The Silent War

HABITAT CHRYSALIS

Originally, the prospectors and miners who came out to the Belt lived inside the largest of the asteroids, Ceres. Honeycombed by nature with lava tubes and caves, Ceres offered solid rock protection against the hard radiation that constantly sleets through the solar system. But at less than half the size of Earth’s Moon, the asteroid’s minuscule gravity presented problems for long-term residents. Muscle and bone deteriorate in microgravity. And every movement in the asteroid’s caves and tunnels, every footfall or hand’s brush against a rock wall, stirred up fine, powdery, carbon-dark dust that lingered in the air, hovering constantly in the light gravity. The dust was everywhere. It irritated the lungs and made people cough. It settled in fine black coatings on dishes in cupboards, on furniture, on clothing hanging limply in closets.

It was Lars Fuchs who had started the ramshackle habitat that eventually was named Chrysalis by the rock rats. When he lived in Ceres with his wife, Amanda, before he was exiled and she divorced him to marry Humphries, Fuchs got his fellow rock rats to start building the habitat.

All the rock rats knew that Fuchs’s real motive was to start a family. A habitat in orbit around Ceres, rotating to produce an artificial gravity, would be a much safer place to have babies. So they started buying stripped-down spacecraft and old junkers that had been abandoned by their owners. They connected them, Tinkertoy fashion, and slowly built a wheeled station in orbit around Ceres that could house the growing population of rock rats. It looked like a rotating junkyard, from the outside. But its interior was clean, efficient, and protected by the electromagnetic radiation shields that each individual ship had built into it.

By the time the residents of Ceres moved to their orbital habitat and named it Chrysalis, Fuchs had lost his one-man war against Humphries Space Systems, been exiled from the habitat he himself had originated, and lost his wife to Martin Humphries.

Big George Ambrose was thinking about that sad history while his torch ship approached Ceres. As he packed his toiletries in preparation for docking, he cast an eye at the wallscreen view of the habitat. Chrysalis was growing. A new ring was being built around the original circular collection of spacecraft. The new ring looked more like a proper habitat: the rock rats had enough money now to invest in real engineering and the same quality of construction that went into the space habitats in the Earth/Moon region.

One day we’ll abandon the old clunker, George told himself, surprised at how rueful he felt about it. It’s been a good home.

The big, shaggy-bearded, redheaded Aussie had started his career as an engineer at Moonbase, long before it became the independent nation of Selene. He had lost his job in one of the economic wobbles of those early days and became a fugitive, a non-person who lived by his wits in the shadowy black market of the “lunar underground.” Then he’d run into Dan Randolph, who made George respectable again. By the time Randolph died, George was a rock rat, plying the dark and lonely expanse of the Belt in search of a fortune. Eventually he was elected chief administrator of Ceres. Now he was returning home from Humphries’s winter solstice party.

He had spent the six days of his return voyage in a liaison with the torch ship’s propulsion engineer, a delightful young Vietnamese woman of extraordinary beauty who talked about fusion rocket systems between passionate bouts of lovemaking. George had been flabbergasted by the unexpected affair, until he realized that she wanted a position on a prospecting ship and a fling with the chief of the rock rats’ community looked to her like a good way to get one.

Well, thought George as he packed his one travel bag, it was fun while it lasted. He told her he’d introduce her to a few prospectors; some of them might need a propulsion engineer. Still, he felt sad about the affair. I’ve been manipulated, he realized. Then, despite himself, he broke into a rueful grin. She’s pretty good at manipulating he had to admit.

Once his travel bag was zipped up, George instructed the ship’s computer to display any messages waiting for him. The wall screen instantly showed a long list. He hadn’t been paying attention to his duties for the past several days, he knew. Being chief administrator means bein’ a mediator, a decision-maker, even a father/confessor to everyone and anyone in the fookin’ Belt, he grumbled silently.

One message, though, was from Pancho Lane.

Surprised and curious, George ordered her message on-screen. The computer displayed a wavering, eye-straining hash of colored streaks. Pancho’s message was scrambled. George had to pull out his personal palmcomp and hunt for the combination to descramble it.

At last Pancho’s lean, lantern-jawed face filled with screen. “Hi George. Sorry we didn’t get to spend more time together before you had to take off. Lemme ask you a question: Can you contact Lars if you need to? I might hafta talk to him.”

The screen went blank.

George stared at it thoughtfully, wondering: Now why in all the caverns of hell would Pancho need to talk to Lars Fuchs?