Ben Bova - Moonwar

It was my childhood when I climbed those mountains and rode around the whole ringwall, he realized. I don’t have time for that anymore. I’ve got an adult’s responsibilities now.

Still, he relaxed and enjoyed the passing scenery: stark, barren, full of promise.

Driving the tractor was like second nature to him. The big lumbering machine would probably trundle out to the mass driver on its own, even if Doug let go of the controls, following the cleated ruts laid down by thousands of tractor journeys across the dusty regolith. But Doug held onto the T-stick. There were enough craterlets and rocks strewn across the ground to cause trouble if he got careless, he knew.

He realized that this was the first time he had been alone in weeks. Not even Bam Gordette was with him. Doug thought about the somber-faced black man. Gordette had been his constant companion wherever he went in Moonbase, his self-appointed protector. Bodyguard, chauffeur, military consultant: I’ve become dependent on him, Doug thought. I wonder what he thinks about all this. I’d like to think of him as a friend, but he’s so quiet and reserved it’s hard to tell what’s going on inside his head.

He said he wanted to come outside with me, but he gave up the idea pretty easily when I told him it wasn’t necessary. Is he afraid of being out here on the surface? Doug almost laughed, inside his helmet. He couldn’t imagine Gordette afraid of anything.

The mass driver came into view, a long dark finger of metal stretched across the crater floor. It had its own acreage of solar farms to provide electricity for the magnets that flung lunar ores toward the factories in orbit around the Earth. Since the U.N.’s siege had begun, the space factories had shut down their operations and the mass driver stood unused in the silence of the lunar landscape.

Unused as an ore supplier.

The physicists had been overjoyed at the shutdown. Years earlier they had built a linear particle accelerator along the three-and-a-half-kilometer length of the mass driver, using its powerful cryogenic magnets to energize subatomic particles for their experiments. But they could use the facility only when the mass driver wasn’’tbusy flinging packets of lunar ores off to the factories in Earth orbit. With the war the factories had been taken over by the U.N. The mass driver stood idle—and the physicists went into a frenzy of activity, ecstatic to use their particle accelerator twenty-four hours each day.

It was easy to spot Wicksen among the spacesuited figures milling around the hardware. His slight figure was encased in a white spacesuit that had WIX stencilled in electric blue on the front of his helmet and across his backpack.

Doug clambered down from the tractor and walked the last twenty meters to the group of people standing with Wicksen. They seemed to be huddled around him like a football team getting instructions from their quarterback.

Flicking to the suit-to-suit frequency, Doug heard the physicist saying,’… you’ll be able to finish this series of runs while I’m putting the focusing magnets together.”

“Here’s Doug now,” said one of the suited figures, pointing with a gloved hand.

Wicksen turned and stepped toward Doug. “You’re a few minutes early.”

“I made better time in the tractor than I expected,” Doug said.

“That’s all right.” The diminutive physicist clasped the sleeve of Doug’s cermet suit. “Come along here, I want to show you what’s involved in this problem.”

He walked Doug the length of the mass driver, explaining in minute detail every step that had to be accomplished in converting the accelerator to an anti-missile gun. Doug’s head was soon whirling with numbers and terms such as ‘beam collimator’ and ‘tesla limits’.

Doug found his attention wandering to the solid bulk of the mass driver itself. It was a triumph of nanotechnology, the most intricate piece of machinery yet constructed by nanomachines. The project had floundered through several false starts, but once Kris Cardenas had come to Moonbase and sunk her teeth into it, the mass driver had slowly taken shape out here on the crater floor: cryogenic aluminum magnets and all.

“Are you sufficiently confused?”

Wicksen’s question snapped Doug’s attention back to the here and now.

“What did you say?”

He could sense Wicksen smiling gently. “I’ve snowed you with a pile of details. Does any of it make sense to you?”

“Not much,” Doug admitted. “What I really need to know is, can you do it?”

“Turn the accelerator into an anti-missile weapon?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“You can?”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“How soon?” Doug asked.

Wicksen hesitated a moment, then answered, “Two days.”

“Two days? That’s all?”

“Two lunar days,” Wicksen said.

“Oh. You mean two months, then,” Doug said, crestfallen.

“We might get lucky and have everything work the first time we try it. That could shave a week or so.”

Two months, Doug thought. Will that be soon enough, or will Faure strike before then?

“We’ll need a target satellite to test it against,” Wicksen added. “I was thinking that Kadar’s survey bird would make a good test target. He’s got all the data from it that he needs.”

Doug heard a strange guttural sound in his earphones. Wicksen was chuckling at the thought of zapping Kadar’s satellite.

He thanked the physicist and climbed back onto the tractor, wondering if there was some way to delay the attack that Faure was undoubtedly planning. Maybe Mom can get the World Court to hear our case before November. Or negotiate with Faure and try to settle this without another military confrontation.

His mind was filled with possibilities, alternatives, strategies as he steered the tractor back across the twenty-kilometer distance to Moonbase’s main airlock.

He had only gone a few kilometers, though, when his suit’s emergency alarm shrilled in his earphones.

“What…?”

Doug glanced down at the telltales on his wrist display. Air supply below safety minimum! Impossible, he told himself. I checked the suit out when I put it on. The air tank was full.

Must be a malfunction in the electrical circuitry, he told himself. Still, he jammed the tractor’s throttle to its highest pitch. The ponderous machine lurched forward. There was no speedometer on the control panel; the tractor’s electrical motors could not move the machine more than thirty klicks per hour, Doug knew.

Half an hour to the base, Doug thought. Better top off the backpack.

With his left hand on the T-stick, Doug fumbled for the tractor’s oxygen hose, nested between the two front seats. He located it by feel and pulled it out of its housing. But when he tried to unscrew the cap of his backpack’s emergency fill-up, it would not move.

How could it be frozen? Doug wondered, his mind racing. He could not remember if he’d tested it when he’d checked out the suit. I should have, he told himself. But he doubted that he did. Too goddamned complacent. Taking shortcuts in the checkout routine.

“Air level approaching redline for life support,” the suit’s automatic emergency system warned. “Replenish air supply or change to another suit.”

Good advice, Doug grumbled silently, out here at least fifteen klicks from the airlock.

I can’t be running out of air, he insisted to himself. But he coughed.

Desperately, he flicked to the base frequency and called, “This is Stavenger. I’m almost out of air! Need help!”

“Got your beacon, Doug,” said the technician from the control center. “Hang on, we’ll send a team out for you.”

Won’t do any good, he knew. They’ll be riding tractors, too. They can’t get to me any faster than I can get to them.