Ben Bova - Moonwar

Grunting an inarticulate reply, Falcone arched his back slightly and looked through his visor up to the top of Mount Yeager, where the microwave transmitters stood. For the first time he realized that this entire ‘blue goo’ business was totally untested.

Christ, I hope it works, he said to himself. If that nuke isn’t stopped by Wicksen’s zap gun, the microwave transmitters’ll be knocked out and all our work will have gone for nothing.

And, he added as he bent stiffly to pick up the jammed hose again, we got a damned good chance of still being out here and getting fried to a crisp by the mother-humpin’ nuke.

The control center was changed. The same hushed intensity, the same low-key lighting, the same hum of murmuring voices and purring electronic machines. Yet the air crackled now; the very smell of the control center was different: nervous, sweaty. It wasn’t fear that Doug sensed from the technicians monitoring their consoles, so much as a focused motivation, anxiety masked by the duties of the moment.

Jinny Anson slipped into an unoccupied chair next to the U-shaped set of communications consoles, while Doug paced slowly through the big chamber, walking behind the seated technicians, glancing at each individual display screen. On one side of the room glowed the huge schematic display of Moonbase’s systems. The opposite wall showed camera views of the approaching Peacekeeper armada and the spacecraft hovering around the L-1 space station.

Doug completed his circuit of the center and returned to Anson’s chair.

“Everything we can do, we’re doing,” he said.

Anson looked up at him. “It’s sweaty palms time now.”

Looking at the view of the approaching Peacekeeper vehicles, Doug said, “The longer they take, the better it is for us. Time’s on our side.”

“For now,” said Anson.

He nodded. “Better put out an announcement that all personnel without specific tasks for the defense of the base should meet in The Cave.”

Anson hiked her brows. “Not stay in their quarters?”

“No, get them into The Cave. Food’s there, and it’ll be easier to deal with them if they’re all together instead of strung out in their individual quarters. There might be fighting in the corridors; I don’t want anybody hurt unnecessarily.”

“Collateral damage,” Anson muttered, turning to the console keyboard.

The editing booth felt hot and stuffy. Edith sat at the big board, watching the array of display screens half-surrounding her, showing views of the approaching Peacekeepers and the spacecraft at L-1.

“The first shot in this battle has already been fired,” she was saying into the microphone that sent her words Earthside. “The U.N. Peacekeepers knocked out a reconnaissance satellite that Moonbase had placed in orbit to observe the Peacekeepers’ movements.”

She pressed the stud that sent the view from Mount Yeager’s camera Earthward. “Now the Peacekeeper assault force is moving across Mare Nubium, approaching Moonbase. What you are seeing now…”

Georges Faure was far from composed as he sat in his office, watching the broadcast of Global News. He fidgeted in his big chair, seething with anger. To think that this woman, this slut of a reporter who had seduced him into allowing her to accompany the original Peacekeeper force to the Moon, to think that she was such a traitor, such a propagandist for the rebels—it exasperated him.

Yet a part of him was thrilled at the sight of the Peacekeeper armada crossing Mare Nubium. These are my troops, Faure told himself, marching under my orders. Let the news media say what they will, in a matter of hours Moonbase will be under my control, as it should be.

And if those rebellious fools attempt the resistance, they will be crushed. As they should be.

Colonel Giap compared the electronic map on the display screen of his tractor’s cab with the view of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains looming before him. His tractor cab was pressurized and armored, so he could ride with the visor of his spacesuit helmet open. He could have made this journey in shirtsleeves, had he chosen to, but that would have meant that he would have to don his spacesuit once they arrived at their designated campsite. He had decided to endure the discomfort of forty-three hours in the spacesuit, instead.

Most of the trip he had spent worrying about nanomachines. Moonbase had no weapons to speak of, he knew, but what kind of devilish weaponry could their nanoscientists devise? Nanomachines had driven off the first Peacekeeper attack. Giap had chosen broad daylight to make his assault, but inside the tunnels of Moonbase the purifying effect of solar ultraviolet did not penetrate. That is why Giap had included special teams of civilians with powerful UV lamps to accompany his troops. He did not intend to be run off by invisible, insidious nanoweapons.

Their base camp location had been carefully chosen to position them close to the two easiest passes over the ringwall mountains, while still placing them within the sheltering lee of the mountains themselves. Those solid piles of rock would protect them from the radiation pulse of the nuclear explosion. There was no need to worry about blast effects in the lunar vacuum, but even if there were the mountains would shelter them, just as it will protect us from the radiation and heat pulse, Giap assured himself.

Still, a tendril of worry gnawed at him. The missile must be accurately aimed. And its warhead must be fused at precisely the correct altitude. If it goes off too soon, or its aim is a fraction of a degree off-target, we could be hit by the heat and radiation.

He reached out a gloved hand to touch the armored roof of the tractor’s cab. Enough protection against a slightly mis-aimed nuclear warhead? he wondered. More likely the metal would serve as an efficient oven, to roast us all to death.

Shaking his head inside the helmet, he tried to push such fears away by attending to his duties. He established communications contact with L-1, although the link was weak and strained with harsh bursts of static. The tractor comm sets were far from satisfactory and sunspots or some other esoteric phenomena could hash up communications quite maddeningly.

The image of a Peacekeeper junior officer appeared on the little screen, wavering slightly and streaked with electronic snow.

“We are on schedule,” Giap informed the junior officer. “All my vehicles will be at their assigned base camp positions within two hours.”

“Very well,” came the woman’s voice, through hissing static. “Missile launch will proceed on schedule unless you order otherwise.”

“Yes, launch on schedule,” said Giap, wondering how firm a comm link they would have once his vehicle was parked up close to the ringwall mountains.

“Mrs President, you’ve got real troubles with this Moonbase business.”

The President gave her staff chief a chilling look, the kind that had been known to cause lesser men to write out their resignations.

The chief of the White House staff was an old hand at this kind of thing, though; he had been with the President since she had first run for the Senate, many elections earlier.

“I mean,” he said, hunching forward in the Kennedy rocker in front of her broad, modern desk,’the poll numbers are changing so fast we can’t keep up with them.”

“The trend?” she snapped.

“Swinging steadily in favor of Moonbase. Those news broadcasts Global’s airing are turning the public’s opinion around a hundred eighty degrees.”

The President turned her chair away from this man she knew so well, away from his earnest, worried face and the problems that slumped his shoulders. She looked out through the long windows to the flower garden that had soothed both Roosevelts and everyone else who had sat at this apex of power in the Oval Office.