Ben Bova - The Silent War

It was clumsy working in the space suit’s gloves, even with the tiny servomotors on the backs to help him flex the fingers. Finally Levinson unsealed the bottle and placed it, open end down, on the exact center of the bull’s-eye. Again, the light gravity worked against him. The bottle bobbed up from the surface as soon as he took his hand off it. Frowning, he pushed it down and held it for a moment, then carefully removed his hand. The bottle stayed put. Looking up, he saw that both his technicians were hovering well clear of the rock. Scared of the nanomachines, Levinson thought. Well, better to be safe than sorry. He grabbed the tether with both hands and hauled himself off the asteroid, then started his hand-over-hand return to the ship.

The tether suddenly went slack, and for a fearful moment Levinson thought something had gone wrong. Then he saw that it was still fastened to the ship’s airlock and remembered that the techs were supposed to set off an explosive charge that released the end of the tether attached to the asteroid. In the vacuum of space he couldn’t hear the pop of the explosive bolt. It took a surprisingly tough effort to turn around, but once he did he saw the other end of the tether hanging limply in empty space.

And the asteroid was vanishing! Levinson’s eyes goggled at how fast the nanomachines were chewing up the asteroid, leaving a rising cloud of dust that grew so rapidly the solid rock itself was quickly obscured. It’s like piranhas eating up a chunk of meat, he thought, recalling videos he had seen of the voracious fish setting a South American stream a-boil as they attacked their prey.

“Start the spectrometer!” Levinson called excitedly as he resumed tugging his way back to the ship.

In less than a minute he could see the sparkling dazzle of a laser beam playing over the expanding dust cloud.

Puffing with exertion, he saw as he approached the airlock that its hatch was closed. His two assistants had jetted to the ship ahead of him, he realized.

“What’re you getting?” he asked into his helmet microphone.

The technician running the spectrometer aboard the ship answered, “Iron, lead, platinum, silver —”

“Pure elements or compounds?” Levinson demanded, watching the asteroid dissolve like a log being chewed up by a wood chipper.

“Atomic species mostly. Some compounds that look pretty weird, but most of it is pure atomic species.”

The weird stuff must be the nanos, Levinson thought. He had programmed them to shut down after forty-eight hours. At this rate there wouldn’t be anything left of the asteroid in forty-eight hours except a cloud of individual atoms. Wow! he thought. It works even better than I expected. Vickie’s going to be impressed, all right.

The spare, austere office was empty except for Wanamaker himself and Wilhelmina Tashkajian, his intelligence officer. She was short, round, dark, and, according to the scuttlebutt that floated around the office, a pretty good amateur belly dancer. All Wanamaker knew for certain was that she had a fine, sharp mind, the kind that can analyze information and draw valid conclusions more quickly than anyone else on his staff. That was all he wanted to know about her.

They sat on opposite sides of the conference table that extended from the admiral’s desk. Like all of Wanamaker’s officers, Tashkajian wore plain gray coveralls with her name and rank spelled out on a smart-chip badge clipped to the flap of her breast pocket. Wanamaker himself wore the same uniform.

He looked up from the report on the display screen built into the table’s top. “They’re testing nanomachines?”

She nodded, her dark eyes somber. “Humphries recruited the scientist that Pancho brought back here from Ceres. Snatched him right out from under our noses.”

Wanamaker grimaced. “She should have kept him on Astro’s payroll.”

“Too late for that, sir.”

“And they’re already in test phase?”

Another nod. “From the information we’ve gathered, they went through the laboratory phase very quickly, and then sent this Dr. Levinson and a crew of technicians out to the Belt. Conclusion: They’re testing nanomachines on an asteroid.”

“Does Pancho know this yet?”

“She gets a copy of my reports automatically.”

“Any response from her?”

“Not yet, sir. I just put out the report this morning. Not everyone reacts as fast as you.” She smiled slightly, then added, “Sir.”

He allowed himself to smile back at her a little.

“The real question,” she said, “is whether HSS is developing nanomachines for processing ores out of the asteroids or as weapons.”

“Weapons?” Wanamaker’s gray brows rose.

“If they can chew up rocks, they can chew up spacecraft, buildings, even people.”

He sank back in the stiff metal chair. “Weapons,” he muttered. “My god.”

“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?” she asked.

“I suppose it is.”

Tashkajian waited a heartbeat, then said, “I’ve been thinking about your request for a diversion, sir.”

“Is this a change of subject?”

“Not entirely, sir.”

Looking slightly puzzled, Wanamaker said, “Go ahead.”

“Suppose we attacked HSS’s base at Vesta,” she began.

“Most of it’s underground,” said Wanamaker. “They’re well dug in. And well defended.”

“Yes, sir, I understand. But they have certain facilities on the surface of the asteroid. Communications antennas. Launchpads. Airlocks to the interior. Even their defensive laser weapons. They’re all up on the surface.”

“So?”

“So we strew the surface with nanomachines that eat metals.”

Wanamaker’s eyes flickered. She couldn’t tell from his stony expression whether he was impressed or disgusted.

She plunged on, “The nanomachines would destroy metal structures, even eat into the asteroid itself. It might not wipe out the base but it would certainly disrupt their operations. It would be the diversion you’ve asked for.”

He was silent for several moments. Then he asked, “And how do you get a ship close enough to Vesta to accomplish this raid? They’d blast the ship into molecules before it got close enough to be dangerous to them.”

“I think I’ve got that figured out, too, sir.”

He saw that she was deadly serious. She wouldn’t bring this up unless she thought she had the entire scheme in hand, he realized.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“We send the ship in when there’s a solar flare.”

Wanamaker blinked. “Do you think…” His voice trailed off.

“I’ve checked out the numbers, sir.” With growing confidence she went on, “A category four solar flare emits a huge cloud of ionized particles. Scrambles communications on all frequencies, including radar! A ship could ride inside the cloud and get close enough to Vesta to release the nanomachines.”

Immediately, he countered, “Solar flare clouds don’t block laser beams.”

“Yessir, I know. But laser sweeps aren’t generally used for spotting spacecraft unless the radar scans have found a bogie. They use laser scans to identify an unknown radar blip.” “Riding inside a radiation cloud is pretty damned hazardous.”

“Not if the ship is properly shielded, sir.”

He fell silent once again, thinking.

“The radiation storm would drive all HSS personnel off the surface of Vesta. They’d all be deep underground, so our nanomachines would destroy their surface facilities without killing any of their personnel.”

Wanamaker tried to scowl and wound up almost smiling, instead. “A humane attack on the enemy.”

“A diversion that could cripple the HSS base on Vesta, at least temporarily, and check their domination of the Belt, sir.”