by Ben Bova
“No.” Faure was surprised to hear his own response.
He realized that he had made his decision before he consciously recognized it. Yamagata wants Moonbase intact, so he can take it over and use it for his own purposes. I want Moonbase destroyed, Faure finally understood. Utterly destroyed. Its inhabitants killed. I want it levelled the way the Romans razed Carthage. And then salt strewn across the ruins to assure that nothing will grow there again.
Moonbase has defied me, and for that they must be punished.
Why should I allow Yamagata to have it as a gift? He will continue to use nanotechnology and show all the world that I am merely his puppet. But that is not the case, no, not at all. Georges Henri Faure is no one’s puppet! I am secretary-general of the United Nations and Moonbase must bow to my will or be destroyed. And Yamagata must understand that I do not serve him; he serves me.
Giap was asking, “You don’t want me to cut off their electrical power?”
“No,” Faure repeated, realizing that it was all playing into his hands. Everything was going to be exactly as he wanted it. “Use ths volunteers.”
It was all falling perfectly into place, after all, Faure thought. Instead of accepting Moonbsse’s surrender I will smite them. The nanotechnology treaty will be enforced; Yamagata will not be allowed to make a mockery of it. Or of me.
“Sir, I want to be certain that I have understood you correctly,” Giap said. “Are you ordering me to use the volunteers?”
“Yes, mon colonel, that is an order.”
The delay from Giap seemed to take longer than three seconds this time. “They will destroy Moonbase,” he said, his voice hushed. “There will be many casualties.”
“So be it,” Faure replied. Better to destroy Moonbase than to allow Yamagata or anyone else to make a farce of my power, he told himself.
“Their hour’s almost up,” Anson pointed out.
Doug had been pacing around the control center, getting some circulation back in his legs, working out the stiffness of his back and shoulders.
The center had been in a state of suspended animation since Doug’s discussion with Colonel Giap. Is it over? Have we won? Or will there be another attack, something new, something we haven’t thought of, something we’re not prepared to meet?
Why haven’t they tried to cut the lines from the solar farms? Doug asked himself. Is it because they thought their nuke would do that job for them? We’re still vulnerable, still hanging by a thread.
Unbidden, a line from a literature class came to him: ‘The ides of March are come,’ Caesar says to the soothsayer, as he goes into the Senate, deriding the old man’s warning. ‘Ay, Caesar,’ says the soothsayer; ‘but not gone.’
We’ve stopped them, Doug told himself. But for how long?
They were all watching him: Jinny, Falcone, even Gordette, standing alone off by the wall. Every technician and specialist in the control center had his eyes on Doug. I wonder were Edith is? he asked himself. Did she go to our quarters for a nap? Bet not.
Edith was napping, but not in the quarters she shared with Doug.
She had tottered back to the university’s studio, dog tired now that the adrenaline of being on the air had drained out of her, but intent on getting a camera and recording the doings in the control center.
She looked in on the editing booth, still hot and sweaty from her hours in it, feeling slightly nettled that she didn’t know for certain how many hours she’d spent broadcasting to Global News and, through Global, to the world.
She started for one of the hand-sized cameras resting in its rack, but Zimmerman’s big plush couch looked too inviting to resist. Just a few minutes’ snooze, she told herself. Stretching out on it, she was asleep within seconds.
“You heard the secretary-general’s orders,” said the volunteer. ‘We will bring you victory.”
Giap turned to the leader of the self-styled Sacred Seven, sitting beside him on the tractor’s bench.
“Not victory,” he snarled. “Annihilation.”
The young Japanese must have smiled behind his helmet visor. “As the secretary-general said, so be it.”
The colonel had no reply. Yet he was thinking, I could still cut their electrical power lines. How long could they hold out then? A few hours, at most. They would have to surrender to me. That would be better than allowing these insane suicide bombers to kill everyone.
“I suggest,” the volunteer said,’that you re-establish negotiations with the Moonbase commander, while your troopers help us to break into the plasma vent tunnels, as per our plan.”
Giap noticed a slight but definite stress on the word our.
Precisely one hour after his conversation with the Peacekeeper commander ended, Doug sat at his console again and re-opened the communications link.
“Have you spoken with your superiors, Colonel?” he asked.
“Yes. They are reluctant to admit that we have reached a stalemate here,” came the colonel’s voice.
Doug wished he could see the man’s face. He sensed a tone he hadn’t heard in their first discussion.
“What are you trying to say?” he asked.
“I am responsible directly to the secretary-general of the United Nations,” Giap said. “My orders come directly from him.”
Doug leaned forward anxiously in his chair. “And what are those orders?”
“He expects me to accept your surrender.”
Doug heard Anson mutter behind him, “When he can breathe vacuum, that’s when we’ll surrender.”
He said mildly to the blank screen, “Your first wave had to surrender to us, colonel.”
Giap seemed to hesitate. Then he replied, “It would be quite easy for us to cut off your electrical power supply.”
There it was, at last. Doug almost felt relieved. “Not as easy as you may think, Colonel,” he replied. “We’ve buried secondary lines to take over if the primaries are cut.”
“We have sensors that will find all the lines.”
“And we have your first wave’s weapons,” said Doug, putting some steel into his voice. “Don’t force us to use them.”
“So we will have a firefight? I believe my troops have more guns—and more ammunition for them.”
“How much oxygen do they have?” Doug asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How long can you remain out on the crater floor, colonel? Remember, we have some of your shoulder-fired missiles now. We can hit your tractors.”
“We have all the logistics we need. You should surrender to me and avoid useless bloodshed.”
Before Doug could reply, Gordette leaned over his shoulder and pointed to the screen showing the floor of the crater. “There’s some activity out there.”
Doug glanced at the screen. “Wait a moment, Colonel,” he said. I’ll be back with you in a few minutes.”
Cutting the connection to the Peacekeepers, Doug punched up a request to rerun the outside camera view.
“Look,” Gordette pointed. “Over there.”
A dozen spacesuited figures marched purposefully toward the main airlock. As they approached they walked out of the camera’s field of view.
“What do the cameras inside the garage show?”
Checking on them, Doug and Gordette saw that the view from inside the garage did not show the dozen troopers at all.
“They stopped outside, off to one side of the main airlock,” Doug said.
“Why?” asked Gordette.
“I’ll try to find out,” said Doug.
Colonel Giap was alone in the tractor’s cab now. Through his binoculars he could see a squad of his troopers helping the Sacred Seven up an aluminum ladder they had placed against the face of the mountain, just to the side of Moonbase’s main airlock. They were struggling to open the square hatch that led into the old plasma vents.
Giap had studied Moonbase’s layout until he knew it as well as the face of his beloved mother. The plasma vents were from Moonbase’s earliest
days, when the builders were excavating tunnels by boiling away the rock with high-temperature plasma torches. The vents let the ultra-hot vapors blow out into the vacuum outside. The vents had not been used, as far as Giap knew, in years. Yet they threaded through the rock above the main corridors of Moonbase. Crawling through them, a man could reach every critical part of the base.
The volunteers will penetrate the base before the rebels know they are being infiltrated. Their first warning will be when the fanatics begin to blow themselves up. Themselves, and every crucial part of Moonbase.
“Colonel Giap?” Stavenger’s voice sounded in his earphones.
“I am still here,” he answered.
“We saw a dozen or so of your troops move off to one side of the main airlock. Now they’re out of our camera’s view. What’s going on?”
Giap was prepared for the question. “They are setting up a maintenance station to repair the spacesuits your dust has fouled. They are trying to remove the dust from their faceplates and joints.”
Stavenger did not reply immediately. Does he believe my lie? Giap wondered.
“Let’s get back to the main point,” the Moonbase commander said at last. “Are you willing to withdraw and leave us in peace?”
“I am not allowed to do so,” Giap stalled. “My orders do not permit it.”
“If you try to cut off our electricity we’ll be forced to fire on you.”
Giap thought the man’s voice sounded very reluctant.
“Then I suggest you surrender, now. While you have the chance.”
“…While you have the chance,” Giap’s voice had an urgency to it that made alarm bells ring in Doug’s head.
“What do you mean?” he asked. “You won’t accept a surrender if you’re able to cut off our electricity?”
No answer for several long moments. Then the colonel replied, “If you fire upon my troopers, if a firefight is started, who knows what will happen next? A battle is not a predictable thing. There will be many deaths.”
Doug got the distinct feeling that there was a hidden subtext in the colonel’s words. He wants me to read between the lines, Doug thought. What’s he trying to say?
“Colonel, I wonder what—”
The control center shook so abruptly that Doug nearly toppled off his chair. A low rumble echoed through the rock chamber. The lights flickered.
“What was that?”
“A quake?”
“An explosion!”
Doug scanned his screens with newfound intensity. The solar farms seemed intact; no one was even near them.
“The water factory!” a technician yelped. “We’ve lost contact with the water factory.”
“The bastards have blown up the water factory!”
CONTROL CENTER
“Give me a view of the water factory!” Doug yelled.
“Cameras are out,” a technician hollered back.
Doug saw a blank screen where the view of the factory should have been.
“Jinny, get a repair team in there!”
“Already on their way,” Anson yelled over her shoulder, halfway to the door.
“How did it happen?”
“Rerun the security camera.”
With Gordette grasping both his shoulders from behind him, Doug saw the camera’s view of the automated water factory. A blur of a figure dropped out of the top of the picture; a flash and then the camera went dead.
“What was that?” Doug asked.
“A man,” said Gordette. “A person, anyway.”
“In a spacesuit,” someone else said.
“Spacesuit…?” Doug’s heart clutched in his chest. “The plasma vents! He came in through the old plasma vents!”
“What the hell are plasma vents?” Gordette asked.
The explosion staggered Zimmerman in his nanolab. A metal cylinder rolled of the bench and crashed to the tiled floor. Inoguchi grabbed the edge of the lab bench where he was standing to steady himself.
“A bomb?” Inoguchi asked.
“Or an accident of some sort,” said Zimmerman. The two scientists had been working flat out on producing therapeutic nanomachines for Cardenas and the medical team in the infirmary. They had not followed the course of the battle. Zimmerman had insisted that he didn’t want to know, not until it was over and decided, one way or the other.
“Should you try to find out?” Inoguchi said, looking worried. “Perhaps we should evacuate this laboratory?”
“Leave?” Zimmerman’s shaggy brows shot up. “Before we have finished this batch? Abandon our work? Never!”
Inoguchi edged toward the nearest phone console. “Perhaps we should at least attempt to determine what has happened.”
“Good. You call. I want to check the progress—”
An overhead panel ripped open with a blood-freezing screech of metal upon metal and two spacesuited figures dropped down in dreamy lunar slow-motion into the middle of the lab.
’Gott in Himmeir Zimmerman roared. “What is this? How can I work with such interruptions?”
The two figures walked slowly among the lab benches, turning every which way like children wandering through a toy store, as they approached the two scientists. Their spacesuits were bundled around their middles with bulky packages wrapped in plastic, with a simple small black box taped to them.
Inoguchi saw a red pushbutton on the black box of the intruder nearest him. Detonators! he realized.
The person nearest Zimmerman raised the visor of his helmet, revealing the face of a handsome young man with a neatly clipped dark beard.
“This is the nanotechnology laboratory?” he asked, in Oxford-accented English.
“Who are you?” Zimmerman demanded. “What are you doing in here?”
“Bombs,” Inoguchi gasped, backing away toward the door to the corridor. “Suicide bombers!”
“Do not move!” the bearded young man commanded. Inoguchi froze in his tracks.
The other intruder raised her visor. “You are Professor Zimmerman, aren’t you?” she asked in a sweet, lilting voice.
“Yes, and you are interrupting work of the utmost importance,” Zimmerman blustered.
The young woman smiled. “God is great,” she said, and pushed her detonator button.
Zimmerman saw a flash and then nothing.
The second explosion rattled the control center even harder than the first.
“They got the nanolab!”
“We’re under attack!”
The plasma vents, Doug thought, remembering how he himself had crawled through the old vents, years ago, to get to the environmental control center before his insane half-brother could destroy it.
There’s a double hatch in the face of the mountain, he recalled, a sort of primitive airlock. The vents are filled with air, but they can be opened to vacuum from here in the control center. Then he recalled that the intruder who dropped in on the water factory was in a spacesuit.
Someone was replaying the security camera view of the nanolab. Two spacesuited figures dropped in from the overhead vent.
Zimmerman! Doug suddenly realized.
“You’ve killed Professor Zimmerman!” he bellowed into his microphone. “You’ve killed Professor Zimmerman!”
Sitting alone in the cab of his tractor, Colonel Giap heard Stavenger’s agonized wail.
“What are you doing to us?” the Moonbase leader howled. “Why? Why kill that old man?”
Why, indeed? Giap asked himself. Because a politician in New York ordered me to do it and I obey my orders. A soldier must obey orders, no matter how distasteful they may be. Without iron discipline no army can endure.
“This isn’t war,” Stavenger was shouting in his earphones. “It’s butchery. It’s indiscriminate slaughter.”
“Yes,” Giap said, so softly that he wasn’t certain he said it at all. “Their intention is to wipe out Moonbase and everyone in it.”
“You’re going to kill us all.”
“Not I,” Giap said
. “This is not my doing, not my wish. I am only following orders.”
“So was Himmler and Bormann and all the other Nazis.” Stavenger’s voice was acid.
Giap was silent for a moment, thinking, I have no orders that forbid me from telling him what he is facing. Faure did not command me to silence. Perhaps…
The colonel heard himself say, “You are being attacked by suicide bombers. Fanatics. Not Peacekeeper troops. Volunteers from the New Morality.” His words came in a rush, as if he were afraid that if he stopped for an instant, took a breath or even a thought, he would close his mouth and say no more. “There are seven of them: one each for your water factory, environmental control center, electrical distribution station, control center and farm. Two for the nanotechnology laboratories.”
Stavenger’s voice was instantly calm, hard. “They’re coming in through the old plasma vents?”
Giap nodded inside his helmet as he said, “Yes.”
“And even if we surrender, they’re going to blow up so much of Moonbase that we’ll all be killed.”
Again Giap nodded, but this time he couldn’t force even the one syllable past his lips.
He turned off his radio connection with Moonbase. Further discussion would be fruitless, purposeless, ridiculous, he told himself. Now it is up to the people of Moonbase to defend themselves, if they can. I have told them more than I should. Now we will see what they can do with my information. If anything.
A screech of metal on metal startled Edith from her nap. She jerked up to a sitting position, blood running cold. Again! Like fingernails across a chalkboard.
As she blinked and looked around the darkened studio, a man in a spacesuit floated down from the shadowy ceiling and landed with a thump that buckled his knees.
Edith got up from Zimmerman’s wide couch and went to the man, helped him to his feet.
“What’re you doing here?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
His reply was muffled by his helmet. Something about the control center, she thought.
“Can’t hear you. Lift up your visor, you don’t need to be sealed up inside your suit.”
He lifted his visor. He was young, oriental.
“This is the control center?” he asked.
Edith shook her head. “You’re ’way off base. The control center’s almost half a—”
