Ben Bova - Moonwar

“They want to take over the base,” Brudnoy replied.

“Yeah, but they wouldn’t want to kill us! Not if we’re just sitting tight inside.”

“Blowing the main airlock wouldn’t necessarily kill us, would it?” Cardenas asked.

“No,” said Anson. “It’d just open up the garage. All the tunnels would still be sealed off—”

“Corridors,” Doug corrected.

“Whatever.”

“Still,” Brudnoy said, “if they blast out the main airlock that would surely mean that they are prepared to blow their way through any of the other airlocks and hatches in the base.”

“It would mean they’re ready to kill us,” Doug agreed.

Zimmerman, sitting alone on the couch by the door, pointed out, “If they blast open the main airlock we would have to surrender. There would be no other option.”

“Not unless we can breathe vacuum,” Anson admitted.

Doug turned to Gordette and again the man was staring at him. “What do you think, Bam? What does your military experience tell you?”

Without the slightest hesitation, Gordette replied, “The Peacekeepers are trained to accomplish their mission with as little bloodshed as possible. They won’t blow any airlocks. Not at first, anyway.”

“You mean we could sit inside and wait ’em out?” Anson asked.

Gordette shook his head.

“What would you do,” Doug asked, “if you were heading up this Peacekeeper mission?”

Getting slowly to his feet, Gordette walked to the wall map and pointed to the thin lines that represented the buried power cables that led from the solar farms into the base. “I’d cut your electrical power lines, here, here, and here.”

“The solar farms,” murmured Brudnoy.

“Without electricity this base goes down the tubes.” Gordette made a diving motion with one hand.

“We have the backup nuclear system,” Anson said.

“They know that,” Gordette replied flatly. “They’ve got as good a map of this base as you do.”

Doug said, “So they’ll cut the line from the nuke, too.”

Gordette nodded.

“Kaput,” said Zimmerman. “How long can we last without electricity? Thirty seconds, perhaps?”

“We have emergency batteries, fuel cells,” said Anson.

“So? How much time do they give us?”

“A few hours.”

“The Peacekeepers will have enough air to wait for us to surrender, no?”

“Yes.”

From his chair in front of Doug’s desk, Brudnoy looked up at Gordette with gloom in his pouchy eyes. “Is there anything we can do? Anything at all?”

Gordette seemed to think about it for a moment. “There’s a maneuver that we use in martial arts when your opponent points a gun at you.”

“What is it?”

Gordette slowly raised his arms over his head in the universal sign of surrender.

The room fell into a dismal silence. Doug looked at them; they seemed defeated already.

“What we’ve learned,” he said in as firm a voice as he could, “is that we’ve got to keep the Peacekeepers from cutting our power lines.”

“How?” Brudnoy asked.

Doug pointed toward Zimmerman. “We need something to defend those power lines.”

“Something?” Zimmerman growled. “What?”

“That’s what you’ve got to figure out, Professor. And you’ve got less than four days to do it.”

Joanna Masterson Stavenger was not accustomed to being snubbed, not even by the world’s most powerful politicians. But Faure refused to speak to her.

At first the U.N. simply did not acknowledge her calls. The wall screen in her quarters showed nothing but electronic hash. The comm tech who was monitoring her transmission said flatly, They’re not answering.”

She reached the Masterson Corporation offices in New York and tried to pipe a call to Faure through them. After nearly twenty-four hours of delays and evasions, one of the U.N. flunkies blandly told her that the secretary-general was unavailable.

Huffing with impatient anger, Joanna called Masterson corporate headquarters in Savannah on a direct laser link.

“I want to speak with the chairman of the board,” she told the young man whose face appeared on her wall screen.

“Mr Rashid isn’t here, Mrs Brudnoy. He’s in—”

Joanna did not wait for the sentence to end. “Find him, wherever he is. I need to talk to him immediately.”

It took almost three seconds for her words to reach Rashid’s aide and his startled expression to show on her screen.

“Get him!” she snapped.

Nearly half an hour later, Ibrahim al-Rashid’s face finally appeared on the wall screen. He had been handsome once, but now his romantic good looks were sinking into softness. His closely-clipped beard was streaked with gray, as was his tightly-curled hair. He had a look of decadence about him, Joanna thought. She knew that Rashid did not drink; he was a faithful Moslem in that regard. But there were drugs. And women, many of them. And the responsibilities that came inescapably with great power.

“Greetings and felicitations, most illustrious one,” he said, his voice reedy but melodious. “How are you enjoying your visit to the Moon?”

“I need to talk to Faure,” Joanna said, unwilling to engage in the usual banter.

Three seconds later Rashid’s brows rose slightly. “I very much doubt that the secretary-general would be willing to speak with you at this point in time.”

“Make it happen, Omar,” Joanna snapped.

If her use of his old nickname upset him, Rashid showed no trace of it. He merely smiled patiently and replied, “And how do I do that, Joanna? Rub a magic lamp?”

Holding on to her swooping temper, Joanna replied, “You get that little Quebecer on the phone and tell him that I’m going to announce to the news media that he has no intention of shutting down Moonbase. He’s going to continue using our nanomachines for his own profit!”

Rashid seemed more sobered than surprised when her words reached him.

“Your son’s declaration of Moonbase’s independence has not been carried by the media,” he said slowly. “There is a blackout on news about Moonbase. Even here in the States the media have acceded to Faure’s request for restraint.”

“This isn’t about Moonbase,” Joanna replied impatiently. “This is about the secretary-general of the United Nations telling the world he’s going to enforce the nanotech treaty when he’s really planning to use our nanomachines for his own purposes.”

She watched his expression intently. Does he already know about this? Has he already cut a deal with Faure?

At last Rashid said, “That does cast a new light on the situation. Perhaps the media would be interested in such a story. Do you have any evidence to back it up? Any corroboration?”

Suddenly Joanna felt wary. “Plenty,” she said, thinking to herself, Omar could be part of Faure’s scheme. He’s never been a supporter of Moonbase.

Almost as if thinking out loud, Rashid murmured, “There is a reporter on board the Clippership heading for Moonbase.”

“I don’t want a reporter,” Joanna said. “I want all the networks. I want every news service on Earth!”

“But the commsats have been programmed to reject all transmissions from Moonbase.”

“I don’t need the commsats. How do you think we’re talking? The technicians here can beam my transmissions to any spot on Earth, almost. All the news services have optical receivers on their rooftops.”

Rashid was silent far longer than the three seconds it took for the round-trip transmission from Moon to Earth and back again.

“Perhaps Faure would be willing to speak with you, after all,” he said at last. “Let me see if I can reach him and get him to listen to reason.”