Ben Bova - Moonwar

“It won’t work.”

“Come on, Lev! It’s worked for Mother Russia all through history.”

Brudnoy was silent for a moment, then he replied, “May I point out that Mother Russia had thousands of kilometers of territory to absorb the invader’s armies. We have—what? Ten thousand square meters?”

“Forty-three thousand and sixteen,” Doug answered promptly. “I checked it in the base plans.”

“I should have known you would.”

Encased in his bulky spacesuit, Captain Munasinghe had to squeeze through the hatch to get into the cockpit. His eyes widened with sudden terror as he looked past the two astronauts through the narrow forward window. The rugged, bare rock surface of the Moon was hurtling up to meet him.

He swallowed hard, not wanting to show the two astronauts that he was afraid.

Before he could speak, the pilot—in the left seat—told him, “We’re programmed to rotate in twelve minutes, so take a good look at the view while you’ve got the chance.”

Munasinghe would rather not. It looked as if they were going to crash and kill everyone aboard.

Forcing his voice to remain even, he asked, “Are you still receiving transmissions from Moonbase?”

“Yeah,” said the copilot. “They say all four of their landing pads are occupied and there’s no place for us to put down.”

“Is that believable?”

“Sure,” the pilot said. “Why the hell not?”

The astronauts were both civilians from the transport line that had provided the Clippership to the U.K. For a fat fee, of course. Munasinghe resented their informality with him. True military personnel would have been preferable. And properly respectful.

“Then how will you land?” Munasinghe asked.

“We’re coming down on a trajectory that’ll put us on their landing pad number three. At T minus fifteen we’ll start scanning the Alphonsus crater floor. If all of their pads really are occupied we’ll pick out a smooth area to set down.”

“You can do this in fifteen minutes’ time?” Munasinghe demanded.

The copilot chuckled. “Don’t you fret none. We can do it in fifteen seconds if we have to.”

“Fifteen seconds!” Munasinghe’s knees went weak at the thought.

The pilot explained, “What he means is, we can hover over the crater floor and pick out our landing site, then jink over to it and sit her down. Nothing to it.”

“Piece of cake,” said the copilot.

“Ten minutes to rotation,” said a synthesized voice from the speaker overhead.

“Enjoy the view while you can,” the pilot said to Munasinghe.

“I must get my troops ready,” he replied. He thought he heard the astronauts laughing at him as he closed the cockpit hatch behind him.

Edith Elgin felt as if she’d been swallowed by some weird creature made of plastic and metal. The spacesuit helmet smelled kind of like a new car, and she could hear the tiny buzz of air fans from inside the suit, as if there were some gnats droning in there with her.

She had been relieved when Munasinghe’s order for everyone to suit up had finally interrupted Killifer’s nonstop monologue of hate. With a smirking grin, Killifer had offered to help Edith get into her spacesuit, but she declined as politely as she could manage, unwilling to give the man a chance to play grab-ass with her. Instead, Edith asked two of the women troopers to help her worm into the spacesuit and check out all the seals and connections.

Killifer did not suit up, she saw. He was going to remain aboard the Clippership with the two astronauts in the cockpit.

Looking through the open visor of her helmet, she saw what appeared to be a collection of fat, bulbous snow monsters, all in white, with human faces peeping out at their tops. Funny, she thought: all the times I’ve been to space stations I’ve never had to get into a spacesuit. Good thing, too. I must look like a roly-poly eskimo in this outfit.

She knew from her Earthside briefings that the backpack she now wore massed fifty-two kilos. One hundred and fourteen point four pounds. In zero gravity it weighed nothing, but Edith was surprised at how difficult it was to move, once the backpack was loaded onto her.

She saw that she was one of the last people still hovering weightlessly in the cabin’s central aisle. Most of the troopers were back in their seats, spacesuits and backpacks and all. And weapons. Each trooper carried a rifle and a bandolier of various types of grenades strung around their shoulders. One of the women had explained the different types: concussion, fragmentation, smoke, and—what was the other one?

Oh, yes: flare. It made a brilliant light that blinded people temporarily.

Slowly, feeling as if she were pregnant with an elephant, Edith pushed herself back into her seat. The backpack forced her to sit on the front few centimeters of the chair.

Munasinghe came through the hatch up forward, from the cockpit. He looked at the watch set into the left cuff of his suit.

“Touchdown in twenty-three minutes,” he announced.

“All buttoned up,” said the chief of the monitoring crew.

Standing behind him, Doug turned his glance from the chief’s set of display screens to the giant electronic wall schematic of the entire base. Every system was functioning within normal limits, every section of the base was secure, almost all the personnel were in their quarters instead of at work, every airtight hatch along each corridor was closed, all the airlocks sealed shut.

Except the main airlock in the now-empty garage.

“They’ve rotated,” said the controller’s voice, from the rocket port. “Coming down the pipe.”

Doug stared at the radar plot that was displayed on the chief’s center screen. Eight smaller screens were arrayed around it, like the compound eye of some strange electronic insect. Each showed a different view.

Leaning over the seated chief’s shoulder, Doug said as calmly as he could, “I want to talk to the controller, please.”

Wordlessly, the chief touched a keypad on the board of his console and the controller’s face suddenly appeared in the upper leftmost of his set of display screens, replacing a view of the crater floor outside.

“I want you to get out of there as soon as they touch down,” Doug reminded the controller. “Shut down all your equipment and get back here as fast as you can.”

“Don’t worry, boss,” she said, with a nervous grin, “I’m not gonna hang out here until they barge in, believe it.”

The rocket port was more than a kilometer away from the base proper. Its underground chambers were connected to the base by a long, straight tunnel. The plan was for the lone controller to drive the old tractor that was used as a taxi to the base, after shutting down all her systems and sealing the two airlocks that opened onto the crater floor. Once she was safely through the airtight hatch at the Moonbase end of the tunnel, the technicians in the control center would pump the air out of the rocket port facility and the connecting tunnel.

“There they are,” said the chief, pointing to a screen on the upper right corner of his complex.

Doug saw a speck of light against the darkness of space, a glint of sunshine reflecting off the curved diamond surface of the Clippership. That ship was built here at Moonbase, he realized. It’s returning home.

Swiftly the glimmer took shape. Doug could see the spacecraft was coming down tail-first.

“Still heading for pad three,” the controller’s voice said, a hint of nervous excitement in her normally laconic tone.

Doug glanced at the screen that showed pad three. A pair of empty tractors sat on it. No way a ship could land there.

“Hovering.”