by Ben Bova
“I know that.”
“Within a few hours,” Yamagata said, “Moonbase will be under U.N. control.”
“I don’t know that,” Joanna replied coldly. “And neither do you.”
“Surely you do not believe that your people can hold out against several hundred trained Peacekeeper troops.”
Joanna allowed a ghost of a smile to curve the corners of her lips. “The Peacekeepers’ nuclear missile failed. And now their assault force is bogged down in the ring-wall mountains. I’d say there is a fair chance that Moonbase will hold out quite well.”
Yamagata shook his head. “No. It is not possible. Despite their temporary successes, Moonbase will fall within a few hours.”
WODJOHOWITCZ PASS
Colonel Giap was in a frenzy of frustrated anger. Not only was his main assault force mired in this devilish blue muck that had hardened to the consistency of concrete, trapping his main assault force in the narrow defile of the mountain pass, but now Georges Faure was demanding that he get on with the conquest of Moonbase.
“It is unacceptable,” Faure was saying, his mustache bristling. “Entirely unacceptable.”
Giap glowered at the secretary-general’s pale image in the small screen of the laptop. The colonel was sitting atop his tractor, buttoned up in his spacesuit. A meter or so from him, where his sergeant still stood hopelessly imbedded, six Peacekeeper troops were chipping away at the hellish blue slime with makeshift implements from the tractor’s tool kit. Two of the troopers were even using the butts of their rifles to bash the sludge in their attempts to release the boots of their sergeant.
“I agree,” Giap said to Faure, tightly reining his anger. “It is unacceptable. But in battle the unacceptable is commonplace.”
Faure sat behind his desk, trembling with rage as he stared at the faceless image of the Peacekeeper colonel in his blank-visored spacesuit. How can a handful of rebels stop a fully armed column of Peacekeeper troops? It is unthinkable, a farce, a disaster. Everyone will be laughing at me, unable to quash a tiny group of scientists and technicians, powerless to bring them under the rule of the law, impotent.
“I tell you this, mon colonel,” Faure said, seething. “If you cannot take Moonbase, then you are to release the volunteers. Do you understand what I am saying?”
In three seconds, Giap replied harshly, “You would rather destroy Moonbase than see it repulse us.”
“Exactly!” Faure snapped.
While he waited for Faure’s reply to reach him, Colonel Giap turned slightly to watch the activity he had ordered. Troopers were placing metal panels scavenged from the marooned tractors’ flooring from the roof of one cab to the tail of the next tractor, forming a bridge across which they could march to the front of the column of stalled vehicles. From the leading tractor they slid more panels across the treacherous blue slime, to where the dusty gray regolith lay bare—and safe.
“Exactly!” Giap heard Faure’s reply.
Taking in a deep breath and then releasing it slowly, to calm himself, Giap said, “There is no need to call on the suicide volunteers as yet. I am extricating most of my troops from the pass. We will march down into the crater floor on foot.”
Faure’s image was a red-faced thundercloud with a quivering mustache.
Before the secretary-general could speak again, Giap went on, “We will meet our secondary force on the crater floor and march on Moonbase. Our numbers will be diminished by less than five percent.”
There, he thought, let the pompous little politician chew on that for three seconds. I am the military commander here. I will counter the enemy’s moves. It was I who insisted on splitting the force. Only a fool of a politician would send his entire force through a single mountain pass that could be guarded or blocked by the enemy so easily.
When Faure’s response came it was a little more restrained. But only a little. “And your equipment? Your missile launchers and other heavy weapons? Your men carry them on their backs, I presume.”
“No,” Giap said, bristling at Faure’s sarcasm. “We will not need them. If the rebels do not open their airlocks to us, we have enough firepower to blast them apart.”
Three seconds later, Faure asked, “Without the heavy missiles?”
“We have the shoulder-launched anti-tank rockets. They will knock down an airlock hatch, I assure you.”
The secretary-general seemed to fidget unhappily in his chair. He fiddled with his mustache, smoothed his slicked-back hair, adjusted the collar of his shirt. Giap sat motionless atop the tractor cab, waiting.
“Well …” Faure said at last. “Perhaps you can carry it off, after all. I hope so, for your sake.”
Giap restrained a bitter reply.
Faure went on, “Remember the volunteers. If all else fails, use them! Moonbase must not survive this day!”
“They’re assembling on the crater floor.” Jinny Anson stated the obvious.
Anson, Gordette, O’Malley and several others were clustered around Doug’s console now, watching the screens over his shoulders. Command central, Doug thought. Wherever I am is the nerve center.
He punched up the imagery that Edith was sending out to Global News and saw the same view: a couple of dozen white Peacekeeper vehicles inching across the floor of the crater, each of them piled high with Peacekeeper troops who had marched down from Wodjo Pass.
“The invaders are moving cautiously,” Edith’s voice was saying. She sounded tense, edgy, her voice raw and strained. She ought to take a break, Doug thought. But I can’t spare anybody to spell her.
Then his eye caught the screen still showing the crowd in the Cave. Maybe there’s somebody there who could take over for her for a while. But Doug immediately put that thought aside. He didn’t have time to go recruiting. And, knowing Edith, she’d sooner burn her vocal cords out entirely than surrender this once-in-a-lifetime chance to narrate a battle on the Moon.
“They’ll deploy around the main airlock,” Gordette said. “Ought to be knocking on our door in less than an hour.”
Doug nodded. “Okay, we’re ready for them. Right?”
Everyone nodded and murmured assent. Doug focused on O’Malley. His dust was going to be crucial.
“Remember,” Doug said, “all we have to do to win is survive. We don’t have to kill any of the Peacekeepers. We don’t have to drive them off the Moon. All we have to do is survive. Like the Confederacy in the American Civil War; they didn’t have to conquer the North, all they had to do was prevent the North from conquering them.”
With a grunt, Gordette shot back, “Which they failed to accomplish.”
The others stared at him. O’Malley looked downright hostile. Anson turned and walked away a few steps. Doug thought, Bam’s not winning any popularity contests.
But he admitted Gordette’s point with a shrug. Moonbase against the United Nations, he thought. That’s what it boils down to. Moonbase against the world.
So far, so good, he told himself. We’ve still got our electricity and we’ve forced the Peacekeepers to abandon their heavy weapons.
But as he watched the implacable approach of the Peacekeeper troops, Doug realized that what had happened so far was just the preliminary phase of this battle. The real fighting was about to begin.
Then the screen showing Edith’s broadcast Earthside winked off.
CRATER FLOOR
Colonel Giap held the electro-optical binoculars to his visor and carefully studied the main airlock to Moonbase. The massive hatch had been slid wide open; the garage inside was brightly lit, clearly visible.
They could be hiding behind the tractors parked in the garage, Giap reasoned, waiting to pick us off as we enter the garage.
Pick us off with what? he asked himself. They have no guns. A few industrial lasers, of course, but those make awkward weapons. Trained troops could silence them in a few minutes.
“The men are deployed and waiting for your orders, sir,” said his sergeant. Not his original. aide; that poo
r devil was still back at the mountain pass, freed at last from the blue slime but in no emotional condition to be relied upon.
“Men and women, sergeant,” Giap reminded him. “It is better to use the word ‘troops.’”
“Yessir,” the sergeant’s apologetic voice hissed in Giap’s helmet earphones. “The troops are waiting for your orders, sir.”
Giap’s timetable was a shambles, but that no longer mattered. They were about to penetrate Moonbase’s perimeter defense.
Putting down his binoculars and letting them dangle from the cord around his neck ring, Giap turned to face his team of officers. Three captains, six lieutenants. His second-in-command, a South African major, had been left with the stalled vehicles up in the mountain pass. We have too many officers anyway, Giap thought. The Peacekeepers are topheavy with brass.
His nine officers straightened to a semblance of attention, a posture difficult to accomplish in their spacesuits and virtually impossible to maintain.
“Stand easy,” Giap said mildly. “We will attack in two waves. First platoon will advance through the airlock and into the garage area on tractors. Second platoon will follow on foot. Third platoon will remain in reserve. Any questions?”
A tenth figure had joined the little group, uninvited. “What are we volunteers to do?”
Giap turned on the questioner. In his spacesuit it was difficult to determine which of the suicide fanatics it might be; the voice sounded American.
“You are to return to the command tractor and remain there, all of you, until I summon you,” Giap said firmly.
“How will we know what to expect?”
Giap allowed himself a sneering smile, knowing that no one could see it behind his tinted visor. “You can follow the progress of the battle on Global News, just like everyone else on Earth.”
Just at that moment his earphones buzzed, signalling an incoming message. Tapping the keypad on his wrist, Giap asked his replacement communications sergeant, “What is it?”
“Report from the mountain-climbing team, sir. They have reached the summit and cut the power lines to all the antennas up there. Moonbase has been silenced.”
For the first time in hours Giap smiled with genuine pleasure. “Good,” he said. “Send them my congratulations and tell them to report back to me on the crater floor as soon as they can.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nodding inside his helmet, Giap told himself that Moonbase was now entirely cut off from the Earth. At last.
The president looked bleary-eyed as she sipped at her first cup of coffee of the morning and stared at the muted wallscreen that showed Global News’ coverage of the Moonbase battle.
“You’re up early,” said her chief of staff, taking his customary place in the Kennedy rocker.
“So’re you,” said the president.
“I haven’t been to sleep all night,” he said, running a hand over his bald pate. From behind her desk, the president could see that he was perspiring.
“It’ll all be over in a few hours,” she said, gesturing toward the wallscreen with the hand that held her coffee mug.
“No it won’t,” said the staff chief gloomily.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Luce, we’ve got a shitstorm of public opinion coming down on us. I spent the whole damned night trying to calm down committee chairmen, media reporters, umpteen different governors and state party officials, even some goddamned church leaders are yelling that we ought to pressure the U.N. into letting Moonbase go!”
The president knew that her loyal assistant never used profanity in her presence unless he was truly upset—or trying to make a crucial point.
But she shook her head. “Harry, it’s just too late to do anything. The Peacekeepers are already there. Look.”
She pointed to the wallscreen again. Turning in the rocker, her staff chief saw dozens of tracked vehicles advancing slowly toward the main airlock hatch of Moonbase.
Suddenly the picture winked off.
“What the hell … ?”
Before the president could reach the remote control unit on her desk, the screen flicked a few times, then showed a harried-looking announcer in a suit and tie.
“We regret to report that technical difficulties have cut off Edie Elgin’s report from Moonbase. We are trying to reestablish contact.”
As the scene switched to a news anchorwoman, who began to summarize what they had been watching live, the president eased back in her desk chair and cast a knowing look at her staff chief.
“It’s all over but the shouting, Harry. Moonbase is finished and all those jerks who were yelling at you will forget about it by this time tomorrow.”
Doug wished he could talk with Edith, now that her marathon performance had been cut short, but he had no time for that. He watched the advancing Peacekeeper troops. So did everyone in Moonbase. In the control center, in the Cave, in the infirmary and labs that were still working, every resident of Moonbase looked at the screens and held his or her breath. Doug had never heard the control center so absolutely silent. Even the hum of the machinery seemed muted.
The white Peacekeeper tractors edged cautiously through the airlock. Big as it was, the airlock could only accommodate two vehicles at a time, so the invading tractors came in pairs, then deployed around the edges of the garage.
“They’re expecting us to fire at them,” Gordette said, almost whispering. Still, his voice broke the silence jarringly.
“With what?” Anson muttered acidly.
Doug looked past Vince Falcone to Nick O’Malley. “Ready with the dust?” he asked, also in a near-reverent whisper.
“Ready and waiting,” O’Malley replied firmly.
Doug nodded as he thought: Waiting. We’ve been waiting a long time. But we won’t have to wait much longer.
“The garage is clear,” Giap heard in his earphones. “No enemy troops.”
The colonel had established his command post just outside the main airlock, where he could see easily into the broad, brightly lit garage.
Four teams of specialists were sweeping the garage floor with powerful ultraviolet lamps. So far there was no sign of nanomachines, but Giap did not want to take any chances. His teams would sterilize the hatches on the other end of the garage, as well, the hatches that led into Moonbase’s corridors.
No opposition so far, Giap mused. Either they intend to surrender once we enter the corridors and occupy their critical centers, or they have a trap waiting for us inside.
He played his plan through his mind once again. The first wave of troops was to open the corridor hatches. They were airlocks, of course, double hatches that protected the corridors from the vacuum outside. They had been built as a secondary level of protection, since usually the garage was pressurized and vehicles and personnel left it for the lunar surface through the oversized main airlock.
If the rebels have sealed the hatches, Giap’s men were under orders to blast them open. If they had been able to bring their missile launchers with them they could have blown the hatches apart from where he was standing, outside the main airlock. As it was, the lighter, shoulder-fired missiles would have to do the job. The troops also had grenades. The hatches would pose no problem, Giap told himself.
Once inside the base proper, his troops would quickly move to the water factory, the control center, the electrical distribution station and the EVC—their environmental control center. Hold those, and you command Moonbase. For good measure, Giap had assigned squads to the underground farming area and the nano-laboratories.
“Sir, the airlocks seem to be operating normally,” one of his captains reported. “The outer hatches are not sealed. Repeat, not sealed.”
Giap suppressed a thrill of elation. So the rebels were going to surrender, after all.
“Have the outer hatches been UV sterilized?” he asked, still worrying about nanoweapons.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. Open all the outer hatches,” he comma
nded, “and check the inner hatches—after they’ve been UV treated.”
“Yes, sir.”
Don’t congratulate yourself too soon, Giap warned himself. There could still be ambushes, traps, inside those corridors.
But he doubted it. What could the rebels do against armed troops in their midst?
CORRIDOR ONE
Ulf Jansen’s only distinguishing feature was that he was the tallest trooper in the Peacekeeper battalion. At one hundred ninety-three centimeters, he towered over the Asians and Africans and Latinos who made up the bulk of the force. He dwarfed his commanding officer, Colonel Giap, and was a full head taller than Sergeant Slavodic, who headed his squad with an even-handed ferocity.
An easygoing, likeable Norwegian, Jansen had joined the Peacekeepers mainly to earn a U.N. scholarship to engineering college. In the four years of his enlistment he had been to Cyprus, Sri Lanka, the Malvinas Islands (which the British still insisted on calling the Falklands) and now he was on the Moon. Another three months and his enlistment would be over; he could start college in the winter semester.
He had been wounded slightly by an antipersonnel mine in Cyprus; otherwise his duties with the Peacekeepers had not been truly dangerous. He had to wear a germproof bio suit most of the time in Sri Lanka, a real misery in all that heat, but it had been better than coming down with the man-made plagues that both sides had used in the last round of their civil war.
Now he clumped into a smooth, metal-walled airlock, wearing a spacesuit that was much more comfortable than the biological protection gear from the Sri Lankan expedition. And everything was so light on the Moon! Jansen hefted his assault rifle as easily as he’d carry a toothpick.
“Move it up, move it up,” his sergeant growled in the English that was the Peacekeepers’ basic language. The whole squad was filing through the airlock, one man at a time. So far there’d been not the slightest sign of enemy opposition. As far as Jansen could tell, Moonbase might have been abandoned and left empty.
