by Ben Bova
Brudnoy shrugged his bony shoulders. “Faure isn’t going to let the World Court consider our claim of independence until his Peacekeepers have taken control of Moonbase.”
“And turned it over to Yamagata to operate,” Joanna growled.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
Fists clenched, Joanna jumped to her feet and started striding across the furniture-crowded living room. “That little turd! He’s in with Yamagata. It’s been a Yamagata operation all along, from the very beginning. They’ll end up operating Moonbase under a U.N. contract and we’ll be out in the cold.”
“Expropriated,” muttered Brudnoy.
“It’s illegal! It’s illegal as hell! But he’s going to get away with it.”
“How is your board of directors taking this?”
She glared at him. “I’ve asked for an emergency meeting of the board, but they’re taking their sweet time getting everybody together.”
“Perhaps—”
“They know Doug can’t live on Earth!” Joanna blurted. “He’ll be a marked man.”
“We’ll be able to protect him,” Brudnoy assured her.
But Joanna shook her head. “No, they’ll get to him. Fanatics. Assassins. Just because he’s got nanomachines in his body. They’ll kill him, sooner or later.”
“Zimmerman won’t be safe from the nanoluddites, either,” Brudnoy pointed out. With a sigh, he added, “None of us will.”
“We can’t let them send us back to Earth, Lev! It’d be a death sentence for Doug, for Zimmerman, for all of us!”
“If only—”
The phone chime interrupted Brudnoy.
“Answer,” Joanna snapped.
The phone’s computer voice said, “Call from Mr Rashid, in Savannah.”
“Put him on!”
Ibrahim al-Rashid’s swarthy face with its trim little beard appeared on the wall screen. To Brudnoy, the man looked like the crafty pirate chieftain of his childhood tapes.
He smiled at Joanna. “You’ll be pleased to know that the emergency board meeting is scheduled to start in ten minutes.”
Joanna sank back onto the couch beside her husband. “Good,” she breathed. “Good.”
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 8 HOURS 57 MINUTES
Rashid hated these electronic meetings. He sat at the head of the nearly-empty board table while the walls around him displayed the images of directors who were in their homes or offices in California, London, Buenos Aires, the middle of the Pacific Ocean—and one, of course, on the Moon.
Only three of Masterson Corporation’s directors lived close enough to Savannah to come to this emergency meeting in person, and one of them had to be ferried by a special medevac tiltrotor plane because he was on life support, awaiting a heart transplant.
“We have got to get the World Court to issue an injunction to stop the Peacekeepers from invading Moonbase!” Joanna was saying, her voice urgent, somewhere between cajoling and pleading.
McGruder, the old man on life support, wheezing through his clear plastic oxygen mask, said testily, “The World Court doesn’t work that way. They have no power to issue injunctions or control the Peacekeepers.”
“Only Faure can direct the Peacekeepers,” said the director from London, a well-preserved matron whom Rashid had pursued amorously from time to time.
“With the oversight of the General Assembly,” the man from California added. “If they don’t like the way he’s handling things, they can override him or even replace him.”
Fat chance, Rashid thought.
Tamara Bonai, sitting on her patio on Tarawa with palm trees behind her swaying in the trade wind, asked, “But what about the news media? Couldn’t we put some pressure on the UN by exposing this plot to the media?”
Rashid said, “Most of the world’s media has been effectively muzzled by Faure. Here in the United States the media executives I’ve talked to tend to see this as a struggle between a giant corporation—which is bad by definition—against the poor people of the world, represented by Faure and the U.N.”
Joanna’s anguished face almost filled the far wall of the board room, like a giant portrait or a hovering djinn.
“Do you mean that they’re ignoring our declaration of independence?” Joanna demanded.
“Yes,” said Rashid, dipping his chin slightly. “They see it as a transparent ploy of Masterson Corporation to maintain control of Moonbase and continue using nanotechnology.”
The meeting room fell silent. What Rashid had told his board was not entirely true, he knew. Yes, the media executives he had spoken with knew that Masterson still controlled Moonbase, despite the legal fiction that the base was owned by the Kiribati Corporation. Tamara Bonai’s beauty and earnestness were not enough to disguise the maneuver that the Moonbase people had pulled to evade the nanotech treaty. But when Rashid had met with his friends among the news media in New York to brief them on the Moonbase situation, he had conveniently overlooked the independence angle.
And from all the communications beamed from Moonbase to Masterson corporate headquarters in Savannah, Rashid had carefully excised all mention of independence before sending them on to the news outlets.
Of all the members of Masterson’s board of directors, Rashid was the least surprised to learn that Yamagata was behind Faure’s grab of Moonbase. Let them have Moonbase, he thought. We still have the patents on the Clipperships. Let Yamagata manufacture them with nanomachines on the Moon; we will still get the patent royalties and our costs will drop to zero. Nothing but profit for us.
And, of course, sooner or later Yamagata will want to initiate a merger with Masterson Corporation. That’s when I will become wealthy enough to retire in true style.
Joanna’s insistent voice snapped him out of his pleasant reverie.
“Once the Peacekeeper troops land here and take over the base we won’t have a chance of stopping Faure from turning Moonbase over to Yamagata.”
“We will be compensated for the takeover,” Rashid pointed out.
And now we have to wait three infernal seconds for her reply, he grumbled to himself.
Joanna stared down the length of conference table at him, her eyes ablaze. “Compensated? You mean it’s all right with you if Faure screws us as long as he pays for the pleasure?”
Rashid’s own temper rose, but he maintained his composure. “I believe it is an ancient piece of oriental wisdom, Joanna: When rape is unavoidable, you might as well relax and enjoy it.”
Joanna stared into Rashid’s beady eyes and battled with every ounce of self-control she possessed to keep from screaming at him.
All across the walls of her living room, the images of the board members were watching her, some sympathetic, some apathetic, a few looking tense with apprehension.
“Omar,” she said, deliberately using Rashid’s belittling nickname, “you might enjoy getting raped, but I don’t, and I don’t think the other members of this board do, either.”
Raising her voice slightly, she said, “I move we take a vote of confidence in our chairman.”
For three tense seconds she waited for a response. None came. No one seconded her motion. Brudnoy, sitting off in a corner of the room where the camera could not pick him up, looked at her with growing pain in his expression.
That’s it, Joanna told herself. Rashid’s in control of the board and I’m not. He’s been using this crisis to solidify his position and undermine mine.
“Very well,” Joanna said at last. “It’s clear that this board is not going to support Moonbase. We’ll have to defend ourselves in spite of you.”
When Rashid heard her words he smiled thinly. “And how to you propose to defend Moonbase, may I ask?”
“We’ll fight with everything we’ve got!”
Rashid smile widened. “You sound like Churchill after Dunkirk, Joanna. “We shall fight them on the beaches and the landing fields. We shall fight them in the cities and the streets.” Do you intend to turn Moonbase into a battlefield?”
&
nbsp; “If I have to,” she snapped.
Before Rashid could respond she added, “Churchill won his war. I intend to win mine.”
And she banged the manual switch that cut off the transmission. The smart walls went dark.
Brudnoy got up from his chair and walked across the small room to sit beside his wife. “At the end of that famous speech that Churchill gave,” he said, “he supposedly added, under his breath, that the British would have to throw beer bottles at the Nazis, because that’s all they had left to fight with.”
Joanna looked into his sad eyes.
“We don’t even have beer bottles, I’m afraid,” Brudnoy said softly.
“I know,” said Joanna, fighting back the tears that wanted to fill her eyes. “I know.”
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 6 HOURS 11 MINUTES
Captain Munasinghe pushed the plastic plug deeper into his ear and waited impatiently for his laptop to finish decoding the message from New York.
At last the computer’s synthesized voice said, “Com-mander-in-Chief, United Nations Peacekeeping Forces to Commander, Lunar Expeditionary Force: Urgent and Top Secret. Message begins. Latest intelligence on enemy intentions. Sources indicate Moonbase will resist your force with all means available to them. You are advised to take every precaution and to be prepared for armed resistance. Message ends.”
Munasinghe nodded to himself and glanced at the American newswoman sitting across the aisle from him. She seemed deep in earnest conversation over her own comm link back to Earth.
He floated out of his chair, fighting back the queasiness that still assailed him whenever he moved. Hovering in the aisle next to his second-in-command, he said, “Start them checking their weapons.”
“Now?” The Norwegian lieutenant blinked his ice-blue eyes at Munasinghe. “We still have six hours before touchdown.”
“Now,” Munasinghe said firmly. “I want the grenades and other explosives checked out and parcelled among the troops. All guns checked. Then start them getting into their spacesuits. We must be prepared for hostile action the instant we land. Fully armed and fully prepared.”
Edith Elgin was furious.
“What do you mean you can’t run the interview?” she hissed into the pin mike that almost touched her lips.
The spacecraft was so far from Earth that it took seconds for her boss’s answer to come back to her.
The decision was made on the twentieth floor, Edie. Nothing I can do about it.”
“But the captain as much as admitted that they’re going in shooting!” Edith wanted to shout, but she had to whisper. It made the whole situation doubly frustrating. “He’d just as soon blast Moonbase with a nuke, if he had one.”
Again the agonizing wait. “Don’t you think I want to run the piece, Edie? It’s great stuff. But my hands are tied! The suits upstairs want to play ball with Faure and the Peacekeepers. At least for now.”
Yeah, Edie said to herself. And after this bloodthirsty captain wipes out Moonbase the suits will want the interview burned because it’ll show what shitheads they are.
“They’re coming right down the pipe,” said the landing controller.
Doug leaned over her shoulder and looked at her radar screen. Only one blip, the Peacekeepers’ Clippership. It was precisely aligned on the grid of thin glowing lines that represented Moonbase’s landing corridor. The spaceport control complex was dark and empty except for this one console. Still, Doug felt the tension that the one solitary blip generated.
“You’ve told them that all four pads are occupied?” Doug asked.
“Yep,” the controller replied without turning from her screen.
“No response from them?”
“Not a peep. They’re not gonna turn around just because we haven’t laid out the welcome mat for them.”
“No,” Doug admitted. “I guess not.”
“Six hours, four minutes,” the controller said, pointing to the digital time display on her console.
“Keep sending them the message. I don’t want them to crash on landing.”
The controller turned in her little chair and looked up at him for the first time. “Why the hell not?” she asked.
The mercenary was sweating as he slipped the fingernail-sized chip into the computer on the desk in his quarters. Electronic germ warfare, he thought: a computer virus.
He was far from being a computer expert, but the chip he had carried in the heel of a shoe was supposed to be totally self-sufficient. Just get access to the right program and stick the chip’s virus into it. Easy, they had told him. Still, the mercenary sweated as he worked his way into the guarded programs that ran Moonbase’s vital systems.
It had been no big deal to ferret out the necessary passwords and coded instructions. Security at Moonbase was a joke. A couple of rounds of expensive real beer, hauled up from Earthside, and a guy was your buddy for life, even if you were black.
The computer program that ran Moonbase’s electrical distribution system was an expert system, with built-in fault diagnosis. The virus was designed to infiltrate the fault diagnosis subprogram and indicate that a dangerous overvoltage had suddenly appeared in the main trunk that connected the solar farms with the base transformers. That would cause the computer to lower the voltage throughout Moonbase: a brown-out. When the virus insisted that the voltage was still too high, the computer would be forced to shut down the main distribution system altogether and throw Moonbase onto its backup fuel cell systems, which were good for only twelve hours, maximum.
By the time they debugged the computer the Peacekeepers would be running the base.
The only light in the mercenary’s quarters was the glow from the display screen, projecting onto his face the multi-colored lines and nodes of the distribution system’s schematic diagram like the warpaint of a Sioux brave.
SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED
The mercenary nodded to himself. You bet you got a system anomaly, he said silently to the computer.
CHECKING SYSTEM ANOMALY
Go right ahead and check your ass off, he told the machine. Check yourself into a nervous breakdown.
SYSTEM ANOMALY REJECTED
“What?” he yelped aloud. He jabbed at the keyboard, expanding the message.
Goddamn, he said to himself. The display screen showed that the program had automatically checked the overvoltage message against independent sensors built into the electrical lines and decided that the message was false.
VIRUS LOCATED, the display screen announced, with no emotion whatever.
VIRUS ELIMINATED
The mercenary banged his fist on the console hard enough to make the screen blink. Damn! he said to himself. Goddamn virus they gave me isn’t worth shit. Fuckin’ expert system is smarter than the fuckin’ virus.
He tried to insert the virus twice more, and both times the fault diagnosis subprogram identified the virus and erased it. Wondering if the program kept a record of attempts to bug it, and if so, whether it automatically notified the security department, the mercenary angrily yanked the chip from the computer slot and decided to toss it into the garbage reprocessor.
That’s all it’s good for, he thought. Garbage.
He slumped down on his bunk and turned on the wall screen. Stavenger was piping the radar plot from the landing control complex onto the base’s general information channel. Less than six hours until the Peacekeepers landed.
He’s a strange one, thought the mercenary. He’s a couple years younger than me, but he’s old beyond his years. Or maybe it’s just that most guys his age haven’t faced any real responsibilities, so they still act like kids.
Stavenger knows what responsibility is. Got to respect him for that. Like me, a little. We both know what it feels like to have a load on your shoulders.
Over the past several days there had been four times when he had been alone with Stavenger, when he could have snapped Stavenger’s neck or driven the cartilage of his nose into his brain with a single sharp blow from the heel of hi
s hand. He’d be dead before he hit the floor.
Yet the mercenary had stayed his hand. Not yet, he had told himself. Don’t kill him yet. Let the virus do the job. He’s not ready to die.
But the virus has failed. Now it’s up to me.
Stavenger did not act like a man seeking death. The young man brimmed with life, with energy and purpose. Wait, the mercenary advised himself, wait until the precise moment.
They were so unprepared to fight, these men and women of Moonbase, so totally lacking in weapons and skills and even the will to resist, that the mercenary found it almost laughable. Why kill Stavenger or any of the rest of them when the Peacekeepers will be able to walk in here and take over without firing a shot?
Wait. Watch and wait. If it actually comes down to a fight, then that will be the time to take out Stavenger and as many of the others as he could reach.
It would be a shame, though. He was getting to like Stavenger. Almost.
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 4 HOURS 4 MINUTES
Loosely restrained by her seat harness, so that she floated lightly in her seat, hardly touching its plastic surface, Edith looked across the Clippership’s aisle at the man sitting beside Captain Munasinghe. He was a civilian, and a few hours after they had lifted off from Corsica he had made a point of introducing himself: Jack Killifer.
He was coming on to her, but Edith frosted him off with a polite smile and buried her nose in her notebook computer. I’m not spending the next four days getting groped by some stranger in front of forty soldiers, she decided.
There was something grim about him. He didn’t seem fazed in the slightest by the zero gee of spaceflight, the way Munasinghe and the other troopers were. Instead he looked as if he were impatient to get to Moonbase and get the job over with. A lean, lantern-jawed, intense man, Edith thought. A man with a personal agenda.
