The Silent War

SHINING MOUNTAIN BASE

Pancho jogged up the rampway, long legs pumping easily as she made her way to the top level of the base. Trotting along the final section of ramp she could see the ribbed vaulting of the surface dome overhead. Almost there, she said to herself.

But she skidded to a halt when she spotted a quartet of men standing by the row of space suits that hung next to the airlock. They were all Japanese, their coveralls sky blue and bearing the white flying crane emblem of Yamagata Corporation. Each of them had an ugly-looking sidearm strapped to his waist.

They saw her, too. Two of them started to sprint toward her as Pancho reversed her course and started back down the ramp, back toward the noisy, bustling construction crews and the minitractors that were hauling loads of steel beams and drywall sheeting. She swung her legs over the ramp’s railing and jumped lightly to the dusty floor several meters below.

The noise was an advantage to her, she thought. Nobody’s going to hear those guards yelling, and these construction guys don’t have comm units in their ears. She loped alongside one of the electric-powered minitractors and hopped into the cart it was towing, landing with a plop amidst coils of wire and bouncing, flexing lengths of plastic piping.

She lay flat, hoping that the guards didn’t see her hitchhike maneuver. The minitractor trundled on for several minutes; all Pancho could see was the bare beams supporting the ceiling overhead.

She was thinking as hard and fast as she could. Airlocks are up on the next level, but they’re all guarded. So are the suits. Even if I could grab a space suit the guards would grab me before I had time to put one on. And there’s the damn-dratted solar storm outside, too. Not the best time for a walk on the surface.

I could use the softsuit, she reminded herself. It’s right here, tucked into my travel bag. Never used the blow-up helmet before but Doug said it works okay. Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. What choice do I have?

The big problem was to get to an airlock without being seen. Suddenly Pancho broke into a fierce grin. No, the problem is how do I get some explosives so I can make a new airlock for myself!

Doug Stavenger tried to busy himself with catching up on the minutes of Selene’s governing council meetings. But as he read the reports of the water board and the maintenance department and the safety office, the words blurred into meaningless symbols before his eyes. Irritated, nervous, he told his computer to show him the latest report on the solar storm.

One wall of the office in his home seemingly dissolved into a three-dimensional image of the Earth/Moon system. It was bathed in a hot pink glow that represented the radiation cloud. Stavenger muted the sound, preferring to read for himself the figures on radiation intensity and predicted time duration of the storm displayed across the bottom of the holographic image.

“Add traffic,” he said quietly.

Several yellow dots appeared in the image. One of them was identified as Elsinore, the ship Edith was aboard.

“Project trajectories.”

Slim green curving lines appeared, the one attached to Elsinore arcing out to the right and out of the cloud.

“Add destinations.”

Elsinore’s projected path ended at a dot labeled “Ceres.” Stavenger noted almost subliminally that of all the ships in the region, there was one named Cromwell but that had no projected destination visible. No course vector for it showed at all. It was deep inside the radiation cloud, too.

As he watched, Cromwell’s dot winked out. Stavenger stared at the display. Either the ship’s suddenly been destroyed or they’ve turned off all their tracking and telemetry beacons. There were no other ships near it, as far as the imagery showed. So it can’t have been attacked by somebody.

Why would they turn off all their beacons? Stavenger asked himself. It took only a moment’s thought for him to understand.

Pancho jumped off the cart as the minitractor rolled past a jumbled pile of equipment and crates of supplies lying in what seemed a haphazard disorder on the dusty concrete floor. The driver saw her and yelled at her over his shoulder in Japanese as the tractor trundled away from her.

“Same to you, buddy,” Pancho hollered back, bowing politely to the driver.

Slinging her travel bag over one shoulder, she ducked behind the nearest pile of crates and started searching through the trove. No explosives, but in the midst of the scattered pieces of equipment she saw something that might be almost as good: a welding laser. Kneeling beside the laser’s finned barrel, she clicked its on switch and felt her heart sink. The power supply’s battery indicator was way down in the red. I need a power source, she told herself.

Suddenly the loudspeakers hanging on poles every fifty meters or so blared into harsh, rapid Japanese. Pancho didn’t understand the words but she knew the tone: There’s an intruder sneaking around here. Find her!

All the construction noise stopped. It was eerie, Pancho thought. The banging, buzzing, yelling construction site went absolutely still. It was as if everybody froze.

But only for a moment. Hunkered behind a crate, Pancho saw the blue-clad construction workers looking around uncertainly. Foremen and women strode out among them, snapping orders. The workers gathered themselves into parties of four, five and six and began methodically searching the entire floor. Pancho figured they were doing the same on the other levels, too.

Feeling like a mouse in a convention hall filled with cats, Pancho knelt behind the crate. The laser was within reach, but without a power supply it was useless. And even if I get outside, she told herself, I’ll have to sprint through the storm to get into one of the hoppers sitting out on the launchpad. The outlook ain’t brilliant.

Then she saw the same minitractor she had ridden on heading across the cement-dusty floor toward her. Two men were squeezed into its cab alongside the driver.

He remembers me hitching the ride, Pancho realized, and he’s bringing the goons to search the area. She smiled. The tractor could serve as a power supply for the laser, she thought. All I have to do is get rid of those three guys. She unclipped her other earring and held it tightly in her palm.

Sitting on the bare concrete floor, her back pressed against the plastic crate, Pancho listened to the tractor coming up and stopping. Voices muttering in Japanese. They’re getting out, she knew. Poking around.

She clambered to her feet. The three saw her immediately. Pancho noticed with some surprise that the hard-hatted driver was a young woman. The other two, bareheaded, were stony-faced men. And armed with guns.

“You!” one of the men shouted in English, pointing a pistol at her. “Don’t move!”

Pancho slowly raised both hands above her head, the earring still clutched in her right palm. Wait, she said to herself, flicking the catch of the earring with her thumb. Let them get just a little closer.

Now! She tossed the earring at them and flung both arms over her eyes. The flash of light still seared through her closed lids and burned a red afterimage on her retinas. But once she opened her eyes she found that she could see well enough. The two goons were writhing on the ground, screeching in Japanese. The woman driver was staggering around blindly. Blinking painful tears, Pancho grabbed the laser in both hands, pushed past the dazed and groping driver, and dumped it into the back of the tractor. Even in one-sixth g, it was heavy.

Quickly she detached the cart and slipped into the tractor’s cab. She put it in gear and headed for the nearest ramp, up to the top level.