“Everybody’s carrying weapons,” said the councilman sitting beside her.
“It’s damned dangerous out there,” agreed the woman on the other side of the table.
“What’s worrying me,” said the accountant, sitting at the table’s end, “is that this fighting is preventing ships from delivering their ores to the buyers.”
The accountant was a red-faced, pop-eyed overweight man who usually wore a genial smile. Now he looked apprehensive, almost grim.
“Our own economy,” he went on, “is based on the business that the miners do. With that business slumping, we’re going to be in an economic bind, and damned soon, too.”
“Worse than that,” said the Valkyrie. “It’s only a matter of time before one of the corporations—either Astro or HSS—tries to take over our habitat and make it a base of their own.”
“And whichever one takes Chrysalis,” said the accountant, “the other one will try to take it from them.”
“Or destroy us altogether.”
Big George huffed out a heavy sigh. “We can’t have any fighting here. They’ll kill us all.”
All their faces turned to him. They didn’t have to say a word; George knew the question they wanted answered. What can we do about it?
“All right,” he said. “I’m gonna send a message to Astro and Humphries. And to Selene, too.” Silently he added, With a copy to Doug Stavenger.
“A message?”
“What are you going to say?”
“I’m gonna tell them all that we’re strictly neutral in this war they’re fightin’,” George replied. “We want no part of it. We’ll keep on sellin’ supplies and providin’ R&R facilities for anybody who wants ’em, HSS, Astro, independents, anybody.”
The others glanced around the table at one another.
George went on, “But we won’t deal with warships. Not from anybody. Only mining ships, prospectors, logistics vessels and the like. We will not supply warships with so much as a toilet tissue.”
“A declaration of neutrality,” said the accountant.
“Do you think that will be enough?”
“What else can we do?”
“Arm the habitat. Be ready to fight anybody who tries to take us over.”
George shook his head ponderously. “This habitat is like an eggshell. We can’t fight. It’d just get us all killed.”
“We could armor the habitat,” the Valkyrie suggested. “Coat the outer hulls with powdered rock, like some of the warships do.”
“That’d just postpone the inevitable,” George said. “A half-dozen ships could sit out there and pound us into rubble.”
“A declaration of neutrality,” someone repeated.
“Do you think it would work?”
George spread his big hands. “Anybody got a better idea?”
Silence fell over the conference room.
George drafted his declaration over the next twenty-four hours, with the help of an assistant who had been a history major before coming out to the Belt. The council met again in emergency session, tore the draft to tatters and rewrote it extensively, then—sentence by sentence, almost—wrote a final draft that was quite close to George’s original. Only after that did they agree to allow George to send the declaration to Pancho Lane at Astro, Martin Humphries of HSS, and the governing board of Selene. George added a copy for Douglas Stavenger, and then released the statement to the news media of the Earth/Moon region.
For the next several days Big George Ambrose was a minor media attraction. Ceres’s neutrality was the first realization for most of the people on battered old Earth that there was a war going on in the Belt: a silent, furtive war taking place far, far away in the dark and cold depths of the Asteroid Belt.
For a few days the Asteroid War was a trendy topic on the news nets, even though no executive of Humphries Space Systems or Astro Corporation deigned to be interviewed or even offer a comment. Sam Gunn, the fast-talking independent entrepreneur, had a lot to say, but the media was accustomed to Gunn’s frenetic pronouncements on the evildoings of the big corporations. Nobuhiko Yamagata agreed to a brief interview, mainly to express his regrets that lives were being lost out in the Belt.
Then a major earthquake struck the California coast, with landslides that sent a pair of tsunamis racing across the Pacific to batter Hawaii and drown several Polynesian atolls. Japan braced for the worst, but the hydraulic buffers that Yamagata had built—and been ridiculed for—absorbed enough of the tsunamis’ energy to spare the major Japanese cities from extensive destruction. The Asteroid War was pushed to a secondary position in the news nets’ daily reporting. Within a week it was a minor story, largely because it was taking place far from Earth and had no direct impact on the Earthbound news net producers.