The Silent War

SHINING MOUNTAIN BASE

You there!” the guard yelled. “Stop that or I’ll shoot!”

Pancho realized that her necklace was tucked inside the dratted softsuit. She couldn’t reach it. Couldn’t whip it off her neck and toss it at the goon. Prob’ly wouldn’t have time to do it before he drilled me, anyway, she thought as she slowly climbed to her feet and raised both gloved hands over her helmeted head. She nudged the laser slightly with her boot. It was still on, still cutting away at the honeycomb shield outside the dome’s wall.

“Who the devil are you?” the guard demanded, walking slowly around the minitractor, a pistol leveled at Pancho’s navel. He looked African but spoke like an Englishman. “And what the devil do you think you’re doing?”

Pancho shrugged inside the softsuit. “Nothin’,” she said, trying to look innocent.

“My god!” the guard yelped, seeing that hole cut into the dome wall and the bright red hot spot the laser was making on the honeycomb shield. “Turn that thing off! Now! Don’t you realize you could—”

At that instant the honeycomb cracked open and a rush of air knocked Pancho flat against the curving dome wall. The guard was staggered but kept his senses enough to realize what was happening. He turned and ran as fast as he could, which wasn’t very fast because he was leaning against a gale-force wind trying to rush out of the hole Pancho had cut. The loudspeakers started yammering in Japanese, then in another language Pancho didn’t understand. She slid down to the floor and slithered out of the break, hoping the softsuit wouldn’t catch or tear on the broken edges of the holes the laser had made.

Outside, she looked around the barren lunar landscape. The dome was on the crest of the ringwall mountains that surrounded Shakleton. The ground sloped away, down toward the floor of the crater. Nothing to see but rocks and minicraters, some of them no bigger than a finger-poke into the stony ground. Damn! Pancho thought. I’m on the wrong side of the dome.

Without hesitation she began sprinting, looking for the launchpads, happy to be able to run inside a space suit. Inside the old hardshell suits it was impossible to do anything more than lumber along like Frankenstein’s monster.

That guard’ll be okay, she told herself. There’s plenty of air inside the dome. They’ll get the leak plugged before anybody’s in any real danger. Jogging steadily, she grinned to herself. Meantime, while they’re chasing around trying to fix the damage I’ve done, I’ll get to one of the hoppers and head on home.

A sickly pale green splotch of color appeared on the left side of her helmet. The earphones said, “Radiation warning. Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately.”

“I’m trying!” Pancho said, surprised at the suit’s sophistication.

Before she took another dozen strides the color went from pastel green to bright canary yellow.

“Radiation warning,” the suit said again. “Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately.”

Pancho gritted her teeth and wondered how she could shut off the suit’s automated voice synthesizer. The launchpads were still nowhere in sight.

Nobuhiko was back at the base’s infirmary, this time in a screened-off cubicle barely large enough to hold a bed, looking down on a heavily sedated Daniel Tsavo. A spotless white bandage covered the upper half of the Kenyan’s black face. He was conscious, but barely so, as the tranquillizing drug took effect.

“… she blinded me,” he was mumbling. “Blind … can’t see…” Yamagata glanced impatiently at the African doctor standing on the other side of Tsavo’s bed. “It’s only temporary,” the doctor said, trying to sound reassuring. He seemed to be speaking to Yamagata, rather than his patient. “The retinal burns will heal in a few days.”

“Failed,” Tsavo muttered. “Failure … blind … nowhere to go … career ruined…”

Bending slightly over the bed, Nobuhiko said, “You haven’t failed. You’ll be all right. Rest now. Everything will be fine in a day or two.”

Tsavo’s right hand groped toward the sound of Yamagata’s voice. Nobuhiko instinctively backed away from it.

“Did you find her?” the Kenyan asked, his voice suddenly stronger. “Did you get what you wanted from her?”

“Yes, of course,” Nobuhiko lied. “You rest now. Everything has turned out very well.”

Tsavo’s hand fell back to the sheets and he breathed a heavy sigh. The doctor nodded as if satisfied that the drugs had finally done their job. Then he made a small shooing gesture.

Nobuhiko understood. He turned away from the bed and stepped out of the tiny cubicle. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of antiseptics that pervaded this part of the infirmary. He had spent many hours in hospitals, when his father was dying. The odor brought back the memory of those unhappy days.

The pair of aides waiting for him out in the corridor snapped to attention almost like elite-corps soldiers, even though they wore ordinary business suits.

“Have they found her?” Nobuhiko asked in Japanese.

“Not yet, sir.”

Nobu frowned as he started walking toward the exit, allowing his aides to see how displeased he was. To come all this way to the Moon, he thought, and have her slip away from us. Hot anger simmered through him.

The senior of the two assistants, noting the obvious displeasure on his master’s face, tried to change the subject:

“Will the black man recover his sight?”

“Apparently,” Nobuhiko snapped. “But he is not to be trusted with any important tasks. Never again.”

Both aides nodded.

As they reached the double doors of the infirmary the handheld of the senior aide beeped. He flicked it open and saw a Yamagata engineer in a sky-blue hard hat staring wide-eyed in the miniaturized screen.

“The dome has been penetrated!” the engineer blurted. “We have sent for repair crews.”

The aide looked stricken. He turned to Yamagata, wordlessly asking him for instructions.

“She did this,” Nobu said. “Despite all our guards and precautions, Pancho has gotten away from us. She’s outside.”

“But the radiation storm!” the junior aide said, aghast. “She’ll be killed out there.”

Suddenly Nobu felt all his anger dissolve; all the tension that had held him like a vise for the past several hours faded away. He laughed. He threw his head back and laughed aloud, while his two aides gaped at him.

“Killed out there?” he said to them. “Not likely. Not Pancho. We couldn’t hold her in here with a thousand guards. Don’t think that a little thing like a solar storm is going to stop her.”

His two aides said nothing even though they both thought that their master had gone slightly insane.

“Radiation warning,” the suit repeated for the umpteenth time. “Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately.”

Pancho made a silent promise to herself that when she got back to Selene she would rip the voice synthesizer out of this goddamned suit and stomp on it for an hour and a half.

The color splashed across the left side of her bubble helmet was bright pink now. I’m absorbing enough radiation to light a concert hall, she thought. Unbidden, the memory of Dan Randolph’s death from radiation poisoning rose in her mind like a ghostly premonition of things to come. She saw Dan lying on his bunk, too weak even to lift his head, soaked in sweat, gums bleeding, hair coming out in bunches, dying while Pancho looked on, helpless, unable to save him.

You got a lot to look forward to, she growled to herself.

Her loping stride had slowed to a walk, but she was still doggedly pressing forward across the outer perimeter of the dome. You don’t really appreciate how big something is until you have to walk around it, she told herself. Everything always looks bigger on foot.

And there it was! Around the curve of the dome she saw one, then two and finally three spacecraft sitting on concrete launchpads. She recognized the little green one that had brought her here from the Astro base, about a hundred klicks away.

Would they have guards placed around those birds? Pancho asked herself, without slowing her pace toward the launchpads.

Naw, she answered. Not in this storm. That’d be suicide duty. Not even Yamagata would ask his people to do that. Then she added, I hope.

Aside from the splotch of color in her helmet and the automated voice’s irritating, repetitive warning, there was no visible, palpable sign of the radiation storm. Pancho was striding along the rocky, barren lunar crest, kicking up slight plumes of dust with each step. Outside the nanomachined fabric of her softsuit was nothing but vacuum, a vacuum thousands of times rarer than the vacuum just above Earth’s atmosphere, nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away. Instinctively she glanced up for a sight of Earth, but the black sky was empty. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the heavy tinting of her helmet. You can always see Earth from Selene, she said to herself. Maybe that’s an advantage over this polar location that we hadn’t realized before.

She started to hurry her pace toward the rocket hopper but found it was too tiring. Uh-oh, she thought. Fatigue’s one of the first signs of radiation sickness.

She knew the vacuum out here wasn’t empty. A torrent of subatomic particles was sleeting down upon her, mostly high-energy protons. The suit absorbed some of them, but plenty of others were getting through to smash into the atoms of her body and break them up. When she glanced at the color swatch in her helmet, though, it had gone down from bright pink to a sultry auburn.

Jeeps, Pancho exclaimed silently, the radiation level’s going down.

“Radiation warning,” the suit repeated yet again. “Radiation level exceeding maximum allowable. Get to shelter immediately.”

“I’m goin’,” Pancho groused. “I’m goin’.”

Radiation’s decreasing. The storm’s ending. Maybe I’ll make it through this after all. But then she thought that Yamagata might send some goons out to the launchpads if the radiation level’s gone down enough. Despite the aches in her legs and back, she pushed herself to walk faster.