by Ben Bova
The one thing that bothered Fuchs was the constant humming, throbbing that pervaded this uppermost level of Selene. He knew that Selene’s nuclear power generators were buried more than a hundred kilometers away, on the far side of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. Yet there was a constant electrical crackle in the air, the faint scent of ozone that triggered uneasy Earthly memories of approaching thunderstorms. Fuchs felt that it shouldn’t bother him, that he should ignore the annoyance. Still, his head ached much of the time, throbbing in rhythm to the constant electrical pulse.
He had chosen this site for his headquarters because he could commandeer the big display screen that had been erected on one side of the storehouse shelving. It had been placed there to help the occasional human operator to locate items stacked in inventory. Fuchs used its link to Selene’s main computer to study schematics of the city’s water and air circulation systems. He was searching for a way into Humphries’s mansion. So far his search had proved fruitless.
“The man must be the biggest paranoid in the solar system,” Fuchs muttered.
“Or the greatest coward,” said Amarjagal, sitting on the walkway’s metal grating beside him, her sturdy legs crossed, her back hunched like a small mountain.
Nodon and Sanja sat slightly farther away, their shaved skulls sheened with perspiration in the overly warm air. This close together, Fuchs could smell their rancid body odors. They have showers in their quarters, he knew. Perhaps they’re worried about their water allotments. Fuchs himself washed infrequently in water tapped from one of the main pipes that ran overhead. No matter how careful he was he always left puddles that drew teams of swiftly efficient maintenance robots, buzzing officiously. Fuchs feared that sooner or later human maintenance workers would come up to determine what was causing the leaks.
“Every possible access to his grotto is guarded by triply redundant security systems,” Fuchs saw as he studied the schematics. “Motion detectors, cameras, heat sensors.”
Nodon pointed with a skinny finger, “Even the electrical conduits are guarded.”
“A mouse couldn’t squirm through those conduits,” said Sanja.
“The man is a great coward,” Amarjagal repeated. “He has much fear in him.”
He’s got a lot to be afraid of, Fuchs thought. Then he added, But not unless we find a way into his mansion.
No matter how they studied the schematics, they could find no entry into Humphries’s domain, short of a brute force attack. But there are only four of us, Fuchs reminded himself, and we have no weapons. Humphries must have a security force patrolling his home that’s armed to the teeth.
Nodon shook his head unhappily. “There is no way that I can see.”
“Nor I,” Amarjagal agreed.
Fuchs took in a deep, heavy breath, then exhaled slowly, wearily. “I can,” he said.
The three of them turned questioning eyes to him.
“One of you will have to change your job, get a position with Selene’s maintenance department.”
“Is that possible?” asked Amarjagal.
“It should be,” Fuchs replied. “You’re all qualified technicians. You have identity dossiers from Astro Corporation.”
“I’ll do it,” said Nodon.
“Good.”
“And after Nodon begins working for the maintenance department?” Amarjagal asked.
Fuchs eyed her dispassionately. Of the three, she was the feistiest, the most likely to ask questions. Is it because she’s a woman? Fuchs wondered.
“I’ll have to acquire an identification chip for myself, so I can get down to Selene’s lowest level.”
“How can you get one?”
“I’ll need help,” he admitted.
The three Asians looked at him questioningly.
“I’ll call Pancho. I’m sure she can get an identification tag for me that will give me access to Humphries’s grotto.”
He was grasping at a straw and he knew it. Even worse, when he called Pancho from one of the phones set along the walkways of the machinery spaces, he was told that Ms. Lane was away from her office and unavailable.
“Where is she?” Fuchs asked.
“Ms. Lane is unavailable at present,” the phone’s synthesized voice answered. “Please leave your name and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.”
Fuchs had no intention of leaving his name. “Can I reach her, wherever she is?”
“Ms. Lane is unavailable at present,” the computer replied cheerfully.
“How long will she be gone?”
“That information is unknown, sir.”
Fuchs thought swiftly. No sense trying to pry information out of a stupid machine, he thought. Besides, he didn’t want to stay on the phone long enough to draw the attention of Selene’s security monitors.
“Tell her that Karl Manstein called and will call again.”
Feeling desperate, trapped, he punched the phone’s OFF key.
It wasn’t easy to surprise Douglas Stavenger. No matter that he had been officially retired from any formal office for decades, he still kept himself informed on everything that happened in Selene. And beyond, to a considerable extent.
He knew that his wife was pressing the news media chief for more coverage of the war raging out in the Belt. He knew that the corporations were pushing in the opposite direction, to keep the story as hushed up as possible. The Starlight tragedy had forced some light into the situation, but both Astro and Humphries Space Systems exerted every gram of their enormous power to move the media off the story as quickly as possible.
But now, as he sat at the breakfast table with his wife, Stavenger was truly shocked by her revelation.
“You’re going to Ceres?” Edith smiled prettily over her teacup. “Nobody else wants to open up this story, Doug, so I’m going to do it.”
He fought down an impulse to shake his head. For several moments he said nothing, staring at his bowl of yogurt and honey, his thoughts spinning feverishly.
Yet when he looked up at her again all he could think to say was, “I don’t like it, Edie.”
“I’m not sure that I like it myself, darling, but somebody’s got to do it and I don’t see anyone else stepping up to the task.”
“It’s dangerous out there.”
Her smile widened. “Now who’s going to harm the wife of Doug Stavenger? That would bring Selene into the war, wouldn’t it?”
“Not automatically, no.”
“No?” She arched a brow at him.
He conceded, “I imagine the corporations would fear Selene’s response.”
“If anyone harmed me,” she went on, quite seriously, “you’d see to it that Selene came into the war on the other side. Right? And that would throw the balance of power against the corporation that harmed me. Wouldn’t it?”
He nodded reluctantly.
“And that would decide the war. Wouldn’t it?”
“It could.”
“It would, and you know it. Everybody knows it, including Pancho Lane and Martin Humphries.” She took another sip of tea, then put the cup down with a tiny clink of china. “So I’ll be perfectly safe out there.”
“I still don’t like it,” he murmured.
She reached across the little table and grasped his hand. “But I’ve got to, Doug. You can see that, can’t you? It’s important: not just to me but to everybody involved, the whole solar system, for god’s sake.”
Stavenger looked into his wife’s earnest eyes and knew he couldn’t stop her.
“I’ll go with you, then,” he said.
“Oh no! You’ve got to stay here!”
“I don’t think—”
“You’re my protection, Doug. What happens if we both get killed out there? Who’s going to lead Selene?”
“The duly elected governing council.”
“Oh, sure,” she sneered. “Without you pulling their strings they’ll dither and shuffle and do nothing, and you know it.”
“No, I don’t
know that.”
She smiled again. “I need your protection, Doug, and I can only get it if you’re here at Selene, keeping things under control.”
“You give me more credit than I deserve.”
“And you’re the youngest eminence grise in the solar system.”
He laughed. It was an old standing joke between them.
“Besides,” Edith went on, “if you come out to Ceres all the attention will be on you. They’ll fall all over themselves trying to show you that everything’s all right. I’ll never get a straight story out of anybody.”
He kept the argument going for nearly another half-hour, but Stavenger knew that his wife would do what she wanted. And so would he. Edith will go to Ceres, he realized, and I’ll stay here.
Nobuhiko was brimming with excitement when he called his father to tell him that Pancho Lane was walking into the Nairobi base on the Moon.
The elder Yamagata was in his cell in the monastery, a fairly sizable room whose stone walls were covered now with bookshelves and smart screens. The room was furnished sparsely, but Nobu noticed that his father had managed to get a big, square mahogany desk for himself.
Saito was sitting on his haunches on a tatami mat, however, directly under the big wallscreen that displayed an intricate chart that Nobu guessed was the most recent performance of the Tokyo stock exchange.
“She’s going into the Nairobi base voluntarily?” Saito asked.
“Yes!” gushed Nobu. “I’ve ordered an interrogation team to get there immediately! The Africans can drug her and the team wring her dry and she’ll never even know it!”
Saito grunted. “Except for her headache the next day.”
Nobu wanted to laugh, but held back.
His father said nothing for long, nerve-racking moments. Finally, “You go to Shackleton. You, yourself.”
“Me? But why—”
“No interrogation team knows as much about our work as you do, my son. You can glean much more from her than they could without you.”
Nobu thought it over swiftly. “But if somehow she recognizes me, remembers afterward…”
“Then she must be eliminated,” Saito answered. “It would be a pity, but it would be quite necessary.”
COMMAND SHIP SAMARKAND
Since the battle that shattered Gormley’s fleet, the HSS base at Vesta had been busy. Ships were sent out in groups of two or three to hound down Astro freighters and logistics vessels. Although Astros crewed ships were armed, they were no match for the warships with their mercenary crews that Humphries was pouring into the Belt.
Sitting in the command chair of Samarkand, in charge of three attack ships, Dorik Harbin wondered how long the war could possibly go on. Astro’s vessels were being methodically eliminated. It was clear that Humphries’s mercenaries were on the verge of sweeping Astro entirely out of the Belt. Astro’s pitiful effort to stop HSS freighters from delivering ores to the Earth/Moon region had backfired hideously with the Starlight fiasco.
Yet the rumor was that more Astro ships were heading for the Belt. Better-armed ships, vessels crewed by mercenaries who were smart enough to avoid massed battles. The war was settling down to a struggle of attrition. Which corporation could better sustain the constant losses of ships and crews? Which corporation would decide the war was costing too much and call it quits?
Not Humphries, Harbin thought. He had met the man and seen the tenacity in his eyes, the dogged drive to succeed no matter what the cost. It’s only money to him, Harbin realized. He isn’t risking his neck, he’s in no danger of shedding his own blood. What does he care how many are killed out here in the empty silence of the Belt?
His communications technician flashed a red-bordered message onto the bridge’s main screen. A solar flare warning. Scanning the data, Harbin saw that it would be several days before the cloud reached the Belt’s inner fringes.
“Run a diagnostic on the radiation shield system,” he commanded, thinking, Make sure now that the shield is working properly, and if it’s not you’ve got three or four days to repair it.
“We have a target, sir!”
His weapons tech’s announcement stirred Harbin out of his thoughts. The flare warning disappeared from the main screen, replaced by three small blips, nearly nine thousand kilometers away, too distant for their telescopic cameras to resolve into a clear optical image.
With the touch of a fingertip on his armrest keypad, Harbin called up the computer’s analysis. Their trajectory was definitely not the Sun-centered ellipse of asteroids; they were moving in formation toward Ceres. Not HSS ships, either; the computer had all their flight plans in its memory.
“Three on three,” he muttered.
As Samarkand and its two accompanying warships sped toward the Astro vessels, the display screen began to show details. One of them was a typical dumbbell-shaped freighter, toting a large, irregularly shaped mass of ores. The other two were smaller, sleeker, obviously escorts designed to protect the freighter. Both the escorts were studded with asteroidal rock, armor to absorb and deflect laser beams.
Harbin’s ships, including Samarkand, were also covered with asteroidal rubble, for the same reason. He saw that the Astro freighter was not so armored. They probably hope to use their cargo as a shield, he thought.
“Parallel course,” he commanded. “Remain at a distance of fifteen hundred klicks. No closer, for the present.”
“It’s a long shot for the lasers,” his weapons tech said, her heavy, dark face looking decidedly unhappy. “And they’re armored, too.”
Harbin nodded. “It’s the freighter we want. I don’t care about the escorts.”
The weapons technician gave him a puzzled frown, then returned her attention to her screens.
Harbin studied the image on the main screen. The Astro escort vessels look more like rock piles than warships, he thought. I suppose we do too. He smiled grimly. Between the two corporations, we must be using more ores as ship’s armor than we’re selling to the markets on Earth. Well, that will end sooner or later. No war lasts forever.
Unbidden, a couplet from the Rubaiyat came to his mind:
One Moment in Annihilation’s waste,
One moment, of the well of life to taste—
“We’ve been pulsed by search radar,” his pilot reported.
Harbin nodded. “They know we’re here.”
“They’re making no move toward us.”
“No,” Harbin replied. “Two escorts are not going to come after the three of us. They’ll stick close to their freighter and wait for us to make a move on them.”
“What move shall we make, sir?”
“Just continue the parallel course at this distance.” Turning to the communication tech, seated beside the pilot, Harbin added, “Make certain that our two other ships follow me closely.”
As the comm tech relayed his orders, Harbin thought, How to separate those two escorts from the freighter? If we go in to attack we’ll be moving into their massed fire. I’ve got to find a way to split them apart.
For long, nerve-stretching minutes the two little formations flew in parallel, too distant for either to waste power on laser shots that would be absorbed by the ships’ protective shields of asteroidal rubble. The Astro ships were hurrying out of the Belt, heading Earthward, to bring the freighter’s massive load of ores to the waiting markets.
“We’ll be reaching fuel bingo in forty-five minutes, sir,” the pilot announced.
Harbin acknowledged the warning with a nod. Fuel bingo: the turn-back point. The farthest distance from their refueling base at Vesta that Samarkand and its two accompanying ships could safely go.
How to separate those escorts from the freighter? Harbin asked himself, over and over. He played one scheme after another in his mind. He riffled through the tactical computer’s preset plans. Nothing that he could use. He was pleased to see that the computer’s data bank included his own tactics against Gormley.
And that gave him the idea he
needed.
“You two,” he said, jabbing a finger at the communications and weapons technicians. “Get to the main airlock and suit up. Now!”
They unbuckled their seat harnesses and scampered to the bridge’s hatch. Once they announced that they were in their space suits, Harbin went back to the airlock to brief them on what they had to do. Neither of them relished the idea of going outside, he could see that on their faces even through the thick visors of their helmets. That didn’t matter to Harbin. There was no other way for his scheme to work.
He made his way back to the bridge and resumed his position in the command chair. The executive officer monitored the two technicians as they left the airlock and followed Harbin’s orders. Within half an hour they reported that they had successfully discharged the electrostatic field that held the rocks of their armor shield tightly around the hull of the ship.
“Some of the rocks are floating loose now,” the weapons tech reported, her voice tense. “Most of ’em are holding in place against the hull, though.”
“Good,” Harbin said tightly. “Come back aboard.”
“Yes, sir.” He could hear the relief in their voices. They were technicians, not trained astronauts. Working outside was not a chore they enjoyed.
While they were wriggling out of their space suits back at the airlock, Harbin commanded his pilot to turn and commence a high-speed run at the Astro ships. The other two HSS vessels were to remain on their courses.
The two technicians struggled back into their seats as Samarkand’s fusion engines accelerated the ship to a full g and then even beyond. Harbin heard metal groaning and creaking as the trio of Astro ships grew visibly bigger in the main screen.
The loosened rocks of the rubble shield were being pushed mechanically by the bulk of the accelerating ship. They were no longer held to the hull by the electrostatic field. Harbin heard thumps and bangs as some of the rocks separated entirely from the ship, but most of them obediently followed Newton’s laws and hung on the ship’s hull.