Ben Bova - Moonwar

“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 each of them was 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 they 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!”

“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 blonde 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.