by Ben Bova
Everything took so damnably long! Commands had to be relayed from one officer to the next, down the chain of command, one person at a time. Fuming inside his spacesuit, Giap summoned a sergeant from the squad waiting as reserves.
Not bothering with the comm line, Giap pressed his helmet against the sergeant’s, like embracing a loved one.
“Sergeant, pick six troopers and bring them to me. I will use them as runners.”
“Runners, sir?”
“To carry messages, fool!”
“Ah! Runners! Yes, sir. Right away, sir.” The sergeant was still babbling as he headed back to his squad.
Everything slowed down to the pace of a nightmare. Giap ordered a runner to find out what the captain was doing at the airlock hatches. It took long minutes before the woman came back, puffing, picked up the colonel’s comm line and plugged it into her own helmet.
“The captain says the inner airlock hatches are closed, but they don’t appear to be locked or sealed. He thinks he can open them manually.”
“Why hasn’t he already opened them?” Giap demanded.
“He’s waiting for your orders, sir.”
“Tell him to open those hatches and get the second wave into the base! And I want a report on what the first wave has accomplished.”
“Yessir.”
The trooper hustled off across the garage floor, looking to Giap more like a white humpbacked alien cyclops than a human being.
Edging closer to the wide-open hatch of the main airlock, Giap once again put his binoculars to his visor. It took agonizingly long, but at last the sergeant seemed to have gotten his order across to the captain. Gesticulating severely, the captain motioned one of his troopers to work the controls of the inner airlock hatch.
Giap saw the trooper step into the metal chamber and tap a button. At last! he thought, as the inner hatch started to slide open.
A ghostly gray mist seemed to waft out of the darkness from beyond the hatch. The trooper inside the airlock, the captain standing just outside it, the runner and several other troopers nearby began to paw at their visors. Giap watched as they staggered backward, gloved hands swiping at their visors like people trying to knuckle dust from their eyes.
Then they stretched their arms out, tottering uncertainly like blind men. The captain bumped into the runner and fell backwards in a dreamy, lunar slow motion until his rump bounced on the smooth rock floor of the garage.
Horrified, Giap shouted inside his helmet, “What’s happened to them? They act as if they’re blind!”
CONTROL CENTER
“It’s working!” Anson said excitedly.
Doug nodded without taking his eyes off the console screens. The Peacekeepers inside the tunnels were truly deaf, dumb and blind now. Helpless. Even a few out in the garage had been blinded by the dust when they’d opened one of the inner airlock hatches.
“You did it!” Doug called over to O’Malley. He grinned boyishly and his cheeks reddened slightly.
“Are your people suited up?” Doug asked Anson.
“Ready to go,” she replied.
He felt a touch on his shoulder and, turning in the little wheeled chair, saw Edith smiling wearily down at him.
“They cut me off,” she said tiredly, her voice raw and cracking.
“You did a great job, Edith,” Doug said, clutching her hand. “A wonderful job.”
“You’ll get an Emmy,” Anson said, patting her shoulder.
“A Cronkite,” Edith croaked. “It’s more prestigious.”
“Whatever.” Anson pulled up a chair at the next console and slipped a headset over her blonde curls.
Gordette slid a chair to Edith, who half-collapsed into it. “I forgot to time myself,” she complained hoarsely. “I don’t have the exact number for how long I was on the air nonstop.”
“We’ll dig it out of the computer,” Doug said.
“Might be a record.”
“You ought to get some rest. Go back to our quarters and take a nap. You’ve earned it.”
“No,” she murmured. “I want to stay here and see it all. I need a couple of cameras…”
The security cameras are logging everything that’s going on in here. Grab a bite at The Cave and then get some rest.”
“I’ve got to go back to the studio. Get a camera. You guys ought to be immortalized for future generations and good ol’ Global News.”
Before Doug could stop her, Edith got to her feet and stumbled toward the door.
He watched her briefly, feeling a sudden urge to get up and put his arm around her, help her, share the comfort of closeness. But he fought it down and turned back to his screens. He had more important things to do.
Jansen fought down the urge to unseal his visor. He could see nothing, hear nothing, and no one could see or hear him, he was certain. It was scary. If only I could see! On Earth, he would have night vision goggles and infrared systems attached to his battle helmet. But they wouldn’t fit inside a spacesuit so the battle helmets had been left aside.
Something inside him was starting to shake. Lost. Alone. No one to give him orders. No one to tell him what to do. Maybe the others are all dead! Or maybe they all got out okay; you might be the only one left in the tunnel.
An enticing voice in his head urged, Just open up the visor and see what’s happening out there.
But he knew the tunnel he was in had no air in it. Open your visor and you kill yourself.
But I’ve got to do something! his mind screamed. I can’t just stand here, blind and deaf. Maybe I can feel my way out, back to the garage…
He tried a few steps, holding his arms out stiffly in front of him like a blind man. His gloved hands touched something solid and smooth. A wall. Which way to the outside? he asked himself. He started walking along the wall, keeping one hand on its reassuring solidity, taking small, frightened, hesitant steps.
And bumped into another figure. He stepped back and tripped over something: someone’s legs, a body on the floor, he had no idea what it was. He lost his balance and began to fall in the slow, nightmarish languid gravity of the Moon.
He sprawled on the tunnel floor, yelling and cursing, tangled in somebody’s limbs, hollering all the louder because nobody could hear him. His shouts became panicky; inside the total isolation of his helmet he heard his own voice screaming wildly, swearing, pleading for light and help and mercy. He wanted to cry; he wanted to beat his head against the wall that he could no longer find.
Something tapped at his helmet. He fell silent, trembling inside. Then he felt the poke of a communications line being inserted into the port on the right side of the helmet.
“Just relax, trooper. Everything will be fine.” It was a woman’s voice, but Jansen had never heard this woman before. A stranger.
“We’re going to take care of you,” she was saying, soothingly. “But first you have to let us take your rifle and other weapons.”
“What’s happening to me?” he asked, shocked at how high and weak his voice sounded. Like a frightened little boy’s.
“Your officers have surrendered to us,” said the woman. “Once we get these weapons off you, we’ll bring you out to the crater floor and return you to your own people.”
Jansen felt his rifle being lifted from off his shoulder. Other hands took his bandolier of grenades and ammunition. Then they helped him to his feet.
“Okay, just walk this way… easy now.”
Jansen let the strangers lead him blindly down the corridor. There was nothing else he could do. His spacesuit felt oddly stiff, the way an arthritic old man must feel. He thought he heard a grinding, rasping noise whenever he flexed his left knee.
Colonel Giap watched helplessly as, one by one, his troopers were led out of the tunnels by spacesuited rebels. The troopers had been disarmed, their weapons were nowhere in sight. They had not raised their hands above their helmeted heads, but it was clear that they had surrendered. They were prisoners. Defeated.
One of his r
unners trotted up to him and held up the communications line from his helmet. Impatiently, Giap gestured for him to plug it into his comm port.
“Sir! The Moonbase commander wishes to speak with you. On the radio, sir.”
Giap felt his brows rise. “They have stopped the jamming?”
“The Moonbase officer that I spoke with said they will stop the jamming once you agree to speak to their commander.”
Giap nodded inside his helmet. “Tell them I will speak to their commander.” What else could he do?
The runner headed back into the garage. Giap turned and walked to a small rock, then sank down carefully onto it. He had been standing for hours, and even in the low gravity of the Moon, his legs were aching.
He watched as, one by one, his troopers were led out of the tunnels and into the garage like a collection of blind beggars, helpless and disarmed. He had to turn his entire body to see his reserve troops, loitering around their tractors out on the crater floor, some of them sitting on the cab roofs, watching and waiting.
His runner came back at last and told him, “The jamming will stop at precisely thirteen hundred hours, sir.”
Giap peered at his wrist. Seven minutes from now.
“We’ve got all of ’em out,” said Anson, from the console next to Doug’s. “And we’ve got all their weapons.”
“Those are shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets,” Gordette said, pointing to one of the screens. “We could hit their tractors with ’em.”
Not that we’ll use them, Doug said to himself. But their commander doesn’t know that. I hope.
His eye on the console’s digital clock, Doug gestured to Anson to cut off the jamming signal at precisely fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds after noon. Ten seconds later, he opened his radio channel to the Peacekeepers’ suit-to-suit frequency.
“This is Douglas Stavenger, chief administrator of Moon-base,” he said. “Am I on the proper frequency to speak with the commander of the Peacekeeper forces?”
“I am Colonel Ngo Duong Giap,” came the reply. “This frequency is good.”
There was no video; Doug’s comm screen remained blank.
“Colonel Giap,” he said, “I believe it is time we discussed an armistice.”
“Armistice?” The colonel’s surprised reply came immediately. The radio link between the Peacekeepers in the crater floor and the control center did not need to be relayed through L-1; the antennas built into the face of the mountain, just above Moonbase’s main airlock, handled the link directly.
“Truce, armistice, whatever you want to call it,” Doug said, feeling the tension and hope in the people clustering about him.
This time the Peacekeeper commander hesitated before replying.
Doug added, “Your attack has failed. Your troops had to surrender to us. We’ve let them return to you, but as you’ll see, their spacesuits are heavily contaminated with dust. They can’t see, and the joints of their suits will soon fail.”
“That was merely my first wave,” Colonel Giap snapped.
“The same thing will happen to your second wave,” Doug replied. “And your third and fourth and fifth. We can blind your soldiers and jam your radio communications. We can gum up the joints of their spacesuits to the point where they’ll quickly become immobilized. There is no way you can get through our tunnels.”
“Nonsense!” spat the colonel. “We have enough weaponry to blast through your tunnels whenever we choose to.”
Glancing at Anson and the others crowding around him, Doug said darkly, “And we have the weapons of your first wave soldiers now. We can shoot back. And men in spacesuits are extremely vulnerable. We won’t need sharpshooters.”
Giap sputtered something unintelligible.
“We have no desire to harm anyone,” Doug said. “All we want is for you to withdraw and leave us alone.”
After several heartbeats, Giap said, “This situation is beyond my authority. I will have to discuss this with my superiors.”
“Fine,” Doug replied. “I’ll call again in exactly one hour. Until then, your suit-to-suit frequencies will be jammed again.”
The nerve-shattering screech of the jamming pierced Giap’s skull like a pair of icepicks driven into his eardrums. He banged on his wrist keypad to shut off his suit radio. As he got to his feet he saw that the other officers were doing the same.
Stomping angrily to the tractor that he had commandeered to be his command center, Giap clambered up into its cab. His communications sergeant was nowhere in sight; he would have to work the laptop himself. Worse still, he would have to face Faure.
No, he realized. There was something even worse. The insufferable Sacred Seven. Their young Japanese leader was waiting for him in the tractor’s cab, sitting in the rear seat. Giap recognized the shoulder patch symbol on his spacesuit: a fist holding a lightning bolt.
And the volunteer was holding the end of a communications wire that was already plugged into his own helmet.
Reluctantly, Giap took the proffered wire and inserted into his own helmet’s comm port.
“Your attack failed,” said the young Japanese. He sounded almost pleased.
“That was merely the first wave—”
“It failed,” the volunteer said. “And I heard what the Stavenger person said to you. Now they have your first wave’s weapons to repel your second wave.”
Giap pulled the laptop communicator from the shelf under the tractor’s dashboard. “I must contact the secretary-general.”
“No need,” said the volunteer. “Let us go in. We will destroy Moonbase and turn your defeat into a victory.”
“I am not defeated!” Giap snarled. “Not yet!”
The volunteer leaned forward and rested his arms on the back of Giap’s seat. The colonel could sense the young man’s tolerant, insufferable smile.
“Why wait?” he said calmly, softly. “You have the means to destroy Moonbase at hand. Why not use it now, without asking permission from your superiors?”
Giap took several long breaths before replying, trying to calm himself. At last he answered, “I am a soldier, sir, not a savage or a madman. I fight to achieve a political goal, not merely to destroy.”
“But you cannot fight without killing, without destruction, can you?”
“Death and destruction are the constant companions of soldiers, that is true,” Giap admitted. “But they are not our purpose! They are not our goal! We fight because the politicians have failed to keep the peace. We do not fight for the love of killing, for the delight of destruction!”
“Admirable,” said the young volunteer. “I am almost convinced that you truly believe that.”
Giap’s hands clenched into fists. For a burning moment he was ready, anxious, to give this young fanatic the death he was seeking. But the moment passed and he flipped his laptop open.
“I must speak with the secretary-general,” he muttered, yanking the comm wire out of his helmet before he could hear the volunteer’s sneering reply.
UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS
It had been a hot, humid, hazy summer day in New York City. The kind of day when, in earlier times, before the Urban Corps, children would have turned fire hydrants into neighborhood sprinklers.
Now an early-evening thunderstorm was booming across Manhattan, sending people scurrying indoors, slowing traffic on the streets and throughways, washing the city better than its maintenance workers ever did.
In his climate-controlled office George Faure was not bothered by the weather. Indeed, he had not even glanced out the dramatic ceiling-high windows since the Peacekeeper assault force had started its trek across Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains.
The assault had not started well and Faure had been spitting with helpless rage as the Peacekeeper colonel reported being stalled in the pass across the mountains. But events had progressed better as the hours wore on.
The frustrating thing was that Faure had to watch the progress of the battle on Global News television, narrated by
that turncoat slut Edie Elgin. But then her broadcast had been abruptly cut off, and Faure celebrated with a little dance across his office carpeting from his desk to the built-in bar, where he poured himself a stiff Pernod and water.
Now, slumped in his desk chair, he realized that his celebration had been premature. Colonel Giap was on his wall screen, reporting in morose detail the defeat of his attack on Moonbase.
“In the tunnels my troops were blind and cut off from all radio communications. They ceased to be a cohesive military unit and were reduced to helpless individuals.”
Faure stared at the faceless image of the spacesuited colonel, his chin sinking to his collar. He could hear his pulse thundering in his ears; burning fury seethed inside him like lava bubbling up from the depths of hell.
But he kept his silence. Moustache twitching, face glowering red, eyes narrowed to slits, he stared at the wall screen until Colonel Giap finished his report.
“And what are your options?” Faure asked once he realized the colonel was waiting for him to say something.
For three long seconds the secretary-general stared at the image of the Peacekeeper officer.
At last Giap replied, “I can send in the second and third waves, but I believe the results would be the same. Once in Moonbase’s tunnels, my troops are at the mercy of the rebels.”
“And you did not foresee this?” Faure snapped.
Again the interminable wait. Then, “I did not foresee that the enemy would be able to blind my troops. I had considered the possibility that they might jam our suit radios, but the blinding was a surprise.”
“So what do you recommend, mon colonel?”
The gold-tinted visor of Giap’s spacesuit might as well have been a blank piece of modernistic sculpture, Faure thought. He would get no brilliance from this man, no military genius.
Giap said, “I recommend that we cut the electrical lines from their solar cell arrays into the base itself. That will cut off their electrical power and force them to surrender.”