Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Keep sending them the message. I don’t want them to crash on landing.”

The controller turned in her little chair and looked up at him for the first time. “Why the hell not?” she asked.

The mercenary was sweating as he slipped the fingernail-sized chip into the computer on the desk in his quarters. Electronic germ warfare, he thought: a computer virus.

He was far from being a computer expert, but the chip he had carried in the heel of a shoe was supposed to be totally self-sufficient. Just get access to the right program and stick the chip’s virus into it. Easy, they had told him. Still, the mercenary sweated as he worked his way into the guarded programs that ran Moonbase’s vital systems.

It had been no big deal to ferret out the necessary passwords and coded instructions. Security at Moonbase was a joke. A couple of rounds of expensive real beer, hauled up from Earthside, and a guy was your buddy for life, even if you were black.

The computer program that ran Moonbase’s electrical distribution system was an expert system, with built-in fault diagnosis. The virus was designed to infiltrate the fault diagnosis subprogram and indicate that a dangerous overvoltage had suddenly appeared in the main trunk that connected the solar farms with the base transformers. That would cause the computer to lower the voltage throughout Moonbase: a brown-out. When the virus insisted that the voltage was still too high, the computer would be forced to shut down the main distribution system altogether and throw Moonbase onto its backup fuel cell systems, which were good for only twelve hours, maximum.

By the time they debugged the computer the Peacekeepers would be running the base.

The only light in the mercenary’s quarters was the glow from the display screen, projecting onto his face the multi-colored lines and nodes of the distribution system’s schematic diagram like the warpaint of a Sioux brave.

The mercenary nodded to himself. You bet you got a system anomaly, he said silently to the computer.

Go right ahead and check your ass off, he told the machine. Check yourself into a nervous breakdown.

“What?” he yelped aloud. He jabbed at the keyboard, expanding the message.

Goddamn, he said to himself. The display screen showed that the program had automatically checked the overvoltage message against independent sensors built into the electrical lines and decided that the message was false.

VIRUS LOCATED, the display screen announced, with no emotion whatever.

The mercenary banged his fist on the console hard enough to make the screen blink. Damn! he said to himself. Goddamn virus they gave me isn’t worth shit. Fuckin’ expert system is smarter than the fuckin’ virus.

He tried to insert the virus twice more, and both times the fault diagnosis subprogram identified the virus and erased it. Wondering if the program kept a record of attempts to bug it, and if so, whether it automatically notified the security department, the mercenary angrily yanked the chip from the computer slot and decided to toss it into the garbage reprocessor.

That’s all it’s good for, he thought. Garbage.

He slumped down on his bunk and turned on the wall screen. Stavenger was piping the radar plot from the landing control complex onto the base’s general information channel. Less than six hours until the Peacekeepers landed.

He’s a strange one, thought the mercenary. He’s a couple years younger than me, but he’s old beyond his years. Or maybe it’s just that most guys his age haven’t faced any real responsibilities, so they still act like kids.

Stavenger knows what responsibility is. Got to respect him for that. Like me, a little. We both know what it feels like to have a load on your shoulders.

Over the past several days there had been four times when he had been alone with Stavenger, when he could have snapped Stavenger’s neck or driven the cartilage of his nose into his brain with a single sharp blow from the heel of his hand. He’d be dead before he hit the floor.

Yet the mercenary had stayed his hand. Not yet, he had told himself. Don’t kill him yet. Let the virus do the job. He’s not ready to die.

But the virus has failed. Now it’s up to me.

Stavenger did not act like a man seeking death. The young man brimmed with life, with energy and purpose. Wait, the mercenary advised himself, wait until the precise moment.

They were so unprepared to fight, these men and women of Moonbase, so totally lacking in weapons and skills and even the will to resist, that the mercenary found it almost laughable. Why kill Stavenger or any of the rest of them when the Peacekeepers will be able to walk in here and take over without firing a shot?

Wait. Watch and wait. If it actually comes down to a fight, then that will be the time to take out Stavenger and as many of the others as he could reach.

It would be a shame, though. He was getting to like Stavenger. Almost.

Loosely restrained by her seat harness, so that she floated lightly in her seat, hardly touching its plastic surface, Edith looked across the Clippership’s aisle at the man sitting beside Captain Munasinghe. He was a civilian, and a few hours after they had lifted off from Corsica he had made a point of introducing himself: Jack Killifer.

He was coming on to her, but Edith frosted him off with a polite smile and buried her nose in her notebook computer. I’m not spending the next four days getting groped by some stranger in front of forty soldiers, she decided.

There was something grim about him. He didn’t seem fazed in the slightest by the zero gee of spaceflight, the way Munasinghe and the other troopers were. Instead he looked as if he were impatient to get to Moonbase and get the job over with. A lean, lantern-jawed, intense man, Edith thought. A man with a personal agenda.

The personnel list in her notebook gave only his name and place of residence: Boston, Massachusetts. Well, that’s a starting point, Edith thought. She went hunting through the background database that she had put together before leaving Atlanta. And soon she found his history, in the material that her source in the Masterson Corporation had given her.

Killifer had been a Masterson employee, she saw. Worked for eighteen years at Moonbase, coming back to Earth only long enough for the mandatory health checks and then shipping back to the Moon immediately. Then, seven years ago, he had abruptly taken early retirement and never went back to Moonbase again. Until now.

Digging deeper, Edith found that Killifer had become an executive in the New Morality movement, one of the key pressure groups that pushed the nanotech treaty through the U.K. and got the U.S. Senate to ratify it.

He’s anti-nanotechnology, Edith realized. But, glancing at him across the aisle, she thought he looked as if he had personal demons driving him. There’s more to it than a religious conviction, she thought. I wonder what’s really itching him?

It was boring as hell sitting in the damned Clippership with nothing to do but listen to Munasinghe’s nitpicking worries. Killifer had spent as much time as he could roaming through the ship, but it only took ten minutes to see everything there was to see: The passenger cabin, filled with a mongrel lot of Peacekeeper troops, most of whom couldn’t even speak English. The galley where their tasteless prepacked meals were microwaved. The cargo bays, stuffed with enough weapons to blow Moonbase into orbit. The head, with the seatbelt and stirrups on the unisex toilet.