by Ben Bova
Wicksen, bending over the makeshift control board inside the buried emergency shelter, saw a swath of green lights interspersed with a handful of yellows. No reds, he told himself. So far, so good.
“Power to max,” he said quietly.
There was no whine of generators spinning up, no vibration from powerful machinery. Just the low background hum of electrical gadgetry in the cramped, round-ceilinged little shelter. The five of them had taken off their helmets; there’d been no time to get out of the suits entirely. Nor any inclination to do so.
Two red lights suddenly glowered at Wicksen. “Main buss has cut out,” he said, tension edging into his voice.
“On it,” said the only woman among his assistants. “I’ll have to run a diagnostic.”
“No time. Go to the backup.”
“Right.”
The red lights remained, but a new pair of greens lit up. Wicksen glanced at the countdown clock: fourteen minutes remaining until impact.
“How’s the pointing system?” he asked.
“It’s tracking okay. Hardly any movement, the bird’s coming right down our throats.”
“Makes life simpler,” Wicksen murmured.
“Magnets are at full power.”
He nodded, blew out a breath through puffed cheeks, then leaned his right index finger on the firing button.
A multitude of red lights sprang up on the board.
“What the hell?”
“Main buss shorted out!” the woman shouted. “Backup’s malfunctioned!”
Wicksen swore under his breath. Murphy’s Law. Turning toward her, he saw that her face look agonized.
“What’s the problem?” he asked calmly. Twelve minutes to impact.
“I don’t know,” she said, voice jittery, as she stared at the instruments in front of her.
Three minutes later Wicksen had satisfied himself that the main buss itself was functioning properly.
“It’s the wiring,” he said, reaching for his helmet. “The connections must have come loose.”
“That can’t be!” said the man who had done the wiring job.
“Can’t be anything else,” said Wicksen simply, as he pulled his helmet over his head.
“You’re not going out there! With the nuke less than ten minutes from detonation!”
“Somebody’s got to.”
“Let me,” said the man who had done the wiring. “It’s my responsibility.”
“We’ll both go,” said Wicksen.
Colonel Giap had taken the precaution of having the seven suicide volunteers placed in the same tractor with him. He wanted them under his eye; he was not willing to take chances that such fanatics might strike off on their own once the action started.
The American woman especially intrigued him. She was not young, and she certainly did not seem fanatical. Giap wondered what could have happened in her life to make her want to embrace death.
So he asked her. There was scarcely any privacy in the tractor, crowded with troops and the seven volunteers, all in spacesuits, but once they were safely parked in the lee of Alphonsus’ ringwall mountains, Giap clambered down onto the dusty regolith soil for a quick inspection of his vehicles.
Once satisfied that all the vehicles were properly positioned and there were no problems with the troops—except the usual complaints of soldiers everywhere—he returned to his own tractor. Instead of re-entering it, however, he ordered the American woman outside.
She came without a murmur and stood before him, an anonymous, sexless figure in a white spacesuit. Giap connected their two helmets with a communications wire, so they could speak without using their suit radios.
“I want to know,” he said without preamble, “how reliable you and your comrades are going to be.”
Without hesitation she replied, “Faithful unto death. That is our motto.”
“A motto is one thing. Soon we will be in action.”
This time her response took a few moments. At last she said, “We are pledged to give our lives to the cause of eliminating the scourge of nanotechnology. When the time comes, we will not hesitate to act.”
“I’m certain,” Giap said. “What concerns me is—what if the time does not come?”
“Does not … I don’t understand.”
“Soon a pair of missiles will knock out Moonbase’s entire electrical generation capability. They will be forced to surrender, or die within a few hours from lack of air to breathe. There will be no need for you to sacrifice yourselves.”
“Oh, I see. You want to know if we will obey your orders.”
“There will be no need to blow up Moonbase—and yourselves.”
“If all goes as you have planned.”
“Well?”
“You have nothing to fear,” she said easily enough. “Our pledge includes that promise to obey the authority over us. For the time being, that authority is you, Colonel.”
All well and good, Giap thought. But still he had no inkling of why this woman—or any of her comrades—was willing to throw away her life.
As if she could read his mind, she said, “You are wondering why I am not married and mothering children, or building a career for myself.”
“Yes,” he confessed. “Why have you volunteered to kill yourself?”
“Because I want to die.”
“But why?”
Without hesitation she began to tell him: of her abused childhood, of her disastrous first marriage, of her slowly evolving awareness that she was homosexual, of her second husband’s violence, of the years she spent in mental hospitals, of the casual rapes by hospital staff and the even more casual applications of mind-altering drugs in an effort to “rehabilitate” her.
Giap wanted to vomit long before she was anywhere near finished. He realized why she thought quick death preferable to continued life.
To interrupt her, he looked at the watch on his wrist-pad. Stopping her unbroken flow of misery, he said, “We must return to the tractor now. The missiles will be reaching their targets soon.”
“It’s the wiring, all right,” said Wicksen’s assistant. “My fault, Wix. I did a damned sloppy job. I was so rushed—”
“No time for that now,” Wicksen said. Pointing to the equipment still strewn on the ground around the mass driver, he said, “We’ve only got a few minutes to get it fixed.”
The man seemed to freeze for several heartbeats, standing immobile in his spacesuit. Then he said only, “Right.” And started for the equipment.
It’s not going to do any good, Wicksen thought. We can’t get this wiring repaired and then power up the magnets again and get everything running in ten minutes. It’s just not enough time. But he bent to his task, forcing all other thoughts out of his mind.
Until his earphones screeched, “Here it comes!”
He jerked up, saw nothing but the looming dark hulk of the mass driver. Then something jarred him off his feet. He sailed like a feather, floating, floating, until he slammed painfully into the ground.
He saw stars flashing, then nothing but darkness.
I’m dead, Wicksen thought. The nuclear warhead went off and it killed me. But why does my head hurt?
Doug and the others in the control center had been sitting tensely, waiting for Wicksen’s beam gun to disable the nuclear warhead.
The main overhead lights came on.
“What the hell?” Anson muttered loudly enough for Doug to hear.
“They’ve powered down the beam gun,” a technician’s voice said.
“Did they hit the warhead?” Doug wondered aloud.
“How could they know whether they’ve knocked it out or not?” Anson demanded. “They oughtta be shooting at it until it hits the frickin’ ground.”
Getting up from his chair, Doug called to the chief communications technician, several seats way from his own, “Can you get Wicksen for me?”
She nodded and worked her keyboard. All eyes in the control center focused on her—or on the screens show
ing the missile warhead streaking toward them.
“No joy,” said the comm tech.
The whole chamber shuddered. Doug felt the solid rock floor beneath his feet vibrate as if a major moon-quake had struck.
“The missile hit!” a technician’s voice rang out. “Dove straight into the friggin’ ground.”
“But there wasn’t any flash,” someone said.
“Radiation counters are quiet.”
“Our nuclear reactor just went off-line,” said another technician, his voice high and quavering. “Backup power system is down.”
Doug looked from one screen to another in the insect-eye array on the console before him. It took him a few moments to realize what had happened.
“It wasn’t the nuke!” Jinny Anson’s voice sounded exultant. “They sent the conventional bomb first!”
“To check their guidance accuracy,” Doug said, his breath shuddering. He half-collapsed back onto the wheeled chair.
“And to see what we had to throw against it,” Gordette added.
Doug looked across to O’Malley. Sweat was trickling down his beefy cheeks.
“It wasn’t the nuke,” O’Malley echoed, sounding relieved, grateful.
“Yeah, okay, but they got our backup generator,” Anson said. “Now if they knock out the solar farms we’re out of it.”
“Another launch from L-1,” a comm tech announced.
“That’s the nuke,” said almost everyone in the control center simultaneously.
MASS DRIVER
Slowly, Wicksen pulled himself up to a sitting position. If I’m not dead yet I soon will be, he thought. Radiation poisoning.
Except for the throbbing pain in the back of his head, though, he felt all right. He tried to rub his eyes, but his gloved hands bumped into the visor of his helmet. Feeling sheepish, he looked around. His assistant was on his knees, getting slowly to his feet.
“You okay?” Wicksen asked.
Before the man could answer, Wicksen’s helmet earphones buzzed with an incoming message. He punched the proper key on his wristpad, noting with a bit of a shock that his radiation dose patch was still a pale chartreuse.
“Wicksen here,” he said, surprised that his voice sounded so calm.
“This is Doug Stavenger,” he heard in his earphones. “What happened?”
“We didn’t have time to fix—wait a minute! Are you running on auxiliary power or not?”
“The missile took out our nuclear generator. It was a conventional warhead. Their nuke is on its way, launched four minutes ago.”
“You mean we’ve still got two hours to get this kloodge working?” Wicksen felt elated.
“Can you do it?”
Despite his cumbersome spacesuit Wicksen jumped to his feet, not so difficult a trick in the low lunar gravity. “We’ll do our best,” he cried, overjoyed at still being alive.
Killifer checked his wristwatch before starting out on his regular rounds through the house. With Rodriguez watching everything through the security cameras, Killifer wanted to make it all seem normal, dull routine. Don’t give the dumb spic any reason to think anything’s out of the ordinary.
It was a big house, and Killifer didn’t want to look hurried. He made his way from the kitchen through the dining room and living room, then into the foyer, where he carefully checked the front door to see that it was properly locked. Across the front hall and into the library, then the entertainment room, checking each of the French windows that opened onto the patio.
Unconsciously licking his lips, he started up the back stairs, past the monstrosity of a grandfather’s clock where the security team kept a pair of submachine guns stashed away. Maybe I should take one of them, he mused. But he decided against it. His pistol held fifty rounds, plenty to do the job. Besides, taking one of the stutter guns from the clock would alert Rodriguez—if he was watching the screens instead of his favorite video show. Be just my luck to have him spot me.
So Killifer passed the loudly ticking clock on the landing and went on up to the second floor. All the bedrooms up there were unoccupied, he knew, except the master bedroom, but his job was to enter each one and check each window.
His palms felt slippery with sweat as he neared the master bedroom. Rodriguez can see me go in there, if he’s watching the screens like he’s supposed to. I’ll have to do it fast and then duck out before he figures out what’s going down. Quite deliberately, Killifer switched off the palm-sized two-way radio he kept in his shirt pocket.
At last he stood before the master bedroom’s double doors. He had memorized the electronic lock’s combination from the list kept in the security office.
Okay, he told himself, licking his lips once again. Don’t just stand around. Do it!
Swiftly he tapped on the miniature keyboard and saw its light turn green. He pushed the door open.
It was a spacious room. Lev Brudnoy lay sprawled on the oversized bed, stark naked. Nothing but gray mottled skin and bones, Killifer saw, and that ratty little beard. The wallscreen on the other side of the room showed a view from the Moon, the crater floor of Alphonsus, it looked like. No sound; either it was muted or nobody was saying anything from Moonbase.
“What is it?” Brudnoy said, sitting up, frowning, reaching for the bedsheet to cover himself.
Joanna was nowhere in sight. Killifer looked across the room: chaise longue, little desk and chair, a couple of upholstered chairs, bookcases, bureaus, mirrors—but no Joanna Brudnoy.
“Where is she?” Killifer hissed, sliding the pistol from his holster.
Brudnoy’s eyes widened. Killifer saw several doors: closets, all closed. And one other door, half ajar. The bathroom.
“Get out of here!” Brudnoy shouted, reaching for the phone console on the night table.
“Where is she?” Killifer yelled back, heading for the half-open bathroom door.
Brudnoy banged the red emergency button on the phone console as Killifer strode swiftly across the bedroom carpeting.
“Joanna!” Brudnoy hollered. “Look out!”
And Killifer felt something thump against his shoulder. Whirling, he saw Brudnoy reaching for another book to throw at him, a skinny naked old man trying to stop him by throwing books.
With a wild laugh, Killifer fired twice. Brudnoy’s chest erupted in blood and he jerked back against the bed’s headboard, arms and legs flailing like a rag doll. Killifer pumped another two shots into him for good measure.
Joanna screamed. Killifer turned and saw her standing naked, frozen, in the bathroom doorway.
“Remember me?” Killifer taunted, levelling his gun at her. For a moment he thought how much fun it would be to rape her, to make her kneel to him, turn herself inside out for him, before he blew her head off. But there wasn’t time.
In that moment Joanna slammed the bathroom door. Killifer heard its lock click.
Laughing even louder, he fired three shots into the lock, then kicked the door open. He stepped into the bathroom—
And Joanna, standing beside the door, drove the point of her hair-stlying scissors into his wrist with every molecule of strength in her. Killifer’s hand went numb and he nearly dropped the gun. Her face white with fury, Joanna snatched a hairbrush and whacked it as hard as she could against his bleeding wrist.
Killifer felt pain flaming up his arm. The gun fell from his fingers. He staggered back, but not before Joanna grabbed the end of the scissors still sticking in his wrist.
“Bastard,” she snarled, working the scissors back and forth. “Murdering bastard!”
Pain searing his whole arm, Killifer cuffed her with his free hand, driving her back against the marble sink. But she held firmly onto the scissors, yanking it from his bleeding wrist.
The gun was on the tiled floor. Killifer bent to reach for it but Joanna kicked it away.
“That’s not going to help you, bitch,” he growled at her. “I’m not leaving here until you’re dead.”
He lunged at her, but Joanna raked
the point of the scissors up his chest and throat and lodged the blades in the underside of his jaw.
Yowling with pain, Killifer staggered back into the bedroom.
Rodriguez was at the hallway door, submachine gun levelled at Killifer’s waist.
“You killed them!” Rodriguez shouted, eyes wide.
“No …” Killifer choked. “No, wait …”
“General’s orders,” Rodriguez said. He fired half a dozen rounds into Killifer’s midsection.
Killifer felt nothing. The bedroom tilted and he was staring at the ceiling. It faded, though, slowly turning dark. He thought of General O’Conner telling him, “The fewer people know about this, the better off we are.”
Rodriguez is one of them, Killifer realized. That sonofabitch O’Conner planted him here to get rid of me once the job’s done.
It was his last thought.
CONTROL CENTER
“When we power up,” Wicksen was telling Doug, “You’re going to be totally blacked out.”
There was no video from the mass driver; Doug spoke to a blank screen.
“We’re plugging in the fuel cells,” he said. “They can keep us going for the few minutes your gun will be running.”
He sensed Wicksen nodding. “Well, we’re doing everything we can here. That missile blast shook half our connections loose and the other half aren’t all that sound, either.”
Doug grimaced, then recalled, “I remember a professor of mine saying that if something scratches or bites, it’s biology; if it stinks or pops, it’s chemistry; and if—”
“If it doesn’t work,” Wicksen finished with him, “It’s physics.”
Neither of them laughed.
“We’re going to power up in fifteen minutes,” Wicksen said. “Will you have the fuel cells on-line by then?”
“If we don’t I’ll call you.”
“That only leaves us six minutes to fire at the nuke,” the physicist said, “assuming they hold off detonation until the warhead’s only three hundred meters above the crater floor.”
“If they detonate higher they’ll shower the Peacekeeper troops with radiation.”
“They’re not digging in?”
