by Ben Bova
Killifer had explained this to the failing old man a dozen times since the blackout decision had been announced.
“That’s right, we’re the only one,” he said. “The apartment blocks and condo buildings curtain their windows as a sign of respect.”
The wizened old man glared at him. “And whose idea was that?”
“Yours, of course,” he said.
“I never made such a decision. I’d remember it if I did.”
“Well,” said Killifer, “it was mine, really. Acting in your name, of course.”
Actually, it had been the bright idea of one of the young psychologists on the staff. But Killifer had implemented it and he’d be damned if he’d let the young snot take the credit.
“Why?” O’Conner asked testily.
Killifer replied, “It gives the ordinary people the feeling that they’re making a sacrifice. It makes them feel that they’re contributing to the general welfare.”
“You’ve learned well,” rasped O’Conner. “Make them want to obey. That’s the secret!”
“You’ve taught me well,” Killifer said, feeling something almost like affection for the old man.
Wheeling his chair around to face Killifer, General O’Conner said, “Now what’s happening with the Moonbase problem?”
Killifer shook his head. “It’s getting worse instead of better.”
“I see they’re broadcasting news reports from Moonbase. I thought the media had agreed to a blackout.”
“They had. But it’s been busted wide open.”
The general’s bloodshot eyes narrowed. “How? Who did it?”
Killifer explained the series of events, tracing the break of the news blackout to Tamara Bonai in Kiribati.
“Kiribati?” General O’Conner’s ravaged face glared at him. “Where’s that?”
“In the Pacific. Micronesia.”
The general seemed to sink in on himself, thinking. Then he started cackling.
“What’s funny?” Killifer asked.
“I did missionary work out there when I was a kid.”
That surprised Killifer. “You did?”
“Tonga. Fiji. I wore the black suit and tie and went out among the heathen.” He wiped at his eyes with a frail hand.
“I never knew.”
“They were good people. They listened to me and smiled and agreed with everything I said. Helped me build a church for them. They even attended services.”
“Terrific,” Killifer muttered.
“But it didn’t do one bit of good. They went about living the way they always had. Dressed up for me, of course. But other times they went back to being as naked as sin. To them, sex was about as casual as taking a swim in the lagoon.”
He almost sounded wistful, Killifer thought. “Well, now they have office buildings and shopping malls and major tourist centers.”
“And this woman, what’s her name?”
“Tamara Bonai.”
“She broke the news blackout?”
“She sure as hell did.”
“Then she ought to be punished,” General O’Conner said. “Swiftly and obviously. People ought to know that those who oppose God’s will are struck down.”
Killifer’s insides shuddered. “You mean kill her?”
“Yes,” said the general. “See to it.”
“Me?”
“You. And nobody else.”
He started to say, “But why me? I’m no…”
O’Conner’s burning red eyes silenced him. The General had made up his mind and he had chosen Killifer for the job. That was unalterable.
One thing that Killifer had learned in his eight years with the Corps: you obey, but you ask for something in return.
“If we’re going to punish people, what about Joanna Stavenger… I mean, Brudnoy.”
“She’s back here, back from the Moon?”
“Yeah.”
O’Conner mulled it over for ten seconds. “You’re right. Strike her down, too.”
Killifer nodded, satisfied. The woman who had ruined his life was going to get what she deserved, at last.
“Too bad we can’t get her son.”
“Douglas Stavenger?”
“Yeah. He’s up at Moonbase, though. Out of reach.” General O’Conner pointed a wavering finger at Killifer.
“Don’t be so sure of that, my boy. No one’s out of reach of the angel of death.”
DAY SIXTEEN
“Hey, what’re you doing there?”
The mercenary looked up. A woman in the slate gray coveralls of the transportation division was striding down the line of spacesuits toward him. She looked to be in her thirties, a little heavyset, mousey brown hair chopped short, and an angry frown on her face.
“Doug Stavenger asked me to check out his suit,” the mercenary said.
“I maintain the suits,” she said, jabbing a thumb toward her ample chest. Her nametag said LIEBOWITZ. “Since when does Stavenger send strangers to do my job?”
She was almost the mercenary’s own height, and now that she was almost nose-to-nose with him he saw that her size was probably muscle, not fat.
He put on a smile. “Doug’s worried about sabotage,” he said. The best lies are always based on the truth, he knew.
“Sabotage? Are you kidding?”
The mercenary shook his head slowly. “No, I’m not kidding, Liebowitz. We’re at war, aren’t we? Under siege?”
“But who the frick’s gonna sabotage anything here? Everybody here’s for Moonbase. We’re all on Stavenger’s side.”
“Yeah? Were you at the meeting in The Cave last week?”
“Sure.”
“How many people there wanted to go back Earthside right away?”
Liebowitz’s expression turned thoughtful. “Well, a few, I guess.”
“And they won’t be able to go until this war is settled, right?”
“Oh, I dunno. Stavenger talked about arranging an evacuation flight for ’em.”
“You seen any evacuation flight arrive? The U.N. wants to keep us bottled up here until we cave in.”
“Yeah, maybe…”
The mercenary was enjoying sparring with her. He began to think it might be fun to share a meal with her, get to know her better. She was white, of course, but maybe…
He pushed those thoughts aside. “Well, don’t you think that maybe some disgruntled technician or administrator might figure that a little sabotage here or there will help make us surrender and end the war? Then he can go home.”
Liebowitz almost bought it. But after a few moments she said, “Naahhh. I just don’t see anybody who’s lived here for more’n ten minutes going around sabotaging anything. That could kill somebody, for chrissakes.”
“Maybe so,” the mercenary said. “But Stavenger’s worried about it and he asked me to check out his suit.”
She puffed out a breath between her teeth. “Okay. Okay. It sounds wonky to me, but if the boss wants you to check his suit, go right ahead.”
She folded her arms across her chest and stood there, solidly planted, not budging. The mercenary went through the motions of checking Doug’s hard suit, wishing she would go away, knowing she wouldn’t, and telling himself that he’d have to come back when Liebowitz was off duty and some less dedicated technician was on the job.
“When’s your shift end?” he asked as he looked over the seal ring on Doug’s helmet.
“Same’s yours.”
“I’m working directly for Stavenger. No shifts; it’s twenty-four hours a day for me.”
She h’mphed. “Well, I’m on the day shift, as you can see. I finish at four, just like everybody else.”
The mercenary returned the helmet to its rack, above the suit. “How about having dinner with me? Seven o’clock, in The Cave?”
She gave him a quizzical look. The mercenary knew exactly what was going through her mind. Would she want to be seen having dinner with a black man?
“Okay,” she said guardedl
y. “Seven o’clock at The Cave.”
It took him a couple of heartbeats to realize she had accepted. “See you there,” he said, with a genuine smile.
And as he walked away, down the long line of empty spacesuits hanging like medieval arrays of armor with their helmets racked above them, he thought that after dinner with her he’d return and finish the job here.
Stavenger’s going to go outside sooner or later, and when he does, a malfunction in his suit is going to kill him.
Later that day Doug was in Jinny Anson’s office, meeting with the base director and the heads of the mining, transportation and research divisions.
Anson had rearranged the furniture so that the oblong conference table now butted against the desk like the vertical leg of a letter T.
Kris Cardenas was also sitting at the table, across from Zoltan Kadar, the astronomer. No one had invited the Hungarian to this strategy meeting; he had shown up with the others and grabbed a chair before anyone could shoo him away. His precious survey satellite to Farside had been launched the day before, so Doug wondered what he wanted now.
And sitting silently on the couch along the far wall of the office was Bam Gordette, silently watching, listening. He’s become like my shadow, Doug thought. Everywhere I go, he goes. He doesn’t say anything, but he takes in everything with those dark brown eyes, like a detective looking over a crime scene. Then a new thought struck Doug: Maybe Bam thinks he’s my bodyguard. He sure acts like one. The thought made him smile to himself. I don’t need a bodyguard here, not in Moonbase. But it made him feel almost grateful to Gordette for caring enough to act as one.
Doug took the chair at the foot of the table, facing Anson, who sat behind her desk.
“I’ve asked you here—most of you, anyway,” he added, with a wry grin in Kadar’s direction,’to talk over the chances of developing defenses against the next Peacekeeper assault.”
“You think they’ll be back, then,” said Deborah Paine. Head of the research division, she had a frizzy blonde hairdo and an hourglass figure that had driven many men to distraction. She happened to be a very serious biologist, a topflight science administrator, and a cheerful lesbian.
“They’ll be back,” Doug said. “Faure’s delaying any negotiations as much as he can. He’s going to try to take us by force before agreeing to any compromise.”
“We don’t want any compromise, either,” Anson snapped. “It’s independence or bust.”
Harry Clemens, the transportation division chief, clasped both hands behind his bald head and tilted his chair so far back Doug was afraid it would fall over. “So we’ve got to be prepared to defend ourselves, then?”
“That’s right,” said Doug.
“Against what?”
“More Peacekeeper troops,” said Vince Falcone, head of the mining division.
“Worse than that,” Clemens said in his mild, soft way.
“Like what?” Falcone asked.
“One modest nuclear warhead exploded a few hundred meters above the crater floor could knock out all our solar farms.”
Doug countered, “But we’ve still got the nuclear backup. It’s buried—”
“Nuclear warhead number two will be a ground blast, to knock out our generator.”
Falcone nodded solemnly. “The second one doesn’t even have to be a nuclear warhead. Conventional warhead will do, if they’ve got the generator pinpointed.”
“Okay,” said Doug, looking at each of them in turn. “The first thing we’ve got to do is figure out what they can throw at us. Then we’ve got to look for ways to defend ourselves against each possible threat.”
“Lotsa luck,” Falcone grumbled. He was built like a fireplug, with short thick arms and a nearly perpetual scowl on his dark face. Instead of the usual coveralls he preferred to wear dark turtlenecks and comfortable, loosefitting jeans that he jammed into scuffed old cowboy boots.
“There may be a way to defend against a nuclear warhead,” said Deborah Paine.
Doug felt his eyebrows hike halfway to his scalp.
“The physicists have been using the mass driver’s magnets to power a particle accelerator,” Paine said. “If we could focus the beam on an incoming warhead, it could destroy the nuclear device’s switching and fusing mechanisms.”
“Are you sure?” Doug asked.
“It’s actually pretty old stuff,” she replied, “from the antimissile defenses that the Peacekeepers maintain in Earth orbit.”
“So it turns the nuke into a dud, huh?” Falcone asked.
“Yes. The warhead will crash onto the crater floor but the bomb won’t go off.”
“That’d still do some damage to the solar panels,” Clemens pointed out.
“Yeah, but not that many of ’em,” said Falcone.
Doug asked, “Could we actually focus the particle beam that way?”
Paine shrugged. It looked delicious to all the men around the table, even though they knew she didn’t do it for their benefit.
I’ll have to ask the physicists about it,” she said. “We should have plenty of time to aim the beam, if they fire the missile from Earthside. Days.”
“Suppose they take over L-1 and use it as a staging base. They could fire the missile from there.”
Nodding, Paine said, “That would still give us a couple of hours or so, maybe more.”
“Maybe less,” Anson said, “if they fire it at high boost.”
“Maybe.”
Doug turned to Cardenas. “Kris, what are you and Zimmerman developing? Anything useful?”
She sighed. “Willi’s got this bug in his ear about using nanomachines to make a person invisible. I was hoping something practical might come out of it, but so far as I can tell he hasn’t accomplished a thing.”
“And your own work?” Doug prompted.
“We can be a big help medically, of course. As far as weaponry is concerned, I haven’t come up with anything except the gobblers. We can program them to eat metals, if you like.”
“We can’t strew the whole crater floor with gobblers,” Doug said.
“Why not?” Anson shot back. “It’s only be for a short time.”
Doug ticked off on his fingers, “One, they’ll most likely land during daylight—”
“You can program gobblers to operate in sunlight, can’t you?” Anson asked Cardenas.
“It’s more difficult, but doable. I’d worry about deactivating them, though.”
“Two,” Doug went on, “what’s to stop the gobblers from i destroying our solar farms, the launch pads and their equipment, even the mass driver?”
Anson pursed her lips. Then she grinned. “Yeah, it would be like shooting ourselves in the foot, wouldn’t it?”
“Shooting ourselves in the head,” Clemens said, with surprising fervor. Doug realized he wanted no part of nanomachines that ate metals.
Turning in his chair to look at Gordette, Doug asked, “Bam, if you were in charge of the Peacekeepers, how would you go about taking Moonbase?”
Gordette shook his head. “I wasn’t an officer, just a dogface.”
“You’re as close to a general as we’ve got here,” Anson said.
“What do you think they’re going to do?” Doug repeated.
Slowly, reluctantly, Gordette got to his feet. All eyes focused on him. “Well, to begin with, I agree with Mr Clemens.
They’ll start with a bombardment to knock out our electrical power.”
“Nuclear warheads?”
“Most likely. But they might use a conventional warhead for our nuclear generator, if they know its location precisely enough.”
“They’ve got the same maps we use,” Falcone grumbled.
“Then what?” Doug asked.
“Most likely they’d have already landed troops outside the crater, on the Mare Nubium side. They’ll wait for the bombardment, then come over Wodjohowitcz Pass to get into the base.”
Doug saw most of the people around the table nodding agreement.
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“If our electrical power is out, all they’ll have to do is knock on our door. We’ll have to surrender to them.”
“We have the fuel cells,” Anson said.
Gordette shrugged. “How long do they give us? A few days? A few hours? The Peacekeepers will be occupying the crater floor; we’ll have no chance to repair the solar farms. We’ll be forced to give up.”
“A nuclear blast probably’d screw up our radiators, too,” I Falcone pointed out. “We’d be boiling in here inside of a few hours.”
The meeting became grim, depressed. No one could offer a way to counter the scenario Gordette had drawn.
Then Kadar spoke up. “It may not be necessary for the Peacekeepers to destroy so much of our generating equipment.”
“Oh?”
“All they have to do is put some biological agents in the drinking water we bring in from the south polar ice fields.”
“Poison us?” Clemens blurted, looking shocked. Almost smiling, Kadar said, “It wouldn’t have to be fatal. A virus that causes a disabling disease. An especially nasty variation of influenza, for instance. Or viral pneumonia. Brought in through our drinking water.”
“We don’t use that much new water,” Anson pointed out. “Our recycling’s pretty efficient.”
“Perhaps so, but over a time scale of months? They could make us all deathly ill.”
“Do we have to defend the south pole, too?” Anson wondered aloud.
With a shake of his head, Doug replied, “We just don’t have the resources.”
“But we can test the water coming in,” Paine said, “and not allow it into the base supply until we’re satisfied that it’s all right.”
“Or,” Cardenas suggested, “we could run the incoming water through a nanomachine screen, program the nanos to pass only water molecules and divert everything else.”
“That would help,” Doug said.
“They won’t be that subtle,” Gordette said, still standing by the couch. “They won’t want to wait weeks or months for a biological agent to take effect. Besides, they know we’ve got nanomachines that we could use to cure any disease they cause.”
“So it’ll be a direct attack.”
That’s what I think,” Gordette replied. “They’ll land their troops, bomb out our electrical power equipment, and then march in here.”