Ben Bova - The Silent War

He spent the morning outlining Pancho’s idea of setting up a blockade against incoming HSS ore carriers.

“Unmanned craft?” asked one of his junior officers.

“Uncrewed,” Wanamaker corrected, “remotely operated from here.”

One of the women officers asked, “Here in Selene? Won’t that get Stavenger and the governing council riled up?”

“Not if we don’t commit any violent acts here in Selene,” Wanamaker replied, smiling coldly. Then he added, “And especially if they don’t know about it.”

“It won’t be easy to build and launch the little robots without Stavenger’s people finding out about it.”

“We can build them easily enough in Astro’s factories up on the surface and launch them aboard Astro boosters. No need for Selene to get worked up over this.”

The younger officers glanced at each other up and down the conference table, while Wanamaker watched from behind his desk. They get the idea, he saw. I’m not asking for their opinions about the idea, I’m telling them that they’ve got to make it work.

“Well,” his engineering chief said, “we can build the little suckers easily enough. Nothing exotic about putting together a heavy laser with a communications system and some station-keeping gear.”

“Good,” said Wanamaker.

Gradually the rest of the staff warmed to the idea.

At length he asked, “How long will it take?”

“We could have the first ones ready to launch in a couple of weeks,” said the engineer.

Wanamaker silently doubled the estimate.

“Wait,” cautioned the intelligence officer, a plump Armenian with long, straight dark hair and darker eyes. “Each of these birds will need sensors to identify potential targets and aim the lasers.”

“No worries,” said the Australian electronics officer. “We can do that in two shakes of a sheep’s tail. Piece of cake.”

“Besides,” pointed out the engineer, “the birds will be operated from here, with human brains in the loop.”

The intelligence officer looked dubious, but voiced no further objections.

“All right, then,” said Wanamaker at last. “Let’s get to work on this. Pronto. Time is of the essence.” That broke up the meeting. But as the staff officers were shuffling toward the door, Wanamaker called the intelligence officer back to his desk.

“Sit down, Willie,” he said, gesturing to the chair on the desk’s left side. He knew she disliked to be called by her real name, Wilhelmina. The things parents do to their kids, Wanamaker thought.

She sat, looking curious, almost worried.

Wanamaker took a breath, then said, “We need a diversion.”

“Sir?”

“Humphries has beat the hell out of us in the Belt, and it’s going to be months before we can start fighting back.”

“But Jess said he’d have the first robots on station in two weeks,” the intelligence officer countered.

“Two weeks plus Murphy’s Law,” Wanamaker said.

Her dark eyes lit with understanding. “If anything can go wrong, it will.”

“Especially in a wartime situation. I know the staff will push as hard as they can, but I don’t expect to be able to hit back to HSS with these robot systems for at least a month, maybe more.”

“I see,” she said.

“Meanwhile, we need a diversion. Something to knock the HSS people off their feet a little, shake them up, make them realize we’re not going to lay down and die.”

“Such as?”

He grinned lopsidedly at her. “That’s what I want you to figure out, kid.”

She did not smile back. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

Levinson felt distinctly uneasy in the space suit. It was bad enough to have to fly out to this remote piece of rock in the middle of nowhere, carrying the heavily armored flask of nanomachines he had produced in the HSS lab at Selene. Now he had to actually go out of the ship like some superjock astronaut and supervise the crew he had brought with him.

“Me?” he had asked, alarmed, when Vickie Ferrer had told him that Martin Humphries himself wanted Lev to personally supervise the experiment.

“You,” she had replied, silky smooth. “It’s to your advantage to handle the job yourself. Why let someone else take the credit for it?”

As he hung weightlessly between the slowly spinning torch ship and the lumpy dark asteroid, clipped to the tether that was anchored to the ship’s airlock, Lev realized that Vickie had played him like a puppet. Her alluring smiles and promising cleavage, her smoky voice and tantalizing hints of what would be possible after he had succeeded with his nanomachines had brought him out here, to this dark and cold emptiness, face to face with a pitted, ugly chunk of rock the size of a football field.

Well, he told himself, when I get back she’ll be waiting for me. She said as much. I’ll be a big success and she’ll be so impressed she’ll do whatever I want her to.

Prodded by Ferrer’s implicit promises, Levinson had rushed through the laboratory work. Producing nanomachines that were not damaged by ultraviolet light was no great feat; the trick was to keep them contained so they couldn’t get loose and start eating up everything in sight. It was after he’d accomplished that that Ferrer had told him he must go out to the Belt and personally supervise the experiment.

So here I am, he said to himself, shuddering inside the space suit. It’s so absolutely empty out here! Despite his cerebral knowledge that the Asteroid Belt was mostly empty space, he found the dark silence unsettling. It’s like being in a football stadium with only one seat occupied, he thought. Like being all alone in an empty city. There were the stars, of course, but they just made Levinson feel spookier. There were millions of them, countless myriads of them crowding the sky so much that the old friendly constellations he knew from Earth were blotted out, swamped in the multitudes. And they didn’t twinkle, they just hung up there as if they were watching, solemn unblinking eyes staring down at him.

“We’re ready to unseal the bugs.” The voice of one of his technicians grated in his earphones, startling Levinson out of his thoughts.

“They’re not bugs,” he replied automatically. “They’re nanomachines.”

“Yeah, right. We’re ready to open the jug.”

Levinson pulled himself slowly along the tether to its other end, anchored in the solid rock of the little asteroid. His two technicians floated above the rock, able to flit back and forth on the minijet thruster units attached to their backpacks. Levinson, a novice at extravehicular activities, kept himself firmly clipped to the tether. He carried the “jug,” a sealed bottle made of pure diamond, on the utility belt around the waist of his space suit.

He planted his feet on the asteroid and, much to his consternation, immediately bounced off. In his earphones he heard one of his techs snicker softly.

“Newton’s laws work even out here,” he said, to cover his embarrassment.

He approached the rock more slowly and, after two more tries, finally got his boots to stay on the surface. He could see the puffs of dust where he first landed still hanging in the asteroid’s minuscule gravity.

The technicians had marked concentric fluorescent circles across the surface of the rock, like a glowing bull’s-eye. Cameras back in the ship would record how quickly the nanomachines spread from the release point, chewing up the rock as they went. Levinson went to the center of the circles, tugging on his tether, bobbing up and off the asteroid’s surface with each step he took. He heard no giggling from his technicians this time. Probably they’ve turned their transmitters off, he thought.