Ben Bova - The Silent War

“Don’t be stupid,” Humphries sneered. “This fiasco with that Starlight vessel has brought Pancho’s little scheme out into the open.”

“But they could strangle your profits if—”

“I’m going to get rid of Astro’s drones at one stroke,” Humphries said confidently.

Ferrer looked at him questioningly.

“Set up a meeting for me with Doug Stavenger.”

“Stavenger?”

“Uh-huh. Once Stavenger has his nose rubbed into the fact that Astro’s controlling those birds from inside Selene, he’ll close down their operation.”

“He will?”

“Yes indeed he will,” said Humphries, smiling broadly. “He’s made it clear to me and that little guttersnipe that he doesn’t want any fighting in Selene. No fighting anywhere on the Moon.”

“But does that mean he’ll demand that Astro close down its control center for the drones?”

“Damned right he will. And he’ll make it stick, too.”

Ferrer was silent for a moment, thinking. Then, “Pancho will just move the control center off the Moon. Put up a space station.”

“And we’ll blast it to smithereens.” Humphries clapped his hands together. “I only hope the damned greasemonkey is aboard when we wipe it out.”

Ferrer thought it over and had to admit that her boss was correct. HSS mercenaries had scored major victories over Astro forces in the Belt. Astro had sprung a surprise with their drones attacking HSS freighters as they approached the Moon, but Humphries was probably right in thinking that Stavenger would force them to move that operation out of the safety of Selene. Of course, zapping that independent freighter and wiping out that family didn’t help Astro’s cause. Not at all.

Yet she heard herself ask, “What about Fuchs? He’s still lurking out there somewhere.”

“Fuchs?” Humphries snorted disdainfully. “He’s a spent force. Once we’ve cleaned out Astro we can hunt him down at our leisure. He’s as good as dead; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

For weeks, Lars Fuchs had been living in the machinery and storage spaces in Selene’s “basement.”

On the Moon, where the deeper below the surface you are, the safer you are from the radiation and temperature swings and the thin but constant infall of micrometeors that pepper the surface, Selene’s “basement” was its topmost level.

Just below the Grand Plaza and its extensions, Selene’s highest underground level was entirely devoted to the pumps and power converters and other life-support equipment that provided the city’s air, water, light and heat. Living quarters were on the lower levels, the lower the more prestigious—and expensive.

The “basement” also held the warehouses that stocked spare parts, clothing, preserved foods, and the tanks of water that Selene’s residents drank and washed in. In short, the “basement” had all the supplies that a renegade, a fugitive, a homeless exile would need to survive.

During the years he had lived at Ceres, Fuchs had listened for hours to Big George Ambrose talking about the “bad old days” when he had lived as a fugitive in Selene’s shadowy underground economy, surviving on his wits and the petty pilfering that provided food and shelter for him and his fellow nonpersons. Even Dan Randolph had once spent a few months hiding from the authorities in Selene.

So Fuchs had politely checked out of the Hotel Luna, afraid that sooner or later he would be identified and forced to return to Earth, and toted his meager travel bag up toward the kilometer-long tunnel that led to Armstrong Spaceport. Instead of going to the spaceport, though, he found one of the access hatches marked MAINTENANCE AND SUPPLY SECTION: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, quickly decoded its simple security lock, and disappeared into the shadowy “basement,” where machinery throbbed incessantly and the air was heavy with the odors of lubricating oil and ozone from the electrical machinery.

Color-coded pipes and electrical conduits ran overhead. Maintenance robots trundled back and forth along the walkways between the pulsating machinery and the warehouse stacks. Simpleminded machines programmed to alert human controllers of malfunctioning equipment or water leaks, the robots were fairly easy to avoid. Fuchs could see the red lights set into their tops flashing through the dimly lit passageways while they were still far enough distant to get out of range of their optical sensors.

There was a scattering of other people hiding there, too, a ragged handful of men and women who preferred to scratch out an underground living rather than submit to Selene’s laws. Some of them were wild-eyed from drugs, or raving alcoholics; others were simply unable or unwilling to live by other people’s rules. Fuchs met a few of them, barely avoided a fight when one of them pulled a knife and ordered him to swear loyalty. Fuchs bent his knee and agreed, then quickly moved as far away from the megalomaniac as he could and never saw him again.

Fuchs settled down in the “basement,” content to sleep in a bedroll and eat canned foods pilfered from the warehouse stocks. He spent his waking hours peering at his palmcomp, studying the schematics of Selene’s air ducts and water pipes, searching for a way to penetrate the lunar city’s lowest level, where Humphries lived in his magnificent mansion.

As the weeks passed, Nodon, Sanja, and Amarjagal arrived at Selene one by one, each of them bearing identification as Astro Corporation employees, lowly technicians. Their one-room corporate apartments were sufficient for them, luxurious compared to Fuchs’s hideout in the storeroom shelves in the “basement.”

Fuchs visited his crew members, furtively making his way through Selene’s corridors to spend long hours with them, planning how he might kill Martin Humphries.

Daniel Jomo Tsavo hated the three-second lag in communications between the Earth and Moon. It upset him to ask a question and then wait and wait and wait until the answer came back. Yet there was no way around the lag. And now the safety people have warned us that a solar storm is on its way; normal communications will be disrupted and all work on the surface will have to stop until the storm passes. Ah well, he said to himself, this call to Yamagata is on a tight laser-beam link. The storm should not affect it, unless it’s powerful enough to fry the laser transmitter on the surface.

“Pancho Lane wants to visit your base?” Nobuhiko Yamagata replied at last.

Tsavo nodded vigorously. “She just called. She’s at the Astro facility in the Malapert Mountains, no more than a hundred kilometers from where I sit.”

Again the interminable lag. Tsavo used the time to study Yamagata. His round, flat face looked frozen, his eyes hooded, his expression unreadable. Yet he must be thinking furiously, Tsavo thought. Come on, come on. Tell me what I should do.

“This is a striking opportunity,” Yamagata said at last. Tsavo agreed heartily. “I took it on my own authority to invite her to come over tomorrow.”

Yamagata again seemed lost in thought. At last he said, “Don’t delay. Bring her to your base as quickly as you can. I will send an interrogation team immediately on a high-g burn. There is much we can learn from her.”

Pancho felt slightly nervous being out on the surface with a solar flare cloud on its way. The scientists had estimated that it would take more than six hours for the radiation to even begin building up, but still she felt edgy about it. She was wearing a standard hard-shell space suit as she followed the Astro base director along the crest of Mount Randolph. Approaching storm or not, the director wanted to show off what his people were doing and Pancho had no intention of showing any fear in front of her own people.