The Silent War gt-11

by Ben Bova

  “Stand down,” he called to them. “We won’t be boarding the habitat.” And he giggled. There’s no habitat to board, he added silently.

  As he entered his privacy compartment he seemed to recall that there was an incoming ship that might be harboring Fuchs. He shook his head foggily. No, that can’t be. I killed Fuchs. I killed them all. All of them.

  He tottered to the lav and splashed cold water on his face. Drug’s wearing off, he realized. They wear off quicker and quicker. I must be building a tolerance to them. Have to tell the medics when we get back to Vesta. Need something stronger, better lasting.

  He flopped onto his bed and closed his eyes. Sleep, he told himself. I need sleep. Without dreams. No dreaming. Please don’t let me dream.

  Doug Stavenger would not allow either Pancho or Humphries to leave his living room. They sat there and watched him desperately trying to reestablish contact with his wife, at Ceres.

  Pancho offered him the full resources of Astro Corporation. After checking with her handheld she told Stavenger, “We’ve got three ships docked at Ceres. I’ve sent an order for them to report to me here.”

  “That will take an hour or more,” Stavenger said.

  Pancho shrugged. “No way I can make it happen faster.”

  Humphries remained on the sofa, silent, his eyes following Stavenger’s every move, every gesture. Pancho felt contempt for the man. And a certain tiny speck of pity. Doug’ll kill him, she knew, if anything’s happened to his wife. All of Humphries’s money can’t help him one little iota now. Doug’ll tear him apart.

  They waited, Stavenger sending urgent, desperate messages to every ship in the Belt, Humphries sitting frozen with fear, Pancho churning the entire situation over and over in her mind, time and again, going over every detail she could think of, reliving the chain of events that had led to this place, this moment, this fearful point in spacetime.

  “There’s somebody else who oughtta be here,” she said at last.

  Stavenger froze the image on the wall screen and turned to look at her, obviously annoyed at her interruption.

  “Yamagata,” Pancho went on, despite his irritation. “Nobuhiko Yamagata should be here, if you want to stop this war.”

  Humphries stirred himself. “Just because his corporation provides mercenary troops—”

  “He’s behind this whole thing,” Pancho said.

  Stavenger gave her his full attention. “What do you mean?”

  “Yamagata’s the money behind the Nairobi base at the south pole,” said Pancho. “He’s been renting mercenaries to Astro and HSS, both.”

  “So?”

  She jabbed a finger at Humphries. “You say you didn’t set up that accident with the cable car?”

  “I didn’t,” Humphries said.

  “Then who else would’ve done it? Who’s sittin’ fat and happy while you and me bleed ourselves to death? Who stands to take over if Astro and HSS go broke?”

  “Yamagata,” Humphries breathed.

  “Yamagata?” Stavenger echoed, still not believing it.

  “Yamagata,” Pancho insisted.

  Stavenger turned back to his wall screen. “Phone, get Nobuhiko Yamagata. Top priority.”

  Leeza Chaptal was back in her space suit, but this time it was covered in slick, shining oil. Still, she was trembling inside it as the airlock hatch swung open.

  The metal cladding of the circular shaft was obviously eaten away down almost to the level of her eyes. But no further, she saw. In the twelve hours since she’d last been in the shaft, the nanomachines had progressed only a meter or so down the shaft.

  “I think they’ve stopped,” she said into her helmet microphone.

  “How can you be sure?” came the reply in her earphones.

  Leeza unhooked the hand laser from her equipment belt. “I’m going to mark a line,” she said, thumbing the laser’s switch. A thin uneven line burned into the steel coating. She realized that her hands were shaking badly.

  “Okay,” she said, backing through the hatch and pushing it shut. “I’ll come back in an hour and see if they’ve chewed past my mark.”

  She clumped in the ungainly suit back to the next hatch and rapped on it. “Fill the tunnel with air and open up,” she ordered. “I’ve got to pee.”

  “They’re leaving,” Edith saw. Still standing in the bridge of Elsinore with the captain and Big George, she saw the ship that had destroyed the habitat accelerate away from the area, dwindling into the eternal darkness, its rocket thrusters glowing hotly.

  “Running away from the scene of the crime,” said the captain.

  George said nothing, but Edith could see the fury burning in his eyes. Suddenly he shook himself like a man coming out of a trance. Or a nightmare.

  He started for the hatch.

  “Where are you going?” the captain asked.

  “Airlock,” George replied, over his shoulder. Squeezing his bulk through the hatch, he said, “Space suits. Gotta see if anybody’s left alive in Chrysalis.”

  Edith knew there couldn’t be any survivors. But George is right, she thought. We’ve got to check.

  And she stirred herself, realizing that she had to record this disaster, this atrocity. I’ve got to get this all on camera so the whole human race can see what’s happened here.

  SELENE: PEACE CONFERENCE

  Three days after the Chrysalis atrocity, the conference took place in Doug Stavenger’s personal office, up in the tower suite that housed Selene’s governing administrators and bureaucrats. It was very small, very private, and extremely well-guarded.

  Only four people sat at the circular table in the center of the office: Pancho, Humphries, Nobuhiko Yamagata and Douglas Stavenger himself. No aides, no assistants, no news reporters or anyone else. Selene security officers were stationed outside the door and patrolled the corridors. The entire area had been swept for electronic bugs.

  Once the four of them were seated, Stavenger began, “This meeting will be held in strict privacy. Only the four of us will know what we say.” The others nodded.

  “None of us will leave this room until we have come to an agreement to stop this war,” Stavenger added, his face totally grim. “There will be no exceptions and no excuses. There’s a lavatory through that door,” he pointed, “but the only way out of here is through the door to the corridor and no one is leaving until I’m satisfied that we’ve reached a workable understanding.”

  Humphries bristled. “What gives you the right to—”

  “Several thousand dead bodies scattered across the Asteroid Belt,” Stavenger snapped. “I’m representing them. You are going to stop this damned war or you are going to starve to death right here at this table. There is no third option.”

  Yamagata smiled uneasily. “I came here voluntarily, at your request, Mr. Stavenger. This is no way to treat a guest.”

  Gesturing in Pancho’s direction, Stavenger replied, “Ms. Lane was your guest at the Nairobi base at Shackleton crater, wasn’t she? And you damned near killed her.”

  Nobuhiko’s brows knit momentarily. Then he said, “I could call for help, you know.”

  Without any change in his expression, Stavenger said, “There’s no way to get a message out of this room. I’ve had it shielded. Your handhelds won’t get a signal past these walls.”

  Pancho leaned back in her chair and stretched her legs beneath the table. “Okay, then. Let’s start talking.”

  Harbin had spent the three days since the attack on Chrysalis drifting in and out of a drug-induced stupor. His executive officer ran the ship while he slept and dreamed eerily distorted fantasies that always ended in blood and death.

  By the time they reached Vesta, he had run out of medications and was beginning to sober up.

  He was washing his bearded, pouchy-eyed face when someone tapped at his door.

  “Enter,” he called, mopping his face with a towel.

  The exec slid the door back and stepped into his compartment. Harbin realized
the bed was a sweaty, tangled mess, and the cramped compartment smelled like the hot insides of an overused gym shoe.

  “We’re about to enter a parking orbit around Vesta, sir,” she said stiffly.

  “The base is back in operation?” he asked. As he spoke the words he realized that he didn’t care if the base was operating again. It meant nothing to him, one way or the other.

  “Yes, sir. The nanomachine attack was limited to the surface installations, for the most part. No one was killed or even injured.”

  Harbin knew from the look on her face that there was more to come. “What else?”

  “I have received orders to relieve you of command. Mr. Humphries personally called and demanded to know who was responsible for the destruction of the Chrysalis habitat. When he found out it was you he went into a rage. Apparently he knows you from an earlier experience.”

  Harbin felt as if he were watching this scene from someplace far away. As if he was no longer in his body, but floating free, drifting through nothingness, alone, untouched, untouchable.

  “Go on,” he heard himself say.

  “He wants you brought to Selene to stand trial for war crimes,” the exec said, her words stiff, brittle.

  “War crimes.”

  “The Chrysalis massacre. He also said that you murdered an employee of his, several years ago.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ve been ordered to relieve you of command and confine you to your quarters. Sir.”

  Harbin almost smiled at her. “Then you should follow your orders.”

  She turned and grasped the door handle. Before she stepped through the doorway, though, she said, “It’s on all the news nets. They’ve been playing it for the past two days.”

  She left him, sliding the door shut. There was no lock on the door. It didn’t matter, Harbin thought. Even if it were locked the accordionfold was so flimsy he could push through it easily. If he wanted to.

  Harbin stood in his musty, messy compartment for a moment, then shrugged. The moving finger writes, he thought. Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

  Why can’t I feel anything? He asked himself. I’m like a block of wood. A statue of ice. The Chrysalis massacre, she called it. Massacre?

  Shrugging his shoulders, he told the wall screen to display a news broadcast.

  A woman’s shocked, hollow-eyed face appeared on the screen, her name—Edie Elgin—spelled out beneath her image. She wore no makeup, her hair was disheveled, her voice little more than a shaky whisper.

  “… been working for several hours now,” she was saying, “trying to determine if there are any survivors. So far, none have been found.”

  The scene suddenly changed to show the shattered remains of the Chrysalis habitat: broken, crumpled cylinders of metal glinting against the blackness of space, jagged pieces floating nearby, bodies drifting.

  And Edie Elgin’s voice, choked with sorrow and horror, nearly sobbing, was saying, “Nearly eleven hundred people were living in the habitat when it was attacked. They had no weapons, no defenses. They were methodically slaughtered by their unidentified attacker.”

  Harbin sank down onto his bed, staring at the screen. The icy armor that had surrounded him began to melt away. For the first time in many days he felt an emotion. He felt pain.

  “Yamagata Corporation is not responsible for the Chrysalis tragedy,” Nobuhiko said sternly. “Our employees were working under a contract with Humphries Space Systems.”

  “I never ordered them to attack the habitat,” Humphries replied, with some heat. “I just wanted them to find Fuchs.”

  Pancho said, “Lars is somewhere in the Belt by now. You’ll never find him.”

  “Yes I will. He tried to kill me!”

  “That wasn’t my doing,” Pancho said.

  Stavenger slapped a palm on the table, silencing them. “I don’t care who did what to whom. The past is over and done with. We’re here to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. I want an end to this fighting.”

  “Sure,” Humphries said easily. “I’m willing to stop it. But I want Fuchs’s head on a platter.”

  “What you want,” said Pancho, “is total control of the Belt and all its resources.”

  “Isn’t that what you want, too?” Humphries countered. Turning to Yamagata, he added, “And you, as well?”

  Keeping his face expressionless, Nobuhiko replied, “Now that you have introduced nanomachine processing to mining the asteroids, there is good economic sense in having one corporation establish a monopoly in the Belt.”

  “But which corporation?” Humphries asked.

  The three of them stared at each other.

  “Wait a minute,” Stavenger interrupted. “You’re all forgetting something that’s important.”

  They turned toward him.

  “There’s more to mining the asteroids than making profits,” he said. “More involved in this than acquiring power.”

  Humphries smirked. “I can’t imagine what it could be.”

  But Pancho’s face lit up. “It’s what Dan Randolph wanted in the first place! Back when we made the flight out to the Belt in the old Starpower!”

  “And what was that?” Nobuhiko asked. “To help the people on Earth,” said Pancho. “Help ’em recover from the greenhouse cliff. Bring ’em the raw materials for rebuilding. Bring ’em the fuels for fusion power generators. That’s what Dan started out to do!”

  “And that’s what you’ve all lost sight of,” said Stavenger.

  “Well, that’s our principal market, I agree,” Humphries said. “But that doesn’t mean—”

  Pancho cut him off. “We oughtta be selling the ores from the asteroids at the lowest possible price. And the fusion fuels, too.”

  “And building more solar power satellites,” Stavenger added.

  “To help rebuild Japan,” Yamagata murmured.

  “To help rebuild the world,” said Pancho.

  Stavenger smiled gently. “And to help expand human habitats on the Moon and elsewhere, in deep space.”

  “We can do that!” Pancho agreed eagerly.

  “But not with the three of you cutting each other’s throats,” Stavenger said.

  “Only one corporation should manage the resources of the Belt,” Yamagata said firmly. “Competition is pointless, once nanoprocessing reduces the prices of asteroidal ores.”

  “Not ores,” Humphries reminded him. “The nanomachines will produce pure metals.”

  “And minerals,” Pancho added.

  Humphries gave her an exaggerated bow of his head.

  “But which corporation will gain the monopoly?” Yamagata asked.

  “None of us,” said Pancho.

  “What?” Humphries snapped. “It’s got to be one of us. Nobody else has the capability.”

  “Selene does,” Pancho said, staring straight at Stavenger.

  Looking back at her, he admitted, “I’ve been thinking that way, too.”

  Humphries exploded, “If you think you’re going to muscle me out of what’s rightfully mine—”

  Pancho waved him down. “Don’t pop your cork, Martin. I know how we can do this and keep our shareholders happy.”

  “I don’t see how that can be done,” Humphries groused.

  “Nor do I,” Nobuhiko added.

  Grinning, Pancho clasped her hands together and leaned them on the conference table. “It’s simple. We each sign a contract with Selene for them to operate our asteroid business. We get the profits, minus a small percentage to Selene.”

  “A manager’s fee,” said Stavenger.

  “Right,” Pancho agreed. “Selene manages our operations and sets the market prices for the asteroidal products. The three of us just sit back and collect the profits.”

  Yamagata took in a deep breath. Then, “I presume that Selene will set the prices as low as possible.”

  “Very likely,” Stavenger said. “Those people on Earth need the resources. We won’t put power trips ahead
of the people’s needs.”

  “Power trips?” Humphries snarled. “You’ll have all the power.”

  “That’s right,” Stavenger replied amiably. “Selene will be the arbiter for the rest of the solar system. No more competition. No more killing. No more war.”

  “I don’t like it,” said Humphries.

  Yamagata asked, “Can Selene be trusted with such power?”

  “Can anyone else in this room?” Stavenger retorted.

  A heavy silence fell across the conference table.

  Finally Pancho said, “I’m willing to try it—on a five-year time limit. That way, if we’re not happy with Selene’s performance when the time’s up, we don’t have to renew the contract.”

  “But only if two of the three corporations refuse to renew,” said Stavenger. “No single corporation can back out of the contract, it will take a majority vote.”

  “Agreed,” said Pancho.

  “I would like to consult my people back on Earth before agreeing,” Yamagata said.

  “I still don’t like it,” Humphries grumbled.

  “C’mon, Martin,” Pancho reached over and shook him slightly by the shoulder. “It’ll make life a lot easier for you. You’ll still be the richest sumbitch in the solar system. All you’ll have to do is sit back and pull in the profits. No more worries.”

  “No more slaughters,” Stavenger said, his face still deadly serious. “Regardless of your intentions, Martin, it was your orders that led to the Chrysalis massacre.”

  “That would never hold up in a court of law.”

  “Don’t be too certain of that. War crimes courts can be very harsh.”

  Humphries leaned back in his chair, his mouth a tight line, his eyes closed. At last he sat up straight and asked Stavenger, “Will you still exile me?”

  Stavenger smiled. “No, I don’t think that would be necessary, Martin. You can rebuild your home down below. Besides, I rather think I’d like to have you close by, where I can keep an eye on you.”

  FINAL ADJUSTMENTS

  The three-second lag in communications between Earth and the Moon did not irritate Nobuhiko Yamagata. He found it useful; it gave him a few moments to think before responding to his father.