The Silent War

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 reports Fuchs received were always weeks out of date, sometimes months. But it was his only link to the rest of the human race, and Fuchs was grateful to Big George for taking the trouble and the risk to do it.

Now, though, as he glowered at George’s unhappy countenance, Fuchs felt considerably less than grateful.

“That’s what his fookin’ party was for,” George was saying, morosely. “He got up on the fookin’ piano bench to tell all those people that he was gonna be a father. Pleased as a fat snake, he looked.”

Fuchs wiped George’s image off the screen and got up from his chair. His compartment was only three strides across, and he paced from one side of it to the other twice, three times, four …

It was inevitable, he told himself. She’s been married to him for eight years. She’s been in his bed every night for all that time. What did you expect?

Yet a fury boiled within him like raging molten lava. This is Humphries’s way of taunting me. Humiliating me. He’s showing the whole world, the whole solar system, that he’s the master. He’s taken my wife and made her pregnant with his son. The bastard! The crowing, gloating, boasting filthy swine of a bastard! I’ve been fighting him for all these years and he fights back by stealing my wife and making her bear his son. The coward! The gutless shit-hearted spineless slimy coward.

His hands balled into fists, Fuchs advanced to the blanked screen, the image of George’s shaggy-maned face still burning in his eyes. He had to hit something, anything, had to release this fury somehow, now, before it exploded inside him.

“Contact,” sang Nodon’s voice over the intercom. “We have radar contact with a vessel.”

Fuchs’s head jerked to the speaker built into the bulkhead.

“It appears to be a logistics ship,” Nodon added.

Fuchs’s lips curled into a humorless smile. “I’m coming up to the bridge,” he said.

By the time he got to the compact, equipment-crammed bridge, Nodon had the approaching logistics ship on the main screen. Amarjagal was in the pilot’s seat, silent and dour as usual. Fuchs stood behind her and focused his attention on the ship.

“What’s a logistics ship doing this deep in the Belt?” he wondered aloud.

Nodon shifted his big, liquid eyes from the screen to Fuchs, then back again. “Perhaps it is off course,” he suggested.

“Or a decoy,” Fuchs snapped. “Any other ships in sight?”

“Nosir. The nearest object is a minor asteroid, less than a hundred meters across.”

“Distance?”

“Four hundred kilometers. Four thirty-two, to be precise.”

“Could it be another ship, disguised?”

Amarjagal spoke up. “There could be a ship behind it. Or even sitting on it.”

The communications receiver’s light began blinking amber.

“They’re trying to speak to us,” Nodon said, pointing to the light.

“Listen, but don’t reply,” Fuchs commanded.

“This is the Roebuck,” the comm speaker announced. A man’s voice; it sounded a little shaky to Fuchs. He’s excited, maybe nervous.

“We have a full cargo of supplies for you. Be willing to accept credit if you don’t have hard goods to trade.”

“Is Roebuck an HSS vessel?” Fuchs asked Nodon.

His fingers flicked across the keyboard set into the control panel. “Nosir. It is registered as an independent.”

“Are the lasers ready?”

Pointing to the green lights of the weapons board, Nodon replied, “Yessir. The crews are all in place.”

In Roebuck’s cargo bay the team of trained mercenaries was already in their spacesuits and warming up the laser weapons.

“Don’t open the hatches until I give the word,” their captain said from his post on the catwalk that ran around the interior of the spacious bay. “I don’t want to give Fuchs any hint that we’re ready to fry his ass.”

Fuchs rubbed his broad, stubbled chin as he stared at the image of the logistics vessel on the bridge’s main screen.

“Why would an independent logistics ship be this deep in the Belt?” he repeated. “There aren’t any miners or prospectors out here.”

“Except us,” agreed Amarjagal.

“Fire number one at their cargo bay,” Fuchs snapped.

Nodon hesitated for a fraction of a moment.

“Fire it!” Fuchs roared.

The first laser blast did little more damage than puncturing the thin skin of Roebuck’s cargo bay hull. As the air rushed out of the bay, their spacesuited commander gave the order to open the hatches and begin firing back at Nautilus.

In the cockpit Abrams felt cold sweat break out all over his body. “He’s shooting at us!”

Wanmanigee tensed, too. “We should get into our space suits! Quickly!”

Those were her last words.

His eyes glued to the main screen, Fuchs saw Roebuck’s cargo bay hatches open.

“They’re firing back,” reported Amarjagal, her voice flat and calm.

“All weapons fire,” Fuchs said. “Tear her to shreds.”

It was a totally unequal battle. Roebuck’s laser beams splashed off Nautilus’s copper armor shields. Nautilus’s five laser weapons slashed through Roebuck’s thin hull, shredding the cargo bay and crew pod within seconds. Fuchs saw several space-suited figures tumble out of the wreckage.

“Cease firing,” he said.

Jabbing a finger at the image of the space-suited people floating helplessly, Nodon asked, “Shall we pick them up?”

Fuchs sneered at him. “Do you want to share your rations with them?” Nodon hesitated, obviously torn.

“And if we take them aboard, what do we do with them? How do we get rid of them? Do you think we can cruise back to Ceres and land them there?”

Nodon shook his head. Still, he turned back to watch the helpless figures floating amidst the wreckage of what had been a vessel only a few moments earlier. His finger hovered over the communications keyboard.

“Don’t tap into their frequency,” Fuchs commanded. “I don’t want to hear them begging.”

For several moments Fuchs and his bridge crew watched the figures slowly, silently drifting. They must be screaming for help, Nodon thought. Beseeching us for mercy. Yet we will not hear them.

At last Fuchs broke the silence. “One-third g acceleration,” he ordered. “Back on our original course. Let’s find a real logistics ship and fill up our supplies.”

“But…”

“They’re mercenaries,” Fuchs snapped. “Hired killers. They came out here to kill us. Now they’ll be dead. It’s no great loss.”

Nodon’s face still showed his desolation. “But they’ll die. They’ll float out there … forever.”

“Think of it this way,” Fuchs said, his voice iron-hard. “We’ve added a few more minor asteroids to the Belt.”