The Silent War

TORCH SHIP NAUTILUS

The ship had once been a freighter with the unlikely name of Lubbock Lights, plying the Asteroid Belt, picking up ores mined by the rock rats and carrying them back to the factories in Earth orbit and on the Moon. Lars Fuchs and his ragtag crew of exiles had seized it and renamed it Nautilus, after the fictional submersible of the vengeance-seeking Captain Nemo.

Over the years, Fuchs had changed the spacecraft. It was still a dumbbell shape, rotating on a buckyball tether to provide a feeling of gravity for the crew. It still could carry thousands of tons of ores in its external grapples. But now it also bore five powerful lasers, which Fuchs used as weapons. And it was armored with thin layers of asteroidal copper fixed a few centimeters outside the ship’s true hull, enough to absorb an infrared laser beam for a second or more. Nautilus’s fusion propulsion system was among the most powerful in the Belt. Speed and maneuverability were important for a pirate vessel.

In the ship’s cramped bridge Fuchs leaned over the back of the pilot’s chair and scowled at the scanner display.

“It is a freighter, nothing more,” said Amarjagal, his pilot. She was a stocky, stoic woman of Mongol ancestry who had been with Fuchs since he’d fled from the mining center at Ceres to take up this life of exile and piracy.

“With a crew pod?” Fuchs sneered.

Nodon, the ship’s engineer, had also been part of Fuchs’s renegade team since the earliest days. He was rail-thin, all bone and sinew, his head shaved bald, spiral scars of ceremonial tattoos swirling across both cheeks. A menacing black moustache drooped down to his jawline, yet his dark brown eyes were big and expressive, soulful.

“A crew pod means that the ship carries food,” he pointed out as he studied the image on the display screen.

“And medical supplies,” added Amarjagal.

“Both of which we could use,” said Nodon.

Fuchs shook his head ponderously. “It could be a trap.”

Neither of his crew replied. They glanced at each other but remained silent.

Fuchs wore a black pullover and shapeless black slacks, as usual. He was a short-limbed, barrel-chested little bear of a man, scowling with anger and implacable in his wrath. His broad, jowly face was etched with hatred, thin slash of a mouth set in a permanent glower, deepset eyes looking far beyond what the others saw. He looked like a badger, a wolverine, small but explosively dangerous.

For nearly a decade Lars Fuchs had been a pirate, an outcast, a renegade who cruised through the vast, silent emptiness of the Belt and preyed on ships owned by Humphries Space Systems.

Once he had considered himself the luckiest man in the solar system. A love-struck student riding the first crewed exploratory ship into the Asteroid Belt, he had actually married the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, Amanda Cunningham. But then he became ensnarled in the battle over the riches of the Belt, one man pitted against Martin Humphries, the wealthiest person off-Earth, and his Humphries Space Systems’ hired thugs. When the HSS mercenaries finally cornered him, Amanda begged Humphries to spare his life.

Humphries was merciful, in the cruelest manner imaginable. Fuchs was banished from Ceres, the only permanent settlement in the Belt, while Amanda divorced him and married Humphries. She was the price for Fuchs’s life. From that time on, Fuchs wandered through the vast dark emptiness of the Belt like a Flying Dutchman, never touching down at a human habitation, living as a rock rat, sometimes prospecting among the asteroids in the farthest reaches of the Belt and digging metal ores and minerals to sell to refinery ships.

More often he swooped down on HSS freighters like a hawk attacking a pigeon, taking the supplies he needed from them, even stealing the ores they carried and selling them clandestinely to other rock rats plying the Belt. It was a pitiful way to maintain his self-respect, telling himself that he was still a thorn in Humphries’s flesh. Merely a small thorn, to be sure, but it was the only thing he could do to keep his sanity. While he almost always attacked automated drone freighters toting their ores back toward the Earth/Moon system, often enough he hit ships that were crewed. Fuchs did not consider himself a killer, but there were times when blood was spilled.

As when he wiped out the HSS mercenaries’ base on Vesta.

Now he frowned at the image of the approaching freighter, with its crew pod attached.

“Our supplies are very low,” Nodon said in a soft voice, almost a whisper.

“They won’t have much aboard,” Fuchs muttered back.

“Enough for us and the rest of the crew for a few weeks, perhaps.”

“Perhaps. We could grab more supplies from a logistics ship.”

Nodon bowed his head slightly. “Yes, that is so.”

Despite its name, the Asteroid Belt is a wide swath of emptiness between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, populated by millions of tiny, cold, dark lumps of metal and rock tumbling around the Sun, leftover bits from the creation of the solar system. The largest, Ceres, is barely a thousand kilometers across. Most of the asteroids are the size of boulders, pebbles, dust motes. Trash, Fuchs thought. Chunks of matter that never became part of a true planet. Leftovers. God’s garbage.

But the “garbage” was a treasure trove for desperate, needy humankind. Earth had been hit hard by climate change, a greenhouse cliff that struck suddenly, viciously, over a few decades. Glaciers melted down, ocean levels rose, coastal cities worldwide were flooded out, the global electrical power net collapsed, hundreds of millions lost their homes, their livelihoods, even their lives. Farmlands dried to dust in perpetual droughts; deserts were swamped with rain; monster storms lashed the frightened, starving refugees everywhere.

In the distant stretches of the Asteroid Belt there were metals and minerals beyond reckoning, raw materials to replace the lost mines of Earth. Factories built in orbit and on the Moon depended on those raw materials. The salvation of the battered, weary Earth lay in the resources and energy of space.

Fuchs gave all this hardly a thought. He concentrated on that freighter plying its way through the Belt, heading at a leisurely pace inward, toward Earth.

“If there’s a crew aboard, why are they coasting on a Hohmann ellipse? Why not light their fusion drive and accelerate toward Earth?”

“Perhaps their engines malfunctioned,” Amarjagal said, without looking up from her control board.

“She’s not beaming out a distress call.”

The pilot lapsed into silence.

“We could hail her,” Nodon proposed.

“And let her know we’re on her tail?” Fuchs snarled. “If we can see her, she can see us.”

“Then let her hail us.”

“She isn’t transmitting anything except a normal tracking beacon and telemetry data,” said Amarjagal.

“What’s her name and registration?”

The pilot touched a key on the board before her, and the information superimposed itself on the ship’s image: John C. Fremont, owned and operated by Humphries Space Systems.

Fuchs sucked in a deep breath. “Get us out of here,” he said, gripping the pilot’s shoulder in his broad, thick-fingered hand. “That ship’s a trap.”

Amarjagal glanced at the engineer, sitting in the right-hand seat beside her, then obediently tapped in a course change. The ship’s fusion engines powered up; Nautilus swung deeper into the Belt.

Aboard the John C. Fremont, Dorik Harbin watched the radar screen on his control panel, his ice-blue eyes intent on the image of Fuchs’s ship dwindling into the vast emptiness of the Asteroid Belt.

His face was like a warrior of old: high cheekbones, narrow eyes, a bristling dark beard that matched the thick black thatch that tumbled over his forehead. His gray coveralls bore the HSS logo over the left breast pocket, and symbols of rank and service on the sleeves and cuffs; he wore them like a military uniform, immaculately clean and sharply pressed. Yet those glacier cold eyes were haunted, tortured. He only slept when he could no longer force himself to stay awake, and even then he needed sedatives to drive away the nightmares that screamed at him.

Now, though, he smiled—almost. He had tangled with Fuchs several times in the past, and the wily outlaw always escaped his grasp. Except once, and that had required a small army of mercenaries. Even then, Humphries had allowed Fuchs to get away alive. It was Fuchs’s wife that Humphries was after, Harbin had learned.

But now Humphries had ordered Harbin to find Fuchs and kill him. Quietly. Out in the cold darkness of the Belt, where no one would know for many months, perhaps years, that the man was dead. So Harbin hunted his elusive quarry alone. He preferred being alone. Other people brought complications, memories, desires he would rather do without.

Harbin shook his head, wondering what schemes played through Humphries’s mind.

Better not to know, he told himself. You have enough old crimes to fill your nightmares for the rest of your life. You don’t need to peer into anyone else’s.