by Ben Bova
“Mustn’t kill…?”
“How can we fight ’em if we can’t kill ’em?”
Edith edged forward slightly in her seat. “The worst thing you can do, the absolute worst, is to kill any of the Peacekeepers.”
Doug realized what she was driving at. “Captain Munasinghe,” he muttered.
“Right. Faure tried to make a martyr out of him, tried to use him to work up public opinion against you.”
“But he killed himself,” Debbie Paine said. “It wasn’t our fault.”
“Okay,” said Edith. “Now imagine what happens if you cook a hundred Peacekeeper troops. Picture what the media Earthside will do with that.”
Silence descended on the office again, gloomier and deeper than before.
“We’ve been working for weeks now to present Moonbase’s side of this story to the media, the weak little guys being bullied by the big, bad U.N. and Peacekeepers,” Edith said. “And it’s starting to work. Public relations polls in the States and Europe show that the people are rooting for us and against the U.N.”
“With that and five bucks I can buy a cup of coffee,” Falcone grumbled.
“Your claim of independence is coming up before the World Court in a few months,” Edith went on. “You need to have the best possible public image.”
“And that means we can’t kill the soldiers attacking us?” Anson demanded.
“That’s exactly what it means,” said Edith heatedly. “Right now a lot of people Earthside are on your side. The underdog always get sympathy. But you start sending body bags back to Earth and your support will evaporate damned quick.”
“So we could win the battle and lose the war,” Doug said.
Nodding, Edith answered, “That’s what it comes down to. Kill Peacekeeper troops and you’ll just convince everybody Earthside that Faure is right. They’ll come at you with still more troops. Or missiles, or whatever it takes to wipe you out.”
“So we can’t kill the Peacekeepers,” Falcone muttered, unbelievingly.
“Then how do we keep them from taking over?” Anson wondered aloud.
Doug echoed her. “How can we win the battle without killing any of the enemy?”
“Damned good question,” Clemens murmured.
For long moments no one said a word. Finally Doug turned to Gordette.
“Bam, how can you stop soldiers without killing them?”
They all turned to Gordette, still sitting by the door. Doug saw the distrust, the outright repugnance on their faces; he wondered what Gordette saw, what he felt.
Gordette looked them over with a gaze that swept the small, crowded office. Then, turning to face Doug squarely, he said, “You’ll have to incapacitate them.”
“How?”
Gordette cocked his head to one side, thinking. “They’ll all be in spacesuits. They’ll be linked by their suit radios. Can you jam their communications?”
Doug said, “We ought to be able to do that.”
“If they can’t talk back and forth they’ll lose their cohesiveness. Instead of a battalion they’ll be a handful of individuals.”
“Like ants!” Paine exclaimed. “One ant by itself is pretty useless. But a whole nest of them can mount an invasion of another nest.”
“Cut off their communications,” Doug repeated.
“Not enough,” said Falcone. “You’ll still have few hundred soldiers armed with guns and whatnot. They can be directed by hand signals, for chrissakes.”
“Not if they are blind,” rumbled Zimmerman.
“What?”
“I have been stupid,” Zimmerman said, shaking his jowly head. “Invisible I cannot make you… but I can make them blind!”
“Blind them? How?”
“Simple,” said the professor. “Let them come into our tunnels. We fill the air with nanomachines that cling to their visors and darken them so they cannot see.”
Doug immediately asked, “Can the bugs cling to their suits, too? Jam up their joints, immobilize them?”
“Like the dust outside!” Anson said.
“Yah! Better than dust,” Zimmerman replied. “My nanos will turn them into statues!”
“But only once they’re inside the base, in the corridors,” Clemens said.
“Yah. The nanos must have air to float in.”
“So we can make them deaf, dumb and blind,” Falcone said.
“And immobile,” Cardenas added.
“Freeze ’em in their tracks,” said Anson.
“Can you produce these nanos in a week?” Doug asked.
For the first time since Doug had known the old man, Zimmerman’s fleshy face looked uncertain. “One week? Not possible! But I will try.”
Doug nodded, but he though that it was awfully risky to allow the Peacekeepers into the base in the hopes that Zimmerman’s nanobugs could neutralize them. Assuming Zimmerman could make the bugs and they worked as advertised. Even then, everything depended on Wix’s beam gun stopping the incoming nuke. And Falcone’s foamgel stopping the Peacekeepers’ heavy equipment up at Wodjohowitcz Pass.
One untested idea on top of another, Doug realized. And if any of the Peacekeepers gets killed, we’ve lost everything.
NIPPON ONE
Colonel Giap tried to suppress the distaste he felt for the Yamagata volunteer.
The man was Japanese, short and wiry, quite young. He had an air of superiority about him, an aura of other-worldliness, as if all of Giap’s responsibilities and worries did not matter at all.
The slow build-up of three hundred Peacekeeper troops -and these seven special volunteers—had strained Nippon One’s facilities to the breaking point. Never a large or comfortable base, its cramped little compartments were now jammed with the extra personnel. Four people were sleeping in cubicles designed for one. Peacekeeper troops even slept in the tunnels on thin foam mattresses or tatami mats.
Giap’s ‘office’ was a storage bin that had been half-emptied by the enormous drain on the base’s logistics. We had better move on Moonbase within the week, the colonel told himself. There will be no food left for us in eight days.
He looked directly into the dark brown eyes of the Yamagata volunteer and saw a placidity, an almost amused sense of superiority. This man is actually looking forward to his death, Giap realized. Then he wondered how much of his bravery of fanaticism came from narcotics. The Sacred Seven, as the suicide volunteers called themselves, lived by themselves, crammed into a single cubicle; they had brought their own food and drink. And so-called medicines.
Three Japanese, three Americans, and an Iranian made up the Sacred Seven. One of the Americans was a woman. All of them were either serenely other-worldly, as their leader was, or brittle and wired, with eyes that glittered with the burning intensity of fanaticism. All of them wore a shoulder patch that showed a fist clutching a bolt of lightning.
There was no space for a desk in the compartment. The two men sat on the floor, cross-legged, facing one another barely centimeters apart, Giap in his light blue uniform, the Japanese volunteer in a gym suit—with the shoulder patch. Above them rose stacks of half-empty shelving. Giap’s personal computer, hardly bigger than his fist, lay on the bare stone floor at his side.
“My orders,” Giap was saying, “are to capture Moonbase intact.”
“If possible,” the volunteer added.
Giap seethed inwardly at the man’s smug attitude. He knows what my orders are. Someone has been leaking the information to him.
“It will not only be possible,” Giap hissed, “but inevitable.”
“Assuming all goes according to your plan.”
“My plan is very thorough.”
“Of course,” said the volunteer airily. “However, should the assault fail, for any reason, my team will destroy Moonbase for you.”
“And destroy yourselves in the doing of it.”
“That is nothing. To give our lives in the service of God is the greatest good.”
Giap wondered whose go
d this man thought he was serving. These zealots all professed loyalty to the New Morality even though their individual religions must obviously be different from one another.
“I want you to understand that you are not to make any move whatsoever unless and until I order it,” Giap said.
The volunteer nodded benignly.
“You and your people are under my command. You will obey my orders.”
“Yes, of course. But you will assign a squad of your troops to help us open up the old plasma exhaust vents.”
It was not a question, Giap knew.
“Yes, as soon as we have secured the main garage area,” he replied.
“Good. Then we will climb into the vents and make our way to the key Moonbase facilities: the water factory, the environmental control center, the control center, the farm, and the nanolabs. I myself and one of the Americans will knock out the nanolabs.”
“Only if I order it,” Giap insisted.
“Of course,” said the volunteer, with his maddening patient smile. “We will need your troopers’ assistance to climb up into the vents, won’t we?”
Giap nodded slowly. The volunteers will each be carrying a hundred kilos of high explosive. Not an easy burden to shoulder in a spacesuit, he knew.
Suicide bombers. The idea rankled him. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command did not trust him to capture Moonbase. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command was working for the New Morality in addition to the corporation. Whoever it was had added these insane volunteers to make certain that Moonbase would be eliminated if it couldn’t be taken intact.
SAVANNAH
The two women were taking lunch on the patio, shaded by a pair of ancient oaks and cooled by a breeze generated from hidden fans built into the brick walls that edged the meticulously cultivated garden of show flowers.
Joanna Brudnoy wore a light sundress of rose pink; Jill Meyers a tailored blouse and knee-length skirt. They had known each other since Jill had been a NASA astronaut working with Paul Stavenger in the very earliest lunar shelters that eventually became Moonbase; long enough so that neither felt the need to try to impress the other.
“We’re in summer recess now,” Jill Meyers said.
“And how long will that last?” Joanna asked, glancing out at the two men working in the garden. One of them actually was a gardener, the other a security guard in disguise.
Jill gave her a freckle-nosed grin. “The International Court of Justice has its own calendar, Jo. Officially, it’ll stay summer until November, when we reconvene.”
“And that’s when you’ll hear Moonbase’s petition?”
Justice Meyers nodded.
“Isn’t there any way of hearing it sooner?” Joanna pleaded. “A special session, perhaps?”
“I tried, Jo,” said Jill. “I went all-out, but I got outvoted, ten to five.”
Joanna toyed absently with the salad in front of her. “Is that how they’ll vote in November, do you think?”
“No, not at all. They just didn’t want to go to the trouble of a special session, that’s all.” Before Joanna could comment, Jill added, “And they’re waiting to see if Moonbase can last until November. If Moonbase survives that long, it’ll be a strong indication that they really can be independent.”
Joanna let go of her fork and it clinked against the glass dish. “Faure’s going to attack them again any day now.”
Nodding, Jill agreed, “That’s what I hear, too.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
“I talked with the President. She’s not going to lift a finger.”
“We’ve been putting as much pressure on our Senators as we can,” Joanna said. “But Moonbase is a private operation, not part of the government.”
“There’s not much they can do about it,” Jill said.
“But there must be something!”
“Wait,” Jill said gently. “Wait and pray.”
Joanna eyed her. “You sound like a New Morality convert.”
Jill took it with a smile. “You don’t have to be a New Morality fanatic to believe in the power of prayer, Jo.”
Several miles away, in the riverfront headquarters of Masterson Corporation, Jack Killifer sat tensely in one of the tight little stalls that passed for offices among the corporation’s personnel department employees.
“I’m taking an awful chance, Mr Killifer,” said the young woman sitting at the desk. She spoke in a near whisper; the padded partitions that marked off her tiny space did not extend all the way to the ceiling. Soft music purred from the hand-sized radio on her desk next to her computer monitor screen.
“Like I’m not?” Killifer snapped, low enough to avoid eavesdroppers, he hoped. His appearance had changed: his gray pony tail was gone; now his hair was dark and clipped short, military style. He had also grown a bushy moustache that he had darkened to match his hair.
“I found your personnel record,” she said, looking worried, “but, lord’s sake, it’s almost nine years old!”
“I don’t want my old record,” he almost snarled. “I want you to generate a new one.”
“But that would be a total fabrication.”
“So what?”
“What if my supervisor checks on it? What could I say?”
Killifer had thought it all out beforehand. “I won’t be around long enough for anybody to notice. A week, maybe less.”
“It’s an awful risk,” she repeated. “For both of us.”
“No risk at all for you,” Killifer said, getting fed up with her fears. “If anybody complains you just tell ’em I showed you documentation.”
“Documentation?”
Killifer pulled a thin sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket. They were not forged, since they were written by a bona fide personnel executive from the Urban Corps’ headquarters in Atlanta. The information in them, however, was completely false.
“Here, scan these into your records before you piss yourself.”
“Sir!”
Killifer sighed. These damned New Morality uptights. Can’t even spit without them getting wired over it.
“Forgive me,” he said.
“Forgiveness is the Lord’s work,” she chanted. Then she turned to her keyboard and activated the scanner.
Good, Killifer thought as he handed her the falsified personnel documents. By the time I walk out of here I’ll be on the payroll as a member of the Masterson security staff. If this uptight little broad doesn’t faint on me first.
MASS DRIVER
“Everything takes longer to do in these suits.” Wicksen’s voice was calm, not complaining, not making excuses; it was as if he were reading a report aloud.
Doug watched the men working at the end of the mass driver. While those who worked on the surface regularly had personalized their spacesuits one way or another, Wicksen’s physicists and technicians were in unmarked, anonymous suits straight off the standby racks.
At Doug’s insistence, a team of construction engineers was building a makeshift shelter for Wicksen’s people a few dozen meters from where they were busily putting together the equipment for the beam gun. Like one of the old tempos, the shelter was dug into the ground and would be covered with loose rubble from the regolith. Wicksen and his assistants could run the beam gun from there. Maybe the shelter would protect them from the radiation of a nuclear explosion, if the gun didn’t work.
“How’s it going?” Doug asked.
“Slowly,” said Wix. “But we’re making progress. We connected the beam collimator this morning. By tomorrow the aiming circuitry should be functional. Day after tomorrow, at the latest.”
“And then you’re ready to shoot?”
Wicksen’s flat, unruffled voice came through Doug’s helmet earphones, “Then we’ll be ready to see if anything really works. After testing the assembly we can power up the magnets and see if the circuitry can handle the load without shorting out.”
“But your calculations—”
“Mat
hematics doesn’t necessarily reflect the real world,” Wicksen said. “Physics is more than numbers in a computer.”
“Oh. I see.”
“I remember when I was a kid in high school, we had a volunteer teacher’s aide come in and help us in our science class. He was retired, used to be a big-time physicist. His daughter was a famous folk singer.”
Doug wondered what this had to do with the defense of Moonbase, but hesitated to interrupt Wicksen.
“He took us out to the gym and attached a bowling ball to one of the climbing ropes. The rope was hanging from a beam ’way up on the ceiling. Then he carried the bowling ball up to the top tier of the benches where we sat during the basketball games.”
“What was he doing?” Doug asked, curious despite himself.
“Teaching us physics. The law of pendulums. He held that big old bowling ball a centimeter in front of his nose, and then let it go.”
“And?”
“It swung on that rope all the way across the gym, like a cannonball, then swung right back toward him again. We all started to yell to him to duck, to get out of the way. But he just stood there and grinned at us.”
Wicksen paused dramatically. Doug waited for him to finish the story.
“The bowling ball stopped a centimeter in front of his nose, then started swinging back again. And he said, “See? It works that way every time. That’s physics!” And I was hooked for life.”
Doug thought he understood. “The demonstration was a lot more convincing than reading the equations about pendulums, right?”
“Right,” said Wicksen. “Of course, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. You’ve got to release the bowling ball without pushing it even the slightest little bit. If you push it, it’ll come back and smash your head in.”
“Is the gun going to work?” Doug asked.
He could sense Wicksen trying to shrug inside his suit. “We don’t know. All the equations check out, but we won’t know until we try it.”
“And you probably won’t get a chance to try it until a nuclear warhead is falling on our heads.”