Ben Bova - The Silent War

Fuchs hesitated for barely a fraction of a second, then rushed up the stairs, the two others behind him. As they reached the landing, Sanja started up the steps behind them.

“The front doorway has been sealed with a metal slab!” he called.

The windows, too, were covered with heavy metal grillwork, Fuchs saw as he glanced around the upstairs hallway. The hall was lined with real wooden furniture: tables and chests and sideboards. Actual paintings hung along the walls.

They think we’re burglars or thieves, Fuchs thought. They’re trying to make certain we can’t get away. But I don’t want to get away, I want to find Humphries.

“Where are you, Humphries?” he shouted at the ceiling. “Show yourself, coward!”

Nodon, his eyes so wide that Fuchs could see white all around the pupils, said in a tight whisper, “They must be sending more guards. We’re trapped!”

All the lights went off, plunging them into almost total darkness. Within an instant, though, Nodon pulled a hand torch from his coverall pocket. Its feeble beam made the hallway look eerie, mysterious.

Fuchs rushed to a heavy walnut table against the wall. With one sweep of his arm he sent the flower vase and smaller porcelain pieces atop it crashing to the carpeted floor.

“Help me turn this thing over and drag it over to the top of the stairs. We can stop them from getting up here.”

Sanja and Amarjagal tipped the table over with a heavy thud, and the four of them pushed it to the head of the stairs and wedged it there between the wall and the staircase railing. Down below they heard the pounding of running feet and saw the shadowy figures of security guards coming along the downstairs hall. They must have been stationed in the basement, Fuchs thought, straining to make out how many of them there were. No more than six, he estimated.

He whispered to the two men, “Get the statues, the chairs, anything you can lift and bring them here. Amarjagal, go down the hallway a few meters so you can fire on them as they come up the stairs.”

If they think we’re going to surrender, they have a big surprise coming, Fuchs thought grimly. I’m not leaving this house until I see Humphries dead at my feet.

Pancho jogged up the rampway, long legs pumping easily as she made her way to the top level of the base. Trotting along the final section of ramp she could see the ribbed vaulting of the surface dome overhead. Almost there, she said to herself.

But she skidded to a halt when she spotted a quartet of men standing by the row of space suits that hung next to the airlock. They were all Japanese, their coveralls sky blue and bearing the white flying crane emblem of Yamagata Corporation. Each of them had an ugly-looking sidearm strapped to his waist.

They saw her, too. Two of them started to sprint toward her as Pancho reversed her course and started back down the ramp, back toward the noisy, bustling construction crews and the minitractors that were hauling loads of steel beams and drywall sheeting. She swung her legs over the ramp’s railing and jumped lightly to the dusty floor several meters below.

The noise was an advantage to her, she thought. Nobody’s going to hear those guards yelling, and these construction guys don’t have comm units in their ears. She loped alongside one of the electric-powered minitractors and hopped into the cart it was towing, landing with a plop amidst coils of wire and bouncing, flexing lengths of plastic piping.

She lay flat, hoping that the guards didn’t see her hitchhike maneuver. The minitractor trundled on for several minutes; all Pancho could see was the bare beams supporting the ceiling overhead.

She was thinking as hard and fast as she could. Airlocks are up on the next level, but they’re all guarded. So are the suits. Even if I could grab a space suit the guards would grab me before I had time to put one on. And there’s the damn-dratted solar storm outside, too. Not the best time for a walk on the surface.

I could use the softsuit, she reminded herself. It’s right here, tucked into my travel bag. Never used the blow-up helmet before but Doug said it works okay. Yeah, maybe. Maybe not. What choice do I have?

The big problem was to get to an airlock without being seen. Suddenly Pancho broke into a fierce grin. No, the problem is how do I get some explosives so I can make a new airlock for myself!

Doug Stavenger tried to busy himself with catching up on the minutes of Selene’s governing council meetings. But as he read the reports of the water board and the maintenance department and the safety office, the words blurred into meaningless symbols before his eyes. Irritated, nervous, he told his computer to show him the latest report on the solar storm.

One wall of the office in his home seemingly dissolved into a three-dimensional image of the Earth/Moon system. It was bathed in a hot pink glow that represented the radiation cloud. Stavenger muted the sound, preferring to read for himself the figures on radiation intensity and predicted time duration of the storm displayed across the bottom of the holographic image.

“Add traffic,” he said quietly.

Several yellow dots appeared in the image. One of them was identified as Elsinore, the ship Edith was aboard.

“Project trajectories.”

Slim green curving lines appeared, the one attached to Elsinore arcing out to the right and out of the cloud.

“Add destinations.”

Elsinore’s projected path ended at a dot labeled “Ceres.” Stavenger noted almost subliminally that of all the ships in the region, there was one named Cromwell but that had no projected destination visible. No course vector for it showed at all. It was deep inside the radiation cloud, too.

As he watched, Cromwell’s dot winked out. Stavenger stared at the display. Either the ship’s suddenly been destroyed or they’ve turned off all their tracking and telemetry beacons. There were no other ships near it, as far as the imagery showed. So it can’t have been attacked by somebody.

Why would they turn off all their beacons? Stavenger asked himself. It took only a moment’s thought for him to understand.

Pancho jumped off the cart as the minitractor rolled past a jumbled pile of equipment and crates of supplies lying in what seemed a haphazard disorder on the dusty concrete floor. The driver saw her and yelled at her over his shoulder in Japanese as the tractor trundled away from her.

“Same to you, buddy,” Pancho hollered back, bowing politely to the driver.

Slinging her travel bag over one shoulder, she ducked behind the nearest pile of crates and started searching through the trove. No explosives, but in the midst of the scattered pieces of equipment she saw something that might be almost as good: a welding laser. Kneeling beside the laser’s finned barrel, she clicked its on switch and felt her heart sink. The power supply’s battery indicator was way down in the red. I need a power source, she told herself.

Suddenly the loudspeakers hanging on poles every fifty meters or so blared into harsh, rapid Japanese. Pancho didn’t understand the words but she knew the tone: There’s an intruder sneaking around here. Find her!

All the construction noise stopped. It was eerie, Pancho thought. The banging, buzzing, yelling construction site went absolutely still. It was as if everybody froze.

But only for a moment. Hunkered behind a crate, Pancho saw the blue-clad construction workers looking around uncertainly. Foremen and women strode out among them, snapping orders. The workers gathered themselves into parties of four, five and six and began methodically searching the entire floor. Pancho figured they were doing the same on the other levels, too.