by Ben Bova
“Sir, we have a target,” the exec’s voice said. Then she added, “I think.”
Harbin slammed the cabinet door shut. “You think?” he shouted to the intercom microphone set into the metal overhead of the lav. “It’s an odd signature, sir.”
Incompetent jackass, Harbin said to himself. Aloud, “I’m on my way.”
He strode to the bridge, simmering anger. I can’t trust this crew to do anything for themselves. I can’t even leave them alone long enough to take a piss.
But as he slid into the command chair he saw that the display on the main screen was indeed fuzzy, indistinct.
“Max magnification,” he commanded.
“It is at maximum,” the comm tech replied. She too was staring at the screen, a puzzled frown furrowing her pale Nordic countenance.
Harbin glanced at the data bar running across the bottom of the display. Just over twelve hundred kilometers away. The object was spinning slowly, turning along its long axis every few seconds.
“Size estimate,” he snapped.
Two pulsating cursors appeared at each end of the rotating object. Blinking alphanumerics said 1.9 meters.
“It’s too small to be a ship,” said the pilot.
“A robot vehicle?” the weapons technician asked. “Maybe a mine of some sort?” Harbin shook his head. He knew what it was. “Turn off the display.”
“But what is it?” the communications tech wondered aloud.
“Turn it off!”
The screen went dark. All four of his officers turned to stare at him questioningly.
“It’s a man,” Harbin said. “Or a woman. Someone in a space suit. Someone dead. Killed in a battle out there, probably months ago.”
“Should we—”
“Ignore it,” he snapped. “It can’t hurt us and there’s nothing more we can do to it. Just leave it alone.”
The officers glanced at each other.
“A casualty of war,” Harbin said grimly as he got out of the command chair. “Just forget about it. I’m going back to my quarters. Don’t disturb me with any more ghosts.”
He went back to his cabin, stripped off his sweaty uniform and stretched out on his bunk. It will be good to get back to Vesta, he thought. This ship needs refurbishment. So do I.
This war can’t last much longer, he told himself. We’ve driven most of the Astro ships out of the Belt. They’ll come back with more, I suppose, and we’ll destroy them. We’ll keep on destroying them until they finally give up. And what then? Do I retire back to Earth? Or keep on working? There’s always money to be made for a mercenary soldier. There’s always someone willing to pay for killing someone else.
He closed his eyes to sleep, but instead he saw a space-suited figure tumbling slowly through the star-flecked emptiness, silently turning over and over, for all eternity alone in the cold, dark emptiness, forever alone.
His eyes snapped open. Harbin thought about taking a shot that would let him sleep, but he didn’t want to dream. So he lay on the bunk for hours, wide awake, staring at the hard metal of the overhead.
“Wish I could call my people and tell ’em I’ll be spending the night here,” Pancho said. “When’s that laser link going to start working?”
Wine bottle in one hand, pneumatic corkscrew in the other, Daniel Tsavo suddenly looked uneasy.
“They’ll know you’re safe down here,” he said, with a slightly labored smile. “Let’s have some wine and stop worrying.”
Pancho made herself smile back at him. “Sure, why not? You open the bottle while I freshen up a little.”
She went to the lavatory and closed its door firmly. Pecking at her wristwatch, she saw that its link with the satellites that were supposed to be tracking her was dead. She tried the phone function. That was down, too.
Pancho leaned against the sink, thinking furiously. I’m cut off from the outside. He wants me to stay here overnight. Fun and games? Maybe, but there’s more to it than just a romp in the sheets. This place is huge. They’re spending more money on construction than Nairobi’s got on its books. A lot more. Somebody big is bankrolling them.
And then it hit her. Tsavo said to me, “Welcome to Shining Mountain Base.” That’s what the Japanese call this mountain range: the Shining Mountains. And that transfer ship outside is painted in Yamagata Corporation’s blue.
Yamagata’s behind all this, Pancho finally realized. They’re bankrolling Nairobi. And now they’ve got me here; I waltzed right in and they’re not going to let go of me that easy.
She heard the pop of a champagne cork through the flimsy lavatory door. Ol’ Danny boy’s working for Yamagata, Pancho said to herself. And I’ll bet there’s enough happy juice in that wine to get me to babble my brains out to him.
I’ve got to get out of here, she told herself. And quick.
Nobuhiko Yamagata paid scant attention to the bows and self-effacing hisses of his underlings. He went straight from the transfer rocket that had landed him at Shining Mountain Base to the room where Pancho Lane would be interrogated. It was in the base’s infirmary, a small room where his interrogation team surrounded an empty gurney. Father is right, Nobu said to himself. I can learn much more from Pancho than these hirelings could.
The team was gowned and masked, like medics. Two young women were helping Nobu into a pale green surgical gown. Within minutes he was masked, gloved, and capped with one of the ridiculous-looking shapeless hats that came down over his ears.
Then he stood by the gurney, waiting. The members of the interrogation team flanked him in silence.
Well, Nobuhiko thought, everything is prepared. Everyone is here except Pancho.
SHINING MOUNTAIN BASE
“Won’t you have some champagne?” Tsavo asked smoothly, offering Pancho one of the crystal flutes that he had filled with the bubbly wine.
“Love to,” said Pancho, smiling her best smile for him.
As he handed her the glass Pancho let it slip from her fingers. She watched with inner amusement as the glass tumbled slowly in the gentle lunar gravity, wine spilling from its lip in languid slow motion. Pancho could have grabbed the glass before it started spilling, but she watched it splash champagne over her coveralls while Tsavo stood there looking shocked.
“Aw gosh,” she said as the glass bounced on the thick carpeting. “Sorry to be so clumsy.”
Tsavo recovered enough to say, “My fault.”
Looking down at the wine-spattered front of her coveralls, Pancho said, “I better dry this off.” She headed for the lavatory, stopping momentarily to unclip one of her earrings and place it on the night table beside the bed.
There are many ways to incapacitate an opponent who’s bigger and stronger than you are, Pancho reminded herself as she firmly closed the lavatory door. One of them is to blind the sumbitch.
She leaned her back against the door and squeezed her eyes shut, but still she saw the flash behind her closed eyelids. Tsavo screamed. By the time Pancho had the lav door open again he was staggering across the bedroom.
“I can’t see!” he shrieked. “I’m blind!”
He crashed into the coffee table, knocking the bottle and chiller bucket to the floor and tumbled into the sofa with a painful thump, groaning, pawing at his eyes.
“I’m blind! I’m blind!”
“Sorry, Danny boy,” Pancho said as she scooped her travel bag off the bed. “You’ll get your sight back in a few hours, more’n likely.”
She left him moaning in a tumbled sobbing heap on the floor by the sofa and dashed out into the corridor.
Now we find out how much security they got here, Pancho said to herself, actually grinning as she raced on her long legs up the carpeted corridor.
Fuchs had thought about calling Astro Corporate headquarters to try to speak with one of Pancho’s aides, but decided against it. None of them would have the authority to give him the help he needed, nor the wit to see the necessity of it. With Pancho out of the picture, Fuchs realized he was on his o
wn.
Just as well, he told himself as he rode the powered stairs down to Selene’s bottommost level. It’s better not to involve Pancho or anyone else. What I have to do I’ll do for myself.
Nodon, Sanja and Amarjagal were waiting for him at the bottom of the last flight of stairs. The corridor down at this level was empty, as Fuchs had expected it to be. Only the very wealthiest lived down here, in the converse of penthouses on Earth. No crowds here, he said to himself as the four of them strode down the broad, empty, quiet corridor. Fuchs saw that the walls here were decorated with bas reliefs, the floor softly carpeted. Security cameras watched them, he knew, but they looked like a quartet of maintenance workers, nothing to set off an alarm.
So far.
“Have you set the maintenance computer?” Fuchs asked Nodon.
The younger man nodded, his big liquid eyes looking slightly frightened. “Yes, sir. The water will be shut off to this level in…” he glanced at his wristwatch, “… three minutes.”
“Good,” said Fuchs. He had no idea how long it would take the maintenance people to discover that the water to level seven had been shut off. Long enough to get the four of us inside Humphries’s grotto, he hoped.
The corridor ended in a blank stone wall with a heavy metal hatch set in it. Beside the hatch was a keypad.
“Do you have the access number?” Fuchs asked Nodon.
“I haven’t had enough time on my job with the maintenance department to be assigned down here,” Nodon said, his voice little more than an apologetic whisper. “But I know the emergency numbers that work on the upper levels.”
“Try them.”
Nodon hunched slightly before the keypad and began tapping numbers. Fuchs watched with gathering impatience. One of those numbers should override the security code, he told himself. Humphries has to allow Selene emergency crews inside his private preserve, he’s got to. Not even he can refuse to allow emergency workers to enter his area. That’s written into Selene’s basic safety regulations.
The hatch suddenly gave off a metallic click. In the stillness of the empty corridor it sounded like a gunshot.
“That’s it!” Fuchs hissed. He set a meaty hand against the cold steel of the hatch and pushed. It opened slowly, silently. A gust of soft, warm air brushed past him as the hatch swung all the way open.
Fuchs gaped at what he saw. A huge expanse filled with brilliant flowers, warm artificial sunlight glowing from the lamps high overhead, the very air heavy with scents he hadn’t smelled since he’d left Earth. And trees! Tall, stately, spreading their leafy branches like arms open to embrace him.
“It’s a paradise,” Amarjagal whispered, her eyes wide with awe. Nodon and Sanja stood beside her, mouths agape. Fuchs felt tears welling up.
With an angry shake of his head he growled, “Come on. Their security alarms must be going off. Their cameras are watching us.”
He started up the brick path that wound through beds of bright colorful flowers, heading for the mansion they could see through the trees.
Paradise, Fuchs thought. But this paradise has armed men guarding it, and they’ll be coming out to stop us in a few minutes.
Nobuhiko pushed up the sleeve of his green surgical gown and looked at his watch. Turning to the chief of the interrogation team, he demanded, “Well, where is she? I’ve been waiting for more than half an hour.”
The man’s mask was slightly askew. He pushed back his shower-cap hat, revealing a line pressed into his high forehead by the cap’s elastic band.
“Tsavo was to bring her here,” he said.
“They should be here by now,” said Nobuhiko.
The man hesitated. “Perhaps they are…”
“They are what?”
With a shrug, the man said, “They spent a night together back at Selene, when they first met. Perhaps they are in bed together now.”
One of the gowned and masked women tittered softly.
Nobuhiko was not amused. “Send someone to find them. At once.”
Her travel bag clutched under one arm, Pancho walked briskly along the corridor, trying to remember the route she had followed when Tsavo brought her down to this level. Cripes, she thought, it was only an hour or two ago but I’m not sure of which way we came. My memory’s shot to hell.
She thought about the stealth suit she had used so many years ago to sneak into Humphries’s mansion unseen. I could use a cloak of invisibility right about now, she told herself as she glanced up at the corridor’s ceiling, searching for surveillance cameras. She couldn’t see any, but she knew that didn’t mean there weren’t any watching.
She spotted a pair of metal doors at the end of the corridor. The elevator! Pancho sprinted to it and leaned on the button set into the wall.
Now we’ll find out if they’re watching me. If the elevator’s working, it means they don’t know I’m on the loose.
The elevator doors slid smoothly open and Pancho stepped into the cab. It wasn’t until the doors shut again and the elevator started accelerating upwards that she thought it might be a trap. Jeeps! They could have an army of guards waiting for me up at the top level.
TORCH SHIP ELSINORE
An ordinary passenger riding out to the rock rats’ habitat at Ceres would have been quickly bored in the cramped confines of the torch ship. Elsinore was accelerating at one-sixth g, so that its sole passenger would feel comfortable at the familiar lunar level of gravity. But like all the ships that plied between the Moon and the Belt, Elsinore was built for fast, efficient travel, not for tourist luxuries. There was no entertainment aboard except the videos broadcast from Selene or Earth. Meals were served in the neatly appointed but decidedly small galley.
Edith had dinner with the ship’s captain and one of his officers, a young Asian woman who said little but listened attentively to the ship’s passenger and her skipper.
“We’ll be vectoring out of the radiation cloud tomorrow,” the captain announced cheerfully, over his plate of soymeat and mushrooms. “Ceres is well clear of the cloud’s predicted path.”
“You don’t seem worried about it,” Edith said.
He made a small shrug. “Not worried, no. Respectful, though. Our radiation shielding is working, so we’re in no danger. And by this time tomorrow we should be out of it altogether.”
“Will the cloud reach the Belt at all?” she asked.
“Oh yes, it’s too big and intense to dissipate until it’s well past the orbit of Jupiter. Ceres is well clear of it, but a good half of the Belt is going to be bathed in lethal radiation.”
Edith smiled for him and turned her attention to her own dinner of bioengineered carp fillet.
After dinner, Edith went to her cabin, sent a laser-beamed message to her husband back at Selene, then started working on the first segment of the documentary she had planned.
Sitting on the tiny couch of her cabin with the video camera perched on its mobile tripod by the bed, she decided to forgo the usual Edie Elgin cheerleader smile. Covering a war was a serious matter.
“This is Edie Elgin, aboard the torch ship Elsinore,” she began, “riding out to the Asteroid Belt, where a deadly, vicious war is taking place between mercenary armies of giant corporations. A war that could determine how much you pay for electrical energy and all the natural resources that are mined in the Belt.”
She got to her feet and walked slowly around the little cabin, the camera automatically pivoting to keep her in focus.
“I’ll be living in this cabin for the next six days, until we arrive at Ceres. Most of the men and women who go out to the Belt to work as miners or prospectors or whatever travel in much less comfortable quarters.”
Edith went to the door and out into the passageway. The camera trundled after her automatically on its tripod as she began to show her viewers the interior of the torch ship. As she spoke, she hoped that this segment wouldn’t be too boring. If it is I can cut it down or eliminate it altogether, she thought. I don’t want to bore the viewers. T
hat is, assuming anybody wants to watch the show once it’s finished.
Cromwell was cruising toward the Belt at a more leisurely pace, allowing the radiation cloud to engulf it. The ship’s five-person crew could not feel the radiation that surrounded the ship nor see it, except in graphs the computer drew from the ship’s sensors.
“The shielding is working fine,” the skipper kept repeating every few minutes. “Working just fine.”
His four crew members wished he’d change the subject.
Eventually, he did. “Set course thirty-eight degrees azimuth, maintain elevation.”
Embedded in the radiation cloud, Cromwell headed toward Vesta.
Suddenly panicked, Pancho stabbed at the panel of buttons in the elevator. The cab lurched to a stop and the doors slid open. The pounding, growling, roaring sounds of construction immediately blasted her ears but she paid them no attention as she walked briskly out into the unfinished expanse.
She saw that she wasn’t at the topmost level, the dome where there was an airlock that led to the rocket hoppers sitting outside. Must be a rampway that leads up, she thought hopefully. Better stay away from the elevators.
A construction worker driving an orange tractor yelled at her in Japanese. Pancho couldn’t understand his words, but she recognized the tone: What the hell are you doing here? Get back where you belong!
With a grin she hollered back to him, “That’s just what I’m trying to do, buddy. Which way is up?”
The head of base security was perspiring visibly. Nobuhiko glared at the black man and demanded, “Well, where is she? She has to be someplace!”
Yamagata had left his interrogation team in their silly green gowns and bustled off to the security chief’s office, tearing off the surgical gown they had given him and throwing it angrily to the floor as his own quartet of bodyguards hastened along behind him.
The security chief was standing behind his desk, flanked by a wall of display screens, most of them blank.
“She was here,” he said, punching a keypad on his desktop, “with Mr. Tsavo.”