Moonwar

by Ben Bova

  The others watched him walk out of the office and slide the door shut softly behind him.

  Anson shook her head. “The Japs aren’t the only ones who’ve got kamikazes.”

  Falcone, his swarthy face set in a scowl, said to Doug, “You’re gonna let him go out on a suicide job?”

  “Do you see any alternatives?” Doug returned, forcing himself to sound much firmer than he felt.

  Before Falcone could answer, Doug added, “Except surrender?”

  “Okay, Wix has made his decision,” Anson said. “Let’s move on.”

  Gratefully, Doug turned to Zimmerman. “Professor, what have you cooked up for us?”

  “Nothing,” said Zimmerman flatly.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing that can be ready in a week.”

  Doug turned to Cardenas. “Kris?”

  “We’re ready to inject therapeutic nanomachines into anyone who’ll accept them. After your recent experience,” she glanced inadvertently at Gordette, “lots of people have come to realize that nanomachines can be extremely helpful to them, healthwise.”

  “Good,” said Doug.

  “But there’s a downside, too,” Cardenas added, raising a warning finger. “Most of the people here intend to return Earthside, sooner or later. They’re scared of trouble down there if they’re carrying nanomachines in them.”

  Doug slumped back in his squeaking little plastic chair. “So what’s the bottom line, Kris?”

  “Most of our people refuse to be injected. But we’re ready for emergency nanotherapy for people who’re hurt or wounded.”

  The stupid fools, Doug thought. Then he realized his own fears of returning Earthside, where nanoluddite assassins waited. Like Killifer. Like the fanatics who murdered anyone who publicly espoused nanotechnology.

  “Okay,” he said wearily. “I assume you’re working with the medical staff.”

  Cardenas grinned. “All three of ’em.”

  Neither Debbie Paine nor Harry Clemens had anything useful for Moonbase’s defense. By the time Doug reached Vince Falcone, though, the burly, swarthy engineer had a knowing glint in his eyes.

  “I been thinking,” Falcone said.

  “I thought I smelled wood burning,” quipped Clemens.

  “They’ll be comin’ over Wodjo Pass, right?” Falcone asked rhetorically.

  Doug looked over at Gordette, who nodded warily.

  “Maybe we can block the pass,” said Falcone.

  “Block it?”

  “Sure. You know the foamgel we use for insulation and whatnot? Smart hydrogel is what it is. Expands or shrinks, depending on how you set it up.”

  Doug remembered that foamgel had been used on his sabotaged spacesuit. He glanced over at Gordette again; Bam was staring at him with unwavering eyes.

  Falcone was grinning now with self-satisfaction. “Suppose we spray a ton or so of the glop along Wodjo Pass, see? The Peacekeepers are coming across the pass in tractors, right? When they’re in the middle of the pass we radiate the gel with microwaves from the antennas on Mt. Yeager.”

  “And the gel swells up to a couple hundred times its original size!” Anson said eagerly.

  “You got it,” said Falcone. “Their tractors are caught in the glop like flies in a spiderweb. Like trucks stuck in deep mud.”

  “You can stop their tractors?” Doug asked. It was the first piece of good news he’d heard.

  Still grinning, Falcone said, “I think so.”

  “But couldn’t the troopers get out and walk across the foam?” Debbie Paine asked. “It hardens like concrete, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Falcone admitted.

  Doug turned to Gordette. “Bam, what do you think?”

  The room fell utterly, uncomfortably silent.

  Gordette spoke up, “Even if they can get out and walk to the crater floor, they’d have to leave most of their heavy equipment behind, in the tractors.”

  “Heavy equipment?” Clemens asked.

  “Missile launchers,” said Gordette. “Artillery. Ammunition cases. They could only bring what the troopers could carry. That’s a big advantage to us.”

  “Can you produce that much foamgel in a few days?” Doug asked.

  Falcone scratched at his stubbly chin. “We got some in inventory already … I’ll get the chem lab to turn out as much as they can.”

  “But will it be enough?”

  “Dunno,” Falcone answered. Then he brightened. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking excited. “It could get even better.”

  “What?”

  “If we can divert enough power from the solar farms to the microwave antennas on Yeager—”

  “Assuming Wix’s beam gun works and the farms aren’t nuked,” Anson interjected.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Falcone said impatiently. “Anyway, gimme enough power for the microwave transmitters and we can fry the Peacekeeper troops while they’re still up in the pass.”

  Doug felt his brows knitting. “What’re you saying, Vince?”

  “The troops’ll be in suits, right? Lotsa metal in their suits. A microwave beam of sufficient strength’ll heat up the metal, even penetrate the suits and cook the guys inside!”

  Anson nearly came up out of her chair. “You can wipe ’em out up there in the pass before they ever get near us!”

  “No!” shouted Edith.

  Surprised, Doug turned toward her.

  “No, you can’t do that,” Edith said, her face set with determination.

  “Whattaya mean we can’t?” Falcone snapped. “I haven’t gone through the numbers but I’m willing to bet—”

  “You mustn’t kill any of them,” Edith said.

  “Mustn’t kill … ?”

  “How can we fight ’em if we can’t kill ’em?”

  Edith edged forward slightly in her seat. “The worst thing you can do, the absolute worst, is to kill any of the Peacekeepers.”

  Doug realized what she was driving at. “Captain Munasinghe,” he muttered.

  “Right. Faure tried to make a martyr out of him, tried to use him to work up public opinion against you.”

  “But he killed himself,” Debbie Paine said. “It wasn’t our fault.”

  “Okay,” said Edith. “Now imagine what happens if you cook a hundred Peacekeeper troops. Picture what the media Earthside will do with that.”

  Silence descended on the office again, gloomier and deeper than before.

  “We’ve been working for weeks now to present Moonbase’s side of this story to the media, the weak little guys being bullied by the big, bad U.N. and Peacekeepers,” Edith said. “And it’s starting to work. Public relations polls in the States and Europe show that the people are rooting for us and against the U.N.”

  “With that and five bucks I can buy a cup of coffee,” Falcone grumbled.

  “Your claim of independence is coming up before the World Court in a few months,” Edith went on. “You need to have the best possible public image.”

  “And that means we can’t kill the soldiers attacking us?” Anson demanded.

  “That’s exactly what it means,” said Edith heatedly. “Right now a lot of people Earthside are on your side. The underdog always gets sympathy. But you start sending body bags back to Earth and your support will evaporate damned quick.”

  “So we could win the battle and lose the war,” Doug said.

  Nodding, Edith answered, “That’s what it comes down to. Kill Peacekeeper troops and you’ll just convince everybody Earthside that Faure is right. They’ll come at you with still more troops. Or missiles, or whatever it takes to wipe you out.”

  “So we can’t kill the Peacekeepers,” Falcone muttered unbelievingly.

  “Then how do we keep them from taking over?” Anson wondered aloud.

  Doug echoed her. “How can we win the battle without killing any of the enemy?”

  “Damned good question,” Clemens murmured.

  For long moments no one said a word. Fina
lly Doug turned to Gordette.

  “Bam, how can you stop soldiers without killing them?”

  They all turned to Gordette, still sitting by the door. Doug saw the distrust, the outright repugnance on their faces; he wondered what Gordette saw, what he felt.

  Gordette looked them over with a gaze that swept the small, crowded office. Then, turning to face Doug squarely, he said, “You’ll have to incapacitate them.”

  “How?”

  Gordette cocked his head to one side, thinking. “They’ll all be in spacesuits. They’ll be linked by their suit radios. Can you jam their communications?”

  Doug said, “We ought to be able to do that.”

  “If they can’t talk back and forth they’ll lose their cohesiveness. Instead of a battalion they’ll be a handful of individuals.”

  “Like ants!” Paine exclaimed. “One ant by itself is pretty useless. But a whole nest of them can mount an invasion of another nest.”

  “Cut off their communications,” Doug repeated.

  “Not enough,” said Falcone. “You’ll still have a few hundred soldiers armed with guns and whatnot. They can be directed by hand signals, for chrissakes.”

  “Not if they are blind,” rumbled Zimmerman.

  “What?”

  “I have been stupid,” Zimmerman said, shaking his jowly head. “Invisible I cannot make you … but I can make them blind!”

  “Blind them? How?”

  “Simple,” said the professor. “Let them come into our tunnels. We fill the air with nanomachines that cling to their visors and darken them so they cannot see.”

  Doug immediately asked, “Can the bugs cling to their suits, too? Jam up their joints, immobilize them?”

  “Like the dust outside!” Anson said.

  “Yah! Better than dust,” Zimmerman replied. “My nanos will turn them into statues!”

  “But only once they’re inside the base, in the corridors,” Clemens said.

  “Yah. The nanos must have air to float in.”

  “So we can make them deaf, dumb and blind,” Falcone said.

  “And immobile,” Cardenas added.

  “Freeze ’em in their tracks,” said Anson.

  “Can you produce these nanos in a week?” Doug asked.

  For the first time since Doug had known the old man, Zimmerman’s fleshy face looked uncertain. “One week? Not possible! But I will try.”

  Doug nodded, but he thought that it was awfully risky to allow the Peacekeepers into the base in the hopes that Zimmerman’s nanobugs could neutralize them. Assuming Zimmerman could make the bugs and they worked as advertised. Even then, everything depended on Wix’s beam gun stopping the incoming nuke. And Falcone’s foamgel stopping the Peacekeepers’ heavy equipment up at Wodjohowitcz Pass.

  One untested idea on top of another, Doug realized. And if any of the Peacekeepers gets killed, we’ve lost everything.

  NIPPON ONE

  Colonel Giap tried to suppress the distaste he felt for the Yamagata volunteer.

  The man was Japanese, short and wiry, quite young. He had an air of superiority about him, an aura of other-worldliness, as if all of Giap’s responsibilities and worries did not matter at all.

  The slow buildup of three hundred Peacekeeper troops—and these seven special volunteers—had strained Nippon One’s facilities to the breaking point. Never a large or comfortable base, its cramped little compartments were now jammed with the extra personnel. Four people were sleeping in cubicles designed for one. Peacekeeper troops even slept in the tunnels on thin foam mattresses or tatami mats.

  Giap’s “office” was a storage bin that had been half-emptied by the enormous drain on the base’s logistics. We had better move on Moon base within the week, the colonel told himself. There will be no food left for us in eight days.

  He looked directly into the dark brown eyes of the Yamagata volunteer and saw a placidity, an almost amused sense of superiority. This man is actually looking forward to his death, Giap realized. Then he wondered how much of his bravery or fanaticism came from narcotics. The Sacred Seven, as the suicide volunteers called themselves, lived by themselves, crammed into a single cubicle; they had brought their own food and drink. And so-called medicines.

  Three Japanese, three Americans, and an Iranian made up the Sacred Seven. One of the Americans was a woman. All of them were either serenely otherworldly, as their leader was, or brittle and wired, with eyes that glittered with the burning intensity of fanaticism. All of them wore a shoulder patch that showed a fist clutching a bolt of lightning.

  There was no space for a desk in the compartment. The two men sat on the floor, cross-legged, facing one another barely centimeters apart, Giap in his light blue uniform, the Japanese volunteer in a gym suit—with the shoulder patch. Above them rose stacks of half-empty shelving. Giap’s personal computer, hardly bigger than his fist, lay on the bare stone floor at his side.

  “My orders,” Giap was saying, “are to capture Moonbase intact.”

  “If possible,” the volunteer added.

  Giap seethed inwardly at the man’s smug attitude. He knows what my orders are. Someone has been leaking the information to him.

  “It will not only be possible,” Giap hissed, “but inevitable.”

  “Assuming all goes according to your plan.”

  “My plan is very thorough.”

  “Of course,” said the volunteer airily. “However, should the assault fail, for any reason, my team will destroy Moonbase for you.”

  “And destroy yourselves in the doing of it.”

  “That is nothing. To give our lives in the service of God is the greatest good.”

  Giap wondered whose god this man thought he was serving. These zealots all professed loyalty to the New Morality, even though their individual religions must obviously be different from one another.

  “I want you to understand that you are not to make any move whatsoever unless and until I order it,” Giap said.

  The volunteer nodded benignly.

  “You and your people are under my command. You will obey my orders.”

  “Yes, of course. But you will assign a squad of your troops to help us open up the old plasma exhaust vents.”

  It was not a question, Giap knew.

  “Yes, as soon as we have secured the main garage area,” he replied.

  “Good. Then we will climb into the vents and make our way to the key Moonbase facilities: the water factory, the environmental control center, the control center, the farm, and the nanolabs. I myself and one of the Americans will knock out the nanolabs.”

  “Only if I order it,” Giap insisted.

  “Of course,” said the volunteer, with his maddeningly patient smile. “We will need your troopers’ assistance to climb up into the vents, won’t we?”

  Giap nodded slowly. The volunteers will each be carrying a hundred kilos of high explosive. Not an easy burden to shoulder in a spacesuit, he knew.

  Suicide bombers. The idea rankled him. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command did not trust him to capture Moonbase. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command was working for the New Morality in addition to the corporation. Whoever it was has added these insane volunteers to make certain that Moonbase will be eliminated if it can’t be taken intact.

  SAVANNAH

  The two women were taking lunch on the patio, shaded by a pair of ancient oaks and cooled by a breeze generated from hidden fans built into the brick walls that edged the meticulously cultivated garden of show flowers.

  Joanna Brudnoy wore a light sundress of rose pink; Jill Meyers a tailored blouse and knee-length skirt. They had known each other since Jill had been a NASA astronaut working with Paul Stavenger in the very earliest lunar shelters that eventually became Moonbase; long enough so that neither felt the need to try to impress the other.

  “We’re in summer recess now,” Jill Meyers said.

  “And how long will that last?” Joanna asked, glancing out at the two men working in the
garden. One of them actually was a gardener, the other a security guard in disguise.

  Jill gave her a freckle-nosed grin. “The International Court of Justice has its own calendar, Jo. Officially, it’ll stay summer until November, when we reconvene.”

  “And that’s when you’ll hear Moonbase’s petition?”

  Justice Meyers nodded.

  “Isn’t there any way of hearing it sooner?” Joanna pleaded. “A special session, perhaps?”

  “I tried, Jo,” said Jill. “I went all-out, but I got outvoted, ten to five.”

  Joanna toyed absently with the salad in front of her. “Is that how they’ll vote in November, do you think?”

  “No, not at all. They just didn’t want to go to the trouble of a special session, that’s all.” Before Joanna could comment, Jill added, “And they’re waiting to see if Moonbase can last until November. If Moonbase survives that long, it’ll be a strong indication that they really can be independent.”

  Joanna let go of her fork and it clinked against the glass dish. “Faure’s going to attack them again any day now.”

  Nodding, Jill agreed, “That’s what I hear, too.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “I talked with the president. She’s not going to lift a finger.”

  “We’ve been putting as much pressure on our senators as we can,” Joanna said. “But Moonbase is a private operation, not part of the government.”

  “There’s not much they can do about it,” Jill said.

  “But there must be something!”

  “Wait,” Jill said gently. “Wait and pray.”

  Joanna eyed her. “You sound like a New Morality convert.”

  Jill took it with a smile. “You don’t have to be a New Morality fanatic to believe in the power of prayer, Jo.”

  Several miles away, in the riverfront headquarters of Masterson Corporation, Jack Killifer sat tensely in one of the tight little stalls that passed for offices among the corporation’s personnel department employees.

  “I’m taking an awful chance, Mr. Killifer,” said the young woman sitting at the desk. She spoke in a near-whisper; the padded partitions that marked off her tiny space did not extend all the way to the ceiling. Soft music purred from the hand-sized radio on her desk next to her computer monitor screen.