Moonwar

by Ben Bova

Doug shook his head. “No, they’re staying buttoned up tight inside their vehicles, as far as we can see.”

  “I’ll bet they’re praying for a low-altitude detonation even more than we are.”

  “Probably so,” Doug agreed.

  “All right,” said Wicksen. “I’ve got work to do. Call me if you can’t get the fuel cells patched in.”

  “Will do.”

  Jinny Anson leaned over Doug’s shoulder. “The fuel cells are up and ready, no sweat.”

  “Good,” he said, wondering if Wicksen heard her before he clicked off.

  For the thousandth time Doug checked out every corner of Moonbase through the screens on the console before him. It felt as if the wheeled typist’s chair on which he sat had welded itself to his butt and spine. The level of tension in the control center was palpable, but it had been so electrically high for so long that it seemed almost normal. People went about their duties mechanically, studying their screens or fingering their keyboards. Hardly a word was spoken now, and no voice rose above an edgy, tightly controlled murmur.

  Doug saw that the Cave was almost filled with men and women milling about aimlessly, sitting huddled in small groups, staring up at the wallscreens. Must be really tough on them, Doug thought, waiting with nothing to do. Then he looked at the camera view from Mt. Yeager; the Peacekeeper troops were also waiting, and the nuclear missile that would end everyone’s suspense was hurtling toward Alphonsus now.

  They’ve won the first round, Doug realized. They aimed at our nuclear generator and hit it. Our backup power system is gone. There must be a considerable amount of radioactive debris splattered across the far side of the crater floor.

  But they don’t suspect we’ve got a beam gun to knock out their nuke, he told himself. Almost bitterly, Doug admitted that their big success so far had been that Wicksen’s beam gun hadn’t worked. Our ace in the hole, he thought wryly. They don’t know we might be able to prevent their nuclear warhead from going off.

  He leaned back in the squeaking little chair, trying to ease the stress that was knotting the muscles of his neck and shoulders. Nanomachines can’t relieve anxiety, he thought.

  Staring up at the dimly lit rock of the ceiling, Doug asked himself, Who am I trying to kid? There are at least three hundred armed and trained troops on the other side of the ringwall. A nuclear bomb is heading toward us. Not a nation in the world has lifted a finger to help us. How on earth can I pretend that we can stand up to the Peacekeepers? We don’t have a chance, not a prayer, against the force of the United Nations.

  Why not just let them walk in here and take over? Why risk the lives of two thousand people? Over what? My own ego? My own fear that once they ship me Earthside some New Morality fanatic’s going to murder me? So what? I’m dead either way. They can kill me here, trying to defend Moonbase, or kill me back on Earth. At least if I surrender to them the rest of the people here will live.

  And Moonbase dies. Yamagata takes over and turns it into his private clinic instead of using it as a springboard to push the frontier outward.

  He shook his head. You’re debating philosophy when a couple of thousand lives are hanging in the balance. That’s not fair. It’s stupid.

  The phone light at the bottom right corner of his set of screens began winking yellow. Shaking himself from his inner misgivings, Doug reached for his headset and slipped it on.

  “Incoming call from Savannah,” a comm tech’s voice said. “Urgent top priority.”

  “Put it through.”

  Doug saw his mother’s face on the lower right screen: hair dishevelled, eyes red and swollen, skin ashen, a silk robe pulled tight around her.

  “What’s wrong?” he blurted.

  But Joanna was already telling him, “Lev’s been killed. Murdered. He was trying to kill me, but I’m all right. But your stepfather’s dead.”

  “Killed? Who did it? Why? Are you really all right?”

  The three seconds it took for her reply stretched like hours.

  “We don’t know who it was. The security guard got him. We’re checking it out. It all happened just a few minutes ago …” Joanna seemed to be gasping, her words barely getting out of her mouth.

  “Are you hurt? Do you have a doctor there?”

  She’s holding back tears, Doug realized, watching his mother’s agonized face. She won’t let herself cry.

  “Paramedics are here and my personal physician’s on his way,” she said, seeming to pull herself up straighter.

  “I’m not hurt. But Lev …”

  Joanna turned away from the screen. A man’s face slid into view, square jaw unshaved, narrow eyes hard and bitter. “This is Captain Ingersoll, I’m with Masterson security. Your mother’s physically unharmed, sir, although she’s had a tremendous psychological shock. I’ll see to it that she calls you back as soon as her doctor’s looked her over and we’ve had a chance to sort things out a bit. Thank you.”

  The screen went blank.

  Doug sat there in stunned silence. If anyone overheard his phone conversation, if anyone tried to talk to him or question him, he didn’t know it. He merely sat staring blankly at the array of screens, his thoughts spinning.

  They tried to kill her. Who was it? Part of Faure’s scheme? Or maybe Yamagata, trying to get her out of their way so they can take control of Masterson Corporation more easily. No, not even Yamagata would go that far. Would they? New Morality zealots, more likely. Fanatics who knew that Mom was backing Moonbase and nanotechnology. Maybe they even knew she’d had a few nanotech treatments herself, over the years.

  She’s all right, though. Lev’s dead, but she’s all right. They murdered Lev. Killed him.

  Jinny Anson was shaking his shoulder. “Wix is ready to power up.”

  He looked up at her. “Okay,” he said dully. “Okay.” Anson peered at him. “Are you all right, Doug?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. Tell Wicksen to shoot the hell out of that missile.”

  Anson looked surprised, but she said merely, “Right.”

  Claire Rossi looked up as the overhead loudpseakers blared through the Cave:

  “WE’RE GOING TO AUXILIARY POWER IN SIXTY SECONDS. LIGHTS WILL GO DOWN TO EMERGENCY LEVELS. ALL UNNECESSARY EQUIPMENT WILL BE POWERED DOWN. THIS SHOULD LAST APPROXIMATELY TEN TO FIFTEEN MINUTES.”

  The Cave buzzed with conversations. When the lights suddenly turned down, a chorus of “ooohs” surged through the crowded cafeteria.

  Then somebody called out, “The lights are low! Time for an orgy!”

  Claire didn’t laugh. Neither did anyone else.

  The lights flickered briefly in the nanolaboratory, then steadied and returned to their normal brightness.

  “See?” Zimmerman said to Inoguchi. “We are essential. We stay at full power.”

  Inoguchi looked up from his work. “I am afraid that the power surge has knocked out the timing circuitry in the assembly feeder,” he said apologetically.

  “What?” Zimmerman bellowed, rushing across the lab to the Japanese scientist’s side.

  “The timing circuitry must be reset,” Inoguchi said. “This batch of nanomachines—”

  “Ruined!” Zimmerman roared, pounding a fist on the lab bench so hard that Inoguchi nearly jumped off his stool. “A microsecond pulse of electricity! Ruined!” He lapsed into German.

  Inoguchi could not understand his words, but the tone was painfully clear.

  * * *

  “Power at ninety-two percent.”

  Wicksen was inside the cramped shelter again. This time he had not bothered to take off his helmet, he merely slid the visor up.

  “Can you goose it higher?” he asked, eyes on the makeshift control board.

  “When I do,” the woman replied, “the needle starts wobbling. I think ninety-two’s the best we can do without risking another shorting out.”

  “Okay,” Wicksen said softly. “Hold it at ninety-two.”

  “Holding and stable.”

/>   “How’s the radar plot?”

  The man standing to his left was bent over a screen that displayed a single lurid red spot against a spiderweb of concentric circles.

  “Coming straight at us, practically zero deflection,” he said tightly. “Pointing system’s holding good, slaved to the radar.”

  Wicksen scanned the board full of gauges and telltale lights: mostly green, a handful of ambers, two reds, but they had been cut out of the circuitry.

  “Anybody see a reason why we shouldn’t shoot the cannon?”

  Dead silence. No sound in the low-ceilinged little shelter except the hum of the electrical equipment.

  “Okay. Here goes.” Wicksen leaned on the red firing button.

  Nothing in the shelter changed. No new noise, no vibration, no sense of having accomplished anything.

  “Power holding steady.”

  “Beam collimation looks good.”

  “Just hold together, baby,” Wicksen pleaded, almost cooed, like a father urging a baby’s first tottering steps. “Just stay together for another five, six minutes. You can do it, baby, you can last that long. You’re a good little pile of junk, you are, you’re working just fine. Keep it up, baby, keep those protons moving.”

  His assistants had never heard Wicksen speak like that, never heard anything remotely like this cooing, coaxing, imploring tone that he was half-whispering, half-singing to the impassive electronics and machinery they had slapped together. They stood in shock for fully five minutes as Wicksen kept up his impromptu lullaby, his supplication, his prayer that the beam gun would work right and do the job they intended it to do.

  As the clock on their control board showed five minutes and nine seconds, Wicksen’s female assistant called out, “Starting to get arcing on the main buss.”

  Wicksen raised one hand in a gesture of patience.

  “It’s going to short out again!”

  “Hold it as long as you can,” he said calmly.

  Half the needles on the board’s gauges suddenly spun down toward zero.

  “It’s gone,” said the man to Wicksen’s right.

  “Main buss shorted.”

  “Power down,” Wicksen said with a sigh. “If we haven’t knocked out the nuke’s fuzing circuitry by now we never will.”

  A small tremor shook the shelter, like the passing of a train nearby.

  “Ground impact.”

  “Yeah, but did the nuke go off?”

  ASSAULT FORCE

  Colonel Giap studied the watch built into the keypad on his spacesuit’s wrist. The nuclear bomb should have exploded almost a full minute earlier.

  His command center inside the tractor was little more than a windowless metal box shoehorned between the tractor’s cab and its rear bed, where a dozen Peacekeeper troops and the seven suicide volunteers sat wedged together like sardines in a tin.

  “Where is the confirmation from L-1?” Giap demanded of the tech sergeant in charge of communications.

  The sergeant said through the upraised visor of his spacesuit, “L-1 wants to speak to you, sir.”

  With an impatient huff, Giap took the laptop comm rig from the sergeant. “We are scheduled to push off in three minutes,” he said sharply. “Where is the confirmation of the nuclear blast?”

  The officer’s image in the small, snow-streaked screen looked strained, worried. “There is no confirmation of the blast, sir,” she said, her voice scratchy with static.

  “No confirmation!”

  “Diagnostics are negative,” the officer said dolefully, “and there is no visual confirmation of the detonation.”

  Giap demanded, “Did the bomb go off or not?”

  “As far as we can tell, sir, it failed.”

  “Failed! Then Moonbase’s electrical power system is still intact.”

  “As far as we can tell, sir.”

  Giap angrily slammed the laptop shut and shoved it back into the sergeant’s gloved hands. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It would be better if their electrical power was cut off, but it really doesn’t matter. We will march across the mountains and blast open their airlocks if they refuse to surrender to me.

  He held up his wrist again. At precisely the second called for in his schedule, he commanded, “Start engines. All vehicles are to move to their assigned locations on the crater floor. Go!”

  Grins and thumbs-up gestures filled the control center; the overhead lights were back to full brightness.

  “It didn’t go off!” Jinny Anson crowed, exultant, almost jumping up and down.

  “Wicksen did it,” said Doug, still only half believing it. O’Malley got up from the chair beside him. “I’m going to check out the dust dispersal systems one more time. Looks like we’ll need ’em now.” He was grinning broadly as he strode out of the control center.

  “Put through a call to Wicksen,” Anson said. “We ought to congratulate him.”

  Doug nodded, but asked, “How much damage did the warhead do when it hit the ground?”

  A technician’s voice answered, “The bird bull’s-eyed on the central solar farm. Knocked out eleven panels and a main feeder line. Our power capacity is down by two percent.”

  “We can live with that,” Anson said quickly.

  Yes, Doug thought. We can live with that. We can even fight with that.

  In the tight confines of the editing booth, Edith had followed the telescope view of the incoming missile warhead, holding her breath, not daring to speak. But when she saw no flash of an explosion and the warhead clunked into the middle of one of the arrays of solar panels spread across the ground, she whooped an involuntary Texas victory yell.

  “It didn’t go off!” she said into her headset microphone, hovering a centimeter from her lips. “Moonbase’s missile defense system worked!”

  She reached out across the control board and activated a chip that held a prerecorded interview with Wicksen, explaining how the particle beam accelerator at the mass driver could be turned into a beam gun. While the canned interview played out, Edith checked with Doug at the control center.

  “He’s on another call,” said the comm tech. From the radiant smile on the technician’s face Edith knew that she’d been right; the nuclear warhead hadn’t exploded.

  “I just want confirmation from him that the nuke didn’t go off,” Edith explained.

  “It didn’t.”

  “Yeah, right. But I need to get his handsome face on Global Network for the whole world to see him saying it didn’t go off.”

  “I’ll give him your message.”

  “Do that,” Edith snapped, feeling nettled. But then she thought, Doug must be up to his scalp in snakes. He won’t have time for the news media.

  She put through a call to Wicksen, out at the mass driver, instead.

  “I swear to you, Joanna, I knew nothing of this,” said Ibrahim al-Rashid.

  He was perched nervously on one of the upholstered chairs in Joanna’s living room. It was two in the morning. Rashid looked baggy-eyed, his clothes hurriedly thrown on. The house was still swarming with police and Masterson Corporation security people. Lev’s body had been taken away, zippered into a black body bag. His murderer’s body, cut almost in half by the submachine gun bullets that had killed him, remained up in her bedroom while the police and security team took fingerprints and photographs.

  “He was a Masterson security guard,” Joanna said, her voice venomously low. “He was trying to kill me.”

  “Joanna,” Rashid said, almost pleading, “you can’t believe that I had anything to do with this!”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” she replied, staring hard at him. She was sitting tensely on the sofa, still wearing nothing more than the silk robe she had pulled on upstairs.

  “He must have been a New Morality fanatic,” Rashid said.

  “Or an assassin from Yamagata.”

  “No! Why would Yamagata want you assassinated?”

  “I don’t know,” Joanna said tightly. “I intend t
o find out.”

  “I’m so sorry about Lev,” Rashid said, his head drooping. “I liked him.”

  “He looked familiar to me,” Joanna murmured.

  “Familiar?”

  “The security guard, the assassin. He’d been around the house for several days and I thought that somehow he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before.”

  “Are you sure … ?”

  “I should have told the security chief then and there,” Joanna said in a choked whisper, speaking more to herself than to Rashid. “I should have realized something wasn’t right.”

  “It isn’t your fault,” Rashid said.

  She focused her gray-green eyes on him, like a pair of guns. “Then whose fault is it?”

  “Not mine!” Rashid fairly yelped. “Joanna, I know we’ve had our differences over corporate policy, but I would never—I mean, something like this …”

  Joanna leaned back against the sofa’s soft pillows. “I want to believe you, Omar. I hope you’re telling me the truth.”

  Rashid swallowed visibly. There was nothing he could say to erase the suspicion in her eyes.

  “Mrs. Brudnoy?” Captain Ingersoll called from the dining room doorway.

  She looked up at him. “Yes? What is it?”

  Stepping slowly, hesitantly into the living room, Ingersoll held up a hand-sized computer. “I think we’ve made a positive ID on the killer.”

  “Who is it?”

  Aiming his handset at the Windowall screen above the fireplace, Ingersoll said, “We ran a computer check on his fingerprints …”

  The big screen atop the mantle showed two sets of inky whorls.

  “He used to work for the corporation years ago, mostly up at Moonbase.”

  The fingerprints were replaced by two photographs: both ID pictures, taken twenty-five years apart.

  “Jack Killifer!” Joanna gasped.

  “That’s his name,” Ingersoll agreed, nodding. “The photo on the right was taken when he joined our security department, a few weeks ago. You can see he trimmed down his hair, darkened it, and grew a mustache.”

  “Jack Killifer,” she repeated. “He’s hated me all these years … hated me enough to kill me.”