Ben Bova - Moonwar

The volunteer nodded benignly.

“You and your people are under my command. You will obey my orders.”

“Yes, of course. But you will assign a squad of your troops to help us open up the old plasma exhaust vents.”

It was not a question, Giap knew.

“Yes, as soon as we have secured the main garage area,” he replied.

“Good. Then we will climb into the vents and make our way to the key Moonbase facilities: the water factory, the environmental control center, the control center, the farm, and the nanolabs. I myself and one of the Americans will knock out the nanolabs.”

“Only if I order it,” Giap insisted.

“Of course,” said the volunteer, with his maddening patient smile. “We will need your troopers’ assistance to climb up into the vents, won’t we?”

Giap nodded slowly. The volunteers will each be carrying a hundred kilos of high explosive. Not an easy burden to shoulder in a spacesuit, he knew.

Suicide bombers. The idea rankled him. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command did not trust him to capture Moonbase. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command was working for the New Morality in addition to the corporation. Whoever it was had added these insane volunteers to make certain that Moonbase would be eliminated if it couldn’t be taken intact.

The two women were taking lunch on the patio, shaded by a pair of ancient oaks and cooled by a breeze generated from hidden fans built into the brick walls that edged the meticulously cultivated garden of show flowers.

Joanna Brudnoy wore a light sundress of rose pink; Jill Meyers a tailored blouse and knee-length skirt. They had known each other since Jill had been a NASA astronaut working with Paul Stavenger in the very earliest lunar shelters that eventually became Moonbase; long enough so that neither felt the need to try to impress the other.

“We’re in summer recess now,” Jill Meyers said.

“And how long will that last?” Joanna asked, glancing out at the two men working in the garden. One of them actually was a gardener, the other a security guard in disguise.

Jill gave her a freckle-nosed grin. “The International Court of Justice has its own calendar, Jo. Officially, it’ll stay summer until November, when we reconvene.”

“And that’s when you’ll hear Moonbase’s petition?”

Justice Meyers nodded.

“Isn’t there any way of hearing it sooner?” Joanna pleaded. “A special session, perhaps?”

“I tried, Jo,” said Jill. “I went all-out, but I got outvoted, ten to five.”

Joanna toyed absently with the salad in front of her. “Is that how they’ll vote in November, do you think?”

“No, not at all. They just didn’t want to go to the trouble of a special session, that’s all.” Before Joanna could comment, Jill added, “And they’re waiting to see if Moonbase can last until November. If Moonbase survives that long, it’ll be a strong indication that they really can be independent.”

Joanna let go of her fork and it clinked against the glass dish. “Faure’s going to attack them again any day now.”

Nodding, Jill agreed, “That’s what I hear, too.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“I talked with the President. She’s not going to lift a finger.”

“We’ve been putting as much pressure on our Senators as we can,” Joanna said. “But Moonbase is a private operation, not part of the government.”

“There’s not much they can do about it,” Jill said.

“But there must be something!”

“Wait,” Jill said gently. “Wait and pray.”

Joanna eyed her. “You sound like a New Morality convert.”

Jill took it with a smile. “You don’t have to be a New Morality fanatic to believe in the power of prayer, Jo.”

Several miles away, in the riverfront headquarters of Masterson Corporation, Jack Killifer sat tensely in one of the tight little stalls that passed for offices among the corporation’s personnel department employees.

“I’m taking an awful chance, Mr Killifer,” said the young woman sitting at the desk. She spoke in a near whisper; the padded partitions that marked off her tiny space did not extend all the way to the ceiling. Soft music purred from the hand-sized radio on her desk next to her computer monitor screen.

“Like I’m not?” Killifer snapped, low enough to avoid eavesdroppers, he hoped. His appearance had changed: his gray pony tail was gone; now his hair was dark and clipped short, military style. He had also grown a bushy moustache that he had darkened to match his hair.

“I found your personnel record,” she said, looking worried, “but, lord’s sake, it’s almost nine years old!”

“I don’t want my old record,” he almost snarled. “I want you to generate a new one.”

“But that would be a total fabrication.”

“So what?”

“What if my supervisor checks on it? What could I say?”

Killifer had thought it all out beforehand. “I won’t be around long enough for anybody to notice. A week, maybe less.”

“It’s an awful risk,” she repeated. “For both of us.”

“No risk at all for you,” Killifer said, getting fed up with her fears. “If anybody complains you just tell ’em I showed you documentation.”

“Documentation?”

Killifer pulled a thin sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket. They were not forged, since they were written by a bona fide personnel executive from the Urban Corps’ headquarters in Atlanta. The information in them, however, was completely false.

“Here, scan these into your records before you piss yourself.”

“Sir!”

Killifer sighed. These damned New Morality uptights. Can’t even spit without them getting wired over it.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“Forgiveness is the Lord’s work,” she chanted. Then she turned to her keyboard and activated the scanner.

Good, Killifer thought as he handed her the falsified personnel documents. By the time I walk out of here I’ll be on the payroll as a member of the Masterson security staff. If this uptight little broad doesn’t faint on me first.

“Everything takes longer to do in these suits.” Wicksen’s voice was calm, not complaining, not making excuses; it was as if he were reading a report aloud.

Doug watched the men working at the end of the mass driver. While those who worked on the surface regularly had personalized their spacesuits one way or another, Wicksen’s physicists and technicians were in unmarked, anonymous suits straight off the standby racks.

At Doug’s insistence, a team of construction engineers was building a makeshift shelter for Wicksen’s people a few dozen meters from where they were busily putting together the equipment for the beam gun. Like one of the old tempos, the shelter was dug into the ground and would be covered with loose rubble from the regolith. Wicksen and his assistants could run the beam gun from there. Maybe the shelter would protect them from the radiation of a nuclear explosion, if the gun didn’t work.

“How’s it going?” Doug asked.

“Slowly,” said Wix. “But we’re making progress. We connected the beam collimator this morning. By tomorrow the aiming circuitry should be functional. Day after tomorrow, at the latest.”

“And then you’re ready to shoot?”

Wicksen’s flat, unruffled voice came through Doug’s helmet earphones, “Then we’ll be ready to see if anything really works. After testing the assembly we can power up the magnets and see if the circuitry can handle the load without shorting out.”

“But your calculations—”

“Mathematics doesn’t necessarily reflect the real world,” Wicksen said. “Physics is more than numbers in a computer.”