by Ben Bova
“We don’t want a set of nanobugs that can’t be turned off,” Doug warned.
She almost smiled. “Scared of the gray goo?”
“Aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh.” She lowered her head a moment, thinking. “Look, when the ship lands, what actually touches the ground?”
“Four landing pads. They’re about two meters in diameter and twenty, thirty centimeters thick.”
“And made of diamond?”
Doug nodded. “Their surfaces and internal bracing are diamond. There’re some hydraulic lines inside them.”
“The hydraulics are oil-based?”
“As far as I know, yes. I could check with the manufacturing division to make sure.”
“Okay,” Cardenas said, walking slowly away from the electron microscope. Doug followed in step beside her.
“The ship lands, right?” she said, thinking out loud. “Its landing pads come down on top of our gobblers. Covers them up, so they’re no longer in sunlight. And they’re shielded from the UV.”
“I get it. Then they can eat their way inside the landing pads and start taking the hydraulic system apart.”
“You got it.”
Doug broke into a grin, but it faded before it was truly started. “Only one problem, Kris.”
“What’s that?”
“What good’s it going to do us to prevent their Clippership from leaving the Moon? We want to stop them from getting here.”
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 11 HOURS 45 MINUTES
Zoltan Kadar sat bleary-eyed in the middle of his monitoring screens, almost in tears as he squinted at the drawing of the farside observatory. A beautiful dream, he told himself. My crowning achievement. It would be called the Kadar Observatory some day.
But it’s only a dream. I can’t even get an observation satellite to survey the ground.
For more than three days and three sleepless nights Kadar had hounded Doug Stavenger, to no avail. Most of his calls were intercepted by Jinny Anson, who sternly told him not to bother Stavenger.
“He’s got too much to do, Zoltan, to worry about your satellite shot.”
Twice he actually got to Stavenger himself, by tracking down Doug’s movements through the length and breadth—and depth—of Moonbase.
The first time, he accosted Stavenger as Doug was talking with the technicians in the control center. Doug listened patiently to Kadar’s complaints, then gripped the astronomer’s slim shoulder.
“Dr. Kadar—”
“Professor Kadar!”
Doug almost laughed in his face. “Professor Kadar, I understand how upset and frustrated you must feel. But you’re not the only one. All our outside activities have been shut down, except for our preparations for defending Moonbase against the Peacekeepers. I’m afraid your survey of Farside is just going to have to wait.”
And with that, a solidly-built grim-faced black man took Kadar’s other arm and firmly led him to the door. Kadar glared at him, and when that didn’t work, he stared at the man’s nametag on his shirt front.
“Mr. Gordette,” Kadar said with as much dignity as he could muster, “there is no need for you to leave your fingerprints on my arm.”
Gordette released him. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Just wanted to make sure you leave Doug alone. He’s got a lot to do, you know.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Late that night, Kadar actually got Stavenger on the phone. If I can’t sleep, Kadar told himself, why should he?
But Stavenger didn’t seem to be sleeping. His image came up immediately on the smart wall of Kadar’s quarters. Stavenger was sitting at a desk in his own quarters, wide awake.
“Dr. Kadar,” Doug said as soon as he recognized his caller’s face.
“I’m sorry to call so late—”
“It doesn’t matter. I was just going over our inventories of supplies.”
“My satellite is ready for launch,” Kadar said. “All I need is your approval and—”
“With all due respect, Professor Kadar, there’s no chance in hell of your getting your satellite launched until this crisis with the Peacekeepers is resolved.”
“It’s only one small rocket. They’ll see that it’s going into a lunar orbit.”
“I’m not going to debate the point, Professor. No launch.”
“You’re standing in the way of science!”
Wearily, Doug replied, “Maybe I am. It can’t be helped. If it’s any consolation, there are a lot of other frustrated people in the base right now. We’ve got a whole troupe of ballet dancers here who can’t return Earthside until this mess is resolved.”
Ballet dancers did not assuage Kadar’s feelings. But as he sat amid his monitoring screens, admiring the drawings of what would someday be the Kadar Observatory on the far side of the Moon, he suddenly realized that frustrated ballet dancers might be more appreciative of his predicament than the management of Moonbase.
Ballet dancers. Kadar pulled himself up from his console chair and headed for his quarters. A shower, a shave, some clean clothes—if I must spend this crisis in frustration, perhaps there is a charming ballerina or two who can understand me and offer consolation.
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 9 HOURS 45 MINUTES
“I’ve never felt so frustrated in my whole life!” Joanna slapped her palm against the ornate little table that stood at the end of her couch.
Startled, Lev Brudnoy looked across the room at her.
“No one answers my calls,” Joanna complained. “No one even acknowledges that they’ve received my calls! It’s like shouting into a deep, dark mine shaft!”
Brudnoy turned off the wall display he had been studying, got up from his chair and went to sit beside his wife.
“Faure’s people are in control of the commsats,” he said gently. “Most probably they are not letting your messages get through to Earth.”
“But I’ve beamed calls directly to the World Court in The Hague. I’ve even had our own people in Savannah relay my messages to Holland. No response. Not even a flicker.”
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 wallscreen. To Brudnoy, the man looked like the crafty pirate chieftain of his childh
ood 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 U.N. 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 undercut 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’s 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?”
“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, “Commander-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 amon
g 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’ 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 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.”
