Ben Bova - Moonwar

“The water factory!” a technician yelped. “We’ve lost contact with the water factory.”

“The bastards have blown up the water factory!”

“Give me a view of the water factory!” Doug yelled.

“Cameras are out,” a technician hollered back.

Doug saw a blank screen where the view of the factory should have been.

“Jinny, get a repair team in there!”

“Already on their way,” Anson yelled over her shoulder, halfway to the door.

“How did it happen?”

“Rerun the security camera.”

With Gordette grasping both his shoulders from behind him, Doug saw the camera’s view of the automated water factory. A blur of a figure dropped out of the top of the picture; a flash and then the camera went dead.

“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 Himmeir 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 was Himmler and Bormann 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.