The Silent War

BALLISTIC ROCKET

From her seat by the narrow window Pancho could see out of the corner of her eye the rugged lunar highlands gliding swiftly past, far below. She was the only passenger on the ballistic rocket as it arced high above the Moon’s barren surface, carrying her from Astro’s Malapert base back to Selene. Her ankle was set in a spraycast; she was heading for Selene’s hospital, and injections of nanomachines that would mend her broken bones and repair the damage that radiation had done to her body.

Pancho had precious little time to study the scenery. She was deep in conversation with Jake Wanamaker, whose craggy unsmiling face reminded her of the rocky land below.

“… should be releasing the nanomachines right about now,” Wanamaker was saying.

“And everybody on Vesta is belowground?” Pancho asked.

“Ought to be, with that radiation cloud sweeping over them. Anybody up on the surface is going to be dead no matter what we do.”

Pancho nodded. “All right. Now what’s this about Humphries’s mansion burning down?”

Wanamaker grimaced with distaste. “A group of four fanatics infiltrated into the grotto down there on the bottom level. Why, we don’t know yet. They’re being held by Selene security in the hospital.”

“And they burned the house down?”

“Set the whole garden on fire. The place is a blackened wasteland.”

“Humphries?”

“No sign of him. Selene inspectors are going through the place now. Apparently the house is still standing, but it’s been gutted by the fire.”

Strangely, Pancho felt no elation at the possibility that Humphries was dead. “Have they found his body?”

“Not yet.”

“And the people who attacked the place are in the hospital?”

“Under guard.”

Pancho knew only one person in the entire solar system who would be crazy enough to attack Humphries in his own home. Lars Fuchs.

“Was Lars Fuchs one of the attackers?”

Wanamaker’s acid expression deepened into a dark scowl. “He gave his name as Karl. Manstein. I don’t think Selene security has tumbled to who he really is.”

For an instant Pancho wondered how Wanamaker knew that Manstein was am alias for Fuchs. But she put that aside as unimportant. “Get him out of there,” she said.

“What?”

“Get him out of the hospital. Out of Selene. Send him back to the Belt, to Ceres, anywhere. Just get him loose from Selene security.”

“But he’s a murderer, a terrorist.”

“I brought him to Selene to help in our fight against Humphries,” Pancho half-lied. “I don’t want Stavenger or anybody else to know that.”

“How am I supposed to get him past Selene’s security guards?” Wanamaker asked, clearly distressed.

Pancho closed her eyes for a moment. Then, “Jake, that’s your problem. Figure it out. I want him off the Moon and headed back to the Belt. Yesterday.”

He took a deep breath, then replied reluctantly, “Yes, ma’am.” For an instant she thought he was going to give her a military salute.

“Anything else?” Pancho asked.

Wanamaker made a face that was halfway between a smile and a grimace. “Isn’t that enough?”

Ulysses S. Quinlan felt awed, his emerald-green eyes wide with admiration, as he stood in the middle of the huge downstairs living room of the Humphries mansion. Or what was left of it. The wide, spacious room was a charred and blackened desolation, walls and ceiling scorched, floor littered with burned stumps of debris and powdery gray ash.

Born in Bellfast of an Irish father and Irish-American mother, Quinlan had grown up to tales of civil wars. To please his father he played football from childhood, which eventually brought him an athletic scholarship to Princeton University, back in the States—which pleased his mother, even though she cried to be separated from her only child. Quinlan studied engineering, and worked long years on the frustrating and ultimately pointless seawalls and hydromechanical barriers that failed to prevent the rising ocean from flooding out most of Florida and the Gulf Coast regions as far south as Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

He suffered a nervous breakdown when Houston was inundated, and was retired at full pension precisely on his fortieth birthday. To get away from oceans and seas and floods he retired to the Moon. Within a year he was working in Selene’s safety department, as happy and cheerful as he’d been before the disastrous greenhouse floods on Earth.

Now he whistled through his breathing mask as he goggled at the size of the mansion’s living room.

“The grandeur of it all,” he said as he shuffled through the gray ash and debris.

“Like the old Tsars in Russia,” said his partner, a stocky redheaded Finnish woman. He could hear the contempt in her tone, even through her breathing mask.

“Aye,” agreed Quinlan, thudding the blackened wall with a gloved fist. “But he built solid. Reinforced concrete. The basic structure stood up to the flames, it did.”

His partner reluctantly agreed. “They could have contained the fire to one area if somebody hadn’t allowed it to spread to the roof.”

Quinlan nodded. “A pity,” he murmured. “A true pity.”

They wore the breathing masks to protect their lungs from the fine ash that they kicked up with each step they took. The grotto had been refilled with breathable air hours earlier. Quinlan and his Finnish partner were inspecting the ruins, checking to make certain that no hint of fire reignited itself now that there was oxygen to support combustion again.

They spent a careful hour sifting through the debris of the lower floor. Then they headed cautiously up the stairs to the upper level. The wooden facings and lush carpeting of the stairway had burned away, but the solid concrete understructure was undisturbed by the fire.

Upstairs was just as bad a mess as below. Quinlan could see the broken and charred remains of what had once been fine furniture, now lying in shattered heaps along the walls of the hallway. The windows were all intact, he noticed, and covered with metal mesh screens. He must have built with tempered glass, Quinlan thought. Bulletproof? I wonder.

Following the floor plan displayed on their handhelds, they pushed through the debris at the wide doorway of the master bedroom suite. Quinlan whistled softly at the size of it all.

“That must have been the bed,” his partner said, pointing to a square block of debris on the floor.

“Or his airport,” muttered Quinlan.

“Hey, look at this.” The Finn was standing in front of an intact door panel. “The fire didn’t damage this.”

“How could that be?” Quinlan wondered aloud, stepping over toward her.

“It’s plastic of some sort,” she said, running her gloved had along the panel.

“Ceramic, looks like.”

The redhead checked her handheld. “Should be a closet, according to the floorplan.”

“How in the world do you get into it, though?” Quinlan looked for a door latch or a button but could see nothing along the soot-blackened door frame.

He tried to slide the door open. It wouldn’t budge. He tapped it, then rapped. “It’s locked from the inside, seems like.”

At that instant the door slid open so fast they both jumped back a startled step or two.

Martin Humphries stood tottering on uncertain legs, glaring at them with red-rimmed blazing in his eyes.

“About time,” he croaked, his voice bricky-dry.

“Mr. Humphries!”

Humphries staggered past them, looked at the ruins of his palatial bedroom, then turned back on them fiercely.

“Water! Give me water.”

Quinlan yanked the canteen from his belt and wordlessly handed it to the angry man. Humphries gurgled it down greedily, water spilling down his chin and dripping onto the front of his wrinkled shirt. Even through the breathing mask, Quinlan could smell the man’s foul body odor.

Humphries put the canteen down from his lips, but still held onto it possessively. Wiping his chin with the back of his free hand, he coughed once, then jabbed a finger at Quinlan.

“Phone,” he snapped, his voice a little stronger than before. “Give me a phone. I’m going to hang that murdering bastard Fuchs by his balls!”