Moonbase - Moonwar Part 58

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Luce, we've got a s.h.i.tstorm of public opinion coming down on us. I spent the whole d.a.m.ned night trying to calm down committee chairmen, media reporters, umpteen different governors and state party officials, even some G.o.dd.a.m.ned church church leaders are yelling that we ought to pressure the U.N. into letting Moonbase go!" leaders are yelling that we ought to pressure the U.N. into letting Moonbase go!"

The President knew that her loyal a.s.sistant never used profanity in her presence unless he was truly upset-or trying to make a crucial point.

But she shook her head. "Harry, it's just too late to do anything. The Peacekeepers are already there. Look."

She pointed to the wall screen again. Turning in the rocker, her staff chief saw a dozens of tracked vehicles advancing slowly toward the main airlock hatch of Moonbase.

Suddenly the picture winked off.

"What the h.e.l.l...?"

Before the President could reach the remote control unit on her desk, the screen flicked a few times, then showed a harried-looking announcer in a suit and tie.

"We regret to report that technical difficulties have cut off Edie Elgin's report from Moonbase. We are trying to re-establish contact."

As the scene switched to a news anchorwoman, who began to summarize what they had been watching live, the President eased back in her desk chair and cast a knowing look at her staff chief.

"It's all over bar the shouting, Harry. Moonbase is finished and all those jerks who were yelling at you will forget about it by this time tomorrow."

Doug wished he could talk with Edith, now that her marathon performance had been cut short, but he had no time for that. He watched the advancing Peacekeeper troops. So did everyone in Moonbase. In the control center, in The Cave, in the infirmary and labs that were still working, every resident of Moonbase looked at the screens and held his or her breath. Doug had never heard the control center so absolutely silent. Even the hum of the machinery seemed muted.

The white Peacekeeper tractors edged cautiously through the airlock. Big as it was, the airlock could only accommodate two vehicles at a time, so the invading tractors came in pairs, then deployed around the edges of the garage.

"They're expecting us to fire at them," Gordette said, almost whispering. Still, his voice broke the silence jarringly.

"With what?" Anson muttered acidly.

Doug looked past Vince Falcone to Nick O'Malley. "Ready with the dust?" he asked, also in a near reverent whisper.

"Ready and waiting," O'Malley replied firmly.

Doug nodded as he thought: Waiting. We've been waiting a long time. But we won't have to wait much longer.

"The garage is clear," Giap heard in his earphones. "No enemy troops."

The colonel had established his command post just outside the main airlock, where he could see easily into the broad, brightly-lit garage.

Four teams of specialists were sweeping the garage floor with powerful ultraviolet lamps. So far there was no sign of nanomachines, but Giap did not want to take any chances. His teams would sterilize the hatches on the other end of the garage, as well, the hatches that led into Moonbase's corridors.

No opposition so far, Giap mused. Either they intend to surrender once we enter the corridors and occupy their critical centers, or they have a trap waiting for us inside.

He played his plan through his mind once again. The first wave of troops were to open the corridor hatches. They were airlocks, of course, double hatches that protected the corridors from the vacuum outside. They had been built as a secondary level of protection, since usually the garage was pressurized and vehicles and personnel left it for the lunar surface through the oversized main airlock.

If the rebels have sealed the hatches, Giap's men were under orders to blast them open. If they had been able to bring their missile launchers with them they could have blown the hatches apart from where he was standing, outside the main airlock. As it was, the lighter, shoulder-fired missiles would have to do the job. The troops also had grenades. The hatches would pose no problem, Giap told himself.

Once inside the base proper, his troops would quickly move to the water factory, the control center, the electrical distribution station and the EVC-their environmental control center. Hold those, and you command Moonbase. For good measure, Giap had a.s.signed squads to the underground farming area and the nanolaboratories.

"Sir, the airlocks seem to be operating normally," one of his captains reported. "The outer hatches are not sealed. Repeat, not sealed."

Giap suppressed a thrill of elation. So the rebels were going to surrender, after all.

"Have the outer hatches been UV sterilized?" he asked, still worrying about nanoweapons.

"Yes, sir."

"Very well. Open all the outer hatches," he commanded, "and check the inner hatches-after they've been UV treated."

"Yes, sir."

Don't congratulate yourself too soon, Giap warned himself. There could still be ambushes, traps, inside those corridors.

But he doubted it. What could the rebels do against armed troops in their midst?

CORRIDOR ONE.

Ulf Jansen's only distinguishing feature was that he was the tallest trooper in the Peacekeeper battalion. At one hundred ninety-three centimeters, he towered over the Asians and Africans and Latinos who made up the bulk of the force. He dwarfed his commanding officer, Colonel Giap, and was a full head taller than Sergeant Slavodic, who headed his squad with an even-handed ferocity.

An easy-going, likeable Norwegian, Jansen had joined the Peacekeepers mainly to earn a U.N. scholarship to engineering college. In the four years of his enlistment he had been to Cyprus, Sri Lanka, the Malvinas Islands (which the British still insisted on calling the Falklands) and now he was on the Moon. Another three months and his enlistment would be over; he could start college in the winter semester.

He had been wounded slightly by an antipersonnel mine in Cyprus; otherwise his duties with the Peacekeepers had not been truly dangerous. He had to wear a germproof bio-suit most of the time in Sri Lanka, a real misery in all that heat, but it had been better than coming down with the man-made plagues that both sides had used in the last round of their civil war.

Now he clumped into a smooth, metal-walled airlock, wearing a s.p.a.cesuit that was much more comfortable than the biological protection gear from the Sri Lankan expedition. And everything was so light on the Moon! Jansen hefted his a.s.sault rifle as easily as he'd carry a toothpick.

"Move it up, move it up," his sergeant growled, in the English that was the Peacekeepers' basic language. The whole squad was filing through the airlock, one man at a time. So far there'd been not the slightest sign of enemy opposition. As far as Jansen could tell, Moonbase might have been abandoned and left empty.

Both airlock hatches were fully open. The Moonbase rebels had pumped all the air out of the corridor on the other side of the hatches, so the troopers were filing through the airlock as quickly as they could.

The corridor on the other side of the hatch was dimly lit. Jansen could see another airlock about a hundred meters down the tunnel.

The sergeant brought up the rear. Once he stepped through the airlock he hustled up to where the officers-two lieutenants and a captain-were standing, poring over a book-sized computer.

"The water factory is on the other side of this hatch here," Jansen heard the captain saying as he tapped a gloved finger on the computer's tiny screen. "Down this corridor and through the cross-"

Jansen's earphones erupted with a brain-piercing screech, like electronic fingernails on an electronic blackboard. Jagged bursts of noise blasted at him. He put his hands to his ears, banged them into his helmet instead. The noise was painful, cutting through his skull like a surgeon's bone saw.

He saw the other troopers clutching at their helmets, reeling, staggering under the agonizing a.s.sault of noise. Even the officers were flailing around helplessly.

His eyes streaming tears from the pain, Jansen fumbled for the control stud on his wrist and shut off his suit radio.

The noise cut off immediately. Blessed quiet.

"What is it?" Giap screamed. "What's going on?" The noise a.s.saulted his brain like a thousand rock concerts, all out of tune. Like a million jet planes taking off. He couldn't hear anything else. He couldn't speak to anyone.

He couldn't think.

All around him, the troops of his third wave were pawing at their helmets, tottering across the dusty lith in obvious agony, some of them falling to their knees.

Giap did the only thing he could think of. He switched off his suit radio. The silence was like a soothing balm, even though his ears continued to ring.

"Turn off your radios!" he commanded, then felt immediately foolish. His own radio was off, his words never got farther than the padding inside his helmet.

But he saw, one by one, his troopers were stopping their gyrations, standing still. Giap knew he himself was panting from the unexpected onslaught. He suspected the other troopers were, too.

He waved the captain of the third wave over to him as he yanked a communications wire from the thigh pouch of his suit. Plugging the wire into his helmet port, he handed it to the captain, who connected it to his own helmet.

"Now we can talk without need of the radios," Giap said.

"Yes, sir," replied the captain. Giap could hear his breathing, still heavy.

"The rebels think they can stall our attack by jamming our suit radio frequencies," the colonel said, with a hint of contempt.

"Yes, sir," the captain said.

"They didn't think that we can communicate directly by wire, without using the radios."

"Yes, sir. But sir, if I may ask: We can speak to each other through the wire, but how will you communicate with the rest of the troops? Especially the first and second waves?"

Giap blinked behind his gold-tinted visor. The first and second waves were inside Moonbase, out of reach, even out of sight.

Jansen stood patiently as the sergeant went down the line, plugging his comm line into a trooper's helmet, speaking a few words, then unplugging and going to the next trooper.

When his turn came at last, the sergeant said gruffly, "No radio. Follow the original plan. Watch my hand signals."

"Right, Sarge," Jansen had time to say before the sergeant popped the comm line out of his helmet and went to the next man in line.

Once the sergeant had relayed his message to every trooper in the squad he hustled back up to the front with the officers. He looked funny in the s.p.a.cesuit, a short thickset figure in the heavy white suit, like a snowman with an a.s.sault rifle and a bandolier of grenades flapping lazily against his sides with every stride he took.

Jansen realized that no one could hear anything he said. Grinning delightedly, he called out, "You look stupid, Sarge!"

No reaction from anyone.

"You look like a fat white grub! You and the idiot officers, too!" he said in Norwegian.

The sergeant turned his way and for an instant Jansen's heart froze in his chest. But then the sergeant pointed to the hatch up ahead and motioned for the squad to follow him.

"Seal the hatches," Doug commanded quietly.

"We got 'em in the cages," said Anson, leaning over his shoulder. "Now we lock 'em in."

"Airlock hatches sealed," came the voice of one of the control technicians.

Doug turned to O'Malley. "Start your dust."

"Right," said O'Malley, tight-lipped.

Something made Jansen turn around as he started marching toward the next hatch. To his surprise, he saw the airlock they had already pa.s.sed through sliding shut.

"Hey!" he yelped. "It's closing!"

No one heard him.

He stopped, and the trooper behind him b.u.mped into him, jostling them both.

Jansen pointed and hollered louder, "They shut the hatch behind us!"

The whole line, from Jansen to the rear, came to a stop. Jansen turned toward the officers up front and waved his arms. "They shut the hatch behind us!" he screamed.

They paid not the slightest attention until they stopped at the closed hatch up front. Then, turning, they seemed to jerk with surprise-whether from seeing the hatch to their rear closed off or from seeing half the squad loitering down the corridor, it was impossible for Jansen to tell.

He pointed at the closed hatch, jabbing his gloved hand in its direction several times. The sergeant came clomping down the corridor toward him, radiating anger even though his s.p.a.cesuit.

"It's closed," Jansen said to the unhearing sergeant.

The lights seemed to be going dimmer. Jansen blinked and reflexively wiped at his visor. His glove left a dark smear across the tinted plastigla.s.s.

"What's happening?" he asked, feeling the edge of panic. He was going blind. The world outside his helmet was nothing more than a misty blur. And it was getting darker by the second.

"What is happening in there?" Giap demanded.

The captain, the only person who could hear him, pointed across the expanse of the garage. "It looks as if the inner hatches have closed."

"Closed?" Giap fumbled with his binoculars, got them to his visor, and swept his field of view across the four airlocks. The inner hatches of each of each of them was sealed tight.

"Get teams to each of those hatches. If they can't be opened manually, blast them open!"

The captain unplugged the communications line from his helmet, leaving it dangling across Giap's shoulder, and trotted off, fumbling in his thigh pouch for his own comm line.

This is absurd, Giap fumed. We are reduced to speaking to each other like children with a couple of paper cups connected by a length of string.

Everything took so d.a.m.nably 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 s.p.a.cesuit, 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.