Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Right.” Killifer nodded.

“Remember, she doesn’t like to see us. Stay in the kitchen until they go up to the master bedroom.”

“What about the butler?”

“He’ll go to bed after they do,” said the chief.

“Okay. Good.”

Again the chief hesitated. Killifer could feel his pulse throbbing in his ears as he sat facing the man across the pathetic little metal desk.

At last the chief said, “All right. Go downstairs and get into your uniform.”

Killifer got up from his chair slowly, turned and went to the office door.

“And thanks for filling in,” the chief said. Reluctantly.

“Nothing to it,” Killifer replied over his shoulder. He pulled the door open, then added, “I can use the extra plastic.”

The bastard suspects something, Killifer said to himself as he stepped out into the hallway. Not enough to turn me down, but this doesn’t sit right with him.

Then he grinned as he clattered down the metal spiral staircase. What the hell! Let him worry all he wants to. I’m in the house for two to three nights and she’s home with her creaky old man. Once the butler goes to bed I’ll scope out the house and figure out the best way to get to her and then get away. Shit, they’ll be paying me to do it. Overtime.

Keiji Inoguchi was surprised by Professor Zimmerman’s call. He hurried to the nanolab, eager to accept Zimmerman’s invitation before the crusty old man changed his mind.

“I am most honored that you have asked me to visit your laboratory once again,” he said, after he had bowed to the professor.

Zimmerman dipped his chin in acknowledgement. “I am asking for more than a visit, my friend. I need your help.”

Inoguchi sucked in his breath. “My help? In what way can I help you?”

Zimmerman led the Japanese scientist back into the bowels of his lab. They walked past rows of computer screens and gray, bulky cryogenic tanks beaded with moisture, Zimmerman in his usual gray suit, grossly overweight, dishevelled, looking distracted and unhappy; Inoguchi in an immaculate white turtleneck shirt and sharply-creased slacks, lean and eager, his eyes snapping up every piece of equipment as if they were cameras.

Hands jammed in his trouser pockets, Zimmerman said heavily, “I am relegated to assisting my former student, Professor Cardenas.”

“Yes?”

“She has asked me to prepare nanomachines capable of repairing wounds inflicted by gunshot or shrapnel—flying metal from explosions.”

“And you want me to assist you in this?” Inoguchi asked.

“I realize you represent the United Nations and are not to take part in the fighting,” Zimmerman said. “But for medical work perhaps you are allowed to use your skills, yah? For humanitarian reasons.”

“Of course,” Inoguchi said without an instant’s hesitation. “Humanitarian purposes come before politics and other considerations.”

Zimmerman stopped in front of a lab bench that supported a massive metal sphere connected to a desktop computer by hair-thin fiber optic cables.

“My staff,” Zimmerman gestured to the sphere.

Inoguchi understood immediately. “Your processors.”

“Yah,” said Zimmerman, lowering his bulk onto a spindly-looking stool. “Now we must teach them to build other nanos that will seal wounds quick, before the patient bleeds to death.”

“Can you do this?”

The old man nodded slowly. “Yah. I have already done it once. Now I must do it again—in a day or so.”

Inoguchi grinned at the professor. “We have much work to accomplish, then.”

Colonel Giap did not relish being under Faure’s direct supervision. The man is a politician, what doeshe know of military tactics? Giap asked himself. I should report to General Uhlenbeck, through the normal chain of command. Instead I must bear with this politician questioning every breath I draw.

He tried to reassure himself with Clausewitz’s dictum that war is merely an extension of politics. It was scant consolation. Yes, politicians such as Ho Chi Minh successfully directed the liberation of Vietnam from the imperialists, he knew. But that was generations ago, and besides, Ho and his comrades had military experience of their own. Faure had probably never even fired a pistol at a target range.

“Was it wise to incapacitate their satellite?” the U.N. secretary-general was asking.

Giap, sitting on the bare floor of his closet-turned-office, replied to the image on his laptop’s screen with all the patience he could muster, “It was necessary. Their satellite could observe our time of departure and our route of march. That would be giving the enemy more information than we want them to have.”

He waited the three seconds, watching Faure twiddle his moustache. Then the secretary-general replied, “But by disabling their satellite, you have told them that you are ready to march.”

“Yes. What of it? Don’t you think they have cameras atop their ringwall mountains looking for us to appear over their horizon?”

Faure’s face creased deeply once he heard Giap’s comment. “Then of what good was it to cripple their satellite? I do not understand your reasoning.”

They went around the subject twice more, Giap resolute and implacable, Faure irritable and demanding.

At last Giap said, “Sir, you may consider my action premature or even mistaken, but it has been done and argument will not undo it.”

Faure flushed angrily once he heard the colonel’s words.

Before he could say anything, Giap added, “If you wish to remove me from command, I understand entirely.”

The secretary-general’s eyes widened momentarily, then he quickly asserted his self-control. Forcing a smile that narrowed his eyes to slits, Faure made a soothing gesture with both hands.

“No, no, of course not, colonel. I have every confidence in you.”

Of course you do, Giap said to himself, now that our jump-off for the attack is only hours away.

“What you’re looking at,” said Edith into her pin mike, “is almost certainly a nuclear-armed missile.”

The monitor screen in the little editing booth showed what Moonbase’s astronomical telescope was focused upon: the clutch of spacecraft hovering around the big space station at the L-1 libration point some fifty-eight thousand kilometers above the Moon’s surface. The picture, with Edith’s commentary, was being broadcast live over Global News Network.

“Despite international agreements that date all the way back to 1967 banning nuclear weapons in space, the United Nations has brought a nuclear-armed missile here to use against Moonbase. Although Moonbase’s residents…”

Doug watched Edith’s performance as he suited up for another surface excursion. It’s one thing to reveal to the world that Faure’s going to nuke our solar energy farms, he told himself, it’s something else to try to knock out the missile once they launch it against us.

Doug hitched a ride on one of the tractors carrying a team of construction workers out to the mass driver. It took the better part of half an hour to trundle the few kilometers in one of the electrically-driven tractors. Doug thought that once this war was over, one of his immediate priorities was going to be developing faster ground vehicles. This is asinine, creaking along at a top speed of thirty klicks per hour.

Then he realized that the Peacekeeper battalion was chugging along at pretty much the same low speed, and he didn’t feel so bad about it. Besides, he added silently, by the time this war is over there might not be a Moonbase and you just might be dead.

The Sun was up over the ringwall mountains, bathing the crater floor in harsh, brilliant light that cast long slanting shadows. It would remain daylight for another twelve days. The Peacekeepers remembered that the nanobugs Moonbase had used against them the first time were deactivated by solar ultraviolet.