Ben Bova - The Silent War

Pancho felt her eyebrows hike up. “You mean the asteroidal metals and minerals that Earthside corporations buy.”

“Yes. Of course. But Selene imports a good deal from Humphries’s mining operations in the Belt, too.”

The big struggle, Pancho knew, was to control the resources of the Asteroid Belt. The metals and minerals mined from the asteroids were feeding Earthside industries crippled by the environmental disasters stemming from the greenhouse cliff.

“Well,” said the Nairobi executive, with his gleaming smile, “that’s just about the whole of it. Does it strike any interest in you?”

Pancho smiled back at him. “ ’Course it does,” she said, thinking about how the kids she grew up with in west Texas would cross their fingers when they fibbed. “I’ll give it a lot of thought, you can believe me.”

“Then you’ll recommend a strategic alliance to your board?”

She could see the eagerness on his handsome young face.

Keeping her smile in place, Pancho replied, “Let me think it over, get my staff to run the numbers. Then, if everything checks out, I’ll certainly bring it up before the board.”

He fairly glowed with pleasure. Pancho thought, Whoever sent this hunk of beefcake didn’t pick him because he’s got a poker face.

She got to her feet and he shot up so quickly that Pancho thought he’d bounce off the ceiling. As it was, he stumbled slightly, unaccustomed to the low lunar gravity, and had to grab a corner of her desk to steady himself.

“Easy there,” she said, grinning. “You only weigh one-sixth of Earth normal here.”

He made a shamefaced smile. “I forgot. The weighted boots aren’t all that much help. Please forgive me.”

“Nothing to it. Everybody needs a little time to get accustomed to lunar gee. How long will you be staying at Selene?”

“I leave tomorrow.”

“You won’t be talking to anybody from HSS?”

“No. Mr. Humphries has a reputation for swallowing up smaller corporations rather than helping them.”

Maybe he’s not from Humphries after all, Pancho thought.

She asked, “So you came up here just to see me?”

He nodded. “This alliance is very important to us. I wanted to speak to you about it face-to-face, not by videophone.”

“Good thinking,” Pancho said, coming around her desk and gesturing toward her office door. “That three-second lag in phone communication is enough to drive me loco.”

He blinked. “Loco? Is that lunar slang?”

With a laugh, Pancho answered, “West Texas, for crazy.”

“You are from Texas?”

“Long time ago.”

Pancho played it cool, watching how he tried to maneuver their conversation into a dinner invitation before she could shoo him out of her office. He smelled good, she noticed. Some sort of cologne that reminded her of cinnamon and tangy spices.

Finally he got to it. “I suppose a person of your importance has a very full calendar.”

“Yep. Pretty much.”

“I was hoping we might have dinner together. Actually, I don’t know anyone else in Selene City.”

She made a show of pulling up her schedule on the wallscreen. “Dinner engagement with my PR director.”

He looked genuinely crestfallen. “Oh. I see.”

Pancho couldn’t help smiling at him. “Hell, I can talk to her some other time. Let’s have dinner together.”

His smile grew even wider than before.

And he was good in bed, too, Pancho discovered. Great, in fact. But the next morning, once he was on his way back Earthside and Pancho had fed herself a breakfast of vitamin E and orange juice, she called her security director from her kitchen and told him to check the guy out thoroughly. If he’s not from Humphries, maybe somebody else wants to move into the territory.

She chuckled to herself as she headed for her office that morning. She had forgotten the man’s name.

The ship had once been a freighter with the unlikely name of Lubbock Lights, plying the Asteroid Belt, picking up ores mined by the rock rats and carrying them back to the factories in Earth orbit and on the Moon. Lars Fuchs and his ragtag crew of exiles had seized it and renamed it Nautilus, after the fictional submersible of the vengeance-seeking Captain Nemo.

Over the years, Fuchs had changed the spacecraft. It was still a dumbbell shape, rotating on a buckyball tether to provide a feeling of gravity for the crew. It still could carry thousands of tons of ores in its external grapples. But now it also bore five powerful lasers, which Fuchs used as weapons. And it was armored with thin layers of asteroidal copper fixed a few centimeters outside the ship’s true hull, enough to absorb an infrared laser beam for a second or more. Nautilus’s fusion propulsion system was among the most powerful in the Belt. Speed and maneuverability were important for a pirate vessel.

In the ship’s cramped bridge Fuchs leaned over the back of the pilot’s chair and scowled at the scanner display.

“It is a freighter, nothing more,” said Amarjagal, his pilot. She was a stocky, stoic woman of Mongol ancestry who had been with Fuchs since he’d fled from the mining center at Ceres to take up this life of exile and piracy.

“With a crew pod?” Fuchs sneered.

Nodon, the ship’s engineer, had also been part of Fuchs’s renegade team since the earliest days. He was rail-thin, all bone and sinew, his head shaved bald, spiral scars of ceremonial tattoos swirling across both cheeks. A menacing black moustache drooped down to his jawline, yet his dark brown eyes were big and expressive, soulful.

“A crew pod means that the ship carries food,” he pointed out as he studied the image on the display screen.

“And medical supplies,” added Amarjagal.

“Both of which we could use,” said Nodon.

Fuchs shook his head ponderously. “It could be a trap.”

Neither of his crew replied. They glanced at each other but remained silent.

Fuchs wore a black pullover and shapeless black slacks, as usual. He was a short-limbed, barrel-chested little bear of a man, scowling with anger and implacable in his wrath. His broad, jowly face was etched with hatred, thin slash of a mouth set in a permanent glower, deepset eyes looking far beyond what the others saw. He looked like a badger, a wolverine, small but explosively dangerous.

For nearly a decade Lars Fuchs had been a pirate, an outcast, a renegade who cruised through the vast, silent emptiness of the Belt and preyed on ships owned by Humphries Space Systems.

Once he had considered himself the luckiest man in the solar system. A love-struck student riding the first crewed exploratory ship into the Asteroid Belt, he had actually married the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, Amanda Cunningham. But then he became ensnarled in the battle over the riches of the Belt, one man pitted against Martin Humphries, the wealthiest person off-Earth, and his Humphries Space Systems’ hired thugs. When the HSS mercenaries finally cornered him, Amanda begged Humphries to spare his life.

Humphries was merciful, in the cruelest manner imaginable. Fuchs was banished from Ceres, the only permanent settlement in the Belt, while Amanda divorced him and married Humphries. She was the price for Fuchs’s life. From that time on, Fuchs wandered through the vast dark emptiness of the Belt like a Flying Dutchman, never touching down at a human habitation, living as a rock rat, sometimes prospecting among the asteroids in the farthest reaches of the Belt and digging metal ores and minerals to sell to refinery ships.

More often he swooped down on HSS freighters like a hawk attacking a pigeon, taking the supplies he needed from them, even stealing the ores they carried and selling them clandestinely to other rock rats plying the Belt. It was a pitiful way to maintain his self-respect, telling himself that he was still a thorn in Humphries’s flesh. Merely a small thorn, to be sure, but it was the only thing he could do to keep his sanity. While he almost always attacked automated drone freighters toting their ores back toward the Earth/Moon system, often enough he hit ships that were crewed. Fuchs did not consider himself a killer, but there were times when blood was spilled.