Moonwar

by Ben Bova

  Both airlock hatches were fully open. The Moonbase rebels had pumped all the air out of the corridor on the other side of the hatches, so the troopers were filing through the airlock as quickly as they could.

  The corridor on the other side of the hatch was dimly lit. Jansen could see another airlock about a hundred meters down the tunnel.

  The sergeant brought up the rear. Once he stepped through the airlock he hustled up to where the officers—two lieutenants and a captain—were standing, poring over a book-sized computer.

  “The water factory is on the other side of this hatch here,” Jansen heard the captain saying as he tapped a gloved finger on the computer’s tiny screen. “Down this corridor and through the cross—”

  Jansen’s earphones erupted with a brain-piercing screech, like electronic fingernails on an electronic blackboard. Jagged bursts of noise blasted at him. He put his hands to his ears, banged them into his helmet instead. The noise was painful, cutting through his skull like a surgeon’s bone saw.

  He saw the other troopers clutching at their helmets, reeling, staggering under the agonizing assault of noise. Even the officers were flailing around helplessly.

  His eyes streaming tears from the pain, Jansen fumbled for the control stud on his wrist and shut off his suit radio.

  The noise cut off immediately. Blessed quiet.

  “What is it?” Giap screamed. “What’s going on?”

  The noise assaulted his brain like a thousand rock concerts, all out of tune. Like a million jet planes taking off. He couldn’t hear anything else. He couldn’t speak to anyone. He couldn’t think.

  All around him, the troops of his third wave were pawing at their helmets, tottering across the dusty regolith in obvious agony, some of them falling to their knees.

  Giap did the only thing he could think of. He switched off his suit radio. The silence was like a soothing balm, even though his ears continued to ring.

  “Turn off your radios!” he commanded, then felt immediately foolish. His own radio was off; his words never got farther than the padding inside his helmet.

  But he saw, one by one, his troopers were stopping their gyrations, standing still. Giap knew he himself was panting from the unexpected onslaught. He suspected the other troopers were, too.

  He waved the captain of the third wave over to him as he yanked a communications wire from the thigh pouch of his suit. Plugging the wire into his helmet port, he handed it to the captain, who connected it to his own helmet.

  “Now we can talk without need of the radios,” Giap said.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the captain. Giap could hear his breathing, still heavy.

  “The rebels think they can stall our attack by jamming our suit radio frequencies,” the colonel said, with a hint of contempt.

  “Yes, sir,” the captain said.

  “They didn’t think that we can communicate directly by wire, without using the radios.”

  “Yes, sir. But sir, if I may ask: We can speak to each other through the wire, but how will you communicate with the rest of the troops? Especially the first and second waves?”

  Giap blinked behind his gold-tinted visor. The first and second waves were inside Moonbase, out of reach, even out of sight.

  Jansen stood patiently as the sergeant went down the line, plugging his comm line into a trooper’s helmet, speaking a few words, then unplugging and going to the next trooper.

  When his turn came at last, the sergeant said gruffly, “No radio. Follow the original plan. Watch my hand signals.”

  “Right, Sarge,” Jansen had time to say before the sergeant popped the comm line out of his helmet and went to the next man in line.

  Once the sergeant had relayed his message to every trooper in the squad he hustled back up to the front with the officers. He looked funny in the spacesuit, a short thickset figure in the heavy white suit, like a snowman with an assault rifle and a bandolier of grenades flapping lazily against his sides with every stride he took.

  Jansen realized that no one could hear anything he said. Grinning delightedly, he called out, “You look stupid, Sarge!”

  No reaction from anyone.

  “You look like a fat white grub! You and the idiot officers, too!” he said in Norwegian.

  The sergeant turned his way and for an instant Jansen’s heart froze in his chest. But then the sergeant pointed to the hatch up ahead and motioned for the squad to follow him.

  “Seal the hatches,” Doug commanded quietly.

  “We got ’em in the cages,” said Anson, leaning over his shoulder. “Now we lock ’em in.”

  “Airlock hatches sealed,” came the voice of one of the control technicians.

  Doug turned to O’Malley. “Start your dust.”

  “Right,” said O’Malley, tight-lipped.

  Something made Jansen turn around as he started marching toward the next hatch. To his surprise, he saw the airlock they had already passed through sliding shut.

  “Hey!” he yelped. “It’s closing!”

  No one heard him.

  He stopped, and the trooper behind him bumped into him, jostling them both.

  Jansen pointed and hollered louder, “They shut the hatch behind us!”

  The whole line, from Jansen to the rear, came to a stop. Jansen turned toward the officers up front and waved his arms. “They shut the hatch behind us!” he screamed.

  They paid not the slightest attention until they stopped at the closed hatch up front. Then, turning, they seemed to jerk with surprise—whether from seeing the hatch to their rear closed off, or from seeing half the squad loitering down the corridor, it was impossible for Jansen to tell.

  He pointed at the closed hatch, jabbing his gloved hand in its direction several times. The sergeant came clomping down the corridor toward him, radiating anger even though his spacesuit.

  “It’s closed,” Jansen said to the unhearing sergeant.

  The lights seemed to be going dimmer. Jansen blinked and reflexively wiped at his visor. His glove left a dark smear across the tinted plastiglass.

  “What’s happening?” he asked, feeling the edge of panic. He was going blind. The world outside his helmet was nothing more than a misty blur. And it was getting darker by the second.

  “What is happening in there?” Giap demanded.

  The captain, the only person who could hear him, pointed across the expanse of the garage. “It looks as if the inner hatches have closed.”

  “Closed?” Giap fumbled with his binoculars, got them to his visor, and swept his field of view across the four airlocks. The inner hatches of each of them were sealed tight.

  “Get teams to each of those hatches. If they can’t be opened manually, blast them open!”

  The captain unplugged the communications line from his helmet, leaving it dangling across Giap’s shoulder, and trotted off, fumbling in his thigh pouch for his own comm line.

  This is absurd, Giap fumed. We are reduced to speaking to each other like children with a couple of paper cups connected by a length of string.

  Everything took so damnably long! Commands had to be relayed from one officer to the next, down the chain of command, one person at a time. Fuming inside his spacesuit, Giap summoned a sergeant from the squad waiting as reserves.

  Not bothering with the comm line, Giap pressed his helmet against the sergeant’s, like embracing a loved one.

  “Sergeant, pick six troopers and bring them to me. I will use them as runners.”

  “Runners, sir?”

  “To carry messages, fool!”

  “Ah! Runners! Yes, sir. Right away, sir.” The sergeant was still babbling as he headed back to his squad.

  Everything slowed down to the pace of a nightmare. Giap ordered a runner to find out what the captain was doing at the airlock hatches. It took long minutes before the woman came back, puffing, picked up the colonel’s comm line and plugged it into her own helmet.

  “The captain says the inner airlock hatches are closed, but t
hey don’t appear to be locked or sealed. He thinks he can open them manually.”

  “Why hasn’t he already opened them?” Giap demanded.

  “He’s waiting for your orders, sir.”

  “Tell him to open those hatches and get the second wave into the base! And I want a report on what the first wave has accomplished.”

  “Yessir.”

  The trooper hustled off across the garage floor, looking to Giap more like a white humpbacked alien cyclops than a human being.

  Edging closer to the wide-open hatch of the main airlock, Giap once again put his binoculars to his visor. It took agonizingly long, but at last the sergeant seemed to have gotten his order across to the captain. Gesticulating severely, the captain motioned one of his troopers to work the controls of the inner airlock hatch.

  Giap saw the trooper step into the metal chamber and tap a button. At last! he thought, as the inner hatch started to slide open.

  A ghostly gray mist seemed to waft out of the darkness from beyond the hatch. The trooper inside the airlock, the captain standing just outside it, the runner and several other troopers nearby began to paw at their visors. Giap watched as they staggered backward, gloved hands swiping at their visors like people trying to knuckle dust from their eyes.

  Then they stretched their arms out, tottering uncertainly like blind men. The captain bumped into the runner and fell backwards in a dreamy, lunar slow motion until his rump bounced on the smooth rock floor of the garage.

  Horrified, Giap shouted inside his helmet, “What’s happened to them? They act as if they’re blind!”

  CONTROL CENTER

  “It’s working!”, Anson said excitedly.

  Doug nodded without taking his eyes off the console screens. The Peacekeepers inside the tunnels were truly deaf, dumb and blind now. Helpless. Even a few out in the garage had been blinded by the dust when they’d opened one of the inner airlock hatches.

  “You did it!” Doug called over to O’Malley. He grinned boyishly and his cheeks reddened slightly.

  “Are your people suited up?” Doug asked Anson.

  “Ready to go,” she replied.

  He felt a touch on his shoulder and, turning in the little wheeled chair, saw Edith smiling wearily down at him.

  “They cut me off,” she said tiredly, her voice raw and cracking.

  “You did a great job, Edith,” Doug said, clutching her hand. “A wonderful job.”

  “You’ll get an Emmy,” Anson said, patting her shoulder.

  “A Cronkite,” Edith croaked. “It’s more prestigious.”

  “Whatever.” Anson pulled up a chair at the next console and slipped a headset over her blond curls.

  Gordette slid a chair to Edith, who half-collapsed into it. “I forgot to time myself,” she complained hoarsely. “I don’t have the exact number for how long I was on the air nonstop.”

  “We’ll dig it out of the computer,” Doug said.

  “Might be a record.”

  “You ought to get some rest. Go back to our quarters and take a nap. You’ve earned it.”

  “No,” she murmured. “I want to stay here and see it all. I need a couple of cameras …”

  “The security cameras are logging everything that’s going on in here. Grab a bite at the Cave and then get some rest.”

  “I’ve got to go back to the studio. Get a camera. You guys ought to be immortalized for future generations and good ol’ Global News.”

  Before Doug could stop her, Edith got to her feet and stumbled toward the door.

  He watched her briefly, feeling a sudden urge to get up and put his arm around her, help her, share the comfort of closeness. But he fought it down and turned back to his screens. He had more important things to do.

  Jansen fought down the urge to unseal his visor. He could see nothing, hear nothing, and no one could see or hear him, he was certain. It was scary. If only I could see! On Earth, he would have night vision goggles and infrared systems attached to his battle helmet. But they wouldn’t fit inside a spacesuit, so the battle helmets had been left aside.

  Something inside him was starting to shake. Lost. Alone. No one to give him orders. No one to tell him what to do. Maybe the others are all dead! Or maybe they all got out okay; you might be the only one left in the tunnel.

  An enticing voice in his head urged, Just open up the visor and see what’s happening out there.

  But he knew the tunnel he was in had no air in it. Open your visor and you kill yourself.

  But I’ve got to do something! his mind screamed. I can’t just stand here, blind and deaf. Maybe I can feel my way out, back to the garage …

  He tried a few steps, holding his arms out stiffly in front of him like a blind man. His gloved hands touched something solid and smooth. A wall. Which way to the outside? he asked himself. He started walking along the wall, keeping one hand on its reassuring solidity, taking small, frightened, hesitant steps.

  And bumped into another figure. He stepped back and tripped over something: someone’s legs, a body on the floor, he had no idea what it was. He lost his balance and began to fall in the slow, nightmarish languid gravity of the Moon.

  He sprawled on the tunnel floor, yelling and cursing, tangled in somebody’s limbs, hollering all the louder because nobody could hear him. His shouts became panicky; inside the total isolation of his helmet he heard his own voice screaming wildly, swearing, pleading for light and help and mercy. He wanted to cry; he wanted to beat his head against the wall that he could no longer find.

  Something tapped at his helmet. He fell silent, trembling inside. Then he felt the poke of a communications line being inserted into the port on the right side of the helmet.

  “Just relax, trooper. Everything will be fine.” It was a woman’s voice, but Jansen had never heard this woman before. A stranger.

  “We’re going to take care of you,” she was saying, soothingly. “But first you have to let us take your rifle and other weapons.”

  “What’s happening to me?” he asked, shocked at how high and weak his voice sounded. Like a frightened little boy’s.

  “Your officers have surrendered to us,” said the woman. “Once we get these weapons off you, we’ll bring you out to the crater floor and return you to your own people.”

  Jansen felt his rifle being lifted from his shoulder. Other hands took his bandolier of grenades and ammunition. Then they helped him to his feet.

  “Okay, just walk this way … easy now.”

  Jansen let the strangers lead him blindly down the corridor. There was nothing else he could do. His spacesuit felt oddly stiff, the way an arthritic old man must feel. He thought he heard a grinding, rasping noise whenever he flexed his left knee.

  Colonel Giap watched helplessly as, one by one, his troopers were led out of the tunnels by spacesuited rebels. The troopers had been disarmed, their weapons were nowhere in sight. They had not raised their hands above their helmeted heads, but it was clear that they had surrendered. They were prisoners. Defeated.

  One of his runners trotted up to him and held up the communications line from his helmet. Impatiently, Giap gestured for him to plug it into his comm port.

  “Sir! The Moonbase commander wishes to speak with you. On the radio, sir.”

  Giap felt his brows rise. “They have stopped the jamming?”

  “The Moonbase officer that I spoke with said they will stop the jamming once you agree to speak to their commander.”

  Giap nodded inside his helmet. “Tell them I will speak to their commander.” What else could he do?

  The runner headed back into the garage. Giap turned and walked to a small rock, then sank down carefully onto it. He had been standing for hours, and even in the low gravity of the Moon, his legs were aching.

  He watched as, one by one, his troopers were led out of the tunnels and into the garage like a collection of blind beggars, helpless and disarmed. He had to turn his entire body to see his reserve troops, loitering around their tract
ors out on the crater floor, some of them sitting on the cab roofs, watching and waiting.

  His runner came back at last and told him, “The jamming will stop at precisely thirteen hundred hours, sir.”

  Giap peered at his wrist. Seven minutes from now.

  “We’ve got all of ’em out,” said Anson, from the console next to Doug’s. “And we’ve got all their weapons.”

  “Those are shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets,” Gordette said, pointing to one of the screens. “We could hit their tractors with ’em.”

  Not that we’ll use them, Doug said to himself. But their commander doesn’t know that. I hope.

  His eye on the console’s digital clock, Doug gestured to Anson to cut off the jamming signal at precisely fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds after noon. Ten seconds later, he opened his radio channel to the Peacekeepers’ suit-to-suit frequency.

  “This is Douglas Stavenger, chief administrator of Moonbase,” he said. “Am I on the proper frequency to speak with the commander of the Peacekeeper forces?”

  “I am Colonel Ngo. Duong Giap,” came the reply. “This frequency is good;”

  There was no video; Doug’s comm screen remained blank.

  “Colonel Giap,” he said, “I believe it is time we discussed an armistice.”

  “Armistice?” The colonel’s surprised reply came immediately. The radio link between the Peacekeepers in the crater floor and the control center did not need to be relayed through L-1; the antennas built into the face of the mountain, just above Moonbase’s main airlock, handled the link directly.

  “Truce, armistice, whatever you want to call it,” Doug said, feeling the tension and hope in the people clustering about him.

  This time the Peacekeeper commander hesitated before replying.

  Doug added, “Your attack has failed. Your troops had to surrender to us. We’ve let them return to you, but as you’ll see, their spacesuits are heavily contaminated with dust. They can’t see, and the joints of their suits will soon fail.”

  “That was merely my first, wave,” Colonel Giap snapped.

  “The same thing will happen to your second wave,” Doug replied. “And your third and fourth and fifth. We can blind your soldiers and jam your radio communications. We can gum up the joints of their spacesuits to the point where they’ll quickly become immobilized. There is no way you can get through our tunnels.”