Ben Bova - Moonwar

He thought about popping into the cockpit, but he figured that the astronauts up there weren’t looking for company, and there wouldn’t be all that much to see, anyway. It’s crowded enough here in the passenger cabin, Killifer told himself, friggin’ cockpit’s about the size of a shoe box.

There was only one bright spot in the whole mess, and that was the good-looking blonde reporter sitting across the aisle from him. Killifer had tried to strike up a conversation with her, but she didn’t seem interested.

Yet now, as he sat wedged in beside the ever whining Munasinghe, she seemed to be giving him the once-over. Killifer laughed to himself. After four days in this sardine can she must be getting horny.

Only about four hours to go, Edith thought. I can handle Killifer for that long. So she smiled the next time he looked her way and, sure enough, as soon as Munasinghe left his seat to see to some problem, Jack Killifer unstrapped and floated out into the aisle beside her.

“Boring trip, isn’t it?” he said, grinning down at her wolfishly.

Edith turned up the wattage on her smile a little. “I’d rather be bored than scared to death.”

Without asking, Killifer pulled himself into the empty seat beside her. “It won’t be long now,” he said.

“You’ve been to Moonbase before, haven’t you?” Edith prompted, as she quietly clicked on the audio recorder built into her electronic notebook.

Killifer huffed. “Spent the better part of eighteen years there.”

“Eighteen years?” she said, wide-eyed. “Wow! You must have been there right at the very beginning.”

“I sure was. Lemme tell you…”

That was all it took to get Killifer talking about himself and Moonbase. But as he talked, the dark brooding anger that simmered inside him started to rise to the surface.

“Joanna Stavenger,” he growled. “She’s the bitch that runs the whole thing up there.”

“I thought Douglas Stavenger was in charge of Moonbase,” Edith said innocently.

“Hah! Maybe he thinks he’s in charge, but it’s his Mama who’s the real boss. The spider woman.”

“Isn’t her name Brudnoy now?”

“Sure,” Killifer answered. “He’s her third husband, you know. The first two died on her.”

“Really?”

He chuckled unpleasantly. “I wonder how long this one’ll last.”

Edith asked, “Douglas Stavenger… isn’t he the one who has the nanomachines in his body? He nearly was killed on the Brennart expedition to the south lunar pole, wasn’t he?”

“I was on that expedition,” Killifer said. “I was Brennart’s right-hand man.”

“Really? Wow!”

For nearly four hours Killifer gabbled away and Edith realized that his nanoluddite leanings were merely the surface manifestation of a deep hatred for Joanna Brudnoy and her son, Doug Stavenger.

Sitting alone in his office, Doug watched the smart wall’s view of the crater floor, where teams of spacesuited men and women were desperately setting up microwave transmission equipment to back up the hard-wire system that carried electrical power from the solar farms to the base’s electrical distribution center.

The microwave transmitters were dark, flat plates, innocuous looking. They were aimed at relay transceivers being set up atop the ringwall mountains, a circuitous route that Doug and his cohorts hoped would fool the Peacekeepers. They can blow the wires, he told himself, but they won’t recognize the backup equipment for what it is.

For maybe half an hour, a sardonic voice in his head sneered. They’re not dummies. They’ll figure it out soon enough.

It’s the best we can do, Doug admitted silently. It’s the best we can do.

Nervously, a feeling of dread gripping him like the freezing hand of death itself, Doug programmed the smart walls to show him every square centimeter of Moonbase. He inspected each of the corridors, the water factory, the environmental control center, the rocket port, the solar farms and the mass driver out on the crater floor, the labs, the workshops, The Cave, where a handful of people were taking a meal in desultory silence, the control center, where tense men and women monitored every part of the base.

“Hold there,” he said.

The walls froze on a panoramic view of the garage. It had been a natural cave in the mountainside, enlarged and smoothed over by Moonbase construction crews. Now it served as a shelter for the tractors that worked out on the surface, a storage area, even a playing arena for the annual low-gee basketball matches. It also served as a buffer between the corridors that housed the living and working areas and the airless lunar surface, outside.

Doug leaned back in his swivel chair and stared at the main airlock. Big enough to let tractors through, its heavy metal surface was dulled and scratched from years of constant use. On the other side of the airlock was the open crater floor. On the opposite side of the garage were the smaller airlocks that led to the individual corridors of Moonbase.

A buffer zone.

“Phone!” Doug called out. “Find Jinny Anson, Professor Cardenas, Lev Brudnoy and Leroy Gordette. Urgent priority. Tell them to report to my office immediately. ”

“But it’s crazy,” Anson snapped.

Doug sat straight up in his chair and stared across his desk into her steel-gray eyes. “Jinny, a very smart man once said, “Just because an idea is crazy doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s right, either.”

“Do you have something better in mind?”

“If we’re going to do anything,” Brudnoy said, “it should be done out on the crater floor, as far away from us as possible.”

“What can we do out there, Lev?”

The Russian thought a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

Doug looked at Cardenas for support, but she merely sat silently in the sling chair in front of his desk, looking thoughtful. I’m putting a lot on her shoulders, he thought. She doesn’t want to commit herself, one way or the other.

He turned to Gordette, sitting off to the side of his desk, slightly separated from the others. “Bam, you’re the only one here with any military experience. What do you think?”

Gordette’s dark face looked utterly serious. “What do I think? I think you’re blowing smoke. All of you. There’s no way in hell you can keep those Peacekeeper troops out of here.”

Doug broke into a grin, his automatic reaction to a challenge. “We’ll see,” he said.

“You’re going to do it?” Anson asked.

“Yep,” said Doug. “We’ve got less than two hours and we’ve got to do something. ”

“But it won’t work! It’ll backfire and—”

“Jinny,” Doug interrupted, “I understand that the four of you are against it. But like Lincoln said when his whole cabinet voted against the Emancipation Proclamation and he was the only one in favor: The ayes have it.”

In his cermet spacesuit Doug stood on the rock floor of the garage as the last of the tractors trundled through the open hatch of the main airlock.

“Only thirty-two minutes left,” Brudnoy said.

Doug had to turn his whole body to see his stepfather’s cardinal red spacesuit standing beside him.

“We’ll make it,” he said. “Cardenas is ready to start laying down the bugs.”

“For what it’s worth, commander, I wish you wouldn’t do this. It’s too risky.” Brudnoy’s voice sounded more morose than usual, in Doug’s earphones.

“I wish I didn’t have to do this,” Doug admitted, “but I can’t see what else gives us a chance to get the Peacekeepers off our backs.”