Moonwar gt-7 Page 13

  “Mrs Brudnoy is willing to accompany you back Earthside,” he was saying as he reached for the keyboard and began typing. “She’s a member of the board of directors of Masterson Corporation, and its former chairperson. She could negotiate this problem directly with the secretary-general.”

  On the screen to his right appeared his message: COUNT THE TROOPERS. MAKE SURE NONE ARE MISSING. THEY COULD BE TRYING TO FIND THE EMERGENCY AIRLOCKS.

  Hansen was saying, “I will have to communicate with my superiors. I don’t have the authority to make such a decision.”

  “Of course,” Doug said. Anything, so long as they don’t get the notion to cut the power lines from the solar farms, or damage the farms themselves.

  The mercenary watched Doug’s performance with grudging respect. He just might pull it off, he told himself. He just might get the Peacekeepers to haul ass out of here and leave us alone.

  The mercenary looked at the faces of the people gathered around Doug. Anxiety, plenty of it. But there was hope in their perspiration-sheened faces, too. And more than hope: admiration. Unadulterated admiration for this young man who was shouldering the burdens of leadership for them, and succeeding at it.

  Deep within himself, the mercenary felt a tangled skein of conflicting emotions. He admired Doug Stavenger, too. But he knew that the more successful Doug was, the closer he was moving to death. If he really does drive the Peacekeepers off, then I’ll have to kill him, like it or not.

  It was strange. For the first time in his life he approached an assassination reluctantly.

  But then he realized that it was Stavenger himself who would force the issue. Like all prey, Stavenger was moving willingly toward his final moment. The mercenary wasn’t stalking him; Stavenger was coming to him, seeking death. If the kid would just let the Peacekeepers come in and take over I wouldn’t have to touch him, the mercenary told himself.

  But no, he’s going to outsmart the Peacekeepers and make himself a hero. A dead hero.

  “Hey, what’s that?”

  Doug caught the flicker of movement in the upper right screen and jerked his attention away from his dialogue with Lieutenant Hansen.

  A spacesuited figure was running into the garage. A kamikaze? Doug’s heart clutched in his chest. A suicide trooper clutching explosives to blow the hatch to one of the corridors?

  “I’m Edie Elgin from Global Network News!” the figure shouted as she ran clumsily toward the hatch to corridor one. “I’m not a soldier, I’m a news reporter and you’ve got to let me in!”

  “Get out of there!” Doug yelled. “The nanobugs will eat out your suit and kill you!”

  “No!” Edith shouted back. “I’m a reporter and I want to talk with you people face-to-face!”

  She reached the hatch and skidded to a stop.

  “The nanobugs are already chewing on your boots,” Doug said. “Get back outside while you still have a chance!”

  “No! You come and let me inside the base.”

  “Flathead,” Jinny Anson growled.

  “It’s a trick,” said Joanna.

  “But she’ll die!” Brudnoy said.

  “Let her! It’s her own damned fault.”

  Doug stared at the display screen showing the spacesuited figure standing defiantly at the hatch. If she were nervous or frightened it didn’t show through the suit. She just stood there, arms folded across her chest.

  “Jesus Christ,” someone muttered.

  Kris Cardenas leaned over Doug’s shoulder. “The bugs will work their way through her boots in a couple of minutes, Doug.”

  “You can’t let her kill herself.”

  “Why not?” Anson snapped.

  “Bad publicity,” Joanna answered.

  While they argued above his head, Doug flicked to the Peacekeepers’ suit-to-suit frequency. Hansen and several others were bellowing to the reporter to get back into the sunlight before the nanobugs killed her. She did not reply to them. Probably not even tuned in to the suit-to-suit freak, Doug thought.

  He looked up at Brudnoy. “Lev, get a team of people down to that airlock. Bring a UV lamp to deactivate the bugs.”

  Brudnoy nodded once and started off.

  Doug called after him, “Do not let any part of her suit inside the base! Understand? Her suit stays in the airlock chamber until we can make absolutely certain it’s been fully decontaminated.”

  Zimmerman lumbered off, too.

  “Where are you going, Professor?” Doug asked.

  “To meet this foolish woman, where else?”

  Doug turned back to the display screens on the console. Hansen and the others were still jabbering on their suit-to-suit frequency.

  “Lieutenant Hansen!” Doug broke in. “Lieutenant, this is Douglas Stavenger.”

  “She’s going to kill herself,” Hansen said grimly.

  “We’re going to take her inside,” Doug said. “Don’t try to take advantage of the situation.”

  “I assure you,” Hansen said,’that this insanity is entirely her own doing. I want no part of it.”

  “Fine,” said Doug. Yet in his mind’s eye he saw this as a ploy by the Peacekeeper lieutenant. Get us to open the hatch to save the life of a nutty reporter and they rush a squad of troopers to get to the hatch before we can close it again.

  “Just to be on the safe side,” Doug said, “I would appreciate it if you and your troopers began filing back toward your Clippership.”

  “You don’t trust me?” Hansen’s voice sounded surprised.

  “It’s easier to trust,” said Doug, “when I can see that you’re not going to rush that hatch.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then you’ll bear the responsibility for the reporter’s death.”

  That was a stretch, Doug knew. We can’t let a reporter die, he told himself. Bad enough their captain killed himself. Everybody on Earth would be turned totally against us. Reporter killed by Moonbase nanobugs. They’d nuke us and feel justified about it.

  “I will order my troopers to stand clear of your airlock,” Hansen said. “That will have to do.”

  Nodding wearily, Doug said, “Okay. I can accept that.”

  TOUCHDOWN PLUS 2 HOURS 11 MINUTES

  Lev Brudnoy tapped Gordette’s shoulder as he started out of the control center.

  I’ll need your help,” he said to the black man.

  Gordette looked startled, but quickly recovered and followed Brudnoy as the old ex-cosmonaut hurried along the corridor toward the cross-tunnel that led to corridor one.

  Brudnoy stopped at one of the wall phones only long enough to call security and ask for an emergency team with a pair of UV lamps to meet them at airlock one.

  “Why two lamps?” Gordette asked as they started trotting down the corridor toward the airlock.

  “In case one fails,” Brudnoy said, puffing.

  “Redundancy.” Gordette understood. An astronaut’s way of thinking.

  The emergency team was not there yet when they got to the end of the corridor. Brudnoy muttered under his breath in Russian.

  “Here they come,” Gordette said, pointing up the corridor.

  With a tight glance, Brudnoy reached out his long fingers and touched the MANUAL OVERRIDE stud on the airlock control panel set into the wall.

  “Tell Doug that I am cycling the airlock manually,” he said to Gordette as he pressed the stud that opened the outer hatch.

  Gordette picked up the wall phone and spoke into it with a hushed urgency. “He’s telling her to step inside the airlock,” he said to Brudnoy.

  The emergency team came up. Its leader, a roundish dark-haired woman, was panting.

  “We were in The Cave with everybody else when the call came through. Hadda run all the way down to the storage lockers to find a second ultraviolet lamp. Why the hell do you need two?”

  Brudnoy ignored her. “Is she inside?” he asked Gordette.

  “Yeah, you can close the outer hatch now.”

  Edith never d
oubted for a moment that they would let her inside. Stavenger sounded too level-headed, too organized to do something stupid.

  “We’re going to open the outer hatch,” his voice said in her helmet earphones. “Get inside quickly, because we’ll need to shut it before any of your Peacekeeper buddies can make a charge for it.”

  The hatch slid open before she could reply. She stepped into what looked like an empty telephone booth with walls of smooth blank metal, lit by a single lamp set into the metal ceiling.

  Soundlessly, the hatch slid shut again.

  Nothing happened. It was like being in a spacious metal coffin. Room enough for two; maybe three, if you really squeezed it.

  Edith heard a throbbing sound. She didn’t really hear it so much as feel it through the soles of her boots. I wonder if the nanobugs really are chewing up my boots, or is the whole thing just an elaborate trick?

  She could really hear a pump chugging away now, and the hiss of air.

  “In a minute or so the inner hatch will open,” Stavenger’s voice told her. “Don’t move. Do not step through the hatch. Understand me? Do not step through.”

  “I understand,” Edith said. He sure sounds uptight all of a sudden.

  “Good,” Stavenger said. “One or two men will come into the airlock with you and help you out of your suit. Do exactly what they tell you.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “We’re risking the safety of this entire base and everybody in it,” Stavenger said. “If the nanobugs infesting your suit get inside we’ll all be dead.”

  Edith blinked with surprise. He really means it! He’s putting the whole base in jeopardy to save my neck.

  The hissing and chugging noises stopped, and for a long moment she stood alone and still in the metal sarcophagus.

  Then the inner door slid open and a lanky, grave faced old man with a ratty gray beard stepped inside. Behind him was a shorter Afro-American, solidly built. He looked somber, too.

  “Welcome to Moonbase,” said the old man, breaking into a boyish smile. “It is my pleasant duty to help you take off your clothes.”

  TOUCHDOWN PLUS 3 HOURS 25 MINUTES

  Wilhelm Zimmerman scowled at the woman. She was pretty, in an All-American, blonde, coltish way. And completely stupid.

  “You came this close to killing yourself,” he growled at Edith, holding his thumb and forefinger a bare millimeter apart.

  Sitting on the examination table, wrapped in nothing but a thin sheet, Edith nodded somberly. “I didn’t realize I’d be putting the whole base at risk.”

  “You think perhaps all this is a game?”

  “Not hardly.”

  Zimmerman locked his hands behind his back and stared at the readouts on the display screens lined above the exam table. Everything looked normal. The UV lamps had deactivated the nanomachines infesting her boots. None of them had penetrated to the inner soles. This woman was clean of nanobugs. Her boots and the rest of her spacesuit were in the nanolab, down in the old section of Moonbase. Zimmerman wanted to inspect those boots personally, to see how much damage the gobblers had done to them. He intended to play back the video of the reporter’s dash through the garage and establish a time-line to determine the rate at which the nanobugs ate through the plastic of the boots.

  “When can I get my clothes back?” Edith asked, clutching the sheet under her chin.

  Startled out of his thoughts, Zimmerman waved a pudgy hand in the air. “Now. They were not contaminated.”

  With a shy smile, she asked, “Then where are they?” Zimmerman scowled again. “Am I your valet? How should I know where they are?”

  Hansen had returned to the Clippership and spent a weary hour discussing the situation with his superiors. He started with his commanding officer at the Peacekeeper base in Corsica, then was bucked up to Peacekeeper headquarters in Ottawa and finally to the U.N. secretary-general, Georges Faure himself.

  Patiently he explained how Captain Munasinghe had been killed. Faure listened, a strange little smile playing about his lips.

  “The captain died in battle against the rebels, then.” Faure made it a statement, not a question.

  “He killed himself accidentally,” Hansen corrected.

  Faure’s expression hardened once he heard the lieutenant’s words. “No, no, no. He died in battle. How it happened is of little consequence. If the Moonbase rebels had not resisted, he would not have been killed.”

  Hansen let the point pass. More than one soldier had become a hero after the fact, he knew.

  “Tell me then,” Faure said, “what do you propose to do now?”

  “Our only alternatives,” he reported, “are to return to Earth with our mission unfulfilled, or to destroy Moonbase’s electrical power equipment, which will force them to surrender within a few hours.”

  Faure’s face, on the cockpit’s small screen, looked perfectly composed. Only the slightest tremble in his voice hinted at the seething rage boiling within him.

  “And if you destroy the electrical equipment,” Faure asked, with exaggerated patience, “what happens to the people of Moonbase?”

  Hansen said, “They will be forced to surrender.”

  Three seconds passed. Faure asked, “Why will they be forced to surrender?”

  “Because without electricity their air-recycling system will shut down and they will soon have no air to breathe.”

  Another three seconds. “And once they surrender, do you have air for them to breathe? Do you have space aboard your ship to carry two thousand men and women back to Earth?” Faure’s voice rose to a snarl. “Or do you propose to let them all die, choking to death while you watch?”

  Hansen stared back evenly at the secretary-general’s image. “I was merely stating what our options are, sir. I was not recommending a course of action.”

  While waiting for Faure’s response, Hansen glanced at Killifer, who seemed grimly amused. “Friggin’ politicians want to have their cake and eat it too,” Killifer whispered. “And when they can’t, they blame it on you.”

  “Attend to me, Lieutenant,” Faure snapped. “You were sent to Moonbase to take over its operation and remove its leaders from control. It now seems that you cannot accomplish that task.”

  “Not without destroying the base, sir,” Hansen replied. “And killing everyone in it.”

  Faure seemed to mull the situation over. “You say that Mrs Brudnoy is willing to accompany you back to Earth?”

  “To negotiate directly with you, yes, sir.”

  The secretary-general toyed with his moustache. Then he asked, “And this news reporter, this Edie Elgin, she is still in Moonbase?”

  “Apparently she intends to stay there. She says she does not wish to return with us.”

  Hansen thought he might be mistaken, it was hard to tell on this small screen, but Faure’s face seemed to be getting quite red. As if he might explode into fury at any instant.

  But instead, the secretary-general said mildly, “Very well. Bring Mrs Brudnoy back with you. Leave the news reporter. The mission is a failure, Lieutenant. A complete and utter failure.”

  Then he added, “Except, of course, for the martyrdom of Captain Munasinghe.”

  TOUCHDOWN PLUS 4 HOURS 48 MINUTES

  “At least we don’t have to pack anything,” Joanna said as she sat at her delicate curved writing desk of light walnut and booted up her personal computer.

  “Are you sure?” Lev Brudnoy asked, from the doorway to their bedroom.

  “Of course,” she answered, without even glancing up at him. “We’ll go to the house in Savannah. My God, I’ll be able to go shopping again!”

  Brudnoy ambled into the living room and sat on one of the little Sheraton sofas. “Are you sure we’ll get to Savannah?”

  Joanna looked up from her computer. “What do you mean?”

  “We’re being carried Earthside on a military transport. It will land at the Peacekeeper base in Corsica. Has it occurred to you that we might be held there, inco
mmunicado?”

  “Incom- what makes you think Faure would do that?”

  Brudnoy shrugged. “It’s easier to negotiate with someone when you have him in prison.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  “Lev, I’m not some nobody that Faure can hide from public view. I’m Joanna Brudnoy! There’d be an uproar if he tried anything like that.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I’m just a worried old man. But,” Brudnoy ticked off on his fingers, “One: Faure has controlled the news media very effectively. Two: As far as everyone Earthside is concerned, you are at Moonbase. Faure isn’t telling anyone that you’re returning with the Peacekeepers. Three: You would make a very good hostage.”

  “I’m sending word to Savannah right now,” Joanna said. “The board of directors will know that I’m coming back with the Peacekeepers.”

  “Can you trust Rashid to inform the board?”

  Joanna stared at her husband for a long, silent moment. Then she nodded. “I don’t think he’d have the guts to keep this information from the board, but just in case, I’ll send the word to each individual board member.”

  “Good,” said Brudnoy.

  “And the news media, too.”

  Brudnoy gave her a sad smile. “Don’t expect a brass band when we arrive in Corsica. Or reporters, either.”

  “You really are a reporter for Global News,” Doug said, feeling foolish even as the words left his lips.

  “I really am,” said Edith Elgin, sitting in front of his desk.

  She was back in the coveralls that the Peacekeepers had given her: sky blue with white trim. The color showed off her thick blonde hair very nicely, Doug thought. Her eyes were her best feature: big, lustrous, emerald-green eyes. Startling eyes. Eyes that made you want to believe whatever she told you. Long legs. She must be almost as tall as I am.

  Edith was studying Doug, too. She saw an earnest-looking six-footer in his mid-twenties (which she knew from checking his bio before coming to the Moon). Olive skin, nice smile, dark hair, gray-blue eyes. Broad shoulders. His coveralls were a couple of shades darker than her own.