by Ben Bova
“Gone? How could he be gone? Where did he go? How could he get out?”
“An Astro Corporation security detail removed him from the hospital shortly after one A.M.,” Grigor replied, his voice as flat and even as a computer’s. “There is no trace of him after that.”
Leaping to his feet so hard that his robe flapped open, Humphries screamed, “Find him! Search every centimeter of the city and find him! Now! Use every man you’ve got.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t stand there! Find him!”
As Grigor turned toward the door, the phone chimed. Scowling, Humphries saw that the wallscreen displayed the name of the caller: Pancho Lane.
“Phone answer,” he snapped.
Pancho’s angular, light tan features took shape on the wallscreen, slightly bigger than life.
“Martin, I have some unpleasant news for you.”
He glared at her image as he pulled the maroon robe tightly around himself.
“Lars Fuchs somehow stole our newest ship and lit out of lunar orbit a few hours ago. He’s prob’ly heading back to the Belt.”
“He stole one of your ships?” Humphries asked, his voice dripping sarcasm.
“Yup,” said Pancho. “Slipped away from a phony security detail that sprang him out of the hospital last night.”
Humphries’s innards felt like a lake of molten lava. “He had lots of help, then, didn’t he?”
Keeping her face immobile, Pancho admitted, “Well, he’s got some friends among my Astro people, yeah. We’re looking into it.”
“I’m sure you are.”
She almost smiled. “I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Thank you, Pancho.”
“Any time, Martin.” The screen went dark.
Humphries stepped to the small table at the end of the sofa, yanked up the lamp sitting atop it, and heaved it at the wallscreen. It bounced off and thudded to the carpeted floor.
“Guttersnipe bitch! She helped him get away. Now he’s running back to the Belt to hide out with his rock rat friends.”
Grigor said, “We could intercept him.”
Humphries glared at his security chief. “He’ll be running silent. You’d have to search the whole region between here and the Belt. There aren’t enough ships—”
“He’ll have to put in somewhere for supplies,” said Grigor. “The Chrysalis habitat at Ceres is the only place for that.”
Still glowering, Humphries said, “They won’t take him in. They exiled him, years ago.”
Nodding slightly, Grigor countered, “Perhaps. But he will contact a ship in the region for supplies.”
“Or capture one, the damned pirate.”
“Either way, Chrysalis is the key to his survival. If we control the habitat at Ceres, we will get him into our grasp, sooner or later.”
Humphries stared at his security chief for a long, silent moment. Then he said, “All right. Tell our people at Vesta to send a force to Ceres and take control of Chrysalis.”
An unhappy expression twisted Grigor’s normally dour face. “We seem to have lost contact with Vesta,” he said, the words coming out swiftly, all in a rush.
“What?”
“I’m sure it’s only temporary.”
“Lost contact?” Humphries’s voice rose a notch.
“It might be the solar storm,” said Grigor, almost to himself, “although the cloud is well past the Belt now.”
“Lost contact with the whole base?” Humphries shouted. “The entire base?”
“For more than twelve hours,” Grigor admitted, almost in a whisper.
Humphries wanted to scream. And he did, so loudly and with such fevered anger that Tatiana Oparin rushed into the sitting room. When she failed to calm him down she called the HSS medical department for Humphries’s personal physician.
COMMAND SHIP SAMARKAND
Harbin hated these one-way messages. I have to sit here like an obedient dog while my master speaks to me, he grumbled silently. Yet there was no other way. Grigor was at Selene, Harbin in his private compartment aboard Samakand, so deep in the Belt that it took light the better part of an hour to span the distance between them.
Grigor’s face, in the display screen, looked even dourer than usual. He’s worried, Harbin thought. Frightened.
“… completely wiped out Humphries’s home here in Selene and killed four security guards,” the security chief was saying, speaking rapidly, nervously. “They also killed Humphries’s personal assistant, the woman Ferrer. The attack was led by Lars Fuchs.”
Fuchs attacked Humphries in his own home! Harbin marveled. He felt some admiration for such daring. Strike your enemy as hard as you can. Strike at his heart.
Grigor was droning on, “Astro has apparently spirited Fuchs away. Most likely he’s on his way back to the Belt. He must have friends at Ceres, allies who will give him supplies and more crewmen. Your orders are to find Fuchs and kill him. Nothing else matters now. Bring Fuchs’s head to Mr. Humphries. He will accept nothing less.” Harbin nodded. This isn’t the first time that Humphries has demanded Fuchs’s life, he recalled. But this will be the last time. The final time. Fuchs has frightened Humphries. Up until now Humphries has fought this war in comfort and safety. But now Fuchs has threatened him, terrified him. Now he’ll move heaven and Earth to eliminate the threat that Fuchs represents. Now it’s time for Fuchs to die.
“Something else,” Grigor added, his eyes shifting nervously. “The base on Vesta has gone silent. We don’t know why. I’ve diverted one of our attack ships to the asteroid to see what’s happened. You stay clear of Vesta. Head directly for Ceres and the habitat Chrysalis. Get Fuchs. Let me worry about Vesta.”
The security chief’s morose face disappeared from Harbin’s screen, leaving him alone in his compartment.
Let him worry about Vesta, Harbin thought sourly. And what do I do about supplies? Where do I get fuel and food for my crew? How do I get all the way over to Ceres on what’s left in my propellant tanks? I’ve stripped this ship’s armor, too. What if I run into an Astro attack vessel? Grigor can give orders, but carrying them out is up to me.
Doug Stavenger was also feeling frustrated about the long time lag between Selene and the Belt. Edith, aboard Elsinore, was approaching Ceres. She would be arriving at the Chrysalis habitat in less than twenty-four hours.
“… so it turns out that if you’d stayed here,” he was saying to her, “you’d have had a big story at your doorstep. Humphries isn’t letting any news media into his home, not even inside his garden, or what’s left of it. But from what the safety inspectors tell me the house is a burned-out shell and that big, beautiful garden of his is almost completely destroyed.”
He hesitated, leaned back in his recliner and tried to group his thoughts coherently. It was difficult speaking to a blank screen. It was like talking to yourself.
“Edie, this war’s gone far enough. I’ve got to do something to stop it. They’re fighting here in Selene now and I can’t permit that. If that fire had spread beyond Humphries’s garden it could have killed a lot of people here. Everyone, maybe, if we couldn’t get it under control. I can’t let them pose that kind of a threat to us. I’ve got to stop them.”
Yes, Stavenger told himself. You’ve got to stop them. But how? How can you stop two of the most powerful corporations in the solar system from turning Selene into a battleground?
When his message arrived at Elsinore, Edith Elgin saw the concern, the deep lines of apprehension creasing her husband’s handsome face.
But in her mind a voice was exulting, Fuchs is heading here! He has to be. He has friends among the rock rats. One way or another he’s going to sneak back to Ceres, at least long enough to refuel and restock his ship. And I’ll be there to interview him!
She was so excited that she hopped up from the chair she’d been sitting in to view her husband’s message and left her cabin, heading up the narrow passageway toward the bridge. I’ve got to find out exactly
when we dock at Chrysalis, she told herself. And see if the captain can spot any other ships heading toward the habitat. Fuchs may be running silent, but his ship will show up on radar, now that we’re clear of the radiation cloud.
Lars Fuchs was indeed heading for Ceres, running silently, all beacons and telemetry turned off. Hands clasped behind his back, mouth turned down in a sullen scowl, he paced back and forth across the bridge of the Halsey, his mind churning.
The ship was running smoothly enough, for its first flight in deep space. Its systems were automated enough so that the four of them could run it as a skeleton crew. Nodon’s shoulder was healing, and Sanja had assured Fuchs that there were more crewmen waiting for them at Chrysalis.
Fuchs was officially exiled from the rock rats’ habitat, and had been for nearly ten years. But they’ll let me take up a parking orbit, he thought. Just for a day or so. Just long enough to take on more crew and supplies.
Then what? he asked himself. I have Nautilus waiting for me in the Belt, and now this new ship. Can I find enough people to crew them both? Humphries will be coming after me with everything he’s got. Fuchs nodded to himself. Let him. Let him chase me all through the Belt. I’ll bleed him dry. I failed to kill him, but I can hurt him where the pain is greatest: in his ledger sheets. Every ship he sends after me is an expense that drains his profits. Every HSS ship that I destroy will pour more red ink on him. I’ll bleed him dry.
Until he kills me, Fuchs realized. This war between us can end in only one way. I’m a dead man. He told me that years ago.
He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in one of the blank screens on the bridge. A bitter, angry face with a thin slash of sneering lips and deepset eyes that burned like hot coals.
All right, he said to his image. He’ll kill me. But it will cost him plenty. I won’t go easily. Or cheaply.
Big George Ambrose was fidgeting uncomfortably at the conference table. His chair was just a tad too small for his bulk, its arms just high enough to force him to hunch his shoulders slightly. After a couple of hours it got painful.
And this meeting had been going on for more than a couple of hours. The governing board of Chrysalis was having one of its rare disagreements. Usually the board was little more than a rubber stamp for George’s decisions. None of the board members really wanted any responsibility. They were all picked at random by the habitat’s personnel computer, and required to serve a year on the governing body. Each of the eight men and women wanted to be back at their jobs or at home or taking in a video or at the pub. Anywhere but stuck in this conference room, wrangling.
George thought the pub was a good idea. Maybe we should have our fookin’ meetings there, he said to himself. Get them all half blind and then take a vote.
But this was a serious issue, he knew. It had to be faced squarely. And soberly.
Pancho had warned George that Lars Fuchs was in a spacecraft heading for the Belt. It didn’t take a genius to realize that he’d have to get supplies from somewhere, and Ceres was the only somewhere there was.
“He might not come here at all,” said one of the board members, an edgy-looking woman in a high-mode pullover that sported more cutouts than material. “He might just hijack a ship or two and steal the supplies he needs. He is a pirate, after all.”
“That’s why we exiled him in the first place,” said the bland-looking warehouse operator sitting next to her.
“That’s not entirely true,” George pointed out.
“But we did exile him,” the warehouseman retorted. “So we don’t have to allow him to dock here.”
“That all happened ten years ago,” said one of the older board members, a former miner who had started a new career as an armaments repairman.
“But he was exiled for life, wasn’t he?”
“Right,” George admitted.
“So there.”
The woman sitting directly across from George, a plumpish redhead with startling violet eyes, said, “Listen. Half the HSS ships in the Belt are going to be looking for Fuchs. If he puts in here they’ll grab him.”
“This is neutral territory,” George said. “Everybody knows that. We’ve established it with HSS and Astro. We service any ship that comes to us, and they don’t do any fighting within a thousand klicks of our habitat.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to service Fuchs. He’s an exile, remember.”
“There’s something else involved,” George added. “We have a news media star heading here. She’ll arrive tomorrow. Edith Elgin.”
“I’ve watched her shows from Selene!”
“Isn’t she married to Douglas Stavenger?”
“What’s she coming here for?”
“To do a documentary about the war,” George explained.
“Do we want to have a documentary about the war? I mean, won’t that be bad publicity for us?”
“She’ll want to interview Fuchs, I bet.”
“That’d be a great way to get everybody’s attention: an interview with the notorious pirate.”
“It’ll make us look like a den of thieves.” “Can we stop her?”
All eight of them looked to George.
Surprised at this turn, George said, “We’d have a helluva time shooing her away. She’s got a right to report the news.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to help her. Let her interview Fuchs somewhere else.”
But George was thinking, Humphries’s people are smart enough to watch her and wait for Fuchs to show up. Wherever she interviews Fuchs, it’s going to be fookin’ dangerous for both of them.
ASTEROID VESTA
An individual nanomachine is like an individual ant: mindless but unceasingly active. Its blindly endless activity is of little consequence by itself; even the most tireless exertions of a device no bigger than a virus can be nothing but invisibly minuscule in the human scale of things.
But while an individual ant can achieve little and has not enough brain to accomplish more than instinctual actions, an ant colony of many millions of blindly scurrying units can strip a forest, build a city, act with a purposefulness that seems little short of human intelligence.
So it is with nanomachines. An individual unit can accomplish little. But strew millions of those virus-sized units over a restricted area and they can build or destroy on a scale that rivals human capacities.
The asteroid Vesta is a spheroid rich in nickel-iron, some 500 kilometers in diameter. The Humphries Space Systems base on Vesta was burrowed, for the most part, more than twenty meters below the asteroid’s pitted, airless, bare surface. The nanomachines that were strewn across a small area of the asteroid’s surface operated in a far different regime of scale and environment. Their world was a universe of endlessly vibrating, quivering molecules where electromagnetic forces held atoms in tight clusters, and Brownian motion buffeted atoms, molecules and nanomachines alike. On that scale of size, the nanomachines were giant mechanical devices, like huge bulldozers or derricks, bulling their way through the constantly jostling, jiggling molecules.
Each nanomachine was built with a set of grippers that fit the shape of the molecule that made up high-grade steel. Each nanomachine had the strength to seize such molecules and pull them apart into their constituent atoms of iron, carbon, chromium, and nickel.
Drawing their energy from the unceasing Brownian vibrations of the molecules themselves, the nanomachines patiently, mindlessly, tirelessly chewed through every molecule of steel they could find, tearing them apart. On the molecular scale of the nanomachines this was a simple operation. It would end only when the quantum-dot timing devices built into each individual nanomachine told it to stop and disassemble itself.
Or when the nanos ran out of steel to chew on. Whichever came first.
Leeza Chaptal was the first to understand what was happening. As she stood in the control center deep underground and watched the monitor screens go blank, one by one, she realized that only the sensors and other equipment up on the surface
were failing.
The technicians seated at their consoles around her had gone from surprise to irritation to outright fear.
“Something’s wiping out everything up on the surface,” one of them said, needlessly. They could all see that.
“Those missiles,” said Leeza. “They must be responsible for this.”
“But what… how?”
“There wasn’t any explosion,” said one of the puzzled technicians. “Nothing seismic registered except their crashing on the surface.”
“And then everything started blanking out.” “Nanomachines,” Leeza guessed. “They must have brought in nanomachines that are eating up our surface installations.”
All the techs turned to her in wide-eyed fear. Nanomachines. They had all heard stories about how they could chew up everything, including people, and turn everything in their path into a dead, formless gray goo.
“Somebody’s got to go up the surface and see what’s going on up there.”
Nobody budged.
Leeza hadn’t expected volunteers. “I’ll go myself,” she said.
Leeza’s heart was already thumping loudly as she clumped to the hatch in the awkward, bulbous hard-shell space suit. Then she saw that the display on the hatch opening onto the vertical shaft that led up to the surface showed that there was nothing but vacuum on its other side.
Omygod, she gasped silently. They’ve eaten through the hatch at the top of the shaft.
Should I go through? What if they infect my suit? What if they start chewing on me?
Yet she had to know what was going on, had to learn the nature and depth of the attack they were undergoing.
Turning to the two maintenance engineers who had helped her into the suit, she said through its fishbowl helmet, “Get back on the other side of the hatch down the corridor.”
They didn’t need to be told twice. Both of them scampered down the corridor and squeezed through the hatch together, neither one of them willing to wait for the other. Leeza heard the metallic thud when they slammed the hatch and sealed it.