Part 40 (1/2)

”Maybe it's me. Maybe there's something wrong with me.”

”What're you talking about, Doug?”

”My older brother, Greg-half-brother, really-he went berserk and tried to wipe out the whole base. He wanted to kill me, just like Bam does.”

”What happened to him?”

”I killed him,” Doug said, the memories choking his voice. ”I didn't want to, but there was no other way...”

It was Edith's turn to fall silent. Doug steered the tractor automatically, following the bright cleat marks in the eons-darkened regolith, remembering, remembering.

”So you want to confront Gordette to bring your brother back, is that it?” she asked at last.

Doug shook his head inside his helmet. ”No, I don't think so.' Then he had to admit, ”I don't really know, Edith. It's just something I've got to do.”

Yet he could not erase the sight of Killifer's leering, twisted face.

Georges Faure found the three-second lag in communications with the Moon especially aggravating. How can one conduct a proper conversation when there is such a wait between words?

”One week,” the Peacekeeper colonel said at last, in reply to Faure's question. ”Ten days, at the outside.”

”Why so long, Colonel Giap?” Faure inquired. ”Why not tomorrow?”

And now we wait again, the secretary-general fumed, staring at the colonel's image on his desktop screen.

Colonel Giap's face was a study in oriental patience: calm, expressionless; his hooded eyes showed no emotion whatsoever.

”You have your full complement of troops,” Faure blurted, not waiting for the colonel's reply. ”All the weapons have been delivered, have they not?”

Giap might have been a statue of teak, for all the response he showed. Faure fidgeted in his swivel chair, fighting the urge to pick up one of the mementos adorning his desk and fling it into the phone screen.

”The battalion is now at full strength, quite so,” the colonel said at last, ”and all our logistics are in place. Also, the special force that Yamagata Industries organized has arrived.”

”Then why do you wait? Strike! Strike now now!”

The colonel had not stopped talking: '... necessary to train the combined team in the precise tactics we will use to take Moonbase. Also, all of the troops must become fully acclimatized to the lower gravity here on the Moon and to working in s.p.a.cesuits. It is crucial that they are able to function as easily and as well as they would on Earth, even in s.p.a.cesuits.”

Faure sank back in his chair as the colonel painstakingly reviewed every step of his planned conquest of Moonbase: the deployment of the Peacekeeper troops outside Alphonsus's ringwall mountains; the nuclear strike that will knock out Moonbase's solar power farms; the missile with the penetrating warhead to destroy their buried nuclear generator; the routes over the ringwall and across the crater floor to the base itself, the a.s.sault on the main airlock and the penetration of the base's corridors, the seizure of Moonbase's key nerve centers.

”By the time we enter their corridors,” Giap was reciting from his action plan,'the people in Moonbase will have less than an hour's worth of electrical power available to them. They must either surrender to us or die of asphyxiation.”

”What if they decide to blow themselves up?” Faure demanded. ”A final grand suicidal gesture of defiance.”

When Giap finally heard the question he almost smiled. ”That is most unlikely. Psychological profiles of all Moonbase personnel have been made available to us, through the Masterson Corporation. Those people are not fatalists. Suicide, even on an individual basis, would never occur to them.”

Faure nodded agreement. He had personally requested the psychological files from Ibrahim al-Ras.h.i.+d. Nominally, the files belonged to the Kiribati Corporation, but it was apparently a simple thing for Ras.h.i.+d to appropriate them through Masterson's computers.

Giap continued, ”However, the special Yamagata force is quite ready for its suicide mission, if our frontal a.s.sault is not immediately successful.”

Faure knew that Yamagata's special force had been recruited from nanoluddite fanatics in j.a.pan and elsewhere.

”We will bring two nuclear power generators in tractors over Wodjohowitcz Pa.s.s and offer to provide electrical power,” Colonel Giap went on, ”in the event that Moonbase surrenders to us.”

”And if they refuse?”

Again the infernal wait. ”We will walk in and take the base. Failing that, the special Yamagata force will destroy the air and water systems, the control center, farms and nanolabs.”

Faure signed deeply. There will be nothing left of Moonbase after that, he thought. But what of it? Yamagata wants Moonbase taken intact, but it will be better if it is wiped out of existence altogether.

Now, if only the colonel would start his troops moving at once. Why wait? Strike swiftly.

Yet he said nothing. He had ordered the Peacekeepers to strike swiftly the first time and it had turned out to be a fiasco.

But this time will be different, Faure told himself. Looking into Colonel Giap's expressionless eyes, Faure concluded that the colonel's plan would work, and he should not meddle in the tactical decisions. Moonbase would be brought to its knees within a week to ten days.

Or destroyed utterly.

DAY FORTY-FOUR.

”Do they have toilets in the tempos?” Edith asked.

Startled out of his inner thoughts, Doug replied, ”Yes. Sure.”

”Good.”

”There's a vacuum toilet behind the seats,” he said, jerking a gloved thumb over his shoulder. ”Kind of tricky using it, but the toilet hatch connects to the port in your suit.”

”How long will it be before we get to the tempo?”

Doug glanced at the electronic map on the tractor's dashboard. ”Less than an hour.”

”I'll wait, then.”

Looking at his wrist displays, Doug saw it was after midnight. Neither of them had slept. For the past few hours Doug had been wrestling with his inner demons, wondering why he was driving himself to confront Gordette. Why not just give up? he kept asking himself. Yet something inside him refused to. He couldn't let Killifer win without at least trying to fight back.

”You want me to drive a while?” Edith asked.

”I'm not tired.”

”You certain? Aren't you sleepy? I sure am.”

”Crank your seat back and catch a few winks,” Doug suggested.

Edith tried; whether she fell asleep or not, Doug could not tell. Steering the tractor was fairly easy; it was built to clamber over rocks and across craterlets, like a tank. Doug followed the bright marks of Gordette's trail, which avoided the boulders and deeper pits scattered across the crater floor.

He saw a rille snaking off to the left, like a narrow riverbed waiting for water. You've been waiting a while, haven't you? Doug asked silently. Four billion years, give or take a week.

In the dark lunar night the stars were like dust strewn across the bowl of the sky. He could see them gleaming at him right down to the chopped-off horizon.

One star in particular seemed to beckon. Red, bright, hovering just over the horizon straight ahead.