Moonwar

by Ben Bova

  And clinging to the edge of the break like a shipwrecked sailor desperately clutching a piece of flotsam, was the spacesuited figure of Leroy Gordette.

  He had one forearm hooked on the crumbling edge of the precipice, and the gloved fingers of his other hand. Doug could see the top of his helmet.

  “Hold on,” he said, and immediately felt foolish. What else was Bam trying to do?

  “Don’t!” the black man warned. “Fuckin’ rock breaks. It’s as thin as tissue paper. Brittle, too.”

  Doug lowered himself to his knees, then got down on his belly and wormed his way toward Gordette.

  “Got no purchase for my feet,” Bam said, panting. “Every time … I try to haul my ass up … fuckin’ rock crumbles more.”

  “How deep is the hole?” Doug asked. “Can you see bottom?”

  Gordette coughed. “Must go … all the way down … to Chicago. No bottom …”

  Inching closer to the man, Doug felt the brittle rock beneath him crack, like thin ice.

  He stretched out his arm as far as he could. “Can you grab my hand?”

  “I’m runnin’ out of air,” Gordette said, gasping. “Forget it. Get outta here.”

  “Grab my hand!” Doug insisted.

  “Can’t.”

  Doug pushed himself a few centimeters closer. A chunk of the rock floor just in front of his helmet gave way and plummeted down into silent darkness.

  “Grab it!”

  “Leave me alone …”

  With gritted teeth Doug slid closer and wrapped his fingers around Gordette’s wrist just as the edge collapsed into shards and fell away.

  Through his suit Doug could feel the vibrations of the servo motors in his glove as they tightened on Gordette’s wrist. The man’s whole weight dangled from Doug’s hand. It felt as if his arm were being wrenched out of its shoulder socket.

  “That’s … a helluva grip … you got,” Gordette grunted.

  Doug could feel Gordette’s body swaying as it hung in the deep black emptiness. Pain burned through his arm and shoulder. The exoskeleton would keep his fingers clamped on Gordette’s wrist, he knew. Good thing we’re on the Moon, Doug thought. With his spacesuit and all he’d yank my arm right out of my shoulder on Earth.

  For moments that stretched like years Doug lay there, flat on his belly, with Gordette hanging in his hand.

  “Lemme go …” Gordette panted. “Lemme die …”

  “If you go,” Doug said grimly, fiercely, “I go with you. We’re in this together, Bam.”

  “You … crazy …”

  Doug tried to worm his way back, away from the brittle, crumbling edge of the abyss. Gordette could do nothing to help, even if he wanted to.

  Got to haul him out of there, Doug told himself. Got to get him on solid ground before he runs out of air.

  But it was almost impossible to edge his way backward with Gordette’s dead weight dangling from his outstretched arm. Grunting, teeth gritted, eyes stinging with sweat, Doug inched back along the glassy rock. It was painfully, agonizingly slow. He felt woozy, head spinning.

  “What’re y’all doing down … oh my god!” Edith’s voice.

  Doug couldn’t see her, didn’t know how she had gotten there. But she sounded like an angel to him.

  “Edith! Where’s the tractor?”

  “Right here,” she said, her voice anxious, high. “I rode out on it.”

  “Great! Get the tow cable. Quick!”

  It seemed to take an eternity and a half for Edith to find the tow cable and then clamber down into the rille behind Doug and tie it to one of the attachment rings on his backpack. She used the cable to climb out again, then went up to the tractor.

  “Use the winch,” Doug called to her. “Controls are on the dashboard.”

  Edith stared at the dashboard, but couldn’t figure out which of the toggles or keypads ran the winch. Instead, she revved up the engines and started backing away, slowly.

  “Easy—easy,” Doug’s voice crackled in her earphones. “He’s in a fabric suit.”

  Edith thought of all the rodeos she had seen, with cowboys guiding their tough little ponies in steer-roping competitions. Just ease on back, she said silently to the tractor. That’s it, honey, nice and slow and easy.

  “Hold it,” Doug commanded. “We’re on safe ground but I think Bam’s passed out.”

  Edith clambered down from the tractor and went to the edge of the gulch. Doug was connecting his emergency air hose from his backpack tank to Gordette’s, watching the regulator gauge on his wrist to make sure he didn’t overpressurize the man’s suit. She shook her head inside her helmet. If it’d been me, I’d’ve let the sumbitch die down there. He tried to kill Doug!

  But she heard Gordette cough and sputter and knew he was going to make it. Doug had saved him.

  It took the better part of an hour to get them both out of the rille and their air tanks topped off from the tractor’s supply. Then Edith started back toward Moonbase with Doug sitting between her and Gordette.

  For hours Gordette said nothing. The man just sat on Doug’s other side, wrapped in his spacesuit and total silence.

  At last Doug said to him, “I’ve been pretty close to death, Bam. It changes your outlook on life.”

  “Does it?” Gordette muttered.

  “It did for me. I think you’re going to find it will for you, too.”

  Gordette said nothing. Edith thought Doug was wasting his breath.

  “When we get back to Moonbase,” Doug went on, “you’ll have the chance to start a new life. Start all over, with the past gone forever.”

  “Until they throw you out of Moonbase,” Gordette said.

  “They’re not going to do that, Bam. With your help, we can beat them.”

  “With my help?”

  “I want you with us. I want you to be part of Moonbase.”

  “Do you?”?

  “We’ve gone through a lot together, Bam. We’re bound together. Life or death, what affects one of us affects us both.”

  Gordette was silent for several moments. Then he said grudgingly, “You got some grip, all right. Once you get your hands on a man you don’t let go, do you?”

  “That’s up to you,” Doug answered.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “Maybe,” Doug admitted.

  “And what about you, lady?” Gordette asked sullenly. “You as crazy as this man here?”

  Edith almost snapped out her true feelings. But she realized that Doug had risked his life to save his would-be murderer. And now it all hung on what she had to say.

  She swallowed her anger. “If Doug wants you to be with us, that’s good enough for me.”

  “You’d trust me?”

  Edith blurted, “Not very far. Not at first, anyway.”

  For a moment there was silence, then Gordette laughed: a low, ironic chuckle. “Fair enough, I guess. Fair enough.”

  Edith wished she could see the man’s face. Doug’s not crazy, she thought. He’s wiser than all of us put together. But I wish I could see Gordette’s face. I’d feel better about this if I could see his eyes.

  PART III

  BATTLE

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger …

  —SHAKESPEARE

  Henry V

  THE HAGUE

  “Telephone for you, Senator. The White House.”

  Jill Meyers looked up from her computer screen. Despite the fact that she had not been a member of the U.S. Senate for nearly six years now, her private secretary still called her “Senator.”

  “Who is it?” she asked warily.

  “The president,” he replied, in his usual near-whisper.

  Jill grinned at her oldest assistant. “I guess I can make time for the president.”

  Almost instantly the face of an intense young man appeared on her desktop screen. “Justice Meyers? One moment, please, for the president.”

 
; His image disappeared and the screen showed the seal of the president of the United States on a royal blue background. The American eagle held a sheaf of arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other: war or peace.

  It took more than a moment for the president to come on, of course. The power trip. The president doesn’t get on the horn until she’s absolutely certain that the party she wants to talk to is already on the line. No flunkies.

  Jill glanced up at her private secretary and realized with a pang that he’d been a fresh-faced kid just out of law school when he’d first come aboard as a senatorial aide. We’re all getting old, she thought, catching her own reflection in the phone screen. Her face was as round ordinary as a pie pan, she thought, with mousey brown hair as straight and limp as overcooked spaghetti. And still that scattering of freckles across her snub of a nose, like a tomboy version of Huck Finn.

  “Jill,” said the president, “you’re looking very pensive today.”

  The president looked elegant, as usual. Silver-gray hair swept back stylishly, bright blue eyes sparkling. Her latest facelift had tightened the sagging flesh beneath her chin and made her seem ten years younger.

  “What can I do for you, Madam President?” Jill asked, genuinely curious about the reason for this call. It had to be nearly seven AM in Washington, early for her.

  “It’s this request for extradition—”

  “Oh. The Killifer business.”

  “Yes. I don’t understand what you’ve got to do with it.”

  “I’ve been asked to intercede, in my official capacity as a justice of the World Court,” Jill said.

  “Asked? By whom?”

  “Joanna Brudnoy.”

  “I see.” The president’s tone went decidedly frosty.

  “The Justice Department has apparently refused to extradite the man to Kiribati.”

  “We have no treaty of extradition with that nation,” the president said.

  “That’s why the World Court has been asked to intercede,” said Jill.

  “I see.”

  “Killifer was identified as the man who raped and murdered Tamara Bonai, yet the American government has refused to extradite him to Kiribati to stand trial. The victim was Kiribati’s head of state, for god’s sake.”

  “That’s a very serious charge,” said the president.

  “There’s an eyewitness.”

  “Douglas Stavenger, I know. But he’s on the Moon and his so-called eyewitnessing was done through a virtual reality link. Any competent defense lawyer will make mincemeat of that.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Jill said. “In any event, I’d think you’d want the sonofabitch to be brought to justice.”

  The president did not flinch at Jill’s deliberate profanity.

  “Jill, this is all tied up with the Moonbase business.”

  “Which means it’s all tied up with the New Morality people, right?”

  “Those are my supporters, Jill.”

  “And they’re protecting a murderer?”

  The president’s face was a smooth, blank façade. She gave away nothing. “An alleged murderer,” she said coolly.

  “I may not be a lawyer,” Jill countered, “but I do know a few points of law. You’re protecting Killifer. Why?”

  “Jill, I thought you were one of my supporters, too. I know you don’t agree with everything the New Morality does, but you’ve always been on my side.”

  “Why are you protecting this man?”

  “There’s much more here than you’re aware of, Jill.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jill said. “I’ve served time at Moonbase. I was there with Paul Stavenger when it was nothing but a bunch of tin cans stuck in the ground.”

  “You had an affair with Paul Stavenger,” the president murmured.

  “Name me one woman who served at Moonbase in those days who didn’t,” Jill rejoined happily. “He was one helluva guy before he married Joanna.”

  “Joanna,” the president said, with obvious distaste.

  “If I were still in the Senate instead of stuck here in the World Court, I’d be fighting you on this Moonbase business. You’re making a bad mistake.”

  With the ghost of a smile, the president said, “That’s the thanks I get for nominating you to the International Court of Justice?”

  “Come off it, Luce.”

  “You backed me on the nanotech treaty when you were in the Senate.”

  “Because I didn’t want nanotechnology turned into a new arms race,” Jill said. “I never thought the treaty’d be used against Moonbase. They can’t exist without nanomachines and you know it.”

  The president sighed. “So I suppose you’ll vote in favor of their independence if the question comes up before the World Court?”

  “It’s on our docket for November. I’ve tried to get an emergency session to hear the matter, but I was voted down.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Jill. By November the question will have been settled conclusively. In fact, it should be settled in about a week or so.”

  “You’re going to do it, then? Attack Moonbase?”

  “The United Nations is doing it, not me.”

  “But you’re not raising a protest? If you hollered, Faure would have to listen.”

  “I am not going to interfere with a U.N. operation,” said the president.

  Jill fumed in silence for a moment, then grumbled, “Well, I hope you don’t expect to get reelected.”

  This time the president’s smile showed teeth. “The New Morality will reelect me because I backed the enforcement of the nanotech treaty.”

  “You think so?”

  “All the polls show it conclusively.”

  “So you’re not going to let Killifer be extradited?”

  “Under no circumstances.”

  “Damn! If I were Doug Stavenger I’d come down there and hang the man myself.”

  “Vigilante justice? From a judge of the World Court?”

  “Justice,” Jill snapped. “When your own government won’t give you justice, you’ve got the right to make your own move. Jefferson wrote that into the Declaration of Independence, remember?”

  “But Jill dear, Stavenger and the rest of his Lunatics don’t regard us as their government anymore. Do they?”

  Jill had no answer. Luce always was the better debater; she could score points off the devil himself whenever she chose to.

  MOONBASE

  Jinny Anson’s office was crowded. Doug sat at the foot of the table that butted against her desk, flanked by Zimmerman and Cardenas, the heads of Moonbase’s major departments, and the physicist Wicksen. There was no room at the little table for Edith, so she sat slightly behind Doug and to his right.

  Bam Gordette sat alone on the couch by the door, separated from all the others by a meter of empty floor-space and an uneasy distrust that was almost palpable. The others are treating Bam as if he’s a leper, Doug thought.

  “You’re certain the Peacekeepers are gonna make their move so soon?” Jinny Anson was asking.

  “We’ve got maybe a week, if we’re lucky,” Doug replied grimly. “What can we accomplish in that time?”

  A gloomy silence filled the office. Even the normally perky Anson looked downcast.

  “Wix?” Doug asked. “We need the beam gun up and working in a week.”

  The physicist shook his head slowly, his big soulful eyes staring straight at Doug. “I told you it would take two lunar days … two months.”

  “You’ve got seven Earth days,” Doug said. “Maybe less.”

  Wicksen started to shake his head.

  “Put every man you’ve got onto it,” urged Doug. “And every woman.”

  “We’re already working flat out.”

  “How close are you?”

  The physicist shrugged uncomfortably, more like a writhing. “The beam collimator is finished. The aiming circuitry is ready to be tested. Then we’ve got to bring the kloodges out to the mass driver and mate them. Then we need t
o test the complete system.”

  “Kloodges?” Edith asked. “What are they?”

  “Ramshackle collections of hardware,” Harry Clemens answered in his laconic twang before Wicksen could respond. “Clinking, clanking, caliginous collections of junk.”

  “Oh.”

  “Makeshift hardware,” Wicksen said, grimacing slightly at Clemens. “Slapped together quickly, without worrying about how it looks.”

  “Kloodges,” Edith repeated.

  Doug demanded, “Can you put it all together by the end of this week?”

  “We have to test—”

  “We don’t have time for testing!” Doug said sharply. “Get the hardware together, make it functional. You can test it after it’s completely assembled, if the Peacekeepers give us enough time.”

  Wicksen’s big eyes widened even further. “You’d hang the survival of this base on untested equipment?”

  “If it doesn’t work, we’re dead anyway,” Doug pointed out. “Right?”

  The physicist thought it over for a moment, his big tarsier’s eyes staring at Doug. At last he admitted, “Right.”

  “Wait a minute,” Anson said, from behind her desk. “Wix, will you have enough time to rig the control system so you can operate the beam gun from inside, here?”

  “No. We’ll have to run it manually, out there at the mass driver.”

  “In suits,” said Vince Falcone.

  Wicksen nodded solemnly.

  “With a nuclear warhead coming at you,” Falcone added.

  Another grave nod.

  Anson said, “So if the beam gun doesn’t work you and your people get fried by the nuke.”

  “That’s right,” Wicksen said slowly. “We’ll be operating an untested apparatus, in the open, in surface suits, and if it doesn’t work the first time we’ll all be toast.”

  All eyes turned to Doug.

  “The alternative is to let the Peacekeepers nuke our solar farms,” he said. But he was thinking, I can’t force Wix and his people to go out there under the gun. I can’t order him to do it.

  Wicksen smiled a strange, enigmatic smile. “Well … I can see that we’ll have to make the apparatus work the first time.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “I’d better get back to the workshop. We have a lot to do and not much time to do it.”