Moonbase - Moonwar Part 49

"You can't fight them! You don't have any weapons."

Again the agonizing wait. Doug said, "We don't have any guns, that's true enough. But we're not beaten yet."

"Doug, what are you thinking of? You can't fight an armed battalion of trained Peacekeeper troops! You'll get yourself killed! You'll destroy Moonbase!"

He hadn't waited for her response. He was saying, in a calm, carefully measured tone. "I can't tell you what we're planning, Mom, because even a tight laser link spreads enough for some snooper to eavesdrop. But we're not going to obediently open our hatches and let the Peacekeepers take over Moonbase."

"Doug, they'll kill you!"

He smiled at her words. "If we surrender and have to return Earthside, I'm a dead man anyway."

Joanna started to reply, then realized that her son was right. He had nothing to lose by fighting for Moonbase.

"Naw, I don't mind working the night s.h.i.+ft," Killifer was saying. "At least I'll be indoors, under the roof, if it rains."

The security chief looked slightly uneasy. "I don't usually put newcomers inside the house," he said, "but Jonesie's come down with some virus and we need a replacement for him right away."

"It's okay," Killifer repeated, trying hard not to sound eager. I'll take his s.h.i.+ft."

"You already did you regular s.h.i.+ft; I don't like asking you to double up."

Killifer shrugged as carelessly as he could. "Four to midnight is easy. I wouldn't go to sleep until after midnight, anyway."

The chief swivelled back and forth slowly in his desk chair, making it squeak slightly, eying Killifer as if he weren't certain he was doing the right thing. Killifer sat in front of the little desk, doing his best to appear nonchalant.

Then he got an inspiration. "I get overtime pay for this, don't I?"

The chief visibly relaxed. "Yeah, sure. Time and a half."

Killifer nodded as if the money was his reason for agreeing to the extra s.h.i.+ft so readily. "Double s.h.i.+ft isn't so bad," he said. "It's only for a few days, right?"

"Yeah," said the chief. "Until Jonesie comes back."

"I'd just be spending my pay in some bar or someplace," Killifer said. "This way I make plastic instead of spending it."

"All right," the chief said, still uneasy. "Go downstairs and change into a regular uniform. You work with Rodriguez. He monitors the screens, in here, and you sit in the kitchen until she and her husband go to bed. Then you patrol the rooms once every half-hour. Check all the windows and doors. Except the master bedroom; just make sure their door's shut tight. Pay particular attention to the sliders that go out to the pool deck."

"Right.' Killifer nodded.

"Remember, she doesn't like to see us. Stay in the kitchen until they go up to the master bedroom."

"What about the butler?"

"He'll go to bed after they do," said the chief.

"Okay. Good."

Again the chief hesitated. Killifer could feel his pulse throbbing in his ears as he sat facing the man across the pathetic little metal desk.

At last the chief said, "All right. Go downstairs and get into your uniform."

Killifer got up from his chair slowly, turned and went to the office door.

"And thanks for filling in," the chief said. Reluctantly.

"Nothing to it," Killifer replied over his shoulder. He pulled the door open, then added, "I can use the extra plastic."

The b.a.s.t.a.r.d suspects something, Killifer said to himself as he stepped out into the hallway. Not enough to turn me down, but this doesn't sit right with him.

Then he grinned as he clattered down the metal spiral staircase. What the h.e.l.l! Let him worry all he wants to. I'm in the house for two to three nights and she's home with her creaky old man. Once the butler goes to bed I'll scope out the house and figure out the best way to get to her and then get away. s.h.i.+t, they'll be paying be paying me to do it. Overtime. me to do it. Overtime.

NANOLAB.

Keiji Inoguchi was surprised by Professor Zimmerman's call. He hurried to the nanolab, eager to accept Zimmerman's invitation before the crusty old man changed his mind.

"I am most honored that you have asked me to visit your laboratory once again," he said, after he had bowed to the professor.

Zimmerman dipped his chin in acknowledgement. "I am asking for more than a visit, my friend. I need your help."

Inoguchi sucked in his breath. "My help? In what way can I help you?"

Zimmerman led the j.a.panese scientist back into the bowels of his lab. They walked past rows of computer screens and gray, bulky cryogenic tanks beaded with moisture, Zimmerman in his usual gray suit, grossly overweight, dishevelled, looking distracted and unhappy; Inoguchi in an immaculate white turtleneck s.h.i.+rt and sharply-creased slacks, lean and eager, his eyes snapping up every piece of equipment as if they were cameras.

Hands jammed in his trouser pockets, Zimmerman said heavily, "I am relegated to a.s.sisting my former student, Professor Cardenas."

"Yes?"

"She has asked me to prepare nanomachines capable of repairing wounds inflicted by gunshot or shrapnel-flying metal from explosions."

"And you want me to a.s.sist you in this?" Inoguchi asked.

"I realize you represent the United Nations and are not to take part in the fighting," Zimmerman said. "But for medical work perhaps you are allowed to use your skills, yah? For humanitarian reasons."

"Of course," Inoguchi said without an instant's hesitation. "Humanitarian purposes come before politics and other considerations."

Zimmerman stopped in front of a lab bench that supported a ma.s.sive metal sphere connected to a desktop computer by hair-thin fiber optic cables.

"My staff," Zimmerman gestured to the sphere.

Inoguchi understood immediately. "Your processors."

"Yah," said Zimmerman, lowering his bulk onto a spindly-looking stool. "Now we must teach them to build other nanos that will seal wounds quick, before the patient bleeds to death."

"Can you do this?"

The old man nodded slowly. "Yah. I have already done it once. Now I must do it again-in a day or so."

Inoguchi grinned at the professor. "We have much work to accomplish, then."

Colonel Giap did not relish being under Faure's direct supervision. The man is a politician, what doeshe know of military tactics? Giap asked himself. I should report to General Uhlenbeck, through the normal chain of command. Instead I must bear with this politician questioning every breath I draw.

He tried to rea.s.sure himself with Clausewitz's dictum that war is merely an extension of politics. It was scant consolation. Yes, politicians such as Ho Chi Minh successfully directed the liberation of Vietnam from the imperialists, he knew. But that was generations ago, and besides, Ho and his comrades had military experience of their own. Faure had probably never even fired a pistol at a target range.

"Was it wise to incapacitate their satellite?" the U.N. secretary-general was asking.

Giap, sitting on the bare floor of his closet-turned-office, replied to the image on his laptop's screen with all the patience he could muster, "It was necessary. Their satellite could observe our time of departure and our route of march. That would be giving the enemy more information than we want them to have."

He waited the three seconds, watching Faure twiddle his moustache. Then the secretary-general replied, "But by disabling their satellite, you have told them that you are ready to march."

"Yes. What of it? Don't you think they have cameras atop their ringwall mountains looking for us to appear over their horizon?"

Faure's face creased deeply once he heard Giap's comment. "Then of what good was it to cripple their satellite? I do not understand your reasoning."

They went around the subject twice more, Giap resolute and implacable, Faure irritable and demanding.

At last Giap said, "Sir, you may consider my action premature or even mistaken, but it has been done and argument will not undo it."

Faure flushed angrily once he heard the colonel's words.

Before he could say anything, Giap added, "If you wish to remove me from command, I understand entirely."

The secretary-general's eyes widened momentarily, then he quickly a.s.serted his self-control. Forcing a smile that narrowed his eyes to slits, Faure made a soothing gesture with both hands.

"No, no, of course not, colonel. I have every confidence in you."

Of course you do, Giap said to himself, now that our jump-off for the attack is only hours away.

"What you're looking at," said Edith into her pin mike, "is almost certainly a nuclear-armed missile."

The monitor screen in the little editing booth showed what Moonbase's astronomical telescope was focused upon: the clutch of s.p.a.cecraft hovering around the big s.p.a.ce station at the L-l libration point some fifty-eight thousand kilometers above the Moon's surface. The picture, with Edith's commentary, was being broadcast live over Global News Network.

"Despite international agreements that date all the way back to 1967 banning nuclear weapons in s.p.a.ce, the United Nations has brought a nuclear-armed missile here to use against Moonbase. Although Moonbase's residents..."

Doug watched Edith's performance as he suited up for another surface excursion. It's one thing to reveal to the world that Faure's going to nuke our solar energy farms, he told himself, it's something else to try to knock out the missile once they launch it against us.

Doug hitched a ride on one of the tractors carrying a team of construction workers out to the ma.s.s driver. It took the better part of half an hour to trundle the few kilometers in one of the electrically-driven tractors. Doug thought that once this war was over, one of his immediate priorities was going to be developing faster ground vehicles. This is asinine, creaking along at a top speed of thirty klicks per hour.

Then he realized that the Peacekeeper battalion was chugging along at pretty much the same low speed, and he didn't feel so bad about it. Besides, he added silently, by the time this war is over there might not be a Moonbase and you just might be dead.

The Sun was up over the ringwall mountains, bathing the crater floor in harsh, brilliant light that cast long slanting shadows. It would remain daylight for another twelve days. The Peacekeepers remembered that the nan.o.bugs Moonbase had used against them the first time were deactivated by solar ultraviolet.

The ma.s.s driver was crawling with s.p.a.cesuited figures. Laser welding torches flashed against the dark bulk of the long metal machines. Doug clambered down from the tractor, leaving the construction team to drive a few hundred meters on, to where their cohorts were digging a trench for the prefab shelter for Wicksen's people.

The suit-to-suit radio frequency was alive with chatter, but Doug found Wicksen visually, from his slight form and the bright blue WIX stencilled on his backpack. There was so much crosstalk on the regular suit-to-suit frequency that Doug walked up to the physicist and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

Wicksen seemed to recognize Doug's suit and held up three gloved fingers. Doug tapped frequency three on his wrist panel.

"I've saved this freak for private conversations," Wicksen's voice said in his earphones.

"How's it going?" Doug asked.

"Have they launched yet?"

"Not as of half an hour ago.' Then he added, "I would've gotten a call if they'd launched while I was riding out here."

"We should have this kloodge put together in another ten or twelve hours."

"Good."

"But there won't be any time to test it."

"Then it better work right the first time," Doug said.

He could sense Wicksen shaking his head inside his helmet. "Nothing works right the first time. Haven't you ever heard of Murphy's Law?"

Ignoring that, Doug asked, "How soon will you have the extra electrical power connected?"

Pointing past the ma.s.s driver's long metal track, Wicksen answered, "The extra men you a.s.signed me are doing that now. You're going to have a temporary brown-out when we fire the gun."

"Better than having a nuclear explosion inside the crater," Doug said grimly.

Wicksen was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "Thanks for putting the construction crew to work for us."

"The numbers that the safety people ran on their computer said that four meters of regolith rubble should protect you from the radiation blast-if they got the yield from the bomb right."

"Whether it works or not, we all feel a lot better knowing we can sit in the shelter while we're running the gun. Thanks a lot."

"Nothing to it. The construction people have nothing else to do."

Turning back toward the ma.s.s driver, Wicksen made a wistful little sigh. "I sure wish we had time to test this beast."

"So do I," Doug said fervently. "So do I."

SAVANNAH.

"But I must speak to Seigo Seigo Yamagata," said Ibrahim al-Ras.h.i.+d. "It is most urgent." Yamagata," said Ibrahim al-Ras.h.i.+d. "It is most urgent."

Ras.h.i.+d's office had once belonged to Joanna Brudnoy, when she had been chairman of Masterson Corporation's board of directors. Many was the time that she had summoned him into her sanctum and he had dutifully scurried to her in response. Once he had acceded to the chairmans.h.i.+p, however, Ras.h.i.+d had completely refurnished and redecorated the office. His desk was a sweeping, curving modernistic work of gla.s.s, his high-backed black leather chair custom-built to his measurements. The walls were adorned with tapestries from Persia and India, the windows were actually wall screens that could display any of thousands of scenes stored in his personal computer's memory.

One of those screens now showed the image of a young j.a.panese man in an open-neck white s.h.i.+rt and tastefully checkered sports jacket, sitting at a desk in an office panelled in what appeared to be teak.

"Seigo Yamagata is not available at present," he said in the h.o.m.ogenized American English of a television announcer. "I am Saito Yamagata, his eldest son. May I be of a.s.sistance to you?"

"I must speak to your father," Ras.h.i.+d demanded.

The younger Yamagata smiled gently and said, "I regret to tell you once again that he is not available."

Ras.h.i.+d felt as if he were talking to a brick wall. Or worse, a large soft pillow that absorbed his words without being moved by them in the slightest.