The Silent War

MATHILDA II

“We have arrived at the designated position,” said the pilot.

Pancho was sitting in the copilot’s chair of Mathilda II’s snug, efficiently laid-out bridge. The pilot, seated on her left, was a youngster she had met when she’d come aboard for this flight. He looked like a kid to Pancho, blond and soft-cheeked and scrubbed pink, but he ran the vessel well enough. Good square shoulders, she noticed. Pancho’s piloting skills were rusty, she knew, but inwardly she longed for a chance to fly this bucket, just for a little larking around. She couldn’t ask, of course. The chairman of the board of Astro Corporation isn’t supposed to be a fly-girl. One of the epithets that Humphries often threw at her was “greasemonkey.” Pancho had no intention of giving the Humper any ammunition.

Still, she thought as she watched the young man play his fingers over the control panel’s keyboard, it’d be fun to goose up the engines and see what this flying machine can do.

“This is the spot, is it?” George asked. Standing behind the pilot’s seat, he bent forward slightly to peer out the forward window. Nothing visible except the desert of dark empty space spangled with solemn, unblinking stars.

The pilot’s name was Oskar Johannson. Despite his youthful appearance, he was stiffly formal with George and Pancho.

“Yes, sir,” he said, pointing to the control panel’s main display screen. “These are the coordinates, in yellow, and this is our position, the blinking red cursor. As you can see, sir, they overlap. We are at the proper position.”

George nodded. Pancho admired Johannson’s strong jaw and gleaming white teeth. Wish he’d smile, she thought. I wonder what it’d take to ruffle his composure a bit.

“No ships in sight?”

“Nothing in view, sir, except a small asteroid about five hundred klicks off, in about the four o’clock position.” He tapped the keyboard once. “Five hundred seventeen kilometers, one hundred twenty-two degrees relative to our position, eight degrees elevation.”

Pancho grinned at the kid’s earnestness. “I thought this position was clear of rocks for at least a thousand klicks all round,” she said.

George scratched at his beard, answering, “Rocks get kicked into new orbits all the time, Pancho. Gravity resonances from Jupiter and the other planets are always scrambling the smaller chunks.”

Resisting the urge to run the display herself, she said, “An unnumbered rock. Might’s well claim it.”

“To do that one of us would hafta suit up and go out there and plant a marker on it.”

“Why not?” Pancho said, pushing herself up from her seat. “I’ll do it. Claim it for Astro.”

“Gimme a closer look at it, Oskar,” George said.

The radar image showed a dumbbell-shaped chondritic asteroid, slowly tumbling end over end.

“A peanut,” George said. “Just like what’s-’is-name.”

“Ida,” said Johannson. “Asteroid number 243.”

“Showin’ off your college education, Ossie?” asked George.

Johannson actually blushed.

Pushing past George, Pancho said, “I’ll go out and claim it. Give me something to do while we’re waiting for Lars to show up.”

George turned and ducked through the hatch after her. “I’ll give you a hand, Pancho.”

“I can do it myself,” she said, heading up the narrow passageway toward the main airlock, where the space suits were stored.

“You’ll need help gettin’ into a suit,” George called after her. “I’ll hafta suit up meself, too, y’know.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Safety regs,” George said firmly. “Somebody’s gotta be suited up and ready to go out in case of an emergency.”

Pancho hmmphed but didn’t object. Safety regulations had saved more than one astronaut’s butt, she knew. She allowed George to help her into the suit and check out her seals and systems. Then she helped George and checked him out.

“What’s funny?” George asked as he pulled the fishbowl helmet over his wild red mane.

Pancho hadn’t realized she was grinning. George seemed about to burst his suit’s seams. “Georgie, you look like a red-headed Santa Claus, you know that?”

“Ho, ho, ho,” he answered flatly.

Pancho was ready to step into the airlock when Johannson’s voice came over the ship’s intercom:

“A ship’s approaching,” he called out. “It’s coming up fast.”

“Lasers armed and ready, sir,” said the weapons technician.

Harbin nodded curtly, his eyes focused on the image of Mathilda II on the main screen of Samarkand’s bridge. Nothing else in range except a minor asteroid, some five hundred klicks away.

Samarkand carried two powerful continuous-wave lasers, adapted from the cutting tools the rock rats used, plus a high-energy pulsed weapon capable of blowing a centimeter-sized hole in the metal skin of a spacecraft from a distance of a thousand kilometers.

Mathilda’s crew module was out of position, Harbin saw; it had rotated away from his fast-approaching ship and was partially shielded by the bulk of the propulsion system, engines and big spherical fuel tanks.

“Stand by,” Harbin ordered quietly. The three crew personnel on the bridge with him sat tensely, waiting for the order to fire.

Just a little closer, Harbin said under his breath to the slowly rotating Mathilda. Just turn a little bit more.

There. The crew module was clearly visible.

“Fire,” Harbin said to the weapons tech. To make certain, he pressed the red button on the keypad set into his command chair’s armrest.

“We got her,” he whispered triumphantly.

Pancho was inside the airlock, ready to go out and claim the unnamed asteroid, when she heard a gurgling scream in her earphones and warning sirens begin an ear-piercing howl.

“What’s that?” she yelled into her helmet microphone.

“Dunno,” George’s voice replied. “Sounds like the emergency hatches slammed shut.”

Pancho banged the airlock control panel, stopping its pumps, then reopened the inner hatch. George was in his space suit, peering down the passageway, his shaggy face frowning with worry.

“Can’t get Johannson on the intercom,” he muttered.

Pointing to the control panel on the emergency hatch a few meters up the passageway, Pancho said, “We’ve lost air pressure.”

“Better stay in the suits, then,” said George as he started toward the closed hatch.

Pancho followed him through three hatches, past the ship’s galley and up to the hatch that opened onto the bridge. Red warning lights showed there was no air pressure along the entire way.

“Jesus!” George yelped once he pushed the hatch open.

Looking over the shoulder of George’s suit, Pancho saw that the bridge’s forward window had been punctured with a fist-sized hole and the control panel was spattered, dripping with bright red blood. Johannson was slumped in his seat, arms hanging, blood-soaked head lolling on his shoulders. George went to him and turned the pilot’s chair around slightly. Johannson’s eyes had blown out, and blood was still cascading from his open mouth.

For the first time in her long career as an astronaut and executive of a space-based corporation, Pancho vomited inside her fishbowl helmet.

“Hit!” said the weapons tech.

Harbin saw that they had indeed hit the crew module dead-on, probably at the bridge. Good.

“Slow to match the target’s velocity,” he commanded. “Move in closer.”

Now to slice the ship to pieces and make sure no one survives.

Suddenly the lights on the bridge went out. As the dim emergency lights winked on, Harbin saw that his pilot’s control board was glaring with red lights.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded.

“Malfunction in the weapons pod,” said the pilot, his fingers playing over the console keypads. “Electrical failure and—”

The lights blinked. This time Harbin felt the ship shudder slightly.

“We’ve been hit!” he snapped.

“Mathilda isn’t firing at us,” the navigator said, staring at the main screen. “That vessel isn’t armed. It’s only a—”

Samarkand lurched noticeably.

“We’re spinning!” the pilot shouted. “Number two propulsion tank’s been ruptured!”

“They’re firing at us,” Harbin shouted.

“But they can’t!”

“Somebody’s firing at us!” he insisted. “Get us out of here! Now!”

“I’m trying to bring the ship under control,” the pilot yelled, her voice edgy, nearing panic.

We should get into our suits, Harbin knew. But there’s no time for that now.

“Get us out of here!” he repeated, trying to sound calm, measured.

That asteroid, he realized. Somebody’s on that asteroid and shooting at us. It must be Fuchs.

Lars Fuchs stood behind his pilot’s chair, legs spread slightly, fists on his hips, eyes blazing with anger as he studied the display screen. They fired on George’s ship, he said to himself. Why? Did they think I was aboard? Or were they trying to kill Pancho? Probably both.

“The enemy is escaping,” Nodon said. He spoke softly, keeping his tone neutral, making as certain as he could not to anger Fuchs.

“Let them go,” Fuchs said. “The dog is whipped, no sense daring him to turn back and snap at us.”

None of the crew on the bridge raised any objection.

“Sanja,” Fuchs said to the man on the communications console, “see if you can contact the ship they attacked.”

Within a few minutes Big George’s face appeared on the screen, his brick-red hair and beard still stuffed inside the fishbowl helmet of his space suit.

“We lost one man,” George said grimly. “No damage to the ship’s systems.”

Past George’s broad shoulder Fuchs could see space-suited personnel smearing epoxy across the bridge’s forward window.

“We’ll have air pressure back in half an hour, maybe less,” said George.

“Pancho is with you?” Fuchs asked.

“Yep. She’s okay.”

“You said she wanted to speak with me.”

“I’ll get her on the line,” said George.

Fuchs waited impatiently, fighting the urge to pace the narrow confines of Nautilus’s bridge. Within a few minutes Pancho’s face replaced George’s on his screen. She was apparently in a privacy compartment, still in her space suit.

“He tried to assassinate you,” Fuchs said without any preliminaries.

“Humphries?” she replied.

“Who else.”

“Maybe he was trying to get you,” Pancho said.

“He promised Amanda he wouldn’t try to harm me,” Fuchs answered, his voice heavy with irony.

An odd expression crossed Pancho’s face. He could not determine what was going through her thoughts.

“It might’ve been a freelancer,” she said at last. “Plenty people are after your scalp, Lars.”

He shook his head, scowling. “That was no freebooter. He knew where you would be and he knew you were attempting to make a rendezvous with me. Only one of Humphries’s agents would have access to such intelligence.”

Pancho nodded inside her space-suit helmet. “I guess.”

Taking a deep breath, Fuchs said, “Well, Pancho, you wanted to speak with me. Here I am. What is it that’s so important?”

That strange expression clouded her face again. “Lars, I need to talk to you face to face about this. Not over a comm link.”

“Impossible. You can’t come aboard my ship and I won’t leave it. Talk now. What is it?”

She hesitated, obviously torn between conflicting emotions.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Lars… it’s about Amanda. Before she died she—”

“She died?” Fuchs felt his heart constrict beneath his ribs. “Amanda is dead?”

Pancho looked stricken. “I didn’t want to tell you like this. I wanted to—”

“She’s dead?” Fuchs repeated, his voice gone hollow. He felt as if he needed to sit down, but he couldn’t show that weakness here on the bridge, in front of his crew.

“She died in childbirth, Lars.” “Giving birth to his son,” Fuchs muttered.

“No, not—”

“He killed her. Humphries killed her just as certainly as if he put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

“Lars, you don’t understand,” said Pancho, almost pleading.

“I understand everything,” he growled. “Everything! Now that she’s dead even his lying promise to her is gone. Now he’ll bend every effort, send every murdering thug he can buy, to kill me. But it won’t work, Pancho. He’ll never kill me.”

“Lars, please. Let me explain—”

“I’ll kill him!” Fuchs bellowed, raising his clenched fists above his head. “I’ll wipe that smug smile off his face and kill him with these bare hands! I’ll repay him for Amanda! I’ll kill him!”

He lurched between the two pilots’ chairs and punched the communications console so hard that glass broke. Pancho’s image disappeared from the display screen.

“I’ll kill you, Humphries!” Fuchs screamed to an uncaring universe.