Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Yeah, but they got guns and we don’t.”

Doug had no rejoinder for that.

If anyone noticed that Claire Rossi and Nick O’Malley left The Cave together, with equally somber expressions on their faces, no one made a fuss about it.

Almost everyone in Moonbase knew that Claire and Nick were lovers. She was the base personnel chief, a petite brunette with video-star looks and a figure that men wanted to howl after. He was a big, lumbering, easy-going redhead who ran a set of tractors up on the surface from the snug confines of a teleoperator’s console down in the control center.

Nick was happy-go-lucky, and counted the most fortunate moment in his young life as the instant he saw Claire walking down one of Moonbase’s corridors. He smiled at her and she smiled back. Electricity crackled. He stopped looking at other women and she had thoughts only for him. It was like magic.

But as they walked slowly out of The Cave, neither of them was smiling.

“We could be stuck here for months,” Claire said as they shouldered their way through the dispersing crowd, heading for her quarters.

Nick was somber, deep in thought. “My work contract runs out in three weeks. What happens then?”

“I guess we won’t be heading back Earthside until Doug and the politicians back home settle this thing.”

“Yeah, but how do I get paid when my contract term ends? What happens then?”

She tried to smile up at him. “Well, we didn’t want to be separated, did we? Maybe you’ll have to stay here until my tour ends and we can go back home together.”

Looking down at her, Nick saw that her smile was forced. “You don’t seem so happy about it.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s…” She fell silent.

“What?”

“Wait until we get to my place,” Claire said, so solemnly that it worried Nick.

Once she shut the door of her one-room compartment, Nick asked almost desperately, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“It’s not wrong, exactly,” she said, going to the bunk and sitting on its edge.

“Well, what?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

He blinked. “You’re going to have a baby?” His voice came out half an octave higher than usual.

“Yes,” she answered, almost shyly.

For a moment he didn’t know what to say, what to do. Then the reality of it burst on him and he broke into an ear-to-ear grin. “A baby! That’s great! That’s wonderful!’

But Claire shook her head. “Not if we can’t get off Moonbase, it isn’t.”

Aboard the Clippership Max Faget, Captain Jagath Munasinghe stared suspiciously at the schematic displayed on his notebook screen.

“And this is the control center? Here?” he pointed with a blunt finger.

“That’s it,” said Jack Killifer. “Take that and you’ve got the whole base under your thumb.”

Munasinghe wore the uniform of the U.N.’s Peacekeeping Force: sky blue, with white trim at the cuffs and along the front of his tunic. Captain’s bars on his collar and a slim line of ribbons on his chest below his name tag. He was of slight build, almost delicate, but his large dark eyes radiated a distrust that always bordered on rage. Born in Sri Lanka, he had seen warfare from childhood and only accepted a commission in the Peacekeepers when Sri Lanka had agreed to disarmament after its third civil war in a century had killed two million men, women and children with a man-made plague virus.

Behind him, forty specially-picked Peacekeepers sat uneasily in weightlessness as the spacecraft coasted toward the Moon. None of them had ever been in space before, not even Captain Munasinghe. Despite the full week of autogenic-feedback adaptation training they had been rushed through, and the slow-release anti-nausea patches they were required to wear behind their ears, several of the troops had vomited miserably during the first few hours of zero-gee flight. Munasinghe himself had managed to fight down the bile that burned in his throat, but just barely.

Sitting beside the captain, Killifer wore standard civilian’s coveralls, slate gray and undecorated except for his name tag over his left breast pocket. He was more than twenty years older than the dark-skinned captain and almost a head taller: lean, lantern-jawed, his face hard and flinty. Once his light brown hair had been shaved down almost to his scalp, but now it was graying and he wore it long enough to tie into a ponytail that bobbed weightlessly at the back of his neck. The sight of it made Munasinghe queasy.

“Forty men to take and hold the entire base,” Munasinghe muttered unhappily.

“It’s not that big a place,” Killifer replied. “And like I told you, take the command center and you control their air, water, heat—everything.”

Munasinghe nodded but his eyes showed that he had his doubts.

“Look,” Killifer said, “you put a couple of men in the environmental control center, here—” he tapped a fingernail on the captain’s notebook screen, “-and a couple more in the water factory, keep a few in the control center and the rest of ’em can patrol the tunnels or do whatever else you want.”

“There are more than two thousand people there.”

“So what? They got no weapons. They’re civilians, they don’t know how to fight even if they wanted to.”

“You are absolutely sure they have no weapons of any kind?”

Killifer gave him a nasty grin. “Nothing. Shit, they don’t even have steak knives; the toughest food they have to deal with is friggin’ soybean burgers.”

“Still…”

Feeling exasperated, Killifer growled. “I spent damn’ near twenty years there. I know what I’m talking about. It’ll be a piece of cake, I tell you. A walkover. You’ll be a friggin’ hero inside of ten minutes.”

Munasinghe’s dubious expression did not change, but he turned and looked across the aisle of the passenger compartment to the reporter who was sitting next to them.

Edith Elgin had thought she’d chat with the women soldiers among the Peacekeepers all the way to the Moon. But ever since the rocket’s engines had cut off and the spacecraft had gone into zero gravity she had felt too nauseous to chat or even smile. Besides, most of the women barely spoke English; the little flags they wore as shoulder patches were from Pakistan and Zambia and places like that.

If she didn’t feel so queasy it would almost have been funny. The reporter who broke the story of finding life on Mars, the woman who had parlayed a Texas cheerleader’s looks and a lot of smarts into prime-time news stardom, sitting strapped into a bucket seat, stomach churning, sinuses throbbing, feeling woozy every time she moved her head the slightest bit. And there’s more than four days of this to go. Sooner or later I’ll have to get up and go to the toilet. She did not look forward to the prospect.

At least nobody’s upchucked for a while, Edith told herself gratefully. The sound of people vomiting had almost broken her when they had first gone into zero gee. Fortunately the Clippership’s air circulation system had been strong enough to keep most of the stench away from her row. Still, the acrid scent of vomit made the cabin smell like a New York alley.

It had been neither simple nor easy to win this assignment to accompany the Peacekeepers to the renegade base on the Moon. The network was all for it, of course, but the U.N. bureaucracy wanted nothing to do with a reporter aboard their spacecraft. Edith had to use every bit of her blonde smiling charm and corporate infighter’s savvy to get past whole phalanxes of administrators and directors and their petty, close-minded assistants. All the way up to Georges Faure himself she had battled.