Ben Bova - Moonwar

Who to call? Then she remembered that Bam Gordette had offered to watch Doug. The man acted like a bodyguard anyway, Edith told herself. She phoned him, but there was no answer at his quarters.

It’s past two in the morning, she saw, glancing at the digital clock set next to the computer screen. He couldn’t be still waiting out in the corridor, could he?

She pushed the door open, and Gordette was sitting on the floor, his back against the opposite wall, his eyes wide open and focused squarely on her.

“You’ve been out here all night?” Edith asked, incredulous.

Getting to his feet, Gordette nodded. “I can sleep anyplace,” he said, by way of explanation.

Swiftly, almost whispering, Edith told him that she had to get to the studio and do a live broadcast.

Gordette nodded solemnly. I’ll take care of Doug.”

“Wonderful,” said Edith, suppressing an urge to kiss him on the cheek. Gordette did not seem like the kind of man to play the usual media kissy-face ritual.

Gordette watched her hurry down the corridor. Silently he slid the door shut and walked to the partition that separated the two sections of Doug Stavenger’s quarters.

Doug lay on his back, his eyelids flickering, his fists clenched.

Not while he’s asleep, Gordette told himself, fingering the obsidian blade in his coverall pocket. That wouldn’t be right. You don’t slaughter a sleeping victim.

The blade had drunk many victims’ blood, centuries ago. Gordette had found it in a crumbling Mayan temple deep in the jungle during the Yucatan uprising. A ceremonial killing knife, the anthropologist attached to his unit had told him. Used for slicing open the chest and taking out the still-beating heart.

The anthropologist had been assigned to the army to help win the hearts and minds of the rebellious Yucatan villagers. Gordette had been a sniper then, sighting his victims in his telescopic sights and firing virus-soaked flechettes into their unsuspecting flesh. It felt like a mosquito bite, and the victim died of fever within two days. When all went well, the victim infected his entire village before he died.

The anthropologist never won the villagers’ hearts and minds. He was killed in a vicious ambush. By the time Gordette and the survivors among his unit were flown out of the jungle, there were almost no villagers left alive.

Gordette sat calmly next to Doug’s bunk and willed him to awake. It’s time, he said silently to his victim. Death has waited long enough.

Doug opened his eyes. He blinked once, twice.

“Bam,” he said.

Gordette nodded solemnly. “Ms Elgin had to go to the studio to do a live broadcast.”

“Oh.” Doug made a weak grin. “And you’re babysitting me.”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

Without lifting his head from the pillow, Doug asked, “So how’s it going?”

“How’s what going?”

“Your investigation. The sabotage of my suit.”

“Oh. That.” Gordette took the obsidian blade from his pocket. Its curved side fit into the palm of his hand perfectly, as if it had been made all those centuries ago expressly for him.

“Well?” Doug asked.

That’s not important now,” said Gordette.

“What do you mean, not important?”

“You’re defeated, Doug. You know that, don’t you?”

Doug’s eyes had no fire in them, no zest. He merely stared at Gordette blankly.

“Moonbase is lost. You can’t save it. You couldn’t even help Ms Bonai. You watched her being raped and murdered and couldn’t do a thing about it.”

Doug opened his mouth but no words came out. He nodded dumbly.

“Everything you want has been taken away from you,” Gordette said, speaking slowly, sonorously, like a priest at a sacrificial altar. “Even your life.”

So swiftly that Doug could not even raise his arms, Gordette clamped his left hand over Doug’s mouth and nose, yanking his chin up, and with his right hand sliced the blade deeply across Doug’s throat, making certain to sever the carotid arteries behind each ear.

Blood spurted high up the wall, gushed over Gordette’s green coveralls and into his face, making him blink and wince. Doug’s body shivered and twitched, then went still.

His hands soaked in Doug’s blood, Gordette stalked out of the room and headed down the empty corridors of Moonbase, shadowy in their nighttime lighting, toward the garage and the main airlock.

For the first time since he’d been a boy, there were tears in his eyes.

“The last time I was on the Moon ended unpleasantly,” said Keiji Inoguchi.

“So?” replied Zimmerman, coolly.

Inoguchi was a full head taller than Zimmerman, and gracefully slim. He seemed to glide rather than walk, totally unperturbed by the low lunar gravity.

“I worked at Nippon One eight years ago,” he told Zimmerman, “but I was sent back to Japan after being injured in an accident. Several of my ribs were broken.”

Zimmerman nodded absently. Of the three U.N. inspectors sent up on the evacuation flight, Inoguchi seemed to be the only one who knew anything about nanotechnology. He claimed to be a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Kyoto, but to Zimmerman he seemed too young for a full professorship—unless he was actually working in a new field, uncluttered by tenured old men, a field such as nanotechnology.

For four days, since the evacuation flight had touched down at Moonbase, Inoguchi and the two other U.N. inspectors had been making their methodical way through the nanolabs. Kris Cardenas had personally conducted their inspection tour, showing them everything—except Zimmerman’s lab.

Zimmerman stayed to himself behind locked doors, unwilling to allow U.N. spionin to poke through his work. From what Cardenas told him, Inoguchi was bright, inquisitive, polite and knowledgeable. The other two seemed to be out-and-out intelligence agents, ham-fisted and hard-eyed, looking for nanotech ‘weapons’ without understanding what they might be.

The inevitable happened late in the evening of their fourth day at Moonbase. Cardenas phoned Zimmerman, still barricaded in his lab, and warned him that Inoguchi was heading his way. Alone.

Zimmerman heard a polite tap at his door almost before he clicked off the phone. Muttering to himself, he went to the door, determined to tell the interfering Japanese upstart that he had no business bothering the great Professor Zimmerman and he should go away and stay away.

Inoguchi bowed deeply as soon as Zimmerman slid the door open. “I am Keiji Inoguchi of the University of Kyoto,” he said, staring at his shoes, not daring to look at Zimmerman. “I know it’s an imposition, but I am required to ask you to allow me to inspect your laboratory.”

Grudgingly, Zimmerman waved the younger man into his lab.

“It is an honor beyond my greatest expectations to actually meet you,” Inoguchi said. His English was American-accented, and Zimmerman thought the man sounded sincere enough even though he kept his face almost totally expressionless and still avoided making eye contact.

“Professor Cardenas tells me you appear quite knowledgeable,” Zimmerman said gruffly. “Are you engaged in nano-technology research at Kyoto?”

Inoguchi hesitated the merest fraction of a second, then replied, “As you know, Professor, nanotechnology research is forbidden by law.”

“Yah. Of course.”

They stood just inside the doorway, Zimmerman blocking his visitor’s further access into the lab, and spoke of many things, from the quality of students to the obtuseness of deans, without again mentioning nanotechnology. Despite their verbal sparring, or perhaps because of it, Zimmerman found that he enjoyed the younger man’s company.