Ben Bova - Moonwar

Doug almost laughed in his face. “Professor Kadar, I understand how upset and frustrated you must feel. But you’re not the only one. All our outside activities have been shut down, except for our preparations for defending Moonbase against the Peacekeepers. I’m afraid your survey of Farside is just going to have to wait.”

And with that, a solidly built, grim-faced black man took Kadar’s other arm and firmly led him to the door. Kadar glared at him, and when that didn’t work, he stared at the man’s nametag on his shirt front.

“Mr Gordette,” Kadar said with as much dignity as he could muster,’there is no need for you to leave your fingerprints on my arm.”

Gordette released him. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Just wanted to make sure you leave Doug alone. He’s got a lot to do, you know.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Late that night Kadar actually got Stavenger on the phone. If I can’t sleep, Kadar told himself, why should he?

But Stavenger didn’t seem to be sleeping. His image came up immediately on the smart wall of Kadar’s quarters. Stavenger was sitting at a desk in his own quarters, wide awake.

“Dr Kadar,” Doug said as soon as he recognized his caller’s face.

“I’m sorry to call so late—”

“It doesn’t matter. I was just going over our inventories of supplies.”

“My satellite is ready for launch,” Kadar said. “All I need is your approval and—”

“With all due respect, Professor Kadar, there’s no chance in hell of your getting your satellite launched until this crisis with the Peacekeepers is resolved.”

“It’s only one small rocket. They’ll see that it’s going into a lunar orbit.”

“I’m not going to debate the point, Professor. No launch.”

“You’re standing in the way of science!”

Wearily, Doug replied, “Maybe I am. It can’t be helped. If it’s any consolation, there are a lot of other frustrated people in the base right now. We’ve got a whole troupe of ballet dancers here who can’t return Earthside until this mess is resolved.”

Ballet dancers did not assuage Kadar’s feelings. But as he sat amidst his monitoring screens, admiring the drawings of what would someday be the Kadar Observatory on the far side of the Moon, he suddenly realized that frustrated ballet dancers might be more appreciative of his predicament than the management of Moonbase.

Ballet dancers. Kadar pulled himself up from his console chair and headed for his quarters. A shower, a shave, some clean clothes—if I must spend this crisis in frustration, perhaps there is a charming ballerina or two who can understand me and offer consolation.

“I’ve never felt so frustrated in my whole life!” Joanna slapped her palm against the ornate little table that stood at the end of her couch.

Startled, Lev Brudnoy looked across the room at her.

“No one answers my calls,” Joanna complained. “No one even acknowledges that they’ve received my calls! It’s like shouting into a deep, dark mine shaft!”

Brudnoy turned off the wall display he had been studying, got up from his chair and went to sit beside his wife.

“Faure’s people are in control of the commsats,” he said gently. “Most probably they are not letting your messages get through to Earth.”

“But I’ve beamed calls directly to the World Court in The Hague. I’ve even had our own people in Savannah relay my messages to Holland. No response. Not even a flicker.”

Brudnoy shrugged his bony shoulders. “Faure isn’t going to let the World Court consider our claim of independence until his Peacekeepers have taken control of Moonbase.”

“And turned it over to Yamagata to operate,” Joanna growled.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Fists clenched, Joanna jumped to her feet and started striding across the furniture-crowded living room. “That little turd! He’s in with Yamagata. It’s been a Yamagata operation all along, from the very beginning. They’ll end up operating Moonbase under a U.N. contract and we’ll be out in the cold.”

“Expropriated,” muttered Brudnoy.

“It’s illegal! It’s illegal as hell! But he’s going to get away with it.”

“How is your board of directors taking this?”

She glared at him. “I’ve asked for an emergency meeting of the board, but they’re taking their sweet time getting everybody together.”

“Perhaps—”

“They know Doug can’t live on Earth!” Joanna blurted. “He’ll be a marked man.”

“We’ll be able to protect him,” Brudnoy assured her.

But Joanna shook her head. “No, they’ll get to him. Fanatics. Assassins. Just because he’s got nanomachines in his body. They’ll kill him, sooner or later.”

“Zimmerman won’t be safe from the nanoluddites, either,” Brudnoy pointed out. With a sigh, he added, “None of us will.”

“We can’t let them send us back to Earth, Lev! It’d be a death sentence for Doug, for Zimmerman, for all of us!”

“If only—”

The phone chime interrupted Brudnoy.

“Answer,” Joanna snapped.

The phone’s computer voice said, “Call from Mr Rashid, in Savannah.”

“Put him on!”

Ibrahim al-Rashid’s swarthy face with its trim little beard appeared on the wall screen. To Brudnoy, the man looked like the crafty pirate chieftain of his childhood tapes.

He smiled at Joanna. “You’ll be pleased to know that the emergency board meeting is scheduled to start in ten minutes.”

Joanna sank back onto the couch beside her husband. “Good,” she breathed. “Good.”

Rashid hated these electronic meetings. He sat at the head of the nearly-empty board table while the walls around him displayed the images of directors who were in their homes or offices in California, London, Buenos Aires, the middle of the Pacific Ocean—and one, of course, on the Moon.

Only three of Masterson Corporation’s directors lived close enough to Savannah to come to this emergency meeting in person, and one of them had to be ferried by a special medevac tiltrotor plane because he was on life support, awaiting a heart transplant.

“We have got to get the World Court to issue an injunction to stop the Peacekeepers from invading Moonbase!” Joanna was saying, her voice urgent, somewhere between cajoling and pleading.

McGruder, the old man on life support, wheezing through his clear plastic oxygen mask, said testily, “The World Court doesn’t work that way. They have no power to issue injunctions or control the Peacekeepers.”

“Only Faure can direct the Peacekeepers,” said the director from London, a well-preserved matron whom Rashid had pursued amorously from time to time.

“With the oversight of the General Assembly,” the man from California added. “If they don’t like the way he’s handling things, they can override him or even replace him.”

Fat chance, Rashid thought.

Tamara Bonai, sitting on her patio on Tarawa with palm trees behind her swaying in the trade wind, asked, “But what about the news media? Couldn’t we put some pressure on the UN by exposing this plot to the media?”

Rashid said, “Most of the world’s media has been effectively muzzled by Faure. Here in the United States the media executives I’ve talked to tend to see this as a struggle between a giant corporation—which is bad by definition—against the poor people of the world, represented by Faure and the U.N.”

Joanna’s anguished face almost filled the far wall of the board room, like a giant portrait or a hovering djinn.

“Do you mean that they’re ignoring our declaration of independence?” Joanna demanded.