Moonbase - Moonwar Part 4

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.

"h.e.l.l, 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 to 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 citizens.h.i.+p?" 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 citizens.h.i.+p, 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 pet.i.te 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 my tour ends and we can go back home together." 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!' wonderful!'

But Claire shook her head. "Not if we can't get off Moonbase, it isn't."

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 109 HOURS.

Aboard the Clippers.h.i.+p Max f.a.get, Max f.a.get, Captain Jagath Munasinghe stared suspiciously at the schematic displayed on his notebook screen. 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 s.p.a.cecraft coasted toward the Moon. None of them had ever been in s.p.a.ce 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. s.h.i.+t, 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 d.a.m.n' 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 pa.s.senger 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 s.p.a.cecraft 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 n.o.body's upchucked for a while, Edith told herself gratefully. The sound of people vomiting had almost broken her when they had first gone into zero gee. Fortunately the Clippers.h.i.+p'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 a.s.signment 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 s.p.a.cecraft. 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 a.s.sistants. 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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.

He took her hand so daintily that Edith thought he was going to kiss it. Instead, Faure led her to one of the plush armchairs and sat in the one facing hers. As she sat down, Edith looked past Faure's smiling figure to the ceiling-high windows that faced uptown, northward, along the East River. She could see the Fifty-ninth Street bridge and well past it, all the way up to the Triboro and beyond.

"What a sparkling day," she said.

Faure took it as a personal compliment. "You see how the electric automobile has already improved the air quality," he said, beaming. It made his tiny eyes almost disappear.

Edith wasn't willing to let him take all the credit. "I thought the electric cars were mandated by the U.S. government. The Environmental Protection Agency, wasn't it?"

"Ah yes," said Faure quickly. "But only after our own efforts had proven successful in reducing the pollution in Tokyo and Mexico City. Now all the major cities are following our lead.' Again the smile that almost swallowed his eyes.

Edith wondered silently, Is he using the editorial 'we' or the imperial?

But she smiled back at the secretary-general and said sweetly, "You know that a big chunk of the American public doesn't agree with what you're doing to Moonbase."

Faure's expression turned hard for a moment, then he shrugged and put on a sad face. "Yes, I know. It is very unfortunate. But one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs, can one?"

Now he's saying 'one' instead of 'we', Edith realized.

"Most of the inhabitants of Moonbase are Americans," she said.

"They are violating the treaty that Americans themselves drafted. The very treaty that the American delegation originally proposed to the General a.s.sembly and fought so hard to have pa.s.sed."

"Still," Edith said, leaning back in the comfortable armchair and crossing her legs at the ankles, "many Americans sympathize with the people in Moonbase."

Faure made a what-can-I-do what-can-I-do shrug. shrug.

"They would feel better about it," Edith continued, "if an American reporter went with the Peacekeepers and sent back on-the-spot reports."

The secretary-general began to shake his head.

"The American media would feel much better about it if a reporter were allowed to go along," Edith added.

"You mean those who control and direct the news media, no?"

"Yes. The top bra.s.s."

Faure sighed heavily. "Frankly, Miss Elgin, the American news media have not always been kind to me."

Edith kept herself from grinning. In most countries the government could muzzle the media pretty effectively. But the First Amendment was still in force in the US. So far.

"You see," Faure said, leaning closer to her, placing his hands on the knees of his perfectly-creased trousers, "it is not I who resists your request. The Peacekeepers are military men. And women, of course. They do not want a news reporter to travel with them. They fear it might hamper them-"

"The military never wants reporters around."

"Quite so. But in this case I can fully understand their hesitation."

Edith said, "If there's a news blackout, the media will have nothing to work with except rumors."

"We will furnish news releases, as a matter of course. Each day a complete summary will be given to the media."

"But some reporters will wonder how accurate it is. There's always the tendency to put your own spin on the actual events, isn't there."

Wearily, Faure replied, "I suppose so. But you must not impugn the integrity of the Peacekeepers. They have accomplished very difficult a.s.signments in many parts of the globe. Take Brazil, for example-"

"Are you saying," Edith interrupted, "that it's up to the Peacekeepers themselves to decide if they take a reporter or not?"

"No, not at all. Merely-"

"Because I thought the Peacekeepers reported to you. I thought you made the final decisions."

"But I do!"