The Silent War

ORE FREIGHTER SCRANTON

Chick Egan was mildly surprised to find a ship approaching Scranton at high speed. The ore freighter was almost clear of the inner fringe of the Belt, heading toward Selene, carrying a full load of asteroidal metals under contract to Astro Corporation. Astro’s people were busily auctioning off the metals on the commodities market at Selene, desperately hoping to get prices high enough to make a minimal profit.

Sitting sideways in the pilot’s seat, his legs dangling over the armrest, Egan had been talking with his partner, “Zep” Zepopoulous, about the advisability of getting a laser weapon for the old, slow Scranton.

“Makes about as much sense as giving Santa Claus a six-shooter,” Zep argued. He was a lean, wiry Greek with thick jet black hair and a moustache to match. “We’re in the freight-hauling business, we’re not fighters.”

Egan’s strawberry-blond hair was shorn down to a military buzz cut. “Yeah, but all the other ships are puttin’ on lasers. For self-defense.”

“This tub isn’t worth defending,” Zep replied, gesturing around the cramped, shabby cockpit with its scuffed bulkheads and worn-shiny seats. “Somebody wants what we’re carrying, we just give it to them and let the insurance carrier worry about it.”

“HSS is going after Astro ships,” Egan said. “And vice versa.”

“We’re only under contract to Astro for this one flight. We could sign up with HSS next time out.”

“Sam Gunn’s arming all his ships,” Egan countered. “Astro, HSS, a lot of the independents, too.”

“Let ’em,” said Zepopoulous. “The day I start carrying weapons is the day I quit this racket and go back to Naxos.”

“What’s left of it.”

“The flooding’s stabilized now, they say. I’ll be a fisherman, like my father.”

“And starve like your father.”

That was when the radar pinged. Both men looked at the screen and saw a ship approaching at high speed.

“Who the hell is that?” Zep asked. The display screen showed only blanks where a ship’s name and ownership would normally appear. “Lars Fuchs?” Egan suggested.

“What would he want a load of ores for? We’re not an HSS ship, and we don’t have any supplies he’d want to take.”

Feeling decidedly nervous, Egan turned to the communications unit. “This is Scranton. Independent inbound for Selene. Identify yourself, please.”

The answer was a laser bolt that punched a hole through the skin of the cockpit. Egan’s last thought was that he wished he had armed Scranton so he could at least die fighting.

George Ambrose listened to the reports in gloomy silence. The six other members of Ceres’s governing council sitting around the oval conference table looked even bleaker.

Eight ships destroyed in the past month. Warships being built at Selene and sent to the Belt by Astro and Humphries Space Systems.

“The HSS base on Vesta has more than two dozen ships orbiting around it,” said the council member responsible for relations with the two major corporations. She was a Valkyrie-sized woman with sandy hair and a lovely, almost delicate fine-boned face that looked out of place on her big, muscular body.

“Everybody’s carrying weapons,” said the councilman sitting beside her.

“It’s damned dangerous out there,” agreed the woman on the other side of the table.

“What’s worrying me,” said the accountant, sitting at the table’s end, “is that this fighting is preventing ships from delivering their ores to the buyers.”

The accountant was a red-faced, pop-eyed overweight man who usually wore a genial smile. Now he looked apprehensive, almost grim.

“Our own economy,” he went on, “is based on the business that the miners do. With that business slumping, we’re going to be in an economic bind, and damned soon, too.”

“Worse than that,” said the Valkyrie. “It’s only a matter of time before one of the corporations— either Astro or HSS—tries to take over our habitat and make it a base of their own.” “And whichever one takes Chrysalis,” said the accountant, “the other one will try to take it from them.”

“Or destroy us altogether.”

Big George huffed out a heavy sigh. “We can’t have any fighting here. They’ll kill us all.”

All their faces turned to him. They didn’t have to say a word; George knew the question they wanted answered. What can we do about it?

“All right,” he said. “I’m gonna send a message to Astro and Humphries. And to Selene, too.” Silently he added, With a copy to Doug Stavenger.

“A message?”

“What are you going to say?”

“I’m gonna tell them all that we’re strictly neutral in this war they’re fightin’,” George replied. “We want no part of it. We’ll keep on sellin’ supplies and providin’ R R facilities for anybody who wants ’em, HSS, Astro, independents, anybody.”

The others glanced around the table at one another.

George went on, “But we won’t deal with warships. Not from anybody. Only mining ships, prospectors, logistics vessels and the like. We will not supply warships with so much as a toilet tissue.”

“A declaration of neutrality,” said the accountant.

“Do you think that will be enough?”

“What else can we do?”

“Arm the habitat. Be ready to fight anybody who tries to take us over.”

George shook his head ponderously. “This habitat is like an eggshell. We can’t fight. It’d just get us all killed.”

“We could armor the habitat,” the Valkyrie suggested. “Coat the outer hulls with powdered rock, like some of the warships do.”

“That’d just postpone the inevitable,” George said. “A half-dozen ships could sit out there and pound us into rubble.”

“A declaration of neutrality,” someone repeated.

“Do you think it would work?”

George spread his big hands. “Anybody got a better idea?”

Silence fell over the conference room.

George drafted his declaration over the next twenty-four hours, with the help of an assistant who had been a history major before coming out to the Belt. The council met again in emergency session, tore the draft to tatters and rewrote it extensively, then—sentence by sentence, almost— wrote a final draft that was quite close to George’s original. Only after that did they agree to allow George to send the declaration to Pancho Lane at Astro, Martin Humphries of HSS, and the governing board of Selene. George added a copy for Douglas Stavenger, and then released the statement to the news media of the Earth/Moon region.

For the next several days Big George Ambrose was a minor media attraction. Ceres’s neutrality was the first realization for most of the people on battered old Earth that there was a war going on in the Belt: a silent, furtive war taking place far, far away in the dark and cold depths of the Asteroid Belt.

For a few days the Asteroid War was a trendy topic on the news nets, even though no executive of Humphries Space Systems or Astro Corporation deigned to be interviewed or even offer a comment. Sam Gunn, the fast-talking independent entrepreneur, had a lot to say, but the media was accustomed to Gunn’s frenetic pronouncements on the evildoings of the big corporations. Nobuhiko Yamagata agreed to a brief interview, mainly to express his regrets that lives were being lost out in the Belt.

Then a major earthquake struck the California coast, with landslides that sent a pair of tsunamis racing across the Pacific to batter Hawaii and drown several Polynesian atolls. Japan braced for the worst, but the hydraulic buffers that Yamagata had built—and been ridiculed for—absorbed enough of the tsunamis’ energy to spare the major Japanese cities from extensive destruction. The Asteroid War was pushed to a secondary position in the news nets’ daily reporting. Within a week it was a minor story, largely because it was taking place far from Earth and had no direct impact on the Earthbound news net producers.

George Ambrose, however, received a personal message from Douglas Stavenger. It was brief, but it was more than George had dared to hope for.

Seated at the desk in his comfortable home in Selene, Stavenger said simply, “George, I agree that Chrysalis could be endangered by the fighting in the Belt. Please let me know what I—or Selene—can do to help.”