Ben Bova - Moonwar

“But he killed himself,” Debbie Paine said. “It wasn’t our fault.”

“Okay,” said Edith. “Now imagine what happens if you cook a hundred Peacekeeper troops. Picture what the media Earthside will do with that.”

Silence descended on the office again, gloomier and deeper than before.

“We’ve been working for weeks now to present Moonbase’s side of this story to the media, the weak little guys being bullied by the big, bad U.N. and Peacekeepers,” Edith said. “And it’s starting to work. Public relations polls in the States and Europe show that the people are rooting for us and against the U.N.”

“With that and five bucks I can buy a cup of coffee,” Falcone grumbled.

“Your claim of independence is coming up before the World Court in a few months,” Edith went on. “You need to have the best possible public image.”

“And that means we can’t kill the soldiers attacking us?” Anson demanded.

“That’s exactly what it means,” said Edith heatedly. “Right now a lot of people Earthside are on your side. The underdog always get sympathy. But you start sending body bags back to Earth and your support will evaporate damned quick.”

“So we could win the battle and lose the war,” Doug said.

Nodding, Edith answered, “That’s what it comes down to. Kill Peacekeeper troops and you’ll just convince everybody Earthside that Faure is right. They’ll come at you with still more troops. Or missiles, or whatever it takes to wipe you out.”

“So we can’t kill the Peacekeepers,” Falcone muttered, unbelievingly.

“Then how do we keep them from taking over?” Anson wondered aloud.

Doug echoed her. “How can we win the battle without killing any of the enemy?”

“Damned good question,” Clemens murmured.

For long moments no one said a word. Finally Doug turned to Gordette.

“Bam, how can you stop soldiers without killing them?”

They all turned to Gordette, still sitting by the door. Doug saw the distrust, the outright repugnance on their faces; he wondered what Gordette saw, what he felt.

Gordette looked them over with a gaze that swept the small, crowded office. Then, turning to face Doug squarely, he said, “You’ll have to incapacitate them.”

“How?”

Gordette cocked his head to one side, thinking. “They’ll all be in spacesuits. They’ll be linked by their suit radios. Can you jam their communications?”

Doug said, “We ought to be able to do that.”

“If they can’t talk back and forth they’ll lose their cohesiveness. Instead of a battalion they’ll be a handful of individuals.”

“Like ants!” Paine exclaimed. “One ant by itself is pretty useless. But a whole nest of them can mount an invasion of another nest.”

“Cut off their communications,” Doug repeated.

“Not enough,” said Falcone. “You’ll still have few hundred soldiers armed with guns and whatnot. They can be directed by hand signals, for chrissakes.”

“Not if they are blind,” rumbled Zimmerman.

“What?”

“I have been stupid,” Zimmerman said, shaking his jowly head. “Invisible I cannot make you… but I can make them blind!”

“Blind them? How?”

“Simple,” said the professor. “Let them come into our tunnels. We fill the air with nanomachines that cling to their visors and darken them so they cannot see.”

Doug immediately asked, “Can the bugs cling to their suits, too? Jam up their joints, immobilize them?”

“Like the dust outside!” Anson said.

“Yah! Better than dust,” Zimmerman replied. “My nanos will turn them into statues!”

“But only once they’re inside the base, in the corridors,” Clemens said.

“Yah. The nanos must have air to float in.”

“So we can make them deaf, dumb and blind,” Falcone said.

“And immobile,” Cardenas added.

“Freeze ’em in their tracks,” said Anson.

“Can you produce these nanos in a week?” Doug asked.

For the first time since Doug had known the old man, Zimmerman’s fleshy face looked uncertain. “One week? Not possible! But I will try.”

Doug nodded, but he though that it was awfully risky to allow the Peacekeepers into the base in the hopes that Zimmerman’s nanobugs could neutralize them. Assuming Zimmerman could make the bugs and they worked as advertised. Even then, everything depended on Wix’s beam gun stopping the incoming nuke. And Falcone’s foamgel stopping the Peacekeepers’ heavy equipment up at Wodjohowitcz Pass.

One untested idea on top of another, Doug realized. And if any of the Peacekeepers gets killed, we’ve lost everything.

Colonel Giap tried to suppress the distaste he felt for the Yamagata volunteer.

The man was Japanese, short and wiry, quite young. He had an air of superiority about him, an aura of other-worldliness, as if all of Giap’s responsibilities and worries did not matter at all.

The slow build-up of three hundred Peacekeeper troops -and these seven special volunteers—had strained Nippon One’s facilities to the breaking point. Never a large or comfortable base, its cramped little compartments were now jammed with the extra personnel. Four people were sleeping in cubicles designed for one. Peacekeeper troops even slept in the tunnels on thin foam mattresses or tatami mats.

Giap’s ‘office’ was a storage bin that had been half-emptied by the enormous drain on the base’s logistics. We had better move on Moonbase within the week, the colonel told himself. There will be no food left for us in eight days.

He looked directly into the dark brown eyes of the Yamagata volunteer and saw a placidity, an almost amused sense of superiority. This man is actually looking forward to his death, Giap realized. Then he wondered how much of his bravery of fanaticism came from narcotics. The Sacred Seven, as the suicide volunteers called themselves, lived by themselves, crammed into a single cubicle; they had brought their own food and drink. And so-called medicines.

Three Japanese, three Americans, and an Iranian made up the Sacred Seven. One of the Americans was a woman. All of them were either serenely other-worldly, as their leader was, or brittle and wired, with eyes that glittered with the burning intensity of fanaticism. All of them wore a shoulder patch that showed a fist clutching a bolt of lightning.

There was no space for a desk in the compartment. The two men sat on the floor, cross-legged, facing one another barely centimeters apart, Giap in his light blue uniform, the Japanese volunteer in a gym suit—with the shoulder patch. Above them rose stacks of half-empty shelving. Giap’s personal computer, hardly bigger than his fist, lay on the bare stone floor at his side.

“My orders,” Giap was saying, “are to capture Moonbase intact.”

“If possible,” the volunteer added.

Giap seethed inwardly at the man’s smug attitude. He knows what my orders are. Someone has been leaking the information to him.

“It will not only be possible,” Giap hissed, “but inevitable.”

“Assuming all goes according to your plan.”

“My plan is very thorough.”

“Of course,” said the volunteer airily. “However, should the assault fail, for any reason, my team will destroy Moonbase for you.”

“And destroy yourselves in the doing of it.”

“That is nothing. To give our lives in the service of God is the greatest good.”

Giap wondered whose god this man thought he was serving. These zealots all professed loyalty to the New Morality even though their individual religions must obviously be different from one another.

“I want you to understand that you are not to make any move whatsoever unless and until I order it,” Giap said.