The Silent War

ASTEROID VESTA

Dorik Harbin hid the discomfort he felt from all the others, but he could not hide it from himself. A man who preferred solitude, a lone wolf who tracked his prey silently, without help, he now was in command of nearly five hundred men and women, mercenaries hired by Humphries for the coming assault against Astro Corporation.

Most of them were engineers and technicians, not warriors. They were building a base on Vesta, burrowing deep into the asteroid’s rocky body, tunneling out hardened silos to hold missiles that could blast approaching ships out of the sky. Harbin remembered HSS’s first attempt to build a base on Vesta’s surface. Fuchs had wiped it out with a single blow, dropping a freighter’s load of asteroidal ores that smashed buildings and people in a deadly avalanche of falling rocks.

So now we dig, Harbin said to himself as he glided down one of the dusty tunnels toward the smoothed-out cave that would be his headquarters. He wore a real uniform now, complete with epaulets on his shoulders and an uncomfortable high choke of a collar. And insignias of rank. Harbin was a colonel now, with four-pointed stars at his throat and cuffs to show it. The emblems disturbed Harbin. They reminded him of crosses. He’d seen too many crosses over the years, in churches and more often in cemeteries.

Humphries paid someone to design these stupid uniforms, he knew. He also knew that a man’s ability to command comes from what is in his head and in his guts, not from fancy uniforms and polished boots.

But Humphries pays the bills, Grigor constantly reminded him. And Humphries is in a sweat to complete this base and begin the assault that will wipe Astro out of the Belt.

But Fuchs is still out there, somewhere, hiding himself deep in the dark emptiness of the Belt. It’s a mistake to stop hunting him, Harbin thought. Humphries thinks that once he’s eliminated Astro, Fuchs will fall into his lap easily enough. But I wonder. The man is wily, tough, a survivor. He’s dangerous, too dangerous to be permitted to live.

Despite its being the third-largest of all the asteroids, Vesta is still only slightly more than five hundred kilometers across. Its gravity is minuscule. Harbin and all the others working inside the tunnels and caves had to wear uncomfortable breathing masks and goggles clamped to their faces constantly because every step they took stirred up fine powdery dust that hung in the air endlessly, floating in the infinitesimal gravity like an eternal, everlasting mist. Still, the people he passed as he glided along the tunnel all snapped salutes at the stars on his uniform. Harbin dutifully returned each salute even though he loathed the necessity.

At least his office was clean. It was a small chamber carved by plasma torches out of the metallic rock and then sprayed with thick layers of plastic to hold down the dust. With the air blowers working, Harbin could take off his goggled mask and breathe normally once the door to the tunnel outside was shut.

The office was little more than a bare cubicle containing a desk and a few chairs. No decorations on the walls. Nothing to remind Harbin of his past. Even the desk drawers were mostly empty, except for the locked one that contained his medications. He slumped tiredly onto his desk chair and commanded his computer to display the day’s incoming messages. I shouldn’t be sitting behind a desk, he told himself. I should be in a ship, tracking down Fuchs. It’s a mistake to let him live.

Then he smiled bitterly at himself. Not that I’ve been so successful at getting him. Fuchs is a wily old badger, Harbin admitted to himself. Almost, he admired the man.

The list of incoming messages took form in the air above Harbin’s desk. Most of them were routine, but there was one from Grigor, Harbin’s direct superior in the HSS chain of command, the only man between him and Martin Humphries himself.

Harbin told the computer to display Grigor’s message.

Grigor’s gloomy image appeared immediately. He was seated at his own desk. It was as if Harbin were looking into the man’s office. To his surprise, the dour, cold-eyed chief of HSS security was actually smiling; it looked as if it pained him to stretch his thin lips that way.

“I have good news for you, Dorik,” said Grigor, almost jovially. “A dozen attack ships are on their way to you, plus supply and logistics vessels. They are not sailing together, of course. That would attract unwelcome attention from Astro and even from the International Astronautical Authority. But they will start arriving at your base within the week. A detailed schedule of their courses, cargoes and arrival times are attached to this message.”

Harbin stopped Grigor’s message and checked the attachment. Impressive. Within two weeks he would have a small armada of warships, ready to ravage the Belt.

He turned Grigor back on. “From the reports you’ve been sending, I can see that the base will be fully operational within three weeks or less. Mr. Humphries wants to make absolutely certain that the base is protected properly. He wants to take no chances that Fuchs or anyone else will attack it before it is completed. Therefore, you are to use the attack vessels as a defensive screen around Vesta. Keep them in orbit around the asteroid and keep them on high alert, prepared to intercept any unauthorized vessel. Is that clear?”

The question was rhetorical, of course. Harbin wouldn’t be able to get a reply to Grigor at Selene for a half-hour or more.

“One final order,” Grigor went on, without waiting for a reply. “Once the entire battle fleet has been assembled, you will hold it in readiness until an attack plan is sent to you through me. Mr. Humphries wants no moves made until he has approved a complete campaign plan.”

Then Grigor smiled again, obviously forced. “Of course, we will expect your inputs for the plan. We won’t finalize it until you have made your contribution.”

The image winked off and Harbin was staring at the empty chairs in front of his desk once again.

“A plan of campaign,” he muttered to himself. Humphries thinks he’s a field marshal now, planning battle strategy. Harbin groaned inwardly. He’s amassing all these weapons, all these people, and he’s sitting back in the safety of that underground mansion of his, playing armchair general. I’ll have to follow his orders, no matter how stupid they might be.

Harbin scrupulously avoided sexual liaisons with any of the people under his command. A commander doesn’t take advantage of his troops, he told himself sternly. Besides, he had medications and virtual reality simulations that satisfied his needs, in part. In some ways they were better than sex; he didn’t have to deal with a real, living person. Better to be alone, he told himself. Better to avoid entanglements.

Yet there was one slim young woman among the engineering staff who attracted him. She looked almost Asian, but not quite: tall, willowy, soft of speech, her skin smooth and the color of burnt gold, with high sculpted cheekbones and almond eyes that he caught, several times, watching him through lowered lashes.

She reminded him of someone, someone he had taken months of rehabilitation treatments to forget. Someone who haunted the edges of his dreams, a woman that not even his drugs could erase completely from his memory. A woman who had claimed to love him, a woman who had betrayed him. A woman he had murdered, ripping the lying tongue out of her throat with his bare hands.

Harbin woke nights sobbing over her. And now this Eurasian engineer watched him furtively when they were in the same room together, smiled at him seductively when he caught her staring at him.

Harbin tried to ignore her, but he couldn’t. Over the weeks and months of building the base, he could not avoid her. And every time he saw her, she smiled and watched him in silence, as if waiting for him to smile back at her, to speak to her, to ask her what her name was or where she was born or why she was here on this godforsaken outpost in the depths of nothingness.

Instead of speaking to her, Harbin brought up her personnel dossier on his office computer. Her name was Leeza Chaptal, born in Selene, her father a French medical doctor, her mother a Japanese-American biologist. She herself was a life-support engineer, and had a year-to-year contract with Humphries Space Systems. She had not volunteered for this job at Vesta; she had been faced with accepting the position or being fired for breach of contract.

She’s not happy here, Harbin thought, scanning her dossier. Yet she seems pleasant enough. Her supervisor rates her work highly, he saw.

It wasn’t until his phone buzzed that Harbin realized he’d been staring at her dossier photograph for more than fifteen minutes.