Ben Bova - Moonwar

So far, so good, he told himself. We’ve still got our electricity and we’ve forced the Peacekeepers to abandon their heavy weapons.

But as he watched the implacable approach of the Peacekeeper troops, Doug realized that what had happened so far was just the preliminary phase of this battle. The real fighting was about to begin.

Then the screen showing Edith’s broadcast Earthside winked off.

Colonel Giap held the electro-optical binoculars to his visor and carefully studied the main airlock to Moonbase. The massive hatch had been slid wide open; the garage inside was brightly lit, clearly visible.

They could be hiding behind the tractors parked in the garage, Giap reasoned, waiting to pick us off as we enter the garage.

Pick us off with what? he asked himself. They have no guns. A few industrial lasers, of course, but those make awkward weapons. Trained troops could silence them in a few minutes.

“The men are deployed and waiting for your orders, sir,” said his sergeant. Not his original aide; that poor devil was still back at the mountain pass, freed at last from the blue slime but in no emotional condition to be relied upon.

“Men and women, sergeant,” Giap reminded him. “It is better to use the word ‘troops’.”

“Yessir,” the sergeant’s apologetic voice hissed in Giap’s helmet earphones. “The troops are waiting for your orders, sir.”

Giap’s timetable was a shambles, but that no longer mattered. They were about to penetrate Moonbase’s perimeter defense.

Putting down his binoculars and letting them dangle from the cord around his neck ring, Giap turned to face his team of officers. Three captains, six lieutenants. His second-in-command, a South African major, had been left with the stalled vehicles up in the mountain pass. We have too many officers anyway, Giap thought. The Peacekeepers are top heavy with brass.

His nine officers straightened to a semblance of attention, a posture difficult to accomplish in their spacesuits and virtually impossible to maintain.

“Stand easy,” Giap said mildly. “We will attack in two waves. First platoon will advance through the airlock and into the garage area on tractors. Second platoon will follow on foot. Third platoon will remain in reserve. Any questions?”

A tenth figure had joined the little group, uninvited. “What are we volunteers to do?”

Giap turned on the questioner. In his spacesuit it was difficult to determine which of the suicide fanatics it might be; the voice sounded American.

“You are to return to the command tractor and remain there, all of you, until I summon you,” Giap said firmly.

“How will we know what to expect?”

Giap allowed himself a sneering smile, knowing that no one could see it behind his tinted visor. “You can follow the progress of the battle on Global News, just like everyone else on Earth.”

Just at that moment his earphones buzzed, signalling an incoming message. Tapping the keypad on his wrist, Giap asked his replacement communications sergeant, “What is it?”

“Report from the mountain-climbing team, sir. They have reached the summit and cut the power lines to all the antennas up there. Moonbase has been silenced.”

For the first time in hours Giap smiled with genuine pleasure. “Good,” he said. “Send them my congratulations and tell them to report back to me on the crater floor as soon as they can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nodding inside his helmet, Giap told himself that Moonbase was now entirely cut off from the Earth. At last.

The President looked bleary-eyed as she sipped at her first cup of coffee of the morning and stared at the muted wall screen that showed Global News’ coverage of the Moonbase battle.

“You’re up early,” said her chief of staff, taking his customary place in the Kennedy rocker.

“So’re you,” said the President.

“I haven’t been to sleep all night,” he said, running a hand over his bald pate. From behind her desk, the President could see that he was perspiring.

“It’ll all be over in a few hours,” she said, gesturing toward the wall screen with the hand that held her coffee mug.

“No it won’t,” said the staff chief gloomily.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Luce, we’ve got a shitstorm of public opinion coming down on us. I spent the whole damned night trying to calm down committee chairmen, media reporters, umpteen different governors and state party officials, even some goddamned church leaders are yelling that we ought to pressure the U.N. into letting Moonbase go!”

The President knew that her loyal assistant never used profanity in her presence unless he was truly upset—or trying to make a crucial point.

But she shook her head. “Harry, it’s just too late to do anything. The Peacekeepers are already there. Look.”

She pointed to the wall screen again. Turning in the rocker, her staff chief saw a dozens of tracked vehicles advancing slowly toward the main airlock hatch of Moonbase.

Suddenly the picture winked off.

“What the hell…?”

Before the President could reach the remote control unit on her desk, the screen flicked a few times, then showed a harried-looking announcer in a suit and tie.

“We regret to report that technical difficulties have cut off Edie Elgin’s report from Moonbase. We are trying to re-establish contact.”

As the scene switched to a news anchorwoman, who began to summarize what they had been watching live, the President eased back in her desk chair and cast a knowing look at her staff chief.

“It’s all over bar the shouting, Harry. Moonbase is finished and all those jerks who were yelling at you will forget about it by this time tomorrow.”

Doug wished he could talk with Edith, now that her marathon performance had been cut short, but he had no time for that. He watched the advancing Peacekeeper troops. So did everyone in Moonbase. In the control center, in The Cave, in the infirmary and labs that were still working, every resident of Moonbase looked at the screens and held his or her breath. Doug had never heard the control center so absolutely silent. Even the hum of the machinery seemed muted.

The white Peacekeeper tractors edged cautiously through the airlock. Big as it was, the airlock could only accommodate two vehicles at a time, so the invading tractors came in pairs, then deployed around the edges of the garage.

“They’re expecting us to fire at them,” Gordette said, almost whispering. Still, his voice broke the silence jarringly.

“With what?” Anson muttered acidly.

Doug looked past Vince Falcone to Nick O’Malley. “Ready with the dust?” he asked, also in a near reverent whisper.

“Ready and waiting,” O’Malley replied firmly.

Doug nodded as he thought: Waiting. We’ve been waiting a long time. But we won’t have to wait much longer.

“The garage is clear,” Giap heard in his earphones. “No enemy troops.”

The colonel had established his command post just outside the main airlock, where he could see easily into the broad, brightly-lit garage.

Four teams of specialists were sweeping the garage floor with powerful ultraviolet lamps. So far there was no sign of nanomachines, but Giap did not want to take any chances. His teams would sterilize the hatches on the other end of the garage, as well, the hatches that led into Moonbase’s corridors.

No opposition so far, Giap mused. Either they intend to surrender once we enter the corridors and occupy their critical centers, or they have a trap waiting for us inside.

He played his plan through his mind once again. The first wave of troops were to open the corridor hatches. They were airlocks, of course, double hatches that protected the corridors from the vacuum outside. They had been built as a secondary level of protection, since usually the garage was pressurized and vehicles and personnel left it for the lunar surface through the oversized main airlock.