The Silent War

The man nodded once, as the heavy steel hatch clicked and slowly swung open.

Stavenger stood out in the corridor beyond the emergency airlock and watched the survivors of the fire come out, two by two.

Like Noah’s Ark, he thought.

Most of them were Humphries security people, their faces smudged with soot as black as their uniforms. There were three Asians, one of them in the gray coveralls of Selene’s maintenance department.

“The last two coming through,” said one of the emergency team.

An odd couple, Stavenger thought. One tall and broad-shouldered, the other short and thickset. Both in black outfits. Then he recognized the dour face of the shorter man. Lars Fuchs! Stavenger realized. That’s Lars Fuchs!

“Anybody else in there?” the emergency team’s chief asked.

“Nobody alive,” said the Humphries’ security chief.

“Okay,” the chief called to his team. “Seal the hatch and let the fire burn itself out.”

Stavenger was already speaking into his handheld, calling for a security team to arrest Lars Fuchs. There’s only one reason for him to be here in Humphries’s private preserve, Stavenger knew. He’s killed Martin Humphries.

If it weren’t so infuriating it would almost be funny, Humphries thought as he sat huddled in his closet.

The idiotic architect who designed this for me never bothered to install a phone inside the shelter because everybody carries handhelds or even implants. I don’t have an implant and I hate those damned handhelds beeping at me. So now I’m sitting here with no goddamned way to let anybody know I’m alive. And I don’t dare go outside because the fire might still be burning. Even if it isn’t, it’s probably used up all the oxygen out there and I’d suffocate.

Damn! Nothing to do but wait.

Humphries detested waiting. For anything, even his own rescue.

CRASH LANDING

Ground’s coming up awful fast, Pancho said to herself. She had allowed the little hopper to follow its ballistic trajectory, knowing it was going to come down way short of the Astro base in the Malapert Mountains. How short she didn’t really care anymore. Her main concern—her only concern now—was to get this bird down without killing herself.

Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, she told herself as the bare, rock-strewn ground rushed up at her. Find a flat, open spot. Just like Armstrong in the old Apollo 11 Eagle. Find a flat, open spot.

Easier said than done. The rolling, hilly ground sliding past her was pitted with craters of all sizes and covered so thickly with rocks and boulders that Pancho thought of a teenaged boy she had dated whose face was covered with acne.

Funny what the mind dredges up, she thought.

“Pay attention to the real world,” she muttered.

She fought down a wave of nausea as the ground rushed up at her. It would be sooo good to just lay down and go to sleep. Her legs felt like rubber, her whole body ached. Without thinking of it consciously she ran her tongue across her teeth, testing for a taste of blood. Bad sign if your gums start bleeding, she knew. Symptom of radiation sickness, big time.

“Pay attention!” she screamed at herself.

“Say again?” came the voice of the flight controller at Malapert.

“Nothin’,” Pancho replied, apologetically. They’ve still got me on their radar, she thought. Good. They’ll know where the body’s buried.

There! Coming up on the right. A fairly flat area with only a few dinky little rocks. It’s sloping, though. On a hillside. Not so bad. If I can reach it.

Pancho nudged the tee-shaped control yoke and the hopper’s maneuvering thrusters squirted out a few puffs of cold gas, enough to jink the ungainly little craft toward the open area she had spotted.

Shit! More rocks than I thought. Well, beggars can’t be choosers. Only enough juice for one landing.

She tapped the keyboard for the automatic landing sequence, not trusting herself to do the job manually. The hopper shuddered as its main engine fired, killed its velocity, and the little craft dropped like a child’s toy onto the stony, sloping ground. All in total silence.

Pancho remembered enough from her old astronaut training to flex her knees and brace her arms against the control podium. The hopper thumped into the ground, one flat landing foot banging into a rock big enough to tip the whole craft dangerously. For a wild moment Pancho thought the hopper was going to tumble over onto its side. It didn’t, but the crash landing was violent enough to tear away the loop that held her right foot to the platform grillwork. Her leg flew up, knocking her so badly off balance that her left leg, still firmly anchored in its foot loop, snapped at the ankle.

Pancho gritted her teeth in the sudden pain of the broken bone as she thudded in lunar slow motion to the grillwork platform.

Feeling cold sweat breaking out of every pore of her body, she thought, Well, I ain’t dead yet.

Then she added, Won’t be long before I am, though.

ASTRO CORPORATION COMMAND CENTER

I might as well move a cot in here, thought Jake Wanamaker as he paced along the row of consoles. A technician sat at each of them, monitoring display screens that linked the command center with Astro ships and bases from the Moon to the Belt. Lit only by the ghostly glow of the screens, the room felt hot and stuffy, taut with the hum of electrical equipment and the nervous tension of apprehensive men and women.

There were only two displays that Wanamaker was interested in: Malapert base, near the lunar south pole, and Cromwell, about to start its runup to the asteroid Vesta.

Wanamaker hunched over the technician monitoring the link with Cromwell. Deep inside the cloud of high-energy particles, radio contact was impossible. But the ship’s captain had sent a tight- beam laser message more than half an hour earlier. It was just arriving at the Astro receiving telescope up on the surface of the Moon.

The screen showed nothing but a jumbled hash of colors.

“Decoding, sir,” the seated technician murmured, feeling the admiral’s breath on the back of her neck.

The streaks dissolved to reveal the apprehensive-looking face of Cromwell’s skipper. The man’s eyes looked wary, evasive.

“We have started the final run to target,” he stated tersely. “The radiation cloud is dissipating faster than predicted, so we will release our payload at the point halfway between the start of the run and the planned release point.”

The screen went blank.

Turning her face toward Wanamaker, the technician said, “That’s the entire message, sir.”

His immediate reaction was to fire a message back to Cromwell ordering the captain to stick to the plan and carry the nanomachines all the way to the predecided release point. But he realized that it would take the better part of an hour for a message to reach the ship. Nothing I can do, he told himself, straightening up. He stretched his arms over his head, thinking, The captain’s on the scene. If he feels he needs to let the package go early it’s for a good reason. But Wanamaker couldn’t convince himself. The captain’s taking the easiest course for himself, he realized. He’s not pressing his attack home.

Turning slowly, he scanned the shadowy room for Tashkajian. She was at her desk on the other side of the quietly intense command center. This is her plan, Wanamaker thought. She worked it out with the captain. If there’s anything wrong with his releasing the package early, she’ll be the one to tell me.