Ben Bova - The Silent War

“Terminated?” Harbin stared at Grigor’s message on his screen. “Just like that, they kick me out?”

He was in his quarters in Vesta while the damaged Samarkand was undergoing repairs. Leeza Chaptal was in bed with him when Grigor’s stinging message came through. Simply one line: Your services for Humphries Space Systems are hereby terminated. Period.

Harbin knew it would take at least half an hour for him to get a message back to Grigor. But what could he say? Ask why he’d been cut loose? That was obvious. He’d failed to get Fuchs, and failed to carry out his assignment about Pancho Lane. They were finished with him.

How many have I killed for them? Harbin asked himself. For more than eight years I’ve done their bidding, and now they kick me out. Terminated. Like some bug they squash under their boots.

Leeza saw the frozen expression on his face, realized that Harbin was raging beneath his mask of icy indifference.

“It’s all right,” she said, sliding her arms around his neck. “Yamagata will hire you.”

“How can you be sure?” he muttered.

“They’ve wanted to hire you for months. Now there’s nothing to prevent you from accepting their offer.”

“But if I’m no longer with HSS, why would they hire me? They only wanted me to spy on Humphries for them.”

“They’ll hire you,” she repeated. “I know they will.”

“Why?”

Leeza smiled at him. “Because there’s going to be a war here in the Belt, and you are a warrior.”

Technically, the principal offices of Astro Corporation were still at La Guaira, off the drowned coast of Venezuela. But Pancho had moved almost all of the corporate headquarters staff to Selene. Most of the board of directors lived in the lunar city, and those who didn’t attended board meetings electronically. The three-second communications lag made the meetings tedious to some extent, but Pancho was perfectly willing to accept that. Astro’s business was off-Earth; even shipping asteroidal ores Earthside was almost entirely a space operation, and Pancho had always insisted on being where the action was.

Now she sat in the richly paneled boardroom, in her usual place at the head of the long polished conference table. The only other person in the room at this moment was Jacob Wanamaker, known as “Hard-Ass Jake.” A retired commander of the International Peacekeeping Force, Wanamaker was a big-shouldered, heavy-bellied, genial-looking older man with a wry, lopsided smile and sad, pouchy brown eyes that had seen much more than their share of death and destruction.

Nobuhiko Yamagata had recommended three military advisors to Pancho: a Japanese mercenary who had fought in miniwars from Indonesia to Chiapas, in Mexico; a Swedish woman who had organized the multinational force that pacified the turmoil in southern Africa; and Hard-Ass Jake. The first two had never been off-Earth; Wanamaker had served several tours aboard a missile-defense space station in Earth orbit. Besides, Jacob Wanamaker had been an admiral in the U.S. Navy before accepting a commission with the IPF, and Pancho figured that fighting in space would be more closely akin to naval warfare than land campaigns.

Once she had personally interviewed the three candidates, Jake won hands down. He was open, easily admitting his lack of experience in space, but the toughness he was famous for showed through his veneer of polite sociability. Pancho had seen men like him when she’d been growing up in west Texas.

“So the trick is,” he told her in his rough, sandpaper voice, “to control the lanes of communication. And to do that, you need vessels that are armed and bases for them to be supplied and repaired.”

Pancho nodded. “Sounds expensive.”

Wanamaker’s weather-seamed face was a geological map of hard experience. “War is never cheap, Ms. Lane. The cost is always high: high in blood and high in money. Lots of money.”

“It must be exciting, though,” she said, probing for his reaction.

Wanamaker cocked a cold eye at her. “Exciting? If you think shitting your pants because you could get killed in the next millisecond is fun, yeah, then I guess you could call it exciting.”

It was at that moment that Pancho decided to hire Jacob Wanamaker.

Now they sat in the otherwise empty boardroom, planning strategy.

“HSS has a major base on Vesta,” Pancho said. “What do we do about that, attack it?”

Wanamaker pursed his lips for a moment, then replied in his gravelly voice, “Why attack them where they’re dug in with solid defenses? That’d cost too many lives.”

“But that base is the center of all their operations in the Belt.”

“Neutralize it, then. Keep a squadron of ships in the vicinity, close enough to knock off vessels going to or from Vesta, but far away enough to avoid the asteroid’s dug-in defenses.”

Pancho nodded.

Warming to his subject, Wanamaker gesticulated with his big hands, cupping them together to form an imaginary sphere.

“Matter of fact,” he said, “why can’t you put three or four of your armed ships together, armor them with asteroidal rock, and keep them on station at a decent distance around Vesta? They’d have more firepower than any individual HSS vessel and more staying power.”

“It’d be like a blockade, wouldn’t it?” Pancho said.

Wanamaker grinned lopsidedly at her. “You catch on pretty quick.”

The rush of pleasure Pancho felt from his praise quickly faded. “But then Humphries’ll send out his ships in groups, ’stead of individually, won’t he?”

“Yep, convoying would be the countermove.”

“It just makes the battles bigger.”

“And more expensive.”

Suddenly she felt gloomy.

Wanamaker immediately picked up on her mood. “Look, Ms. Lane—”

“Pancho,” she corrected absently.

“Okay, Pancho, then. Sherman was right: war is hell, pure and simple. It costs so much in money and blood that if there’s any other way to settle your differences with Humphries—any way at all —take it and avoid the bloodshed.”

She looked into his earnest brown eyes and said, “I’ve been trying to avoid this for more’n eight years, Jake. There’s no way to get around it, short of giving Humphries total control of the Belt, which means total control of the whole solar system. I won’t allow that. I can’t.”

He puffed his cheeks out in a king-sized sigh. “Then we’ll have to fight.”

“Guess so,” Pancho said morosely.

“You know, battles are won first of all on the morale of the people doing the fighting. Hardly any unit fights to the last man or the last cartridge. Especially mercenaries, such as you’ll be using. Somebody decides it’s hopeless and gives up before he gets killed.”

“Or she,” said Pancho.

He acknowledged that with a nod. “Battles are won in the mind and the heart, Pancho. Wars too. The winner is always the guy who won’t admit defeat.”

She leaned back in her chair, stretched her long legs and stared up at the boardroom’s smooth white ceiling.

“Humphries is a stubborn SOB,” she said. “And he’s not doing the fighting. He sits safe and snug in his house down at the bottom level and gives the orders.”

“And pays the bills,” Wanamaker added.

Pancho stared at him.

“The way to win this war is to make it too expensive for him to keep on fighting it.”

“That means it’ll be expensive for Astro, too, and I’ve got a board of directors to answer to. Humphries can walk all over his board.”

With an understanding nod, Wanamaker replied, “Then you’re going to have to do some fighting, too, with your board. Just because you’re at the top of the chain of command doesn’t mean you don’t have to put your butt on the line, Pancho.”