Moonwar

by Ben Bova

  Does she love me? Will she want to share her life with me after this war is finished and she can go back Earthside again?

  Yet in the back of his mind he realized that there had never been any hint of a traitor in Moonbase before Edith Elgin had arrived.

  He heard his mother’s voice, You didn’t have this kind of trouble before she talked her way into the base, did you?

  Doug ignored the voice. Or tried to.

  DAY TWENTY-FOUR

  Jack Killifer found that he was enjoying his visit to Tarawa. Despite his orders.

  Outwardly, he was an American tourist taking in the beaches and fishing excursions by day, the gambling casino and musical shows by night. There were plenty of women, especially in the casino, most of them Asian, although he saw a couple of terrific tall blondes that must have been from Sweden or Germany or maybe even the States. Funny that there were hardly any island women in the casino, he thought. But he preferred big broads, anyway, not the dark little wahines.

  There was one particular island woman that he had to find, though: Tamara Bonai.

  Killifer had balked when General O’Conner told him to take care of Bonai himself. “Why not hire a professional?” he had demanded.

  The wizened old man had glared at him from his wheelchair. “God’s work has to be done by God’s people, Jack. It would be wrong to bring in an outsider. Wrong, and dangerous. The fewer people know about this, the better off we are.”

  Killifer had been forced to agree. Get a professional and you’d be blackmailed for life.

  “If the woman was in the States, or Europe, or even Japan,” O’Conner had added, “we could get one of our local zealots to do her. But out there on those islands, we don’t have anybody we can depend on. That’s why it’s got to be you, Jack.”

  Reluctantly, he had bowed to the general’s order.

  “Besides,” the old man had said, a vicious smile on his lips, “this won’t be your first time. You murdered Foster Brennart, didn’t you?”

  Sitting at the bar closest to the roulette table, nursing a rye and ginger-ale, Killifer thought back to Brennart and the first expedition to the lunar south pole. He’d wanted to kill Doug Stavenger; Brennart’s death was more of an accident than anything else. He’d tried to trap the Stavenger kid up there on the mountaintop during the radiation storm. But Brennart had to be a friggin’ hero and go out there with him. So Brennart died and became a legend, while Stavenger pulled through and survived.

  It was Joanna Stavenger that he had really wanted to kill. Joanna Brudnoy now. The bitch blamed him for her husband’s death. Paul Stavenger had been killed by nanobugs from Killifer’s lab. So his widow exiled Killifer to Moonbase. Either go to Moonbase or face trial for murder, she had told him. He picked Moonbase. It wrecked his career, ruined his life.

  And she’s still running other people’s lives, Mrs. Rich Bitch, lording it over everybody else. I’ll get her. One way or the other I’ll get her.

  The tall glass in his hand suddenly shattered, spraying rye and ginger-ale and ice cubes across the bar. The guy next to him jumped up from his barstool and wiped at his shirt front, his expression halfway between surprise and anger. Fuck you, Killifer told him silently.

  The bartender, a burly Micronesian in a loose-fitting mesh shirt, hurried up to him.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Killifer said, shaking his drenched hand. “I’m all right, don’t worry.”

  “Man, that’s some grip you got,” said the bartender as he quickly set up another drink. “Take it easy, Iron Man, we only got a couple hundred of these glasses!”

  “You didn’t cut yourself, did you?”

  A delicious redhead in a strapless gown took his hand in her gentle fingers, then looked up at him with big blue innocent eyes.

  “Naw,” Killifer said, smiling at her. “I’m okay.”

  “You must have some kind of troubles, crushing the glass like that. Like, real tension, huh?”

  He admired the curve of her cleavage. “Everybody’s got troubles,” he said.

  “Boy, is that true.”

  “You too?”

  “Don’t even ask,” she said.

  “Come on up to my room,” Killifer said, “and we can tell each other about our troubles.”

  She didn’t hesitate a microsecond. “Okay. Let’s.”

  “Well,” said Lev Brudnoy to his wife, “they agreed to evacuate up to sixty people from Moonbase. They’re calling it a mercy flight.”

  Brudnoy had just returned to Savannah from a two-day trip to United Nations headquarters. Joanna met him at the Masterson Corporation airport. Now, in the privacy of their soundproofed limousine, he told her what he’d accomplished in New York.

  “A mercy flight,” Joanna echoed.

  With a ghostly smile, Brudnoy said, “They intend to get as much publicity out of it as possible: bringing back people from Moonbase who might have been held as hostages.”

  “Hostages! Why, that lying little—”

  Brudnoy put a lean finger to her lips. “Publicity is very important. Faure is very much aware that public opinion must remain on his side.”

  Joanna nodded understanding. “That’s why they tried to make a hero out of that Peacekeeper captain.”

  “And why Faure went berserk with anger when the news networks started playing the reports coming out of Moonbase.”

  “I hope he bursts a blood vessel.”

  “They wanted Moonbase to stop broadcasting news reports,” Brudnoy said, “in return for the evacuation flight.”

  “What?”

  “I refused, of course. That’s why a half hour’s conference took two days. They were adamant, but I”—Brudnoy placed a hand on the breast of his open-collar shirt—“I outsat them. They demanded that we stop the broadcasts; I simply told them that it was impossible. After ducking into Faure’s office fifty times or so, they gave in at last.”

  Joanna grabbed him by the ears and kissed him. “Good for you, Lev!”

  “It was nothing. Had I known your reaction, I would have made more demands on them.”

  She studied his smiling face. Behind his grin, Lev looked tired, worried.

  “Faure’s building up a new military force to take Moonbase,” he said softly.

  “You’re certain?”

  He nodded wearily. “All the signs point to it. The U.N. bureaucrats are merely stalling for time, nitpicking about the evacuation flight and the arrangements for a meeting between you and Faure. In the meantime, I saw plenty of Peacekeeper officers heading into Faure’s office.”

  “Really.”

  “And worse,” Lev said. “There were several Yamagata Corporation people there, too.”

  Joanna leaned her head back against the limousine’s plush upholstery. “I’ve got to get the board of directors to support Moonbase. If they back me, we can start to put pressure on the White House.”

  “And if they don’t?” Lev asked.

  “They will,” Joanna said firmly. “They’ve got to.”

  Ibrahim al-Rashid steepled his fingers as he gazed at Tamara Bonai’s image on the wallscreen of his office. She is certainly beautiful, he thought. If only I could convince her to see things my way.

  “Then you will attend the emergency board meeting in person?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Bonai said. “I want to be there.”

  She was apparently in her office, too, although it was difficult to tell, with all the rattan and bamboo decor and the wide windows looking out onto a delicious tropical beach.

  “Perhaps you could come a day or so early,” Rashid suggested. “I would be pleased to take you to New York City or wherever else you would like to visit.”

  Bonai seemed to think the matter over for a few heartbeats. “I’ve never been to Washington. I understand it’s quite lovely in the spring.”

  “Washington,” Rashid said, thinking quickly. “The national capital. I know a very comfortable hotel just a short walk from the White House. Pe
rhaps I could arrange a visit with the president.”

  She smiled delightfully. “I’m afraid that would have to be arranged by my own foreign secretary. I am a chief of state, remember, and there is protocol involved.”

  Rashid smiled back at her. “Of course. But perhaps I could be of some help. I know the president personally, and a little friendly persuasion always makes the wheels turn more smoothly.”

  “That would be very kind of you.”

  “Nothing at all,” he said. “I’d be happy to do it.”

  Bonai’s face grew more serious. “You understand that I am fully in support of Moonbase’s independence, don’t you?”

  “Of course. But you won’t mind if I try to convince you otherwise?”

  “You can try.”

  “You see, I have believed for many years that the true future of Masterson Corporation lies in the development of fusion power.”

  “As Yamagata is doing in Japan?”

  “Yes, exactly. If we can work together with Yamagata we can open up the market for fusion power plants in North America. The market is worth trillions of dollars!”

  “As long as you can import helium-three from the Moon.”

  Rashid kept the disappointment from showing on his face. She knows the whole story; there’s no way to fool her about this.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “Fusion power makes economic sense only if we can use helium-three as a fuel.”

  “Which is why Yamagata wants Moonbase.”

  “Yamagata is producing helium-three at its own base in Copernicus.”

  “But without nanomachines to do the work, their costs are prohibitively high.”

  “I wouldn’t say prohibitively,” Rashid argued.

  Bonai smiled brightly. “Then why do they want Moonbase, if not for our nanotechnology?”

  “With nanomachines extracting helium-three from the Moon’s soil,” Rashid said, warming to his subject, “the costs of fusion power go down dramatically. We could offer the world the ultimate energy system, the energy source the stars themselves use! It would be cheap, efficient, and clean: no radioactive wastes!”

  “No radioactive waste?” Bonai probed.

  Rashid waved a hand in the air. “Well, some, of course. But very little, and totally manageable. Not like the old-style fission reactors, with their uranium and plutonium.”

  “I see.”

  “We could be the primary producer of fusion power systems for North and South America,” he said, regaining his enthusiasm. “The market will be trillions of dollars every year! Think of the profits!”

  “And who would make these profits? Masterson Corporation or Yamagata?”

  “Both,” Rashid answered.

  She said nothing for several moments. Then, rather thoughtfully, Bonai offered, “We must talk about this in more detail.”

  “Yes. When you visit Washington. Before the board meeting.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Before the board meeting, certainly.”

  Rashid felt delighted. I’m winning her over! he told himself.

  DAY TWENTY-FIVE

  “He makes a certain amount of sense, Doug,” Bonai was saying. “Fusion power could be an enormous market.”

  Tamara and Doug were strolling along the beach, side by side, even though separated physically by nearly four hundred thousand kilometers.

  Doug had gone to Moonbase’s virtual reality studio and donned a full-body sensor suit. Instead of the cumbersome helmets that VR systems had once required, he wore contact lenses over his eyes. Produced by nanomachines, the contacts served as miniaturized television screens that fed visual input to his retinas. A microcamera was mounted just above his eyes on a headband. Equally tiny microphones were plugged into his ears.

  As far as Doug could see, hear or touch, he was sloshing through the gentle surf on Bonai’s private islet, on the far side of the Tarawa lagoon, away from Bonriki and Betio, where the airport and hotels were.

  It was beautiful, Doug had to admit. Gorgeous, with the sun dipping down toward the ocean horizon and the trade wind bending the palm trees. The surf broke out on the coral reef with booming roars; here in the lagoon it lapped softly at their feet as they walked along the golden beach.

  Tamara was beautiful, too, in a wraparound flowered pareo of blue and gold, her bronzed shoulders bare, her lustrous black hair cascading down her back. She stumbled slightly on the wet sand and Doug reached out a hand to steady her. Even with the three-second lag between Earth and Moon, her hand was still there for him to grasp. He felt her hand clutch his, and she smiled up at him as they continued down the beach, hand in hand.

  She could have stayed in her office and simply programmed the VR equipment to show us this beach scene, Doug knew. But Tamara actually was strolling on one of the small islets up at the far end of the lagoon, wearing a full-body sensor suit and a set of microminiaturized cameras that ringed her head like a diadem to provide a complete picture of the island environment for the virtual reality link.

  Sweeping his gaze from her lovely face to the curving length of the beach, the graceful palms, the brilliant white clouds parading across the bright blue sky, Doug realized why he had been so reluctant to meet with Tamara in virtual reality. This was the world that was denied him. This was the world that humans were meant to live on, not the harsh lifeless Moon, but this tropical island where you could stand naked in the warm breeze and breathe free.

  I could live here, he thought. I’d be safe enough here; nanoluddite fanatics wouldn’t even know I’m down here.

  There was another world, though: stark, barren, dangerous—yet full of promise. We can make a paradise on the Moon, Doug told himself. We can build a world that’s fair and free, a world where people can live and work and create a better future.

  But it’ll never be like this, he knew—the world I left behind me. Someday we’ll have something approaching this on the Moon. Someday. But it will never be the same.

  A powered outrigger was chugging along slowly in the lagoon, heading their way, its electric motor almost completely silent as it sluiced through the marvelously clear water. Doug could see its shadow undulating across the white sandy bottom of the lagoon, hardly a meter deep.

  “I thought this was your private islet,” Doug said to Tamara.

  She followed his gaze. “Everybody knows the islands up on this end of the lagoon are off-limits. The boys who handle the boats tell tourists not to come this far.”

  Frowning, Doug said, “Well, there’s one tourist who didn’t listen.”

  Bonai watched intently as the outrigger hit the current flowing between islets and slewed badly. The man in the canoe worked the gimballed engine back and forth to straighten out again.

  “He’ll get himself in trouble,” she said.

  “Serves him right,” said Doug.

  Still watching, she said, “But he might overturn the canoe.”

  “An outrigger?”

  He waited, then heard her reply. “It’s been done before.”

  Doug laughed. “Then he can walk back to Bonriki. The lagoon’s not deep and the water’s warm.”

  Another electric-powered outrigger came into view, bigger, more powerful, faster. KIRIBATI CORP. was painted on its prow in bright orange letters.

  “Here come my bodyguards,” Bonai said.

  “Bodyguards?”

  She smiled at him. “The beach patrol from the hotel. They make sure none of the tourists comes up this way.”

  Doug watched as the beach patrol boat pulled up even with the smaller outrigger. Three men were in the bigger canoe, he saw: young, muscular, bronzed skin. One of them had an electric bullhorn in his hand.

  “I’M SORRY, SIR, BUT THIS PART OF THE LAGOON IS OFF-LIMITS TO VISITORS. PLEASE TURN AROUND AND HEAD BACK TOWARD THE HOTEL.”

  For a moment Doug thought that the visitor would try to defy the patrol. But then he turned around and both canoes slowly headed back down the lagoon.

  “You see?” Bonai said teasingly.
“We can be alone together. I have my bodyguards to ensure our privacy.”

  “You mean that if I tried to come here in the flesh, they’d stop me?”

  “No, Doug. Not you,” she said, growing serious. “I would always allow you to come here whenever you wanted to.”

  He realized he was still holding her hand. Tamara looked up at him. “You did promise, you know. This virtual reality visit doesn’t count.”

  “I know,” he said. She gave no indication that she wanted him to release her hand, and he felt too awkward to let go.

  So they walked in silence, hand in hand, for several moments.

  “When do you go to Savannah?” he asked.

  Again the wait. Then, “I leave Monday morning.”

  “Monday? But the board meeting isn’t for another week.”

  “My foreign secretary is arranging a quick visit with your president, at the White House.”

  With a pang, Doug realized that the president of the United States was no longer his president.

  “It’s something that Rashid suggested,” she said. “He’s going to give me a tour of the city afterward. Then I’ll go to Savannah for the board meeting.”

  “Rashid suggested you see the president?”

  “No, he suggested escorting me wherever I’d like to go. I picked Washington, and my foreign secretary has moved heaven and earth to get me a five-minute meeting with the president. Rashid’s been helping, of course.”

  “A photo op,” Doug muttered.

  Bonai agreed. “I imagine that’s about all it will be: a public relations gesture toward the chief executive of the Kiribati Council.”

  Suddenly realizing what an opportunity her visit could be, Doug asked urgently, “Tamara, could you do us a favor?”

  “Us?”

  “Moonbase.”

  She looked up at him from beneath long eyelashes, the expression on her lovely face almost sly. “I’d be happy to do a favor for you, Doug.”

  Oblivious to her nuance, Doug went on, “When you’re talking to the president, could you ask her to consider backing our independence?”

  The three seconds ticked slowly. “The American president? She’s as anti-nanotechnology as they come!”