“How’s the suit feel?” the factory director asked. Her voice sounded a bit uneasy, edgy, in Stavenger’s earplug.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll bet I could do handsprings in it.”
The woman immediately said, “I wouldn’t advise that, sir.”
Stavenger laughed. “Please call me Doug. Everybody does.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, uh, Doug. My name’s Ronda.”
Stavenger knew her name. And her complete dossier. Although he had not held an official position in Selene’s government for decades, Doug Stavenger still kept a steady finger on the lunar nation’s pulse. He had the advantage of prestige and the even bigger advantage of freedom. He could go anywhere, see anything, influence anyone. And he did, although usually only in the subtlest manner.
But the time for subtlety was ending quickly. He had asked for this tour of Selene’s newest factory because it had been built to supply new torch ships for the corporations competing in the Belt: torch ships armed with powerful lasers, warships built of diamond hulls constructed by nanomachines.
They’re killing each other out in the Belt, Stavenger knew. He also knew that sooner or later, one way or the other, the war would come to Selene. What he didn’t know was how to prevent it; how to stop the fighting.
“How many orders for ships do you have?” he asked the factory manager.
“Six,” she replied. “Three from Astro and three from HSS.” She hesitated a beat, then added, “Funny how the orders always come paired up. We never make a ship for one of the corporations without making a ship for the other at the same time.”
That had been Stavenger’s doing. He had exerted every gram of influence he possessed to keep both Humphries and Pancho from outproducing the other. If they want to fight, Stavenger had reasoned, it’s up to us to keep the competition equal. As soon as one of them gets the upper hand they’ll be able to dictate the prices for raw materials to us. Selene will have to pay whatever the winner asks for its natural resources. Whoever wins this war in the Belt will win control of Selene as well.
That, Stavenger was determined, would not be allowed to happen.
To the factory manager, he asked as casually as he could manage, “Suppose a third party started ordering spacecraft. Could you supply them on the same schedule you’re working now?”
He couldn’t see her face through the visor of her hard-shell helmet, but he could sense her nodding. “Sure. We’d have to set up another facility, but that’s easy to do: Just pour another concrete pad and roof it over. The nanos do all the real work.”
Stavenger nodded. “I see.”
Curiosity got the better of the manager. “But who’d be ordering more ships? Who’d this third party be?”
With a soft shrug, he replied, “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe Selene.”
The manager could not have been more surprised if Stavenger had actually turned a handspring there on the factory floor.
Less than twenty kilometers from the new lunar factory, Lars Fuchs was passing through customs at Selene’s Armstrong Spaceport.
He had come to the Moon by a circuitous route, leaving the Belt weeks earlier to return to his native Switzerland, using the passport that Pancho had sent to him through Big George. Although exiled from Ceres and persona non grata at Selene, neither Switzerland nor any other nation of Earth had outlawed Fuchs. Customs officials at the spaceport in Milan had subjected him to a quick but thorough medical examination, including a full-body scan and a blood sample to make certain he did not bear nanomachines.
Thus Lars Fuchs, citizen of Switzerland, returned to his native land. He had spent weeks working out in a centrifuge he’d built aboard Nautilus, but still the heavy gravity of Earth made him feel tired, depressed. Even worse was the sight of the sprawling tent city that he glimpsed outside of Milan from the high-speed train as it raced toward the Alps. From the city’s newly walled and guarded borders, past Brescia and all the way to the shores of Lake Garda he could see nothing but the shacks and shanties of the homeless, the dispossessed, the haunted, hopeless victims of the greenhouse warming.