Ben Bova - Moonwar

In that moment Joanna slammed the bathroom door. Killifer heard its lock click.

Laughing even louder, he fired three shots into the lock, then kicked the door open. He stepped into the bathroom-

And Joanna, standing beside the door, drove the point of her hair-styling scissors into his wrist with every molecule of strength in her. Killifer’s hand went numb and he nearly dropped the gun. Her face white with fury, Joanna snatched a hairbrush and whacked it as hard as she could against his bleeding wrist.

Killifer felt pain flaming up his arm. The gun fell from his fingers. He staggered back, but not before Joanna grabbed the end of the scissors still sticking in his wrist.

“Bastard,” she snarled, working the scissors back and forth. “Murdering bastard!”

Pain searing his whole arm, Killifer cuffed her with his free hand, driving her back against the marble sink. But she held firmly onto the scissors, yanking it from his bleeding wrist.

The gun was on the tiled floor. Killifer bent to reach for it but Joanna kicked it away.

That’s not going to help you, bitch,” he growled at her. “I’m not leaving here until you’re dead.”

He lunged at her, but Joanna raked the point of the scissors up his chest and throat and lodged the blades in the underside of his jaw.

Yowling with pain, Killifer staggered back into the bedroom.

Rodriguez was at the hallway door, submachine gun levelled at Killifer’s waist.

“You killed them!” Rodriguez shouted, eyes wide.

“No…” Killifer choked. “No, wait…”

“General’s orders,” Rodriguez said. He fired half a dozen rounds into Killifer’s midsection.

Killifer felt nothing. The bedroom tilted and he was staring at the ceiling. It faded, though, slowly turning dark. He thought of General O’Conner telling him, ‘The fewer people know about this, the better off we are.’

Rodriguez is one of them, Killifer realized. That sonofabitch O’Conner planted him here to get rid of me once the job’s done.

It was his last thought.

“When we power up,” Wicksen was telling Doug, “you’re going to be totally blacked out.”

There was no video from the mass driver; Doug spoke to a blank screen.

“We’re plugging in the fuel cells,” he said. “They can keep us going for the few minutes your gun will be running.”

He sensed Wicksen nodding. “Well, we’re doing everything we can here. That missile blast shook half our connections loose and the other half aren’t all that sound, either.”

Doug grimaced, then recalled, “I remember a professor of mine saying that if something scratches or bites, it’s biology; if it stinks or pops, it’s chemistry; and if—”

“If it doesn’t work,” Wicksen finished with him, “it’s physics.”

Neither of them laughed.

“We’re going to power up in fifteen minutes,” Wicksen said. “Will you have the fuel cells on line by then?”

“If we don’t I’ll call you.”

That only leaves us six minutes to fire at the nuke,” the physicist said, “assuming they hold off detonation until the warhead’s only three hundred meters above the crater floor.”

“If they detonate higher they’ll shower the Peacekeeper troops with radiation.”

They’re not digging in?”

Doug shook his head. “No, they’re staying buttoned up tight inside their vehicles, as far as we can see.”

I’ll bet they’re praying for a low-altitude detonation even more than we are.”

“Probably so,” Doug agreed.

“All right,” said Wicksen. “I’ve got work to do. Call me if you can’t get the fuel cells patched in.”

“Will do.”

Jinny Anson leaned over Doug’s shoulder. The fuel cells are up and ready, no sweat.”

“Good,” he said, wondering if Wicksen heard her before he clicked off.

For the thousandth time Doug checked out every corner of Moonbase through the screens on the console before him. It felt as if the wheeled typist’s chair on which he sat had welded itself to his butt and spine. The level of tension in the control center was palpable, but it had been so electrically high for so long that it seemed almost normal. People went about their duties mechanically, studying their screens or fingering their keyboards. Hardly a word was spoken now, and no voice rose above an edgy, tightly-controlled murmur.

Doug saw that The Cave was almost filled with men and women milling about aimlessly, sitting huddled in small groups, staring up at the wall screens. Must be really tough on them, Doug thought, waiting with nothing to do. Then he looked at the camera view from Mount Yeager; the Peacekeeper troops were also waiting, and the nuclear missile that would end everyone’s suspense was hurtling toward Alphonsus now.

They’ve won the first round, Doug realized. They aimed at our nuclear generator and hit it. Our backup power system is gone. There must be a considerable amount of radioactive debris splattered across the far side of the crater floor.

But they don’t suspect we’ve got a beam gun to knock out their nuke, he told himself. Almost bitterly, Doug admitted that their big success so far had been that Wicksen’s beam gun hadn’t worked. Our ace in the hole, he thought wryly. They don’t know we might be able to prevent their nuclear warhead from going off.

He leaned back in the squeaking little chair, trying to ease the stress that was knotting the muscles of his neck and shoulders. Nanomachines can’t relieve anxiety, he thought.

Staring up at the dimly-lit rock of the ceiling, Doug asked himself, Who am I trying to kid? There are at least three hundred armed and trained troops on the other side of the ringwall. A nuclear bomb is heading toward us. Not a nation in the world has lifted a finger to help us. How on earth can I pretend that we can stand up to the Peacekeepers? We don’t have a chance, not a prayer, against the force of the United Nations.

Why not just let them walk in here and take over? Why risk the lives of two thousand people? Over what? My own ego? My own fear that once they ship me Earthside some New Morality fanatic’s going to murder me? So what? I’m dead either way. They can kill me here, trying to defend Moonbase or kill me back on Earth. At least if I surrender to them the rest of the people here will live.

And Moonbase dies. Yamagata takes over and turns it into his private clinic instead of using it as a springboard to push the frontier outward.

He shook his head. You’re debating philosophy when a couple of thousand lives are hanging in the balance. That’s not fair. It’s stupid.

The phone light at the bottom right corner of his set of screens began winking yellow. Shaking himself from his inner misgivings, Doug reached for his headset and slipped it on.

“Incoming call from Savannah,” a comm tech’s voice said. “Urgent top priority.”

“Put it through.”

Doug saw his mother’s face on the lower right screen: hair dishevelled, eyes red and swollen, skin ashen, a silk robe pulled tight around her.

“What’s wrong?” he blurted.

But Joanna was already telling him, “Lev’s been killed. Murdered. He was trying to kill me but I’m all right. But your stepfather’s dead.”

“Killed? Who did it? Why? Are you really all right?”

The three seconds it took for her reply stretched like hours.

“We don’t know who it was. The security guard got him.

We’re checking it out. It all happened just a few minutes ago…” Joanna seemed to be gasping, her words barely getting out of her mouth.

“Are you hurt? Do you have a doctor there?”

She’s holding back tears, Doug realized, watching his mother’s agonized face. She won’t let herself cry.