The Silent War

MARE NUBIUM

Passengers screamed as the cablecar plunged in lunar slow motion toward the ground, twenty meters below. It was like a nightmare. Strangely, Pancho felt no fear, only an odd sort of fascination. While she watched the ground coming up toward the car’s windows she had time to think, If the windows crack we’ll lose our air and die in less than a minute.

The cable car’s nose plowed into the ground with a grinding, screeching groan. Pancho was thrown painfully against the shoulder straps of her safety harness, then banged the back of her head against her seat’s headrest.

For a second or two there was complete silence. Then people began to moan, sob. Pancho’s head buzzed painfully. Automatically, she started to unclick the safety harness. The Asian-American seated next to her was already out of his straps.

“You okay?” he asked.

Pancho nodded tentatively. “I think so.”

“They designed these cars to withstand a crash,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“They’ll have a rescue team here shortly. There’s enough air to keep us breathing for several hours, plus emergency tanks.”

Pancho stared at him. “Sounds like you swallowed the emergency procedures book.”

He grinned weakly, looking slightly ashamed. “I’m always a little nervous about traveling, so I read everything I can find about the vehicles I’m going to travel in.”

Pancho tapped on the glassteel window. “Ain’t even cracked.”

“Good thing. There’s no air outside.”

“What’s going to happen?” a woman’s voice demanded sharply.

Pancho turned in her seat. The car’s floor slanted upward, but otherwise everything inside seemed close to normal. A couple of the passengers had even stood up, legs a little shaky, looking around with wide, staring eyes.

“Better to stay in your seats,” Pancho said, in her most authoritative voice. “The car’s got an automatic emergency beacon. They’ve prob’ly already started a rescue team from Selene.”

“How long will it take?”

“Will our air hold out?”

“The lights are dimmer, aren’t they?”

“We must be on battery power,” said the Asian-American. “The batteries are designed to last for six hours or more.”

“Six hours? You mean we’ll be stuck here for six hours?”

“No, it’s just—”

The speakers set in to the overhead suddenly announced, “Cable car five-oh-two, this is the Safety Office headquarters. We will be launching a rescue hopper in less than thirty minutes. What is your situation, please?”

A babble of voices rose from the passengers, some frightened, some angry.

“Shut Up!” Pancho commanded. Once they were stilled, she said loudly and clearly, “We’ve crashed, but we’re intact. All systems functioning. No major injuries.”

“My back is hurt!” a woman said.

“I think I sprained my wrist,” said one of the male passengers.

The loudspeakers replied, “We’ll have a medic aboard the rescue hopper. Please stay calm. Help is on the way.”

Pancho sat on her seat’s armrest so she could look up the car’s central aisle at the other passengers. They had all gotten back into their seats. No blood in sight. They looked shaken; a few of them were definitely angry, glaring.

“How long is this going to take?” one of the men asked no one in particular. “I’ve got a flight back to Kansas City to catch.”

Pancho smiled inwardly. If they’re in good enough shape to complain, she thought, we’ve got no major problems. Then she added, As long as the rescue team gets here before the batteries go flat.

The Asian-American pressed his fingertips against the curved inner wall of the car’s hull. “Diamond construction,” he said, as much to himself as to Pancho. “Built by nanomachines.”

It sounded to Pancho as if he were trying to reassure himself. Then she noticed that he had a plastic packet in his lap. It contained two breathing masks and a small tank of compressed oxygen.

Lordy lord, Pancho thought. He really came prepared for a calamity.

LOGISTICS SHIP ROEBUCK

“I still don’t like it,” said Luke Abrams as he studied the radar display.

“You’ll like the money,” replied his partner, Indra Wanmanigee.

Abrams shot her a sour look. They were sitting side by side in the cockpit of Roebuck’s crew module. Normally the ship carried supplies from the habitat in orbit around Ceres to the miners and prospectors scattered around the Belt. This time, however, they were sailing deeper into the Belt than normal. And instead of supplies, Roebuck carried a team of mercenaries, armed with a pair of high-power lasers.

Tired of eking out a living as a merchant to the rock rats, Wanmanigee had made a deal with Humphries Space Systems to use Roebuck as a Trojan horse, drifting deep into the Belt in the hope that Lars Fuchs would intercept the ship to raid it for supplies. Fuchs would find, of course, not the supplies he and his crew wanted, but trained mercenaries who would destroy his ship and kill him. The HSS people offered a huge reward for Fuchs’s head, enough to retire and finally get married and live the rest of her life like a maharanee and her consort.

“I still don’t like it,” Abrams muttered again. “We’re sitting out here like a big, fat target. Fuchs could gut our crew module and kill us both with one pop of a laser.”

“He hardly ever kills independents,” she replied mildly. “More likely he will demand to board us and steal our cargo.”

Abrams grumbled something too low for her to understand. She knew he worried about the six roughnecks living in the cargo hold. There were two women among them, but still Abrams feared that they might take her into their clutches. Wanmanigee kept to the crew module; the only mercenary she saw was their captain—a handsome brute, she thought, but she wanted no man except her stoop-shouldered, balding, potbellied, perpetually worried Abrams. She could control him, and he genuinely loved her. No other man would be worth the trouble, she had decided years earlier.

Suddenly Abrams sat up straighter in his copilot’s chair. “I’ve got a blip,” he said, tapping a fingernail against the radar screen.

Aboard Nautilus Lars Fuchs sat in his privacy cubicle, staring bitterly at Big George’s image on the screen above his bunk.

Over the years of his exile, Fuchs had worked out a tenuous communications arrangement with Big George, who was the only man outside of his ship’s crew that Fuchs trusted. It was George who had commuted Fuchs’s death sentence to exile; the big Aussie with the brick-red hair and bushy beard had saved Fuchs’s life when Humphries had been certain that he’d seen the last of his adversary.

Fuchs planted miniaturized transceivers on tiny, obscure asteroids. From time to time, George squirted a highly compressed message to one of those asteroids by tight-beam laser. Each coded message ended with the number designation of the asteroid to which the next message would be beamed. In this way Fuchs could be kept abreast of the news from the rest of civilization. It was a halting, limping method of communication; the news