Moonbase - Moonwar Part 3

"How can I do that? Your own silly rules prevent me from using nanomachines anywhere inside Moonbase, except in my laboratory," Zimmerman grumbled.

"The safety rules, yes, I know," said Doug.

"Even my furniture I had to make in my lab and then get a crew to schlep schlep into here." into here."

"We can't take the chance of having nanomachines propagate inside the base."

"Nonsense," Zimmerman muttered. "Superst.i.tion."

Cardenas stepped in again. "So you're ready to bend the safety rules, Doug?"

"We'll have to, at least a little."

"And you need help with medical supplies, right?"

"Right."

"Aspirin maybe?" Zimmerman grumbled suspiciously.

"More than aspirin," said Doug.

"Specifically?"

"I don't know, specifically. You'll have to talk to the medical staff."

"I will have to? have to? These are your orders? You are the field marshal now and I am under your command?" These are your orders? You are the field marshal now and I am under your command?"

"That's exactly right," said Cardenas, still smiling sweetly. "That's the situation we're in, Willi, and we've all got to do everything we can to help."

Zimmerman mumbled something in German.

"Otherwise," Cardenas warned, "we'll all be sent back to Earth-and never allowed to work on nanotechnology again."

For a long moment the old man said nothing. Then, with an enormous groaning sigh, he nodded unhappily. It made his cheeks waddle.

"Yah," he said at last. "I will speak with your medical staff. I might as well. There is nothing else for me to do, now that Kiribati no longer takes our transmissions."

Lunar University's courses had been beamed to Kiribati for distribution to students around the world. That had worked well enough for the engineering and humanities curricula. But since most nations forbade teaching nanotechnology openly, the nanotech courses had to be packaged separately and delivered in clandestine ways. Cardenas often complained that she felt as if she were dealing in p.o.r.nographic videos, "shipping them out in plain brown wrappers'.

"When this is over you can start teaching again," Doug said.

"You think we will win?" Zimmerman's tone made it clear that he had no such illusions.

"We'll try," said Doug, getting to his feet.

"And we'll do everything we can to help," Cardenas said. "Won't we, Willi?"

"Yah.' Without enthusiasm.

"Thanks," Doug said. "I appreciate whatever you can do."

He started off toward the door, threading his way through the equipment standing idle in the shadows of the unlit studio. Behind his retreating back, Cardenas leaned toward Zimmerman and whispered a suggestion to him. The old man frowned, then shrugged.

"Maybe we can make you invisible," Zimmerman called after Doug, his voice echoing through the darkened studio.

Doug looked back over his shoulder and suppressed the urge to laugh. That'd be great," he said, thinking that bulletproof would be a lot better.

Back in his quarters, Doug lit up his wall screen, scanning the computer's personnel files for anyone who had military experience. It was a fruitless search. Moonbase's employees were scientists and engineers, technicians and medical doctors, computer a.n.a.lysts, nurses, construction specialists, agrotechnicians, managers and administrators. They had all been hired through Masterson Corporation's personnel office, back Earthside. The only military veterans were a handful among the astronauts who piloted the transfer s.p.a.cecraft from Earth, and none of them were at Moonbase at the present time.

Faure picked his timing very carefully, Doug realized. Halfway through the first phase of building the main plaza, with dozens of extra construction workers on hand and not a single s.p.a.cecraft at the rocket port. We've even got that dance troupe from Canada visiting; another thirty-five mouths to feed.

He sat up straight and raised his arms over his head, stretching until he felt his vertebrae pop. Well, he said to himself, at least the dancers don't eat much. I guess.

Of all the two thousand, four hundred and seventy-seven men and women at Moonbase, only one had the slightest military experience. One of the construction technicians working on the new aquaculture tanks, a man named Leroy Gordette. His file showed that he had spent four years in the U.S. Army, enlisting when he had been seventeen, nearly ten years earlier.

His photo on the wall screen showed a serious, almost grim Afro-American with red-rimmed eyes and a military buzz cut almost down to his scalp. He looks fierce enough, Doug thought, staring at the picture.

"It's better than nothing," Doug muttered. "Phone," he called.

"Call please?" asked the computer's androgynous synthesized voice.

"Leroy Gordette," he said to the phone system.

"No response," said the computer a moment later. "Do you wish to search for him or leave a message?"

"Leave a message."

"Recording."

"Mr Gordette, this is Douglas Stavenger. Please call me as soon as you can. It's about the military situation we're in."

With twenty-twenty hindsight, Doug could see that this confrontation had been inevitable from the day Faure had won his campaign to be elected secretary-general of the United Nations; he intended to enforce the nanotech treaty with every weapon at his disposal. None of the others-not even Doug's mother-had foreseen that it would come down to military force. But Doug had studied enough history to understand that force was the ultimate tool of political leaders. He had no illusions about it, despite his a.s.surances that this 'war' was not going to be a shooting match.

Faure was no military genius, but he was a tyrant. He fully intended to make the U.N. into a true global government. With himself at its head.

Moonbase stood in his way. The nanotech treaty was just an excuse. As long as Moonbase ignored the U.N.'s authority, nations on Earth could justifiably resist U.N. encroachments on their sovereignty. So Moonbase had to be brought into line. Or destroyed.

The trouble was, the more Doug studied history, the more he delved into the b.l.o.o.d.y, murderous track that led to the present day, the more he found himself reluctantly agreeing with Faure's professed aims.

Ten billion people on Earth. And that was only the official count. There were probably a billion more, at least, that the various national censuses missed. Ten or eleven billion mouths to feed, ten or eleven billion people to house and clothe and educate. Most of them were poor, hungry, ignorant. And their numbers were growing faster than anyone could cope with. Three hundred thousand babies born every day. every day. All the wealth in the world could barely maintain a minimum level of existence for them. All the wealth in the world could barely maintain a minimum level of existence for them.

The rich refused to help the poor, of course. Not unless the poor reduced their birth rate, lowered their numbers. Starvation swept whole continents; plagues killed millions. Still the numbers grew. The poor of the world increased and multiplied and became poorer, hungrier, sicker.

Only a world government could hope to deal with the global problem of population. Only a true world government had the faintest chance of redistributing the world's wealth more equitably. That was Faure's proclaimed goal, his aim.

Doug agreed that the goal was worthy, vital, crucial to the survival of the human species. He also knew that it would never be achieved; not the way Faure was going about it.

The beep of his computer snapped Doug out of his ruminations. Its message light blinked at him.

"Answer," he commanded the phone.

It was not Gordette returning his call. Doug recognized the face of one of the communications technicians, calling from the control center.

"Doug, we're getting a transmission from L-l. Single frequency. The secretary-general of the United Nations is about to give a speech and they want us to see it."

"Okay," he said, sagging back tiredly in his chair. "Pipe it through. Might as well put it on the general system, so everybody can see it."

"Will do."

Then Doug got as better idea. "Wait. Make an announcement that anyone not on essential duty should go straight to The Cave. Put Faure on the wall screens there. I want everybody to see this."

"Will you be going to The Cave, too?"

"Right," said Doug, pushing himself out of his chair.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 112 HOURS.

Georges Henri Faure felt not the slightest twinge of nervousness as he walked slowly to the podium. The General a.s.sembly chamber was hushed, so quiet that Faure could hear his own footsteps on the marble floor, despite the fact that the chamber was completely filled. Every delegate was in his or her proper seat. The media thronged the rear and overflowed into the side aisles, cameras focused on him. The visitors' gallery was packed.

He was a dapper little man, shaped rather like a pear but dressed so elegantly that no one noticed his figure. Nor the slight limp that marred his stride. His thinning dark hair was slicked back from his high forehead, and his face was round, pink-cheeked, almost cherubic except for his old-fashioned wire-brush moustache. On the rare occasions when his iron self-control failed and he became agitated, the points of the moustache would quiver noticeably. It sometimes made people laugh, but it was a bad mistake to laugh at Georges Faure. He neither forgot nor forgave.

His eyes were small, deep-set, dark and never still. They constantly darted here and there, watching, weighing, probing, judging. Many said, behind his back, that they were the eyes of an opportunist, a climber, a politician. Faure knew what they said of him: that he was a man consumed by ego and vaulting ambition. But no, he insisted to himself; what drove him was not personal ambition but an inner desire, a drive, a sacred mission: to save the world from itself; to bring order and stability to all of humankind; to avert the tragedy of chaos and disaster that threatened the Earth's misguided peoples.

He reached the marble podium. The floor behind it had been raised slightly, cunningly, so that no one in the audience could see that he actually stood on a platform. Smiling down on the rows of expectant faces, he leaned his weight on his arms, to ease his aching foot. He waited a moment, feeling the warmth of the undivided attention of every delegate, the glow of the media's cameras and recorders, the admiration of the public. The first line of his speech was on the electronic prompter; the tumbler on the podium held the Evian water he was partial to. Everything was in its place.

He began: "Delegates of the General a.s.sembly and the Security Council, members of the news media, members of the public and citizens of the world-I stand before you with a heart filled with both sadness and hope.

"Since seven years ago, all work on nanotechnology has been wisely banned by mutual accord of the member nations of this august organization. I am pleased to report to you that the last remaining nation on Earth to refuse to sign the nanotechnology treaty and accede to its terms has now at last signed that treaty. Kiribati has joined the great commonwealth of nations at last!"

A storm of applause rose from the floor of the huge auditorium. A sharp-witted observer would have noted that it began in the section where the U.N. staff bureaucrats sat: Faure's employees.

In Moonbase, Doug sat at one of the tables in The Cave, the old cafeteria, watching the wall-sized display screen showing Faure. The Cave was jammed with people; everyone who was not needed on duty had packed its cavernous confines. All the seats along the cafeteria tables were filled and people were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles between the tables; the only open s.p.a.ces were the squares of lovingly tended gra.s.s that were scattered across the rock floor. It was like a flare party, Dough thought, although no one was drinking or dancing. Or laughing.

Faure's hugely enlarged features gazed down upon them from the wide Windowall screen up at the front of The Cave like an electronic deity, larger than life.

"There are those misguided souls," Faure was saying, unconsciously touching the end of his moustache with a fingertip, "who ask why nanotechnology must be banned. There are those who question our policy."

He looked up and smiled mechanically, almost squeezing his tiny eyes shut. "To paraphrase the American revolutionary Jefferson, in respect to the public opinion we should declare the causes that have impelled us to this decision."

Jinny Anson, sitting next to Doug at the long cafeteria table, hissed, "That's a real outga.s.sing, using Jefferson."

Doug nodded and said nothing.

Faure went on, "Nanotechnology offers enormous medical benefits, we are told. Its enthusiasts claim that nanomachines injected into the human body can prolong life and promote perfect health. Yes, perhaps. But for whom? For the starving ma.s.ses of Africa or Latin America? For those dying of plagues because they are too poor to afford simple medical treatment?

"No! Nanotechnology would be available only to the very rich. It would be one more method by which the rich separate themselves from the poor. This cannot be allowed! The gap between the rich and poor is one of the most pernicious and dangerous causes of unrest and instability on Earth! We must strive to narrow this gap, not widen it."

"By making everybody equally poor," Joanna muttered, seated on Doug's other side.

"Furthermore," Faure continued, "nanotechnology can be used as an insidious new form of weapon, deadlier than poisonous gas, more difficult to detect and counter than biological weapons. In a world tottering on the brink of catastrophe, the very last thing we desire is a new weapons technology. We have worked for more than ten years now to convince nations to give up their armies and allow the Peacekeepers to protect their borders. We have reduced the world's nuclear a.r.s.enals to a mere handful of missiles. We stand for disarmament and peace! How could we allow scientists in their secret laboratories to design perfidious new weapons of nanomachines?"

"So," Zimmerman grumbled, down the table from Doug, "now I am an evil Dr Frankenstein."

Faure took a sip of Evian, replaced the gla.s.s delicately on the podium, and resumed.

"As I said, every nation on Earth has finally signed the nanotechnology treaty. At last, there is no place on Earth where nanotechnology can be practiced or taught."

Another burst of applause. But Doug knew what was coming next: the real reason for Faure's speech.

"Yet there is a place where nanotechnology is practiced every day, every hour. That place is not on Earth. It is on the Moon, at the privately owned center called Moonbase."

"Pa.s.s the bread, here comes the baloney," somebody in the cafeteria said, loudly enough to echo off the rock walls. No one laughed or even stirred to see who said it.

"The residents of Moonbase have refused to suspend their nanotechnology workings. They have refused to stop their researches into new forms and uses of nanotechnology.' Faure's face had become grim. "True, they have offered to allow United Nations representatives to inspect their facilities and their laboratories, but they absolutely refuse to abide by the requirements of the nanotechnology treaty."

He looked up at his audience. "This cannot be allowed! We cannot permit them to develop further the nanotechnology in secret, some four hundred thousand kilometers away from our supervision!"

Faure's moustache was starting to bristle. "Who knows what kinds of new and dreadful capabilities they are developing in their secret laboratories? Who knows what their intentions are?"

People in The Cave were jeering now. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.d knows we need nan.o.bugs to make the air we breathe!"

Taking a deep breath, Faure raised his hands as if motioning for attention. "Therefore, I have sent a detachment of Peacekeeper troops to Moonbase to enforce the conditions of the nanotechnology treaty on the lunar residents. They will arrive at Moonbase within slightly more than four days. Their mission is one of peace; but they are of course prepared to defend themselves if the Moonbase residents offer resistance."

Faure looked up again and peered directly into the camera. He seemed to loom above the people in The Cave.

"To these renegades of Moonbase I have this to say: Resistance is futile. You must obey the same laws that everyone on Earth obeys. I will employ all the power necessary to enforce the conditions of the nanotechnology treaty, whether on Earth or on the Moon. If, in your misguided attempts to defy the United Nations and the will of the peoples of Earth, you use force against our Peacekeepers, you will regret it."

The audience applauded wildly. Faure smiled and dipped his chin several times: his way of bowing. Then the screen went blank.

Doug blinked several times. The crowd in The Cave stirred and rumbled with a hundred conversations.

"He didn't mention a word about our declaration of independence," Joanna said.

"Nor our request for U.N. membership," Brudnoy added.

Doug got to his feet. "And he isn't going to have a news conference, where reporters can ask him questions, either."

"How long until the Peacekeepers land?" Anson asked.

Doug pressed the face of his wrist.w.a.tch; the digital readout changed from the local time to a countdown.

"One hundred eleven hours and forty-eight minutes," he said.

"Well," Anson said, digging her hands into the pockets of her jeans, "you'd better think of something something between now and then, boss." between now and then, boss."

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 111 HOURS 48 MINUTES.

"You're right," Doug said to Anson.