by Ben Bova
She stopped. She realized that this stranger was wrapped in what looked like explosives.
The main door to the water factory was warped by the explosion. Jinny Anson had to get two of the biggest men she could find among the maintenance crew to push the damned door open.
Inside was nothing but carnage, a smoking wreckage of pipes and pumps, water gushing out into a crater ripped into the rock floor. Water! Being wasted, sloshing around across the floor, running out of pipes blasted loose and dangling from shattered supports.
Coughing as she advanced into the smokey ruins, Anson saw that the blast had dug a crater into the rock floor and water from the broken pipes was rushing into it.
“Get those pipes shut off,” she said to the maintenance team. “Turn off that water flow.”
“Water could leak into the tunnel below,” one of the men said.
Anson shook her head. “Doesn’t look like the crater’s deep enough. The blast didn’t penetrate into the lower level.”
A woman engineer pointed out, “Maybe so, but the water’s flowing into the piping and conduits between levels. Could short out the electrical lines.”
“Jesus on jet skis!” Anson growled. “If water seeps into the main distribution station…”
“Blackout,” said the engineer.
“First thing is to stop the incoming flow,” she said, pointing to the maintenance crew already working on the ends of the shattered pipes.
This water’s come all the way from the south pole, Anson told herself. And some brain-dead geek has to blast the factory apart and splash it all over the base. It was sacrilegious to her, to any of the old-time Lunatics, to waster precious water.
“How can we remove the water that’s already pooling in the crater?” the engineer asked. “It must be seeping along the conduits already.”
Anson’s answer was immediate. “We vacuum it out!”
“Huh?”
Doug sat frozen in front of his console, his mind spinning. Suicide bombers. Religious fanatics. How do we stop them? They’ve already knocked out the water factory and Zimmerman’s lab. The EVC and the electrical center and the farm are farther inside the base; the kamikazes haven’t had time to reach that far yet. But the colonel said one of them is supposed to hit the control center. Why isn’t he here yet?
“Bam,” he said, turning to Gordette. “Get teams of people to guard the EVC—”
“And the other points, I know,” Gordette replied. “We can use the guns we captured. Shoot the bastards soon’s they open the ceiling vents.”
“If you can do that without setting off their explosives.”
Gordette shrugged. “Don’t make that much never-mind, one way or the other, does it?”
Reluctantly, Doug admitted, “No, I guess not. But we’ve got to try something.’
“True enough,” Gordette agreed.
A comm tech’s voice in his earphone called, “Urgent call from Anson at the water factory.”
“What is it, Jinny?” Doug asked.
There was no video from the water factory, only Anson’s tight, excited voice.
“You’ve got to open the plasma vents to vacuum,” she said, without preamble. “That’s the only way to suck the loose water out of here. Otherwise it’s going to seep down to the electrical distribution station and short out the whole goddamned base, I betcha.”
“Open the vents to vacuum?”
“Right.”
“But you’ve got people in the water factory.”
“We’ll be outta here in five minutes, tops. The place is a complete wreck. Got a team turning off the incoming stream but there’s a crater filling up with water and it’s seeping into the pipes and conduits between levels.”
Doug glanced at the big electronic schematic of the entire base on the wall above him. The water factory was dark, and he saw that one section of living quarters on the lower level had already blacked out.
“We’re getting shorts in residential tunnel two,” he said.
“Open the vents!” Anson urged. “Before the whole damned base shorts out!”
“Will do,” he said, adding silently, If the controls still work.
“Give me five minutes to get my people out of here,” Anson added.
“Will do,” Doug repeated.
It took almost that long to call up the ancient program that operated the plasma vent baffles. There were two out at the mountain face, and single baffles spaced almost haphazardly along the old vents, hinged to flap open in one direction only—outward—like the valves in a human body’s arteries.
He remembered that many of those partitions had been very tough to open when he’d crawled through the vents, seven years earlier. Hinges caked with lunar dust, almost welded shut. Will their motors work? Will they respond to the program commands?
A shadow fell across him and he looked up. Gordette was standing over him with an assault rifle held across his chest.
Before Doug could ask, Gordette smiled grimly and said, “I’m guarding the control center. Security’s sent teams out to the other areas to guard them. They told me to stay here with you; they didn’t want me with them.”
Doug didn’t have time to worry about Gordette’s feelings.
Blinking with a sudden idea, he said, as much to himself as to Gordette, “If we open all the plasma vents we might flush out any of the kamikazes crawling through them.”
Gordette’s brows rose a half-centimeter, but he said nothing.
“Especially if we start pumping high-pressure air into the far end of each of the vents,” Doug muttered. “We’ll turn those old vents into wind tunnels!”
He called Vince Falcone over to him, hurriedly explained what he wanted, and then hunched over his keypad and began banging away at it.
PLASMA VENT TUNNEL
It was easy to become disoriented in the dark, empty plasma vent tunnels. Crawling along inside a spacesuit with a hundred kilos of explosive strapped to your waist did not make the job any simpler.
But I’ll get there, Amos Yerkes told himself. I have the most difficult assignment, but I’ll carry it out. They gave me the farthest target, the hardest one to reach, because they know I’m the best of the batch. The others needed drugs to buck up their courage but I’ve never touched them. I’m better than they are and they know it. That’s why they’ve entrusted me with the most demanding task: blowing up their environmental control center.
Yerkes was twenty-two and considered himself a failure as a son and as a man. But this is one thing I will not fail at. “Nothing in my life,” he slightly misquoted Shakespeare, “will so become me as my leaving of it.”
In the light of his helmet lamp he saw another of those dreadful partitions. It had taken him far longer to open the last few than he had thought it would. Hours, it seemed. They were all stuck fast, and he had been sweating inside his spacesuit before he could pull them down on their creaking hinges. Then, once he had crawled over them, they had each snapped shut again with a startling clang that could probably be heard over the length and breadth of the base.
This partition was no different: a thin baffle of metal, hinged on the bottom. Stuck fast with caked dust. Yerkes brushed doggedly at the dust with his gloved fingers, wishing he could open his visor and blow the stuff out of his way. But he had been ordered to keep his spacesuit sealed, just in case the vent tunnels did not hold air as they believed.
As he worked, sweat stinging his eyes, he pictured the services that would be held in his honor back in Atlanta. General O’Conner himself will give the eulogy, he thought. My parents will cry and wish they had treated me better.
Vince Falcone was grateful for the Moon’s low gravity as he and six other men trundled heavy cylinders of oxygen down the corridor toward the environmental control center.
Doug’s idea was wild, Falcone thought, but he couldn’t think of anything better.
This had better work, he told himself. Otherwise we’ll all be dead in another half-hour or so.
“You will take me to the control center,” the spacesuited Japanese said.
“I can’t,” Edith blurted.
He grabbed her wrist hard. “Why not?”
Thinking as swiftly as she ever had, Edith lied, The corridors are guarded. We’d both be shot the minute we stepped outside.”
He glared at her.
“And we’re so far away from the control center,” Edith quickly added,’that your bomb wouldn’t touch it if you set it off in here.”
Still glaring, he looked around at the studio’s cameras and fake-bookcase sets. Not a worthy target.
“You’re hurting my wrist,” Edith said.
He let go. “You are my hostage,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, looking around the empty, sparsely lit studio. Nowhere to hide, nothing here but video and VR equipment. Even if I grabbed a camera or tripod or something and tried to bash him, he’s protected by his helmet. And he might set off his bomb.
“You will call the control center and tell them to surrender to me,” the young man said, his voice harsh, guttural. “If you refuse I will kill us both.”
“Oh, I’ll call them, don’t worry about that.”
Doug fidgeted on his chair, waiting for Falcone to report he was ready to pump high-pressure oxygen into the plasma vents.
“We’re clear of the factory,” Jinny Anson reported from a corridor wall phone. “Had to seal the whole section of corridor, “cause the door to the factory’s been damaged by the blast.”
“Okay, fine,” Doug said. “We ought to open the vents to vacuum in a few minutes.” Silently he added, Come on, Vince!
“Call from the university studio,” a comm tech’s voice said in his earphone.
Edith, he knew. Doug nodded and touched the proper keypad.
Edith’s face appeared on his central screen. She looked strained, worried. Then Doug saw, behind her, the face of an oriental in a spacesuit helmet.
“Doug, I’m a hostage—”
The intruder pushed her aside. “You must surrender to me immediately! If you don’t, I will blow up this chamber with this woman in it!”
Doug felt as if someone had pushed him off a cliff. His mouth went dry. It took him two swallows to work up enough moisture to reply, “Hold on. I’ll surrender. Just don’t do anything foolish.”
“I must speak to the commander of Moonbase!” the suicide bomber insisted. “No underlings!”
“I’m Douglas Stavenger, the chief administrator of Moon-base.”
The Japanese’s eyes widened momentarily. “Douglas Stavenger? The one whose body is filled with nanomachines?”
“Yes, that’s me.” Doug felt Bam Gordette’s presence behind him, strong, protective.
“You must come here and surrender to me personally!”
“I understand.”
“Now! Quickly! Otherwise I kill her!”
“Okay, I’m on my way,” Doug said. He cut the connection and jumped up from his chair.
Gordette stood in his way. “You go in there, he’s gonna set off his explosives.”
“If I don’t go, he’s going to kill Edith.”
ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL CENTER
Falcone and his team threaded their way through the maze of piping and pumps that recycled and circulated air through Moonbase, dragging the cylinders of high-pressure oxygen clunking loudly along the narrow metal mesh walkways that twined through the throbbing equipment.
“There it is!” one of his men shouted, pointing to a metal hatch set into the rock ceiling.
Falcone squinted up to where the man was pointing. The ceiling was shadowy, criss-crossed with pipes.
“Naw,” he said. “Farther back. We want the last one of the hatches. The very last one.”
The man grumbled but moved on, deeper into the EVC.
“Is this really gonna work?” asked the guy just behind Falcone, gasping with exertion as he dragged a bulky oxygen cylinder.
“High-pressure gas on this end, vacuum on the other end. Oughtta blow out anything in the vents that ain’t fastened down.”
“Oughtta,” the man puffed.
Oughtta, Falcone said to himself. If the team with the friggin’ hoses shows up in time.
Doug spoke into his hand-held phone as he ran along the corridor toward the university studio.
“How soon?” he demanded.
“Got the hoses, finally,” Falcone’s voice crackled. “Gimme five minutes.”
“We’ve got to open the vents to vacuum, Vince! Water’s shorting out half the sections on level two.”
“Three minutes.”
“Call the control center when you’re ready. Jinny’s back and she’ll handle it.”
“What about you?”
Glancing at Gordette, loping along beside him with his assault rifle gripped tightly in his hands, Doug replied, “I’ve got other problems.”
As far as Amos Yerkes could tell, this was the last partition between him and the environmental control center. Blinking at the sweat trickling into his eyes, telling himself he should have thought to wear a head band, he pulled out the schematic map of Moonbase and tried to check out where he actually was.
Yes, that should be the end of the tunnel, on the other side of this partition. One more to go and he’d be directly over Moonbase’s environmental control center.
When I blow that up, he thought happily, they won’t have any air to breath. I won’t go alone; I’ll take all of them with me!
He started working on the partition with newfound energy.
Face streaked with grease, Jinny Anson sat at the same console Doug had been using, finger hovering over the keypad that would open all the plasma vent baffles.
Come on, Vince, she grumbled to herself. Move it, you big ape.
As if he’d heard her, Falcone’s swarthy face appeared on the screen showing the environmental control center.
Grinning broadly, he said, “All connected. We’re ready anytime you are.”
Anson let out a grateful sigh, then said, “Ten seconds?”
“Ten seconds,” Falcone said, teeth flashing.
“On my mark…” She glanced at the console’s digital clock. “Mark!”
“Ten seconds and counting,” Falcone said.
As they approached the double doors of the studio, Doug said to Gordette, “Are you a good-enough shot to get him without hitting the explosives?”
Gordette grunted. “Which eye do you want me to hit?”
Doug almost stopped running. We’re going to kill a man, he realized. Deliberately kill him. Or try to.
“Besides,” Gordette added,’they’re most likely carrying plastic explosives. Bullets won’t set ’em off.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yep,” said Gordette, without missing a stride.
As he worked on the final partition, Yerkes wondered how the other volunteers had done. He had felt the rumble of two explosions, it seemed like hours ago. Since then nothing. The others must be having the same troubles I’ve had, he thought. But they don’t have as far to travel as I do. I’ll blow up my target before they even get to theirs.
The thought pleased him.
The partition was loosening, he could feel it as he dug the accumulated dust away from its hinges. Not merely loosening, it was shaking, flapping-
It sprang open, banging on his helmet, half stunning Yerkes. He heard a rushing sound, like wind, like a roaring hurricane.
He was sliding along the vent, skidding backwards on his belly, being pushed by some giant hand faster and faster. The dim circle of light thrown by his helmet lamp showed the vent walls speeding past.
Desperately he tried to stop himself, dig his gloved fingers into the vent floor, but there was nothing to grab onto. He reached out sideways toward the tunnel walls but the force of the wind tore at his hands, his arms, and he skidded along backwards, screaming now in fear as he slid down the vent like a feather caught in a tornado.
Colonel Giap had cl
imbed up onto the roof of his tractor’s cab. There had been no word from Moonbase since he’d told Stavenger about the suicide bombers. His troops loitered around their vehicles, waiting for the inevitable. The ground had trembled twice, more than an hour earlier. Then nothing but silence and stillness.
Giap looked at the watch on the wrist of his spacesuit. They’re all dead in there by now, he thought. Dead or dying. I should send the troops in, perhaps we can save a few.
Something caught his eye. He blinked, not sure of what he was seeing. A cloud of glittering sparkles was erupting slowly from the hatch that opened into the plasma vents. The ladder that his troops had placed there toppled slowly, like a stiff, arthritic old man, and fell flat on the crater floor in complete silence, sending up a puff of dust.
It was like a geyser, Giap thought, but a geyser of scintillating little jewels that flashed and twinkled in the harsh sunlight. On and on it went, spewing slowly out from the plasma vent hatch across the dark lunar sky, a thousand million fireflies flickering in all the colors of the rainbow.
Then something solid and heavy came shooting out of the hatch. Giap saw arms and legs flailing. A spacesuit! A man! One of the suicide volunteers, he realized. The body soared across the crater floor and landed with a thump that raised a lazy cloud of dust. It did not move once it hit.
Giap stared, not knowing what to think, what to do. Another body came flying out, tumbling like a pinwheel, landing helmet-first on the regolith. And then a third, limbs hanging loosely, already unconscious or dead. It fell near the other two.
THE STUDIO
Doug stopped in front of the double doors marked LUNAR UNIVERSITY VIDEO CENTER: DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHT IS FLASHING.
As he reached for the door pull, Gordette grabbed at his hand.
“Hold it,” Gordette said. “Look before you leap.”
Doug nodded and went to the wall phone next to the doors. Calling the control center, he asked for the security camera view of the studio.
The wall phone’s screen was tiny. It showed the panoramic view of the studio from the ceiling.
