Ben Bova - Moonwar

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 off 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 tractors 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 Moon-base,” 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.”

“Nonsense!” spat the colonel. “We have enough weaponry to blast through your tunnels whenever we choose to.”

Glancing at Anson and the others crowding around him, Doug said darkly, “And we have the weapons of your first wave soldiers now. We can shoot back. And men in spacesuits are extremely vulnerable. We won’t need sharpshooters.”

Giap sputtered something unintelligible.

“We have no desire to harm anyone,” Doug said. “All we want is for you to withdraw and leave us alone.”

After several heartbeats, Giap said, “This situation is beyond my authority. I will have to discuss this with my superiors.”

“Fine,” Doug replied. “I’ll call again in exactly one hour. Until then, your suit-to-suit frequencies will be jammed again.”

The nerve-shattering screech of the jamming pierced Giap’s skull like a pair of icepicks driven into his eardrums. He banged on his wrist keypad to shut off his suit radio. As he got to his feet he saw that the other officers were doing the same.

Stomping angrily to the tractor that he had commandeered to be his command center, Giap clambered up into its cab. His communications sergeant was nowhere in sight; he would have to work the laptop himself. Worse still, he would have to face Faure.

No, he realized. There was something even worse. The insufferable Sacred Seven. Their young Japanese leader was waiting for him in the tractor’s cab, sitting in the rear seat. Giap recognized the shoulder patch symbol on his spacesuit: a fist holding a lightning bolt.

And the volunteer was holding the end of a communications wire that was already plugged into his own helmet.

Reluctantly, Giap took the proffered wire and inserted into his own helmet’s comm port.