by Ben Bova
The controller turned in her little chair and looked up at him for the first time. “Why the hell not?” she asked.
The mercenary was sweating as he slipped the fingernail-sized chip into the computer on the desk in his quarters. Electronic germ warfare, he thought: a computer virus.
He was far from being a computer expert, but the chip he had carried in the heel of a shoe was supposed to be totally self-sufficient. Just get access to the right program and stick the chip’s virus into it. Easy, they had told him. Still, the mercenary sweated as he worked his way into the guarded programs that ran Moonbase’s vital systems.
It had been no big deal to ferret out the necessary passwords and coded instructions. Security at Moonbase was a joke. A couple of rounds of expensive real beer, hauled up from Earthside, and a guy was your buddy for life, even if you were black.
The computer program that ran Moonbase’s electrical distribution system was an expert system, with built-in fault diagnosis. The virus was designed to infiltrate the fault diagnosis subprogram and indicate that a dangerous overvoltage had suddenly appeared in the main trunk that connected the solar farms with the base transformers. That would cause the computer to lower the voltage throughout Moonbase: a brown-out. When the virus insisted that the voltage was still too high, the computer would be forced to shut down the main distribution system altogether and throw Moonbase onto its backup fuel cell systems, which were good for only twelve hours, maximum.
By the time they debugged the computer, the Peacekeepers would be running the base.
The only light in the mercenary’s quarters was the glow from the display screen, projecting onto his face the multicolored lines and nodes of the distribution system’s schematic diagram like the warpaint of a Sioux brave.
SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED
The mercenary nodded to himself. You bet you got a system anomaly, he said silently to the computer.
CHECKING SYSTEM ANOMALY
Go right ahead and check your ass off, he told the machine. Check yourself into a nervous breakdown.
SYSTEM ANOMALY REJECTED
“What?” he yelped aloud. He jabbed at the keyboard, expanding the message.
Goddamn, he said to himself. The display screen showed that the program had automatically checked the overvoltage message against independent sensors built into the electrical lines and decided that the message was false.
VIRUS LOCATED, the display screen announced, with no emotion whatever.
VIRUS ELIMINATED
The mercenary banged his fist on the console hard enough to make the screen blink. Damn! he said to himself. Goddamn virus they gave me isn’t worth shit. Fuckin’ expert system is smarter than the fuckin’ virus.
He tried to insert the virus twice more, and both times the fault diagnosis subprogram identified the virus and erased it. Wondering if the program kept a record of attempts to bug it, and if so, whether it automatically notified the security department, the mercenary angrily yanked the chip from the computer slot and decided to toss it into the garbage reprocessor.
That’s all it’s good for, he thought. Garbage.
He slumped down on his bunk and turned on the wall-screen. Stavenger was piping the radar plot from the landing control complex onto the base’s general information channel. Less than six hours until the Peacekeepers landed.
He’s a strange one, thought the mercenary. He’s a couple years younger than me, but he’s old beyond his years. Or maybe it’s just that most guys his age haven’t faced any real responsibilities, so they still act like kids.
Stavenger knows what responsibility is. Got to respect him for that. Like me, a little. We both know what it feels like to have a load on your shoulders.
Over the past several days there had been four times when he had been alone with Stavenger, when he could have snapped Stavenger’s neck or driven the cartilage of his nose into his brain with a single sharp blow from the heel of his hand. Stavenger would be dead before he hit the floor.
Yet the mercenary had stayed his hand. Not yet, he had told himself. Don’t kill him yet. Let the virus do the job. He’s not ready to die.
But the virus has failed. Now it’s up to me.
Stavenger did not act like a man seeking death. The young man brimmed with life, with energy and purpose. Wait, the mercenary advised himself, wait until the precise moment.
They were so unprepared to fight, these men and women of Moonbase, so totally lacking in weapons and skills and even the will to resist, that the mercenary found it almost laughable. Why kill Stavenger or any of the rest of them when the Peacekeepers will be able to walk in here and take over without firing a shot?
Wait. Watch and wait. If it actually comes down to a fight, then that will be the time to take out Stavenger and as many of the others as he could reach.
It would be a shame, though. He was getting to like Stavenger. Almost.
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 4 HOURS 4 MINUTES
Loosely restrained by her seat harness, so that she floated lightly in her seat, hardly touching its plastic surface, Edith looked across the Clippership’s aisle at the man sitting beside Captain Munasinghe. He was a civilian, and a few hours after they had lifted off from Corsica he had made a point of introducing himself: Jack Killifer.
He was coming on to her, but Edith frosted him off with a polite smile and buried her nose in her notebook computer. I’m not spending the next four days getting groped by some stranger in front of forty soldiers, she decided.
There was something grim about him. He didn’t seem fazed in the slightest by the zero gee of spaceflight, the way Munasinghe and the other troopers were. Instead he looked as if he were impatient to get to Moonbase and get the job over with. A lean, lantern-jawed, intense man, Edith thought. A man with a personal agenda.
The personnel list in her notebook gave only his name and place of residence: Boston, Massachusetts. Well, that’s a starting point, Edith thought. She went hunting through the background database that she had put together before leaving Atlanta. And soon she found his history, in the material that her source in the Masterson Corporation had given her.
Killifer had been a Masterson employee, she saw. Worked for eighteen years at Moonbase, coming back to Earth only long enough for the mandatory health checks and then shipping back to the Moon immediately. Then, seven years ago, he had abruptly taken early retirement and never went back to Moonbase again. Until now.
Digging deeper, Edith found that Killifer had become an executive in the New Morality movement, one of the key pressure groups that pushed the nanotech treaty through the U.N. and got the U.S. Senate to ratify it.
He’s anti-nanotechnology, Edith realized. But, glancing at him across the aisle, she thought he looked as if he had personal demons driving him. There’s more to it than a religious conviction, she thought. I wonder what’s really itching him?
It was boring as hell sitting in the damned Clippership with nothing to do but listen to Munasinghe’s nitpicking worries. Killifer had spent as much time as he could roaming through the ship, but it only took ten minutes to see everything there was to see. The passenger cabin, filled with a mongrel lot of Peacekeeper troops, most of whom couldn’t even speak English. The galley, where their tasteless prepacked meals were microwaved. The cargo bays, stuffed with enough weapons to blow Moonbase into orbit. The head, with the seatbelt and stirrups on the unisex toilet.
He thought about popping into the cockpit, but he figured that the astronauts up there weren’t looking for company, and there wouldn’t be all that much to see, anyway. It’s crowded enough here in the passenger cabin, Killifer told himself, friggin’ cockpit’s about the size of a shoe box.
There was only one bright spot in the whole mess, and that was the good-looking blond reporter sitting across the aisle from him. Killifer had tried to strike up a conversation with her, but she didn’t seem interested.
Yet now, as he sat wedged in beside the ever-whining Munasinghe, she seemed to be giving him
the once-over. Killifer laughed to himself. After four days in this sardine can she must be getting horny.
* * *
Only about four hours to go, Edith thought. I can handle Killifer for that long. So she smiled the next time he looked her way and, sure enough, as soon as Munasinghe left his seat to see to some problem, Jack Killifer unstrapped and floated out into the aisle beside her.
“Boring trip, isn’t it?” he said, grinning down at her wolfishly.
Edith turned up the wattage on her smile a little. “I’d rather be bored than scared to death.”
Without asking, Killifer pulled himself into the empty seat beside her. “It won’t be long now,” he said.
“You’ve been to Moonbase before, haven’t you?” Edith prompted, as she quietly clicked on the audio recorder built into her electronic notebook.
Killifer huffed. “Spent the better part of eighteen years there.”
“Eighteen years?” she said, wide-eyed. “Wow! You must have been there right at the very beginning.”
“I sure was. Lemme tell you …”
That was all it took to get Killifer talking about himself and Moonbase. But as he talked, the dark brooding anger that simmered inside him started to rise to the surface.
“Joanna Stavenger,” he growled. “She’s the bitch that runs the whole thing up there.”
“I thought Douglas Stavenger was in charge of Moonbase,” Edith said innocently.
“Hah! Maybe he thinks he’s in charge, but it’s his mama who’s the real boss. The spider woman.”
“Isn’t her name Brudnoy now?”
“Sure,” Killifer answered. “He’s her third husband, you know. The first two died on her.”
“Really?”
He chuckled unpleasantly. “I wonder how long this one’ll last.”
Edith asked, “Douglas Stavenger … isn’t he the one who has the nanomachines in his body? He was nearly killed on the Brennart expedition to the south lunar pole, wasn’t he?”
“I was on that expedition,” Killifer said. “I was Brennart’s right-hand man.”
“Really? Wow!”
For nearly four hours Killifer gabbled away and Edith realized that his nanoluddite leanings were merely the surface manifestation of a deep hatred for Joanna Brudnoy and her son, Doug Stavenger.
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 2 HOURS 38 MINUTES
Sitting alone in his office, Doug watched the smart wall’s view of the crater floor, where teams of spacesuited men and women were desperately setting up microwave transmission equipment to back up the hard-wire system that carried electrical power from the solar farms to the base’s electrical distribution center.
The microwave transmitters were dark, flat plates, innocuous looking. They were aimed at relay transceivers being set up atop the ringwall mountains, a circuitous route that Doug and his cohorts hoped would fool the Peacekeepers. They can blow the wires, he told himself, but they won’t recognize the backup equipment for what it is.
For maybe half an hour, a sardonic voice in his head sneered. They’re not dummies. They’ll figure it out soon enough.
It’s the best we can do, Doug admitted silently. It’s the best we can do.
Nervously, a feeling of dread gripping him like the freezing hand of death itself, Doug programmed the smart walls to show him every square centimeter of Moonbase. He inspected each of the corridors, the water factory, the environmental control center, the rocket port, the solar farms and the mass driver out on the crater floor, the labs, the workshops, the Cave, where a handful of people were taking a meal in desultory silence, the control center, where tense men and women monitored every part of the base.
“Hold there,” he said.
The walls froze on a panoramic view of the garage. It had been a natural cave in the mountainside, enlarged and smoothed over by Moonbase construction crews. Now it served as a shelter for the tractors that worked out on the surface, a storage area, even a playing arena for the annual low-gee basketball matches. It also served as a buffer between the corridors that housed the living and working areas and the airless lunar surface, outside.
Doug leaned back in his swivel chair and stared at the main airlock. Big enough to let tractors through, its heavy metal surface was dulled and scratched from years of constant use. On the other side of the airlock was the open crater floor. On the opposite side of the garage were the smaller airlocks that led to the individual corridors of Moonbase.
A buffer zone.
“Phone!” Doug called out. “Find Jinny Anson, Professor Cardenas, Lev Brudnoy and Leroy Gordette. Urgent priority. Tell them to report to my office immediately.”
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 1 HOUR 57 MINUTES
“But it’s crazy,” Anson snapped.
Doug sat straight up in his chair and stared across his desk into her steel-gray eyes. “Jinny, a very smart man once said, ‘Just because an idea is crazy doesn’t mean it’s wrong.’”
“Doesn’t mean it’s right, either.”
“Do you have something better in mind?”
“If we’re going to do anything,” Brudnoy said, “it should be done out on the crater floor, as far away from us as possible.”
“What can we do out there, Lev?”
The Russian thought a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.
Doug looked at Cardenas for support, but she merely sat silently in the slingchair in front of his desk, looking thoughtful. I’m putting a lot on her shoulders, he thought. She doesn’t want to commit herself, one way or the other.
He turned to Gordette, sitting off to the side of his desk, slightly separated from the others. “Bam, you’re the only one here with any military experience. What do you think?”
Gordette’s dark face looked utterly serious. “What do I think? I think you’re blowing smoke. All of you. There’s no way in hell you can keep those Peacekeeper troops out of here.”
Doug broke into a grin, his automatic reaction to a challenge. “We’ll see,” he said.
“You’re going to do it?” Anson asked.
“Yep,” said Doug. “We’ve got less than two hours and we’ve got to do something.”
“But it won’t work! It’ll backfire and—”
“Jinny,” Doug interrupted, “I understand that the four of you are against it. But like Lincoln said when his whole cabinet voted against the Emancipation Proclamation and he was the only one in favor: The ayes have it.”
TOUCHDOWN MINUS 32 MINUTES
In his cermet spacesuit Doug stood on the rock floor of the garage as the last of the tractors trundled through the open hatch of the main airlock.
“Only thirty-two minutes left,” Brudnoy said.
Doug had to turn his whole body to see his stepfather’s cardinal-red spacesuit standing beside him.
“We’ll make it,” he said. “Cardenas is ready to start laying down the bugs.”
“For what it’s worth, commander, I wish you wouldn’t do this. It’s too risky.” Brudnoy’s voice sounded more morose than usual in Doug’s earphones.
“I wish I didn’t have to do this,” Doug admitted, “but I can’t see what else gives us a chance to get the Peacekeepers off our backs.”
“It won’t work.”
“Come on, Lev! It’s worked for Mother Russia all through history.”
Brudnoy was silent for a moment, then he replied, “May I point out that Mother Russia had thousands of kilometers of territory to absorb the invader’s armies. We have—what? ten thousand square meters?”
“Forty-three thousand and sixteen,” Doug answered promptly. “I checked it in the base plans.”
“I should have known you would.”
Encased in his bulky spacesuit, Captain Munasinghe had to squeeze through the hatch to get into the cockpit. His eyes widened with sudden terror as he looked past the two astronauts through the narrow forward window. The rugged, bare rock surface of the Moon was hurtling up to meet him.
He swallowed hard, not wanting to show the two astron
auts that he was afraid.
Before he could speak, the pilot—in the left seat—told him, “We’re programmed to rotate in twelve minutes, so take a good look at the view while you’ve got the chance.”
Munasinghe would rather not. It looked as if they were going to crash and kill everyone aboard.
Forcing his voice to remain even, he asked, “Are you still receiving transmissions from Moonbase?”
“Yeah,” said the copilot. “They say all four of their landing pads are occupied and there’s no place for us to put down.”
“Is that believable?”
“Sure,” the pilot said. “Why the hell not?”
The astronauts were both civilians from the transport line that had provided the Clippership to the U.N. For a fat fee, of course. Munasinghe resented their informality with him. True military personnel would have been preferable. And properly respectful.
“Then how will you land?” Munasinghe asked.
“We’re coming down on a trajectory that’ll put us on their landing pad number three. At T minus fifteen we’ll start scanning the Alphonsus crater floor. If all of their pads really are occupied, we’ll pick out a smooth area to set down.”
“You can do this in fifteen minutes’ time?” Munasinghe demanded.
The copilot chuckled. “Don’t you fret none. We can do it in fifteen seconds if we have to.”
“Fifteen seconds!” Munasinghe’s knees went weak at the thought.
The pilot explained, “What he means is, we can hover over the crater floor and pick out our landing site, then jink over to it and sit her down. Nothing to it.”
“Piece of cake,” said the copilot.
“Ten minutes to rotation,” said a synthesized voice from the speaker overhead.
“Enjoy the view while you can,” the pilot said to Munasinghe.
“I must get my troops ready,” he replied. He thought he heard the astronauts laughing at him as he closed the cockpit hatch behind him.
Edith Elgin felt as if she’d been swallowed by some weird creature made of plastic and metal. The spacesuit helmet smelled kind of like a new car, and she could hear the tiny buzz of air fans from inside the suit, as if there were some gnats droning in there with her.
