Ben Bova - Moonwar

He got up from his chair, spine creaking after being seated for so long, and walked stiffly to Falcone’s post.

“Wait until you’ve got as many in the trap as possible. Then spring it.”

Falcone nodded without taking his eyes from his screens. They had been over this a hundred times, at least.

“It’s your show, now, Vince,” he said, gripping Falcone’s burly shoulder.

“Right, boss,” said Falcone, his eyes still fixed on his screens.

Colonel Giap had learned long ago not to be the first in line of march through enemy territory. His tractor was the third in line as they threaded up the flank of the mountains and into the narrow defile of the pass.

“Force B, report,” he said into his helmet microphone.

All his communications were relayed through the L-1 station, hovering nearly forty thousand kilometers above. There was a noticeable, annoying little lag as the electronic signals bounced back and forth.

“Force B reporting,” crackled in his earphones. “No opposition. Proceeding on schedule.”

“Good. Report any problems immediately,” said Giap.

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel nodded inside his helmet. Keeping to schedule was important. He had planned the conquest of Moonbase down to the minutest details, and included every contingency he could imagine in his plans. The nuclear bomb did not go off, Moonbase still enjoyed its full capacity of electrical power. Giap had included that possibility in his planning. It made no difference. His primary force would batter down their main airlock and enter the garage area precisely on schedule, while Force B deployed on the crater floor as a strategic reserve, after sending a small contingent to take the mass driver—which Giap expected to be undefended.

His special team of mountain climbers would disable all of Moonbase’s communications antennas, cutting off the rebels’ reports to the news media back on Earth. Faure had insisted on that, and for once Giap agreed with the secretary-general. Cut out their tongues.

The first wave of assault troops would include the decontamination squads with their powerful ultraviolet lights, to deactivate any nanomachines that the Moonbase rebels might try to use. Giap smiled thinly at the memory of how the rebels had used nanomachines to panic the first Peacekeeper force sent against Moonbase. That trick won’t work a second time, he assured himself.

His earphones buzzed. Switching to the tractor’s intercom, Giap asked testily, “What is it?”

“Sensors are picking up an unusual level of microwave radiation, sir,” his surveillance officer reported.

In the cramped confines of his windowless command center, Giap barely had room to turn and face the woman. Even so, sealed inside her spacesuit, he could not see her face, merely the reflection of his own helmet in her closed visor.

“A dangerous level?” Did the rebels have exotic weapons, after all?

“No, sir, nothing dangerous. It’s more like a radar scan, but it’s coming at us from all directions, as if the microwaves are reflecting off the mountains walls around us.”

Giap felt his brow wrinkle. Microwaves? What are they trying to accomplish?

“Lead tractor calling, sir,” said his communications sergeant. “Emergency.”

Giap switched to the proper frequency. “Sir! Our tractor is stuck. We can’t move!”

“Can’t move?”

The voice in his earphones sounded more puzzled than worried. “It’s as if we hit some deep mud…”

“There is no mud on the Moon!” Giap snapped.

“Yessir, I know. But we’re mired in something. We can’t move forward or back. My engineer is afraid of burning out the drive motors.”

Giap’s own tractor lurched and slowed noticeably.

“What’s going on?” he yelled to his comm sergeant.

“I don’t know!”

Within minutes the first twenty-two tractors in the assault force reported being stuck fast. Several burned out their drive motors trying to force themselves through whatever it was that had mired them down.

“Get out and see what it is!” Giap screamed at his own driver as he motioned his sergeant to open the overhead hatch.

In his anxiety, Giap forgot the gentle lunar gravity and pulled himself up so hard he nearly soared completely out of the tractor. He sprawled across the roof of the cab, legs dangling inside his shoebox-sized command center.

Pulling himself up to a sitting position, Giap looked around. His first sensation was relief at being out of the metal coffin of the command center. He saw smooth-walled gray rock mountains and a dark, star-strewn sky.

Then he looked down and saw that his tractor, and every other one up and down the line that he could see, were engulfed halfway up their drive wheels in a weird, bright blue sea of spongy-looking stuff.

“Sergeant!” he yelled into his helmet mike. “Get up here.”

The sergeant popped the hatch to his cab and scrambled up to sit on the roof next to him.

Pointing at the sea of blue, Giap commanded, “Climb down the side of the tractor and test the consistency of that material.”

“What is it?” the sergeant asked. Then he added, “Sir.”

“If I knew what it was I wouldn’t need you to test it!”

“Maybe it’s some sort of Moon creature,” the sergeant said, his voice hollow.

“Don’t be stupid!” Giap barked. “It’s man-made. It’s something the rebels have cooked up to slow us down.”

The sergeant climbed down the ladder built into the tractor’s side, slow and awkward in his cumbersome spacesuit. Very gingerly, he touched the blue surface with a booted toe.

“It feels soft, sir,” he reported.

“How soft? Can you walk on it?”

The sergeant pushed his boot in deeper, then—still grasping the ladder rungs with both hands—he tried standing on it. His boots sank in until their tops were covered in blue.

“Well?” Giap demanded.

He heard his sergeant puffing and grunting. “I’m stuck in it, sir. I can’t pull my feet out.”

In the half-hour it took for Seigo Yamagata to answer Joanna’s call, she paced the living room, trying to burn up some of the fear and anger and grief that the tranquilizers had dulled but not removed.

While she paced she watched the Global News channel that was devoting full time to live coverage of the battle for Moonbase. Edie Elgin’s voice sounded strained, slightly hoarse from long hours of nonstop talking, but she was still going strong.

Joanna learned that the Peacekeepers’ nuclear missile attack had failed and Moonbase’s electrical power supply was still intact. Now she watched the view from atop Mount Yeager as the main Peacekeeper assault force came to a halt in Wodjohowitcz Pass.

“The smart foamgel will set to the consistency of concrete,” Edie Elgin was saying. “Wodjohowitcz Pass is effectively blocked, as far as the Peacekeepers’ vehicles are concerned.”

As she paced and watched, Joanna thought about getting dressed in something more substantial than her thin white robe, but that would have meant going upstairs. Even though the police were finished now with the bedroom, Joanna found she could not willingly go in there, not yet, not with Lev’s blood still staining the bedclothes. Tomorrow, maybe. After they’ve cleaned everything up.

The phone chimed at last and she went to the sofa where the camera could focus on her. Seigo Yamagata’s lean, lined face appeared on the screen above the fireplace, replacing Edie Elgin’s report from the Moon. It was impossible to tell what time it might be in Tokyo from the wide window behind Yamagata’s desk; the downtown city towers were drenched in driving rain.

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” Joanna began.

Yamagata raised a hand. “It is of no consequence. I have just been informed of the attempt on your life. Please accept my deepest condolence for the loss of your husband.”