Bova, Ben - Moonwar

VIP免费

2024-12-07 0 0 921.79KB 189 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

MOONWAR

Book II of The Moonbase Saga

Ben Bova

CONTENTS

Part I Skirmish

Part II Siege

Part III Battle

War is an evil thing, but to submit to the dictation of other states is worse . . . Freedom, if we hold fast

to it, will ultimately restore our losses, but submission will mean permanent loss of all that we value ...

To you who call yourselves men of peace, I say: You are not safe unless you have men of action on

your side.

-Thucydides

Once we have lived through the rapid changes that are now marking our transition from the third to the

fourth phase of history, from a period of diversification to one of unification, we shall be squarely

faced with a number of serious problems . . .

It has been shown by many social experiments that man cannot control every facet of life. All we can

do is to try to isolate the factors that are the keys to the entire structure, and to work on them. These are

basically: the conservation of natural resources; power-production; population-control; the full

utilization of brainpower; and education. The details of the social structure will fall into place

automatically as the end product of all these forces; as they always have done . . .

Political unification of the world is not the first necessary step. By the time it has become possible

without turmoil, it will also have become unnecessary.

-Carleton S. Coon

PROLOGUE: MOONBASE CONTROL CENTER

'L-l's out.'

The chief communications technician looked up sharply from her keyboard. 'Try the backup.'

'Already did,' said the man at the console beside her. 'No joy. Every frequency's dead.'

The third comm tech, seated at the console on the chief's other side, tapped one keypad after another.

His display screen showed nothing but streaks of meaningless hash.

'They did it,' he confirmed. 'They pulled the plug.'

The other controllers and technicians left their own stations and drifted tensely, expectantly toward the

communications consoles. Their consoles flickered and glowed, untended. The big electronic wall

screen that displayed all of Moonbase's systems hung above them as if nothing unusual was happening.

The chief pushed back her little wheeled chair slightly. 'They did it right when they said they would,

didn't they?'

'That's it, then,' said the male comm tech. 'We're at war.'

No one replied. No one knew what to say. The knot of men and women stood there in uneasy silence.

The only sounds were the low humming of the electronics consoles and the soft whisper of the air-

circulation fans.

'I'd better pipe the word up to the boss,' the chief technician muttered, reaching toward her keyboard.

She started to peck at the keys.

'Shit!' she snapped. 'I broke a fingernail.'

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 116 HOURS 30 MINUTES

Douglas Stavenger stood at the crest of Wodjohowitcz Pass, listening to the silence. Inside the base

there were always voices, human or synthesized, and the constant background hum of electrical

machinery. Out here, up on the mountains that ringed the giant crater Alphonsus, he heard nothing but

his own breathing - and the faint, comforting whir of the spacesuit's air circulation fans.

Good noise, he thought, smiling to himself. When that noise stops, so does your breathing.

He had climbed down from the tractor near the spot where the plaque was, a small square of gold

riveted onto the rock face, dedicated to his father:

On this spot Paul Stavenger chose to die,

in order to save the men and women of

Moonbase.

Doug had not driven up to the pass for the sake of nostalgia, however. He wanted to take a long, hard

look at Moonbase. Not the schematic diagrams or electronic charts, but the real thing, the actual base

as it stood beneath the uncompromising stars.

Everyone in the base thought they were safe and snug, dug into the side of the ringwall mountain they

had named Yeager. Sheltered by solid rock, they had little fear of the dangers up on the airless surface,

where the crater floor was bathed in hard radiation and the temperature could swing four hundred

degrees between daylight and night, between sunshine and shadow.

But Doug saw how terribly vulnerable they all were. They had protected themselves against the forces

of nature, true enough. But now they were threatened with destruction by the hand of war.

Doug looked out at the solar farm, thousands of acres of dark solar cells that greedily drank in sunlight

and converted it noiselessly into the electricity the base needed the way a man needs blood. They could

be blown to dust by conventional explosives or blasted into uselessness by the radiation pulse from a

nuclear warhead.

Even easier, he realized, an enemy could knock out the radiators and we'd all stew underground in our

own waste heat until we either surrendered or collapsed from heat exhaustion.

His eyes travelled to the rocket pads. They were empty now that the morning's lunar transfer vehicle

had loaded up and departed. Beyond, he saw the geodesic dome that sheltered the construction pad;

inside it, a half-built Clippership was being built by virus-sized nanomachines that converted meteoric

carbon dust into the hard, strong structure of pure diamond. How could we protect spacecraft sitting

out on the pads? We can't shelter them and we don't have the facilities to bring them underground.

That dome is no protection against missiles or even bullets.

He looked farther out across the crater floor, to where the mass launcher stretched its lean dark metallic

finger to the horizon. A single warhead could wreck it forever, Doug knew.

Well, we can't beat them in a shooting war, he told himself. That's certain.

Turning his gaze back to the edge of the solar farm, Doug saw the dark slick-looking film on the

ground where the nanomachines were busily converting the silicon and metals of the lunar regolith into

more solar cells.

That's what this war is all about, he knew. Nanomachines. And he thought he could feel the trillions of

nanos inside his own body. If I go back to Earth I'll be a marked man. Some crackpot nanoluddite will

murder me, just the way they've killed so many others. But if the only way to avert this war is to close

Moonbase, where else can I go?

His mind churning, he turned again and looked down at the deep pit that would one day be Moonbase's

grand plaza. If we ever get to finish it.

All construction jobs begin by digging a hole in the ground, he said to himself. It doesn't make any

difference if you're on the Moon or the Earth.

Under the brilliant illumination of powerful lamps spaced around the edge of the pit, front-loaders

were working soundlessly in the lunar vacuum, scooping up dirt and dumping their loads onto the

waiting trucks. Clouds of fine lunar dust hung over the machines, scattering the lamp light like fog.

The first time I've seen mist on the Moon, Doug mused. Not a molecule of water in that haze, though.

All of the machinery was controlled by operators sitting safely inside their stations at the control

center. Only a handful of construction workers were actually out on the floor of the crater Alphonsus.

I should be inside, too, Doug told himself. The deadline comes up right about now. I ought to be inside

facing the music instead of out here, trying to avoid it all.

In the seven years of his exile on the Moon, Doug had always come out to the lunar surface when he

had a problem that ached in him. The Moon's harsh, airless other-worldliness concentrated his mind on

the essentials: life or death, survival or extinction. He never failed to be thrilled by the stark grandeur

of the lunar landscape. But now he felt fear, instead. Fear that Moonbase would be closed, its potential

for opening the space frontier forever lost. Fear that he would have to return to Earth, where fanatic

assassins awaited him.

And anger, deep smoldering anger that men would threaten war and destruction in their ignorant, blind

zeal to eradicate Moonbase.

Simmering inside, Doug turned back to the tractor and climbed up to its bare metal driver's seat. The

ground here along the pass was rutted by years of tractors' cleats clawing through the dusty lunar

regolith. He himself had driven all the way around these softly rounded mountains, circumnavigating

the crater; not an easy trek, even in a tractor. Alphonsus was so big its ringwall mountains disappeared

beyond the short lunar horizon. The jaunt had taken almost a week, all of it spent inside a spacesuit

that smelled very ripe by the time he came home again. But Doug had found the peace and inner

tranquility he had sought, all alone up on the mountaintops.

Not today. Even out here there was no peace or tranquility for him.

Once he reached the crater floor he looked beyond the uncompromising slash of the horizon and saw

the Earth hanging in the dark sky, glowing blue and decked with streams of pure white clouds. He felt

no yearning, no sense of loss, not even curiosity. Only deep resentment, anger. Burning rage. The

Moon was his true home, not that distant deceitful world where violence and treachery lurked behind

every smile.

And he realized that the anger was at himself, not the distant faceless people of Earth. I should have

known it would come to this. For seven years they've been putting the pressure on us. I should have

seen this coming. I should have figured out a way to avoid an outright conflict.

He parked the tractor and walked along the side of the construction pit, gliding in the dreamlike,

floating strides of the Moon's low gravity. Turning his attention back to the work at hand, Doug saw

that the digging was almost finished. They were nearly ready to start the next phase of the job. The

tractors were best for the heavy work, moving large masses of dirt and rock. Now the finer tasks would

begin, and for that the labs were producing specialized nanomachines.

He wondered if they would ever reach that stage. Or would the entire base be abandoned and left

suspended in time, frozen in the airless emptiness of infinity? Worse yet, the base might be blasted,

bombed into rubble, destroyed for all time.

It can't come to that! I won't let that happen. No matter what, I won't give them an excuse to use force

against us.

'Greetings and felicitations!' Lev Brudnoy's voice boomed though Doug's helmet earphones.

Startled out of his thoughts, Doug looked up and saw Brudnoy's tall figure approaching, his spacesuit a

brilliant cardinal red. The bulky suits smothered individual recognition, so long-time Lunatics tended

to personalize their suits for easy identification. Even inside his suit, though, Brudnoy seemed to stride

along in the same gangly, loose-jointed manner he did in shirtsleeves.

'Lev - what are you doing here?'

'A heart-warming greeting for your stepfather.'

'I mean ... oh, you know what I mean!'

'Your mother and I decided to come up now, in case there's trouble later on.'

Nodding inside his helmet, Doug agreed, 'Good thinking. They might shut down flights here for a

while.'

'How is the suit?' Brudnoy asked.

Doug had forgotten that he was wearing the new design. 'Fine,' he said absently, his attention still on

the digging.

'Do the gloves work as well as my engineers promised me they would?' Brudnoy asked, coming up

beside Doug.

Holding out a hand for the Russian to see, Doug slowly closed his fingers. He could feel the vibration

of the tiny servomotors as they moved the alloy 'bones' of the exoskeleton on the back of his hand.

'I haven't tried to crush any rocks with them,' Doug said, half in jest.

'But the pressure is not uncomfortable?' Brudnoy asked. 'You can flex your fingers easily?'

Nodding again, Doug replied, 'About as easily as you can in regular gloves.'

'Ahh,' Brudnoy sighed. 'I had hoped for much better.'

'This is just the first shot, Lev. You can improve it, I'm sure.'

'Yes, there is always room for improvement.'

The suit Doug wore was a cermet hard shell from boots to helmet; even the joints at the ankles, knees,

hips, shoulders, elbows and wrists were overlapping circles of cermet. The ceramic-metal material was

strong enough to hold normal shirtsleeve-pressure air inside the suit even though the pressure outside

was nothing but hard vacuum. Thus the suit operated at normal air pressure, instead of the low-

pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen that the standard spacesuits required. No prebreathing was

needed with the new design; you could climb into it and button up immediately.

The gloves were always a problem. They tended to balloon even in the low-pressure suits. Doug's

gloves were fitted with spidery exoskeleton struts and tiny servomotors that amplified his natural

strength, so he could grasp and work even though the gloves would have been too stiff for him use

without their aid.

'Maybe we could lower the pressure in the gloves,' Doug suggested.

'We would have to put a cuff around your wrist to seal-'

'Priority message.' The words crackled in their earphones. 'Priority message for Douglas Stavenger.'

Tapping at the keypad built into the wrist of his spacesuit, Doug said, 'This is Stavenger.' He was

surprised at how dry his throat suddenly felt. He knew what the message would be.

'All frequencies from the L-l commsat have been cut off,' said the chief communications technician.

'Communications directly from Earth have also been stopped.'

Doug's heart began hammering inside him. He looked at Brudnoy, but all he could see was the

reflection of his own faceless helmet in the gold tint of the Russian's visor.

Swallowing hard, Doug said, 'Okay. Message received. Thank you.'

He waited a beat, then added, 'Please find Jinny Anson for me.'

'Will do.'

An instant later the former base director's voice chirped in his earphones, 'Anson here.'

'Jinny, it's Doug. I need to talk with you, right away.'

'I know,' she said, her voice sobering.

'Where are you?'

'In the university office.'

'Please meet me in my place in fifteen minutes.'

'Right.'

Doug turned and started along the edge of the construction pit, heading for the airlock in swift, gliding

strides. Brudnoy kept pace beside him.

'It's started,' he said.

I'll inform your mother,' said the Russian.

With a bitter smile, Doug replied, 'She already knows, I'm sure. They couldn't declare war on us

without her knowing about it.'

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 115 HOURS 55 MINUTES

'So they've done it,' said Jinny Anson, with a challenging grin. 'Damn flatheads.'

Anson, Brudnoy and Doug's mother Joanna were sitting before Doug's desk. Anson was leaning back

in her webbed chair almost casually. Wearing comfortable faded denim jeans and an open-collar

velour blouse, she looked vigorous and feisty, her short-cropped hair still golden blonde, her steel-gray

eyes snapping with barely suppressed anger.

Joanna seemed calm, but Doug knew that her composed expression masked an inner tension. She had

let her shoulder-length hair go from ash blonde to silver gray, but otherwise she looked no more than

forty. She was dressed elegantly, as usual: a patterned coral skirt, its hem slightly weighted to make it

drape properly in the soft lunar gravity, and a crisply tailored white blouse buttoned at the throat and

wrists, where jewelry sparkled.

Seated between the two women was Brudnoy, his long face with its untidy gray beard looking somber,

his baggy eyes on Doug. Brudnoy's dark turtleneck and unpressed denims seemed almost shabby, next

to his wife's impeccable ensemble. His gray lunar softboots were faded and shiny from long use.

Although Doug's office was little larger than a cubbyhole carved out of the ringwall mountain's flank,

its walls were smart screens from padded tile floor to smoothed rock ceiling; flat, high-definition,

digital display screens that could be activated by voice or by the pencil-sized laser pointer resting on

Doug's desk.

Doug kept one eye on the screen covering the wall to the left of his desk; it was scrolling a complete

checkout of Moonbase's entire systems. He needed to reassure himself that everything was operating

normally. The other two walls could have been showing videos of any scenery he wanted, but Doug

had them displaying the security camera views of the base, switching every ten seconds from one

tunnel to another and then to the outside, where the teleoperated tractors were still working in the pit as

if nothing had happened. The wall behind him was blank.

Feeling uneasy as he sat behind his desk, Doug said, 'Now I don't want people getting twitchy about

this. The base should run as normally as possible.'

'Even though Faure's declared war on us?' Anson cracked.

'It's not that kind of a war,' Doug snapped back. "There's not going to be any shooting.'

'Not from our side, anyway,' said Anson. "The best we could do is throw rocks at 'em.'

'At whom?' Doug's mother asked testily.

'Peacekeeper troops,' said Doug.

Everyone in the office looked startled at the thought.

'You don't think they'd really go that far, do you?' Anson asked, looking worried for the first time.

Doug picked up his laser pointer and aimed its red spot at one of the icons lining the top of the wall

screen on his left. The wall became a schematic display of the Earth-Moon system, with clouds of

satellites orbiting the Earth. A dozen navigational satellites clung to low orbits around the Moon, and

the big crewed station at the L-l position still showed as a single green dot.

'No traffic,' Doug said. "This morning's LTV's stopped at L-l. Nothing at all moving between LEO and

here.'

'Not yet,' muttered Brudnoy.

'They wouldn't invade us,' Joanna said firmly. 'That little Quebecer hasn't got the guts.'

Brudnoy ran a bony finger across his short gray beard. No matter how carefully he trimmed it, the

beard somehow looked shaggy all the time.

'That little Quebecer,' he reminded his wife, 'has fought his way to the top of the United Nations. And

now he's gotten the U.N. to declare us in violation of the nanotech treaty.'

Joanna frowned impatiently. 'We've been violating that treaty since it was written.'

'But now your little Quebecer has obtained the authority to send Peacekeeper troops here to enforce the

treaty on us,' Brudnoy continued.

'You really think it'll come to that?' Anson asked again, edging forward slightly in her chair.

'Sooner or later,' Doug said.

'They know we can't stop using nanomachines,' Joanna said bitterly. 'They know they'll be destroying

Moonbase if they prevent us from using them.'

'That's what they're going to do, though,' said Brudnoy, growing more gloomy with each word.

'Then we'll have to resist them,' Doug said.

'Fight the Peacekeepers?' Anson seemed startled at the thought. 'But-'

'I didn't say fight,' Doug corrected. 'I said resist.'

'How?'

'I've been studying the legal situation,' Doug said. 'We could declare our independence.'

His mother looked more irked than puzzled. 'What good would that do?'

'As an independent nation, we wouldn't sign the nanotech treaty, so it wouldn't apply to us.'

Brudnoy raised his brows. 'But would the U.N. recognize us as an independent nation? Would they

admit us to membership?'

'Faure would never allow it,' Joanna said. 'The little Quebecer's got the whole U.N. wrapped around his

manicured finger.'

'How would the corporation react if we declared independence?' Jinny Anson asked.

'Kiribati couldn't do anything about it,' said Doug.

Brudnoy sighed painfully. 'If they hadn't knuckled under to Faure and signed the treaty-'

'They didn't have much choice, really,' said Doug. Looking straight at his mother, he went on, 'But

what about Masterson? How's your board going to react to our independence?'

'I'll handle the board of directors,' Joanna replied flatly.

'And Rashid?'

She smiled slightly. 'He'll go up in a cloud of purple smoke. But don't worry; even though he's the

board chairman now I can keep him in his place.'

'Independence,' Anson murmured.

Doug said, 'We're pretty much self-sufficient, as far as energy and food are concerned.'

'How long is "pretty much?"' Joanna asked.

'We can go for months without importing anything from Earth, I betcha,' Anson replied.

'Really?' Doug asked.

She shrugged. 'Condiments might be a problem. Ketchup, seasonings, salt.'

'We can manufacture salt with nanomachines,' Doug said. 'Ought to be simple enough.'

'Where can you get the sodium and chlorine?' Anson retorted. 'Not out of the regolith.'

Doug smiled a little. 'Out of the reprocessors. Recycle the garbage.'

Anson made a sour face.

'Could we really get along for months without importing anything from Earth?' Joanna asked.

'Maybe a year,' Anson said. 'If you don't mind eating your soyburgers without mustard.'

Brudnoy flexed his gnarled fingers. 'Aren't you glad that I insisted on planting onions and garlic, along

with my flowers?'

'Do you have any jalapeno peppers out at the farm?' Anson asked.

Brudnoy shook his head.

'A year,' Joanna mused. 'This ought to be settled long before that.'

'One way or another,' said Brudnoy morosely.

'Pharmaceuticals might be a problem,' Doug said, turning to the wall screen on his right. With the laser

he changed the display from a camera view of the empty rocket launching pads to an inventory of the

base's pharmaceutical supplies. 'We've been bringing them up on a monthly schedule. Got a . . .' he

studied the display screen briefly, '. . . three-month supply on hand.'

'Maybe we can use nanomachines instead,' Joanna suggested. It was an open secret that her youthful

appearance was due to nanotherapy that tightened sagging muscles and kept her skin tone smooth.

'I can talk to Cardenas about that,' Anson replied.

'And Professor Zimmerman,' Doug said.

'You talk to Zimmerman,' she snapped. 'He always tries to bully me.'

Brudnoy volunteered, I'll see Zimmerman.'

'You?'

With a guilty smile, the Russian said, 'He and I have been working on a little project together: using

nanomachines to make beer.'

'Lev!' Joanna glared at her husband.

Brudnoy raised a placating hand. 'Don't worry. So far, we've accomplished less than nothing. The stuff

is so bad not even Zimmerman will drink it.'

Doug chuckled at his stepfather's self-deprecating manner. Then he said, 'Okay. Our first move is to

declare independence and-'

'How can we let anyone on Earth know we're applying for U.N. membership if all the communications

links are cut off?' Joanna asked.

'We can talk to Earth,' Anson assured her. 'Radio, TV, even laser beams if we need 'em. We don't need

the commsats; just. squirt our messages straight to the ground antennas.'

'The question is,' said Brudnoy, 'will anyone on Earth respond to us?'

'They will,' Doug said. 'Once they learn what we're doing. And there's always the news media.'

'Ugh!' said Joanna.

'Don't knock them,' Doug insisted. 'They might turn out to be our best ally in this.'

'Our only ally,' said Brudnoy.

'Okay, okay, so we declare independence,' Anson cut in. 'Then what?'

'If Faure refuses to recognize us we appeal to the World Court,' said Doug.

Joanna agreed. 'Tie him up legally and wait for world opinion to come over to our side.'

'Lots of luck,' Brudnoy mumbled.

'Do you think it'll work?' Anson wondered.

'It's got to,' said Joanna.

'Jinny,' said Doug, pointing a finger in her direction, 'I want you to take over as base director.'

'Me? Why? I haven't been behind that desk in almost eight years!'

Grinning at her, Doug said, 'You know more about what's going on in these tunnels than I do. Don't try

to deny it.'

'But I've got the university to run,' she protested. 'And what're you going to be doing?'

'The university's going to be in hibernation as long as Earthside isn't allowed to communicate with us.

Your students won't be able to talk to you.'

'But you . . . ?'

'I've been studying military history ever since Faure was elected secretary-general,' Doug said. 'One

thing I've learned is that we're going to need somebody to give his undivided attention to this crisis. I

can't be running the day-to-day operation of Moonbase and handle the war at the same time.'

'You said it's not a war,' Joanna said sharply.

'Not a shooting war,' Doug admitted. 'Not yet. But we've got to be prepared for that possibility.'

'You can't-'

'He's right,' Brudnoy said, interrupting his wife. 'Doug should devote his full attention to this situation.'

'And I'm gonna be base director again,' Anson said. She did not seem displeased with the idea.

'So you will be our generalissimo,' said Brudnoy, pointing at Doug. 'Jinny becomes base director once

again. And you, dear wife,' he turned to face Joanna, 'must serve as our foreign secretary, in charge of

diplomatic relations with Masterson and the other corporations.'

'And what will you be doing, Lev?' Joanna asked her husband.

'Me?' Brudnoy's shaggy brows climbed halfway to his scalp. 'I will remain as usual: nothing but a

peasant.'

'Yeah, sure,' Anson chirped.

Brudnoy shrugged. 'I have no delusions of grandeur. But I think it will be important to keep the major

corporations on our side.'

'I'll handle relations with Masterson Corporation,' Joanna agreed. 'We'll try to put some pressure on the

government in Washington to oppose this U.N. takeover.'

'If you can keep the board on our side,' Doug said.

His mother raised an imperious brow. 'I told you, don't worry about the board.'

'Or Rashid?'

'Or Rashid either,' Joanna riposted. Turning slightly toward her husband, she added, ' Rashid's a man

with real delusions of grandeur.'

'Okay,' said Jinny Anson. 'Then I'll run the base and you, Doug, you can run the war.'

'Thanks a lot.'

'Somebody's got to-'

'Hold it!' Doug snapped. The message icon on his left screen was blinking. Urgent message. And he

saw that a cardinal red dot had cleared the swarm of low-orbit satellites around the Earth and was

heading outward.

'Message,' Doug called out in the tone that the computer recognized. His voice trembled only slightly.

'A crewed spacecraft just lifted from the military base on Corsica,' a comm tech's voice said. 'It's on a

direct lunar trajectory.'

'Peacekeeper troops,' Doug said.

'Must be.'

They all turned toward Doug.

'So what do we do now, boss?' Jinny Anson asked.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 114 HOURS 35 MINUTES

'Five days,' Doug said to the woman's image on his screen. 'They'll be here in a little less than five

days.'

Tamara Bonai frowned slightly, nothing more than a faint pair of lines between her brows. But on her

ethereally beautiful face it seemed a gross disfigurement. Her face was a sculptor's dream, high

cheekbones and almond eyes; her skin a light clear teak; her long hair a tumbling cascade as lustrous

and black as the infinity of space.

Like Doug, she was seated behind a desk. Her life-sized image on the wall in front of him made it look

as if Doug's office opened onto her office on Tarawa: lunar rock and smart walls suddenly giving way

to Micronesian ironwood and bamboo.

'When I visited Moonbase,' she said, 'the trip took only one day.'

'We brought you up on a high-energy burn,' said Doug. 'The Peacekeepers are coming on a minimum-

energy trajectory.'

It took almost three seconds for his words to reach Earth and her reply to get back to his office at

Moonbase. Usually Doug relaxed during the interval but now he sat tensely in his padded swivel chair.

Bonai smiled slightly. 'The Peacekeepers are trying to save money by taking the low-energy route?'

Doug forced a laugh. 'I doubt it. I think they want to give us as much time as possible to think things

over and then surrender.'

Her lips still curved deliciously, Bonai asked, 'Is that what you will do: surrender?'

'No,' said Doug. 'We're just about self-sufficient now. We can get along without Earth for a long

while.'

If she was surprised by Doug's answer, it did not show on her face. Doug wondered if anyone was

eavesdropping on their conversation. It was being carried by a tight laser beam, but still the tightest

beam spread a few kilometers across over the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer distance between the

Earth and the Moon. The island of Tarawa was tiny, but still big enough for Rashid or someone else to

pick up the beamed signal.

'You are prepared to fight Peacekeeper troops?' she asked.

'We're not going to surrender Moonbase to them.'

She seemed genuinely worried. 'But they will have guns . . . other weapons. What weapons do you

have?'

"There isn't even a target pistol in all of Moonbase,' Doug admitted. 'But we've got some pretty good

brains here.'

Once she heard his words, she shook her head slightly. 'You can't stop bullets with words.'

'Maybe we can,' Doug said. Not waiting for a response from her, he went on, 'We're going to declare

our independence and apply to the General Assembly for admission to the U.N.'

Her delay in responding to him was longer than three seconds. At last Bonai said, 'It's my fault, isn't it?

You're in this trouble because I bowed to the U.N.'s pressure and signed the nanotech treaty.'

'You did what was best for your people,' Doug replied. 'You did what you had to do.'

Masterson Corporation had owned and operated Moonbase from its beginning as a set of half-buried

shelters huddled near the mountain ringwall of the giant crater Alphonsus. Nanotechnology made it

possible for the base to grow, and begin to prosper.

Virus-sized nanomachines scoured the regolith of Alphonsus' crater floor, extracting oxygen and the

scant atoms of hydrogen that blew in on the solar wind. Once ice fields were discovered in the south

polar region, nanomachines built and maintained the pipeline that fed water across more than a

thousand kilometers of mountains and craters. Nanomachines built solar cells out of the regolith's

silicon, to supply the growing base with constantly increasing electrical power. Nanomachines had

built the mass driver that launched payloads of lunar ores to factories in Earth orbit.

And nanomachines took carbon atoms from near-Earth asteroids and built Clipperships of pure

diamond, Moonbase's newest export and already its principal source of cash flow. Diamond

Clipperships were not only the world's best spacecraft; they were starting to take over the market for

long-range commercial air flight on Earth.

The United Nations' nanotechnology treaty banned all nanotech operations, research and teaching in

the nations that signed the treaty. Seven years earlier, when it became clear that the United States

would sign the treaty - indeed, American nanoluddites had drafted the treaty - Masterson Corporation

had set up a dummy company on the island nation of Kiribati and transferred Moonbase to the straw-

man corporation. As long as Kiribati did not sign the treaty, Moonbase could legally continue using

nanomachines, which were as vital to Moonbase as air.

But the day after Tamara Bonai, chief of the Kiribati council, reluctantly signed the nanotech treaty,

the U.N.'s secretary general - Georges Faure - personally called Joanna Stavenger and told her that

Moonbase had two weeks to shut down all nanotech operations, research and teaching.

Exactly two weeks later, to the very minute, all communications links from Earth to Moonbase were

cut. And now a spacecraft carrying U.N. Peacekeeper troops had lifted from Corsica on a leisurely

five-day course for Moonbase.

'You have no idea of how much pressure they put on us,' Bonai said, her lovely face downcast. 'They

even stopped tourist flights from coming to our resorts. It was an economic blockade. They would

have strangled us.'

'I'm not blaming you for this,' Doug said. 'I only called to let you know that we're declaring our

independence. As an independent nation that hasn't signed the nanotech treaty, we'll be able to keep on

as we have been, despite Faure and his Peacekeepers.'

She almost smiled. 'Does that mean that you will continue to honor your contracts with Kiribati

Corporation?'

Moonbase marketed its diamond Clipperships and other exports to transportation companies on Earth

through Kiribati Corporation.

'Yes, certainly,' Doug said. Then he added, 'As soon as this situation is cleared up.'

'I understand,' she said. 'We will certainly not object to your independence.'

Doug smiled back at her. 'Thanks, Tamara. I knew I could count on you.'

The three seconds ticked. 'Good luck, Doug,' she said at last.

Thanks again. I think we're going to need all the luck we can get.'

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 114 HOURS

Kind of a shame, the mercenary thought. They're pretty nice people, these guys I work with. The

women, too. But I won't be hurting them. It's the leaders I'm after. The Brudnoys and Jinny Anson and

the Stavenger kid.

Nodding as if reaffirming his mission, he went back to his work. Got to finish this job, he told himself.

Can't leave anything undone. No loose ends; no mistakes.

The word spread through Moonbase's corridors with the speed of sound. In workshops and offices, in

living quarters and laboratories, out at the spaceport, at the mass driver, even among the handful of

spacesuited men and women working on the surface, the word flashed: We're at war. U.N. troops are

on their way here.

It's about time, said the mercenary to himself. Years of diplomats in their fancy suits and their evasive

language, farting around, trying to talk the problem to death, and now at last they're taking action.

He looked up from the work he was doing; he took pride in his work. No one suspected that he was a

deep agent, a trained killer who had been inserted into Moonbase more than a year earlier to work his

way into the community and wait for the right moment. He had been without contact from his

superiors ever since he first set foot in Moonbase. He would operate now without orders.

Cripple Moonbase. That was his mission. For a year he had studied all of Moonbase's systems and

personnel. The underground base was pathetically vulnerable to sabotage. Every breath of air, every

molecule of water, depended on complex machinery, all of it run by sophisticated computer programs.

Sophisticated meant fragile, the mercenary knew. A computer virus could bring Moonbase to its knees

in a matter of hours, maybe less.

There was another part of his mission. Decapitate the leadership. His superiors used words such as

incapacitate and immobilize. What they meant was kill.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 113 HOURS 22 MINUTES

Doug sat alone in his quarters, staring at his blank wall screen. Declare our independence, he thought.

Just like that. Tell the flatlanders down there that we no longer belong to Kiribati Corporation or any

company or government on Earth. What words do I use to get that across?

His quarters were larger than his office, one of the new 'suites' big enough to partition into a sitting

room and a separate bedroom. It even had its own bathroom.

Leaning back in his comfortable chair of yielding plastic foam, Doug asked the computer to call up the

American Declaration of Independence from his history program. Jefferson's powerful, eloquent words

filled the wall screen. Doug reduced the display to a less imposing size, then spent several minutes

studying it. Finally he shook his head. That was fine for 1776, he told himself, but this is nearly three

hundred years later. They'd sound pretty stilted now.

Besides, he thought, everybody'd recognize the source. I'd be accused of plagiarism. That's no way to

start a new nation.

He thought back to his studies of military history. The American general who had commanded the

Allied armies in Europe during World War II - what was his name? Ike something.

A few touches of his laser pointer and he had Dwight Eisenhower's multimedia biography on the

screen. He muted the sound and scrolled slowly through it, searching for the terse statement that

Eisenhower had written back to Washington

when the Nazis surrendered. His aides had wanted a long, flowery announcement filled with stirring

phrases and fulsome praise for the various generals. Eisenhower had tossed their suggestions aside and

written - ah! There it is: 'The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 02.41 local time, May 7,

1945.'

That's what I want, Doug said to himself. Short, strong, direct.

He cleared his throat and called to the computer, 'Dictation.' Then, after a moment's thought, he said

slowly and clearly:

'Moonbase hereby declares its independence from Earth and asks for admission to the United Nations.'

He stared at the words for a long moment, then decided they said what he intended to say. Briefly he

thought of running them past his mother and Lev Brudnoy, but he shook his head at the idea. They'd

want to tinker with the statement, maybe hedge it or decorate it with reasons and arguments. Ear

candy. I'm in command, we've all agreed to that and we've all agreed to declaring our independence.

This is the message we send to Faure and the rest of Earth.

Doug called up the communications desk at the command center.

'Beam this message to U.N. headquarters in New York,' he said, 'and spray it to every antenna on

Earth. All the commsats, too. Send it by laser to Kiribati and to Masterson Corporation's headquarters

in Savannah.'

The chief comm tech on duty was a young man that Doug had played against in Moonbase's annual

low-gravity Olympic games. He grinned as he scanned Doug's message.

'Right away, boss,' he said.

Doug blanked his screen and leaned back in his foam chair. Okay, it's done. Now to see if it has any

effect.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 112 HOURS 17 MINUTES

Although Lunar University had no real campus, its heart was the plushly-equipped studio where

teaching was done through electronic links to Earth and virtual reality programs.

Wilhelm Zimmerman liked his creature comforts. He demanded them. He had come to Moonbase

because the 'verdammt treaty' had closed his university department in Basel. He had given up cigars

and strudel and even beer, but he still managed to overeat, under-exercise, and drive Moonbase's

supply and maintenance staffs into frenzies with his demands for couches and padded chairs big

enough to take his girth comfortably.

He still dressed in the gray, old-fashioned three-piece suits he had brought to Moonbase with him

seven years earlier. He had personally designed a set of nanomachines to keep the suits in perfect

repair, renewing fraying cuffs and worn spots - atom by atom. The nanomachines even kept his clothes

clean.

Still, as he sat sprawled in his favorite sofa, he looked like a rumpled mess, his jacket unbuttoned and

flapping loose, his vest stretched tight across his ample stomach, tie loose from shirt collar, the halo of

stringy gray hair surrounding his bald pate as dishevelled as King Lear in the storm scene.

'A direct trajectory here?' he was asking Doug. 'It is customary first to go to a space station, yah?'

'I think they might be worried that most of the people in the space stations are on our side,' Doug said.

Doug was sitting in one of the oversized, overpadded armchairs facing the sofa. Built by nanomachines

that Zimmerman himself had programmed, the furniture looked ludicrously out of place in this vast,

echoing electronics studio carved out of the lunar rock. No one else was in the studio. The lights had

been turned off, except for the lamps on the end tables that flanked the sofa: slender graceful stalks of

lunar aluminum; the tables were built of lightweight but sturdy honeycomb 'sandwich' metal, also

produced by nanomachines.

Zimmerman nodded as if Doug's answer satisfied him. 'And you have notified the U.N. that we are

now an independent nation?'

Nodding, Doug replied, "The U.N., and as much of the news media as we could reach.'

'Still the troopship has not turned around?' Zimmerman's accent seemed to get thicker each year.

'Not yet.'

'And there is no reaction from the U.N. to your declaration of independence?'

'Not yet,' Doug repeated.

'So,' the professor stretched out his short arms, 'now we have nothing to do except wait, yah?'

'And prepare.'

Zimmerman's shaggy brows shot up. 'Prepare for what? Either they accept our independence or the

Peacekeepers come in here and close everything.'

'I don't intend to allow them to close Moonbase,' Doug said evenly.

Zimmerman snorted. 'And how do you intend to stop them? With prayer, maybe?'

'That's why I've come here to you, Professor,' said Doug. 'We need your help.'

'To do what? Make a magic wand for you out of nanomachines? A death ray, maybe you want?'

Doug was accustomed to the old man's blustering. 'I was thinking more along the lines of medical

help,' he said. 'We may need-'

'I thought I'd find you here, Willi.'

Kris Cardenas came striding out of the shadows. Despite her years on the Moon she still kept a deep

tan, thanks to ultraviolet lamps. To Doug she looked like a California surfer: broad shoulders, trim

build, sparkling blue eyes. She kept her sandy hair clipped short and wore a loose, comfortable

jumpsuit of pastel yellow. No jewelry, no decorations of any kind. From the easy-going, no-fuss look

of her, you would never suspect she was a Nobel laureate nanotech researcher.

'Our young friend here wants me to make everyone bulletproof,' Zimmerman said, grudgingly dragging

his bulk to one side of the sofa so Cardenas could sit beside him. Even on the Moon, Zimmerman did

not move fast.

'No,' Doug protested. 'All I'm asking-'

'You think perhaps that the nanomachines you carry inside you will protect you against machine guns?

They saved your life twice before, but they don't make you a superman.'

'Willi,' said Cardenas, with a charmer's smile, 'why don't you let Doug tell you what he wants?'

'Medical supplies,' Doug blurted before Zimmerman could say another word. 'If we're cut off from

Earth for more than a couple of months we're going to run short of medical supplies. I was wondering

if nanomachines could be developed to replace or augment some of the pharmaceuticals we use.'

'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 into here.'

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

'Nonsense,' Zimmerman muttered. 'Superstition.'

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? 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

pornographic 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 analysts, nurses, construction specialists,

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

MOONWARBookIIofTheMoonbaseSagaBenBovaCONTENTSPartISkirmishPartIISiegePartIIIBattleWarisanevilthing,buttosubmittothedictationofotherstatesisworse...Freedom,ifweholdfasttoit,willultimatelyrestoreourlosses,butsubmissionwillmeanpermanentlossofallthatwevalue...Toyouwhocallyourselvesmenofpeace,Isay:Youare...

展开>> 收起<<

Bova, Ben - Moonwar.pdf

共189页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Bova, Ben - Moonwar

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: