The Silent War

HABITAT CHRYSALIS

Big George was at the airlock to greet her when Pancho left her private torch ship Starpower III and stepped aboard the rock rats’ habitat in orbit about Ceres.

“Welcome to our humble home,” George said, with an exaggerated flourish.

Pancho grinned at him. “Good to be here, Georgie. Gonna give me the ten-dollar tour?”

“Sure will.”

George led her almost halfway through the rotating complex of connected spacecraft bodies. Pancho enjoyed teasing George about how the habitat looked like a floating junkyard, but once inside the linked vessels she had to admit that the habitat was clean, comfortable, and even attractive. Each interconnected craft was painted in a distinctive color scheme, mostly restful pastels, although there were some bolder, brighter hues here and there, and striking designs decorating some of the bulkheads. The place smelled new, fresh, a far cry from the dust-choked caves and tunnels of Ceres.

As they stepped through the hatches from one spacecraft to another, George proudly showed Pancho the living quarters, common rooms, laboratories, workshops, warehouses and business offices that made up the growing complex.

“Got nearly a thousand people livin’ here now,” he declared, “with more comin’ every week.”

“I’m impressed,” Pancho said. “I really am. You guys’ve done a terrific job.”

George smiled boyishly behind his thick red beard. The tour ended at a closed metal door marked NANOTECH LAB. Pancho felt a pang of hopeful surprise.

“Don’t tell me Kris is back!”

“Nah,” George replied, tapping out the combination on the door’s security keypad. “Dr. Cardenas is still off on the Saturn expedition.”

As he pushed the door open he added, “But she’s not the only nanotech genius in the world, y’know. We’ve got a few of our own, right here.”

The nanotechnology lab was eerily quiet. Pancho saw gleaming cabinets of white and stainless steel lining the walls, and a double row of workbenches that held more metal boxes and instruments. She recognized the gray metal tubing of a scanning field microscope off in one corner, but the rest of the equipment was unfamiliar to her.

“Is anybody working here?” she asked. The lab seemed empty of people, except for the two of them.

“Should be,” George said, frowning slightly. “I told ’im we’d be here.”

“Excuse me,” said a soft voice behind them.

Pancho turned to see an overweight young man with dark hair tied back in a ponytail, a neatly trimmed beard, and a slightly bemused expression on his roundish face. His thick dark brows were raised, as if he were puzzled. His lips were curled slightly into a half smile that seemed apologetic, defensive. He was wearing plain gray coveralls, but had a bright plaid vest over them. No tattoos or jewelry, except for a heavy square gold ring on his right hand.

“I had to take a break,” he said in a gentle, almost feminine voice. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you came in.”

George clapped him on the shoulder lightly, but it was enough to make the young man totter. “That’s okay, Lev. When you gotta go, you gotta go.”

He introduced Pancho to Levi Levinson, then added, “Lev here’s from MIT. Brightest lad we’ve got. Boy genius and all that.”

Levinson didn’t seem at all embarrassed by George’s praise. “I learned a lot from Dr. Cardenas before she left.”

“Such as?” Pancho challenged.

Levinson’s smile turned slightly superior. “I’ll show you. I’ve got a demonstration all set up.” He gestured toward the nearer of the two workbenches.

George dragged over a couple of high stools and offered one to Pancho as he explained, “I was after Kris for years to figure out how we could use nanomachines to separate metals from the ores in the asteroids. Lev here thinks he’s solved the problem.”

Pancho felt impressed. Turning to Levinson, she asked, “Have you?”

He looked quietly confident, almost smug. All he said was, “Watch.”

Pancho watched. Levinson took a dark, lumpy, potato-sized chunk of a metallic asteroid and deposited it into one of the big metal cubicles on the workbench. Half a dozen transparent plastic tubes led from the container to smaller bins farther down the bench. Pancho saw that a digital timer started counting seconds when Levinson clicked the lid closed.

“It’s not much of a trick to program nanomachines to separate a specific element from a gross sample,” he said. “Nanos are quite capable of taking specific atoms from a sample of material. It’s just a matter of programming them properly.”

“Uh-huh,” said Pancho.

“The problem’s always been to separate all the different elements in a Void simultaneously, without the nanos interfering with one another.”

“And in a high-UV environment,” George added.

Levinson shrugged his rounded shoulders. “That part was easy. Just harden the nanos so UV won’t dissociate them.”

Pointing to the sealed container, Pancho asked, “You mean these nanomachines won’t be knocked out by ultraviolet light?”

“That’s why I keep them sealed inside the container,” Levinson answered. “If they got loose they’d start taking the habitat apart, atom by atom.”

“Jeeps,” Pancho muttered.

“It’s perfectly safe,” Levinson calmly assured her. “The container is lined with diamond surfaces and none of the nanos are programmed to separate carbon.”

“So they can’t attack people,” George said.

Levinson nodded, but Pancho thought that people also contain iron, phosphorus and a lot of other elements that those nanomachines were programmed to separate. Maybe that’s why Kris dragged her feet on this project, she thought.

A bell pinged. An electric motor whirred. Pancho saw little trickles of what looked like dirt or dust sliding down the six transparent tubes toward the bins on the workbench. As she looked closer, though, several of the growing piles seemed to glitter in the light from the overhead lamps. “The transport tubes are also pure diamond,” Levinson said. “Just a precaution, in case a few of the nanomachines are still present in the differentiated samples.”

Pancho nodded wordlessly.

Levinson applied a handheld mass spectrometer to each of the piles of dirt, in turn. Pure iron, pure nickel, gold, silver, platinum and lead.

With a wave of one hand, he said, “Voila!”

George clapped his beefy hands together. “Y’see, Pancho? With nanomachines we can mine the metals outta the ’roids easy as pie. All the slugwork gets done by the nanos. All the miners hafta do is sit back and let the little buggers do all the fookin’ work!”

“It can be done for minerals, too,” Levinson said, in an offhand manner. “Easier, in fact. The nanos work at the molecular level there, rather than atomic.”

Pancho looked at each of them in turn. She stood up and planted her hands on her hips. “Fine work,” she said. “Only one problem I can see.”

“What’s that?”

“This’ll knock the price of metals and minerals down pretty close to zero.”

“Huh?” George grunted.

“You’re gonna make it so easy to mine the asteroids that we’ll get a glut on the market,” Pancho said. “And most of the miners will be thrown out of work, to boot.”

George frowned. “I didn’t think of that. I was just tryin’ t’make their work easier.”

“Too easy,” said Pancho.

Levinson looked completely unconcerned. “New technology always brings some economic dislocations. But think of the benefits of cheaper raw materials.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Pancho. Then it hit her with the force of a body blow. “Holy cripes! Once Humphries finds out about this there’s gonna be hell to pay!”

“Whattaya mean?” George asked.

“Once this nanotechnology starts being used, there won’t be room for two competing companies in the Belt. The only way to make economic sense out of this is for one company to run the whole damned Belt, keep production of raw materials under control and set prices for the buyers. That’s what he’s after!”

“But Humphries doesn’t know anything about this,” George said.

“Wanna bet?” Pancho snapped.