Moonbase - Moonwar Part 55

The lights flickered briefly in the nanolaboratory, then steadied and returned to their normal brightness.

"See?" Zimmerman said to Inoguchi. "We are essential. We stay at full power."

Inoguchi looked up from his work. "I am afraid that the power surge has knocked out the timing circuitry in the a.s.sembly feeder," he said apologetically.

"What?" Zimmerman bellowed, rushing across the lab to the j.a.panese scientist's side.

"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 b.u.t.ton.

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 a.s.sistants 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 impa.s.sive 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 a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.sing of a train nearby.

"Ground impact."

"Yeah, but did the nuke go off?"

a.s.sAULT FORCE.

Colonel Giap studied the watch built into the keypad on his s.p.a.cesuit'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-l?" Giap demanded of tech sergeant in charge of communications.

The sergeant said through the upraised visor of his s.p.a.cesuit, "L-l 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 a.s.signed locations on the crater floor. Go!' 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 Masterson 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 a.s.sa.s.sin from Yamagata."

"No! Why would Yamagata want you a.s.sa.s.sinated?"

"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 a.s.sa.s.sin. 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 - never - I mean, something like this..." 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."