Moonwar

by Ben Bova

  “What was that?” Doug asked.

  “A man,” said Gordette. “A person, anyway.”

  “In a spacesuit,” someone else said.

  “Spacesuit … ?” Doug’s heart clutched in his chest.

  “The plasma vents! He came in through the old plasma vents!”

  “What the hell are plasma vents?” Gordette asked.

  The explosion staggered Zimmerman in his nanolab. A metal cylinder rolled of the bench and crashed to the tiled floor. Inoguchi grabbed the edge of the lab bench where he was standing to steady himself.

  “A bomb?” Inoguchi asked.

  “Or an accident of some sort,” said Zimmerman. The two scientists had been working flat out on producing therapeutic nanomachines for Cardenas and the medical team in the infirmary. They had not followed the course of the battle. Zimmerman had insisted that he didn’t want to know, not until it was over and decided, one way or the other.

  “Should you try to find out?” Inoguchi said, looking worried. “Perhaps we should evacuate this laboratory?”

  “Leave?” Zimmerman’s shaggy brows shot up. “Before we have finished this batch? Abandon our work? Never!”

  Inoguchi edged toward the nearest phone console. “Perhaps we should at least attempt to determine what has happened.”

  “Good. You call. I want to check the progress—”

  An overhead panel ripped open with a blood-freezing screech of metal upon metal and two spacesuited figures dropped down in dreamy lunar slow-motion into the middle of the lab.

  “Gott in Himmel!” Zimmerman roared. “What is this? How can I work with such interruptions?”

  The two figures walked slowly among the lab benches, turning every which way, like children wandering through a toy store, as they approached the two scientists. Their spacesuits were bundled around their middles with bulky packages wrapped in plastic, with a simple small black box taped to them.

  Inoguchi saw a red pushbutton on the black box of the intruder nearest him. Detonators! he realized.

  The person nearest Zimmerman raised the visor of his helmet, revealing the face of a handsome young man with a neatly clipped dark beard.

  “This is the nanotechnology laboratory?” he asked, in Oxford-accented English.

  “Who are you?” Zimmerman demanded. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Bombs,” Inoguchi gasped, backing away toward the door to the corridor. “Suicide bombers!”

  “Do not move!” the bearded young man commanded. Inoguchi froze in his tracks.

  The other intruder raised her visor. “You are Professor Zimmerman, aren’t you?” she asked in a sweet, lilting voice.

  “Yes, and you are interrupting work of the utmost importance,” Zimmerman blustered.

  The young woman smiled. “God is great,” she said, and pushed her detonator button.

  Zimmerman saw a flash and then nothing.

  The second explosion rattled the control center even harder than the first.

  “They got the nanolab!”

  “We’re under attack!”

  The plasma vents, Doug thought, remembering how he himself had crawled through the old vents, years ago, to get to the environmental control center before his insane half-brother could destroy it.

  There’s a double hatch in the face of the mountain, he recalled, a sort of primitive airlock. The vents are filled with air, but they can be opened to vacuum from here in the control center. Then he recalled that the intruder who dropped in on the water factory was in a spacesuit.

  Someone was replaying the security camera view of the nanolab. Two spacesuited figures dropped in from the overhead vent.

  Zimmerman! Doug suddenly realized.

  “You’ve killed Professor Zimmerman!” he bellowed into his microphone. “You’ve killed Professor Zimmerman!”

  Sitting alone in the cab of his tractor, Colonel Giap heard Stavenger’s agonized wail.

  “What are you doing to us?” the Moonbase leader howled. “Why? Why kill that old man?”

  Why, indeed? Giap asked himself. Because a politician in New York ordered me to do it and I obey my orders. A soldier must obey orders, no matter how distasteful they may be. Without iron discipline no army can endure.

  “This isn’t war,” Stavenger was shouting in his earphones. “It’s butchery. It’s indiscriminate slaughter.”

  “Yes,” Giap said, so softly that he wasn’t certain he said it at all. “Their intention is to wipe out Moonbase and everyone in it.”

  “You’re going to kill us all.”

  “Not I,” Giap said. “This is not my doing, not my wish. I am only following orders.”

  “So were Himmler and Borman and all the other Nazis.” Stavenger’s voice was acid.

  Giap was silent for a moment, thinking, I have no orders that forbid me from telling him what he is facing. Faure did not command me to silence. Perhaps …

  The colonel heard himself say, “You are being attacked by suicide bombers. Fanatics. Not Peacekeeper troops. Volunteers from the New Morality.” His words came in a rush, as if he were afraid that if he stopped for an instant, took a breath or even a thought, he would close his mouth and say no more. “There are seven of them: one each for your water factory, environmental control center, electrical distribution station, control center and farm. Two for the nanotechnology laboratories.”

  Stavenger’s voice was instantly calm, hard. “They’re coming in through the old plasma vents?”

  Giap nodded inside his helmet as he said, “Yes.”

  “And even if we surrender, they’re going to blow up so much of Moonbase that we’ll all be killed.”

  Again Giap nodded, but this time he couldn’t force even the one syllable past his lips.

  He turned off his radio connection with Moonbase. Further discussion would be fruitless, purposeless, ridiculous, he told himself. Now it is up to the people of Moonbase to defend themselves, if they can. I have told them more than I should. Now we will see what they can do with my information. If anything.

  A screech of metal on metal startled Edith from her nap. She jerked up to a sitting position, blood running cold. Again! Like fingernails across a chalkboard.

  As she blinked and looked around the darkened studio, a man in a spacesuit floated down from the shadowy ceiling and landed with a thump that buckled his knees.

  Edith got up from Zimmerman’s wide couch and went to the man, helped him to his feet.

  “What’re you doing here?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  His reply was muffled by his helmet. Something about the control center, she thought.

  “Can’t hear you. Lift up your visor, you don’t need to be sealed up inside your suit.”

  He lifted his visor. He was young, oriental.

  “This is the control center?” he asked.

  Edith shook her head. “You’re way off base. The control center’s almost half a—”

  She stopped. She realized that this stranger was wrapped in what looked like explosives.

  The main door to the water factory was warped by the explosion. Jinny Anson had to get two of the biggest men she could find among the maintenance crew to push the damned door open.

  Inside was nothing but carnage, a smoking wreckage of pipes and pumps, water gushing out into a crater ripped into the rock floor. Water! Being wasted, sloshing around across the floor, running out of pipes blasted loose and dangling from shattered supports.

  Coughing as she advanced into the smoky ruins, Anson saw that the blast had dug a crater into the rock floor and water from the broken pipes was rushing into it.

  “Get those pipes shut off,” she said to the maintenance team. “Turn off that water flow.”

  “Water could leak into the tunnel below,” one of the men said.

  Anson shook her head. “Doesn’t look like the crater’s deep enough. The blast didn’t penetrate into the lower level.”

  A woman engineer pointed out, “Maybe so, but the water
’s flowing into the piping and conduits between levels. Could short out the electrical lines.”

  “Jesus on jet skis!” Anson growled. “If water seeps into the main distribution station …”

  “Blackout,” said the engineer.

  “First thing is to stop the incoming flow,” she said, pointing to the maintenance crew already working on the ends of the shattered pipes.

  This water’s come all the way from the south pole, Anson told herself. And some brain-dead geek has to blast the factory apart and splash it all over the base. It was sacrilegious to her, to any of the old-time Lunatics, to waste precious water.

  “How can we remove the water that’s already pooling in the crater?” the engineer asked. “It must be seeping along the conduits already.”

  Anson’s answer was immediate. “We vacuum it out!”

  “Huh?”

  Doug sat frozen in front of his console, his mind spinning. Suicide bombers. Religious fanatics. How do we stop them? They’ve already knocked out the water factory and Zimmerman’s lab. The EVC and the electrical center and the farm are farther inside the base; the kamikazes haven’t had time to reach that far yet. But the colonel said one of them is supposed to hit the control center. Why isn’t he here yet?

  “Bam,” he said, turning to Gordette. “Get teams of people to guard the EVC—”

  “And the other points, I know,” Gordette replied. “We can use the guns we captured. Shoot the bastards soon’s they open the ceiling vents.”

  “If you can do that without setting off their explosives.”

  Gordette shrugged. “Don’t make that much never-mind, one way or the other, does it?”

  Reluctantly, Doug admitted, “No, I guess not. But we’ve got to try something.”

  “True enough,” Gordette agreed.

  A comm tech’s voice in his earphone called, “Urgent call from Anson at the water factory.”

  “What is it, Jinny?” Doug asked.

  There was no video from the water factory, only Anson’s tight, excited voice.

  “You’ve got to open the plasma vents to vacuum,” she said without preamble. “That’s the only way to suck the loose water out of here. Otherwise it’s going to seep down to the electrical distribution station and short out the whole goddamned base, I betcha.”

  “Open the vents to vacuum?”

  “Right.”

  “But you’ve got people in the water factory.”

  “We’ll be outta here in five minutes, tops. The place is a complete wreck. Got a team turning off the incoming stream, but there’s a crater filling up with water and it’s seeping into the pipes and conduits between levels.”

  Doug glanced at the big electronic schematic of the entire base on the wall above him. The water factory was dark, and he saw that one section of living quarters on the lower level had already blacked out.

  “We’re getting shorts in residential tunnel two,” he said.

  “Open the vents!” Anson urged. “Before the whole damned base shorts out!”

  “Will do,” he said, adding silently, If the controls still work.

  “Give me five minutes to get my people out of here,” Anson added.

  “Will do,” Doug repeated.

  It took almost that long to call up the ancient program that operated the plasma vent baffles. There were two out at the mountain face, and single baffles spaced almost haphazardly along the old vents, hinged to flap open in one direction only—outward—like the valves in a human body’s arteries.

  He remembered that many of those partitions had been very tough to open when he’d crawled through the vents, seven years earlier. Hinges caked with lunar dust, almost welded shut. Will their motors work? Will they respond to the program commands?

  A shadow fell across him and he looked up. Gordette was standing over him with an assault rifle held across his chest.

  Before Doug could ask, Gordette smiled grimly and said, “I’m guarding the control center. Security’s sent teams out to the other areas to guard them. They told me to stay here with you; they didn’t want me with them.”

  Doug didn’t have time to worry about Gordette’s feelings. Blinking with a sudden idea, he said, as much to himself as to Gordette, “If we open all the plasma vents, we might flush out any of the kamikazes crawling through them.”

  Gordette’s brows rose a half-centimeter, but he said nothing.

  “Especially if we start pumping high-pressure air into the far end of each of the vents,” Doug muttered. “We’ll turn those old vents into wind tunnels!”

  He called Vince Falcone over to him, hurriedly explained what he wanted, and then hunched over his keypad and began banging away at it.

  PLASMA VENT TUNNEL

  It was easy to become disoriented in the dark, empty plasma vent tunnels. Crawling along inside a spacesuit with a hundred kilos of explosive strapped to your waist did not make the job any simpler.

  But I’ll get there, Amos Yerkes told himself. I have the most difficult assignment, but I’ll carry it out. They gave me the farthest target, the hardest one to reach, because they know I’m the best of the batch. The others needed drugs to buck up their courage, but I’ve never touched them. I’m better than they are and they know it. That’s why they’ve entrusted me with the most demanding task: blowing up their environmental control center.

  Yerkes was twenty-two and considered himself a failure as a son and as a man. But this is one thing I will not fail at. Nothing in my life, he slightly misquoted Shakespeare, will so become me as my leaving of it.

  In the light of his helmet lamp he saw another of those dreadful partitions. It had taken him far longer to open the last few than he had thought it would. Hours, it seemed. They were all stuck fast, and he had been sweating inside his spacesuit before he could pull them down on their creaking hinges. Then, once he had crawled over them, they had each snapped shut again with a startling clang that could probably be heard over the length and breadth of the base.

  This partition was no different: a thin baffle of metal, hinged on the bottom. Stuck fast with caked dust. Yerkes brushed doggedly at the dust with his gloved fingers, wishing he could open his visor and blow the stuff out of his way. But he had been ordered to keep his spacesuit sealed, just in case the vent tunnels did not hold air as they believed.

  As he worked, sweat stinging his eyes, he pictured the services that would be held in his honor back in Atlanta. General O’Conner himself will give the eulogy, he thought. My parents will cry and wish they had treated me better.

  Vince Falcone was grateful for the Moon’s low gravity as he and six other men trundled heavy cylinders of oxygen down the corridor toward the environmental control center.

  Doug’s idea was wild, Falcone thought, but he couldn’t think of anything better.

  This had better work, he told himself. Otherwise we’ll all be dead in another half hour or so.

  “You will take me to the control center,” the spacesuited Japanese said.

  “I can’t,” Edith blurted.

  He grabbed her wrist hard. “Why not?”

  Thinking as swiftly as she ever had, Edith lied, “The corridors are guarded. We’d both be shot the minute we stepped outside.”

  He glared at her.

  “And we’re so far away from the control center,” Edith quickly added, “that your bomb wouldn’t touch it if you set it off in here.”

  Still glaring, he looked around at the studio’s cameras and fake-bookcase sets. Not a worthy target.

  “You’re hurting my wrist,” Edith said.

  He let go. “You are my hostage,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said, looking around the empty, sparsely lit studio. Nowhere to hide, nothing here but video and VR equipment. Even if I grabbed a camera or tripod or something and tried to bonk him, he’s protected by his helmet. And he might set off his bomb.

  “You will call the control center and tell them to surrender to me,” the young man said, his voice harsh, gu
ttural. “If you refuse I will kill us both.”

  “Oh, I’ll call them, don’t worry about that.”

  Doug fidgeted on his chair, waiting for Falcone to report he was ready to pump high-pressure oxygen into the plasma vents.

  “We’re clear of the factory,” Jinny Anson reported from a corridor wall phone. “Had to seal the whole section of corridor, ’cause the door to the factory’s been damaged by the blast.”

  “Okay, fine,” Doug said. “We ought to open the vents to vacuum in a few minutes.” Silently he added, Come on, Vince!

  “Call from the university studio,” a comm tech’s voice said in his earphone.

  Edith, he knew. Doug nodded and touched the proper keypad.

  Edith’s face appeared on his central screen. She looked strained, worried. Then Doug saw, behind her, the face of an oriental in a spacesuit helmet.

  “Doug, I’m a hostage—”

  The intruder pushed her aside. “You must surrender to me immediately! If you don’t, I will blow up this chamber with this woman in it!”

  Doug felt as if someone had pushed him off a cliff. His mouth went dry. It took him two swallows to work up enough moisture to reply, “Hold on. I’ll surrender. Just don’t do anything foolish.”

  “I must speak to the commander of Moonbase!” the suicide bomber insisted. “No underlings!”

  “I’m Douglas Stavenger, the chief administrator of Moonbase.”

  The Japanese’s eyes widened momentarily. “Douglas Stavenger? The one whose body is filled with nanomachines?”

  “Yes, that’s me.” Doug felt Bam Gordette’s presence behind him, strong, protective.

  “You must come here and surrender to me personally!”

  “I understand.”

  “Now! Quickly! Otherwise I kill her!”

  “Okay, I’m on my way,” Doug said. He cut the connection and jumped up from his chair.

  Gordette stood in his way. “You go in there, he’s gonna set off his explosives.”

  “If I don’t go, he’s going to kill Edith.”

  ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL CENTER