Ben Bova - The Silent War

“You can do that?”

He nodded. “They’d be close enough to be remotely operated from here at Selene. It’d be cheaper than using crewed ships.”

Pancho had only one further question. “How soon can we get this going?”

Wanamaker pushed his chair back from the table and got to his feet. “Real soon,” he said. “Very damned real soon.”

Pancho watched him hurry away, thinking, So I won’t need Lars after all. Doesn’t matter where he’s hiding. I won’t need him now.

Later that morning, with some reluctance, Pancho slipped on the soft-suit and sealed the opening that ran the length of the torso’s front. Doug Stavenger was already in his suit. To Pancho he looked as if he’d been packed into a plastic-wrap food container, except for the fishbowl helmet he held cradled in his arms.

“This thing really works?” she asked, picking up her helmet from the shelf in the locker.

Stavenger nodded, smiling at her. “It’s been tested for months now, Pancho. I’ve worn it outside myself several times. You’re going to love it.”

She felt totally unconvinced. Never fly in a new airplane, she remembered from her first days as a pilot. Never eat in a new restaurant on its opening day.

Plucking at the transparent nanomachined fabric with gloved fingers, she said, “Kinda flimsy.”

“But it works like a charm.”

“That mean you gotta say prayers over it?”

Stavenger laughed. “Come on, Pancho. Once we’re outside you’ll wonder how you were ever able to stand those clunky cermet suits.”

“Uh-huh.” She could see the enthusiasm in his eyes, his smile, his whole demeanor. He’s like a kid with a new toy, she thought.

But he was right. It took roughly ten minutes to walk from the airlock at Selene to Factory Number Eleven, out on the floor of the giant crater Alphonsus. Before even five minutes were up, Pancho had fallen in love with the softsuit.

“It’s terrific,” she said to Stavenger, shuffling along beside her, his boots kicking up gentle clouds of dust. “It’s like being without a suit, almost.”

“I told you, didn’t I?”

Pancho held both hands before her and flexed her fingers. “Hot spit! Even the gloves are easy to work. This is like magic!”

“Not magic. Just nanotechnology.”

“And the radiation protection?”

“About the same as a hard-shell suit,” Stavenger said. “We could add electromagnetic shielding, but that would probably attract a lot of dust from the ground.”

She nodded inside her helmet.

“You’re okay for short time periods on the surface,” Stavenger went on. “Off the Moon an electromagnetic system can be added to the suits easily enough.”

Pancho asked, “Doug, ol’ pal, how’d you like to sign a contract with Astro to manufacture and distribute these softsuits?”

He laughed. “No thanks, Pancho. Selene’s going to develop this product. We’ll sell them at pretty close to cost, too.”

Pancho understood the meaning behind his words. If Selene signed up with Astro for selling the suits, Humphries would complain. If Selene gave a contract to HSS, Astro would fight it. She nodded again inside the fishbowl helmet. Better to keep this out of either corporation’s hands. Better to let Selene handle this one themselves.

The low curving roof of the factory loomed before them. Stavenger and Pancho climbed the stairs to the edge of the factory’s thick concrete slab, then stepped through the “car wash,” the special airlock that scrubbed their suits free of dust and other contaminants before they were allowed to enter the ultra-pure domain of the factory itself. Pancho felt the jets and scrubbers pummeling her brutally.

“Hey Doug,” she gasped. “You gotta reset these things to go easier.”

His voice in her helmet earphones sounded bemused. “We did reset them, Pancho. They would’ve knocked you flat if we’d left them at the same power level we used for the hard-shell suits.”

It took Pancho a few moments to catch her breath once she had stepped out of the “car wash” and onto the factory floor. As Stavenger came up beside her, also breathing heavily, she looked out at the two completed spacecraft. Their diamond hulls looked dark, like ominous shadows lurking beneath the curved roof of the factory.

“There they are,” Stavenger said tightly. “One for you and one for Humphries.”

She understood the tension in his voice. “Two brand-new warships. So we can go out and kill some more mercenaries.”

Stavenger said nothing.

“We’ve got six more under contract, right?” she asked.

After several heartbeats, Stavenger said, “Yes. And we’re building the same number for Humphries.”

“So no matter who wins, Selene makes money.”

“I don’t like it, Pancho. I don’t like any of this. If I could convince the governing council to renege on these contracts, I would.”

“I don’t like it either, Doug. But what else can we do? Let the Humper take over the whole danged solar system?”

He fell silent again.

As they trudged back in silence toward the airlock at Selene, Pancho said to herself: Deadlock. Selene doesn’t want either one of us to win. They don’t want one side to beat the other and become master of the whole solar system. Even if Astro wins, if I win, Selene’s scared shitless that they’ll be under my thumb. Doug wants to see Humphries and Astro fight ourselves into exhaustion, and then he’ll step in and be the peacemaker again.

So they’re doing their best to keep us even. They won’t make a warship for Humphries without making one for Astro. Keeps them neutral, Doug says. Keeps us in a deadlock, that’s what it keeps.

There’s gotta be some way out of this, some way to break through and beat the Humper before we’re both so broke and dead-flat exhausted that both our corporations go bust.

If I could get Lars to help us, she thought. He might just be able to tip the scales in our favor. But the l’il bugger has disappeared. What’s he up to? Why’s he gone to ground on me?

Shaking her head inside the fishbowl helmet, Pancho considered: We need an outside force, a partner, an ally. Somebody who can tip the scales in Astro’s favor. Outmaneuver Humphries. Overpower him. Some way to outflank HSS.

Then it hit her. Nairobi! That guy from Nairobi Industries wanted a strategic alliance with Astro. I wonder if he’s still interested? I’ll have to look him up soon’s I get back to the office, whatever his name was.

Jake Wanamaker’s command center was a cluster of offices set slightly apart from the rest of Astro Corporation’s headquarters. With wry humor, Wanamaker mused that Humphries could do more damage to Astro, at far less cost, by attacking these offices and wiping out the corporation’s military command. But even war has its rules, and one of the fundamental rules of this conflict was that no violence would be tolerated anywhere on the Moon. The side that broke that rule would bring Selene and its considerable financial and manufacturing clout into the battle as an enemy.

So despite the purely perfunctory guards stationed at the double doors of the command center, armed with nothing more than sidearms, Wanamaker had little fear of being attacked here in Selene. He went through the doors and down the central corridor, heading for his own office to a chorus of “Good morning, Admiral” accompanied by military salutes. Wanamaker returned each salute scrupulously: good discipline began with mutual respect, he felt.

Wanamaker’s office was spartan. The battleship-gray metal furniture was strictly utilitarian. The only decorations on the walls were citations he had garnered over his years of service. The wallscreens were blank as his staff filed in and took their chairs along the scuffed old conference table that butted against his desk. Wanamaker had salvaged them both from his last sea command, an amphibious assault command vessel.