Ben Bova - Moonwar

“Paramedics are here and my personal physician’s on his way,” she said, seeming to pull herself up straighter. “I’m not hurt. But Lev…”

Joanna turned away from the screen. A man’s face slid into view, square jaw unshaved, narrow eyes hard and bitter. “This is Captain Ingersoll, I’m with Masterson security. Your mother’s physically unharmed, sir, although she’s had a tremendous psychological shock. I’ll see to it that she calls you back as soon as her doctor’s looked her over and we’ve had a chance to sort things out a bit. Thank you.”

The screen went blank.

Doug sat there in stunned silence. If anyone overheard his phone conversation, if anyone tried to talk to him or question him, he didn’t know it. He merely sat staring blankly at the array of screens, his thoughts spinning.

They tried to kill her. Who was it? Part of Faure’s scheme? Or maybe Yamagata, trying to get her out of their way so they can take control of Masterson Corporation more easily. No, not even Yamagata would go that far. Would they? New Morality zealots, more likely. Fanatics who knew that Mom was backing Moonbase and nanotechnology. Maybe they even knew she’d had a few nanotech treatments herself, over the years.

She’s all right, though. Lev’s dead but she’s all right. They murdered Lev. Killed him.

Jinny Anson was shaking his shoulder. “Wix is ready to power up.”

He looked up at her. “Okay,” he said dully. “Okay.”

Anson peered at him. “Are you all right, Doug?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. Tell Wicksen to shoot the hell out of that missile.”

Anson looked surprised, but she said merely, “Right.”

Claire Rossi looked up as the overhead loudpseakers blared through The Cave:

“WE’RE GOING TO AUXILIARY POWER IN SIXTY SECONDS. LIGHTS WILL GO DOWN TO EMERGENCY LEVELS. ALL UNNECESSARY EQUIPMENT WILL BE POWERED DOWN. THIS SHOULD LAST APPROXIMATELY TEN TO FIFTEEN MINUTES.”

The Cave buzzed with conversations. When the lights suddenly turned down, a chorus of ‘ooohs’ surged through the crowded cafeteria.

Then somebody called out, “The lights are low! Time for an orgy!”

Claire didn’t laugh. Neither did anyone else.

The lights flickered briefly in the nanolaboratory, then steadied and returned to their normal brightness.

“See?” Zimmerman said to Inoguchi. “We are essential. We stay at full power.”

Inoguchi looked up from his work. “I am afraid that the power surge has knocked out the timing circuitry in the assembly feeder,” he said apologetically.

“What?” Zimmerman bellowed, rushing across the lab to the Japanese scientist’s side.

“The timing circuitry must be reset,” Inoguchi said. “This batch of nanomachines—”

“Ruined!” Zimmerman roared, pounding a fist on the lab bench so hard that Inoguchi nearly jumped off his stool. “A microsecond pulse of electricity! Ruined!” He lapsed into German.

Inoguchi could not understand his words, but the tone was painfully clear.

“Power at ninety-two percent.”

Wicksen was inside the cramped shelter again. This time he had not bothered to take off his helmet, he merely slid the visor up.

“Can you goose it higher?” he asked, eyes on the makeshift control board.

“When I do,” the woman replied,’the needle starts wobbling. I think ninety-two’s the best we can do without risking another shorting out.”

“Okay,” Wicksen said softly. “Hold it at ninety-two.”

“Holding and stable.”

“How’s the radar plot?”

The man standing to his left was bent over a screen that displayed a single lurid red spot against a spiderweb of concentric circles.

“Coming straight at us, practically zero deflection,” he said tightly. “Pointing system’s holding good, slaved to the radar.”

Wicksen scanned the board full of gauges and telltale lights: mostly green, a handful of ambers, two reds but they had been cut out of the circuitry.

“Anybody see a reason why we shouldn’t shoot the cannon?”

Dead silence. No sound in the low-ceilinged little shelter except the hum of the electrical equipment.

“Okay. Here goes.” Wicksen leaned on the red firing button.

Nothing in the shelter changed. No new noise, no vibration, no sense of having accomplished anything.

“Power holding steady.”

“Beam collimation looks good.”

“Just hold together, baby,” Wicksen pleaded, almost cooed, like a father urging a baby’s first tottering steps. “Just stay together for another five, six minutes. You can do it, baby, you can last that long. You’re a good little pile of junk, you are, you’re working just fine. Keep it up, baby, keep those protons moving.”

His assistants had never heard Wicksen speak like that, never heard anything remotely like this cooing, coaxing, imploring tone that he was half-whispering, half-singing to the impassive electronics and machinery they had slapped together. They stood in shock for fully five minutes as Wicksen kept up his impromptu lullaby, his supplication, his prayer that the beam gun would work right and do the job they intended it to do.

As the clock on their control board showed five minutes and nine seconds, Wicksen’s female assistant called out, “Starting to get arcing on the main buss.”

Wicksen raised one hand in a gesture of patience.

“It’s going to short out again!”

“Hold it as long as you can,” he said calmly.

Half the needles on the board’s gauges suddenly spun down toward zero.

“It’s gone,” said the man to Wicksen’s right.

“Main buss shorted.”

“Power down,” Wicksen said, with a sigh. “If we haven’t knocked out the nuke’s fusing circuitry by now we never will.”

A small tremor shook the shelter, like the passing of a train nearby.

“Ground impact.”

“Yeah, but did the nuke go off?”

Colonel Giap studied the watch built into the keypad on his spacesuit’s wrist. The nuclear bomb should have exploded almost a full minute earlier.

His command center inside the tractor was little more than a windowless metal box shoehorned between the tractor’s cab and its rear bed, where a dozen Peacekeeper troops and the seven suicide volunteers sat wedged together like sardines in a tin.

“Where is the confirmation from L-1?” Giap demanded of tech sergeant in charge of communications.

The sergeant said through the upraised visor of his spacesuit, “L-1 wants to speak to you, sir.”

With an impatient huff, Giap took the laptop comm rig from the sergeant. “We are scheduled to push off in three minutes,” he said sharply. “Where is the confirmation of the nuclear blast?”

The officer’s image in the small, snow-streaked screen looked strained, worried. “There is no confirmation of the blast, sir,” she said, her voice scratchy with static.

“No confirmation!”

“Diagnostics are negative,” the officer said dolefully, “and there is no visual confirmation of the detonation.”

Giap demanded, “Did the bomb go off or not?”

“As far as we can tell, sir, it failed.”

“Failed! Then Moonbase’s electrical power system is still intact.”

“As far as we can tell, sir.”

Giap angrily slammed the laptop shut and shoved it back into the sergeant’s gloved hands. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It would be better if their electrical power was cut off, but it really doesn’t matter. We will march across the mountains and blast open their airlocks if they refuse to surrender to me.

He held up his wrist again. At precisely the second called for in his schedule, he commanded, “Start engines. All vehicles are to move to their assigned locations on the crater floor. Go!’