Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Stay away from me!”

“Why did you try to kill me, Bam?”

Gordette’s eyes showed white all around the irises. “I cut your fuckin’ throat!”

Doug sighed. “The nanomachines inside me. They closed the wound and kept me from bleeding to death.”

“That’s not possible!”

“Of course it is. There’s nothing supernatural here, Bam. No magic. Just those little nanobugs.”

With the spacesuit on, it was impossible to see Gordette’s chest rising and falling. But his mouth hung open, panting.

“Why’d you want to kill me, Bam? What did I do to you that you wanted to murder me?”

For several heartbeats Gordette said nothing, did not move. Then he sagged down onto the lower bunk.

“It wasn’t you,” he said, sinking his head into his hands. “Had nothing to do with you.”

“It was me you tried to kill.”

“You or me, man. Life or death. I had to do it. Had to. One of us had to go. I should’ve slit my own throat; been better that way.”

“Why?” Doug asked again. “Why did you have to do it?”

“I’m a soldier. I follow orders. Or else.”

“You were sent here to kill me?”

Gordette looked up at Doug with reddened eyes. “You know that little shit Faure’s been planning this for years.”

“You work for the U.N.? The Peacekeepers?”

“Naw. I get paid by Washington. Special security forces. They pulled me out of the army. Trained me to be an assassin.”

“You’ve killed other people?”

His face looked awful. That’s my profession, man. That’s what they trained me to do. Either that or spend my life in jail.”

“Why jail?”

He laughed bitterly. “Why else? I killed somebody. It was an accident but I did it and the only way to stay out of jail was to go into the army. They always held that over me; do what they want or they send me to jail for life. No parole. No sweetheart minimum-security farm, either. Jail. In with the perverts and the maniacs.”

Doug unfastened his helmet, pulled it off over his head, then walked the length of the narrow shelter to sit on the bunk opposite Gordette. He placed the helmet on the bedsheet beside him.

“Okay, Bam. That’s all over now. You can live here. You can be free of them.”

The black man stared into Doug’s eyes. “Live at Moonbase?”

That’s right.”

“I tried to kill you and you’re offering me asylum?”

That’s what Moonbase is all about, Bam. A place to build a new life.”

Gordette said nothing, but his expression showed doubt, suspicion, scorn.

“I’m a fugitive, too,” Doug said. “On Earth I’d be a marked man waiting for some nanoluddite fanatic to assassinate me. On the Moon I can live—”

“Until some hired assassin knocks you off.”

Doug reached out his gloved hand. “Join us, Bam.”

T don’t deserve to join you,” Gordette said, recoiling. “I’m a murderer! A killer!”

“You were a murderer. Now you have the chance to change, to start a new life.”

“Doing what?”

Patiently, Doug said, “Doing whatever you do best. It’s up to you.”

“I killed my own mother!” he screamed, leaping to his feet. “I killed her!”

Doug looked up at him and saw fear, guilt, and the depths of hell in Gordette’s red-rimmed eyes.

Gordette bent over him and yanked Doug to his feet so hard that Doug’s helmet rolled off the bunk and bounced on the concrete floor.

“I killed my mother!” he roared into Doug’s face. “Don’t talk to me about starting a new life.”

He pushed Doug down onto the bunk again and went for his own helmet. Doug watched him put it on, seal the neck ring. Then Gordette started to pull on his gloves.

“Where are you going?” Doug asked.

“Out there. Anyplace. I’ll keep going until I run out of air. That’ll put an end to it.”

Doug got up from the bunk. “Bam, you can’t do that! I can’t let you do it.”

Staring grimly at him through his open helmet, Gordette muttered, “How you gonna stop me, man?”

Doug walked toward him. “Don’t kill yourself, for God’s sake. You can start a whole new life here.”

“Yeah? For how long? In a week or so the Peacekeepers are gonna come marching in here and I’ll be on my way back Earthside, heading for jail ’cause I didn’t nail you.”

“We can keep the Peacekeepers out,” Doug said, feeling almost desperate. “We can stay free.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Don’t kill yourself, Bam!”

Gordette looked at him with eyes suddenly grown calm and cold. “One of us has to die, Doug. I’d rather it be me. Even if I killed you, they’d just set me up for some other piece of shit. Let me end it, man. Let me put an end to the whole fucking mess.”

“No!” Doug snapped, and grabbed for Gordette.

Almost by reflex, Gordette backhanded Doug across the jaw, knocking him off balance, staggering in his spacesuit halfway down the length of the shelter.

Gordette slammed his visor down and turned for the airlock hatch. Doug charged after him. Gordette spun to face him, snapped Doug’s head back with a straight left, then levelled him with a right. Doug’s eyesight blurred as his head hit the concrete flooring, then everything went black.

Edith woke up, stiff and groaning, in the tractor’s seat. She went to rub her eyes but her hands bumped the helmet visor. Pulling herself up to a sitting position, she saw that the tractor was stopped in front of the tempo and Doug was gone.

He must be inside with Gordette, she thought, suddenly alarmed. Quickly she searched around her seat for something that might be useful as a weapon. If there was a tool kit on the tractor, it wasn’t in sight.

Empty-handed, she started to climb down to the ground. As she put one boot on the sandy regolith she saw a spacesuited figure march determinedly past her, past the other parked tractor, and away from the tempo. It wasn’t Doug’s suit, she knew.

Ignoring the distress signals her bladder was sending, Edith went to the open airlock hatch. Doug must be inside, she thought. It took an eternally long moment for her to find the instructions printed on the inner wall of the airlock, alongside the control keypad. Edith had to turn on her helmet light to read them.

It was simple enough. She slid the hatch shut and activated the pump. When the light turned green she opened the inner hatch and stepped into the shelter.

Doug was on the floor, his helmet off, pushing himself up onto his elbows.

“He wants to kill himself,” Doug said to her. She barely heard him through her sealed helmet.

Sliding her visor up, she knelt beside Doug. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“He wants to kill himself,” Doug repeated.

“Let him,” she snapped. “Better him than you.”

Slowly, Doug pushed himself to a sitting position, shook his head a few times, then started to clamber to his feet. “Where’d my helmet get to?” he mumbled.

“You’re not going out there after him!”

He looked at her. “I can’t let him die out there, Edith. He… I just can’t.”

I’ll go with you, then.”

“You stay here,” Doug said firmly, walking back to pick his helmet off the floor. “You’re a lot safer here inside the shelter.”

“And you’re going out to catch him?”

“To find him. To help him—if he’ll let me.”

“Not without me!”

“Yes, without you. You stay here. If I’m not back in an hour, get into the tractor and go back to Moonbase.”

Edith started to argue, but one look into Doug’s determined blue-gray eyes stopped her. It would be pointless, she knew.

So she waited ten minutes, by the watch on her spacesuit wrist, after Doug left the shelter. Then she went to the airlock and started after him in the tractor.