Moonwar gt-7

by Ben Bova

  Cardenas slumped in her chair. “Nanomachines aren’t going to be much help, then.”

  “We can knock out a nuclear warhead,” Paine insisted.

  “Maybe,” said Doug.

  “How’ll we deal with a whole regiment of Peacekeeper troops?” Anson asked glumly.

  “We’ll have to think of something,” said Doug, trying to show a cheerfulness he did not feel.

  “If we can keep on generating electricity…”

  Doug pushed his chair back from the table. “I want to talk to the head honcho of the physicists about this particle beam idea.”

  “The new guy,” Anson said. “He came up here on the last flight before this mess started.”

  “What’s his name,” Doug asked, “Wickens?”

  “Wicksen,” Paine corrected. “Robert T. Wicksen.”

  DAY SEVENTEEN

  After the meeting Doug went straight to the office of Robert T. Wicksen. The physicist was a small, slight man, built like a sparrow, but with large, intelligent, gray eyes magnified by old-fashioned rimless glasses.

  “Focus the particle beam on an incoming missile warhead?” Wicksen asked. His voice was flat and calm. He was not perturbed by Doug’s question, he merely repeated it to be certain he understood what Doug was asking. Physically he reminded Doug of a tarsier: little, cautious, big staring eyes. Yet he seemed composed, unruffled, perhaps unflappable.

  Wicksen’s office was a cubbyhole crammed with electronic gear. No desk, not even any chairs; only a pair of stools that looked as if Wicksen had crafted them himself out of lunar metals. Yet everything was as neat as a picture out of a sales catalogue. Everything in its proper place. All the equipment humming reassuringly. All the screens displayed data curves that flickered and shifted as they spoke. Wicksen himself was equally neat, in a crisp open-necked white shirt and perfectly creased dark gray trousers.

  “We need to know if it’s possible to convert your particle accelerator into a beam weapon,” Doug said, sitting on one of the room’s two stools.

  Sitting on the other stool, facing Doug like an elfish wizard in modern clothes, Wicksen nodded somberly. “It’s possible. Anything is possible.”

  “But can you do it, Dr Wicksen?”

  “Wix.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Wix. Everyone calls me Wix.”

  “All right… Wix. Can you do it?”

  Wicksen extended one arm and tapped idly on the keyboard nearest him. “Have to increase the power output, of course,” he muttered, more to himself than his visitor. “And focusing the beam isn’t a trivial problem.”

  Doug asked his question again, silently, with his eyes.

  Wicksen scratched his pointed chin a moment, then said, “Meet me at the mass driver tomorrow at ten. I’ll be able to answer you then.”

  Doug sensed that trying to urge this man or hurry him would be a waste of breath. Wicksen understood the situation they were in. Doug had noticed him at the meeting in The Cave the previous week. Yet the physicist showed neither worry nor disappointment at being asked to break off his experiments and convert his accelerator into a weapon. He seemed more curious than upset.

  “He’s a strange duck,” Doug said to Edith that night, in his quarters. She had moved in her meager possessions after their first three nights together.

  “I’ve interviewed lots of scientists,” Edith said, unzipping her white coveralls. “They’re all pretty weird, one way or the other.”

  “I’ve got to make a call Earthside,” Doug said, padding barefoot to his desk on the other side of the room partition. “Won’t take long,” he called to Edith.

  “I’ll keep the bed warm,” she called back.

  Grinning, Doug called Tamara Bonai at Tarawa. She was his one sure source of news about how things were going Earthside. His mother’s calls were tapped, both Doug and Joanna were certain, so she had to be careful about how much she told her son.

  But Tamara, as head of both the Kiribati Corporation and the island nation itself, could speak much more freely.

  “You owe me a fishing trip,” her image on the wall screen teased.

  She was on the beach, obviously just after a swim in the lagoon. Her flowered pareo clung wetly to her graceful figure; drops of water beaded her bare shoulders; her long dark hair glistened in the high afternoon sun.

  “As soon as I can get Earthside,” he promised anew. Then he asked, “How’s our publicity campaign?”

  As he waited for her reply, Doug admired her long slim legs and the nipples that pushed against the pareo’s thin fabric. Since he’d started sleeping with Edith he’d been noticing a lot more about the women he saw.

  “Every network is carrying your reports from Moonbase now,” Bonai said, smiling brightly as she sat cross-legged before the phone camera set on the sand before her. The camera automatically moved to keep her in focus.

  “And there is considerable turmoil among the board of Masterson Corporation. Now that your mother is here on Earth, she’s demanding a special meeting to take up the question of Moonbase’s political independence.”

  “How’s Rashid reacting?”

  Bonai turned to look out at the lagoon as she waited for Doug’s words to reach her. Then she turned back to the phone and said, “It’s difficult to read his reaction. I’m sure he wants to push through a merger with Yamagata, but that possibility could cause a major rift on the board and he’d prefer to avoid a confrontation, if he can.”

  Within a few seconds Doug forgot how enticing Bonai looked and fell deeply into a discussion with her about the politics of Masterson Corporation, the United Nations, and world public opinion.

  “Faure has not said a peep about Moonbase for more than a week now,” she reported. “He’s trying to ride out the waves your broadcasts have created.”

  Doug replied, “He’s planning another attack on us. I’m certain of it.”

  Once she heard him, Bonai shrugged her bare shoulders. “Could be, I suppose.”

  “Can you try to get closer to Rashid, Tamara? I need to know what he’s thinking, what he’s planning to do.”

  When her reply came to him, it was, “Are you asking me to use my feminine wiles on him?”

  “No, I—”

  But Bonai hadn’t waited for his response. She continued, “He has some reputation, you know. There are rumors he keeps a harem over in North Africa somewhere.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  She kept on, “It might be fun to see what he’s really like. Maybe I’ll invite him here for a private get-together.”

  “Tamara, I didn’t mean you should try to seduce him,” Doug said.

  She laughed. “Don’t be so uptight! He won’t be able to turn down a chance to win me over to his side.”

  “But—”

  “It’s nothing I won’t do for you when you come here for your fishing trip,” she added, mischievously.

  Feeling perplexed, Doug didn’t know what to say.

  Still smiling, Bonai said, “Don’t worry, Doug. I know what I’m doing. And I have plenty of big, strong bodyguards here to protect me—if I ask them to.”

  She clicked off the connection before Doug could reply.

  Frowning at the empty wall screen, Doug got to his feet. Edith was standing by the partition, wrapped in a towel, eying him.

  “Should I be jealous?” she asked.

  “No!” Doug blurted. “Of course not.”

  “She’s awful purty.” Edith used her Texas accent.

  “She’s the CEO of Kiribati Corporation,” Doug said. “She’s the person who got your first news report on the air Earthside.”

  “She’s still awful purty,” said Edith, reaching for him.

  Doug thought he should feel annoyed. Instead, he felt almost pleased with himself.

  As Doug rode on the tractor across Alphonsus’s cracked and pockmarked floor, he realized that this was the first time he’d been outside in weeks.

  He took a deep breath of canned s
uit air and felt his spirits rise. Strange, he thought, even sealed inside a spacesuit I feel free out here, happy. He looked up at the worn old mountains of the ringwall marching off across the horizon and recognized each rounded hump as an old friend from his childhood.

  It was my childhood when I climbed those mountains and rode around the whole ringwall, he realized. I don’t have time for that anymore. I’ve got an adult’s responsibilities now.

  Still, he relaxed and enjoyed the passing scenery: stark, barren, full of promise.

  Driving the tractor was like second nature to him. The big lumbering machine would probably trundle out to the mass driver on its own, even if Doug let go of the controls, following the cleated ruts laid down by thousands of tractor journeys across the dusty regolith. But Doug held onto the T-stick. There were enough craterlets and rocks strewn across the ground to cause trouble if he got careless, he knew.

  He realized that this was the first time he had been alone in weeks. Not even Bam Gordette was with him. Doug thought about the somber-faced black man. Gordette had been his constant companion wherever he went in Moonbase, his self-appointed protector. Bodyguard, chauffeur, military consultant: I’ve become dependent on him, Doug thought. I wonder what he thinks about all this. I’d like to think of him as a friend, but he’s so quiet and reserved it’s hard to tell what’s going on inside his head.

  He said he wanted to come outside with me, but he gave up the idea pretty easily when I told him it wasn’t necessary. Is he afraid of being out here on the surface? Doug almost laughed, inside his helmet. He couldn’t imagine Gordette afraid of anything.

  The mass driver came into view, a long dark finger of metal stretched across the crater floor. It had its own acreage of solar farms to provide electricity for the magnets that flung lunar ores toward the factories in orbit around the Earth. Since the U.N.’s siege had begun, the space factories had shut down their operations and the mass driver stood unused in the silence of the lunar landscape.

  Unused as an ore supplier.

  The physicists had been overjoyed at the shutdown. Years earlier they had built a linear particle accelerator along the three-and-a-half-kilometer length of the mass driver, using its powerful cryogenic magnets to energize subatomic particles for their experiments. But they could use the facility only when the mass driver wasn’’tbusy flinging packets of lunar ores off to the factories in Earth orbit. With the war the factories had been taken over by the U.N. The mass driver stood idle—and the physicists went into a frenzy of activity, ecstatic to use their particle accelerator twenty-four hours each day.

  It was easy to spot Wicksen among the spacesuited figures milling around the hardware. His slight figure was encased in a white spacesuit that had WIX stencilled in electric blue on the front of his helmet and across his backpack.

  Doug clambered down from the tractor and walked the last twenty meters to the group of people standing with Wicksen. They seemed to be huddled around him like a football team getting instructions from their quarterback.

  Flicking to the suit-to-suit frequency, Doug heard the physicist saying,’… you’ll be able to finish this series of runs while I’m putting the focusing magnets together.”

  “Here’s Doug now,” said one of the suited figures, pointing with a gloved hand.

  Wicksen turned and stepped toward Doug. “You’re a few minutes early.”

  “I made better time in the tractor than I expected,” Doug said.

  “That’s all right.” The diminutive physicist clasped the sleeve of Doug’s cermet suit. “Come along here, I want to show you what’s involved in this problem.”

  He walked Doug the length of the mass driver, explaining in minute detail every step that had to be accomplished in converting the accelerator to an anti-missile gun. Doug’s head was soon whirling with numbers and terms such as ‘beam collimator’ and ‘tesla limits’.

  Doug found his attention wandering to the solid bulk of the mass driver itself. It was a triumph of nanotechnology, the most intricate piece of machinery yet constructed by nanomachines. The project had floundered through several false starts, but once Kris Cardenas had come to Moonbase and sunk her teeth into it, the mass driver had slowly taken shape out here on the crater floor: cryogenic aluminum magnets and all.

  “Are you sufficiently confused?”

  Wicksen’s question snapped Doug’s attention back to the here and now.

  “What did you say?”

  He could sense Wicksen smiling gently. “I’ve snowed you with a pile of details. Does any of it make sense to you?”

  “Not much,” Doug admitted. “What I really need to know is, can you do it?”

  “Turn the accelerator into an anti-missile weapon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can?”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

  “How soon?” Doug asked.

  Wicksen hesitated a moment, then answered, “Two days.”

  “Two days? That’s all?”

  “Two lunar days,” Wicksen said.

  “Oh. You mean two months, then,” Doug said, crestfallen.

  “We might get lucky and have everything work the first time we try it. That could shave a week or so.”

  Two months, Doug thought. Will that be soon enough, or will Faure strike before then?

  “We’ll need a target satellite to test it against,” Wicksen added. “I was thinking that Kadar’s survey bird would make a good test target. He’s got all the data from it that he needs.”

  Doug heard a strange guttural sound in his earphones. Wicksen was chuckling at the thought of zapping Kadar’s satellite.

  He thanked the physicist and climbed back onto the tractor, wondering if there was some way to delay the attack that Faure was undoubtedly planning. Maybe Mom can get the World Court to hear our case before November. Or negotiate with Faure and try to settle this without another military confrontation.

  His mind was filled with possibilities, alternatives, strategies as he steered the tractor back across the twenty-kilometer distance to Moonbase’s main airlock.

  He had only gone a few kilometers, though, when his suit’s emergency alarm shrilled in his earphones.

  “What…?”

  Doug glanced down at the telltales on his wrist display. Air supply below safety minimum! Impossible, he told himself. I checked the suit out when I put it on. The air tank was full.

  Must be a malfunction in the electrical circuitry, he told himself. Still, he jammed the tractor’s throttle to its highest pitch. The ponderous machine lurched forward. There was no speedometer on the control panel; the tractor’s electrical motors could not move the machine more than thirty klicks per hour, Doug knew.

  Half an hour to the base, Doug thought. Better top off the backpack.

  With his left hand on the T-stick, Doug fumbled for the tractor’s oxygen hose, nested between the two front seats. He located it by feel and pulled it out of its housing. But when he tried to unscrew the cap of his backpack’s emergency fill-up, it would not move.

  How could it be frozen? Doug wondered, his mind racing. He could not remember if he’d tested it when he’d checked out the suit. I should have, he told himself. But he doubted that he did. Too goddamned complacent. Taking shortcuts in the checkout routine.

  “Air level approaching redline for life support,” the suit’s automatic emergency system warned. “Replenish air supply or change to another suit.”

  Good advice, Doug grumbled silently, out here at least fifteen klicks from the airlock.

  I can’t be running out of air, he insisted to himself. But he coughed.

  Desperately, he flicked to the base frequency and called, “This is Stavenger. I’m almost out of air! Need help!”

  “Got your beacon, Doug,” said the technician from the control center. “Hang on, we’ll send a team out for you.”

  Won’t do any good, he knew. They’ll be riding tractors, too. They can’t get
to me any faster than I can get to them.

  His breath caught in his throat. He felt as if he were gagging.

  “No… air…”

  An incredibly searing pain flamed through his chest. Christ almighty, my lungs are collapsing!

  Yet he remained conscious, acutely aware of everything happening to him.

  Can’t breathe! He was gasping, his right hand clawing at the collar of his helmet. Can’t breathe! The pain in his chest was excruciating, yet he did not pass out. His mind was still alert, still functioning.

  This is what drowning must be like. You try to breath but there’s no air.

  Deliberately, he turned off his suit radio. They’ve got the tractor’s beacon to track me. Don’t want them to hear me screaming.

  But he could not scream. There was no air in his lungs, no air in his throat. Nothing but pain and pain and more pain.

  And he could not collapse into oblivion. His legs, his gut, even his hands and arms were flaming with agony now, but the mercy of unconsciousness was not allowed him. Doggedly, tears blurring his vision, pain racking his body, he slumped over the tractor’s controls, too weak to sit upright. But still conscious.

  Time lost all meaning. Doug knew he was in hell: endless, eternal suffering. Damned, damned, damned to torment forever. The silent, stark lunar landscape trundled past slowly, maddeningly slowly. Doug felt as if he were mired in quicksand, already sucked down into it, unable to catch a breath, impossible to breathe, to move, to do anything but suffer.

  He wanted to faint, he wanted to die and get it over with. He thought deliriously that he must already be dead. Why, this is hell nor am I out of it.

  He could not breathe. He could not cough or gasp or cry or beg for mercy. Yet he could not end the pain. It went on and on, endlessly, while his mind shrieked and gibbered with horrified terror.

  Something banged into his helmet. He felt himself jerked back against the seat.

  Slowly the pain eased away. His last touch with the world drifted away from him, leaving him floating in darkness, alone, silent, free of pain and desire and fear.