Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Maybe,” Anson said. He could barely make out the word.

“Okay, thanks. We’re heading that way. Call you when we get there.”

“Hell you will. You’ll be over the horizon even for the antennas up on Yeager.”

They were passing the crater’s central peaks, Doug saw, where the astronomical center was located. Jinny’s transmission was already starting to break up.

“Okay, then,” he said into his helmet mike. “I’ll call you when we’re coming back.”

“I’m sending a security team out after you,” Anson said, a faint whisper being drowned in crackles and hisses.

“No!” he snapped. “No need for that.”

“Can’t hear you, boss,” Anson said through the growing interference. “You’re breaking up too much.”

Doug clicked from the long-range frequency to the suit-to-suit freak. “She’s pretty smart, Jinny is,” he said to Edith. “Knows how to use the systems.”

“I feel better knowing there’s a security team backing us up.”

“By three hours or so,” Doug said.

“What makes you think she waited until now to send them out?”

Doug felt his brows rise. “You’re pretty smart yourself, you know.”

Edith replied, “You’re just figuring that out?”

She could see Gordette’s tractor trail easily now that there were no other cleat marks chewing up the regolith. No one’s been out here in a long time, she thought.

“Tempo six was one of the original shelters my father built,” Doug explained. “Before they decided where the permanent base would be sited they dug shelters into a dozen spots on the crater floor and outside the ringwall on Mare Nubium.”

“Do you think Gordette has really stopped there?” Edith asked.

She waited for several moments before Doug replied, “I don’t know. I can’t understand why he headed this far away from the base. There aren’t any easy passes over the ringwall up in this region. If he wanted to get out of Alphonsus, Wodjo Pass around Yeager would be the easiest way.”

“Maybe he’s going to meet somebody or get picked up, something like that,” Edith said.

“Maybe.”

She went on, “That’d mean he’ll have other people with him, wouldn’t it?”

“If they’ve been waiting for him at the tempo, yeah, maybe.”

“Then we’re steering ourselves right into a trap, Doug. He’s tried to murder you twice. You’re giving him another shot at it.”

A longer silence this time. Edith stared at Doug’s space-suited figure, trying to peer through it to see the man inside. All she saw was the cermet suit, like armor, and the strange metal pistons of the muscle amplifiers on the backs of his gloves, like a skeleton’s hands, but made of metal rather than bone.

“Jinny didn’t say there are any other vehicles parked at the tempo,” he said at last. “I don’t think anybody else is there.”

Then why did he stop there?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” he said.

“Why don’t you wait for the security team to catch up with us?” Edith urged.

“I can’t let him get away. He can tell the Peacekeepers exactly how to knock out our electrical power and take over the base.”

“You don’t think they know that already?”

“Bam knows what we’ve been doing, what we’ve been thinking. I can’t let him tell it all to the Peacekeepers.”

“Doug, you’re full of bullshit,” she said, feeling anger rising in her. “You’re acting like some macho gunslinger who’s got to face down the bad guy all by himself.”

“It’s not that, Edith.”

“The hell it isn’t. You’re going to get yourself killed, and me too.”

“No! I—” Doug realized there was some truth in Edith’s accusation. He turned to look at her and saw only the reflection of his own blank visor in the dim Earthlight.

“At least wait for the security team,” she repeated.

“Edith… I trusted him. I thought I saw a man I could rely on. I don’t why he tried to kill me—”

“Because he’s an agent from the U.N.,” Edith snapped. “Or Yamagata, more likely.”

“Or maybe the nanoluddites,” Doug heard himself agree. “I never thought of that before, but maybe they were able to infiltrate Moonbase, after all.”

“Then why confront him?”

Yes, why? Doug asked himself. The man’s a murderer, a hired assassin, maybe a nanoluddite fanatic. So what if he can tell the Peacekeepers about the pitiful defenses we’re trying to set up? Big deal. They’re going to walk in here and take over the base no matter what you do.

Then he thought of Tamara and how he helplessly watched Killifer rape and kill her. Murderer! his conscience shrieked. You let him murder her while you stood by as impotent as a baby. He saw Killifer’s smug, hateful face, the glint in his eyes, the snarl of his voice. I’ll find him, Doug told himself. I’ll track him down wherever he is and kill him. I’ll rip his guts out. I’ll tear him apart.

But Killifer’s a half-million kilometers away, on a world you’ll never return to. Gordette’s within reach; you’ll be face-to-face with him soon. Are you going to kill Bam? Are you going to make him pay for Killifer? Why not? What difference does it make? They’re all killers, all murderers. It’s time to start paying them back. Time to even the score.

Yet another voice in his head spoke: I liked Bam. We could have become good friends, in time. He seemed so steady, so focused, like a big brother…

And then Doug remembered. “Greg tried to kill me, too.”

“What?” Edith asked.

“Maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

“What’re you talking about, Doug?”

“My older brother, Greg—half-brother, really—he went berserk and tried to wipe out the whole base. He wanted to kill me, just like Bam does.”

“What happened to him?”

“I killed him,” Doug said, the memories choking his voice. “I didn’t want to, but there was no other way…”

It was Edith’s turn to fall silent. Doug steered the tractor automatically, following the bright cleat marks in the eons-darkened regolith, remembering, remembering.

“So you want to confront Gordette to bring your brother back, is that it?” she asked at last.

Doug shook his head inside his helmet. “No, I don’t think so.” Then he had to admit, “I don’t really know, Edith. It’s just something I’ve got to do.”

Yet he could not erase the sight of Killifer’s leering, twisted face.

Georges Faure found the three-second lag in communications with the Moon especially aggravating. How can one conduct a proper conversation when there is such a wait between words?

“One week,” the Peacekeeper colonel said at last, in reply to Faure’s question. “Ten days, at the outside.”

“Why so long, Colonel Giap?” Faure inquired. “Why not tomorrow?”

And now we wait again, the secretary-general fumed, staring at the colonel’s image on his desktop screen.

Colonel Giap’s face was a study in oriental patience: calm, expressionless; his hooded eyes showed no emotion whatsoever.

“You have your full complement of troops,” Faure blurted, not waiting for the colonel’s reply. “All the weapons have been delivered, have they not?”

Giap might have been a statue of teak, for all the response he showed. Faure fidgeted in his swivel chair, fighting the urge to pick up one of the mementos adorning his desk and fling it into the phone screen.

“The battalion is now at full strength, quite so,” the colonel said at last, “and all our logistics are in place. Also, the special force that Yamagata Industries organized has arrived.”

“Then why do you wait? Strike! Strike now !”