Ben Bova - The Silent War

Feeling like a mouse in a convention hall filled with cats, Pancho knelt behind the crate. The laser was within reach, but without a power supply it was useless. And even if I get outside, she told herself, I’ll have to sprint through the storm to get into one of the hoppers sitting out on the launchpad. The outlook ain’t brilliant.

Then she saw the same minitractor she had ridden on heading across the cement-dusty floor toward her. Two men were squeezed into its cab alongside the driver.

He remembers me hitching the ride, Pancho realized, and he’s bringing the goons to search the area. She smiled. The tractor could serve as a power supply for the laser, she thought. All I have to do is get rid of those three guys. She unclipped her other earring and held it tightly in her palm.

Sitting on the bare concrete floor, her back pressed against the plastic crate, Pancho listened to the tractor coming up and stopping. Voices muttering in Japanese. They’re getting out, she knew. Poking around.

She clambered to her feet. The three saw her immediately. Pancho noticed with some surprise that the hard-hatted driver was a young woman. The other two, bareheaded, were stony-faced men. And armed with guns.

“You!” one of the men shouted in English, pointing a pistol at her. “Don’t move!”

Pancho slowly raised both hands above her head, the earring still clutched in her right palm. Wait, she said to herself, flicking the catch of the earring with her thumb. Let them get just a little closer.

Now! She tossed the earring at them and flung both arms over her eyes. The flash of light still seared through her closed lids and burned a red afterimage on her retinas. But once she opened her eyes she found that she could see well enough. The two goons were writhing on the ground, screeching in Japanese. The woman driver was staggering around blindly. Blinking painful tears, Pancho grabbed the laser in both hands, pushed past the dazed and groping driver, and dumped it into the back of the tractor. Even in one-sixth g, it was heavy.

Quickly she detached the cart and slipped into the tractor’s cab. She put it in gear and headed for the nearest ramp, up to the top level.

Big George scowled at the display splashed across his wall screen as he sat in his favorite recliner, feet up, a frosty mug of beer at his side. Solar storm, he said to himself. Big one.

The IAA forecasters were predicting that the storm would not reach Ceres. The cloud of ionized particles followed the interplanetary magnetic field, and the field’s loops and knots were guiding it across the other side of the solar system, far from Ceres’s position. George felt grateful. Chrysalis was protected by electromagnetic shielding, just as most spacecraft were, but George had no great ambition to ride out a storm.

Poor bastards on Vesta are gonna get it, he noted. Hope they’ve got the sense to get their arses underground in time. George shrugged and reached for his beer. At least they’ve got plenty of warning.

The display showed spacecraft traffic. Elsinore was the only vessel George was interested in. Edith Elgin was aboard, coming to Ceres to do a video report on the war out here. About fookin’ time somebody in the news media paid attention, George thought.

Elsinore was swinging clear of the radiation cloud, he saw. She’ll be here in four days and some, George said to himself. Good. We’ll be waitin’ for her.

He took a long swallow of beer. There was nothing else for him to do, except wait.

Fuchs crouched behind the makeshift barricade jammed at the top of the stairs, peering into the shadows. Some light from the garden outside was leaking through the grills covering the upstairs windows. He could hear movement downstairs, but it was almost impossible to see anything with all the indoor lights off. Nodon has a hand torch, he knew, but to turn it on would simply give the guards a target to shoot at.

“Nodon,” he whispered, “pull down some of the drapes on the windows.”

The crewman scuttled away, and Fuchs heard ripping noises, then a muffled thud.

A strong voice called from the first floor, “Whoever you are, you can’t get out of here. You’re trapped. Better give yourselves up and let us turn you over to the authorities.”

Fuchs bit back the snarling reply he wanted to make. Nodon slithered up and pushed some bunched-up fabric into his hands. “Will this do, Captain?” he asked.

“We’ll see,” Fuchs whispered back.

A light flashed momentarily in the darkness and a man yowled with pain. Amarjagal, halfway across the landing, had fired her gun at someone creeping silently up the steps. But not silently enough. The Mongol woman had heard him and shot him with her laser pistol. Its beam was invisible, but the fabric of the guard’s clothing flashed when it was hit. Fuchs heard the man tumbling down the carpeted stairs.

We need some light, Fuchs said to himself. If I can set this drapery afire we can use it as a torch.

Another spark of light splashed against the table, just past Fuchs’s ear. He smelled burning wood.

“Behind us!” Sanja screamed in his native Mongol dialect.

Fuchs turned as both Sanja and Nodon fired blindly down the hallway. There’s another staircase! he realized. Fool! Fool! You should have thought of that, should have—

Nodon screamed with pain as a bolt struck him and grabbed his shoulder. Fuchs snatched the gun from Nodon’s fingers and fired blindly down the hall. In the corner of his eye he saw Amarjagal shooting at a pair of figures crawling up the steps.

Dropping Nodon’s gun, Fuchs bunched the drapery fabric in one hand and fired his gun into it. The stuff smoldered. He fired again, and it burst into flame. So much for fire-retardant materials, he thought. Put a hot enough source on it and it will burn.

“Shoot at them,” he ordered Sanja. “Keep their heads down.”

Sanja obediently fired down the hallway, even picking up Nodon’s gun and shooting with both hands.

Fuchs scrambled to his feet and plunged down the hall, bellowing like a charging bull, firing his own gun with one hand and waving the blazing drapery over his head with the other. Whoever was down there was still ducking, not firing back. Fuchs saw the back stairwell, skidded to a stop and threw the fiery fabric down the steps. For good measure he sprayed the stairwell with his gun.

He saw several men backing down the stairs as the drapery tumbled down. The carpeting on the steps began to smoke and an alarm started screeching in the flickering shadows.

Humphries had gone from his office into his adjoining bedroom, eyes wide with fright. He could feel his heart pounding beneath his ribs, hear the pulse thundering in his ears so loudly he barely heard Ferrer shouting at him.

Somebody’s broken into my house, screeched a voice in his head. Somebody’s gotten into my home!

The emergency lights were on and the cermet shutters had sealed off the bedroom from the office and the hallway beyond it. Nobody can get to me, Humphries told himself. There’s two fireproof doors between me and them. I’m safe. They can’t reach me. The guards will round them up. I’m safe in here.

Still in her white terrycloth robe, Ferrer grabbed him by both shoulders. “It’s Fuchs!” she shouted at him. “Look at the display!”

The wall screen showed a stubby miniature bear of a man charging down the hallway outside, swinging a blazing length of drapery.

“Fuchs?” Humphries gasped. It was difficult to make out the man’s face in the false-color image of the infrared camera. “It can’t be!”

Ferrer looked angry and disgusted. “It is! The computer’s matched his image and his voice. It’s Fuchs and three of his henchmen.”