The Silent War

TORCH SHIP STARPOWER III

Like most torch ships, Starpower III was built like a dumbbell, bulbous propellant tanks on one end of a kilometer-long bucky-ball tether, habitation module on the other, with the fusion rocket engine in the center. The ship spun lazily on the ends of the long tether, producing a feeling of gravity for the crew and passengers.

Pancho’s quarters aboard her personal torch ship were comfortable, not sumptuous. The habitation module included the crew’s quarters, the bridge, work spaces and storage areas, as well as Pancho’s private quarters plus two more compartments for guests.

Pancho was afraid that her lone guest on this trip from Ceres to Selene would become obstreperous. Levi Levinson was flattered almost out of his mind when Pancho told him she wanted to bring him to Selene to meet the top scientists there. “Two of ’em are on the Nobel committee,” Pancho had said, with complete truthfulness and a good deal of artful suggestion.

Levinson had immediately packed a travel bag and accompanied her to the torch ship. Now, though, as they approached Selene, Pancho broke the unpleasant news to him. She invited him to dinner in her private quarters and watched with secret amusement as he goggled at the array of food spread on the table between them by the ship’s two galley servers.

“You’ve made a terrific scientific breakthrough,” she told Levinson, once the servers had left. “But I’m not sure the rock rats are gonna take advantage of it.”

Levinson’s normal expression reminded Pancho of a deer caught in an automobile’s headlights. Now his brows shot even higher than usual. “Not take advantage of it?” he asked, a spoonful of soup trembling halfway between the bowl and his mouth. “What do you mean?”

Pancho had spent most of the day talking with Big George via a tight-beam laser link. George had hammered it out with the rock rats’ governing council. They were dead-set against using anything that would drop the prices of the ores they mined.

“Fookin’ prices are low enough,” George had growled. “We’ll all go broke if they drop much more.”

Now Pancho looked into Levinson’s questioning eyes and decided to avoid the truth. The kid’s worked his butt off to make this breakthrough, she told herself, and now you’ve got to tell him it was all for nothing.

“It’s the safety problem,” she temporized. “The rock rats are worried about using nanos that can’t be disabled by ultraviolet light.”

Levinson blinked, slurped his soup, then put the spoon back into the bowl. “I suppose some other safety features could be built into the system,” he said.

“You think so?”

“Trouble is, the nanos have to work in a high radiation environment. They’ve got to be hardened.”

“And that makes them dangerous,” said Pancho.

“Not really.”

“The miners think so.”

Levinson took a deep, distressed breath. “But if they handle the nanos properly there shouldn’t be any problems.”

Pancho smiled at him like a mother. “Lev, they’re miners. Rock rats. Sure, most of ’em have technical degrees, but they’re not scientists like you.”

“I could work out protocols for them,” he mumbled, half to himself. “Safety procedures for them to follow.”

“Maybe you could,” Pancho said vaguely.

He stared down into his soup bowl for several moments, then looked back up at her. “Does this mean I can’t publish my work?”

“Publish?”

“In The Journal of Nanotechnology. It’s published in Selene and I thought I’d meet the editors while I’m there.”

Pancho thought it over for all of a half-second. A scientific journal. Maybe a hundred people in the whole solar system read it. But one of them will bring the news to Humphries, she was sure. Hell, she said to herself, the Hump prob’ly knows about it already. Not much goes on anywhere that he doesn’t know about.

“Sure you can publish it,” she said easily. “No problem.” Levinson broke into a boyish smile. “Oh, that’s okay then. As long as I can publish and get credit for my work, I don’t care what the stupid rock rats do.”

Pancho stared at him, struggling to hide her feelings. Like so many scientists, this kid’s an elitist. She felt enormously relieved.

Dorik Harbin knew all about addiction. He’d started taking narcotics when he was a teenager, still in his native Balkan village. The elders fed a rough form of hashish to the kids when they sent the youths out on missions of ethnic cleansing. As he progressed up the ladder of organized murder and rape, his need for drugs became deeper, more demanding. As a mercenary in the employ of Humphries Space Systems he had been detoxed several times, only to fall back into his habit time and again. Ironically, HSS medics supplied the medications as part of the corporation’s “incentive program.” Their meds were much better, too: designer drugs, tailored for specific needs. Drugs to help you stay awake and alert through long days and weeks of cruising alone through the Belt, seeking ships to destroy. Drugs to enhance your battle prowess, to make you fiercer, angrier, bloodier than any normal human being could be. Most of all, Harbin needed drugs to help him forget, to blot out the images of helpless men and women screaming for mercy as they floated into space from their broken spacecraft to drift in their survival pods or even alone in their spacesuits, drift like flailing, begging, terrified dust motes until at last death quieted their beseeching voices and they wafted through space in eternal silence.

A lesser man would have been driven to madness by the hopelessness of it all. Humphries’s medical specialists took pains to detoxify Harbin’s body, to purge his blood stream of the lingering molecules of narcotics. Then other Humphries specialists fed him new medications, to help him do the killings that the corporation paid him to do. Harbin smiled grimly at the irony and remembered Kayyam’s words:

No matter which of the laboratory-designed drugs he took, though, nor how much, they could not erase his dreams, could never blot out the memories that made his sleep an endless torture of punishment. He saw their faces, the faces of all those he had killed over the years, distorted with pain and terror and the sudden realization that their lives were finished, without mercy, without hope of rescue or reprieve or even delay. He heard their screams, every time he slept.

The revenge of the weak against the strong, he told himself. But he dreaded sleep, dreaded the begging, pleading chorus of men and women and babies.

Yes, Harbin knew about addiction. He had allowed himself to become addicted to a woman once, and she had betrayed him. So he had to kill her. He had trusted her, let his guard down and allowed her to reach his innermost soul. He had even dared to dream of a different life, an existence of peace and gentleness, of loving and being loved. And she had betrayed him. When he ripped the lying tongue out of her mouth, she was carrying another man’s baby.

He swore never to repeat that mistake. Never to allow a woman to get that close to him. Never. Women were for pleasure, just as some drugs were. Nothing more.

Yet Leeza intrigued him. She went to bed with Harbin easily enough; she even seemed flattered that the commander of the growing base on Vesta took enough notice of her to bring her to his bed. She was compliant, amiable, and energetic in her lovemaking.

Don’t get involved with her! Harbin warned himself sternly. Yet, as the weeks slipped by in the dull, cramped underground warrens of Vesta, he found himself spending more and more time with her. She could make him forget the past, at least for the duration of a pleasant dinner together. She could make time disappear entirely when they made love. She could even make Harbin laugh.

Still he refused to allow her into his private thoughts. He refused to hope about the future, refused even to think about any future at all except completing this military base on Vesta and following Martin Humphries’s command to hunt down Lars Fuchs and kill him.

But the new orders superseded the old. Grigor told him that Humphries wanted an all-out attack on Astro Corporation ships.

“Forget Fuchs for the moment,” Grigor’s prerecorded message said. “There are bigger plans in the works.”

Harbin knew he was becoming addicted to Leeza when he told her how dissatisfied he was with the new orders.

She lay in bed beside him, her tousled head on his bare shoulder, the only light in the room coming from the glow of starlight from the wallscreen that displayed the camera view of deep space from the surface of Vesta.

“Humphries is preparing to go to war against Astro?” Leeza asked, her voice soft as silk in the starlit darkness.

Knowing he shouldn’t be revealing so much to her, Harbin said merely, “It looks that way.”

“Won’t that be dangerous for you?” It was difficult to shrug with her head on his shoulder. “I get paid for taking risks.”

She was silent for several heartbeats. Then, “You could get paid much more.”

“Oh? How?”

“Yamagata Corporation would equal your salary from HSS,” she said.

“Yamagata?”

With a slight, mischievous giggle, Leeza added, “And you could still be drawing your pay from Humphries, at the same time.”

He turned toward her, brows knitting. “What are you talking about?”

“Yamagata wants to hire you, Dorik.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I work for them.”

“For Yamagata?”

Her voice became almost impish. “I do the job I was hired to do for Humphries and draw my HSS salary for it. I report on what’s happening here to Yamagata, and they pay me the same amount that HSS does. Isn’t that neat?”

“It’s treason,” Harbin snapped.

She raised herself on one elbow. “Treason? To a corporation? Don’t be silly.”

“It’s not right.”

“Loyalty to a corporation is a one-way street, Dorik. Humphries can fire you whenever he chooses to. There’s nothing wrong with feathering your own nest when you have the opportunity.”

“Why is Yamagata so interested in me?”

“They want to know what Humphries is doing. I’m too low in the organization to give them the whole picture. You’re the source they need.”

Harbin leaned back on his pillow, his thoughts spinning.

“You don’t have to do anything against HSS,” Leeza urged. “All Yamagata wants is information.”

For now, Harbin added silently. Then he smiled in the darkness. She’s just like all the others. A traitor. He almost felt relieved that he didn’t have to build an emotional attachment to her.