Moonwar gt-7

by Ben Bova

She pressed the stud that sent the view from Mount Yeager’s camera Earthward. “Now the Peacekeeper assault force is moving across Mare Nubium, approaching Moonbase. What you are seeing now…”

  Georges Faure was far from composed as he sat in his office, watching the broadcast of Global News. He fidgeted in his big chair, seething with anger. To think that this woman, this slut of a reporter who had seduced him into allowing her to accompany the original Peacekeeper force to the Moon, to think that she was such a traitor, such a propagandist for the rebels—it exasperated him.

  Yet a part of him was thrilled at the sight of the Peacekeeper armada crossing Mare Nubium. These are my troops, Faure told himself, marching under my orders. Let the news media say what they will, in a matter of hours Moonbase will be under my control, as it should be.

  And if those rebellious fools attempt the resistance, they will be crushed. As they should be.

  Colonel Giap compared the electronic map on the display screen of his tractor’s cab with the view of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains looming before him. His tractor cab was pressurized and armored, so he could ride with the visor of his spacesuit helmet open. He could have made this journey in shirtsleeves, had he chosen to, but that would have meant that he would have to don his spacesuit once they arrived at their designated campsite. He had decided to endure the discomfort of forty-three hours in the spacesuit, instead.

  Most of the trip he had spent worrying about nanomachines. Moonbase had no weapons to speak of, he knew, but what kind of devilish weaponry could their nanoscientists devise? Nanomachines had driven off the first Peacekeeper attack. Giap had chosen broad daylight to make his assault, but inside the tunnels of Moonbase the purifying effect of solar ultraviolet did not penetrate. That is why Giap had included special teams of civilians with powerful UV lamps to accompany his troops. He did not intend to be run off by invisible, insidious nanoweapons.

  Their base camp location had been carefully chosen to position them close to the two easiest passes over the ringwall mountains, while still placing them within the sheltering lee of the mountains themselves. Those solid piles of rock would protect them from the radiation pulse of the nuclear explosion. There was no need to worry about blast effects in the lunar vacuum, but even if there were the mountains would shelter them, just as it will protect us from the radiation and heat pulse, Giap assured himself.

  Still, a tendril of worry gnawed at him. The missile must be accurately aimed. And its warhead must be fused at precisely the correct altitude. If it goes off too soon, or its aim is a fraction of a degree off-target, we could be hit by the heat and radiation.

  He reached out a gloved hand to touch the armored roof of the tractor’s cab. Enough protection against a slightly mis-aimed nuclear warhead? he wondered. More likely the metal would serve as an efficient oven, to roast us all to death.

  Shaking his head inside the helmet, he tried to push such fears away by attending to his duties. He established communications contact with L-1, although the link was weak and strained with harsh bursts of static. The tractor comm sets were far from satisfactory and sunspots or some other esoteric phenomena could hash up communications quite maddeningly.

  The image of a Peacekeeper junior officer appeared on the little screen, wavering slightly and streaked with electronic snow.

  “We are on schedule,” Giap informed the junior officer. “All my vehicles will be at their assigned base camp positions within two hours.”

  “Very well,” came the woman’s voice, through hissing static. “Missile launch will proceed on schedule unless you order otherwise.”

  “Yes, launch on schedule,” said Giap, wondering how firm a comm link they would have once his vehicle was parked up close to the ringwall mountains.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  “Mrs President, you’ve got real troubles with this Moonbase business.”

  The President gave her staff chief a chilling look, the kind that had been known to cause lesser men to write out their resignations.

  The chief of the White House staff was an old hand at this kind of thing, though; he had been with the President since she had first run for the Senate, many elections earlier.

  “I mean,” he said, hunching forward in the Kennedy rocker in front of her broad, modern desk,’the poll numbers are changing so fast we can’t keep up with them.”

  “The trend?” she snapped.

  “Swinging steadily in favor of Moonbase. Those news broadcasts Global’s airing are turning the public’s opinion around a hundred eighty degrees.”

  The President turned her chair away from this man she knew so well, away from his earnest, worried face and the problems that slumped his shoulders. She looked out through the long windows to the flower garden that had soothed both Roosevelts and everyone else who had sat at this apex of power in the Oval Office.

  “I mean it, Luce,” her staff chief said,’this has turned into real trouble.”

  “What about the New Morality?” she asked, still without looking at him.

  He did the unthinkable. He got up from the rocking chair and walked around her desk, forcing her to face him.

  Bending his knees slightly and leaning his liver-spotted hands on them so his eyes were on the same level as hers, he said gently, “They’re not going to be enough, Luce. The public’s demanding that you do something.”

  She glared at him and swung back to the desk. He returned to the rocking chair.

  “Are you telling me that O’Conner and Previs and all the other New Morality leaders are abandoning me on this?”

  “No, not at all,” he said, raising his hands. “The hard core of the Faithful are with you as much as they’ve ever been. They see this fight on the Moon as the battle between the forces of good and the evils of nanotechnology.”

  “So where’s my problem?”

  “It’s the peripherals,” he said with a sigh. “You’ve got the hard core, they’re solidly with you. But the hard core isn’t that many votes, Luce! The New Morality’s real strength has been in its numbers, yeah, but most of those numbers aren’t fanatics. They’re ordinary folks who think the New Morality’s ideas about cleaning up crime and vice are pretty good.”

  “And now?”

  “Now they’re looking at their television screens and seeing the big, bad U.N. attacking poor little Moonbase. And most of those people at Moonbase are Americans.”

  “Who use nanomachines.”

  The staff chief shook his head. “The voters don’t care that much about the nanomachines. What’s getting them worked up is the sight of a bunch of Americans getting attacked by the Peacekeepers—who are mostly foreigners.”

  “But they elected me because I pushed the nanotech treaty.”

  “That’s not important to them now. As long as the Moon people keep their nanomachines on the Moon, the average American voter doesn’t care a gnat’s fart about it.”

  The President glared at her staff chief for long icy moments.

  He gave her a weak grin. “Don’t blame the messenger for the message,” he said.

  She huffed at him, then reached out and flicked on her desktop computer. “I want to see these numbers for myself.”

  The staff chief leaned back in the rocker and watched her face as the data from the constantly ongoing public-opinion poll flickered across her screen.

  When she finally looked up at him she asked, “What should I do?”

  “Call Faure and tell him to back off, maybe?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! It’s much too late for that.”

  “At least tell him that you’re concerned about the safety of the American citizens at Moonbase.”

  “But they’ve declared their independence! They don’t want American citizenship!”

  “We don’t know if that’s just a ploy or not. Either way, there’re probably a lot of men and women up there who want to keep their citizenship and come back to the States as soon as they can.”

  The President shook her head. “I
can’t weasel on Faure. I’ve been one of his strongest supporters! If I turn on him now, the word of this Administration will be worthless all around the world. Nobody would trust us again.”

  “I’m thinking about your re-election campaign.”

  She waved a hand in the air. “That’s next year, for God’s sake. By that time Moonbase will be under U.N. control and this whole flap will be forgotten.”

  Her staff chief still looked worried.

  “All right,” the President said,’so Yamagata will be running Moonbase and taking over the spacecraft market. If Masterson Corporation goes for it, what am I going to do about it?”

  “Once the opposition starts gnawing on that bone…”

  She shook her head stubbornly.

  “They’re already starting to make noises in the Senate,” he insisted. “Joanna Brudnoy’s been talking with half the committee chairmen on the Hill.”

  “It’s a fait accompli,” the President said curtly. “In another forty-eight hours or so the Peacekeepers will have taken over Moonbase and this whole problem will resolve itself.”

  “Maybe,” the staff chief said softly. “But what happens if Moonbase drives the Peacekeepers off? They did it once, you know.”

  She scoffed at him. “That’s impossible and you know it.”

  “Yeah. But still…”

  “Don’t you intend to sleep?” Lev Brudnoy asked his wife.

  Joanna sat in the exact center of the largest sofa in their living room, her eyes riveted to the big Windowall screen above the dark fireplace.

  “I couldn’t sleep if I tried, Lev,” she replied. “Not with this going on.”

  The screen showed the view from the cameras atop Mount Yeager. The Peacekeepers’ vehicles were slowing to a halt at the base of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. They were arranging themselves in a single thin, undulating line that snaked along the flank of the mountains, each newly arriving tractor taking its position at the end of the constantly growing line. The cameras’ resolution was fine enough to spot individual soldiers, if any appeared, but the vehicles stayed tightly buttoned up. Joanna could see the spokes of their springy wheels and the cleats on the tractors’ treads, but no person got out of the vehicles.

  They’re waiting, Joanna thought. Waiting for the missile that will be launched from L-1. Then they’ll attack. They’ll storm Moonbase, and Doug will try to stop them and they’ll kill my son and destroy everything.

  Brudnoy sank his lanky frame onto the sofa next to her, murmuring, “At least we could go upstairs and watch from bed. Nothing is going to happen for another nine or ten hours, at least.”

  “You go if you’re getting sleepy,” Joanna said, not moving her eyes from the screen. Edie Elgin had been speaking for nearly an hour, but now her voice had stopped and the screen was silent.

  He shrugged and sat beside her for several minutes. “This is like watching ice melt,” he grumbled. “It’s hypnotic. Don’t you feel your eyes growing heavy? Sleepy? Drowsy?”

  Joanna poked at him with her elbow. “Stop it, Lev!”

  “At least come up to bed,” he urged. “The screen up there will show the same picture, I assure you.”

  “No.”

  Brudnoy got slowly to his feet, then bent down to put his bearded face in front of Joanna’s, noses almost touching.

  “My darling wife,” he said, blocking her view of the screen. “I have seldom insisted on my rights as your lord and master—”

  “My what?”

  “But there comes a time when a man must do what a man must do. Either you come up to the bedroom with me or I will be forced to carry you.”

  “We’re not on the Moon, Lev,” Joanna said, smiling at him despite herself. “You’ll give yourself a hernia.”

  “That will be entirely your fault, not mine,” he said, very seriously. With that, he reached one arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her legs.

  “All right!” Joanna yelped. “All right! I’ll go upstairs. I’ll go with you.”

  Brudnoy straightened up. “Good,” he said, offering her his hand.

  And as she allowed her husband to help her up from the sofa and started for the bedroom, Jack Killifer—watching from the dining room door that he had opened a crack—also said, “Good,” in a whisper that only he could hear.

  Doug was nervously munching a sandwich, sitting on one of the spindly chairs in front of a console in the control center. Like his mother, like the millions of people Earthside watching Global News, like the men and women who had gathered in The Cave to wait out the battle, Doug was watching the camera views from Mount Yeager.

  “They’re not doing anything,” he murmured.

  Bam Gordette, standing slightly behind Doug like a bodyguard, said, “That’s the army: hurry up and wait.”

  Doug thought that the thirty-klicks-per-hour pace of the Peacekeepers’ vehicles hardly qualified for hurrying up, but they were definitely waiting now.

  The control center had settled into a waiting mode also. Everything that could be done to prepare Moonbase’s defenses had been done. Nick O’Malley paced nervously a few consoles away, hoping that his dust would work as he had promised. Vince Falcone and his crew had finally come back from Wodjo Pass, grumbling and griping about the foamgel’s intractability but satisfied that they had covered as much of the pass as they could.

  Wix and his people are still working on the particle gun, Doug knew. They’re the key to our defense, the crucial link in the chain. If they can’t stop that nuclear missile we might as well surrender. We’ll have to surrender.

  Nothing had moved out on the Mare Nubium for at least an hour.

  “They’re waiting for the missile strike,” Doug said to no one in particular.

  As if in response, one of the comm techs sang out, “They’ve launched! Rocket flare from L-1. Their missile’s heading our way.”

  MASS DRIVER

  Robert T. Wicksen was still outside, checking the wiring connections from the main magnets to the hastily installed switching panel, when the word came from the control center:

  “L-1’s launched their bird.”

  By reflex, he looked up. Instead of the sky he saw the inside of his helmet, dark and confining.

  “How much time do we have?” he asked calmly.

  “Wait one,” the comm tech’s voice said in his earphones. Then he heard her muttering, “Doppler plot… burn rate…acceleration—looks like… one hundred fifty-six minutes, according to the computer.”

  “Two and a half hours, plus six minutes.”

  “If they don’t light a second stage.”

  “Keep me informed.”

  “Will do.”

  Switching to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wix told the four volunteers still working with him, “We have two and a half hours. Double check everything.”

  The spacesuited figures bent to their work.

  “That’s the nuke,” Doug muttered.

  “Must be,” said Jinny Anson. Like Doug, she was staring at the screen showing the blunt-nosed missile. It seemed to be hanging in space now that its rocket engine had shut down; the stars in the background did not move.

  Two and a half hours, Doug thought. What have we forgotten to do? Looking up, he traced the glowing lines on the electronic map of the base that covered one entire wall of the control center. Water factory, environmental control center, electrical power—they’re as protected as they’ll ever be. Turning to the insect-eye array of screens at the console he had commandeered, Doug saw displays of Wodjohowitcz Pass and the crater floor. Off near the brutally short horizon he could barely make out the ant-like forms of Wix and his volunteers still tinkering at the mass driver.

  Another screen showed the crowd in The Cave. They seemed calm enough. They’re safe, he told himself. Even if Wix’s gun fails and the nuke blasts out the solar farms, they’ll be unharmed. We’ll have to surrender, I guess, but they’ll be safe.

  Then a new fear assailed him. If they knock out ou
r electrical power we’ll only have a few hours’ worth of juice from the backup fuel cells. The Peacekeepers must have emergency power generators with them. They’ve got to! Otherwise everybody here will die in a couple of hours, asphyxiated from lack of air to breathe.

  The Peacekeepers won’t want to kill us all, he told himself. They’ll have emergency power supplies with them. Otherwise this’ll be a slaughter.

  “Why aren’t you in The Cave?” Kris Cardenas asked.

  Zimmerman looked up from the scanning probe microscope’s image-intensifier screen at his unexpected visitor. Keiji Inoguchi, on the other side of the room at the processor control board, stared at the sandy-haired, trim-figured Cardenas as if she were a video star.

  “And why should I be at The Cave? Am I expected at a party?”

  “Everyone who’s not assigned to a defense task is supposed to go to The Cave.”

  “Pah!” Zimmerman snapped his fingers.

  “Doug Stavenger’s orders,” Cardenas said.

  “So why are you not in The Cave?” Zimmerman demanded.

  She grinned as if she enjoyed fencing with him. “I’m on duty at the infirmary. I just ran up here to see how much of a supply of therapeutic nanobugs you had left for us.”

  “We are still working on them,” Zimmerman said.

  Turning her cornflower blue eyes to Inoguchi, Cardenas asked, “And you’re helping him?”

  Inoguchi bowed deeply, then replied, “It is my privilege to assist Professor Zimmerman, yes.”

  “But you’re one of the U.N. inspectors, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, that is true. But the medical work we are doing here is beyond the scope of politics.”

  Zimmerman scowled. “He’s learning everything he can in preparation for running the nanolab once Yamagata takes over the base.”

  Inoguchi looked stricken. “I am assisting you for humanitarian reasons!”

  “You are spying on me,” Zimmerman grumbled.

  “Now Willi,” Cardenas intervened, “you can’t attack Professor Inoguchi like that! It’s not polite and it isn’t fair.”

  “Yah. Of course. Only it is true.”