The Silent War

SIX YEARS EARLIER SELENE: ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS

Pancho Lane tilted back in her sculpted chair, fingers steepled in front of her face, hiding any display of the suspicion she felt for the man sitting before her desk.

One of the two major things she had learned in her years as chief of Astro Corporation was to control her emotions. Once she would have gotten out of her chair, strode around the desk, hauled this lying turkey buzzard up by the scruff of his neck and booted his butt all the way back to Nairobi, where he claimed to come from. Now, though, she simply sat back in cold silence, hearing him out.

“A strategic alliance would be of great benefit to both of us,” he was saying, in his deeply resonant baritone. “After all, we are going to be neighbors here on the Moon, aren’t we?”

Physically, he was a hunk and a half, Pancho admitted to herself. If lie’s here as bait, at least they sent something worth biting on. Strong, broad cheekbones and a firm jawline. Deeply dark eyes that sparkled at her when he smiled, which he did a lot. Brilliant white teeth. Skin so black it almost looked purple. Conservative gray business cardigan, but under it peeped a colorfully patterned vest and a soft yellow shirt opened at the collar to reveal a single chain of heavy gold.

“Your base is going to be more’n four thousand kilometers from here, way down at Aitken Basin.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, with that dazzling smile. “But our base at Shackleton will be only about a hundred klicks from the Astro power facility down in the Malapert Range, you see.”

“The Mountains of Eternal Light,” Pancho murmured, nodding. The Japanese called them the Shining Mountains. Down near the lunar south pole there were several peaks so tall that they were perpetually in sunlight. Astro had established a solar power center there, close to the deposits of frozen water.

“The facility that we are building will be more than a mere base,” the Nairobi representative added. “We intend to make a real city at Shackleton Crater, much like Selene.”

“Really?” Pancho said, keeping her expression noncommittal. She had just been informed, a few minutes earlier, that another Astro freighter had disappeared out in the Belt: the second one in as many weeks. Humphries is at it again, she thought, nibbling away. And if this guy isn’t a stalking horse for Humphries, I’ll be dipped in deep dung.

The other major thing that Pancho had learned was to maintain herself as physically youthful as possible. Rejuvenation therapies that were once regarded as expensive extravagances for the vain and video personalities were now commonplace, especially among the viciously competitive power brokers of the giant corporations. So Pancho looked, physically, much as she had when she’d been thirty: tall, leggy and slim. She had even had the tattoo on her buttocks removed, because board room politics sometimes evolved into bedroom antics, and she didn’t want a teenaged misjudgment to become a whispered rumor. She hadn’t done anything about her face, though, which she considered to be forgettably ordinary except for its unfortunate stubborn, square jaw. Her only concession to the years was that she’d allowed her closely cropped hair to go totally white. The beauticians told her it made a stunning contrast to her light mocha skin.

Pancho made a point of going counter to the fashionable styles of the moment. This season the emphasis was on bulky pullovers and heavy-looking sweaters with strategic cutouts to make them interesting to the eye. Instead, Pancho wore a tailored pantsuit of pale ivory, which accented her long, lean figure, with highlights of asteroidal jewelry at her wrists and earlobes. Her office wasn’t particularly large, as corporate suites went, but it was sumptuously decorated with modern furniture, paintings that Pancho had personally commissioned, and holowindows that could display scenery from half a dozen worlds.

“Pardon me for asking a foolish question, I’ve never been to the Moon before. Is that real wood paneling?” her visitor asked, wide-eyed.

Aw, come on, Pancho groused silently. You can’t be that much of a rube.

“And your desk, too? Did you have it flown all the way here to the Moon?”

“In a sense,” Pancho answered evenly, wondering how much of this guy’s naivete was an act. “Our biotech division sent up a shipload of gengineered bacteria that produce cellulose. Same things tree do, at the cellular level.”

“I see,” he said, his voice still somewhat awed. “The bacteria produce bioengineered wood for you.”

Pancho nodded. “All we bring up from Earth is a small sample of bugs, and they reproduce themselves for us.”

“Marvelous. Nairobi Industries doesn’t have a biotechnology division. We are only a small corporation, compared to Astro or Humphries Space Systems.”

“Well, we all had to start at the beginning,” Pancho said, thinking that it sounded fatuous.

Her visitor didn’t seem to notice. “However, in exchange for help in building our base here on the Moon we offer a unique entry into the growing markets of Africa and the Indian subcontinent.”

The Indian subcontinent, Pancho thought grimly; between their nukes and their biowar there isn’t much left for those poor bastards. And Africa’s still a mess, pretty much.

“We are also developing strong ties with Australia and New Zealand,” he went on. “They still hesitate to deal with Africans, but we are overcoming their prejudices with sound business opportunities for them.”

Pancho nodded. This guy’s a stalking horse, all right. Whoever he’s really working for thinks he’s damned smart sending a black man to make this offer. Thinks I’ll get all gooey and not see past the trap they’re setting up.

Humphries. It’s gotta be Martin Humphries, she reasoned. The old Humper’s been after Astro for years. This is just his latest maneuver. And he’s started knocking off our freighters again.

As if he could read her thoughts, the Nairobi representative added, in a confidential near-whisper, “Besides, an alliance between your corporation and mine will outflank Humphries Space Systems, so to speak. Together, we could take a considerable amount of market share away from HSS.”

Pancho felt her eyebrows hike up. “You mean the asteroidal metals and minerals that Earthside corporations buy.”

“Yes. Of course. But Selene imports a good deal from Humphries’s mining operations in the Belt, too.”

The big struggle, Pancho knew, was to control the resources of the Asteroid Belt. The metals and minerals mined from the asteroids were feeding Earthside industries crippled by the environmental disasters stemming from the greenhouse cliff.

“Well,” said the Nairobi executive, with his gleaming smile, “that’s just about the whole of it. Does it strike any interest in you?”

Pancho smiled back at him. “ ’Course it does,” she said, thinking about how the kids she grew up with in west Texas would cross their fingers when they fibbed. “I’ll give it a lot of thought, you can believe me.”

“Then you’ll recommend a strategic alliance to your board?”

She could see the eagerness on his handsome young face.

Keeping her smile in place, Pancho replied, “Let me think it over, get my staff to run the numbers. Then, if everything checks out, I’ll certainly bring it up before the board.”

He fairly glowed with pleasure. Pancho thought, Whoever sent this hunk of beefcake didn’t pick him because he’s got a poker face.

She got to her feet and he shot up so quickly that Pancho thought he’d bounce off the ceiling. As it was, he stumbled slightly, unaccustomed to the low lunar gravity, and had to grab a corner of her desk to steady himself.

“Easy there,” she said, grinning. “You only weigh one-sixth of Earth normal here.”

He made a shamefaced smile. “I forgot. The weighted boots aren’t all that much help. Please forgive me.”

“Nothing to it. Everybody needs a little time to get accustomed to lunar gee. How long will you be staying at Selene?”

“I leave tomorrow.”

“You won’t be talking to anybody from HSS?”

“No. Mr. Humphries has a reputation for swallowing up smaller corporations rather than helping them.”

Maybe he’s not from Humphries after all, Pancho thought.

She asked, “So you came up here just to see me?”

He nodded. “This alliance is very important to us. I wanted to speak to you about it face-to-face, not by videophone.”

“Good thinking,” Pancho said, coming around her desk and gesturing toward her office door. “That three-second lag in phone communication is enough to drive me loco.”

He blinked. “Loco? Is that lunar slang?”

With a laugh, Pancho answered, “West Texas, for crazy.”

“You are from Texas?”

“Long time ago.”

Pancho played it cool, watching how he tried to maneuver their conversation into a dinner invitation before she could shoo him out of her office. He smelled good, she noticed. Some sort of cologne that reminded her of cinnamon and tangy spices.

Finally he got to it. “I suppose a person of your importance has a very full calendar.”

“Yep. Pretty much.”

“I was hoping we might have dinner together. Actually, I don’t know anyone else in Selene City.”

She made a show of pulling up her schedule on the wallscreen. “Dinner engagement with my PR director.”

He looked genuinely crestfallen. “Oh. I see.”

Pancho couldn’t help smiling at him. “Hell, I can talk to her some other time. Let’s have dinner together.”

His smile grew even wider than before.

And he was good in bed, too, Pancho discovered. Great, in fact. But the next morning, once he was on his way back Earthside and Pancho had fed herself a breakfast of vitamin E and orange juice, she called her security director from her kitchen and told him to check the guy out thoroughly. If he’s not from Humphries, maybe somebody else wants to move into the territory.

She chuckled to herself as she headed for her office that morning. She had forgotten the man’s name.