Ben Bova - Moonwar

We’ve stopped them, Doug told himself. But for how long?

They were all watching him: Jinny, Falcone, even Gordette, standing alone off by the wall. Every technician and specialist in the control center had his eyes on Doug. I wonder were Edith is? he asked himself. Did she go to our quarters for a nap? Bet not.

Edith was napping, but not in the quarters she shared with Doug.

She had tottered back to the university’s studio, dog tired now that the adrenaline of being on the air had drained out of her, but intent on getting a camera and recording the doings in the control center.

She looked in on the editing booth, still hot and sweaty from her hours in it, feeling slightly nettled that she didn’t know for certain how many hours she’d spent broadcasting to Global News and, through Global, to the world.

She started for one of the hand-sized cameras resting in its rack, but Zimmerman’s big plush couch looked too inviting to resist. Just a few minutes’ snooze, she told herself. Stretching out on it, she was asleep within seconds.

“You heard the secretary-general’s orders,” said the volunteer. ‘ We will bring you victory.”

Giap turned to the leader of the self-styled Sacred Seven, sitting beside him on the tractor’s bench.

“Not victory,” he snarled. “Annihilation.”

The young Japanese must have smiled behind his helmet visor. “As the secretary-general said, so be it.”

The colonel had no reply. Yet he was thinking, I could still cut their electrical power lines. How long could they hold out then? A few hours, at most. They would have to surrender to me. That would be better than allowing these insane suicide bombers to kill everyone.

“I suggest,” the volunteer said,’that you re-establish negotiations with the Moonbase commander, while your troopers help us to break into the plasma vent tunnels, as per our plan.”

Giap noticed a slight but definite stress on the word our .

Precisely one hour after his conversation with the Peacekeeper commander ended, Doug sat at his console again and re-opened the communications link.

“Have you spoken with your superiors, Colonel?” he asked.

“Yes. They are reluctant to admit that we have reached a stalemate here,” came the colonel’s voice.

Doug wished he could see the man’s face. He sensed a tone he hadn’t heard in their first discussion.

“What are you trying to say?” he asked.

“I am responsible directly to the secretary-general of the United Nations,” Giap said. “My orders come directly from him.”

Doug leaned forward anxiously in his chair. “And what are those orders?”

“He expects me to accept your surrender.”

Doug heard Anson mutter behind him, “When he can breathe vacuum, that’s when we’ll surrender.”

He said mildly to the blank screen, “Your first wave had to surrender to us, colonel.”

Giap seemed to hesitate. Then he replied, “It would be quite easy for us to cut off your electrical power supply.”

There it was, at last. Doug almost felt relieved. “Not as easy as you may think, Colonel,” he replied. “We’ve buried secondary lines to take over if the primaries are cut.”

“We have sensors that will find all the lines.”

“And we have your first wave’s weapons,” said Doug, putting some steel into his voice. “Don’t force us to use them.”

“So we will have a firefight? I believe my troops have more guns—and more ammunition for them.”

“How much oxygen do they have?” Doug asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How long can you remain out on the crater floor, colonel? Remember, we have some of your shoulder-fired missiles now. We can hit your tractors.”

“We have all the logistics we need. You should surrender to me and avoid useless bloodshed.”

Before Doug could reply, Gordette leaned over his shoulder and pointed to the screen showing the floor of the crater. “There’s some activity out there.”

Doug glanced at the screen. “Wait a moment, Colonel,” he said. I’ll be back with you in a few minutes.”

Cutting the connection to the Peacekeepers, Doug punched up a request to rerun the outside camera view.

“Look,” Gordette pointed. “Over there.”

A dozen spacesuited figures marched purposefully toward the main airlock. As they approached they walked out of the camera’s field of view.

“What do the cameras inside the garage show?”

Checking on them, Doug and Gordette saw that the view from inside the garage did not show the dozen troopers at all.

“They stopped outside, off to one side of the main airlock,” Doug said.

“Why?” asked Gordette.

“I’ll try to find out,” said Doug.

Colonel Giap was alone in the tractor’s cab now. Through his binoculars he could see a squad of his troopers helping the Sacred Seven up an aluminum ladder they had placed against the face of the mountain, just to the side of Moonbase’s main airlock. They were struggling to open the square hatch that led into the old plasma vents.

Giap had studied Moonbase’s layout until he knew it as well as the face of his beloved mother. The plasma vents were from Moonbase’s earliest days, when the builders were excavating tunnels by boiling away the rock with high-temperature plasma torches. The vents let the ultra-hot vapors blow out into the vacuum outside. The vents had not been used, as far as Giap knew, in years. Yet they threaded through the rock above the main corridors of Moonbase. Crawling through them, a man could reach every critical part of the base.

The volunteers will penetrate the base before the rebels know they are being infiltrated. Their first warning will be when the fanatics begin to blow themselves up. Themselves, and every crucial part of Moonbase.

“Colonel Giap?” Stavenger’s voice sounded in his earphones.

“I am still here,” he answered.

“We saw a dozen or so of your troops move off to one side of the main airlock. Now they’re out of our camera’s view. What’s going on?”

Giap was prepared for the question. “They are setting up a maintenance station to repair the spacesuits your dust has fouled. They are trying to remove the dust from their faceplates and joints.”

Stavenger did not reply immediately. Does he believe my lie? Giap wondered.

“Let’s get back to the main point,” the Moonbase commander said at last. “Are you willing to withdraw and leave us in peace?”

“I am not allowed to do so,” Giap stalled. “My orders do not permit it.”

“If you try to cut off our electricity we’ll be forced to fire on you.”

Giap thought the man’s voice sounded very reluctant.

“Then I suggest you surrender, now. While you have the chance.”

“…While you have the chance,” Giap’s voice had an urgency to it that made alarm bells ring in Doug’s head.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “You won’t accept a surrender if you’re able to cut off our electricity?”

No answer for several long moments. Then the colonel replied, “If you fire upon my troopers, if a firefight is started, who knows what will happen next? A battle is not a predictable thing. There will be many deaths.”

Doug got the distinct feeling that there was a hidden subtext in the colonel’s words. He wants me to read between the lines, Doug thought. What’s he trying to say?

“Colonel, I wonder what—”

The control center shook so abruptly that Doug nearly toppled off his chair. A low rumble echoed through the rock chamber. The lights flickered.

“What was that?”

“A quake?”

“An explosion!”

Doug scanned his screens with newfound intensity. The solar farms seemed intact; no one was even near them.