The Silent War

friendship. She wants me to get back to Selene. She can’t trust any communications link to say it in so many words, but her intention is clear. She wants me to kill Humphries. She knows that’s what I want to do, and she’s willing to help me do it. It will be a great help to her, of course. But it will be a joy to me. Even if it costs my own life, I will snuff out Humphries.

His thirst for vengeance kindled him for the remainder of his train ride to Bern.

But once in his native Bern he became sad and dispirited, depressed at how the old city had become so shabby, so filled with aimless, homeless men and women, even children, wandering the streets, begging for handouts when the police weren’t looking. Fuchs was shocked that the streets were littered with trash; the city that had once sparkled was now grimy, obviously decaying. And at night the streets could even be dangerous, he was warned by the weary-eyed concierge at his hotel.

A week was more than enough for him. Fuchs used the identity Pancho had provided for him to book passage back to Selene. He rented a modest suite for himself at the Hotel Luna, with an expense account to be paid by Astro Corporation. Closer to Humphries, he told himself. Within arm’s reach, almost. Close enough to kill. But you must be patient, he thought. You must be careful. Humphries is surrounded by guards and other employees. Pancho can’t openly help me to reach him; she can’t allow herself to be seen as aiding an assassin. I’ll have to act alone. I’ll have to get through to Humphries on my own. I don’t know how, not yet, but I will do it. Or die in the trying.

He had to disguise his appearance, of course. Lifts in his shoes made him slightly taller. Rigid, spartan dieting had slimmed him somewhat, but no fasting could reduce his barrel chest or thickly muscled limbs. He had grown a thick black beard and wore molecule-thin contact lenses that Astro’s people had clandestinely sent him; they altered his retinal pattern enough to fool a computer’s simple comparison programming.

Still, Fuchs could not help sweating nervously as he shuffled through the line leading to the customs inspection booth at Selene’s Armstrong Spaceport. He had taken a mild tranquillizer but it didn’t seem to be helping to calm his growing apprehension.

When he came to the inspection station the computer’s synthesized German sounded slightly strange to him, until he realized the machine was not programmed to speak in his own Swiss dialect. He answered its questions as briefly as he could, knowing that the system did not have the voice print of Lars Fuchs in its memory, yet still worried that somehow it might. It didn’t. He followed instructions and looked into the retinal scanner for the required five seconds, slowly counting them off in silence.

The automated systems built into the archway directly in front of the inspector’s booth scanned his one travel bag and his body without a problem. Fuchs had nothing with him or on him that would trigger an alarm. The human inspector sitting in the booth behind the automated machinery looked bored, his thin smile forced. Fuchs handed him his falsified identity chip and the inspector slipped it into his desktop.

“Karl Manstein?”

“Ja,” Fuchs answered.

The inspector asked, “Purpose of your visit?” in standard English; the booth’s synthesized computer voice translated his words into German.

“Vacation.”

For a heart-stopping moment the inspector studied his screen display, his eyes narrowing. Then he popped Fuchs’s thumbnail-sized chip out of his computer and slid it over the countertop to him.

“Welcome to Selene, Herr Manstein. Enjoy your vacation.”

“Thank you,” Fuchs replied gratefully, scooping up the chip in one meaty hand and hurrying past the inspector, toward the electric-powered cart that would carry him into Selene.

His first task, once he was safely in his suite at the Hotel Luna, would be to send innocuous-seeming messages to his three most trusted crew members, waiting at Ceres. “I have arrived at Selene, and everything is fine.” That was the code phrase that would tell them to head for Selene also. Fuchs intended to kill Humphries, and he knew he could not do it alone.

ORE FREIGHTER SCRANTON

Chick Egan was mildly surprised to find a ship approaching Scranton at high speed. The ore freighter was almost clear of the inner fringe of the Belt, heading toward Selene, carrying a full load of asteroidal metals under contract to Astro Corporation. Astro’s people were busily auctioning off the metals on the commodities market at Selene, desperately hoping to get prices high enough to make a minimal profit.

Sitting sideways in the pilot’s seat, his legs dangling over the armrest, Egan had been talking with his partner, “Zep” Zepopoulous, about the advisability of getting a laser weapon for the old, slow Scranton.

“Makes about as much sense as giving Santa Claus a six-shooter,” Zep argued. He was a lean, wiry Greek with thick jet black hair and a moustache to match. “We’re in the freight-hauling business, we’re not fighters.”

Egan’s strawberry-blond hair was shorn down to a military buzz cut. “Yeah, but all the other ships are puttin’ on lasers. For self-defense.”

“This tub isn’t worth defending,” Zep replied, gesturing around the cramped, shabby cockpit with its scuffed bulkheads and worn-shiny seats. “Somebody wants what we’re carrying, we just give it to them and let the insurance carrier worry about it.”

“HSS is going after Astro ships,” Egan said. “And vice versa.”

“We’re only under contract to Astro for this one flight. We could sign up with HSS next time out.”

“Sam Gunn’s arming all his ships,” Egan countered. “Astro, HSS, a lot of the independents, too.”

“Let ’em,” said Zepopoulous. “The day I start carrying weapons is the day I quit this racket and go back to Naxos.”

“What’s left of it.”

“The flooding’s stabilized now, they say. I’ll be a fisherman, like my father.”

“And starve like your father.”

That was when the radar pinged. Both men looked at the screen and saw a ship approaching at high speed.

“Who the hell is that?” Zep asked. The display screen showed only blanks where a ship’s name and ownership would normally appear. “Lars Fuchs?” Egan suggested.

“What would he want a load of ores for? We’re not an HSS ship, and we don’t have any supplies he’d want to take.”

Feeling decidedly nervous, Egan turned to the communications unit. “This is Scranton. Independent inbound for Selene. Identify yourself, please.”

The answer was a laser bolt that punched a hole through the skin of the cockpit. Egan’s last thought was that he wished he had armed Scranton so he could at least die fighting.

George Ambrose listened to the reports in gloomy silence. The six other members of Ceres’s governing council sitting around the oval conference table looked even bleaker.

Eight ships destroyed in the past month. Warships being built at Selene and sent to the Belt by Astro and Humphries Space Systems.

“The HSS base on Vesta has more than two dozen ships orbiting around it,” said the council member responsible for relations with the two major corporations. She was a Valkyrie-sized woman with sandy hair and a lovely, almost delicate fine-boned face that looked out of place on her big, muscular body.

“Everybody’s carrying weapons,” said the councilman sitting beside her.

“It’s damned dangerous out there,” agreed the woman on the other side of the table.

“What’s worrying me,” said the accountant, sitting at the table’s end, “is that this fighting is preventing ships from delivering their ores to the buyers.”

The accountant was a red-faced, pop-eyed overweight man who usually wore a genial smile. Now he looked apprehensive, almost grim.