Ben Bova - Moonwar

It was not until that instant that Rashid realized he had put his future into the hands of ruthless men.

Only a few miles away, Joanna paced restlessly through the living room of her home.

“A new exercise regime?” Lev asked, stretched out on the big sofa across from the unused fireplace.

“How can you just sit there?” she blurted. “The Peacekeepers have already started their march to Alphonsus.”

Her husband made a wry face. “What can we do about it? The decisions are in Doug’s hands. Working ourselves into heart seizures won’t help.”

“If only we could get there…”

“And give Doug two more useless people to worry about?”

She whirled and rushed toward him. “Lev, call him. Talk to him. Make him understand that he’s got to surrender! He can’t fight the Peacekeepers! They’ll kill everyone in Moonbase.”

Slowly, like a weary old man, Lev swung his legs off the sofa and sat up. He grasped Joanna’s wrist and pulled her down onto the cushion beside him.

“Listen to me, dear one. Doug understands the situation as well as we do, or better. He knows what he can do to defend the base—”

“Against missiles and nuclear bombs? You saw the news broadcast!”

Lev put a finger on her lips, silencing her for the moment.

“It isn’t our decision to make,” he said softly. “If I called him, not only would it distract him from the thousands of vital things he must think about, but I would end up agreeing with him—victory or death!”

Joanna stared at him as if he had gone mad. “Victory or… what are you saying?”

“Doug believes in Moonbase with all his soul,” Lev replied. “To him, it is his world, his life. He won’t want to live in a world without Moonbase.”

“No,” Joanna said, feeling weak with shock. “That can’t be. Doug can come back here. He can live with us. I’ll protect him, guard him…” Her voice faded into silence.

Lev shook his head. “Not all the fanatics belong to the New Morality, my darling. In his own very rational way, your son is a fanatic, too. That’s what it takes to fight hopeless odds.”

Joanna sank back into the sofa, stunned with the realization that Lev understood Doug better than she did.

And in the security office in the servants’ wing of the house, Jack Killifer leaned over his partner’s shoulder, grinning at the camera display of the Brudnoys in their living room.

Rodriguez glanced up at Killifer. “You ought to be in the kitchen. That’s your post, not here.”

Killifer grinned at him. “The entertainment’s better in here.”

“There they are.”

Doug stared at the smart wall display in Jinny Anson’s office. Three columns of tracked vehicles had come up over the horizon and were moving majestically across the barren plain of Mare Nubium, churning up plumes of dust from the regolith. He realized that the dust had lain there undisturbed for billions of years. No, not really undisturbed, he reminded himself. Meteroids fell into the regolith constantly, adding to it, grinding it up, creating the dust that the cleated tracks of the Peacekeeper force were now violating.

The cameras atop Mount Yeager and two other peaks in the Alphonsus ringwall showed the approaching attackers clearly. Ahead of the middle column rode a smaller tractor, clean white except for a blue patch on its side.

“Can we get a close-up of that lead vehicle?” he asked quietly.

Anson worked her keyboard and the view zoomed in on the first tractor. The blue square was the U.N. emblem: a polar projection map of Earth on a sky-blue background, surrounded by a pair of olive branches.

Doug snorted with disdain. Olive branches. The symbol of peace. Leading three columns of soldiers and weaponry devoted to conquering Moonbase.

“We’d better get down to the control center,” Anson said. Her voice was hushed, strained, just as Doug’s.

“Right,” he said tightly.

Robert T. Wicksen got the news in his helmet earphones.

Automatically he looked across the crater floor toward Wodjohowitcz Pass. From where the mass driver stood, the pass appeared as little more than a dimple in the ring of rounded smooth mountains.

“What about the missile at L-1?” he asked, his voice shaking just slightly.

“Still sitting there,” came the voice from the control center.

Wicksen puffed out a relieved breath. “Keep me informed, please.”

“Will do.”

Clicking to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wicksen called out. “Listen up, people. The Peacekeeper troops are coming across Mare Nubium. The balloon will be going up very soon now.”

A dead silence greeted his warning. None of his exhausted team had a word to say.

Vince Falcone was swearing under his breath, but his mut-terings were loud enough for one of his technicians to ask, “Repeat, please. I didn’t get it.”

“You don’t want it,” Falcone said into his helmet microphone.

He and six picked assistants were trying to spread the smart foamgel across the narrowest portion of Wodjohowitcz Pass from storage canisters on the backs of the tractors they were driving. The work was slow, tedious, and made exasperatingly difficult by the fact that the gel tended to clot in the hoses instead of flowing smoothly, as the chemists had promised.

When the clotting problem had first surfaced, hours earlier, Falcone had told his people merely to increase the pressure on the nitrogen gas they were using to force the gel out of the storage tanks. But nitrogen was rare and precious on the Moon, and Falcone quickly saw that they weren’t going to have enough to do the job. He had originally wanted to use oxygen for the pressure gas, it was plentiful and cheap, but the chemists had worried that oxygen would react with the gel and change its chemical properties too much.

“Helium would be best,” the chief chemist had mused. “If only we had enough helium…”

So they had settled on nitrogen, raiding the life support backup supplies for two dozen tanks of it. And now it wasn’t doing the job.

Time and again, Falcone and his cohorts had to stop their tractors and physically clean out the jammed hoses with wire brushes that the chemists had provided them.

“Everything in chemistry comes down to plumbing,” Falcone muttered to himself. “Might as well be cleaning a goddamned latrine.”

A voice crackled in his earphones. “What I don’t understand is why nobody’s hardening the microwave antennas against radiation.”

Falcone looked up from his work and tried to identify the questioner as his voice continued, “I mean, like what good is this goop gonna do if the antennas are knocked out by the nuke’s radiation pulse?”

Newman, Falcone decided. He never could see past his friggin’ nose. “What happens if Wix’s smart guys don’t stop the nuke?” he demanded.

For a moment no one replied, then Newman said, “The warhead goes off above the crater floor, right?”

“And what happens then?”

“Uh… it knocks out the solar farms.”

“And where do the antennas get their electricity?”

“From the… oh, yeah, I get it. If the nuke goes off the antennas are dead anyway, right?”

“So there’s no sense sending anybody up to the top of Yeager to harden the antennas. Capisce?’

No response, although Falcone thought he heard stifled giggling from somebody.

A few minutes later his earphones chimed, so he dropped his brush and let the kinked hose fall gently to the ground as he tapped the keypad on his wrist.

A comm tech’s voice announced, “Peacekeeper vehicles are in sight, crossing Mare Nubium.”

“How long before they reach the pass?” he asked.

“Unknown. The thinking here is that they’ll stop and camp at the foot of the ringwall until the nuke from L-1 hits.”