Peacekeepers (1988)

by Ben Bova

  She was waiting for him by the bus, in the midst of the noisy, clanging garage. She wore dark maroon coveralls, almost the color of Burgundy wine. No dangling zipper pulls. A small slate-gray duffel bag hung from one shoulder.

  "Are you my driver?" she asked Jay.

  "I'm the driver."

  He was nearly a foot taller than she, and he judged that they were roughly the same age: middle twenties. Jay had not bothered to shave that morning, and he suddenly felt grimy and unkempt in her level stare. She didn't have much of a figure. Her mouth was turned down slightly at the comers.

  "Okay, then," she said. "Drive."

  He popped the hatch and stood beside it as she climbed the metal steps slowly, uncertain of herself in the low lunar gravity. Jay took the six rungs in one jump and ducked into the shadowy interior of bus 301.

  On the outside, 301 looked like any other heavily used tour bus: its bright yellow anodized hull had been dulled by exposure to vacuum and the hard radiation that drenches the lunar surface. There were dents here and there and a crusting of dust along the wide tracks. The crescent and human figure of its stylish Moonbase logo was the only fresh bit of color on its bodywork. Management saw to that.

  Inside, though, 301 had been fitted out for a long excursion: the seats removed and a pair of sleeping units installed, each with its own bathroom facilities. The galley was forward, closest to the cab, and the air lock and pressure suits at the rear by the hatch. Jay would have preferred it the other way around, but he had no say in the design of the bus or its interior layout.

  Without a word to his passenger, he pushed past her and slid into the driver's seat. With one hand he slipped the comm headset over his thick dark hair, while with his other he tapped the control board keys, checking out the bus's systems displays. He got his route clearance from the transit controllers and started up the engines.

  The bus lumbered forward slowly, the thermionic engines purring quietly, efficiently. Jay felt his passenger's presence, standing behind and slightly to one side of him, as he steered along the lighted path through the busy garage and out to the massive air lock.

  She slipped into the right-hand seat as he went down the final checklist with the controllers. The inner air-lock hatch closed behind them; Jay thought she tensed slightly at the muted thump when the massive steel doors sealed themselves shut.

  Pumps whined to life, their noisy clattering diminishing like a fading train whistle as the air was sucked out of the big steel-walled chamber.

  "You're cleared for excursion, 301," he heard in his earphone, "Three-oh-one, on my way," he muttered.

  The controller's voice lightened. "Have fun. Jay. Six nights with a redhead, wow!" He chuckled.

  Jay said nothing, but shot a quick sidelong glance at his passenger. She could not hear the controller, thank the gods.

  The air lock's outer hatch slid open slowly, revealing the desolate splendor of the Sea of Clouds. It was night, and would be for another sixty hours. But the huge blue globe of Earth hung in the sky, nearly full, shining so brilliantly that there was no true darkness.

  Mare Nubium looked like a sea that had been petrified.

  The rocky soil undulated in waves, almost seemed to be heaving gently, dimpled by craters and little pockmarks and cracks of rills that snaked across the ground like sea serpents. The horizon was brutally near, like the edge of a cliff, sharp and uncompromising as the end of the world.

  Beyond it the sky was utterly black.

  "I thought we'd be able to see the stars," his passenger said.

  "You will," Jay replied.

  The ground they traversed was roiled and churned as a battlefield. Treads of giant tractors, boot prints of humans, singed and blackened spots where rockets had landed years ago. Nothing ever changes on the Moon's surface unless people change it, and this close to Moonbase, people and their machines had been moving back and forth for more than a generation.

  Jay took 301 out past the old mass driver. The electric catapult was so long that its far end disappeared over the horizon.

  "Is that the original mass driver?" his passenger asked.

  He answered with a nod.

  "I understand it's out of commission. Being repaired or something?"

  "Right," he said.

  For the next fifteen minutes they drove in silence along the length of the mass driver. They passed a team of pressure-suited technicians gathered around one of the big magnet coils.

  "My name's Kelly," his passenger offered.

  "It's on the trip sheet," Jay replied. "Kelly, S. A. From Toronto, Canada. First time on the Moon."

  "What's your name?"

  Jay turned his head toward her. For the love of Godzilla, don't tell me she's a Moon groupie, he said to himself.

  We're going to be cooped up in this tin can for six days.

  "Jay," he snapped.

  "The woman at the tourist office told me it was Jonathan."

  He twisted uncomfortably in the chair. "Everybody calls me Jay."

  "Jonathan, Jr."

  Jay looked at her again. Really looked at her. "Who the hell are you?"

  "I told you. My name's Kelly."

  "You're no tourist."

  "And you're no bus driver."

  "What do you want?"

  Kelly studied his face for a moment. It seemed to Jay that she was trying to smile, trying to put him at his ease.

  Not succeeding.

  "I want to know whose side you're on," she said at last.

  "Side? What are you talking about? I'm not on anybody's sucking side! Leave me alone!" He kicked in the brake and 301 shuddered to a stop.

  "You picked the wrong side once," Kelly said, her voice flat, as if she were reading from a memorized dossier. "The people who sent me here think you might have made the same mistake again."

  "I'm taking you back to the base."

  She put a hand out toward him. "If you do, I'll have to report our suspicions to the Moonbase security people. You'll lose your job. As a minimum."

  "Leave me alone!"

  "I would if I could," Kelly said, her voice softening. "But there's a nuclear bomb on its way to Moonbase. It might already be here. Some people think you're in on the deal."

  He stared at her. Even here they had followed him. Even here, in the midst of all this emptiness, a quarter-million miles from Earth, even here they were hounding him.

  He took a deep breath, then said evenly, "Look. I'm not in on any deal. If you want to tag me with some wild-ass charges, think up something more believable than a nuke, huh? Just let me do my job and live in peace, okay?"

  Kelly shook her head. "None of us can live in peace, Jay. A nuclear weapon is going to wipe out Moonbase unless we can find it and the people who are behind it. And damned soon."

  "You're crazy!"

  "Maybe. But we're not going to Copernicus. We're going to Fra Mauro."

  "The hell we are," he growled. "You're going right back to base." He grasped the steering wheel and started to thumb the button that would put the tracks in gear again.

  "If I do," Kelly warned, "you won't be just working out a ten-year sentence here at Moonbase. You'll spend the rest of your life in jail."

  He glared at her.

  Kelly did not glare back. She smiled sadly. "I wouldn't be talking with you if I thought you were part of any terrorist group. But if you refuse to help me, I've got no choice but to turn you over to the people who think you are."

  Every muscle in Jay's body was tensed so hard that he ached from toe to scalp.

  Kelly leaned toward him slightly. "Look. The nuke is real. These people intend to blow out Moonbase. Help me find the bomb and you can make everybody back Earthside forget about your past mistake."

  He felt as helpless as he had when he was a baby and his father would suddenly swoop down on him and toss him terrifyingly high into the air.

  "You don't understand," Jay said slowly, miserably. "I don't care if they remember what happened back then or not. All
I want is to be away from it all, away from all of them. All of them. Forever."

  She made a sympathetic sound, almost like a mother cooing at her infant. "It doesn't work that way. They've come here. Maybe not the same people who got you into trouble in the first place, but the same kind of people."

  His head sank low. He closed his eyes, as if that would make her go away and leave him alone.

  "You've got to help me, Jay."

  He said nothing; wished he were deaf.

  "You've got no choice."

  Wordlessly he put the tracks in gear and pushed the accelerator. The lumbering bus shuddered and started forward.

  She's right, he told himself. I've got no choice. One mistake haunts you for the rest of your life. They'll never leave me alone, no matter how far I run. Not for the rest of my life.

  He realized that the only way out was to end his life, once and for all.

  He drove 301 in silence, not even glancing at the young woman sitting beside him. The vehicle plowed along for more than an hour, following the network of tracks worn into the powdery regolith that headed northward across Mare Nubium in the general direction of Copernicus.

  But when Jay reached for the radio transmitter control on the dashboard, Kelly's hand quickly intercepted his.

  "I've got to get Fra Mauro's coordinates from the data bank."

  "I'll punch in the coordinates," she countered.

  He pointed to the bus's guidance computer; Kelly typed out the coordinates with smooth, practiced efficiency. Jay noticed that her hands were tiny, her fingers as small as a child's doll.

  When the bus turned off the heavily tracked course toward Copernicus and started westward. Jay punched in the autopilot and took his hands from the wheel. He leaned back in his seat and tried to relax. It was like trying to breathe vacuum.

  "Are we really going to Fra Mauro?" he asked.

  "Close."

  "What makes you think the nuke is hidden there?"

  "We have our information sources."

  "We?" He turned in his seat to look fully at her. "Did my father send you?"

  She said, "No. I'm not working for the Peacekeepers. Not directly, anyway."

  "Then he does have something to do with this!"

  "The Peacekeepers have no jurisdiction here. They're only allowed to operate when an attack is launched across an international frontier."

  "So they claim."

  Kelly ignored his thrust. "Moonbase isn't about to be invaded. It's being threatened by a gang of terrorists. We're trying to stop them."

  "Who the hell is this 'we'?"

  "Private operation."

  He waited for more. When she did not offer it, Jay asked, "And the terrorists?"

  "Professionals. Third World fanatics who're against the industrialized nations and against the Peacekeepers."

  Jay remembered a group of men and women who were against the Peacekeepers. Feared that the International Peacekeeping Force was a first step toward a world government.

  Refused to accept the idea of having their nations disarm and trust their defense to a gaggle of foreigners.

  They had rebelled against the IPF and nearly won. Nearly.

  Jay had been one of those rebels. His father, now director-general of the IPF, had branded him a traitor. .

  "Some of the smaller nations," Kelly was saying, "don't like the IPF in general, and hate Moonbase in particular. Lunar ores and space factories are competing with Third World countries. They say that just when they're starting to make a success of industrialization, Moonbase is underselling them."

  "So they hire a gang of professionals to nuke Moonbase."

  "That's it."

  "And where do they get their nuclear device? The IPF's been pretty damned thorough in dismantling the world's nuclear arsenals."

  "Not really," said Kelly. "Disarmament's been more or less at a standstill for the past several years. There's at least half a dozen nukes unaccounted for. Somebody named Jabal Shamar stole them and disappeared."

  "And you think one of them's here?"

  Nodding, "Or on its way. Shamar sold it for the equivalent of a hundred million dollars. In gold."

  Jay whistled with awe. Despite himself, he believed her story. That's just what some of those bastards would do.

  They don't care who gets killed, as long as it isn't them.

  The only part that he refused to believe was her insistence that his father had no role in this operation. He knows about it. Jay told himself. He knows exactly where I am.

  Down to the millimeter.

  A flicker of movement caught his eye. Movement meant only one thing on the eons-dead surface of the Moon.

  "Another vehicle up there."

  Kelly barely moved in her seat, but her body tensed like a gun being cocked.

  "Another bus?" she asked.

  "Out here? No way."

  "Then what . . . ?"

  He tapped the camera keyboard and displayed the view on the screen that took up the middle of the dashboard.

  The vehicle was a smallish tractor, painted bright red, not unlike the automated crawlers that tended the solar energy farms. But the bubble riding atop it was undeniably a life-support module.

  "Two-man job," Jay muttered.

  "Have they seen us?"

  "Probably. Might be from Lunagrad."

  "This far south?"

  "It's a free territory," Jay said. "They've got just as much right to poke around here as anybody."

  "Is it likely?"

  "No," he had to admit. "The Russians usually stay close to their own bases. And there's no scientific excursion out here—that I know of."

  "Turn around," Kelly said.

  "What? I thought you wanted to get to Fra Mauro."

  "I do, but i want to get there alive. Turn around!"

  She was genuinely frightened. Jay saw. He gripped the wheel and slewed the bus almost ninety degrees, angling roughly northeast.

  We can tell them we just took a side trip on our way to Copernicus, Jay said to himself. Then he realized that he had accepted her view of the situation without thinking consciously about it: he had accepted the idea that this crawler was carrying two terrorists who had somehow learned of Kelly's mission and were here to stop her.

  Kelly popped out of her seat and went back toward the sleeping compartments. She returned with a pair of binoculars, big and black and bulky. Jay recognized the make and model: electronically boosted optics, capable of counting the pores on your nose at a distance of ten miles.

  "They're following us." Her voice was flat, almost calm.

  Only the slightest hint of an edge in it. "Two men in the cab, both wearing pressure suits with the visors up."

  She's been in heavy scenes before. Jay thought. Probably a lot more than I have. In the back of his mind he remembered the only real danger he had ever seen, the battle in orbit that his side had lost. Because of me. Jay heard his mind accuse. We lost because of me.

  "They're gaining on us," Kelly announced, the binocs glued to her eyes. "Can't you go faster?"

  "This tub isn't built for speed," Jay grumbled, leaning on the throttle. The bus lurched marginally faster.

  "There's no place to hide out here," she said.

  "It's like the ocean." He thought that his father would know what to do. An old salt like him, with his Annapolis training, would be right at home on this lunar sea.

  "You've only got the one air lock?"

  Jay nodded. "Emergency hatch here by my side." He nudged the red release catch with his left elbow. "But you've got to be in a suit to use it."

  "We'd better suit up, then. And fast."

  "Now wait a minute . . ."

  She cut him off with a dagger-sharp look. "You say you're not in with them. Okay, I'll believe that. As long as you behave like you're not in with them."

  Jay turned away from those blazing eyes and looked out the side window. The red crawler was gaining on them, coming up on their left rear.

  Kelly
said, "Suits."

  She's scared of what they'll do when they overtake us, he thought. Deep inside him, Jay was frightened too. He set the controls back on autopilot and followed the diminutive redhead back toward the air-lock hatch.

  It took nearly fifteen minutes to worm into the suits and check out all the seals and systems.

  "When we get outside," Kelly said through her open visor, "no radio. If we have to talk, we put our helmets together."

  "Tete-a-tete."

  She flashed a quick grin at him, thinking it was a pun rather than standard lunar jargon.

  They clumped back to the cab, single file, in the bulky suits. The crawler had gained appreciably on them. It was scarcely half a kilometer away. Jay began pecking at the guidance computer's keyboard.

  "What are you doing?" Kelly demanded. "We don't have time . . ."

  "Instructing this bucket to circle around and head back to base. That way we can pick it up again later. Don't think we're going to walk back to Moonbase, do you?"

  "I hadn't thought that far ahead," she admitted.

  They made their way back to the air lock and squeezed inside together. The outer hatch was on the right side of the bus, away from the approaching crawler. His stomach quivering with butterflies, Jay snapped his visor down securely and punched the button that cycled the air lock.

  He had to override the safety subsystem that prevented the lock from being used while the bus was in motion.

  It seemed like an hour. The pumps clattered loud enough to be heard Earthside. Finally the amber light turned to red and the outer hatch popped slightly ajar. Jay swung it open the rest of the way.

  The rough landscape was rushing past them at nearly thirty klicks per hour. It looked very hard and solid, totally uninviting.

  "You sure you want to do this?" he asked.

  "It's better than being killed."

  "Maybe."

  "You first," she commanded.

  Jay obeyed almost by reflex. He waited for a patch of ground that was relatively free of rocks, then jumped from the lip of the air lock. It wasn't until he was soaring through the vacuum in the dreamlike slow motion of lunar gravity that he realized this might all have been her ploy for getting the bus to herself.