Ben Bova - Moonwar

But no, he’s going to outsmart the Peacekeepers and make himself a hero. A dead hero.

“Hey, what’s that?”

Doug caught the flicker of movement in the upper right screen and jerked his attention away from his dialogue with Lieutenant Hansen.

A spacesuited figure was running into the garage. A kamikaze? Doug’s heart clutched in his chest. A suicide trooper clutching explosives to blow the hatch to one of the corridors?

“I’m Edie Elgin from Global Network News!” the figure shouted as she ran clumsily toward the hatch to corridor one. “I’m not a soldier, I’m a news reporter and you’ve got to let me in!”

“Get out of there!” Doug yelled. “The nanobugs will eat out your suit and kill you!”

“No!” Edith shouted back. “I’m a reporter and I want to talk with you people face-to-face!”

She reached the hatch and skidded to a stop.

“The nanobugs are already chewing on your boots,” Doug said. “Get back outside while you still have a chance!”

“No! You come and let me inside the base.”

“Flathead,” Jinny Anson growled.

“It’s a trick,” said Joanna.

“But she’ll die!” Brudnoy said.

“Let her! It’s her own damned fault.”

Doug stared at the display screen showing the spacesuited figure standing defiantly at the hatch. If she were nervous or frightened it didn’t show through the suit. She just stood there, arms folded across her chest.

“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered.

Kris Cardenas leaned over Doug’s shoulder. “The bugs will work their way through her boots in a couple of minutes, Doug.”

“You can’t let her kill herself.”

“Why not?” Anson snapped.

“Bad publicity,” Joanna answered.

While they argued above his head, Doug flicked to the Peacekeepers’ suit-to-suit frequency. Hansen and several others were bellowing to the reporter to get back into the sunlight before the nanobugs killed her. She did not reply to them. Probably not even tuned in to the suit-to-suit freak, Doug thought.

He looked up at Brudnoy. “Lev, get a team of people down to that airlock. Bring a UV lamp to deactivate the bugs.”

Brudnoy nodded once and started off.

Doug called after him, “Do not let any part of her suit inside the base! Understand? Her suit stays in the airlock chamber until we can make absolutely certain it’s been fully decontaminated.”

Zimmerman lumbered off, too.

“Where are you going, Professor?” Doug asked.

“To meet this foolish woman, where else?”

Doug turned back to the display screens on the console. Hansen and the others were still jabbering on their suit-to-suit frequency.

“Lieutenant Hansen!” Doug broke in. “Lieutenant, this is Douglas Stavenger.”

“She’s going to kill herself,” Hansen said grimly.

“We’re going to take her inside,” Doug said. “Don’t try to take advantage of the situation.”

“I assure you,” Hansen said,’that this insanity is entirely her own doing. I want no part of it.”

“Fine,” said Doug. Yet in his mind’s eye he saw this as a ploy by the Peacekeeper lieutenant. Get us to open the hatch to save the life of a nutty reporter and they rush a squad of troopers to get to the hatch before we can close it again.

“Just to be on the safe side,” Doug said, “I would appreciate it if you and your troopers began filing back toward your Clippership.”

“You don’t trust me?” Hansen’s voice sounded surprised.

“It’s easier to trust,” said Doug, “when I can see that you’re not going to rush that hatch.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you’ll bear the responsibility for the reporter’s death.”

That was a stretch, Doug knew. We can’t let a reporter die, he told himself. Bad enough their captain killed himself. Everybody on Earth would be turned totally against us. Reporter killed by Moonbase nanobugs. They’d nuke us and feel justified about it.

“I will order my troopers to stand clear of your airlock,” Hansen said. “That will have to do.”

Nodding wearily, Doug said, “Okay. I can accept that.”

Lev Brudnoy tapped Gordette’s shoulder as he started out of the control center.

I’ll need your help,” he said to the black man.

Gordette looked startled, but quickly recovered and followed Brudnoy as the old ex-cosmonaut hurried along the corridor toward the cross-tunnel that led to corridor one.

Brudnoy stopped at one of the wall phones only long enough to call security and ask for an emergency team with a pair of UV lamps to meet them at airlock one.

“Why two lamps?” Gordette asked as they started trotting down the corridor toward the airlock.

“In case one fails,” Brudnoy said, puffing.

“Redundancy.” Gordette understood. An astronaut’s way of thinking.

The emergency team was not there yet when they got to the end of the corridor. Brudnoy muttered under his breath in Russian.

“Here they come,” Gordette said, pointing up the corridor.

With a tight glance, Brudnoy reached out his long fingers and touched the MANUAL OVERRIDE stud on the airlock control panel set into the wall.

“Tell Doug that I am cycling the airlock manually,” he said to Gordette as he pressed the stud that opened the outer hatch.

Gordette picked up the wall phone and spoke into it with a hushed urgency. “He’s telling her to step inside the airlock,” he said to Brudnoy.

The emergency team came up. Its leader, a roundish dark-haired woman, was panting.

“We were in The Cave with everybody else when the call came through. Hadda run all the way down to the storage lockers to find a second ultraviolet lamp. Why the hell do you need two?”

Brudnoy ignored her. “Is she inside?” he asked Gordette.

“Yeah, you can close the outer hatch now.”

Edith never doubted for a moment that they would let her inside. Stavenger sounded too level-headed, too organized to do something stupid.

“We’re going to open the outer hatch,” his voice said in her helmet earphones. “Get inside quickly, because we’ll need to shut it before any of your Peacekeeper buddies can make a charge for it.”

The hatch slid open before she could reply. She stepped into what looked like an empty telephone booth with walls of smooth blank metal, lit by a single lamp set into the metal ceiling.

Soundlessly, the hatch slid shut again.

Nothing happened. It was like being in a spacious metal coffin. Room enough for two; maybe three, if you really squeezed it.

Edith heard a throbbing sound. She didn’t really hear it so much as feel it through the soles of her boots. I wonder if the nanobugs really are chewing up my boots, or is the whole thing just an elaborate trick?

She could really hear a pump chugging away now, and the hiss of air.

“In a minute or so the inner hatch will open,” Stavenger’s voice told her. “Don’t move. Do not step through the hatch. Understand me? Do not step through.”

“I understand,” Edith said. He sure sounds uptight all of a sudden.

“Good,” Stavenger said. “One or two men will come into the airlock with you and help you out of your suit. Do exactly what they tell you.”

“Okay, sure.”

“We’re risking the safety of this entire base and everybody in it,” Stavenger said. “If the nanobugs infesting your suit get inside we’ll all be dead.”

Edith blinked with surprise. He really means it! He’s putting the whole base in jeopardy to save my neck.

The hissing and chugging noises stopped, and for a long moment she stood alone and still in the metal sarcophagus.

Then the inner door slid open and a lanky, grave faced old man with a ratty gray beard stepped inside. Behind him was a shorter Afro-American, solidly built. He looked somber, too.