The Silent War

chilled by the time a saffron-robed lama conducted him through the thick wooden door and into a hallway paneled with polished oak.

Saito was waiting for him in a small room with a single window that looked out on the snow-clad mountains. A low lacquered table and two kneeling mats were the only furniture, but there was a warm fire crackling in the soot-blackened fireplace. Nobu folded his parka neatly on the floor and stood before the fireplace, gratefully absorbing its warmth.

Wearing a kimono of deep blue, decorated with the flying crane emblem of the Yamagata family, his father waited in patient silence until Nobu grew uneasy and turned from the fireplace. Then Saito greeted his son with a full-bodied embrace that delighted Nobu even though it squeezed the breath out of him. Altitude and bear hugs did not mix well.

“You’ve lost a kilo or two,” said the elder Yamagata, holding his son at arm’s length. “That’s good.”

Nobuhiko dipped his chin in acknowledgment.

Saito slapped his bulging belly. “I’ve found them! And more!” He laughed heartily.

Wondering how his father could gain weight in a monastery, Nobu said, “I spoke with Martin Humphries. He apparently does not know that we are backing the Africans.”

“And Astro?”

“Pancho Lane launched an investigation of Nairobi Industries. It has found nothing to tie us to them.”

“Good,” said Saito as he knelt slowly, carefully on one of the mats. It rustled slightly beneath his weight. “It’s better if no one realizes we are returning to space operations.”

“I still don’t understand why we must keep our interest in Nairobi Industries a secret.” Nobu knelt on the other mat, close enough to his father to smell the older man’s aftershave lotion.

Saito patted his son’s knee. “Humphries Space Systems and Astro Corporation are fighting for control of the Belt, aren’t they? If they knew Yamagata will soon be competing against them, they might combine their forces against us.” Nobu shook his head. “Pancho Lane despises Humphries. And he feels the same about her.”

With a knowing grin, Saito countered, “They might hate each other, but their personal feelings wouldn’t stop them from uniting to prevent us from establishing ourselves in the Belt. Personal emotions take a back seat to business, son.”

“Perhaps,” Nobu conceded.

“Work through the Africans,” Saito counseled. “Let Nairobi Industries establish a base on the Moon. That will be our foothold. The prospecting ships and ore carriers they send to the Asteroid Belt will return profits to Yamagata.”

“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.