The Silent War

ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS

Technically, the principal offices of Astro Corporation were still at La Guaira, off the drowned coast of Venezuela. But Pancho had moved almost all of the corporate headquarters staff to Selene. Most of the board of directors lived in the lunar city, and those who didn’t attended board meetings electronically. The three-second communications lag made the meetings tedious to some extent, but Pancho was perfectly willing to accept that. Astro’s business was off-Earth; even shipping asteroidal ores Earthside was almost entirely a space operation, and Pancho had always insisted on being where the action was.

Now she sat in the richly paneled boardroom, in her usual place at the head of the long polished conference table. The only other person in the room at this moment was Jacob Wanamaker, known as “Hard-Ass Jake.” A retired commander of the International Peacekeeping Force, Wanamaker was a big-shouldered, heavy-bellied, genial-looking older man with a wry, lopsided smile and sad, pouchy brown eyes that had seen much more than their share of death and destruction.

Nobuhiko Yamagata had recommended three military advisors to Pancho: a Japanese mercenary who had fought in miniwars from Indonesia to Chiapas, in Mexico; a Swedish woman who had organized the multinational force that pacified the turmoil in southern Africa; and Hard-Ass Jake. The first two had never been off-Earth; Wanamaker had served several tours aboard a missile-defense space station in Earth orbit. Besides, Jacob Wanamaker had been an admiral in the U.S. Navy before accepting a commission with the IPF, and Pancho figured that fighting in space would be more closely akin to naval warfare than land campaigns.

Once she had personally interviewed the three candidates, Jake won hands down. He was open, easily admitting his lack of experience in space, but the toughness he was famous for showed through his veneer of polite sociability. Pancho had seen men like him when she’d been growing up in west Texas.

“So the trick is,” he told her in his rough, sandpaper voice, “to control the lanes of communication. And to do that, you need vessels that are armed and bases for them to be supplied and repaired.”

Pancho nodded. “Sounds expensive.”

Wanamaker’s weather-seamed face was a geological map of hard experience. “War is never cheap, Ms. Lane. The cost is always high: high in blood and high in money. Lots of money.”

“It must be exciting, though,” she said, probing for his reaction.

Wanamaker cocked a cold eye at her. “Exciting? If you think shitting your pants because you could get killed in the next millisecond is fun, yeah, then I guess you could call it exciting.”

It was at that moment that Pancho decided to hire Jacob Wanamaker.

Now they sat in the otherwise empty boardroom, planning strategy.

“HSS has a major base on Vesta,” Pancho said. “What do we do about that, attack it?”

Wanamaker pursed his lips for a moment, then replied in his gravelly voice, “Why attack them where they’re dug in with solid defenses? That’d cost too many lives.”

“But that base is the center of all their operations in the Belt.”

“Neutralize it, then. Keep a squadron of ships in the vicinity, close enough to knock off vessels going to or from Vesta, but far away enough to avoid the asteroid’s dug-in defenses.”

Pancho nodded.

Warming to his subject, Wanamaker gesticulated with his big hands, cupping them together to form an imaginary sphere.

“Matter of fact,” he said, “why can’t you put three or four of your armed ships together, armor them with asteroidal rock, and keep them on station at a decent distance around Vesta? They’d have more firepower than any individual HSS vessel and more staying power.”

“It’d be like a blockade, wouldn’t it?” Pancho said.

Wanamaker grinned lopsidedly at her. “You catch on pretty quick.”

The rush of pleasure Pancho felt from his praise quickly faded. “But then Humphries’ll send out his ships in groups, ’stead of individually, won’t he?”

“Yep, convoying would be the countermove.”

“It just makes the battles bigger.”

“And more expensive.”

Suddenly she felt gloomy.

Wanamaker immediately picked up on her mood. “Look, Ms. Lane—”

“Pancho,” she corrected absently.

“Okay, Pancho, then. Sherman was right: war is hell, pure and simple. It costs so much in money and blood that if there’s any other way to settle your differences with Humphries—any way at all —take it and avoid the bloodshed.”

She looked into his earnest brown eyes and said, “I’ve been trying to avoid this for more’n eight years, Jake. There’s no way to get around it, short of giving Humphries total control of the Belt, which means total control of the whole solar system. I won’t allow that. I can’t.”

He puffed his cheeks out in a king-sized sigh. “Then we’ll have to fight.”

“Guess so,” Pancho said morosely.

“You know, battles are won first of all on the morale of the people doing the fighting. Hardly any unit fights to the last man or the last cartridge. Especially mercenaries, such as you’ll be using. Somebody decides it’s hopeless and gives up before he gets killed.”

“Or she,” said Pancho.

He acknowledged that with a nod. “Battles are won in the mind and the heart, Pancho. Wars too. The winner is always the guy who won’t admit defeat.”

She leaned back in her chair, stretched her long legs and stared up at the boardroom’s smooth white ceiling.

“Humphries is a stubborn SOB,” she said. “And he’s not doing the fighting. He sits safe and snug in his house down at the bottom level and gives the orders.”

“And pays the bills,” Wanamaker added.

Pancho stared at him.

“The way to win this war is to make it too expensive for him to keep on fighting it.”

“That means it’ll be expensive for Astro, too, and I’ve got a board of directors to answer to. Humphries can walk all over his board.”

With an understanding nod, Wanamaker replied, “Then you’re going to have to do some fighting, too, with your board. Just because you’re at the top of the chain of command doesn’t mean you don’t have to put your butt on the line, Pancho.”

She tried to smile. “I guess the price of commodities from the Belt is gonna go up.”

George was surprised at Pancho’s message.

“Go full speed ahead on the nanoprocessing,” she said, her lantern-jawed face deadly serious. “It’s important that we bring down the costs of mining the rocks.”

George studied her image on the wallscreen of his sitting room, thinking, First she says nanoprocessing is gonna knock the bottom outta the market and now she’s hot to trot with it. What’s goin’ on with her?

Pancho’s next sentence explained it, at least partially. “Astro’s got some big expenses coming up, Georgie. Anything we can do to lower our costs will let us squeeze some extra profits out of the mining operations and help us pay for what’s coming up.”

“What’s coming up?” George asked Pancho’s image.

She couldn’t answer, of course, not for an hour or so, but George was afraid he already knew. They’re gonna fight it out, he figured. No more pokin’ here and there, they’re gonna fight a fookin’ full-scale war. And they’re gonna do it right here in the Belt.

“One more thing,” Pancho was going on, with hardly a pause for breath. “It’s going to be more dangerous out there for Lars than ever before. Tell him it’s time for him to come in from the cold. I can give him a new identity, let him live here in Selene if he wants to or even back on Earth. He’s got to get out of the Belt, for his own safety.”

George nodded at Pancho’s image. She looked grave, somber. Like a woman about to go to war, George thought. Then he realized, No. She looks more like a fookin’ avenging angel.

Victoria Ferrer watched Humphries’s reaction to the latest reports from his far-flung intelligence network.

“Astro’s arming ships,” he muttered, staring at the display hovering in midair above his desk. “And she’s pushing the nanoprocessing scheme.”

“She’s preparing to go to war,” Ferrer said. “Against you.”

He looked up at her, his face cold with fury. “With nanoprocessing, Pancho can cut her costs and give Astro an extra layer of profits to finance her war.”

“Then we’ve got to get into nanoprocessing, too.”

“Damned quick,” Humphries snapped.

“The scientist who perfected the process is here in Selene,” Ferrer pointed out. “He came in with Pancho.”

“Hire him away from Astro,” Humphries said immediately.

“He’s not an Astro employee,” she said. “Not legally, at least.”

“Then hire him. Give him whatever he wants. If he won’t come along with us, kidnap him. I want him working for me!”

“I understand,” Ferrer said.

Humphries rubbed his hands together. “By god, with nanoprocessing we’ll cut the costs of mining down to nothing, almost. Down to the cost of transportation, just about.”

“Nanotechnicians don’t come cheap.”

He sneered at her. “Cheap enough. We’ll only need a handful of them. We’ll have those little buggers not only mining the ores out of the asteroids, but refining them into pure metals while they do it. What more could you ask for?”

Ferrer looked less enthusiastic. “Lots of miners are going to be thrown out of work.”

“So what?” Humphries said offhandedly. “More recruits for the mercenaries.”

More cannon fodder, Ferrer thought.

Still in his quarters inside the asteroid Vesta, Dorik Harbin tried to think of the French phrase about the more that things may change, the more they remain the same. Instead, a quatrain from the Rubaiyat came to his mind:

Yesterday, this day’s madness did prepare:

Tomorrow’s silence, triumph or despair;

Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor why;

Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

The irony is almost cosmic, Harbin thought. Humphries fires me because I’ve failed to kill Fuchs. Yamagata hires me to lead a squadron of mercenaries. Humphries hires Yamagata’s mercenaries and bases their ships on Vesta. I didn’t have to move, didn’t even have to pack a travel bag. Here I am in the same quarters, lower in rank but higher in pay. All I have to do is lead three ships into battle against Astro Corporation. Fuchs has become a sideshow.

His relationship with Leeza Chaptal had changed, though. She had emerged as Yamagata’s senior officer among the mercenaries hired by Humphries Space Systems. Now she outranked Harbin, and had little time for him. Which was just as well, Harbin thought. He had no enthusiasm for sleeping with a senior officer. It was one thing to take orders from a woman in battle; in bed, it was a totally different matter.

But Harbin had his consolations. In the travel bag that he didn’t have to pack rested a flat gray oblong medical kit that contained a subcutaneous microspray syringe and an array of specially designed medications.

Something for every mood, Harbin thought as he went to the bag and pulled out the kit. Sitting on his bed, he clicked open its lid and examined the vials lined up neatly, each in their clasps. Something to alleviate depression. Something to enhance sexual performance. This one smothers fear. That one speeds reaction times. Each one designed specifically for my metabolism. And Leeza says Yamagata can supply as much as I need.

Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where. He repeated the line over and again in his mind as he took a vial from the neat little row and inserted it into the syringe. Something to make me forget everything, he thought. Something for oblivion.

He rolled up the sleeve of his uniform and pressed the syringe to the bare skin of his forearm. Heard its gentle, soothing, reptilian hiss.

He looked up and saw that the wallscreen was displaying a view from the surface of Vesta. A sliver of bare rock, and then the black emptiness of infinity. Stars upon stars, all silent and grave, staring back at him. A barren wilderness of cold and dark.

The drug started to take effect quickly. Harbin lay back on his bed, thinking, Oh, wilderness were paradise enow.

He closed his eyes and begged the silent stars to keep him from dreaming.