Ben Bova - The Silent War

The hatch slammed behind him, making him flinch again. The captain, grim-faced, whirled on him.

“It’s those goddamned bugs of yours! They’re eating up my ship!”

Levinson knew it couldn’t be true. Pea-brained rocket jocks! Anything goes wrong, they blame the nearest scientist.

“The nanomachines are on the asteroid,” he said, with great calm and dignity. “Or what’s left of it. They couldn’t possibly be aboard your ship.”

“The hell they’re not!” roared the captain, jabbing an accusing finger at the displays on the instrument board. Levinson could see they were swathed in red.

“They couldn’t—”

“They were in that dust cloud, weren’t they?”

“Well, yes, perhaps a few,” he admitted.

“And the loose end of your fucking tether was flapping around in the cloud, wasn’t it?”

Levinson started to reply, but his mouth went so dry he couldn’t form any words.

“You brought the mother-humping bugs aboard my ship, damn you!”

“But… but…”

“They’re eating out the airlock compartment! Chewing up the metal of the hull, for chrissakes!” The captain advanced toward Levinson, hands clenched into fists, face splotched with red fury. “You’ve got to stop them!”

“They’ll stop themselves,” said Levinson, backing away a step and bumping into the closed hatch. “I built a time limit into them. Once the time limit is reached they run out of power and shut themselves down.”

The captain sucked in a deep breath. His face returned almost to its normal color. “They’ll stop?”

“Yessir,” Levinson said. “Automatically.”

“How soon?”

Levinson swallowed and choked out, “Forty-eight hours.”

“Forty-eight hours?” the captain bellowed.

Levinson nodded, cringing.

The captain turned back toward the two crewmen seated at the instrument panel. “Contact Chrysalis. Report our situation to them.”

The crewman in the left-hand seat asked, “Anything else to tell them, sir?”

The captain fumed in silence for a moment, then muttered, “Yeah. Read them your last will and testament. We’re going to die here. All of us.”

Levinson wet his pants.

Levinson had never been so terrified. He stumbled back to his compartment, slid the door shut after three trembling tries, then yanked his palmcomp out of his coveralls, tearing the pocket slightly, and called up the numbers he needed to calculate how long the torch ship would last.

The tiny corner of his mind that still remained rational told him the calculation was meaningless. He had no firm idea of how fast the nanomachines were disassembling the ship, and only the haziest notion of how massive the ship was. You’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, he told himself. But he knew he had to do something, anything, to try to stave off the terror that was staring him in the face.

We could make it to Ceres in less than forty-eight hours, he thought, if the captain pushes the engines to their max. If the nanomachines don’t destroy the engines first. Okay, we get to Ceres, to the habitat Chrysalis. They won’t let us in, though, because they’d be afraid of the nanos damaging them.

But the machines will shut themselves down in forty-eight hours, Levinson reminded himself. Less than that, now; it was about two hours ago that we dispersed them on the asteroid.

How fast are they eating up the ship? he asked himself. Maybe I can make some measurements, get at least a rough idea of their rate of progress. Then I could—

He never finished the sentence. The curving bulkhead of his compartment, formed by the ship’s hull, suddenly cracked open. Levinson watched in silent horror as a chunk of metal dissolved before his goggling eyes. The air rushed out of the compartment with such force that he fell to his knees. His lungs collapsed as he sank to the metal deck of the compartment, blood gushing from every pore. He was quite dead by the time his nanomachines began taking him apart, molecule by molecule.

Martin Humphries was talking with his six-year-old son, Alex, in the family’s estate in Connecticut.

“Van cries all the time,” Alex said, looking sad. “The doctor says he’s real sick.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Humphries, feeling nettled. He wanted to talk about other things than his stunted younger son.

“Can I come to see you?” Alex asked, after the three-second lag between Earth and Moon.

“Of course,” Humphries replied. “As soon as your school year ends you can come up here for a week or so. You can take walks on the Moon’s surface and learn how to play low-games.”

He watched his son’s face, so like the pictures of himself at that age. The boy blossomed into a huge smile when he heard his father’s words.

“With you, Daddy?”

“Sure, with me, or one of my staff. They can—”

The amber light signaling an incoming call began blinking. Humphries had given orders that he was not to be disturbed except for cataclysms. He glared at the light, as if that would make it stop claiming his attention.

“I’ve got to go now, Alex. I’ll call you again in a day or so.”

He clicked off the connection, and never saw the hurt disappointment on his son’s face.

Whoever was calling had his private code. And the message was scrambled as well, he saw. Scowling with impatience, Humphries instructed the computer to open the message. Victoria Ferrer’s features appeared in three dimensions in the hologram above his desk. She looked tired, depressed.

“I’m on a torch ship on my way back to Selene,” she said. “Still too far out for a two-way conversation, but I know you’ll want to hear the bad news right away.”

He started to ask what she was talking about, then realized that she wouldn’t hear his question for a good twenty minutes or more.

“The nanomachine experiment backfired. The bugs got loose on the ship and totally destroyed it. Nothing left but a cloud of atoms. Everybody killed, including Levinson.” She gave a few more details, then added, “Oh, by the way, the recruiting was pretty much a flop, too. Those rock rats are too smart to volunteer for cannon fodder.”

Her message ended.

Humphries leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the wall screen that displayed a hologram of Jupiter’s colorful swirling clouds.

Completely destroyed the ship and killed everybody aboard, he repeated to himself. What a weapon those little bugs could make!

Starlight was an independent freighter. For years it had plied between Ceres and Selene, taking on cargoes of ore in the Belt and carrying them on a slow, curving ellipse to the waiting factories on the Moon and in Earth orbit. Its owners, a married couple from Murmansk, had kept strictly aloof from the big corporations, preferring to make a modest living out of carrying ores and avoiding entanglements. Their crew consisted of their two sons and daughters-in-law. On their last trip to Selene they had tarried a week longer than usual so that their first grandchild—a girl— could be born in the lunar city’s hospital. Now, after a trip with the squalling new baby to the Belt, they were returning to Selene, happy to be away from the fighting that had claimed so many Astro and HSS ships.

The Astro drone had no proper name, only a number designation: D-6. The D stood for “destroyer.” It was an automated vessel, remotely controlled from Astro’s offices in Selene. The controllers’ assignment was to attack any HSS vessels approaching the Moon. The particular controller on duty that morning had a list of HSS ships in her computer, complete with their names, performance ratings, and construction specifications. She suspected that Starlight was a disguised version of a Humphries freighter and spent most of the morning scanning the vessel with radar and laser probes.