Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Take ’em about two days to cover the distance?” Gordette asked.

“Just about,” Doug replied.

“Two Earth days,” Arisen said. “Forty-eight hours. Maybe a little less if they push it.”

Steepling his fingers almost as if in prayer, Gordette said, “Well, if they’re gonna knock out your satellite it’ll be just before they haul ass and start on their way here.”

“Why bother?”

“Standard operating procedure. No commander wants the enemy watching his route of march, if he can help it.”

Anson looked from Gordette to the wall screen and back again. “So if our bird goes off the air…”

“That means they’re starting on their way here,” Doug finished for her.

As if on cue, the wallscreen display broke into wild jagged streaks and then went blank.

The three of them rushed down to the control center, once they were certain that the reconnaissance satellite had actually been knocked out, and the dead wallscreen wasn’t merely a malfunction somewhere in the communications system.

“You want to launch another recce bird?” Anson asked as they dashed along the corridor, hurrying past startled people.

“Not much sense to that,” Doug said over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Gordette agreed. “Just be target practice for them.”

The control center was calm, with its usual air of controlled intensity, the quiet hum of consoles, the flickering of display screens in the dimly-lit chamber. Doug automatically glanced at the big wallscreen that displayed a schematic of the entire base. The usual scattering of red and yellow lights, but otherwise everything was operating normally.

Doug knew from hours of studying the ballistics that a nuclear-tipped missile could be launched from the L-1 station and reach Moonbase in less than an hour. Even faster if the Peacekeepers wanted to goose it, but Doug thought that they would want to take at least an hour so that they would have time to make pinpoint mid-course corrections. If his reasoning was correct, they would want the nuke to go off over the solar farms inside Alphonsus’s ringwall after the Peacekeeper assault force had arrived on the other side of the mountains, shielded from the nuke’s radiation pulse, and ready to cross Wodjohowitcz Pass as soon as the explosion had knocked out Moonbase’s main electrical power supply.

The radar view of L-1 showed the same cluster of spacecraft hovering around the space station that Doug had seen the last time he’d looked.

“Can we get a visual?” he asked Jinny. “Turn one of the astronomical’scopes on it?”

She nodded and walked off toward the technician who was monitoring the automated astronomical equipment sitting out by the central peak in the middle of Alphonsus.

Edith came tearing into the control center, breathless.

“Doug,” she said, puffing as she skidded to a stop next to him, “McGrath wants me to pipe the battle Earthside in real time!”

“Who’s McGrath?”

“The top boss! He owns Global News!”

Doug shifted mental gears as fast as he could; still, it took a few moments for him to realize what Edith was telling him.

“You’ll show what’s happening here when the Peacekeepers attack?”

“To the whole blazin’ world!” Edith said, exultant.

For the first time in what seemed like years, Doug felt a genuine smile curving his lips. “Faure’s not going to like that… not at all.”

Through her sitting room window, Joanna could see a soft twilight descending on the garden and the woods beyond it. The trees had been planted there to cover up the view of Savannah’s skyline and give the occupants of her house the feeling that they were truly out in the countryside rather than half a mile from the Interstate.

“Global’s going to broadcast the confrontation?” she asked Doug’s image, grinning at her from the Windowall screen above the fireplace. She could not bear to use the word battle or attack. She knew that Moonbase could not win a battle or survive an attack.

“Edan McGrath himself called Edith and asked her to do it,” Doug said after the three-second lag. “Real-time coverage; blow by blow.”

“I’ve already got a pocketful of senators demanding an investigation of the President’s handling of the Moonbase crisis,” Joanna mused. “Coverage of the confrontation will show the voting public how you’re being attacked by the U.N.’s Peacekeepers.”

“This has got to stay confidential,” Doug was saying, not waiting for her response. “We don’t want Faure to know about it beforehand.”

Joanna’s brows knit. “But, Doug, maybe if we leaked the information Faure would call off the attack.”

She watched her son’s image in the display screen. Once he heard her words he shook his head. “The Peacekeepers are already on their way here, Mom. No one’s going to call off the attack. Not now.”

Alarm tingled through Joanna like an electric current. “You’re certain?”

“In forty-eight hours or less we’ll be able to see them coming across Mare Nubium.”

Joanna suddenly felt as if someone had ripped out her insides. All these weeks she had known it would come to this, yet she realized now that she had desperately clung to an unconscious hope that it could all be averted.

“You’ll have to surrender to them, then,” she said dully.

Three seconds passed. Doug replied, “Maybe.”

“You can’t fight them! You don’t have any weapons.”

Again the agonizing wait. Doug said, “We don’t have any guns, that’s true enough. But we’re not beaten yet.”

“Doug, what are you thinking of? You can’t fight an armed battalion of trained Peacekeeper troops! You’ll get yourself killed! You’ll destroy Moonbase!”

He hadn’t waited for her response. He was saying, in a calm, carefully measured tone. “I can’t tell you what we’re planning, Mom, because even a tight laser link spreads enough for some snooper to eavesdrop. But we’re not going to obediently open our hatches and let the Peacekeepers take over Moonbase.”

“Doug, they’ll kill you!”

He smiled at her words. “If we surrender and have to return Earthside, I’m a dead man anyway.”

Joanna started to reply, then realized that her son was right. He had nothing to lose by fighting for Moonbase.

“Naw, I don’t mind working the night shift,” Killifer was saying. “At least I’ll be indoors, under the roof, if it rains.”

The security chief looked slightly uneasy. “I don’t usually put newcomers inside the house,” he said, “but Jonesie’s come down with some virus and we need a replacement for him right away.”

“It’s okay,” Killifer repeated, trying hard not to sound eager. I’ll take his shift.”

“You already did you regular shift; I don’t like asking you to double up.”

Killifer shrugged as carelessly as he could. “Four to midnight is easy. I wouldn’t go to sleep until after midnight, anyway.”

The chief swivelled back and forth slowly in his desk chair, making it squeak slightly, eying Killifer as if he weren’t certain he was doing the right thing. Killifer sat in front of the little desk, doing his best to appear nonchalant.

Then he got an inspiration. “I get overtime pay for this, don’t I?”

The chief visibly relaxed. “Yeah, sure. Time and a half.”

Killifer nodded as if the money was his reason for agreeing to the extra shift so readily. “Double shift isn’t so bad,” he said. “It’s only for a few days, right?”

“Yeah,” said the chief. “Until Jonesie comes back.”

“I’d just be spending my pay in some bar or someplace,” Killifer said. “This way I make plastic instead of spending it.”

“All right,” the chief said, still uneasy. “Go downstairs and change into a regular uniform. You work with Rodriguez. He monitors the screens, in here, and you sit in the kitchen until she and her husband go to bed. Then you patrol the rooms once every half-hour. Check all the windows and doors. Except the master bedroom; just make sure their door’s shut tight. Pay particular attention to the sliders that go out to the pool deck.”