed in the family’s estate near New Kyoto, Nobuhiko was lost in admiration for the depth of his father’s thought. A war between HSS and Astro. Nobu smiled. Living in a monastery hasn’t softened the old man’s heart. Or his brain.
HABITAT CHRYSALIS
Originally, the prospectors and miners who came out to the Belt lived inside the largest of the asteroids, Ceres. Honeycombed by nature with lava tubes and caves, Ceres offered solid rock protection against the hard radiation that constantly sleets through the solar system. But at less than half the size of Earth’s Moon, the asteroid’s minuscule gravity presented problems for long-term residents. Muscle and bone deteriorate in microgravity. And every movement in the asteroid’s caves and tunnels, every footfall or hand’s brush against a rock wall, stirred up fine, powdery, carbon-dark dust that lingered in the air, hovering constantly in the light gravity. The dust was everywhere. It irritated the lungs and made people cough. It settled in fine black coatings on dishes in cupboards, on furniture, on clothing hanging limply in closets.
It was Lars Fuchs who had started the ramshackle habitat that eventually was named Chrysalis by the rock rats. When he lived in Ceres with his wife, Amanda, before he was exiled and she divorced him to marry Humphries, Fuchs got his fellow rock rats to start building the habitat.
All the rock rats knew that Fuchs’s real motive was to start a family. A habitat in orbit around Ceres, rotating to produce an artificial gravity, would be a much safer place to have babies. So they started buying stripped-down spacecraft and old junkers that had been abandoned by their owners. They connected them, Tinkertoy fashion, and slowly built a wheeled station in orbit around Ceres that could house the growing population of rock rats. It looked like a rotating junkyard, from the outside. But its interior was clean, efficient, and protected by the electromagnetic radiation shields that each individual ship had built into it.
By the time the residents of Ceres moved to their orbital habitat and named it Chrysalis, Fuchs had lost his one-man war against Humphries Space Systems, been exiled from the habitat he himself had originated, and lost his wife to Martin Humphries.
Big George Ambrose was thinking about that sad history while his torch ship approached Ceres. As he packed his toiletries in preparation for docking, he cast an eye at the wallscreen view of the habitat. Chrysalis was growing. A new ring was being built around the original circular collection of spacecraft. The new ring looked more like a proper habitat: the rock rats had enough money now to invest in real engineering and the same quality of construction that went into the space habitats in the Earth/Moon region.
One day we’ll abandon the old clunker, George told himself, surprised at how rueful he felt about it. It’s been a good home.
The big, shaggy-bearded, redheaded Aussie had started his career as an engineer at Moonbase, long before it became the independent nation of Selene. He had lost his job in one of the economic wobbles of those early days and became a fugitive, a non-person who lived by his wits in the shadowy black market of the “lunar underground.” Then he’d run into Dan Randolph, who made George respectable again. By the time Randolph died, George was a rock rat, plying the dark and lonely expanse of the Belt in search of a fortune. Eventually he was elected chief administrator of Ceres. Now he was returning home from Humphries’s winter solstice party.
He had spent the six days of his return voyage in a liaison with the torch ship’s propulsion engineer, a delightful young Vietnamese woman of extraordinary beauty who talked about fusion rocket systems between passionate bouts of lovemaking. George had been flabbergasted by the unexpected affair, until he realized that she wanted a position on a prospecting ship and a fling with the chief of the rock rats’ community looked to her like a good way to get one.
Well, thought George as he packed his one travel bag, it was fun while it lasted. He told her he’d introduce her to a few prospectors; some of them might need a propulsion engineer. Still, he felt sad about the affair. I’ve been manipulated, he realized. Then, despite himself, he broke into a rueful grin. She’s pretty good at manipulating he had to admit.
Once his travel bag was zipped up, George instructed the ship’s computer to display any messages waiting for him. The wall screen instantly showed a long list. He hadn’t been paying attention to his duties for the past several days, he knew. Being chief administrator means bein’ a mediator, a decision-maker, even a father/confessor to everyone and anyone in the fookin’ Belt, he grumbled silently.
One message, though, was from Pancho Lane.
Surprised and curious, George ordered her message on-screen. The computer displayed a wavering, eye-straining hash of colored streaks. Pancho’s message was scrambled. George had to pull out his personal palmcomp and hunt for the combination to descramble it.
At last Pancho’s lean, lantern-jawed face filled with screen. “Hi George. Sorry we didn’t get to spend more time together before you had to take off. Lemme ask you a question: Can you contact Lars if you need to? I might hafta talk to him.”
The screen went blank.
George stared at it thoughtfully, wondering: Now why in all the caverns of hell would Pancho need to talk to Lars Fuchs?
HELL CRATER
Pancho always grinned when she thought about Father Maximilian J. Hell, the Jesuit astronomer for whom this thirty-kilometer-wide lunar crater had been named. Wily promoters such as Sam Gunn had capitalized on the name and built a no-holds-barred resort city at Hell Crater,
complete with gambling casinos and euphemistically named “honeymoon hotels.”
Astro Corporation had made a fair pocketful of profits from building part of the resort complex. But Pancho wasn’t visiting Hell to check on corporate interests. She had received a message from Amanda to meet her at the medical center there. Mandy’s message had come by a tortuously circuitous route, imbedded in a seemingly innocuous invitation to Selene’s annual Independence Day celebration, sent by none other than Douglas Stavenger.
Ever since the Christmas party Pancho had been trying to see Amanda, to renew the friendship that had come to a screeching halt once Mandy had married Humphries. Amanda replied politely to each of Pancho’s invitations, but somehow always had an excuse to postpone a meeting. Mandy never replied in real time; her messages were always recorded. Pancho studied Amanda’s face each time, searching for some hint of how Mandy was and why she wouldn’t—or, more likely, couldn’t—get away from Humphries long enough to have lunch with an old pal.
So when Stavenger’s video invitation popped up on Pancho’s screen, she was staggered to see his youthful face morph into Amanda’s features. “Please meet me at the Fossel Medical Center, Pancho, next Wednesday at eleven-thirty.”
Then her image winked out and Doug Stavenger’s was smiling at her again. Pancho couldn’t recapture Mandy’s message, either. It was gone completely.
Curiouser and curiouser, Pancho thought as she rode the cable car from Selene. The cable lines were the cheapest and most efficient transportation system on the Moon. Rockets were faster, and there was a regular rocket shuttle between Selene and the growing astronomical observatory complex at Farside. But the cable cars ran up and over the Alphonsus ringwall mountains and out to Copernicus, Hell, and the other budding centers being built on the Moon’s near side. There were even plans afoot to link Selene with the bases being built in the lunar south polar region by cable systems.
A corporate executive of Pancho’s stature could have commandeered a car for herself, or even flown over to Hell in her own rocket hopper. But that wasn’t Pancho’s style. She enjoyed being as inconspicuous as possible, and found it valuable to see what the ordinary residents of Selene—the self-styled Lunatics—were thinking and doing. Besides, she didn’t want to call the attention of Humphries’s ever-present spies to the fact that she was going, literally, to Hell.
So she whizzed along twenty meters above the flat, pockmarked, rock-strewn surface of Mare Nubium, wondering what Amanda was up to. The cable car’s interior was almost exactly like a spacecraft’s passenger cabin, except that Pancho could feel it swaying slightly as she sat in her padded chair. Small windows lined each side of the cabin, and there was a pair of larger curving windows up forward, where tourists or romantics could get a broad view of the barren lunar landscape rushing past. What’d that old astronaut call it? Pancho asked herself. Then she remembered: “Magnificent desolation.”
Those front seats were already taken, so Pancho slouched back in her chair and pulled out her palmcomp. Might’s well get some work done, she told herself. But she couldn’t help staring out at the mountains of the highlands rising beyond the horizon, stark and bare in the harsh unfiltered sunlight.
At last the car popped into the yawning airlock at Hell Crater. Pancho hurried through the reception center and out into the main plaza. The domed plaza was circular, which made it seem bigger than the plaza at Selene. Pancho marveled at the crowds that bustled along the shrubbery-lined walkways: elderly couples, plenty of younger singles, whole families with laughing, excited kids. Most of the tourists were stumbling in the low lunar gravity, even in the weighted boots they had rented. Despite the catastrophes that had smitten Earth, there were still enough people with enough wealth to make Hell a profitable resort.
Shaking her head ruefully as she walked toward the medical center, Pancho thought about how Hotel Luna back at Selene was practically bankrupt. It wasn’t enough to a offer first-rate hotel facility on the Moon, she realized. Not anymore. But give people gambling, prostitution, and recreational drugs and they’ll come up and spend their money. Of course, nobody accepted cash. All financial transactions were computerized, which helped keep everybody reasonably honest. For a modest percentage of the gross, the government of Selene policed the complex and saw to it that visitors got what they paid for, nothing more and nothing less. Even the fundamentalists among Selene’s population appreciated the income that kept their taxes low, although they grumbled about the sinful disgrace of Hell.
As Pancho pushed through the lobby door of the Fossel Medical Center, she immediately saw that the center’s clientele consisted almost entirely of two types: senior citizens with chronic complaints, and very beautiful prostitutes—men as well as women—who were required to have their health checked regularly. Pancho was wearing a well-tailored business suit, but still the “working women” made her feel shabby.
She strode up to the reception center, which was nothing more than a set of flat screens set into the paneling of the curved wall. Pancho picked the screen marked visitors and spoke her name slowly and clearly.
“You are expected in Room 21-A,” said a synthesized voice, while the screen displayed a floor plan with Room 21-A outlined in blinking red. “Follow the red floor lights, please.”
Pancho followed the lights set into the floor tiles and found 21-A without trouble. A couple of security people were in the corridor, a man at one end and a woman at the other, both dressed in ordinary coveralls, both trying to look unobtrusive. HSS flunkies, Pancho guessed.
When she opened the door and stepped into the room, though, she was surprised to see not Amanda, but Doug Stavenger.
“Hello, Pancho,” he said, getting up from the chair on which he’d been sitting. “Sorry for all the cloak and dagger business.”
The room was apparently a waiting area. Small, comfortably upholstered chairs lined its walls. A holowindow displayed a view of the Earth in real time. A second door was set into the back wall.
“I was expecting Mandy,” said Pancho.
“She’ll be here in a few minutes.”
Doug Stavenger’s family had created the original Moonbase, the lunar outpost that eventually grew into the nation of Selene. He had been the leader in Moonbase’s brief, successful war against the old United Nations and their Peacekeeper troops, which established the lunar community’s independence from Earth. Stavenger himself had chosen the name Selene for the fledgling lunar nation.
Although he was fully a generation older than Pancho, Stavenger looked no more than thirty: a handsome, solidly built middleweight whose tawny skin was only a shade lighter than Pancho’s. His body was filled with therapeutic nanomachines that destroyed invading microbes, cleared away fats and arterial plaque, rebuilt his tissues to keep him physically youthful. They had saved his life, twice. Officially Stavenger had been retired for many years, although everyone knew he was still a political power broker in Selene. His influence was even felt in the Asteroid Belt and at the fusion-scooping operation in orbit around Jupiter. But he was exiled from Earth; the worldwide ban on nanotechnology meant that no nation on Earth would allow him within its borders.
“What’re you doin’ here?” Pancho asked as she sat in the chair next to Stavenger.
He hesitated a heartbeat, then replied, “I’ll let Amanda tell you.”
“What’s she here for?”
Stavenger smiled sphinxlike.
If it had been anyone else Pancho would have fumed. She felt her brows knitting. “Some sort of game going on?”
Stavenger’s smile faded. “Some sort, indeed.”
The inner door swung open and Amanda stepped into the room. She was wearing the latest style of baggy blue-gray sweatshirt that stopped short of her rumpled, darker slacks so that her midriff was bare. In keeping with the current fashion, she had an animated decal sprayed around her waist: a procession of colorful elves and trolls, their endless marching powered by Amanda’s body heat. Her golden hair was slightl
y disheveled. Even though she smiled at Pancho, the expression on her face seemed far less than happy. She looked pale, tense.
Stavenger got to his feet, but Pancho went like a shot to Amanda and wrapped her arms around her and held her close.
“Cripes almighty, Mandy, it’s great to see you.” Without your sumbitch husband between us, Pancho added mentally.
Amanda seemed to understand exactly how Pancho felt. She rested her head on Pancho’s shoulder for a moment and murmured, “It’s good to see you, too, Pancho.”
They disentangled and sat down next to each other. Stavenger pulled a third chair over to sit facing them.
“The room’s clean,” he said. “Whatever we say here won’t go beyond these walls. And all the other waiting rooms along this corridor are unoccupied.”
Pancho realized that the security people out in the hallway were from Selene, not Humphries Space Systems.
“What’s this all about?” she asked.
“I need to tell you something, Pancho,” said Amanda.
“Must be important.”
“Life or death,” Stavenger muttered.
“Martin is planning some sort of move against Astro,” Amanda said. “He’s furious with you, Pancho. He believes you’ve been supplying Lars, helping him to prey on HSS ships.”
“That’s bullshit,” Pancho snapped. “Hell, he’s knocked off three of Astro’s robot freighters in the past month. First one, I thought maybe Lars had done it, but not three.”
“Lars wouldn’t attack your ships, Pancho,” Amanda said.
Stavenger agreed. “There’s something in the wind, that’s for sure. Someone’s pumping money into this new African corporation.”
“Nairobi Industries,” said Pancho. “They’re building a facility at Shackleton Crater, near the south pole.”
“And Martin is backing them?”
“Either Humphries or a third player that’s staying behind the scenes so far,” said Stavenger.