by Ben Bova
“The timing circuitry must be reset,” Inoguchi said. “This batch of nanomachines—”
“Ruined!” Zimmerman roared, pounding a fist on the lab bench so hard that Inoguchi nearly jumped off his stool. “A microsecond pulse of electricity! Ruined!” He lapsed into German.
Inoguchi could not understand his words, but the tone was painfully clear.
“Power at ninety-two percent.”
Wicksen was inside the cramped shelter again. This time he had not bothered to take off his helmet, he merely slid the visor up.
“Can you goose it higher?” he asked, eyes on the makeshift control board.
“When I do,” the woman replied,’the needle starts wobbling. I think ninety-two’s the best we can do without risking another shorting out.”
“Okay,” Wicksen said softly. “Hold it at ninety-two.”
“Holding and stable.”
“How’s the radar plot?”
The man standing to his left was bent over a screen that displayed a single lurid red spot against a spiderweb of concentric circles.
“Coming straight at us, practically zero deflection,” he said tightly. “Pointing system’s holding good, slaved to the radar.”
Wicksen scanned the board full of gauges and telltale lights: mostly green, a handful of ambers, two reds but they had been cut out of the circuitry.
“Anybody see a reason why we shouldn’t shoot the cannon?”
Dead silence. No sound in the low-ceilinged little shelter except the hum of the electrical equipment.
“Okay. Here goes.” Wicksen leaned on the red firing button.
Nothing in the shelter changed. No new noise, no vibration, no sense of having accomplished anything.
“Power holding steady.”
“Beam collimation looks good.”
“Just hold together, baby,” Wicksen pleaded, almost cooed, like a father urging a baby’s first tottering steps. “Just stay together for another five, six minutes. You can do it, baby, you can last that long. You’re a good little pile of junk, you are, you’re working just fine. Keep it up, baby, keep those protons moving.”
His assistants had never heard Wicksen speak like that, never heard anything remotely like this cooing, coaxing, imploring tone that he was half-whispering, half-singing to the impassive electronics and machinery they had slapped together. They stood in shock for fully five minutes as Wicksen kept up his impromptu lullaby, his supplication, his prayer that the beam gun would work right and do the job they intended it to do.
As the clock on their control board showed five minutes and nine seconds, Wicksen’s female assistant called out, “Starting to get arcing on the main buss.”
Wicksen raised one hand in a gesture of patience.
“It’s going to short out again!”
“Hold it as long as you can,” he said calmly.
Half the needles on the board’s gauges suddenly spun down toward zero.
“It’s gone,” said the man to Wicksen’s right.
“Main buss shorted.”
“Power down,” Wicksen said, with a sigh. “If we haven’t knocked out the nuke’s fusing circuitry by now we never will.”
A small tremor shook the shelter, like the passing of a train nearby.
“Ground impact.”
“Yeah, but did the nuke go off?”
ASSAULT FORCE
Colonel Giap studied the watch built into the keypad on his spacesuit’s wrist. The nuclear bomb should have exploded almost a full minute earlier.
His command center inside the tractor was little more than a windowless metal box shoehorned between the tractor’s cab and its rear bed, where a dozen Peacekeeper troops and the seven suicide volunteers sat wedged together like sardines in a tin.
“Where is the confirmation from L-1?” Giap demanded of tech sergeant in charge of communications.
The sergeant said through the upraised visor of his spacesuit, “L-1 wants to speak to you, sir.”
With an impatient huff, Giap took the laptop comm rig from the sergeant. “We are scheduled to push off in three minutes,” he said sharply. “Where is the confirmation of the nuclear blast?”
The officer’s image in the small, snow-streaked screen looked strained, worried. “There is no confirmation of the blast, sir,” she said, her voice scratchy with static.
“No confirmation!”
“Diagnostics are negative,” the officer said dolefully, “and there is no visual confirmation of the detonation.”
Giap demanded, “Did the bomb go off or not?”
“As far as we can tell, sir, it failed.”
“Failed! Then Moonbase’s electrical power system is still intact.”
“As far as we can tell, sir.”
Giap angrily slammed the laptop shut and shoved it back into the sergeant’s gloved hands. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It would be better if their electrical power was cut off, but it really doesn’t matter. We will march across the mountains and blast open their airlocks if they refuse to surrender to me.
He held up his wrist again. At precisely the second called for in his schedule, he commanded, “Start engines. All vehicles are to move to their assigned locations on the crater floor. Go!’
Grins and thumbs-up gestures filled the control center; the overhead lights were back to full brightness.
“It didn’t go off!” Jinny Anson crowed, exultant, almost jumping up and down.
“Wicksen did it,” said Doug, still only half believing it.
O’Malley got up from the chair beside him. “I’m going to check out the dust dispersal systems one more time. Looks like we’ll need ’em now.” He was grinning broadly as he strode out of the control center.
“Put through a call to Wicksen,” Anson said. “We ought to congratulate him.”
Doug nodded, but asked, “How much damage did the warhead do when it hit the ground?”
A technician’s voice answered, “The bird bullseyed on the central solar farm. Knocked out eleven panels and a main feeder line. Our power capacity is down by two percent.”
“We can live with that,” Anson said quickly.
Yes, Doug thought. We can live with that. We can even fight with that.
In the tight confines of the editing booth, Edith had followed the telescope view of the incoming missile warhead, holding her breath, not daring to speak. But when she saw no flash of an explosion and the warhead clunked into the middle of one of the arrays of solar panels spread across the ground, she whooped an involuntary Texas victory yell.
“It didn’t go off!” she said into her headset microphone, hovering a centimeter from her lips. “Moonbase’s missile defense system worked!”
She reached out across the control board and activated a chip that held a pre-recorded interview with Wicksen, explaining how the particle beam accelerator at the mass driver could be turned into a beam gun. While the canned interview played out, Edith checked with Doug at the control center.
“He’s on another call,” said the comm tech. From the radiant smile on the technician’s face Edith knew that she’d been right; the nuclear warhead hadn’t exploded.
“I just want confirmation from him that the nuke didn’t go off,” Edith explained.
“It didn’t.”
“Yeah, right. But I need to get his handsome face on Global Network for the whole world to see him saying it didn’t go off.”
“I’ll give him your message.”
“Do that,” Edith snapped, feeling nettled. But then she thought, Doug must be up to his scalp in snakes. He won’t have time for the news media.
She put through a call to Wicksen, out at the mass driver, instead.
“I swear to you, Joanna, I knew nothing of this,” said Ibrahim al-Rashid.
He was perched nervously on one of the upholstered chairs in Joanna’s living room. It was two in the morning. Rashid looked baggy-eyed, his clothes hurriedly thrown on. The house was still swarming with police and Master
son Corporation security people. Lev’s body had been taken away, zippered into a black body bag. His murderer’s body, cut almost in half by the submachine gun bullets that had killed him, remained up in her bedroom while the police and security team took fingerprints and photographs.
“He was a Masterson security guard,” Joanna said, her voice venomously low. “He was trying to kill me.”
“Joanna,” Rashid said, almost pleading, “You can’t believe that I had anything to do with this!”
“I don’t know what to believe,” she replied, staring hard at him. She was sitting tensely on the sofa, still wearing nothing more than the silk robe she had pulled on upstairs.
“He must have been a New Morality fanatic,” Rashid said.
“Or an assassin from Yamagata.”
“No! Why would Yamagata want you assassinated?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said tightly. “I intend to find out.”
“I’m so sorry about Lev,” Rashid said, his head drooping. “I liked him.”
“He looked familiar to me,” Joanna murmured.
“Familiar?”
The security guard, the assassin. He’d been around the house for several days and I thought that somehow he looked familiar but I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before.”
“Are you sure…?”
“I should have told the security chief then and there,” Joanna said in a choked whisper, speaking more to herself than to Rashid. “I should have realized something wasn’t right.”
“It isn’t your fault,” Rashid said.
She focused her gray-green eyes on him, like a pair of guns. “Then whose fault is it?”
“Not mine!” Rashid fairly yelped. “Joanna, I know we’ve had our differences over corporate policy, but I would never - I mean, something like this…”
Joanna leaned back against the sofa’s soft pillows. “I want to believe you, Omar. I hope you’re telling me the truth.”
Rashid swallowed visibly. There was nothing he could say to erase the suspicion in her eyes.
“Mrs Brudnoy?” Captain Ingersoll called from the dining room doorway.
She looked up at him. “Yes? What is it?”
Stepping slowly, hesitantly into the living room, Ingersoll held up a hand-sized computer. “I think we’ve made a positive ID on the killer.”
“Who is it?”
Aiming his hand set at the Windowall screen above the fireplace, Ingersoll said, “We ran a computer check on his fingerprints…”
The big screen atop the mantle showed two sets of inky whorls.
“He used to work for the corporation years ago, mostly up at Moonbase.”
The fingerprints were replaced by two photographs: both ID pictures, taken twenty-five years apart.
“Jack Killifer!” Joanna gasped.
“That’s his name,” Ingersoll agreed, nodding. “The photo on the right was taken when he joined our security department, few weeks ago. You can see he trimmed down his hair, darkened it, and grew a moustache.”
“Jack Killifer,” she repeated. “He’s hated me all these years… hated me enough to kill me.”
“You think his motivation was personal, then?” Ingersoll asked.
She glanced at Rashid before answering. The man looked puzzled. Of course, Joanna realized; Omar doesn’t know anything about Killifer or his history.
“Yes,” she said to Ingersoll. “Personal.”
“Can you tell me something about it?” the captain asked.
“Tomorrow,” Joanna said. “Call me tomorrow, around noon.”
“Because we still got a problem here,” Ingersoll went on, slow, measured, not easily deterred.
“A problem?”
“The other security guard, Rodriguez.”
“The one who shot Killifer.”
“Yes’m. He’s nowhere to be found. Apparently took off for parts unknown. We found the stutter gun he used, he left it on the kitchen table, nice and neat. But his car’s gone and him with it.”
Rashid’s brows knit. “Why would he run away?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Ingersoll.
“Tomorrow,” Joanna said firmly.
Ingersoll seemed to think it over for a heartbeat or two, then nodded and walked back into the dining room.
“Omar, thanks for coming over,” Joanna said to Rashid. “I’m sorry if it looked as if I suspected you. It’s been… it’s been a terrible few hours.”
Rashid knew he was being dismissed and he felt grateful for it. Getting to his feet, he asked, “Will you be all right? Do you need anything?”
“My doctor’s here,” she said, remaining seated on the sofa. “He’s already dosed me with tranquilizers and God knows what else. He’ll stay here in the house and there are the servants, of course.”
“Of course,” Rashid murmured, eager to get away, glad that the burning fury of her suspicion had passed over him.
Joanna summoned the butler, who accompanied Rashid to his car, then returned to the living room.
“What else can I do for you?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “That’s all for now. Go get yourself some sleep.”
“And you…?”
“I’ll sleep here,” Joanna said.
“I’ve had the guest suite prepared for you,” the butler suggested.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t want to go upstairs. Not just yet. I’ll sleep here on the sofa. I’ll be fine.”
The butler left, silent as a shadow, then returned a moment later with a downy white blanket and a flowered pillow. Joanna watched him place them on the end of the sofa, then leave the room again.
I should cry, she told herself. I should let it come out. Lev didn’t deserve this. It was me he was after. Lev died trying to save my life.
Instead of crying, she reached over to the phone console and told its voice-recognition system, “Get Seigo Yamagata for me. No intermediaries. This is an emergency call for him and no one else.”
It’s time to end this war, Joanna told herself.
EDITING BOOTH
“Moonbase has survived the Peacekeepers’ missile attack,” Edith was saying into her microphone. “But not unscathed. The first missile destroyed Moonbase’s backup power generator. That was a conventional explosive warhead and it hit the buried generator precisely.”
The display screens running across the top of the control board showed the quiet frenzy of Moonbase’s control center, the crowd milling around in The Cave, a view of the crater floor where Wicksen and his crew were riding back to the main airlock in a jouncing tractor, and the scene from Mount Yeager showing the Peacekeeper assault force’s vehicles trundling up toward Wodjohowitcz Pass.
Selecting the view of Wicksen’s tractor, Edith continued without missing a beat, “The U.N.’s second missile was a nuclear weapon, aimed to wipe out Moonbase’s main electrical power solar panels, which are spread across the floor of the crater. The people here call them solar farms. Thanks to the brilliant work of a handful of scientists and technicians …”
She praised Wicksen and his people, explained how the beam gun had deactivated the nuclear warhead and turned it into a dud.
But her eyes were pinned on the screen showing the Peacekeepers’ vehicles creeping up the outer slope of the ringwall mountains.
Vince Falcone was watching the same view, sitting at a console in the control center. He was sweating, perspiration beading his upper lip and forehead, trickling down his swarthy cheeks.
This has gotta work, he kept telling himself. It’s gotta work. Otherwise they’ll be able to bring their missile launchers right up to our front door and blast it open.
For the twentieth time in the past half-hour he checked the circuitry to the microwave antennas atop Mount Yeager. One of the bright young short-timers had done a computer simulation that showed the microwaves would be reflected by the rock walls of Wodjo Pass and effectively reach all the foamgel goo they had spread there. The rock a
bsorbed some of the microwave energy, of course, but reflected enough to get the job done.
Falcone hoped.
He looked across the row of consoles to where Doug Stavenger was sitting, deep in conversation with somebody on his screens. The kid’s got all this responsibility on his shoulders, Falcone told himself. Least I can do is get this mother-lovin’ foamgel to work.
He returned his attention to the screen showing the approaching Peacekeeper force. And felt a shock race through him.
They’re splitting up! Falcone saw. The vehicles were dividing into two columns, one of them coming up toward Wodjo Pass, but the other snaking around the base of the ringwall mountains toward the steeper notch some two dozen kilometers farther away.
And it looked like a small party was starting out on foot to climb Mount Yeager, where the microwave antennas were.
Stupid shitfaced bastards, Falcone raged, offering the assessment both to the Peacekeepers and his own shortsightedness. They’re only sending part of their forces across Wodjo. The rest of ’em will get through without being stopped by the goo. And if they knock out the antennas up on Yeager the goo won’t do us any fucking good at all.
The earphone of the headpiece clamped over his thickly curling hair suddenly crackled. “Vince, this is Doug Stavenger. They’ve divided their force.”
“Yeah, I can see it.”
“It looks like that second group’s heading for the northwest notch.”
“And they’re sending a team up Yeager.”
“They’re going to get through with no trouble, aren’t they?”
Falcone nodded bitterly. “Even if we could spray some goo over that pass the microwaves from Yeager couldn’t reach it. Assuming they don’t disable the antennas before we want to us ’em.”
“Well, what can we do?” Doug asked.
Falcone wished he had an answer.
We should have known they’d split their forces, Doug raged at himself. I should’ve figured that the Peacekeepers wouldn’t send their whole force through Wodjo. That was wishful thinking, nothing but wishful thinking.
“It’s not so bad,” Gordette said, pulling up a chair to sit beside him.