by Ben Bova
“Hell you will. You’ll be over the horizon even for the antennas up on Yeager.”
They were passing the crater’s central peaks, Doug saw, where the astronomical center was located. Jinny’s transmission was already starting to break up.
“Okay, then,” he said into his helmet mike. “I’ll call you when we’re coming back.”
“I’m sending a security team out after you,” Anson said, a faint whisper being drowned in crackles and hisses.
“No!” he snapped. “No need for that.”
“Can’t hear you, boss,” Anson said through the growing interference. “You’re breaking up too much.”
Doug clicked from the long-range frequency to the suit-to-suit freak. “She’s pretty smart, Jinny is,” he said to Edith. “Knows how to use the systems.”
“I feel better knowing there’s a security team backing us up.”
“By three hours or so,” Doug said.
“What makes you think she waited until now to send them out?”
Doug felt his brows rise. “You’re pretty smart yourself, you know.”
Edith replied, “You’re just figuring that out?”
She could see Gordette’s tractor trail easily now that there were no other cleat marks chewing up the regolith. No one’s been out here in a long time, she thought.
“Tempo six was one of the original shelters my father built,” Doug explained. “Before they decided where the permanent base would be sited they dug shelters into a dozen spots on the crater floor and outside the ringwall on Mare Nubium.”
“Do you think Gordette has really stopped there?” Edith asked.
She waited for several moments before Doug replied, “I don’t know. I can’t understand why he headed this far away from the base. There aren’t any easy passes over the ringwall up in this region. If he wanted to get out of Alphonsus, Wodjo Pass around Yeager would be the easiest way.”
“Maybe he’s going to meet somebody or get picked up, something like that,” Edith said.
“Maybe.”
She went on, “That’d mean he’ll have other people with him, wouldn’t it?”
“If they’ve been waiting for him at the tempo, yeah, maybe.”
“Then we’re steering ourselves right into a trap, Doug. He’s tried to murder you twice. You’re giving him another shot at it.”
A longer silence this time. Edith stared at Doug’s space-suited figure, trying to peer through it to see the man inside. All she saw was the cermet suit, like armor, and the strange metal pistons of the muscle amplifiers on the backs of his gloves, like a skeleton’s hands, but made of metal rather than bone.
“Jinny didn’t say there are any other vehicles parked at the tempo,” he said at last. “I don’t think anybody else is there.”
Then why did he stop there?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” he said.
“Why don’t you wait for the security team to catch up with us?” Edith urged.
“I can’t let him get away. He can tell the Peacekeepers exactly how to knock out our electrical power and take over the base.”
“You don’t think they know that already?”
“Bam knows what we’ve been doing, what we’ve been thinking. I can’t let him tell it all to the Peacekeepers.”
“Doug, you’re full of bullshit,” she said, feeling anger rising in her. “You’re acting like some macho gunslinger who’s got to face down the bad guy all by himself.”
“It’s not that, Edith.”
“The hell it isn’t. You’re going to get yourself killed, and me too.”
“No! I—” Doug realized there was some truth in Edith’s accusation. He turned to look at her and saw only the reflection of his own blank visor in the dim Earthlight.
“At least wait for the security team,” she repeated.
“Edith… I trusted him. I thought I saw a man I could rely on. I don’t why he tried to kill me—”
“Because he’s an agent from the U.N.,” Edith snapped. “Or Yamagata, more likely.”
“Or maybe the nanoluddites,” Doug heard himself agree. “I never thought of that before, but maybe they were able to infiltrate Moonbase, after all.”
“Then why confront him?”
Yes, why? Doug asked himself. The man’s a murderer, a hired assassin, maybe a nanoluddite fanatic. So what if he can tell the Peacekeepers about the pitiful defenses we’re trying to set up? Big deal. They’re going to walk in here and take over the base no matter what you do.
Then he thought of Tamara and how he helplessly watched Killifer rape and kill her. Murderer! his conscience shrieked. You let him murder her while you stood by as impotent as a baby. He saw Killifer’s smug, hateful face, the glint in his eyes, the snarl of his voice. I’ll find him, Doug told himself. I’ll track him down wherever he is and kill him. I’ll rip his guts out. I’ll tear him apart.
But Killifer’s a half-million kilometers away, on a world you’ll never return to. Gordette’s within reach; you’ll be face-to-face with him soon. Are you going to kill Bam? Are you going to make him pay for Killifer? Why not? What difference does it make? They’re all killers, all murderers. It’s time to start paying them back. Time to even the score.
Yet another voice in his head spoke: I liked Bam. We could have become good friends, in time. He seemed so steady, so focused, like a big brother…
And then Doug remembered. “Greg tried to kill me, too.”
“What?” Edith asked.
“Maybe it’s me. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.”
“What’re you talking about, Doug?”
“My older brother, Greg—half-brother, really—he went berserk and tried to wipe out the whole base. He wanted to kill me, just like Bam does.”
“What happened to him?”
“I killed him,” Doug said, the memories choking his voice. “I didn’t want to, but there was no other way…”
It was Edith’s turn to fall silent. Doug steered the tractor automatically, following the bright cleat marks in the eons-darkened regolith, remembering, remembering.
“So you want to confront Gordette to bring your brother back, is that it?” she asked at last.
Doug shook his head inside his helmet. “No, I don’t think so.” Then he had to admit, “I don’t really know, Edith. It’s just something I’ve got to do.”
Yet he could not erase the sight of Killifer’s leering, twisted face.
Georges Faure found the three-second lag in communications with the Moon especially aggravating. How can one conduct a proper conversation when there is such a wait between words?
“One week,” the Peacekeeper colonel said at last, in reply to Faure’s question. “Ten days, at the outside.”
“Why so long, Colonel Giap?” Faure inquired. “Why not tomorrow?”
And now we wait again, the secretary-general fumed, staring at the colonel’s image on his desktop screen.
Colonel Giap’s face was a study in oriental patience: calm, expressionless; his hooded eyes showed no emotion whatsoever.
“You have your full complement of troops,” Faure blurted, not waiting for the colonel’s reply. “All the weapons have been delivered, have they not?”
Giap might have been a statue of teak, for all the response he showed. Faure fidgeted in his swivel chair, fighting the urge to pick up one of the mementos adorning his desk and fling it into the phone screen.
“The battalion is now at full strength, quite so,” the colonel said at last, “and all our logistics are in place. Also, the special force that Yamagata Industries organized has arrived.”
“Then why do you wait? Strike! Strike now!”
The colonel had not stopped talking: “…necessary to train the combined team in the precise tactics we will use to take Moonbase. Also, all of the troops must become fully acclimatized to the lower gravity here on the Moon and to working in spacesuits. It is crucial that they are able to function as easily and as we
ll as they would on Earth, even in spacesuits.”
Faure sank back in his chair as the colonel painstakingly reviewed every step of his planned conquest of Moonbase: the deployment of the Peacekeeper troops outside Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains; the nuclear strike that will knock out Moonbase’s solar power farms; the missile with the penetrating warhead to destroy their buried nuclear generator; the routes over the ringwall and across the crater floor to the base itself, the assault on the main airlock and the penetration of the base’s corridors, the seizure of Moonbase’s key nerve centers.
“By the time we enter their corridors,” Giap was reciting from his action plan,’the people in Moonbase will have less than an hour’s worth of electrical power available to them. They must either surrender to us or die of asphyxiation.”
“What if they decide to blow themselves up?” Faure demanded. “A final grand suicidal gesture of defiance.”
When Giap finally heard the question he almost smiled. “That is most unlikely. Psychological profiles of all Moonbase personnel have been made available to us, through the Masterson Corporation. Those people are not fatalists. Suicide, even on an individual basis, would never occur to them.”
Faure nodded agreement. He had personally requested the psychological files from Ibrahim al-Rashid. Nominally, the files belonged to the Kiribati Corporation, but it was apparently a simple thing for Rashid to appropriate them through Masterson’s computers.
Giap continued, “However, the special Yamagata force is quite ready for its suicide mission, if our frontal assault is not immediately successful.”
Faure knew that Yamagata’s special force had been recruited from nanoluddite fanatics in Japan and elsewhere.
“We will bring two nuclear power generators in tractors over Wodjohowitcz Pass and offer to provide electrical power,” Colonel Giap went on, “in the event that Moonbase surrenders to us.”
“And if they refuse?”
Again the infernal wait. “We will walk in and take the base. Failing that, the special Yamagata force will destroy the air and water systems, the control center, farms and nanolabs.”
Faure signed deeply. There will be nothing left of Moonbase after that, he thought. But what of it? Yamagata wants Moonbase taken intact, but it will be better if it is wiped out of existence altogether.
Now, if only the colonel would start his troops moving at once. Why wait? Strike swiftly.
Yet he said nothing. He had ordered the Peacekeepers to strike swiftly the first time and it had turned out to be a fiasco.
But this time will be different, Faure told himself. Looking into Colonel Giap’s expressionless eyes, Faure concluded that the colonel’s plan would work, and he should not meddle in the tactical decisions. Moonbase would be brought to its knees within a week to ten days.
Or destroyed utterly.
DAY FORTY-FOUR
“Do they have toilets in the tempos?” Edith asked.
Startled out of his inner thoughts, Doug replied, “Yes. Sure.”
“Good.”
“There’s a vacuum toilet behind the seats,” he said, jerking a gloved thumb over his shoulder. “Kind of tricky using it, but the toilet hatch connects to the port in your suit.”
“How long will it be before we get to the tempo?”
Doug glanced at the electronic map on the tractor’s dashboard. “Less than an hour.”
“I’ll wait, then.”
Looking at his wrist displays, Doug saw it was after midnight. Neither of them had slept. For the past few hours Doug had been wrestling with his inner demons, wondering why he was driving himself to confront Gordette. Why not just give up? he kept asking himself. Yet something inside him refused to. He couldn’t let Killifer win without at least trying to fight back.
“You want me to drive a while?” Edith asked.
“I’m not tired.”
“You certain? Aren’t you sleepy? I sure am.”
“Crank your seat back and catch a few winks,” Doug suggested.
Edith tried; whether she fell asleep or not, Doug could not tell. Steering the tractor was fairly easy; it was built to clamber over rocks and across craterlets, like a tank. Doug followed the bright marks of Gordette’s trail, which avoided the boulders and deeper pits scattered across the crater floor.
He saw a rille snaking off to the left, like a narrow riverbed waiting for water. You’ve been waiting a while, haven’t you? Doug asked silently. Four billion years, give or take a week.
In the dark lunar night the stars were like dust strewn across the bowl of the sky. He could see them gleaming at him right down to the chopped-off horizon.
One star in particular seemed to beckon. Red, bright, hovering just over the horizon straight ahead.
Doug realized it was the beacon light atop the radio mast of tempo six.
We’ll be there in half an hour, he told himself.
Then what?
Doug took in a deep double lungful of canned air. We’ll find out when we get there.
In the airlessness of the Moon Gordette won’t hear us coming up, if he’s inside the tempo. The first warning he’ll get is when I start the airlock cycling. I’ll park the tractor and let Edith keep on sleeping. No sense getting her involved in whatever’s going to happen inside when I confront Bam. Things could get messy.
All of a sudden they were there. The dark hump of dirt that marked the site of the buried shelter loomed in front of Doug’s straining eyes. A single tractor was parked to one side of the airlock.
Doug stopped his tractor and looked over at Edith. Not a stir from her. Good, he thought, she’s sound asleep.
He climbed down slowly from the cab and walked over to the other tractor. One set of fresh boot prints in the sandy regolith led straight to the airlock. Bam’s in there. Alone.
Okay, Doug told himself. This is it.
A gentle slope led down to the airlock’s outer hatch. No wind on the Moon to cover the grade with newly-blown dust; it would remain clear for eons, except for the occasional tracks of boots. Doug slid the hatch open and stepped into the phonebooth-sized airlock. He closed the outer hatch, sealed it, then pressed a thumb against the electronic pad that activated the pumps. The telltale light above the pad immediately went from red to amber.
It seemed to take an eternity. Doug could feel the vibration of the pump working against the soles of his boots, but for several long moments he could hear nothing. Then, as the chamber filled with air, the chugging of the pumps became audible.
He knows he’s got a visitor, Doug thought, clenching his fists involuntarily. The tiny whine of the gloves’ servomotors surprised him and he unflexed his hands. It took an effort of will.
The light turned green. Doug slid the inner hatch open.
Gordette stood at the far end of the shelter, by the two tiers of bunks. He was apparently putting his spacesuit on again; torso, leggings and boots were in place. His helmet rested on one of the lower bunks. Doug could not see his gloves.
Gordette’s brows knit as he recognized the cermet suit that he had once sabotaged.
“Who the fuck are you and what’re you doing in that suit?”
Doug slid his visor up. “It’s me, Bam.”
The man shuddered visibly. He staggered back a step and leaned against the bunks for support.
“You’re dead! I killed you!”
“You tried,” Doug said, stepping further into the shelter. “Why?”
“Stay away from me!”
“Why did you try to kill me, Bam?”
Gordette’s eyes showed white all around the irises. “I cut your fuckin’ throat!”
Doug sighed. “The nanomachines inside me. They closed the wound and kept me from bleeding to death.”
“That’s not possible!”
“Of course it is. There’s nothing supernatural here, Bam. No magic. Just those little nanobugs.”
With the spacesuit on, it was impossible to see Gordette’s chest rising and falling. But his mou
th hung open, panting.
“Why’d you want to kill me, Bam? What did I do to you that you wanted to murder me?”
For several heartbeats Gordette said nothing, did not move. Then he sagged down onto the lower bunk.
“It wasn’t you,” he said, sinking his head into his hands. “Had nothing to do with you.”
“It was me you tried to kill.”
“You or me, man. Life or death. I had to do it. Had to. One of us had to go. I should’ve slit my own throat; been better that way.”
“Why?” Doug asked again. “Why did you have to do it?”
“I’m a soldier. I follow orders. Or else.”
“You were sent here to kill me?”
Gordette looked up at Doug with reddened eyes. “You know that little shit Faure’s been planning this for years.”
“You work for the U.N.? The Peacekeepers?”
“Naw. I get paid by Washington. Special security forces. They pulled me out of the army. Trained me to be an assassin.”
“You’ve killed other people?”
His face looked awful. That’s my profession, man. That’s what they trained me to do. Either that or spend my life in jail.”
“Why jail?”
He laughed bitterly. “Why else? I killed somebody. It was an accident but I did it and the only way to stay out of jail was to go into the army. They always held that over me; do what they want or they send me to jail for life. No parole. No sweetheart minimum-security farm, either. Jail. In with the perverts and the maniacs.”
Doug unfastened his helmet, pulled it off over his head, then walked the length of the narrow shelter to sit on the bunk opposite Gordette. He placed the helmet on the bedsheet beside him.
“Okay, Bam. That’s all over now. You can live here. You can be free of them.”
The black man stared into Doug’s eyes. “Live at Moonbase?”
That’s right.”
“I tried to kill you and you’re offering me asylum?”
That’s what Moonbase is all about, Bam. A place to build a new life.”
Gordette said nothing, but his expression showed doubt, suspicion, scorn.
“I’m a fugitive, too,” Doug said. “On Earth I’d be a marked man waiting for some nanoluddite fanatic to assassinate me. On the Moon I can live—”