Moonwar gt-7 Read online

  He began:

  “Delegates of the General Assembly 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 spaces were the squares of lovingly tended grass 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 outgassing, 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 masses 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 arsenals 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 glass 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.”

  “Pass 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 bastard knows we need nanobugs 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 wristwatch; 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 between now and then, boss.”

  TOUCHDOWN MINUS 111 HOURS 48 MINUTES

  “You’re right,” Doug said to Anson.

  He clambered up onto the cafeteria table and raised his arms over his head. “Hey!” he shouted to the murmuring, scattering crowd. “Hold on! I’ve got a few words to say.”

  The crowd stopped heading for the exit and turned toward him, some looking expectant, others puzzled.

  “You Lunatics so eager to get back to work that you can’t hang in here a couple minutes more?” Doug asked, grinning at them.

  “Hell, boss, we’ll stay all day if you want us to,” hollered one of the men in the rear.

  “If you serve some drinks,” another voice chipped in.

  Doug kept his grin in place. “No drinks. And this is only going to take a few minutes.”

  Someone groaned theatrically. A few people laughed at it.

  “I want you to know,” Doug said, scanning their faces, “that we declared Moonbase’s independence a few hours ago. We had to do it, so that as an independent nation we can refuse to sign the nanotech treaty and continue t
o work here the way we always have.”

  “You mean we’re citizens of Moonbase now?” a woman asked.

  “I have to give up my American citizenship?” another voice from the crowd.

  “That’s all to be ironed out in negotiations with the US government and other governments,” Doug said. “We’re not going to ask any of you to give up your original citizenship, not if you don’t want to.”

  “What about those Peacekeeper troops Faure’s sending here?”

  “We’ll tell them we’re an independent nation now and they have no authority here,” Doug answered.

  “They gonna accept that?”

  “We’ll see,” said Doug.

  “Don’t give up your day job,” somebody said. Everyone laughed—nervously, Doug thought. But when he looked down at his mother, still seated at the table on which he was standing, she was not laughing at all. Not even smiling.

  “We’ll deal with the Peacekeepers when they get here,” Doug promised. “They’re not looking for a fight and neither are we.”

  “Yeah, but they got guns and we don’t.”

  Doug had no rejoinder for that.

  TOUCHDOWN MINUS 110 HOURS 7 MINUTES

  If anyone noticed that Claire Rossi and Nick O’Malley left The Cave together, with equally somber expressions on their faces, no one made a fuss about it.

  Almost everyone in Moonbase knew that Claire and Nick were lovers. She was the base personnel chief, a petite brunette with video-star looks and a figure that men wanted to howl after. He was a big, lumbering, easy-going redhead who ran a set of tractors up on the surface from the snug confines of a teleoperator’s console down in the control center.

  Nick was happy-go-lucky, and counted the most fortunate moment in his young life as the instant he saw Claire walking down one of Moonbase’s corridors. He smiled at her and she smiled back. Electricity crackled. He stopped looking at other women and she had thoughts only for him. It was like magic.

  But as they walked slowly out of The Cave, neither of them was smiling.

  “We could be stuck here for months,” Claire said as they shouldered their way through the dispersing crowd, heading for her quarters.

  Nick was somber, deep in thought. “My work contract runs out in three weeks. What happens then?”

  “I guess we won’t be heading back Earthside until Doug and the politicians back home settle this thing.”

  “Yeah, but how do I get paid when my contract term ends? What happens then?”

  She tried to smile up at him. “Well, we didn’t want to be separated, did we? Maybe you’ll have to stay here until my tour ends and we can go back home together.”

  Looking down at her, Nick saw that her smile was forced. “You don’t seem so happy about it.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “It’s…” She fell silent.

  “What?”

  “Wait until we get to my place,” Claire said, so solemnly that it worried Nick.

  Once she shut the door of her one-room compartment, Nick asked almost desperately, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s not wrong, exactly,” she said, going to the bunk and sitting on its edge.

  “Well, what?”

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  He blinked. “You’re going to have a baby?” His voice came out half an octave higher than usual.

  “Yes,” she answered, almost shyly.

  For a moment he didn’t know what to say, what to do. Then the reality of it burst on him and he broke into an ear-to-ear grin. “A baby! That’s great! That’s wonderful!’

  But Claire shook her head. “Not if we can’t get off Moonbase, it isn’t.”

  TOUCHDOWN MINUS 109 HOURS

  Aboard the Clippership Max Faget, Captain Jagath Munasinghe stared suspiciously at the schematic displayed on his notebook screen.

  “And this is the control center? Here?” he pointed with a blunt finger.

  “That’s it,” said Jack Killifer. “Take that and you’ve got the whole base under your thumb.”

  Munasinghe wore the uniform of the U.N.’s Peacekeeping Force: sky blue, with white trim at the cuffs and along the front of his tunic. Captain’s bars on his collar and a slim line of ribbons on his chest below his name tag. He was of slight build, almost delicate, but his large dark eyes radiated a distrust that always bordered on rage. Born in Sri Lanka, he had seen warfare from childhood and only accepted a commission in the Peacekeepers when Sri Lanka had agreed to disarmament after its third civil war in a century had killed two million men, women and children with a man-made plague virus.

  Behind him, forty specially-picked Peacekeepers sat uneasily in weightlessness as the spacecraft coasted toward the Moon. None of them had ever been in space before, not even Captain Munasinghe. Despite the full week of autogenic-feedback adaptation training they had been rushed through, and the slow-release anti-nausea patches they were required to wear behind their ears, several of the troops had vomited miserably during the first few hours of zero-gee flight. Munasinghe himself had managed to fight down the bile that burned in his throat, but just barely.

  Sitting beside the captain, Killifer wore standard civilian’s coveralls, slate gray and undecorated except for his name tag over his left breast pocket. He was more than twenty years older than the dark-skinned captain and almost a head taller: lean, lantern-jawed, his face hard and flinty. Once his light brown hair had been shaved down almost to his scalp, but now it was graying and he wore it long enough to tie into a ponytail that bobbed weightlessly at the back of his neck. The sight of it made Munasinghe queasy.

  “Forty men to take and hold the entire base,” Munasinghe muttered unhappily.

  “It’s not that big a place,” Killifer replied. “And like I told you, take the command center and you control their air, water, heat—everything.”

  Munasinghe nodded but his eyes showed that he had his doubts.

  “Look,” Killifer said, “you put a couple of men in the environmental control center, here—” he tapped a fingernail on the captain’s notebook screen, “-and a couple more in the water factory, keep a few in the control center and the rest of ’em can patrol the tunnels or do whatever else you want.”

  “There are more than two thousand people there.”

  “So what? They got no weapons. They’re civilians, they don’t know how to fight even if they wanted to.”

  “You are absolutely sure they have no weapons of any kind?”

  Killifer gave him a nasty grin. “Nothing. Shit, they don’t even have steak knives; the toughest food they have to deal with is friggin’ soybean burgers.”

  “Still…”

  Feeling exasperated, Killifer growled. “I spent damn’ near twenty years there. I know what I’m talking about. It’ll be a piece of cake, I tell you. A walkover. You’ll be a friggin’ hero inside of ten minutes.”

  Munasinghe’s dubious expression did not change, but he turned and looked across the aisle of the passenger compartment to the reporter who was sitting next to them.

  TOUCHDOWN MINUS 108 HOURS 57 MINUTES

  Edith Elgin had thought she’d chat with the women soldiers among the Peacekeepers all the way to the Moon. But ever since the rocket’s engines had cut off and the spacecraft had gone into zero gravity she had felt too nauseous to chat or even smile. Besides, most of the women barely spoke English; the little flags they wore as shoulder patches were from Pakistan and Zambia and places like that.

  If she didn’t feel so queasy it would almost have been funny. The reporter who broke the story of finding life on Mars, the woman who had parlayed a Texas cheerleader’s looks and a lot of smarts into prime-time news stardom, sitting strapped into a bucket seat, stomach churning, sinuses throbbing, feeling woozy every time she moved her head the slightest bit. And there’s more than four days of this to go. Sooner or later I’ll have to get up and go to the toilet. She did not look forward to the prospect.

  At least nobody’s upchucked for a wh
ile, Edith told herself gratefully. The sound of people vomiting had almost broken her when they had first gone into zero gee. Fortunately the Clippership’s air circulation system had been strong enough to keep most of the stench away from her row. Still, the acrid scent of vomit made the cabin smell like a New York alley.

  It had been neither simple nor easy to win this assignment to accompany the Peacekeepers to the renegade base on the Moon. The network was all for it, of course, but the U.N. bureaucracy wanted nothing to do with a reporter aboard their spacecraft. Edith had to use every bit of her blonde smiling charm and corporate infighter’s savvy to get past whole phalanxes of administrators and directors and their petty, close-minded assistants. All the way up to Georges Faure himself she had battled.

  “My dear Miss Elgin,” Faure had said, with his smarmy smile, “this is a military expedition, not a camping trip.”

  “This is news,” Edith had countered, “and the public demands to know what’s going on, first-hand.”

  She had been brought to Faure’s presence in the Secretariat building. Not to his office, though. The secretary-general chose to meet her in a small quiet lounge on the building’s top floor. The lounge was plush: thick beige carpeting, comfortable armchairs and curved little sofas. Even the walls were covered with woven tapestries of muted browns and greens. The decor seemed to absorb sound; it was a room that gave no echoes, a room to share whispered secrets.

  Edith had chosen to wear a clinging knee-length dress of bright red, accented with gold bracelets and necklace to compliment her sunshine yellow hair. Once it had been truly that happy color; for years now she had helped it along with tint.

  Faure had let her wait for almost ten minutes before he showed up, a dapper little man in a precisely-cut suit of elegant dark blue set off perfectly by a necktie of deep maroon.