Ben Bova - The Silent War

She called her boss on her handheld and reported her finding: one tractor driver and two guards, all three of them incapacitated, blinded.

“Where’s the tractor?” Her boss’s face, even in the handheld’s minute screen, scowled implacably at her.

“Not here,” she replied.

The boss almost smiled. “Good. All tractors have radio beacons. Get the number of the tractor out of the driver, then we can track its beacon and find out where the fugitive is.”

“Assuming the fugitive is with the tractor,” she said, before thinking.

His scowl deepened. “Yes, assuming that,” he growled.

It wasn’t wise to second-guess the boss, she remembered too late.

Pancho hesitated as she held the laser’s cutting head next to the curving metal wall. I cut a hole and the air whooshes out. None of the people up here are in suits. They could get killed.

Then she shook her head. This dome’s too big for that. The air starts leaking out, they’ll pop some emergency sheets that’ll get carried to the hole and plug it up long enough for them to get a repair crew to fix it. Nobody’s going to get hurt except you, she said to herself, if you don’t get your butt in gear.

She thumbed the laser’s control switch. Its infrared beam was invisible, but a thin spot of cherry-red instantly began glowing on the metal wall. Holding the laser head in both her gloved hands like an old-fashioned power drill, Pancho slowly lifted it in an arc-like shape. She felt nothing inside the softsuit, but noticed that dust was swirling along the floor and disappearing into the thin, red-hot cut. Punched through, she thought. Nothing but vacuum outside.

The wall was thick, and the work went slowly, but finally Pancho cut a hole big enough for her to crawl through. Dust and scraps of litter were rushing through it now. But as she turned off the laser and ducked the hole, she saw there was another wall beyond it. Drat-damn it! Meteor shield.

It was a flimsy wall of honeycomb metal set up outside the actual dome structure to absorb the constant hail of micrometers that rained down on the Moon’s surface. Grumbling to herself, Pancho took up the laser again and started cutting once more. This one’ll go a lot faster, she told herself.

She heard a voice bellowing in Japanese, very close, but ignored it, sawing frantically with the laser to cut through the meteor shield and get outside.

“You there!” a man’s voice yelled in English. “Stop that or I’ll shoot!”

Despite his outward show of confidence as he sat in the command chair on the bridge, Cromwell’s skipper felt decidedly nervous as the creaking old ore ship cruised toward Vesta inside the radiation cloud. As surreptitiously as he could, he kept an eye on the console that monitored the radiation levels inside and outside his ship. A glaring red light showed that the sensors outside were reporting lethally high radiation, enough to kill a man in minutes. Next to that baleful red glow on the control panel a string of peaceful pale green lights reported that radiation levels inside the ship were close to normal.

Good enough, the captain said to himself. So far. We still have a long way to go.

He had worked out with the special weapons tech how close they would have to be to Vesta before releasing the twin missiles that contained the nanomachines. They had developed three possible scenarios. The first one was the basic plan of attack, the flight path they would follow if everything went as planned and they were not detected by Humphries’s people. That was the trajectory they were following now, sneaking along inside the radiation cloud until they reached the predetermined release point.

If they were detected on their way in to Vesta, or if the ship developed some critical malfunction such as a breakdown of its radiation shielding (a possibility that made the skipper shudder) then they would release the missiles early and hope that they would not be seen or intercepted by Vesta’s defense systems. The skipper and the weapons tech had worked out a release point for that contingency. It was only six hours from where they now were.

Their third option was to call off the attack altogether. That decision would be entirely—and solely—up to the captain. Only a major disaster would justify abandoning the attack, such as a serious malfunction of the ship’s systems or an interception by HSS vessels.

Cruising blind and deaf inside the radiation cloud, watching the sensor readings on the control panel, the skipper thought that of the three options before him he much preferred number two. Let’s get to the early release point, fire the damned missiles at Vesta, and get the hell out of here before something goes wrong.

He got up from the command chair. All four of his crew turned from their consoles toward him.

“I’m going to catch some zees,” he said gruffly. “You take your normal relief, one at a time. Ms. Yamaguchi, you have the con. Wake me in five hours.”

“Yes, sir. Five hours.”

The captain ducked through the hatch. His quarters were immediately aft of the bridge. Five hours, he thought. I’ll make my decision after a good nap, when my mind is fresh.

He knew what he wanted that decision to be.

In his basement office, Humphries’s security chief watched the screens on the wall to one side of his desk with growing dismay. Four guys are holding off two dozen of my people. The dumb bozos are just sitting there like a bunch of petrified chipmunks. And now the back staircase is on fire. Humphries is gonna fry my ass for this.

Angrily he punched the keyboard on his desk. “What the hell are you punks doing, waiting for hot dogs so you can have a fuckin’ barbecue?”

He had only a voice link with his team upstairs, no video. “I got six people wounded here.”

“You got a dozen and a half untouched! Go get the intruders!”

“Why should we rush ’em and take more casualties? They’re not goin’ anywhere. We can wait ’em out.”

“While the fuckin’ house burns down?” the chief yelled.

“Then we’ll burn ’em out!”

The chief thought it over swiftly. Humphries is sealed into his master suite. They can’t get to him. The fire’s triggered the automatic alarms. That upstairs hallway is closed off by airtight doors. Windows are already sealed. Okay. We’ll let the fire do the job.

It was getting smoky in the upstairs hall. Leaning his back against the overturned table Fuchs peered down the hallway and saw flames licking at the carpet, spreading toward them.

“We must get out,” Amarjagal repeated.

The flames reached the drapes on the farthest window. They began smoldering.

Coughing, Sanja added, “It is useless to die here, Captain.”

Fuchs wanted to pound his fists on the floor. Humphries was a few meters away, cowering behind his protective cermet barrier. The coward! Fuchs raged. The sniveling coward. But he’s smarter than I am. He’s prepared for this attack, while I’ve led my people into a stupid assault that will gain us nothing even if we live through it. He pictured Humphries’s smirking face and felt the rage rising inside him even hotter than the flames creeping toward them.

“THE ENTIRE HALLWAY AREA IS SEALED OFF,” the loudspeaker voice declared. “THE FIRE’S GOING TO SUCK ALL THE OXYGEN OUT OF YOUR AIR. YOU HAVE THREE CHOICES: SUFFOCATE, ROAST, OR SURRENDER.”

Sitting cross-legged on his oversized bed, Humphries yelled at the wallscreen image of his security chief, “You’re letting them burn up the second-floor hallway? Do you have any idea of the value of the artwork on those walls? The furniture alone is worth more than your salary!”