Ben Bova - The Silent War

Harbin scrupulously avoided sexual liaisons with any of the people under his command. A commander doesn’t take advantage of his troops, he told himself sternly. Besides, he had medications and virtual reality simulations that satisfied his needs, in part. In some ways they were better than sex; he didn’t have to deal with a real, living person. Better to be alone, he told himself. Better to avoid entanglements.

Yet there was one slim young woman among the engineering staff who attracted him. She looked almost Asian, but not quite: tall, willowy, soft of speech, her skin smooth and the color of burnt gold, with high sculpted cheekbones and almond eyes that he caught, several times, watching him through lowered lashes.

She reminded him of someone, someone he had taken months of rehabilitation treatments to forget. Someone who haunted the edges of his dreams, a woman that not even his drugs could erase completely from his memory. A woman who had claimed to love him, a woman who had betrayed him. A woman he had murdered, ripping the lying tongue out of her throat with his bare hands.

Harbin woke nights sobbing over her. And now this Eurasian engineer watched him furtively when they were in the same room together, smiled at him seductively when he caught her staring at him.

Harbin tried to ignore her, but he couldn’t. Over the weeks and months of building the base, he could not avoid her. And every time he saw her, she smiled and watched him in silence, as if waiting for him to smile back at her, to speak to her, to ask her what her name was or where she was born or why she was here on this godforsaken outpost in the depths of nothingness.

Instead of speaking to her, Harbin brought up her personnel dossier on his office computer. Her name was Leeza Chaptal, born in Selene, her father a French medical doctor, her mother a Japanese-American biologist. She herself was a life-support engineer, and had a year-to-year contract with Humphries Space Systems. She had not volunteered for this job at Vesta; she had been faced with accepting the position or being fired for breach of contract.

She’s not happy here, Harbin thought, scanning her dossier. Yet she seems pleasant enough. Her supervisor rates her work highly, he saw.

It wasn’t until his phone buzzed that Harbin realized he’d been staring at her dossier photograph for more than fifteen minutes.

He was a child again, being led by the hand through the majestic marble-walled building where people stood in quiet little groups gazing at the pictures on the walls and speaking in hushed murmurs. The paintings meant nothing to him, nor did the names that his tutor whispered to him: da Vinci, Raphael, Degas, Renoir. Then he saw the picture of the beautiful sailboats gliding across a calm blue sea beneath the summer sun. When he refused to leave it, his tutor sniffed, “Monet. Quite overly popular.”

Suddenly it was Christmas, and instead of the painting he wanted, his father presented him with a new computer. When he started to cry with disappointment, his father loomed over him and said sternly, “You can look at all the paintings you want through the web.”

And then he was on the boat, the trimaran, and the storm was coming up fast and the boat was heaving wickedly in the monstrous waves and one of the waves broke over the bow and swept him off his feet. He felt the numbing cold water clutching at him, dragging him under, while his father watched from the tossing deck, his arms folded sternly across his chest, his face set in a scowl of disappointment. He doesn’t care if I drown! young Martin realized as he thrashed helplessly in the icy water. He doesn’t care if I live or die.

“That was foolish of you, Marty,” his father growled at him after a crewman had fished him out of the ocean. “Nine years old and you still don’t have the brains that god gave to a rabbit.”

Martin Humphries, aged nine, dripping wet and shivering with cold, understood from that moment onward that he had no one on Earth to protect him, no one to help him, no one that could ever love him. Not even his mother, drunk most of the time, gave a damn about him. He was alone, except for what and who he could buy.

“This is a dream,” he told himself. “This all happened long ago. Mother’s been dead for ages and father died years ago. It’s all over. He can’t humiliate you anymore.”

But others could. He saw himself at the board meeting of the Astro Corporation, everyone seated at the long table staring at him.

Sitting at the head of the table in the chairman’s seat to which she’d just been elected, Pancho Lane was pointing her accusing finger at him.

“How long are we going to allow the head of our biggest rival to sit on our board of directors?” she demanded. “How long are we going to let Judas sit among us? All he wants is to take control of Astro Corporation, and he’ll keep on screwing us every chance he gets, if we don’t get rid of him here and now.”

The vote was close, but not close enough.

“That’s it, then,” said Pancho, barely able to conceal the satisfied smirk that played at the corners of her lips. “Martin, you’ve been kicked off this board. And high time, too.”

He saw how white his face was, how his hands trembled no matter how hard he struggled to control them. The others tried to hide their emotions, but he could see they were secretly laughing at him. All of them, even the ones he had thought were on his side.

Feeling cold sweat beading his forehead, his upper lip, he rose shakily to his feet, the blood thundering in his ears, his mind pulsing with ringing, defiant declarations.

But all he could manage to choke out was, “You haven’t seen the last of me.”

As he stumbled out of the richly carpeted boardroom he could hear muffled laughter behind his back. I’ll get them, he swore to himself. Each and every one of them. Especially Pancho, that guttersnipe. I’ll get her if it takes every penny, every ounce of sweat, every drop of blood that I’ve got. I’ll get her. I’ll see her dead. I’ll dance on her grave.

Big George was at the airlock to greet her when Pancho left her private torch ship Starpower III and stepped aboard the rock rats’ habitat in orbit about Ceres.

“Welcome to our humble home,” George said, with an exaggerated flourish.

Pancho grinned at him. “Good to be here, Georgie. Gonna give me the ten-dollar tour?”

“Sure will.”

George led her almost halfway through the rotating complex of connected spacecraft bodies. Pancho enjoyed teasing George about how the habitat looked like a floating junkyard, but once inside the linked vessels she had to admit that the habitat was clean, comfortable, and even attractive. Each interconnected craft was painted in a distinctive color scheme, mostly restful pastels, although there were some bolder, brighter hues here and there, and striking designs decorating some of the bulkheads. The place smelled new, fresh, a far cry from the dust-choked caves and tunnels of Ceres.

As they stepped through the hatches from one spacecraft to another, George proudly showed Pancho the living quarters, common rooms, laboratories, workshops, warehouses and business offices that made up the growing complex.

“Got nearly a thousand people livin’ here now,” he declared, “with more comin’ every week.”

“I’m impressed,” Pancho said. “I really am. You guys’ve done a terrific job.”

George smiled boyishly behind his thick red beard. The tour ended at a closed metal door marked NANOTECH LAB. Pancho felt a pang of hopeful surprise.

“Don’t tell me Kris is back!”

“Nah,” George replied, tapping out the combination on the door’s security keypad. “Dr. Cardenas is still off on the Saturn expedition.”