The Silent War

ORE CARRIER STARLIGHT

Starlight was an independent freighter. For years it had plied between Ceres and Selene, taking on cargoes of ore in the Belt and carrying them on a slow, curving ellipse to the waiting factories on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Its owners, a married couple from Murmansk, had kept strictly aloof from the big corporations, preferring to make a modest living out of carrying ores and avoiding entanglements. Their crew consisted of their two sons and daughters-in-law. On their last trip to Selene they had tarried a week longer than usual so that their first grandchild—a girl— could be born in the lunar city’s hospital. Now, after a trip with the squalling new baby to the Belt, they were returning to Selene, happy to be away from the fighting that had claimed so many Astro and HSS ships.

The Astro drone had no proper name, only a number designation: D-6. The D stood for “destroyer.” It was an automated vessel, remotely controlled from Astro’s offices in Selene. The controllers’ assignment was to attack any HSS vessels approaching the Moon. The particular controller on duty that morning had a list of HSS ships in her computer, complete with their names, performance ratings, and construction specifications. She suspected that Starlight was a disguised version of a Humphries freighter and spent most of the morning scanning the vessel with radar and laser probes.

Astro’s command center was kept secret from Humphries’s people, of course; it was also kept secret from the government of Selene, which insisted that no hostilities should take place in its jurisdiction. So the controller watched Starlight passively, without trying to open up a communications link with the freighter or even asking the International Astronautical Authority offices about the ship’s registration and identity.

To her credit, the Astro controller instructed D-6 to obtain close-up imagery of the approaching freighter. Unfortunately, the destroyer’s programming was new and untried; the drone had been rushed into use too soon. The onboard computer misinterpreted the controller’s order. Instead of a low-power laser scan, the destroyer hit Starlight with a full-intensity laser beam that sawed the vessel’s habitation module neatly in half, killing everyone aboard.

Pancho was heading for the Moon’s south pole when the news of the Starlight fiasco reached her.

She was flying in a rocket on a ballistic trajectory to the Astro power station set on the summit of the highest peak in the Malapert Mountains. Taller than Everest, Mt. Dickson’s broad, saddle-shaped summit was always in sunlight, as were its neighboring peaks. Astro workers had covered its crest with power towers topped by photovoltaic cells. The electricity they generated was carried back to Selene by cryogenically cooled cables of lunar aluminum that ran across the rugged, crater-pocked highlands for nearly five thousand kilometers.

For the few brief minutes of the rocket’s arcing flight southward, the handful of passengers hung weightlessly against their seat restraint straps. To her surprise, Pancho actually felt a little queasy. You’ve been flying a desk too long, girl. She thought about how the future growth of the Moon would almost certainly be in the polar regions. Water deposits were there, she knew, and you could build power towers that were always in sunlight, so you got uninterrupted electricity, except for Earth eclipses, but that was only a few minutes out of the year. It was a mistake to build Selene near the equator, she thought.

Back in those days, though, it started as a government operation. Moonbase. Some bean-counting sumbitch of a bureaucrat figured it’d be a couple of pennies cheaper in propellant costs to build near the equator than at either polar region. They picked Alphonsus because there were vents in the crater floor that outgassed methane now and then. Big lollapalooza deal! Water’s what you need, and the ice deposits at the poles are where the water is. Even so, it isn’t enough. We have to import water from the rock rats.

As the rocket vehicle fired its retros in preparation for landing at the Astro base, Pancho caught a glimpse through her passenger window of the construction already underway at Shackleton Crater, slightly more than a hundred kilometers distant. Nairobi’s found the money they needed, she told herself. She had followed their progress in the weekly reports her staff made, but seeing the actual construction sprawling across the floor of Shackleton impressed her more than written reports or imagery. Where’s their money coming from? she asked herself. Her best investigators had not been able to find a satisfactory answer.

She had brought one of the new nanomachine space suits with her, folded and packed in her travel bag. Stavenger had even supplied her with a nanofabric helmet that could be blown up like a toy balloon. Pancho packed it but firmly decided that if she had to use the softsuit she’d find a regular bubble helmet to go with it.

There was no need for a space suit. Once the ballistic rocket touched down, a flexible tunnel wormed from the base’s main airlock to the ship’s hatch. Pancho walked along its spongy floor to the airlock, where the director of the base was waiting for her, looking slightly nervous because he wasn’t entirely sure why the company’s CEO had suddenly decided to visit his domain.

Pancho allowed him to tour her through the base, which looked to her a lot like most of the other lunar facilities she had seen. It was almost entirely underground; the work on the surface of maintaining the solar cells and building new ones was done by robotic machines tele-operated from the safety of the underground offices.

“Of course, we’re not as luxurious down here as Selene,” the base director explained in a self-deprecating tone, “but we do have the basic necessities.”

With that, he ushered Pancho into a tight, low-ceilinged conference room that was crowded with his senior staff people, all of them anxious to meet the CEO and even more anxious to learn why she had come to see them. The conference table was set with sandwiches and drinks, with a scale model of the base sitting in the middle of the table.

There weren’t enough chairs for everyone, so Pancho remained standing, munched on a sandwich, sipped at a plastic container of fruit juice, and chatted amiably with the staff—none of whom dared to sit down while the CEO remained standing.

At last she put her emptied juice container back on the table. As if on signal, all conversations stopped and everyone turned toward her.

She grinned at them. “I guess you’re wondering why I dropped in on y’all like this,” Pancho said, reverting to her west Texas drawl to put them at their ease. “It’s not every day that the chief of the corporation comes to see us,” the base director replied. A few people tittered nervously.

“Well,” said Pancho, “to tell the truth, I’m curious ’bout what your new neighbors are up to. Any of you know how to get me invited over to the Nairobi complex?”