by Ben Bova
Doug snorted with disdain. Olive branches. The symbol of peace. Leading three columns of soldiers and weaponry devoted to conquering Moonbase.
“We’d better get down to the control center,” Anson said. Her voice was hushed, strained, just as Doug’s was.
“Right,” he said tightly.
Robert T. Wicksen got the news in his helmet earphones. Automatically he looked across the crater floor toward Wodjohowitcz Pass. From where the mass driver stood, the pass appeared as little more than a dimple in the ring of rounded smooth mountains.
“What about the missile at L-1?” he asked, his voice shaking just slightly.
“Still sitting there,” came the voice from the control center.
Wicksen puffed out a relieved breath. “Keep me informed, please.”
“Will do.”
Clicking to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wicksen called out, “Listen up, people. The Peacekeeper troops are coming across Mare Nubium. The balloon will be going up very soon now.”
A dead silence greeted his warning. None of his exhausted team had a word to say.
Vince Falcone was swearing under his breath, but his mutterings were loud enough for one of his technicians to ask, “Repeat, please. I didn’t get it.”
“You don’t want it,” Falcone said into his helmet microphone.
He and six picked assistants were trying to spread the smart foamgel across the narrowest portion of Wodjohowitcz Pass from storage canisters on the backs of the tractors they were driving. The work was slow, tedious, and made exasperatingly difficult by the fact that the gel tended to clot in the hoses instead of flowing smoothly, as the chemists had promised.
When the clotting problem had first surfaced, hours earlier, Falcone had told his people merely to increase the pressure on the nitrogen gas they were using to force the gel out of the storage tanks. But nitrogen was rare and precious on the Moon, and Falcone quickly saw that they weren’t going to have enough to do the job. He had originally wanted to use oxygen for the pressure gas, it was plentiful and cheap, but the chemists had worried that oxygen would react with the gel and change its chemical properties ’too much.
“Helium would be best,” the chief chemist had mused. “If only we had enough helium …”
So they had settled on nitrogen, raiding the life support backup supplies for two dozen tanks of it. And now it wasn’t doing the job.
Time and again, Falcone and his cohorts had to stop their tractors and physically clean out the jammed hoses with wire brushes that the chemists had provided them.
“Everything in chemistry comes down to plumbing,” Falcone muttered to himself. “Might as well be cleaning a goddamned latrine.”
A voice crackled in his earphones. “What I don’t understand is why nobody’s hardening the microwave antennas against radiation.”
Falcone looked up from his work and tried to identify the questioner as his voice continued, “I mean, like what good is this goop gonna do if the antennas are knocked out by the nuke’s radiation pulse?”
Newman, Falcone decided. He never could see past his friggin’ nose. “What happens if Wix’s smart guys don’t stop the nuke?” he demanded.
For a moment no one replied, then Newman said, “The warhead goes off above the crater floor, right?”
“And what happens then?”
“Uh … it knocks out the solar farms.”
“And where do the antennas get their electricity?”
“From the … oh, yeah, I get it. If the nuke goes off the antennas are dead anyway, right?”
“So there’s no sense sending anybody up to the top of Yeager to harden the antennas. Capisce?”
No response, although Falcone thought he heard stifled giggling from somebody.
A few minutes later his earphones chimed, so he dropped his brush and let the kinked hose fall gently to the ground as he tapped the keypad on his wrist.
A comm tech’s voice announced, “Peacekeeper vehicles are in sight, crossing Mare Nubium.”
“How long before they reach the pass?” he asked.
“Unknown. The thinking here is that they’ll stop and camp at the foot of the ringwall until the nuke from L-1 hits.”
Grunting an inarticulate reply, Falcone arched his back slightly and looked through his visor up to the top of Mt. Yeager, where the microwave transmitters stood. For the first time he realized that this entire “blue goo” business was totally untested.
Christ, I hope it works, he said to himself. If that nuke isn’t stopped by Wicksen’s zap gun, the microwave transmitters’ll be knocked out and all our work will have gone for nothing.
And, he added as he bent stiffly to pick up the jammed hose again, we got a damned good chance of still being out here and getting fried to a crisp by the mother-humpin’ nuke.
* * *
The control center was changed. The same hushed intensity, the same low-key lighting, the same hum of murmuring voices and purring electronic machines. Yet the air crackled now; the very smell of the control center was different: nervous, sweaty. It wasn’t fear that Doug sensed from the technicians monitoring their consoles, so much as a focused motivation, anxiety masked by the duties of the moment.
Jinny Anson slipped into an unoccupied chair next to the U-shaped set of communications consoles, while Doug paced slowly through the big chamber, walking behind the seated technicians, glancing at each individual display screen. On one side of the room glowed the huge schematic display of Moonbase’s systems. The opposite wall showed camera views of the approaching Peacekeeper armada and the spacecraft hovering around the L-1 space station.
Doug completed his circuit of the center and returned to Anson’s chair.
“Everything we can do, we’re doing,” he said.
Anson looked up at him. “It’s sweaty palms time now.”
Looking at the view of the approaching Peacekeeper vehicles, Doug said, “The longer they take, the better it is for us. Time’s on our side.”
“For now,” said Anson.
He nodded. “Better put out an announcement that all personnel without specific tasks for the defense of the base should meet in the Cave.”
Anson hiked her brows. “Not stay in their quarters?”
“No, get them into the Cave. Food’s there, and it’ll be easier to deal with them if they’re all together instead of strung out in their individual quarters. There might be fighting in the corridors; I don’t want anybody hurt unnecessarily.”
“Collateral damage,” Anson muttered, turning to the console keyboard.
The editing booth felt hot and stuffy. Edith sat at the big board, watching the array of display screens half surrounding her, showing views of the approaching Peacekeepers and the spacecraft at L-1.
“The first shot in this battle has already been fired,” she was saying into the microphone that sent her words Earthside. “The U.N. Peacekeepers knocked out a reconnaissance satellite that Moonbase had placed in orbit to observe the Peacekeepers’ movements.”
She pressed the stud that sent the view from Mt. Yeager’s camera Earthward. “Now the Peacekeeper assault force is moving across Mare Nubium, approaching Moonbase. What you are seeing now …”
Georges Faure was far from composed as he sat in his office, watching the broadcast of Global News. He fidgeted in his big chair, seething with anger. To think that this woman, this slut of a reporter who had seduced him into allowing her to accompany the original Peacekeeper force to the Moon, to think that she was such a traitor, such a propagandist for the rebels—it exasperated him.
Yet a part of him was thrilled at the sight of the Peacekeeper armada crossing Mare Nubium. These are my troops, Faure told himself, marching under my orders. Let the news media say what they will, in a matter of hours Moonbase will be under my control, as it should be.
And if those rebellious fools attempt the resistance, they will be crushed. As they should be.
Colonel Giap compared the electronic map on the display s
creen of his tractor’s cab with the view of Alphonsus’ ringwall mountains looming before him. His tractor cab was pressurized and armored, so he could ride with the visor of his spacesuit helmet open. He could have made this journey in shirtsleeves, had he chosen to, but that would have meant that he would have to don his spacesuit once they arrived at their designated campsite. He had decided to endure the discomfort of forty-three hours in the spacesuit, instead.
Most of the trip he had spent worrying about nanomachines. Moonbase had no weapons to speak of, he knew, but what kind of devilish weaponry could their nanoscientists devise? Nanomachines had driven off the first Peacekeeper attack. Giap had chosen broad daylight to make his assault, but inside the tunnels of Moonbase the purifying effect of solar ultraviolet did not penetrate. That was why Giap had included special teams of civilians with powerful UV lamps to accompany his troops. He did not intend to be run off by invisible, insidious nanoweapons.
Their base camp location had been carefully chosen to position them close to the two easiest passes over the ringwall mountains, while still placing them within the sheltering lee of the mountains themselves. Those solid piles of rock would protect them from the radiation pulse of the nuclear explosion. There was no need to worry about blast effects in the lunar vacuum, but even if there were the mountains would shelter them, just as it will protect us from the radiation and heat pulse, Giap assured himself.
Still, a tendril of worry gnawed at him. The missile must be accurately aimed. And its warhead must be fuzed at precisely the correct altitude. If it goes off too soon, or its aim is a fraction of a degree off-target, we could be hit by the heat and radiation.
He reached out a gloved hand to touch the armored roof of the tractor’s cab. Enough protection against a slightly misaimed nuclear warhead? he wondered. More likely the metal would serve as an efficient oven, to roast us all to death.
Shaking his head inside the helmet, he tried to push such fears away by attending to his duties. He established communications contact with L-1, although the link was weak and strained with harsh bursts of static. The tractor comm sets were far from satisfactory and sunspots or some other esoteric phenomenon could hash up communications quite maddeningly.
The image of a Peacekeeper junior officer appeared on the little screen, wavering slightly and streaked with electronic snow.
“We are on schedule,” Giap informed the junior officer. “All my vehicles will be at their assigned base camp positions within two hours.”
“Very well,” came the woman’s voice, through hissing static. “Missile launch will proceed on schedule unless you order otherwise.”
“Yes, launch on schedule,” said Giap, wondering how firm a comm link they would have once his vehicle was parked up close to the ringwall mountains.
THE WHITE HOUSE
“Madam President, you’ve got real troubles with this Moonbase business.”
The president gave her staff chief a chilling look, the kind that had been known to cause lesser men to write out their resignations.
The chief of the White House staff was an old hand at this kind of thing, though; he had been with the president since she had first run for the Senate, many elections earlier.
“I mean,” he said, hunching forward in the Kennedy rocker in front of her broad, modern desk, “the poll numbers are changing so fast we can’t keep up with them.”
“The trend?” she snapped.
“Swinging steadily in favor of Moonbase. Those news broadcasts Global’s airing are turning the public’s opinion around a hundred eighty degrees.”
The president turned her chair away from this man she knew so well, away from his earnest, worried face and the problems that slumped his shoulders. She looked out through the long windows to the flower garden that had soothed both Roosevelts and everyone else who had sat at this apex of power in the Oval Office.
“I mean it, Luce,” her staff chief said, “this has turned into real trouble.”
“What about the New Morality?” she asked, still without looking at him.
He did the unthinkable. He got up from the rocking chair and walked around her desk, forcing her to face him.
Bending his knees slightly and leaning his liver-spotted hands on them so his eyes were on the same level as his, he said gently, “They’re not going to be enough, Luce. The public’s demanding that you do something.”
She glared at him and swung back to the desk. He returned to the rocking chair.
“Are you telling me that O’Conner and Previs and all the other New Morality leaders are abandoning me on this?”
“No, not at all,” he said, raising his hands. “The hard core of the Faithful are with you as much as they’ve ever been. They see this fight on the Moon as the battle between the forces of good and the evils of nanotechnology.”
“So where’s my problem?”
“It’s the peripherals,” he said with a sigh. “You’ve got the hard core, they’re solidly with you. But the hard core isn’t that many votes, Luce! The New Morality’s real strength has been in its numbers, yeah, but most of those numbers aren’t fanatics. They’re ordinary folks who think the New Morality’s ideas about cleaning up crime and vice are pretty good.”
“And now?”
“Now they’re looking at their television screens and seeing the big, bad U.N. attacking poor little Moonbase. And most of those people at Moonbase are Americans.”
“Who use nanomachines.”
The staff chief shook his head. “The voters don’t care that much about the nanomachines. What’s getting them worked up is the sight of a bunch of Americans getting attacked by the Peacekeepers—who are mostly foreigners.”
“But they elected me because I pushed the nanotech treaty.”
“That’s not important to them now. As long as the Moon people keep their nanomachines on the Moon, the average American voter doesn’t care a gnat’s fart about it.”
The president glared at her staff chief for long icy moments.
He gave her a weak grin. “Don’t blame the messenger for the message,” he said.
She huffed at him, then reached out and flicked on her desktop computer. “I want to see these numbers for myself.”
The staff chief leaned back in the rocker and watched her face as the data from the constantly ongoing public-opinion poll flickered across her screen.
When she finally looked up at him she asked, “What should I do?”
“Call Faure and tell him to back off, maybe?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s much too late for that.”
“At least tell him that you’re concerned about the safety of the American citizens at Moonbase.”
“But they’ve declared their independence! They don’t want American citizenship!”
“We don’t know if that’s just a ploy or not. Either way, there’re probably a lot of men and women up there who want to keep their citizenship and come back to the States as soon as they can.”
The president shook her head. “I can’t weasel on Faure. I’ve been one of his strongest supporters! If I turn on him now, the word of this Administration will be worthless all around the world. Nobody would trust us again.”
“I’m thinking about your reelection campaign.”
She waved a hand in the air. “That’s next year, for god’s sake. By that time Moonbase will be under U.N. control and this whole flap will be forgotten.”
Her staff chief still looked worried.
“All right,” the president said, “so Yamagata will be running Moonbase and taking over the spacecraft market. If Masterson Corporation goes for it, what am I going to do about it?”
“Once the opposition starts gnawing on that bone …”
She shook her head stubbornly.
“They’re already starting to make noises in the Senate,” he insisted. “Joanna Brudnoy’s been talking with half the committee chairmen on the Hill.”
“It’s a fait accompli,” the president said
curtly. “In another forty-eight hours or so the Peacekeepers will have taken over Moonbase and this whole problem will resolve itself.”
“Maybe,” the staff chief said softly. “But what happens if Moonbase drives the Peacekeepers off? They did it once, you know.”
She scoffed at him. “That’s impossible and you know it.”
“Yeah. But still…”
“Don’t you intend to sleep?” Lev Brudnoy asked his wife.
Joanna sat in the exact center of the largest sofa in their living room, her eyes riveted to the big Windowall screen above the dark fireplace.
“I couldn’t sleep if I tried, Lev,” she replied. “Not with this going on.”
The screen showed the view from the cameras atop Mt. Yeager. The Peacekeepers’ vehicles were slowing to a halt at the base of Alphonsus’ ringwall mountains. They were arranging themselves in a single thin, undulating line that snaked along the flank of the mountains, each newly arriving tractor taking its position at the end of the constantly growing line. The cameras’ resolution was fine enough to spot individual soldiers, if any appeared, but the vehicles stayed tightly buttoned up. Joanna could see the spokes of their springy wheels and the cleats on the tractors’ treads, but no person got out of the vehicles.
They’re waiting, Joanna thought. Waiting for the missile that will be launched from L-1. Then they’ll attack. They’ll storm Moonbase, and Doug will try to stop them and they’ll kill my son and destroy everything.
Brudnoy sank his lanky frame onto the sofa next to her, murmuring, “At least we could go upstairs and watch from bed. Nothing is going to happen for another nine or ten hours, at least.”
“You go if you’re getting sleepy,” Joanna said, not moving her eyes from the screen. Edie Elgin had been speaking for nearly an hour, but now her voice had stopped and the screen was silent.
He shrugged and sat beside her for several minutes. “This is like watching ice melt,” he grumbled. “It’s hypnotic. Don’t you feel your eyes growing heavy? Sleepy? Drowsy?”
Joanna poked at him with her elbow. “Stop it, Lev!”
