Part 11 (1/2)

G.o.dd.a.m.n, he said to himself. The display screen showed that the program had automatically checked the overvoltage message against independent sensors built into the electrical lines and decided that the message was false.

VIRUS LOCATED, the display screen announced, with no emotion whatever.

VIRUS ELIMINATED.

The mercenary banged his fist on the console hard enough to make the screen blink. d.a.m.n! he said to himself. G.o.dd.a.m.n virus they gave me isn't worth s.h.i.+t. f.u.c.kin' expert system is smarter than the f.u.c.kin' virus.

He tried to insert the virus twice more, and both times the fault diagnosis subprogram identified the virus and erased it. Wondering if the program kept a record of attempts to bug it, and if so, whether it automatically notified the security department, the mercenary angrily yanked the chip from the computer slot and decided to toss it into the garbage reprocessor.

That's all it's good for, he thought. Garbage.

He slumped down on his bunk and turned on the wall screen. Stavenger was piping the radar plot from the landing control complex onto the base's general information channel. Less than six hours until the Peacekeepers landed.

He's a strange one, thought the mercenary. He's a couple years younger than me, but he's old beyond his years. Or maybe it's just that most guys his age haven't faced any real responsibilities, so they still act like kids.

Stavenger knows what responsibility is. Got to respect him for that. Like me, a little. We both know what it feels like to have a load on your shoulders.

Over the past several days there had been four times when he had been alone with Stavenger, when he could have snapped Stavenger's neck or driven the cartilage of his nose into his brain with a single sharp blow from the heel of his hand. He'd be dead before he hit the floor.

Yet the mercenary had stayed his hand. Not yet, he had told himself. Don't kill him yet. Let the virus do the job. He's not ready to die.

But the virus has failed. Now it's up to me.

Stavenger did not act like a man seeking death. The young man brimmed with life, with energy and purpose. Wait, the mercenary advised himself, wait until the precise moment.

They were so unprepared to fight, these men and women of Moonbase, so totally lacking in weapons and skills and even the will to resist, that the mercenary found it almost laughable. Why kill Stavenger or any of the rest of them when the Peacekeepers will be able to walk in here and take over without firing a shot?

Wait. Watch and wait. If it actually comes down to a fight, then that will be the time to take out Stavenger and as many of the others as he could reach.

It would be a shame, though. He was getting to like Stavenger. Almost.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 4 HOURS 4 MINUTES.

Loosely restrained by her seat harness, so that she floated lightly in her seat, hardly touching its plastic surface, Edith looked across the Clippers.h.i.+p's aisle at the man sitting beside Captain Munasinghe. He was a civilian, and a few hours after they had lifted off from Corsica he had made a point of introducing himself: Jack Killifer.

He was coming on to her, but Edith frosted him off with a polite smile and buried her nose in her notebook computer. I'm not spending the next four days getting groped by some stranger in front of forty soldiers, she decided.

There was something grim about him. He didn't seem fazed in the slightest by the zero gee of s.p.a.ceflight, the way Munasinghe and the other troopers were. Instead he looked as if he were impatient to get to Moonbase and get the job over with. A lean, lantern-jawed, intense man, Edith thought. A man with a personal agenda.

The personnel list in her notebook gave only his name and place of residence: Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts. Well, that's a starting point, Edith thought. She went hunting through the background database that she had put together before leaving Atlanta. And soon she found his history, in the material that her source in the Masterson Corporation had given her.

Killifer had been a Masterson employee, she saw. Worked for eighteen years at Moonbase, coming back to Earth only long enough for the mandatory health checks and then s.h.i.+pping back to the Moon immediately. Then, seven years ago, he had abruptly taken early retirement and never went back to Moonbase again. Until now.

Digging deeper, Edith found that Killifer had become an executive in the New Morality movement, one of the key pressure groups that pushed the nanotech treaty through the U.K. and got the U.S. Senate to ratify it.

He's anti-nanotechnology, Edith realized. But, glancing at him across the aisle, she thought he looked as if he had personal demons driving him. There's more to it than a religious conviction, she thought. I wonder what's really itching him?

It was boring as h.e.l.l sitting in the d.a.m.ned Clippers.h.i.+p with nothing to do but listen to Munasinghe's nitpicking worries. Killifer had spent as much time as he could roaming through the s.h.i.+p, but it only took ten minutes to see everything there was to see: The pa.s.senger cabin, filled with a mongrel lot of Peacekeeper troops, most of whom couldn't even speak English. The galley where their tasteless prepacked meals were microwaved. The cargo bays, stuffed with enough weapons to blow Moonbase into orbit. The head, with the seatbelt and stirrups on the unis.e.x toilet.

He thought about popping into the c.o.c.kpit, but he figured that the astronauts up there weren't looking for company, and there wouldn't be all that much to see, anyway. It's crowded enough here in the pa.s.senger cabin, Killifer told himself, friggin' c.o.c.kpit's about the size of a shoe box.

There was only one bright spot in the whole mess, and that was the good-looking blonde reporter sitting across the aisle from him. Killifer had tried to strike up a conversation with her, but she didn't seem interested.

Yet now, as he sat wedged in beside the ever whining Munasinghe, she seemed to be giving him the once-over. Killifer laughed to himself. After four days in this sardine can she must be getting h.o.r.n.y.

Only about four hours to go, Edith thought. I can handle Killifer for that long. So she smiled the next time he looked her way and, sure enough, as soon as Munasinghe left his seat to see to some problem, Jack Killifer unstrapped and floated out into the aisle beside her.

”Boring trip, isn't it?” he said, grinning down at her wolfishly.

Edith turned up the wattage on her smile a little. ”I'd rather be bored than scared to death.”

Without asking, Killifer pulled himself into the empty seat beside her. ”It won't be long now,” he said.

”You've been to Moonbase before, haven't you?” Edith prompted, as she quietly clicked on the audio recorder built into her electronic notebook.

Killifer huffed. ”Spent the better part of eighteen years there.”

”Eighteen years?” she said, wide-eyed. ”Wow! You must have been there right at the very beginning.”

”I sure was. Lemme tell you...”

That was all it took to get Killifer talking about himself and Moonbase. But as he talked, the dark brooding anger that simmered inside him started to rise to the surface.

”Joanna Stavenger,” he growled. ”She's the b.i.t.c.h that runs the whole thing up there.”

”I thought Douglas Stavenger was in charge of Moonbase,” Edith said innocently.

”Hah! Maybe he thinks he's in charge, but it's his Mama who's the real boss. The spider woman.”

”Isn't her name Brudnoy now?”

”Sure,” Killifer answered. ”He's her third husband, you know. The first two died on her.”

”Really?”

He chuckled unpleasantly. ”I wonder how long this one'll last.”

Edith asked, ”Douglas Stavenger... isn't he the one who has the nanomachines in his body? He nearly was killed on the Brennart expedition to the south lunar pole, wasn't he?”

”I was on that expedition,” Killifer said. ”I was Brennart's right-hand man.”

”Really? Wow!”

For nearly four hours Killifer gabbled away and Edith realized that his nanoluddite leanings were merely the surface manifestation of a deep hatred for Joanna Brudnoy and her son, Doug Stavenger.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 2 HOURS 38 MINUTES.

Sitting alone in his office, Doug watched the smart wall's view of the crater floor, where teams of s.p.a.cesuited men and women were desperately setting up microwave transmission equipment to back up the hard-wire system that carried electrical power from the solar farms to the base's electrical distribution center.

The microwave transmitters were dark, flat plates, innocuous looking. They were aimed at relay transceivers being set up atop the ringwall mountains, a circuitous route that Doug and his cohorts hoped would fool the Peacekeepers. They can blow the wires, he told himself, but they won't recognize the backup equipment for what it is.