Peacekeepers (1988) (29 page)

The shelter was a life-support module from the earliest days of lunar exploration, buried under several meters of scooped-up regolith rubble. Safe as a squirrel's nest in winter.

The left leg of Jay's suit was grating ominously as they hurried the last kilometer toward the shelter. The dust was grinding away at that knee joint. He looked over at Kelly.

She seemed to be keeping pace with him, loping along in the dreamlike low gravity.

They bounded down the slight slope to the shelter's air-lock entrance. It was too small for both of them to go through at the same time, but they squeezed into it together anyway. Jay heard somebody laughing as the air lock cycled; it was his own voice, cackling like a madman.

"We made it, kid," he said. "We're safe."

"For the time being," she reminded him, as the inner hatch slid open.

"Not even for that," said the man waiting inside. He held a needle-slim flechette gun in his hand.

There were two of them, both dark of hair and eye, skin the color of desert sand. One was bearded, one not. Both held guns.

The shelter was old and small; its inner walls curved up barely high enough to allow Jay to stand upright. The equipment inside looked ancient, dusty. Even the bunks seemed moldy with age.

They made Kelly and Jay take off their pressure suits. Jay was actually glad to be out of his, yet he felt almost naked and unprotected without it.

"What happens now?" Kelly asked, her voice flat and cold.

"Now we wait," said the bearded one in slightly accented English. "The bomb goes off in little more than two hours. Our superiors will pick us up for transport back to Earth. They will decide what to do with you."

The other was younger, barely out of his teens. Jay saw.

He seemed fiercely amused. "There won't be enough room aboard the ship for two prisoners."

Kelly's mouth dropped open. All pretense of cool professionalism disappeared. "You mean you . . . you're going to leave us here? Kill us?"

The bearded one shrugged.

"Oh please don't!" Kelly pleaded. "Please ... I don't want to die. I'll do anything! Anything!"

She took a step closer to the bearded one. Jay felt his insides chum. The little bitch. She'll offer them her body to save herself. She doesn't give a tinker's damn about what happens to me.

But he realized that both men had turned their entire attention to Kelly, who was pleading so loudly and plaintively that it finally got through Jay's skull that this was a ruse.

Is she ... ?

With one lightning motion Kelly kicked the bearded one in the groin and simultaneously grabbed his right wrist and pushed the gun aside. The gun went off and a slim steel flechette thudded into the metal wall of the shelter.

With the roar of a jungle savage, Jay launched himself at the younger one, who had turned slightly away from him.

He swung back, but not fast enough. Jay snapped his wrist, then knocked him unconscious with a vicious chop against the side of his neck.

He looked over at Kelly, bending over the prostrate body of the bearded one.

"I was worried you wouldn't catch on," she said, grinning.

"I almost didn't."

"Try the radio," she commanded, pointing.

It was useless, Jay saw. They had fired several flechettes into it.

"Just about two hours now," Kelly said. "How long will it take us to get back to Moonbase?"

"Depends," he replied, "on whether this shelter has a hopper in working condition."

They bound the two unconscious men with electrician's tape, then worked back into their suits. Jay led the way through the air lock and out behind the pile of rubble covering the shelter.

The spidery body of a lunar hopper stood out in the open. It looked like a small metal platform raised off the ground by three skinny bowed legs. An equally insubstantial railing went around three sides of the platform, with a pedestal for controls and displays. Beneath the platform were small spherical tanks and a rocket nozzle mounted on a swivel.

He inspected the hopper swiftly. "Cute. They shot up the oxygen tank. No oxygen, no rocket. Lazy bastards, though. They should have dismantled this go-cart more thoroughly than this."

Explaining as he worked. Jay ducked back inside the shelter and came out with a i^air of oxygen bottles from the shelter's emergency supply and a set of tools. It took more than an hour, but finally he got the long green bottles attached firmly enough to the line that fed the rocket's combustion chamber.

At least I think it's firmly enough, he told himself.

He helped Kelly up onto the platform and then got up beside her, snapped on the safety tethers that hung from the railing, and plugged his suit radio into the hopper's radio system. Kelly followed his every motion.

"Ready to try it?" he asked.

"Yeah. Sure." Her voice in his earphones sounded doubtful.

He nudged the throttle. For an eternally long moment not a thing happened. Then the platform shuddered and jumped and they were soaring up over the lunar landscape like a howitzer shell.

"It works!" Kelly exulted. Jay noticed that both her gloved fists were gripping the railing hard enough to bend the metal.

"Next stop, Moonbase!" he yelled back at her.

They got high enough to see the lights of the base's solar-energy farm, spread out across the shore of the Mare Nubium, where automated tractors were converting raw regolith soil into solar cells and laying them out in neat hexagonal patterns.

Jay tried to steer toward the lights, but the hopper's internal safety program decided that there was not enough fuel for maneuvering
and
a safe landing. So they glided on, watching the lights of the energy farm slide off to their right.

It was eerie, flying in total silence, without a breeze, without even vibration from the platform they stood upon.

Like a dream, coasting effortlessly high above the ground.

Kelly used the hopper's radio to send an emergency call to Moonbase security. "There's a nuclear bomb planted somewhere in the oxygen factory," she repeated a dozen times. There was no answer from Moonbase.

"Either we're not getting through to them or they're not getting through to us," she said, her voice brittle with apprehension.

"Maybe they think it's a nut call."

He sensed her shaking her head. "They've got to check it out. They can't let a warning about a nuclear bomb go without checking on it."

"Nukes are pretty small. The oxygen plant's damned big."

"I know," she answered. "I know. And there isn't much time."

Jay realized that they were flying toward the imminent nuclear explosion. Like charging into the mouth of the cannon, he thought.

He heard himself saying, "You were damned good back there. You could have taken both of them by yourself."

"No, that's not likely," she replied absently, her mind obviously elsewhere. "I was counting on your help and you came through."

A long silence. Then Kelly asked, "Will those two have enough air in the shelter to last until their friends pick them up?"

"Probably. I only took the emergency backup bottles. Who the hell cares about them, anyway?"

"No sense killing them."

"Why not? They'd kill us. They're trying to blow up Moonbase and kill everybody, aren't they?"

A longer silence. They were descending now. The ground was slowly, languidly coming closer. And closer.

"Will one nuke really be enough to wipe out the whole base?" Kelly asked.

"Depends on its size. Probably won't vaporize the whole base. But they're smart to put it in the oxygen factory. Like shooting a guy in the heart. The blast will destroy Moonbase's oxygen production. No O2 for life support, or for export. Oxygen's still the Moon's major export product."

"I know that."

"The bomb will kick up a helluva lot of debris, too. Like a big meteor impacting. The splash will cover the solarenergy farms, I'll bet. Electricity production goes down close to zero."

Kelly muttered something unintelligible.

Jay had to admire the terrorists' planning. "They won't kill many people directly. They'll force Moonbase to shut down. Somebody'll have to evacuate a couple thousand people back to Earth. Neat job."

The ground was coming up faster now. Automatically the hopper's computer fired its little rocket engine and they slowed, then landed with hardly a thump.

"We must be a couple of klicks from the factory," Jay said. "You stay here and keep transmitting a warning. I'll go to the factory and see what's happening there."

"Hell, no!" Kelly snapped. "We're both going to the factory."

"That's stupid . . ."

"Don't get macho on me, Yank, just when I was starting to like you. Besides, you might still be one of the bad guys. I'm not letting you out of my sight."

He grinned at her, knowing that she could not see it through the helmet visor. "You still harbor suspicions about me?"

"Officially, yes."

"And unofficially?" he asked.

"We're wasting time. Let's get moving."

There was less than a half hour remaining by the time they reached the oxygen factory.

"
It's big!
" Kelly said. Their suit radios worked now; they had outrun the jammers.

"There's a thousand places they could tuck a nuke in here."

"Where the hell are the Moonbase security people?"

Jay took a deep breath. Where would I place a nuke, to do the maximum damage? Not out here at the periphery of the factory. Deep inside, where the heavy machinery is.

The rock crushers? No. The ovens and electric arc separators, "Come on," he commanded.

They ducked under conveyor belts, dodged maintenance robots gliding smoothly along the factory's concrete pad with arms extended semi-menacingly at the intruding humans. Past the rock crushers, pounding so thunderously that Jay could feel their raw power vibrating along his bones. Past the shaker screens where the crushed rock and sandy soil were sifted.

Up ahead was the heavy stuff, the steel complex of electrical ovens and the shining domes protecting the lightning-bolt arcs that extracted pure oxygen from the lunar minerals. The area was a maze of pipes. Off at one end of it stood the tall cryogenic tanks where the precious oxygen was stored.

It was dark in there. The meteor screen overhead shut out the Earthlight, and there were only a few lamps scattered here and there. The maintenance robots did not need lights, and humans were discouraged from tinkering with the automated machinery.

"It's got to be somewhere around here," Jay told Kelly.

They separated, each hunting frantically for an object that was out of place, a foreign invading cell in this almost living network of machinery that pulsed like a heart and produced oxygen for its human dependents to breathe.

"Four minutes 'til the nuke goes off!"

The words rasped in Jay's earphones. He knew that Kelly was nearly exhausted. He was himself: soaked with sweat and bone-tired.

"It's got to be here someplace. " Desperation edged her voice. Four minutes and counting.

He halted in the midst of the pulsing machinery, took the last of the antistatic pads from his leg pouch, and carefully cleared his helmet visor of the dust that had accumulated there.

Then immediately wished he hadn't.

Six other pressure-suited figures had entered the factory complex. Each of them carried a flechette gun in his gloved hand.

Jay tried as best as he could to duck behind the lumbering conveyor belt to his right. He motioned for Kelly to do the same. She had seen them too, and squatted awkwardly in her suit like a little kid playing hide-and-seek.

Jay watched the six pressure-suited figures, his mind racing. Less than three minutes left! What the hell can we do? Where's the base security people?

For a wild instant he thought that these six might be Moonbase security personnel. But their suits bore no insignia, no Moonbase logo, no names stenciled on their chests.

Feeling trapped and desperately close to death. Jay suddenly yelled into his helmet microphone, "That's it! It's disarmed. We can relax now."

Kelly scuttled over to him and pressed her helmet against his. "What are you ..."

He shoved her away and pointed with his other hand.

The intruders were gabbling at each other in their own language. Two of them ducked under a conveyor belt and headed straight toward the tall cryogenic storage tanks.

"Come on," Jay whispered urgently at Kelly.

They duck walked on a path parallel to the two terrorists, staying behind the conveyors and thick pipes, detouring around the massive stainless-steel domes of the electric arcs until they came up slightly behind the pair, at the base of the storage tanks.

Jay jabbed a gloved finger, gesturing. Beneath the first of the tanks lay an oblong case, completely without markings of any kind.

One of the terrorists bent over it and popped open a square panel. The other leaned over his shoulder, watching.

"We should have brought the guns from the shelter,"

Kelly whispered as they huddled together behind a set of smaller tanks.

"Good time to think of it."

Without straightening up, he launched himself across the ten meters separating them from the terrorists. Arms outstretched, he slammed into the two of them and they all smashed against the curving wall of the storage tanks.

Jay had seen men in pressure suits fight each other.

Tempers can flare beyond control even in vacuum. Most of the time they were like the short-lived shoving matches between football players encased in their protective padding and helmets. But now and then lunar workers had tried to murder one another.

He knew exactly what to do. Before either of the terrorists could react Jay had twisted the helmet release catch off the nearer one. He panicked and thrashed madly, kicking and fumbling with his gloved hands to seal the helmet again. He must have been screaming, too, but Jay could not hear him.

The second one had time to stagger to his knees, halfway facing Jay. But Kelly slammed into his side, knocking him over against the oblong crate that held the nuclear weapon.