Ben Bova - Moonwar

If the rebels have sealed the hatches, Giap’s men were under orders to blast them open. If they had been able to bring their missile launchers with them they could have blown the hatches apart from where he was standing, outside the main airlock. As it was, the lighter, shoulder-fired missiles would have to do the job. The troops also had grenades. The hatches would pose no problem, Giap told himself.

Once inside the base proper, his troops would quickly move to the water factory, the control center, the electrical distribution station and the EVC—their environmental control center. Hold those, and you command Moonbase. For good measure, Giap had assigned squads to the underground farming area and the nanolaboratories.

“Sir, the airlocks seem to be operating normally,” one of his captains reported. “The outer hatches are not sealed. Repeat, not sealed.”

Giap suppressed a thrill of elation. So the rebels were going to surrender, after all.

“Have the outer hatches been UV sterilized?” he asked, still worrying about nanoweapons.

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Open all the outer hatches,” he commanded, “and check the inner hatches—after they’ve been UV treated.”

“Yes, sir.”

Don’t congratulate yourself too soon, Giap warned himself. There could still be ambushes, traps, inside those corridors.

But he doubted it. What could the rebels do against armed troops in their midst?

Ulf Jansen’s only distinguishing feature was that he was the tallest trooper in the Peacekeeper battalion. At one hundred ninety-three centimeters, he towered over the Asians and Africans and Latinos who made up the bulk of the force. He dwarfed his commanding officer, Colonel Giap, and was a full head taller than Sergeant Slavodic, who headed his squad with an even-handed ferocity.

An easy-going, likeable Norwegian, Jansen had joined the Peacekeepers mainly to earn a U.N. scholarship to engineering college. In the four years of his enlistment he had been to Cyprus, Sri Lanka, the Malvinas Islands (which the British still insisted on calling the Falklands) and now he was on the Moon. Another three months and his enlistment would be over; he could start college in the winter semester.

He had been wounded slightly by an antipersonnel mine in Cyprus; otherwise his duties with the Peacekeepers had not been truly dangerous. He had to wear a germproof bio-suit most of the time in Sri Lanka, a real misery in all that heat, but it had been better than coming down with the man-made plagues that both sides had used in the last round of their civil war.

Now he clumped into a smooth, metal-walled airlock, wearing a spacesuit that was much more comfortable than the biological protection gear from the Sri Lankan expedition. And everything was so light on the Moon! Jansen hefted his assault rifle as easily as he’d carry a toothpick.

“Move it up, move it up,” his sergeant growled, in the English that was the Peacekeepers’ basic language. The whole squad was filing through the airlock, one man at a time. So far there’d been not the slightest sign of enemy opposition. As far as Jansen could tell, Moonbase might have been abandoned and left empty.

Both airlock hatches were fully open. The Moonbase rebels had pumped all the air out of the corridor on the other side of the hatches, so the troopers were filing through the airlock as quickly as they could.

The corridor on the other side of the hatch was dimly lit. Jansen could see another airlock about a hundred meters down the tunnel.

The sergeant brought up the rear. Once he stepped through the airlock he hustled up to where the officers—two lieutenants and a captain—were standing, poring over a book-sized computer.

“The water factory is on the other side of this hatch here,” Jansen heard the captain saying as he tapped a gloved finger on the computer’s tiny screen. “Down this corridor and through the cross—”

Jansen’s earphones erupted with a brain-piercing screech, like electronic fingernails on an electronic blackboard. Jagged bursts of noise blasted at him. He put his hands to his ears, banged them into his helmet instead. The noise was painful, cutting through his skull like a surgeon’s bone saw.

He saw the other troopers clutching at their helmets, reeling, staggering under the agonizing assault of noise. Even the officers were flailing around helplessly.

His eyes streaming tears from the pain, Jansen fumbled for the control stud on his wrist and shut off his suit radio.

The noise cut off immediately. Blessed quiet.

“What is it?” Giap screamed. “What’s going on?” The noise assaulted his brain like a thousand rock concerts, all out of tune. Like a million jet planes taking off. He couldn’t hear anything else. He couldn’t speak to anyone.

He couldn’t think.

All around him, the troops of his third wave were pawing at their helmets, tottering across the dusty lith in obvious agony, some of them falling to their knees.

Giap did the only thing he could think of. He switched off his suit radio. The silence was like a soothing balm, even though his ears continued to ring.

“Turn off your radios!” he commanded, then felt immediately foolish. His own radio was off, his words never got farther than the padding inside his helmet.

But he saw, one by one, his troopers were stopping their gyrations, standing still. Giap knew he himself was panting from the unexpected onslaught. He suspected the other troopers were, too.

He waved the captain of the third wave over to him as he yanked a communications wire from the thigh pouch of his suit. Plugging the wire into his helmet port, he handed it to the captain, who connected it to his own helmet.

“Now we can talk without need of the radios,” Giap said.

“Yes, sir,” replied the captain. Giap could hear his breathing, still heavy.

“The rebels think they can stall our attack by jamming our suit radio frequencies,” the colonel said, with a hint of contempt.

“Yes, sir,” the captain said.

“They didn’t think that we can communicate directly by wire, without using the radios.”

“Yes, sir. But sir, if I may ask: We can speak to each other through the wire, but how will you communicate with the rest of the troops? Especially the first and second waves?”

Giap blinked behind his gold-tinted visor. The first and second waves were inside Moonbase, out of reach, even out of sight.

Jansen stood patiently as the sergeant went down the line, plugging his comm line into a trooper’s helmet, speaking a few words, then unplugging and going to the next trooper.

When his turn came at last, the sergeant said gruffly, “No radio. Follow the original plan. Watch my hand signals.”

“Right, Sarge,” Jansen had time to say before the sergeant popped the comm line out of his helmet and went to the next man in line.

Once the sergeant had relayed his message to every trooper in the squad he hustled back up to the front with the officers. He looked funny in the spacesuit, a short thickset figure in the heavy white suit, like a snowman with an assault rifle and a bandolier of grenades flapping lazily against his sides with every stride he took.

Jansen realized that no one could hear anything he said. Grinning delightedly, he called out, “You look stupid, Sarge!”

No reaction from anyone.

“You look like a fat white grub! You and the idiot officers, too!” he said in Norwegian.

The sergeant turned his way and for an instant Jansen’s heart froze in his chest. But then the sergeant pointed to the hatch up ahead and motioned for the squad to follow him.

“Seal the hatches,” Doug commanded quietly.

“We got ’em in the cages,” said Anson, leaning over his shoulder. “Now we lock ’em in.”