The Silent War

WEATHER FORECAST

Jersey Zorach was a dour, dark, stolid astrophysicist who studied the weather in space. Despite his being a third-generation American, born and raised just outside Chicago, he had never outgrown his Latvian heritage of being burdened with a sense of impending doom.

He sat in his messy little cubbyhole of an office, a squat, untidy man built rather like a fireplug, with a thick thatch of unruly prematurely gray hair flopping down over his forehead, surrounded by beeping display screens, stacks of books, reports, video chips and the scattered remains of many meals he had eaten at his desk.

Since interplanetary space is a nearly perfect vacuum, most people smiled or even laughed when Zorach told them his profession, waiting for a punch line that never came. There was no rain or snow in space, true enough. But Zorach knew there was a wind of ghostly microscopic particles blowing fitfully from the Sun, a solar wind that sometimes reached hurricane velocities and more. There was a constant drizzle of cosmic particles sleeting in from the distant stars as well.

And there were clouds, sometimes. Invisible but quite deadly clouds.

For years he had worked to make precise predictions of solar flares. He studied the Sun until his eyes burned from staring at its seething, roiling image. He made mountains of statistical analyses, trying to learn how to forecast solar flares by matching existing data on earlier flares and making “backcasts” of them. He spun out holographic maps of the interplanetary magnetic field, knowing that those invisible threads of energy steered the radiation clouds that were thrown out by solar flares.

Nothing worked. His predictions were estimates at best. Everyone praised him and the results he was obtaining, but Zorach knew he had yet to predict a single flare. Not one, in all the years he had been working on them.

So he wasn’t surprised when one of the display screens in his cluttered office suddenly pinged. Turning to it, he saw nothing unusual to the unaided eye. But the alphanumerics strung along the bottom of the screen told him clearly that a new solar flare had just erupted.

A big one, he saw. Big and nasty. He knew the automated system was already sending warnings to every human habitat and outpost from Selene to the colony in orbit around distant Saturn. But he pecked at his own phone and called Selene’s safety office to make certain they started bringing everybody in from the surface. It was a point of honor with him. If I can’t predict the bloody storms, he said to himself, at least I can make certain no one is killed by them.

Deep below the Moon’s surface in his private grotto, Martin Humphries had no worries about solar flares or the radiation clouds that accompanied them.

He was ambling slowly through the colorful garden in the patio outside the elaborately carved front door of his mansion, with Victoria Ferrer at his side. The heady aroma of solid beds of roses and peonies filled the air, and he felt victory was close enough almost to touch.

“We’re winning,” Humphries said happily. “We’ve got Astro on the run.”

Ferrer, walking slowly alongside him, nodded her agreement. But she warned, “This latest move of Astro’s could cut off the ore shipments coming in from the Belt.”

Humphries disagreed with a wave of his hand in the air. “Drones attacking our automated freighters? I’m not worried about that.”

“You should be. This could be serious.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Humphries sneered. “This fiasco with that Starlight vessel has brought Pancho’s little scheme out into the open.”

“But they could strangle your profits if—”

“I’m going to get rid of Astro’s drones at one stroke,” Humphries said confidently.

Ferrer looked at him questioningly.

“Set up a meeting for me with Doug Stavenger.”

“Stavenger?”

“Uh-huh. Once Stavenger has his nose rubbed into the fact that Astro’s controlling those birds from inside Selene, he’ll close down their operation.”

“He will?”

“Yes indeed he will,” said Humphries, smiling broadly. “He’s made it clear to me and that little guttersnipe that he doesn’t want any fighting in Selene. No fighting anywhere on the Moon.”

“But does that mean he’ll demand that Astro close down its control center for the drones?”

“Damned right he will. And he’ll make it stick, too.”

Ferrer was silent for a moment, thinking. Then, “Pancho will just move the control center off the Moon. Put up a space station.”

“And we’ll blast it to smithereens.” Humphries clapped his hands together. “I only hope the damned greasemonkey is aboard when we wipe it out.”

Ferrer thought it over and had to admit that her boss was correct. HSS mercenaries had scored major victories over Astro forces in the Belt. Astro had sprung a surprise with their drones attacking HSS freighters as they approached the Moon, but Humphries was probably right in thinking that Stavenger would force them to move that operation out of the safety of Selene. Of course, zapping that independent freighter and wiping out that family didn’t help Astro’s cause. Not at all.

Yet she heard herself ask, “What about Fuchs? He’s still lurking out there somewhere.”

“Fuchs?” Humphries snorted disdainfully. “He’s a spent force. Once we’ve cleaned out Astro we can hunt him down at our leisure. He’s as good as dead; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

For weeks, Lars Fuchs had been living in the machinery and storage spaces in Selene’s “basement.”

On the Moon, where the deeper below the surface you are, the safer you are from the radiation and temperature swings and the thin but constant infall of micrometeors that pepper the surface, Selene’s “basement” was its topmost level.

Just below the Grand Plaza and its extensions, Selene’s highest underground level was entirely devoted to the pumps and power converters and other life-support equipment that provided the city’s air, water, light and heat. Living quarters were on the lower levels, the lower the more prestigious—and expensive.

The “basement” also held the warehouses that stocked spare parts, clothing, preserved foods, and the tanks of water that Selene’s residents drank and washed in. In short, the “basement” had all the supplies that a renegade, a fugitive, a homeless exile would need to survive.

During the years he had lived at Ceres, Fuchs had listened for hours to Big George Ambrose talking about the “bad old days” when he had lived as a fugitive in Selene’s shadowy underground economy, surviving on his wits and the petty pilfering that provided food and shelter for him and his fellow nonpersons. Even Dan Randolph had once spent a few months hiding from the authorities in Selene.

So Fuchs had politely checked out of the Hotel Luna, afraid that sooner or later he would be identified and forced to return to Earth, and toted his meager travel bag up toward the kilometer-long tunnel that led to Armstrong Spaceport. Instead of going to the spaceport, though, he found one of the access hatches marked MAINTENANCE AND SUPPLY SECTION: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, quickly decoded its simple security lock, and disappeared into the shadowy “basement,” where machinery throbbed incessantly and the air was heavy with the odors of lubricating oil and ozone from the electrical machinery.

Color-coded pipes and electrical conduits ran overhead. Maintenance robots trundled back and forth along the walkways between the pulsating machinery and the warehouse stacks. Simpleminded machines programmed to alert human controllers of malfunctioning equipment or water leaks, the robots were fairly easy to avoid. Fuchs could see the red lights set into their tops flashing through the dimly lit passageways while they were still far enough distant to get out of range of their optical sensors.

There was a scattering of other people hiding there, too, a ragged handful of men and women who preferred to scratch out an underground living rather than submit to Selene’s laws. Some of them were wild-eyed from drugs, or raving alcoholics; others were simply unable or unwilling to live by other people’s rules. Fuchs met a few of them, barely avoided a fight when one of them pulled a knife and ordered him to swear loyalty. Fuchs bent his knee and agreed, then quickly moved as far away from the megalomaniac as he could and never saw him again.

Fuchs settled down in the “basement,” content to sleep in a bedroll and eat canned foods pilfered from the warehouse stocks. He spent his waking hours peering at his palmcomp, studying the schematics of Selene’s air ducts and water pipes, searching for a way to penetrate the lunar city’s lowest level, where Humphries lived in his magnificent mansion.

As the weeks passed, Nodon, Sanja, and Amarjagal arrived at Selene one by one, each of them bearing identification as Astro Corporation employees, lowly technicians. Their one-room corporate apartments were sufficient for them, luxurious compared to Fuchs’s hideout in the storeroom shelves in the “basement.”

Fuchs visited his crew members, furtively making his way through Selene’s corridors to spend long hours with them, planning how he might kill Martin Humphries.