Moonwar

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:

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-1 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-1 position still showed as a single green dot.

“No traffic,” Doug said. “This morning’s LTV’s stopped at L-1. 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, agrotechnicians, managers and administrators. They had all been hired through Masterson Corporation’s personnel office, back Earthside. The only military veterans were a handful among the astronauts who piloted the transfer spacecraft from Earth, and none of them were at Moonbase at the present time.

Faure picked his timing very carefully, Doug realized. Halfway through the first phase of building the main plaza, with dozens of extra construction workers on hand and not a single spacecraft at the rocket port. We’ve even got that dance troupe from Canada visiting; another thirty-five mouths to feed.

He sat up straight and raised his arms over his head, stretching until he felt his vertebrae pop. Well, he said to himself, at least the dancers don’t eat much. I guess.

Of all the two thousand, four hundred and seventy-seven men and women at Moonbase, only one had the slightest military experience. One of the construction technicians working on the new aquaculture tanks, a man named Leroy Gordette. His file showed that he had spent four years in the U.S. Army, enlisting when he had been seventeen, nearly ten years earlier.

His photo on the wall screen showed a serious, almost grim Afro-American with red-rimmed eyes and a military buzz cut almost down to his scalp. He looks fierce enough, Doug thought, staring at the picture.

“It’s better than nothing,” Doug muttered. “Phone,” he called.

“Call please?” asked the computer’s androgynous synthesized voice.

“Leroy Gordette,” he said to the phone system.

“No response,” said the computer a moment later. “Do you wish to search for him or leave a message?”

“Leave a message.”

“Recording.”

“Mr Gordette, this is Douglas Stavenger. Please call me as soon as you can. It’s about the military situation we’re in.”

With twenty-twenty hindsight, Doug could see that this confrontation had been inevitable from the day Faure had won his campaign to be elected secretary-general of the United Nations; he intended to enforce the nanotech treaty with every weapon at his disposal. None of the others—not even Doug’s mother—had foreseen that it would come down to military force. But Doug had studied enough history to understand that force was the ultimate tool of political leaders. He had no illusions about it, despite his assurances that this ‘war’ was not going to be a shooting match.

Faure was no military genius, but he was a tyrant. He fully intended to make the U.N. into a true global government. With himself at its head.

Moonbase stood in his way. The nanotech treaty was just an excuse. As long as Moonbase ignored the U.N.’s authority, nations on Earth could justifiably resist U.N. encroachments on their sovereignty. So Moonbase had to be brought into line. Or destroyed.

The trouble was, the more Doug studied history, the more he delved into the bloody, murderous track that led to the present day, the more he found himself reluctantly agreeing with Faure’s professed aims.

Ten billion people on Earth. And that was only the official count. There were probably a billion more, at least, that the various national censuses missed. Ten or eleven billion mouths to feed, ten or eleven billion people to house and clothe and educate. Most of them were poor, hungry, ignorant. And their numbers were growing faster than anyone could cope with. Three hundred thousand babies born every day. All the wealth in the world could barely maintain a minimum level of existence for them.

The rich refused to help the poor, of course. Not unless the poor reduced their birth rate, lowered their numbers. Starvation swept whole continents; plagues killed millions. Still the numbers grew. The poor of the world increased and multiplied and became poorer, hungrier, sicker.

Only a world government could hope to deal with the global problem of population. Only a true world government had the faintest chance of redistributing the world’s wealth more equitably. That was Faure’s proclaimed goal, his aim.

Doug agreed that the goal was worthy, vital, crucial to the survival of the human species. He also knew that it would never be achieved; not the way Faure was going about it.

The beep of his computer snapped Doug out of his ruminations. Its message light blinked at him.

“Answer,” he commanded the phone.

It was not Gordette returning his call. Doug recognized the face of one of the communications technicians, calling from the control center.

“Doug, we’re getting a transmission from L-1. Single frequency. The secretary-general of the United Nations is about to give a speech and they want us to see it.”

“Okay,” he said, sagging back tiredly in his chair. “Pipe it through. Might as well put it on the general system, so everybody can see it.”

“Will do.”

Then Doug got as better idea. “Wait. Make an announcement that anyone not on essential duty should go straight to The Cave. Put Faure on the wall screens there. I want everybody to see this.”

“Will you be going to The Cave, too?”

“Right,” said Doug, pushing himself out of his chair.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 112 HOURS

Georges Henri Faure felt not the slightest twinge of nervousness as he walked slowly to the podium. The General Assembly chamber was hushed, so quiet that Faure could hear his own footsteps on the marble floor, despite the fact that the chamber was completely filled. Every delegate was in his or her proper seat. The media thronged the rear and overflowed into the side aisles, cameras focused on him. The visitors’ gallery was packed.

He was a dapper little man, shaped rather like a pear but dressed so elegantly that no one noticed his figure. Nor the slight limp that marred his stride. His thinning dark hair was slicked back from his high forehead, and his face was round, pink-cheeked, almost cherubic except for his old-fashioned wire-brush moustache. On the rare occasions when his iron self-control failed and he became agitated, the points of the moustache would quiver noticeably. It sometimes made people laugh, but it was a bad mistake to laugh at Georges Faure. He neither forgot nor forgave.

His eyes were small, deep-set, dark and never still. They constantly darted here and there, watching, weighing, probing, judging. Many said, behind his back, that they were the eyes of an opportunist, a climber, a politician. Faure knew what they said of him: that he was a man consumed by ego and vaulting ambition. But no, he insisted to himself; what drove him was not personal ambition but an inner desire, a drive, a sacred mission: to save the world from itself; to bring order and stability to all of humankind; to avert the tragedy of chaos and disaster that threatened the Earth’s misguided peoples.

He reached the marble podium. The floor behind it had been raised slightly, cunningly, so that no one in the audience could see that he actually stood on a platform. Smiling down on the rows of expectant faces, he leaned his weight on his arms, to ease his aching foot. He waited a moment, feeling the warmth of the undivided attention of every delegate, the glow of the media’s cameras and recorders, the admiration of the public. The first line of his speech was on the electronic prompter; the tumbler on the podium held the Evian water he was partial to. Everything was in its place.

He began:

“Delegates of the General Assembly and the Security Council, members of the news media, members of the public and citizens of the world—I stand before you with a heart filled with both sadness and hope.

“Since seven years ago, all work on nanotechnology has been wisely banned by mutual accord of the member nations of this august organization. I am pleased to report to you that the last remaining nation on Earth to refuse to sign the nanotechnology treaty and accede to its terms has now at last signed that treaty. Kiribati has joined the great commonwealth of nations at last!”

A storm of applause rose from the floor of the huge auditorium. A sharp-witted observer would have noted that it began in the section where the U.N. staff bureaucrats sat: Faure’s employees.

In Moonbase, Doug sat at one of the tables in The Cave, the old cafeteria, watching the wall-sized display screen showing Faure. The Cave was jammed with people; everyone who was not needed on duty had packed its cavernous confines. All the seats along the cafeteria tables were filled and people were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the aisles between the tables; the only open spaces were the squares of lovingly tended grass that were scattered across the rock floor. It was like a flare party, Dough thought, although no one was drinking or dancing. Or laughing.

Faure’s hugely enlarged features gazed down upon them from the wide Windowall screen up at the front of The Cave like an electronic deity, larger than life.

“There are those misguided souls,” Faure was saying, unconsciously touching the end of his moustache with a fingertip, “who ask why nanotechnology must be banned. There are those who question our policy.”

He looked up and smiled mechanically, almost squeezing his tiny eyes shut. “To paraphrase the American revolutionary Jefferson, in respect to the public opinion we should declare the causes that have impelled us to this decision.”

Jinny Anson, sitting next to Doug at the long cafeteria table, hissed, “That’s a real outgassing, using Jefferson.”

Doug nodded and said nothing.

Faure went on, “Nanotechnology offers enormous medical benefits, we are told. Its enthusiasts claim that nanomachines injected into the human body can prolong life and promote perfect health. Yes, perhaps. But for whom? For the starving masses of Africa or Latin America? For those dying of plagues because they are too poor to afford simple medical treatment?

“No! Nanotechnology would be available only to the very rich. It would be one more method by which the rich separate themselves from the poor. This cannot be allowed! The gap between the rich and poor is one of the most pernicious and dangerous causes of unrest and instability on Earth! We must strive to narrow this gap, not widen it.”

“By making everybody equally poor,” Joanna muttered, seated on Doug’s other side.

“Furthermore,” Faure continued, “nanotechnology can be used as an insidious new form of weapon, deadlier than poisonous gas, more difficult to detect and counter than biological weapons. In a world tottering on the brink of catastrophe, the very last thing we desire is a new weapons technology. We have worked for more than ten years now to convince nations to give up their armies and allow the Peacekeepers to protect their borders. We have reduced the world’s nuclear arsenals to a mere handful of missiles. We stand for disarmament and peace! How could we allow scientists in their secret laboratories to design perfidious new weapons of nanomachines?”

“So,” Zimmerman grumbled, down the table from Doug, “now I am an evil Dr Frankenstein.”

Faure took a sip of Evian, replaced the glass delicately on the podium, and resumed.

“As I said, every nation on Earth has finally signed the nanotechnology treaty. At last, there is no place on Earth where nanotechnology can be practiced or taught.”

Another burst of applause. But Doug knew what was coming next: the real reason for Faure’s speech.

“Yet there is a place where nanotechnology is practiced every day, every hour. That place is not on Earth. It is on the Moon, at the privately owned center called Moonbase.”

“Pass the bread, here comes the baloney,” somebody in the cafeteria said, loudly enough to echo off the rock walls. No one laughed or even stirred to see who said it.

“The residents of Moonbase have refused to suspend their nanotechnology workings. They have refused to stop their researches into new forms and uses of nanotechnology.” Faure’s face had become grim. “True, they have offered to allow United Nations representatives to inspect their facilities and their laboratories, but they absolutely refuse to abide by the requirements of the nanotechnology treaty.”

He looked up at his audience. “This cannot be allowed! We cannot permit them to develop further the nanotechnology in secret, some four hundred thousand kilometers away from our supervision!”

Faure’s moustache was starting to bristle. “Who knows what kinds of new and dreadful capabilities they are developing in their secret laboratories? Who knows what their intentions are?”

People in The Cave were jeering now. “The bastard knows we need nanobugs to make the air we breathe!”

Taking a deep breath, Faure raised his hands as if motioning for attention. “Therefore, I have sent a detachment of Peacekeeper troops to Moonbase to enforce the conditions of the nanotechnology treaty on the lunar residents. They will arrive at Moonbase within slightly more than four days. Their mission is one of peace; but they are of course prepared to defend themselves if the Moonbase residents offer resistance.”

Faure looked up again and peered directly into the camera. He seemed to loom above the people in The Cave.

“To these renegades of Moonbase I have this to say: Resistance is futile. You must obey the same laws that everyone on Earth obeys. I will employ all the power necessary to enforce the conditions of the nanotechnology treaty, whether on Earth or on the Moon. If, in your misguided attempts to defy the United Nations and the will of the peoples of Earth, you use force against our Peacekeepers, you will regret it.”

The audience applauded wildly. Faure smiled and dipped his chin several times: his way of bowing. Then the screen went blank.

Doug blinked several times. The crowd in The Cave stirred and rumbled with a hundred conversations.

“He didn’t mention a word about our declaration of independence,” Joanna said.

“Nor our request for U.N. membership,” Brudnoy added.

Doug got to his feet. “And he isn’t going to have a news conference, where reporters can ask him questions, either.”

“How long until the Peacekeepers land?” Anson asked.

Doug pressed the face of his wristwatch; the digital readout changed from the local time to a countdown.

“One hundred eleven hours and forty-eight minutes,” he said.

“Well,” Anson said, digging her hands into the pockets of her jeans, “you’d better think of something between now and then, boss.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 111 HOURS 48 MINUTES

“You’re right,” Doug said to Anson.

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.

“Hell, 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 citizenship?” 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 citizenship, 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 petite 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 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!’

But Claire shook her head. “Not if we can’t get off Moonbase, it isn’t.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 109 HOURS

Aboard the Clippership Max Faget, 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 spacecraft coasted toward the Moon. None of them had ever been in space 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. Shit, 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 damn’ 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 passenger 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 spacecraft 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 nobody’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 Clippership’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 assignment 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 spacecraft. 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 assistants. 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 sunshine 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 Assembly and fought so hard to have passed.”

“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 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 brass.”

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 assignments 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!”

“Yet in this case you’re going to let them dictate to you, is that it?”

Faure’s moustache quivered slightly. “Not at all! I make the decision and they follow.”

Smiling her prettiest, Edith knew she had him. “In that case, you certainly understand how important it will be to have an unbiased, trusted news reporter on the scene when they land at Moonbase.”

Faure’s face clearly showed that he did not like being mousetrapped. But slowly his expression changed; he smiled again, showing teeth.

“Yes, you are correct,” he said slowly. “The responsibility is mine. All mine. The weight of the major decisions is upon my shoulders alone.”

Edith recognized the crafty look in his eyes.

“This is not an easy decision to make, Miss Elgin,” Faure went on. “Special arrangements require certain… ah, accommodations.”

“What do you mean?” Edith asked, knowing perfectly well what he meant.

Leaning forward even more and tapping a pudgy finger on her knee, Faure said, “We have much to discuss about this. Perhaps we could have dinner this evening?”

The body tax. Edith controlled her inner anger as she told herself, Even after all these years of women’s rights it still comes down to the damned body tax. He’s got the power and he knows it. If I want him to do me a favor he expects me to do one for him in return. And all he sees is a good-looking blonde.

“Dinner sounds fine,” she said, thinking, It won’t be the first time you’ve opened your legs to get a good assignment. Sometimes you’ve got to give some head to get ahead.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 96 HOURS

The mercenary stared at the message that was waiting for him on his wall screen.

“The prey runs to the hunter,” he muttered to himself.

Slowly he peeled off his grimy fatigues and wadded them into a ball that he tossed onto his bunk as he headed for the shower stall. His quarters were one of the old rooms in Moonbase. Most people complained that they were small and cramped, but the mercenary found the space just fine for his needs. Two of the walls were smart screens, recently installed. The shower stall was new, too.

Making sure the temperature dial was still set for dead cold, the mercenary stepped into the stall and let the reviving water sluice over his body. The prey runs to the hunter, he thought again. Doug Stavenger wants to see me.

Ever since he had first begun training as a sniper, back during his army days, he had thought of killing as a sort of religious rite. A sacred responsibility. Everybody dies, the only question about it is where and when. And how.

I give them a clean death. Not like some of those freaks.

When he was taken out of the army to serve in the covert intelligence agency, he had the time and the need to take up the study of primitive hunters who believed that the animals they killed came to them for death. The prey runs to the hunter.

If you do everything just right, make all the proper rituals and set things up just the way they should be, then the prey comes to you and asks to be allowed to die. Not in so many words, of course. But they come to me for death.

Just like Doug Stavenger’s going to do. Hell, he’s already started along the path.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 95 HOURS 54 MINUTES

Zoltan Kadar was a Hungarian who prided himself on being slicker and smarter than ordinary mortals. He also happened to be one of the top astronomers in the world and an extremely clever man.

But now he felt frustrated and, worse, ignored.

He strode along the corridor toward the base director’s office, hands balled into fists, arms swinging like a soldier on parade. He was on the small side, quite slim, a fencer’s agile figure. His hair was dark and straight, and came to a pronounced widow’s peak centered above his heavy dark eyebrows. People called him Count Dracula, although once they got to know him they changed his nickname to Slick Willy. Kadar revelled in the characterization.

“Hey, Slick, where you going?”

Kadar barely slowed his determined stride as he recognized Harry Clemens, head of the transportation division. Clemens was one of the older engineers, a true Lunatic who had been working at Moonbase for many years.

“Hello, Harry.”

Working hard to stay with Kadar, Clemens—lanky, balding, un-athletic—said, “Jeez, you look like you’re going to lead the charge of the light brigade.”

“They’ve cancelled my Farside survey flight,” Kadar said through gritted teeth. “I’m going to get it back on schedule.”

“Oh, yeah, I know about that. Too bad.”

“Too bad for them. They can’t just stop my work like that.” He snapped the fingers of his left hand.

“Everything’s ground to a halt. We’re at war, you know.”

“Pah!”

“Nothing’s going out, really. There’s a Peacekeeper troopship on its way here.”

“What has that got to do with building the Farside observatory?”

Clemens was a practical engineer, and he recognized a stone wall when he saw one. “Well, I’ve got to turn off here. I’m helping the nanotech crew to shut down the bugs building the Clippership.”

“Goodbye, Harry,” said Kadar.

“Hope you can get what you want, but I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Goodbye, Harry.”

Another minute’s march brought Kadar to the base director’s office. He rapped once on the door and opened it.

Jinny Anson was sitting behind the desk, talking on the phone to some woman. She glanced up at Kadar and waved him to a chair in front of her desk. From the expression on her face, Kadar realized that she knew she was in for trouble.

“Where is Stavenger?” Kadar asked as soon as Anson clicked off her phone screen.

“Doug’s taking charge of the war. I’m the base director pro-tern.” Before Kadar could draw a breath she added, “And all work outside has been suspended, Zoltan, not just yours.”

“I’m not interested in the rest of them. It’s my work that is important.”

“Sure,” Anson said good naturedly. “But we can’t hang a surveillance satellite over Farside until this business with the Peacekeepers is cleared up.”

“I don’t see why. It’s an uncrewed satellite. I will take care of all the monitoring myself. I have the programs all in place.”

With a patient sigh, Anson explained, “Look, there’s a Clippership full of Peacekeepers on their way here to take over the base. We’re going to try to stop them—don’t ask me how, that’s Doug’s problem.”

“But what has this to do with my work?” Kadar couldn’t help putting a stress on the word my.

“The U.N.’s already taken over the L-1 satellite. Maybe they’ve got Peacekeepers there, maybe not, we don’t know.”

“But again, what has this—”

“They’re watching us, Zoltan. They’re watching every move we make. With telescopes and radar and every other kind of sensor they’ve got.”

“So?”

“So what’s their reaction gonna be if we launch a rocket? They won’t just ignore it. Maybe they’ve already got high-power lasers at L-1 and they’ll zap your rocket before they can figure out where it’s heading.”

“Nonsense! We’ll simply tell them what the rocket’s mission is.”

“And they’ll believe you?” Anson’s earnest expression eased into a sly smile. “They’ll believe a Hungarian?”

Kadar grinned back at her. “That might be a problem,” he conceded.

“We don’t want to do anything that’ll give the UN a reason to start bombarding us. Your rocket stays in the shed until this crisis is over.”

“Bombard us? That’s idiotic. We’re buried deep enough so that even nuclear bombs won’t harm us.”

“Really?” Anson snapped. “You really want to test that theory? And what about the solar farms and the mass driver and all your astronomical equipment out on the crater floor? What happens to them?”

Kadar slouched back in his chair like a petulant child. “I want to talk to Stavenger,” he said.

“He’s too damned busy for picobits like this, Zoltan. I’m the acting director and I say your rocket sits.”

With a slight hike of his heavy brows, Kadar got slowly out of his chair and walked to the door.

“Thank you for your time,” he said to Anson.

“Nothing to it.”

Kadar stepped through the door and closed it softly, saying to himself, Now where in hell can I find Stavenger?

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 95 HOURS 20 MINUTES

“When do they land?” asked Toshiru Takai.

Doug did not have to look at his watch. “In less than four days.”

Takai nodded and made a sound halfway between a sigh and a groan.

Doug was walking with him slowly across the vast floor of the crater Copernicus, where the Nippon One base was situated, more than a thousand kilometers from Moonbase. Since they were communicating through a virtual reality program, they could walk on the lunar surface without space suits. Doug wore his usual unadorned sky-blue coveralls; Takai a similar jumpsuit of pearl gray, decorated with a single white heron over the breast pocket, the symbol of Yamagata Corporation.

“I tried to reach your corporate headquarters in Tokyo,” Doug said, “but there seemed to be some difficulty with their receiving equipment.”

“I imagine your transmissions are being jammed by the Peacekeepers,” Takai said, showing no emotion on his lean, bony face. He was in his early thirties; Doug thought of him as his own age, roughly, even though Takai was at least five years older.

With an understanding smile, Doug said, “Our transmissions are getting through to Savannah and Tarawa and even New York.”

Takai gave him a sidelong glance. “Do you want me to tell you that my superiors in Tokyo have decided not to speak with you?” His voice was low, but filled with strength.

“I’d like to know where they stand,” Doug said evenly. “Where you stand.”

“Why, here I am, in the middle of the most beautiful crater on the Moon!”

Doug laughed at the joke. Although they had never met physically, he had known Takai for three years now, ever since the young enginner had been chosen to direct the Yamagata lunar base. While their virtual selves could walk in the vacuum without even kicking up a cloud of dust, each of them was safely in his office, deep underground.

Yet Doug could reach out and clasp Takai’s shoulder. Toshi, I need to know what Yamagata is going to do. It’s important for us. For both of us.”

“I know,” Takai admitted.

Nippon One was the only other lunar base still active. Its reason for existence, aside from scientific studies, was to extract helium-three from the Moon’s regolith and ship it to the nuclear fusion power plants that were springing up throughout Japan, China, and the Pacific Rim nations. Fusion power was not welcomed in Europe or North America, where anti-nuclear fears not only persisted, but were actively fanned by the nanoluddites.

The Europeans had closed down their base at Grimaldi when the nanotech treaty had gone into effect for the Euro-Russian consortium that managed the base. They still sent occasional maintenance crews to repair and refurbish the scientific gear that ran automated at Grimaldi, but even those visitors rode on Masterson LTVs or Yamagata’s.

“Are you going to shut down Nippon One?” Doug asked, half-dismayed that he had to be so direct with his Japanese friend.

“That is not in my instructions,” Takai replied.

Damn! thought Doug. He’s not just being roundabout; he’s being actually evasive.

“Toshi, I really need to know what Yamagata plans to do.”

For several moments Takai said nothing. He simply walked along the virtual crater floor and avoided looking at Doug.

“What do you plan to do?” Takai countered. “Surely you don’t expect to fight the Peacekeepers.”

“We’ve declared our independence,” Doug said. “Legally, the Peacekeepers have no right to bother us.”

“Only if the UN accepts your independence.”

Doug nodded.

“They won’t,” Takai predicted. “You know they won’t.”

“I’m not so sure. Time is on our side. If we can hold on and prevent the Peacekeepers from taking over the base, we could eventually get world opinion on our side and—”

“Time is on your side until the Peacekeepers land,” Takai pointed out.

“But if we can keep them from taking Moonbase,” Doug said earnestly,’then we can get through this. All we have to do is show the world that we can survive, that we can hang in there and take care of ourselves. Sooner or later they’ll recognize the fact that we are independent.”

Takai shook his head. “You’re dreaming, Doug.”

“No,” Doug insisted. “It’s like the situation in the American Civil War. All the Confederacy had to do was keep itself intact, not let the Union conquer it. In time, the nations of Europe would recognize it as a separate nation.”

“But that didn’t happen, did it?” Takai asked gently.

“We can make it happen here.”

“No, Doug. That isn’t going to be allowed to happen, believe me.”

Doug hesitated, digesting not only Takai’s words, but their tone. He knows more than he’s willing to tell me, Doug realized.

“Don’t you think Japan would recognize our independence if we drove off the Peacekeepers?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Is Yamagata against us? I need to know, Toshi. Lives depend on it.”

Takai said nothing.

“Well?” Doug demanded.

The pained expression on Takai’s face showed the tension he was feeling. “My instructions are to continue as usual. We will operate Nippon One as we normally do, despite your present … difficulties.”

They both knew that Nippon One carefully refrained from using nanotechnology. Instead of using nanomachines to extract helium-three from the ground, they used cumbersome bulldozers and old-fashioned mass spectrometers to separate the isotope from the other lunar ores. It kept the cost of helium-three at least ten times higher than it would have been if nanomachines had been employed to ferret out the helium-three nuclei, individually.

But Nippon One bought its water from Moonbase. Shut down Moonbase and the Japanese base dies, too.

“I don’t understand how that can be,” Doug said.

“Those are my instructions.”

Walking beside his virtual friend in silence, Doug thought, He wants to tell me what’s going on, but he can’t. His loyalty to Yamagata is preventing him from telling me the whole truth.

“We’ve already declared our independence, you know,” Doug said.

“Yes, you told me. I doubt that it’ll do you any good.”

“What was Tokyo’s reaction to that?”

“No reaction. The first I heard of it was just now, when you told me.”

“Your corporate superiors didn’t tell you about it?”

“Not one word.”

“We beamed the information to Yamagata headquarters and to every news agency on Earth.”

“I have not received any information about that,” Takai said, genuinely upset.

“That must mean that Faure intends to ignore our declaration and proceed as if it’s a non-starter.”

“Yes, of course.”

They took a few more paces across the crater floor, skirting a fresh-looking craterlet about the size of a beach ball’s indentation.

“Toshi, how are you going to get water if Moonbase is shut down? You can’t use nanomachines, and—”

“We will get our water the same way we do now.”

“But Moonbase will be closed. The Peacekeeper troops are on their way to shut us down.”

Takai grimaced, struggling inwardly. At last he said, The Peacekeepers are coming to remove you and your people from the management of Moonbase. That does not mean they intend to close the base entirely.”

Doug stopped in his tracks. “Not…” His mind started spinning. “Not close the base? Toshi, are you sure?”

“It could cost me my position if anyone learns that I told you. Yes, I am quite certain. Or I should say that Tokyo is quite certain.”

“They’re not going to close the base?”

“Faure spoke directly to the head of the Yamagata clan himself and assured him that Moonbase will continue to supply water to Nippon One—after the Peacekeeper troops remove you and your staff from the base.”

“Faure intends to continue running Moonbase,” Doug repeated, feeling hollow with surprise. “The little fur ball doesn’t care about the nanotech treaty; he wants to control Moonbase himself!”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 93 HOURS 45 MINUTES

“But don’t you understand what this means?” Joanna demanded.

“It means that Faure wants to take over Moonbase,” said Doug.

“It means we can do business with him!” his mother replied eagerly. “We can cut a deal.”

Doug stared at his mother. She was sitting bolt upright in the chaise longue she had brought from her home in Savannah as part of the elaborate furnishings for her two-room suite at Moonbase. Leaning toward her from the delicate little Sheraton sofa on which he sat, Doug shook his head unhappily.

“Faure won’t make any deals. He intends to use the Peacekeepers to toss us out of here and then have the UN itself run the base.”

Joanna gave her son a pitying smile. “Doug, he’ll need trained personnel to run this base. He’ll have to use the people who are here.”

“That doesn’t include thee and me.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Joanna said. She seemed actually happy with Doug’s news; pleased that Faure wanted to take over Moonbase.

“He’ll want to continue to manufacture Clipperships, of course,” Joanna mused. “That’s where the profits are. Every transportation line on Earth wants our Clipperships and he can pump the profits into the U.N.”

“Or his own pocket.”

“Maybe,” Joanna agreed. “Even better. The more venal he is, the easier it’ll be to deal with him.”

Doug shook his head again. “That’s what the German industrialists thought about Hitler.”

“Faure’s no Hitler. He’s not a fanatic. He isn’t even going to stop our nanomachines. He just wants to run them for his own profit.”

Getting to his feet, Doug said, “I’m still assuming that we’ll have to handle the Peacekeepers, and we’ve got less than four days to figure out how to do it.”

“What do you intend to do?”

He shrugged. “I’ve asked Zimmerman and Cardenas to meet me in my quarters. Lev and Jinny Anson, too. And one of the aquaculture technicians, the only guy in the base who’s had any military experience at all.”

“All right,” Joanna said, looking up at her son from the chaise longue. “You do that. I’m going to put in a call to Faure. He’ll negotiate. I know he will.”

“Don’t commit us to anything until I get a chance to see what it is, okay?”

Joanna nodded absently. “Oh, I don’t think Faure will agree to anything concrete until the Peacekeepers get here and take over the base.”

“That’s what I’m trying to prevent.”

“Good,” she said. “If we could somehow keep the Peacekeepers out of here it would strengthen our hand tremendously.”

“I’ll see what we can do,” said Doug.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 90 HOURS 11 MINUTES

Moonbase had started as a clutch of temporary shelters, little more than aluminum cans the size of house trailers, dug into the lunar regolith on the floor of the crater Alphonsus and then covered over with rubble to protect them from the radiation and temperature swings between night and day. And from the occasional meteoroid strike. Meteor showers that were spectacular light shows in the night sky of Earth were potentially dangerous volleys of celestial machine-gun fire on the airless Moon.

By the time of Doug Stavenger’s first visit to the Moon, on his eighteenth birthday, Moonbase had grown into a set of four parallel tunnels dug into the flank of Mount Yeager. Offices, labs, workshops and living quarters lined the tunnels. The water factory was at the front of one tunnel, the environmental control center—where the base’s air was recycled and kept circulating properly—was at the rear.

In his seven years at Moonbase, Doug had seen those original four tunnels grow to eight, with the four new tunnels sunk a level below the original quartet. Rough rock walls were smoothed with plasma torches and painted in pastels selected by psychologists—then painted over by base personnel who demanded brighter, bolder colors. And the occasional graffitist. When the grand plaza’s construction was finished, twenty more tunnels would be added beneath it.

If we ever get to finish the grand plaza, Doug thought as he walked toward his quarters. He nodded and smiled automatically to everyone he passed. Doug knew most of the long-time Lunatics by sight, but there were always hundreds of short-term workers at the base. How many of them will stay with us? he wondered. Even if we keep the Peacekeepers out and establish our independence, will we have enough people left here to run the base?

There were directional signs on the walls now, and electronic maps at intersections that showed a schematic of the tunnel system. Corridors, Doug reminded himself. We call them corridors now, not tunnels.

He turned left at an intersection and bumped into a man in olive green coveralls who was striding purposefully down the corridor. They each muttered an apology and fell into step, side by side, as they walked down the corridor.

Out of the side of his eye, Doug looked the man over. He thought he recognized him, but couldn’t quite place who he was. The man was a couple of inches shorter than Doug’s own six-one, but built wide and solid, like a bulldozer. Not an ounce of fat on him: he had felt iron-hard when Doug had bumped into him. His skin was the color of milk chocolate, his neatly-trimmed hair dark and wiry. Doug could not see his nametag without making it obvious he was looking at it.

So he said, “I’m Doug Stavenger,” and stuck out his hand without breaking stride.

The man made a perfunctory smile. “I know.”

For a moment Doug thought he was going to refuse to shake, but then the man took Doug’s proffered hand and said, in a clear, distinct, deliberate baritone, “My name is Bam Gordette.”

“Leroy Gordette?” Suddenly the picture from the personnel file clicked in Doug’s mind.

Gordette replied, “Call me Bam. It’s short for Bama, which in turn is short for Alabama.”

“You’re from Alabama?” Doug asked.

“Yeah, but I got no banjo on my knee.” Gordette smiled, but it looked purely mechanical.

“I was born in Georgia,” said Doug.

“I know.”

They had reached the door to Doug’s quarters, which was doubling as his office now that Jinny Anson occupied the director’s post. Opening it, Doug ushered Gordette in with a gesture. “The others will be here in a few minutes.”

The smart walls were all blank as they stepped in. Gordette started to sit on the couch by the door, but Doug pointed to the sling chair next to his writing desk. As he went to the desk and dropped into his swivel chair, Doug said, “We can use the few minutes to get to know each other.”

Gordette nodded tightly. Doug looked into his deep brown eyes and saw that Gordette would be a tough opponent in a poker game. He gave away nothing.

“You were in the army?” Doug prompted.

“Special Forces.”

“How long?”

“I did a four-year hitch.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Got a better offer.”

Doug tapped on his keyboard and Gordette’s personnel file came up on the wall screen to his left.

“What kind of a company is Falcon Electronics?”

“Small,” said Gordette. “They did customized electro-optical rigs, stuff like that.”

“You were with them almost nine years?”

“Right.”

“And then you got a job with Masterson Corporation and came to Moonbase.”

“Right.”

Leaning back in his chair, Doug asked, “How do you like it here?”

Gordette thought for a moment. “Not bad. Most of the people here are smart, civilized.”

“Civilized?”

“There’s not much of a color problem here. Not like back in the States.”

Doug felt shocked. “You had race problems?”

Gordette smiled again, but this time it dripped acid. “There’s no black man on Earth doesn’t have race problems.”

“I’m part black,” Doug said. “My father—”

“I know all about it. But your skin is white enough, and you got enough money, so it doesn’t matter to you.”

Doug felt as if he were battering against a solid steel barrier. Not that Gordette seemed hostile; he simply offered nothing. It was like talking to an automaton. And yet there was something going on behind those unwavering eyes. The man wasn’t stupid, Doug judged. He’s just sitting there, looking at me. As if he’s studying me.

Lev Brudnoy stuck his head through Doug’s open door and broke the tightening silence. Moments later, Jinny Anson, Professor Zimmerman and Kris Cardenas joined the conference.

As they carefully, meticulously, went over every inch of Moonbase’s layout, equipment and supplies, Doug watched Gordette. The man said nothing, but seemed entirely focused on their discussion. He listened intently, hands clasped in front of his face as if in prayer. Every now and then, though, Doug caught him looking directly at him. Gordette never looked away. He simply stared at Doug, face utterly impassive, eyes boring into Doug as if he were taking X-ray photographs.

“So we can button up and wait for ’em to run out of air,” Anson said, waving a hand at the schematic diagram of the base that filled one whole wall of Doug’s office.

“Suppose they blow out the main airlock?” Brudnoy asked. “What then?”

Anson’s normally perky expression paled slightly. “Why would they do that?”

“They want to take over the base,” Brudnoy replied.

“Yeah, but they wouldn’t want to kill us! Not if we’re just sitting tight inside.”

“Blowing the main airlock wouldn’t necessarily kill us, would it?” Cardenas asked.

“No,” said Anson. “It’d just open up the garage. All the tunnels would still be sealed off—”

“Corridors,” Doug corrected.

“Whatever.”

“Still,” Brudnoy said, “if they blast out the main airlock that would surely mean that they are prepared to blow their way through any of the other airlocks and hatches in the base.”

“It would mean they’re ready to kill us,” Doug agreed.

Zimmerman, sitting alone on the couch by the door, pointed out, “If they blast open the main airlock we would have to surrender. There would be no other option.”

“Not unless we can breathe vacuum,” Anson admitted.

Doug turned to Gordette and again the man was staring at him. “What do you think, Bam? What does your military experience tell you?”

Without the slightest hesitation, Gordette replied, “The Peacekeepers are trained to accomplish their mission with as little bloodshed as possible. They won’t blow any airlocks. Not at first, anyway.”

“You mean we could sit inside and wait ’em out?” Anson asked.

Gordette shook his head.

“What would you do,” Doug asked, “if you were heading up this Peacekeeper mission?”

Getting slowly to his feet, Gordette walked to the wall map and pointed to the thin lines that represented the buried power cables that led from the solar farms into the base. “I’d cut your electrical power lines, here, here, and here.”

“The solar farms,” murmured Brudnoy.

“Without electricity this base goes down the tubes.” Gordette made a diving motion with one hand.

“We have the backup nuclear system,” Anson said.

“They know that,” Gordette replied flatly. “They’ve got as good a map of this base as you do.”

Doug said, “So they’ll cut the line from the nuke, too.”

Gordette nodded.

“Kaput,” said Zimmerman. “How long can we last without electricity? Thirty seconds, perhaps?”

“We have emergency batteries, fuel cells,” said Anson.

“So? How much time do they give us?”

“A few hours.”

“The Peacekeepers will have enough air to wait for us to surrender, no?”

“Yes.”

From his chair in front of Doug’s desk, Brudnoy looked up at Gordette with gloom in his pouchy eyes. “Is there anything we can do? Anything at all?”

Gordette seemed to think about it for a moment. “There’s a maneuver that we use in martial arts when your opponent points a gun at you.”

“What is it?”

Gordette slowly raised his arms over his head in the universal sign of surrender.

The room fell into a dismal silence. Doug looked at them; they seemed defeated already.

“What we’ve learned,” he said in as firm a voice as he could, “is that we’ve got to keep the Peacekeepers from cutting our power lines.”

“How?” Brudnoy asked.

Doug pointed toward Zimmerman. “We need something to defend those power lines.”

“Something?” Zimmerman growled. “What?”

“That’s what you’ve got to figure out, Professor. And you’ve got less than four days to do it.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 63 HOURS 29 MINUTES

Joanna Masterson Stavenger was not accustomed to being snubbed, not even by the world’s most powerful politicians. But Faure refused to speak to her.

At first the U.N. simply did not acknowledge her calls. The wall screen in her quarters showed nothing but electronic hash. The comm tech who was monitoring her transmission said flatly, They’re not answering.”

She reached the Masterson Corporation offices in New York and tried to pipe a call to Faure through them. After nearly twenty-four hours of delays and evasions, one of the U.N. flunkies blandly told her that the secretary-general was unavailable.

Huffing with impatient anger, Joanna called Masterson corporate headquarters in Savannah on a direct laser link.

“I want to speak with the chairman of the board,” she told the young man whose face appeared on her wall screen.

“Mr Rashid isn’t here, Mrs Brudnoy. He’s in—”

Joanna did not wait for the sentence to end. “Find him, wherever he is. I need to talk to him immediately.”

It took almost three seconds for her words to reach Rashid’s aide and his startled expression to show on her screen.

“Get him!” she snapped.

Nearly half an hour later, Ibrahim al-Rashid’s face finally appeared on the wall screen. He had been handsome once, but now his romantic good looks were sinking into softness. His closely-clipped beard was streaked with gray, as was his tightly-curled hair. He had a look of decadence about him, Joanna thought. She knew that Rashid did not drink; he was a faithful Moslem in that regard. But there were drugs. And women, many of them. And the responsibilities that came inescapably with great power.

“Greetings and felicitations, most illustrious one,” he said, his voice reedy but melodious. “How are you enjoying your visit to the Moon?”

“I need to talk to Faure,” Joanna said, unwilling to engage in the usual banter.

Three seconds later Rashid’s brows rose slightly. “I very much doubt that the secretary-general would be willing to speak with you at this point in time.”

“Make it happen, Omar,” Joanna snapped.

If her use of his old nickname upset him, Rashid showed no trace of it. He merely smiled patiently and replied, “And how do I do that, Joanna? Rub a magic lamp?”

Holding on to her swooping temper, Joanna replied, “You get that little Quebecer on the phone and tell him that I’m going to announce to the news media that he has no intention of shutting down Moonbase. He’s going to continue using our nanomachines for his own profit!”

Rashid seemed more sobered than surprised when her words reached him.

“Your son’s declaration of Moonbase’s independence has not been carried by the media,” he said slowly. “There is a blackout on news about Moonbase. Even here in the States the media have acceded to Faure’s request for restraint.”

“This isn’t about Moonbase,” Joanna replied impatiently. “This is about the secretary-general of the United Nations telling the world he’s going to enforce the nanotech treaty when he’s really planning to use our nanomachines for his own purposes.”

She watched his expression intently. Does he already know about this? Has he already cut a deal with Faure?

At last Rashid said, “That does cast a new light on the situation. Perhaps the media would be interested in such a story. Do you have any evidence to back it up? Any corroboration?”

Suddenly Joanna felt wary. “Plenty,” she said, thinking to herself, Omar could be part of Faure’s scheme. He’s never been a supporter of Moonbase.

Almost as if thinking out loud, Rashid murmured, “There is a reporter on board the Clippership heading for Moonbase.”

“I don’t want a reporter,” Joanna said. “I want all the networks. I want every news service on Earth!”

“But the commsats have been programmed to reject all transmissions from Moonbase.”

“I don’t need the commsats. How do you think we’re talking? The technicians here can beam my transmissions to any spot on Earth, almost. All the news services have optical receivers on their rooftops.”

Rashid was silent far longer than the three seconds it took for the round-trip transmission from Moon to Earth and back again.

“Perhaps Faure would be willing to speak with you, after all,” he said at last. “Let me see if I can reach him and get him to listen to reason.”

“Good,” said Joanna. “We’ve only got a little more than two and a half days before the Peacekeepers land here.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Don’t let Faure delay until his troops land. I won’t wait that long. Tell him he’s got twenty-four hours to get in touch with me. Or else I go to the media.”

“Harkening and obedience,” said Rashid, just as he did in the old days when Joanna was chairman of the board and he was only a rising young executive.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 38 HOURS 30 MINUTES

Edith’s nausea was almost completely gone. A tendril of unease persisted deep inside her, but she thought it was probably more psychological than physical now. She still felt slightly dizzy whenever she moved her head too fast, but the moment passed quickly.

In fact, floating free in zero gravity was fun! She had set up her two minicams in the spacecraft’s cargo bay, amid bulky crates marked AMMUNITION: 9 MM: FRANGIBLE and GRENADES: CONCUSSION: MARK 17/A.

She had interviewed two ordinary troopers, a shy teenaged boy from Bangladesh and his sergeant, a tough no-nonsense Cuban woman. It was like interviewing athletes: monosyllabic answers, platitudes, and long, perplexed silences.

Edith checked her hair in her hand mirror. It was floating nicely; not so wild that it would distract the viewer, just enough to show what weightlessness could do. The cameras were tightly tethered to a pair of tied down crates so they wouldn’t bob around; there were no girders or other projections on the smooth curving bulkhead of diamond on which to secure them.

Captain Munasinghe glided through the hatch, trying to look as if he was unaffected by zero gee. He had removed the medication patch from behind his ear, but Edith saw faint rings there, like the scars from an octopus’s suckers, and wondered how comfortable the captain really felt.

He was small and slim, dark skin shining as if it had been oiled. He had put on a fresh uniform, Edith saw, crisp and clean. His eyes were his best feature, large and dark and somehow fierce-looking. They’ll show up great on camera, she thought. But he’s so little, I’ll look like a horse next to him.

Then she smiled to herself. Zero gee to the rescue. I’ll just let him float higher off the deck than I do. Keep the focus tight, head and shoulders. He’ll look taller than me and I’ll bet he’ll love it. Realistic journalism.

“I just want to ask you a few questions, Captain Munasinghe,” she said, trying to put him at ease. “Just look at me and ignore the cameras.”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Ready?”

Munasinghe nodded, then licked his lips.

Wondering who had taught him to do that, Edith pressed the switch on her remote control wand and said, “Okay, here we go.”

She arranged herself facing Munasinghe and slightly below him, so his head topped hers by a few centimeters. Camera one held the two-shot; the second camera focused on the captain’s face. Edith would do her reaction close-ups afterward; they would be spliced in Earthside as cutaways.

“Here with me now is Captain Munasinghe of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, the commander of this mission to the Moon,” said Edith.

“Captain Munasinghe, how do you feel about leading forty armed troops to Moonbase?”

Munasinghe drifted closer to her as he replied, “The Peacekeepers were created by international agreement to enforce the decisions of the United Nations’ secretariat. Moonbase is violating the terms of the nanotechnology treaty, therefore we have been dispatched to the Moon to put an end to this violation.”

“Yes, but how do you feel personally about this mission?”

“I am proud to bear the responsibility of carrying out the United Nations’ decision to enforce the nanotechnology treaty,” he said. It sounded like a parrot repeating a line it had been laboriously taught.

The interview teetered between a disaster and a farce. Munasinghe had canned answers for every question she asked, undoubtedly written in New York for him to memorize. Worse, he kept pushing so close to Edith that she thought he wanted to rub noses with her. She could smell the cloying, faintly acrid odor of whatever breath treatment he had gargled.

She unconsciously moved away from him, trying to maintain a proper distance for their interview, but he kept moving in on her. In the back of her mind Edith remembered that different cultures have different ideas of the proper distance for social intercourse, but this was going out on the network, for chrissakes! It’s going to look like he’s coming on to me.

The cameras tracked them automatically, but after only a few minutes Edith’s back bumped against one of the cargo crates and she could retreat no farther. Munasinghe hovered before her, his breath making her want to gag, his burning eyes boring into hers as if he intended to rape her.

Edith was about to give up all pretense of trying to conduct a rational interview and wind it up as quickly as she could, but some inner determination was urging her to get something, anything out of Munasinghe.

In desperation, she gestured with her free hand to the crates of munitions around them. “Do you think you’re really going to need all this firepower against the people of Moonbase? After all, they’re unarmed, aren’t they?”

“They claim that they are unarmed, yes.”

“You don’t believe that?”

“I am a soldier,” Munasinghe said, eyes burning into her. “I must be prepared for the worst that the enemy could possibly do to us.”

“But what could a gaggle of scientists and technicians do to a platoon of fully-armed Peacekeepers?”

“We don’t know, but we must be prepared.”

“With hand grenades and explosives?”

“With every weapon at our disposal,” Munasinghe said, without an instant’s hesitation. “If the people of Moonbase offer the slightest opposition, we are prepared to use whatever level of force is required.”

Edith’s breath caught in her throat. “You mean you’re prepared to kill them?”

“If necessary. Yes, of course.”

“Even though they’re unarmed?”

He jabbed a finger in her face. “You keep saying they are unarmed. How do we know this? How do we know what kinds of weapons they may have at Moonbase? I am responsible for bringing Moonbase under United Nations’ jurisdiction. I am responsible for the lives of my troops. If the enemy offers the slightest resistance, the slightest provocation, I have ordered my troops to shoot.”

“Shoot to kill?” Edith was surprised at how hollow her voice sounded.

“When you are in battle you don’t have the luxury of attempting to merely wound your enemy. Shoot to kill, yes, of course.”

“At the slightest provocation?”

For the first time, Captain Munasinghe smiled. “I have served in Eritrea, in Colombia, and against the Armenian terrorists. Believe me, you do not give an enemy a second chance to kill you. Not if you want to survive the engagement.”

“Let me get this straight,” Edith said. “You’re saying that you’ve ordered your troops to shoot to kill at the slightest sign of resistance from the people of Moonbase.”

“At the slightest sign of resistance,” Munasinghe affirmed. “Better to destroy Moonbase and everyone in it than to return to Earth with our mission a failure.”

Edith swallowed hard, then said, “Thank you, Captain Munasinghe.”

She had to push herself past him, then forced a smile as she looked straight into camera one and concluded, “This is Edie Elgin, in space with the U.N. Peacekeeper force, on the way to Moonbase.”

Munasinghe drifted back, then asked, “Is that all? Is it finished?”

“That’s it,” said Edith, hoping he would go away.

“Was it satisfactory? Can I see it?”

Wearily, Edith ran the abbreviated interview on camera one’s monitor. Munasinghe watched himself, fascinated. Edith wondered if the network suits would play the interview. They had made it clear they wanted to cooperate with the U.N., and this interview could stir a lot of hostility toward the Peacekeepers if it was aired.

No, she told herself, they’ll play it. They’ll have to. So the U.N. bitches about it, so what. This is news.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 27 HOURS 51 MINUTES

The mercenary returned to his quarters and sat on his bunk. The time to strike is nearly here, he told himself.

The situation was almost ludicrous. The more he thought about the base’s electrical power supplies, its life support systems, its total lack of weaponry or military capability, the more he realized that a single man like himself could bring the entire base to its knees.

They won’t need a ship full of Peacekeepers. I can do it all by myself.

But the Peacekeepers were on their way and there was almost nothing that the inhabitants of Moonbase could do to stop them.

Why assassinate the leaders when they can’t offer any resistance? Just knock out their electrical power system and they’re helpless. It won’t make any difference if Doug Stavenger lives or dies; Moonbase will cave in as soon as the Peacekeepers arrive.

The mercenary got down onto the floor in front of his bunk and folded his legs into the lotus position. Resting the backs of his hands on his knees, he closed his eyes and murmured his mantra, seeking harmony and understanding.

He saw in his mind’s eye what he always saw. His ten-year-old brother in convulsions, dying of the zip he had snorted while their mother lay sprawled on the sofa, too dazed with the same shit to phone for help. He saw his six-year-old self locked in the dark roach closet because he’d been a bad boy, watching his brother die through the closet door keyhole, listening to the screams that turned into strangled, choking sobs and finally ended in a groan that still tortured his soul.

If I had been good, I wouldn’t have been locked in the roach closet. I could’ve helped Timmy.

He saw his mother die, too. She was the first person he ever killed. He was fifteen and a father but she still treated him like a little kid. Took the strap to him. He grabbed it away from her and swung it hard enough to knock her down. Her head cracked on the table leg and her eyes went blank.

He saw his first sergeant, as brutal a man as any, but fair and unwaveringly honest. And the old cowboy on the rifle range, the one who taught him how to shoot. And how to hunt.

Death was his companion always. His ancient friend. He was death’s best assistant. That was his destiny, his purpose in life: to bring people to death.

He opened his eyes. Deep within him the ancient calm had returned. There were no doubts, no qualms, no divisions within him. He was one again. Whole. Death was at his side, invisible but palpable, his oldest and best companion.

After all, he told himself, Stavenger’s entire life revolves around Moonbase. Take that away from him and he’s as good as dead anyway. I’ll merely be helping him to the place where he wants to be.

Still, he sighed.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 20 HOURS

Joanna Stavenger actually felt nervous as she sat in her favorite armchair, waiting for Georges Faure’s call. The secretary-general had at first refused to speak to her at all, but the threat of telling the media that he planned to use nanomachines despite his public denouncement of them apparently had forced his hand.

Apparently, she reminded herself. The little bastard’s waited until the troopship is almost ready to land before agreeing to talk to me.

Faure had put up conditions. This was to be strictly a private conversation between the two of them. No third parties. And it was to be understood that he was speaking to her as a courtesy only, not in his capacity as secretary-general of the United Nations.

Joanna had agreed easily. She knew that Faure had no private existence; whatever he said to her was being said by the man who headed the U.N. And she conveniently forgot her pledge of privacy when she told her son that Faure was going to speak to her. Doug was not in her sitting room with her, but he was plugged into their conversation, in his own quarters.

Precisely at the appointed moment the synthesized voice of the communications system said, “Monsieur Faure is calling from New York.”

“On screen, please,” Joanna replied.

A window seemed to open on the wall before her and Faure’s face appeared, no larger than life-size. Joanna had programmed the smart wall that way; she had no desire to see Faure looming over her like an intimidating giant.

“Madame Brudnoy,” Faure said, with a polite little smile.

“Mr Secretary-General,” Joanna replied.

While she waited the three seconds for his reply, Joanna examined the room in which Faure was sitting. It didn’t look like an office; more like the living room of a spacious apartment in a high-rise building. She could not see much of the background behind him, but there was a window that looked out on the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

“I am not speaking as the secretary-general, Madame. This is a personal conversation between two private citizens.”

Joanna nodded an acknowledgement.

“May I say that you look radiant? And your apartment, from what I can see of it, seems quite charming. I had no idea such luxuries were to be found in Moonbase.”

Joanna had put on a tailored blouse of coral pink and a dark mid-thigh skirt: comfortable without being too dressy.

“Thank you,” she said. “This is my personal furniture. I had it brought up from Savannah years ago. I assure you, the other living quarters here are nowhere near as elegant.”

“I see,” said Faure, after the annoying lag. “The privileges of the wealthy.”

Joanna bit back the temptation to comment on Faure’s luxurious apartment. “I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me.”

This time it took more than three seconds for him to reply. His brow furrowed, his mouth pursed. At last he said, “Madame Brudnoy, it took a struggle with my conscience to decide to answer your request. I confess that my first instinct was to ignore it, and remain aloof from you and everyone else in Moonbase until this crisis is settled.”

“I think it’s always best to discuss problems frankly, face-to-face.”

His frown eased somewhat. “Yes, I agree. That is why I am speaking to you.”

“What about our declaration of independence?”

If the question jolted him, Faure gave no indication of it. “Declaration of independence? Pah!” He snapped his fingers. “A transparent ploy to avoid complying with the nano-technology treaty.”

“A right of every nation,” Joanna retorted. “Just because we’re on the Moon doesn’t mean we don’t have the same rights as any other group of people.”

“You are not a nation,” Faure countered. “Moonbase is a division of a corporation.”

“Moonbase is a community of more than two thousand people. We have the right to be independent.”

His cheeks flushed, Faure waved both hands indignantly. “But you are not a nation! Two thousand people do not make a nation! You can’t even exist by yourselves without supplies from Earth. It is as if a group of people on an ocean liner declared themselves an independent nation. It is nonsense!”

“We are self-sufficient,” Joanna insisted. “We produce our own food. We can exist on our own without any help from Earth.” That was stretching things, she knew, and yet a part of her mind marveled at the realization that the stretch was not all that much. Moonbase could exist without help from Earth.

Faure made a visible effort to calm himself. “Madame Brudnoy, you know and I know that this so-called declaration of independence is nothing more than the smoke screen, the camouflage to disguise the fact that you wish to continue using nanotechnology and evade the conditions of the treaty.”

“But you intend to continue using nanotechnology once you’ve taken over Moonbase,” Joanna said.

Once he heard her words, Faure’s face went from red to white, as if someone had slapped him.

He took a deep breath, then said evenly, “What makes you think that?”

Smiling, Joanna replied, “Don’t you think I have contacts inside Yamagata Corporation? Several of the board members of Masterson Corporation are also on Yamagata’s board.”

Faure sat in silence for several moments. Then he made a little shrug and admitted, “It is entirely possible that we will allow some work on nanomachines to continue, once we have taken over operation of Moonbase.”

“Moonbase will continue to supply water to Nippon One,” Joanna said flatly, not making a question of it.

Reluctantly, Faure nodded.

“And Moonbase will continue to manufacture spacecraft using nanomachines,” she added.

“Only temporarily,” Faure replied once he heard her words. “You have contracts with various international transport companies. The United Nations will see that those contractual obligations are fulfilled.”

“Of course,” said Joanna graciously. “And by the time all our backlog orders have been filled, the United Nations will find that nanomanufacturing can be quite profitable. And not harmful in the slightest. Right?”

Faure leaned tensely toward the camera. “Madame Brudnoy, the nanotechnology treaty exists because of the fears that nanomachines have created. Your own husband was killed by nanomachines, was he not?”

Joanna kept herself from flinching. I should have expected that, she told herself.

Without pausing, Faure went on, “Nanotechnology can produce insidious weapons, deadly weapons. Nanomachines can kill, as you well know. A mistake, an error, and runaway nanomachines could devour everything in their path, like those armies of ants in South America that devastate entire landscapes and leave nothing alive in their wake.”

His moustache bristling with fervor, Faure continued, “We cannot have nanomachines on Earth! No matter what glorious benefits they promise, we cannot take the risk that they present to us.”

“But we’re not on the Earth. You could allow nanomanufacturing here on the Moon,” said Joanna.

He replied, “I am willing to allow it on a temporary, experimental basis—under United Nations’ control.”

With sudden understanding, Joanna said, “Because Yamagata insisted on it. And if Yamagata didn’t go along with you, then the Japanese government would oppose your takeover of Moonbase and you can’t afford to have them against you.”

She realized that that was the truth of it. If Japan opposed Faure’s plans, a whole bloc of opposition would arise in the U.N.

“You are very perspicacious,” Faure said. He leaned back in his chair, seemed to relax. “But the facts are that Japan supports my efforts and the Peacekeepers will be landing at Moonbase in less than twenty hours. Fait accompli!”

“And who’s going to run Moonbase after the Peacekeepers land?”

Once Faure heard her question, he smiled like the Chesire cat. “Why, who else but specialists from Yamagata Corporation?”

Joanna could not have been more stunned if Faure had leaped across the quarter-million miles separating them and punched her. She simply sat in her armchair, mouth hanging open, while Faure smiled his widest at her.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 17 HOURS 38 MINUTES

Dr Hector Montana was not known for his bedside manner. He was a brusque, no-nonsense physician who had spent most of his career dealing with factory workers, construction crews, and industrial accidents. He was a capable surgeon and, thanks to Moonbase’s electronic communications systems, he could consult and even work with virtually any physician on Earth.

Until the war sprang up.

Now he scowled openly at the young couple sitting tensely before his desk. He was a slim, pinch-faced man with graying hair combed straight back off his low forehead. His skin was the color of sun-dried adobe. His profile looked as if it had been carved by an ancient Mayan: high cheekbones, prominent nose.

“Pregnant.” He made the word sound like an accusation.

“Yes,” said Claire Rossi. “There’s no doubt about it.”

“I’m not an obstetrician.”

“Yes, but we thought you should know.”

O’Malley spoke up, “I want to make sure she gets the best medical attention possible.”

“Then you should’ve taken some precautions beforehand,” Dr Montana snapped. “We don’t have facilities for this sort of thing here.”

Nick bulled his shoulders forward slightly, matching the physician’s frown with one of his own. “We don’t need facilities, for God’s sake. I just want to see that she gets the proper care.”

“I can’t even get in touch with other medical centers back on Earth,” Montana grumbled. “We’ve been blacked out.”

“Surely this emergency will be over with soon enough for me to go back Earthside,” said Claire. As chief of the personnel department, she knew Moonbase’s policy perfectly well. Pregnant women were shipped back Earthside before their pregnancies became so advanced that rocket flight was not recommended.

“And what if it isn’t?” Montana snapped.

“Then you’ll have to take care of her,” O’Malley said, with more than a hint of belligerence in his voice. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

“You want my considered medical advice? Abort it. Get rid of it now, to be on the safe side. There’s no telling how long this stupid blockade is going to last.”

“We can’t!” O’Malley said.

“You’re young enough to have a dozen babies. This one is bad timing, that’s all.”

“I won’t,” Claire said quietly.

“You’re both Catholic, is that it?” Montana’s voice softened slightly. “I am too. The Church won’t—”

“We’re not going to have an abortion,” O’Malley said, his voice darkening. “And that’s final.”

Montana huffed at him. “Well, maybe the Peacekeepers will take over the base and send us all back home.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 12 HOURS 22 MINUTES

Doug stood atop a house-sized boulder and watched the drivers park their tractors on the three unoccupied landing pads of the rocket port. The half-built Clippership that had been towed onto the fourth pad gleamed in the starlight.

Jinny Anson, recognizable by the bright rings of butter yellow on the arms of her bulky spacesuit, stood beside him.

“Okay,” her voice said in his helmet earphones, “we clutter up the landing pads so they can’t use ’em. But they can still put down on the crater floor just about anywhere they want to.”

Doug nodded inside his helmet. Jinny was right. Alphonsus’s floor was flat enough for a Clippership to set down. The ground was cracked with rilles, pockmarked with small craters and strewn with rocks, but there were plenty of open spaces where a good pilot could make a landing.

“All you’re doing is forcing ’em to sit down a kilometer or so farther away from our main airlock,” Anson went on. “What good’s that going to do?”

“Maybe none,” Doug admitted. “But I sure as hell don’t intend to let them use our landing pads.”

He sensed Anson shrugging inside her suit.

“Jinny, it’s just about the only chance we’ve got, other than just folding up and surrendering.”

“That damned Quebecer wants to turn the base over to Yamagata?” Anson asked for the fortieth time.

“That’s what he told my mother.”

“Son of a bitch.” She pronounced each word distinctly, with feeling.

“Come on, let’s get inside,” Doug said. “They’re finished here and I want to see how far Zimmerman and Cardenas have gotten along.”

The nanotech lab was a series of workshops set along one of the old Moonbase tunnels. The rooms were interconnected by airtight hatches and that entire section of corridor could be sealed off from the rest of the base, if necessary. Each workshop room and the corridor outside had powerful ultraviolet lamps running along their bare rock ceilings, capable of disabling any of the virus-sized nanomachines that might have inadvertently been released to float in the air. The floors and walls were strung with buried wires that could generate a polarizing current that would also deactivate any stray nanomachines.

These safety systems were turned on at the end of every working day, to guarantee that no nanomachines infected the rest of the base. The containment worked. Although nanomachines were assembled constantly for tasks as diverse as ferreting oxygen atoms out of the regolith and building spacecraft structures of pure diamond out of carbon dust from asteroids, there had been no runaway ‘gray goo’ of nanomachines devouring everything in their path, no plagues of nanobug diseases.

Over the years Professors Cardenas and Zimmerman and their assistants had developed nanomachines for medical uses. Moonbase employees regularly received nano injections to scrub plaque from their blood vessels and to augment their natural immune systems. In a closed environment such as the underground base, nanotherapy helped to prevent epidemics that might endanger the entire population. It was a standing joke that people returned from Moonbase healthier than they arrived. No one in Moonbase even had the sniffles, except for those few who were allergic to the ubiquitous lunar dust.

And the Cardenas/Zimmerman team was working on that.

Or had been, until the U.N. crisis erupted.

Doug went to Cardenas. Zimmerman would see no one; he had locked himself in his lab with orders that he could not, must not, would not be disturbed under any circumstances whatsoever.

“It’s my fault,” Kris Cardenas told Doug. “I teased Willi that afternoon you came to us in the university studio, told him he ought to figure out how to make a person invisible.”

“That’s what he’s working on?”

Cardenas nodded.

“But what help is that going to be?”

She shrugged. “Leave him alone. While he’s pushing down that line he’ll probably come up with one or two other things that’ll be really useful.”

Doug started to object, but Cardenas added, “It won’t do you any good to try to get him onto another track. He’ll just bluster and roar and go right back to what he wants to do.”

“I know,” Doug admitted ruefully.

“Let me show you what we’ve accomplished,” Cardenas said, leading Doug to the massive gray metal tubing of the high-voltage scanning probe microscope that stood at one end of the lab table.

The two scientists working at the table made room for them. Cardenas peered at the microscope’s display screen briefly, made a small adjustment on a roller dial, then turned smiling to Doug.

“Take a look.”

The display screen showed a swarm of dots surrounding a flat grayish thing. The gray material was shrinking rapidly. The dots seemed to be devouring it like a pack of scavengers tearing apart a bleeding carcass.

“We’ve revived an old idea,” Cardenas said as he watched. “Something we were working on more than twenty years ago, back Earthside.”

Slowly, Doug backed away from the screen and looked into her brilliant blue eyes. “Gobblers,” he whispered.

“Right. This particular set is programmed to disassemble carbon-based molecules…” Her voice trailed off as she saw the expression on Doug’s face and realized that it had been gobblers, from her own lab in San Jose, that had killed Doug’s father up on Wodjohowitcz Pass.

“Oh!” she said, fingers flying to her lips.

Doug fought the memory. It had happened before he’d been born. He’d been eighteen when he finally discovered that his half-brother Greg had used gobbler nanomachines to murder Paul Stavenger. That’s all in the past, Doug told himself. Greg’s been dead for seven years and it’s all over and there’s nothing you or anybody else can do to change the past.

“It’s all right,” he said brusquely to Cardenas. “I was just… it just caught me unawares, that’s all.”

“I had forgotten,” Cardenas said, her voice low, trembling slightly. “Twenty-five years ago…”

“It’s all right,” he repeated. Taking a deep breath, he tried to bury the past and concentrate on the present.

“By the time the Peacekeepers land, though, the Sun will be up and the nanomachines will go into estivation, won’t they?”

“We can program a batch to work at high temperature.”

“What about the UV?”

Cardenas nodded and leaned her butt on the edge of the work bench. “It’s pretty intense in sunlight, yeah. But I think we can work around it.”

“We don’t want a set of nanobugs that can’t be turned off,” Doug warned.

She almost smiled. “Scared of the gray goo?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Uh-huh.” She lowered her head a moment, thinking. “Look, when the ship lands, what actually touches the ground?”

“Four landing pads. They’re about two meters in diameter and twenty, thirty centimeters thick.”

“And made of diamond?”

Doug nodded. “Their surfaces and internal bracing are diamond. There’re some hydraulic lines inside them.”

“The hydraulics are oil-based?”

“As far as I know, yes. I could check with the manufacturing division to make sure.”

“Okay,” Cardenas said, walking slowly away from the electron microscope. Doug followed in step beside her.

“The ship lands, right?” she said, thinking out loud. “Its landing pads come down on top of our gobblers. Covers them up, so they’re no longer in sunlight. And they’re shielded from the UV.”

“I get it. Then they can eat their way inside the landing pads and start taking the hydraulic system apart.”

“You got it.”

Doug broke into a grin, but it faded before it was truly started. “Only one problem, Kris.”

“What’s that?”

“What good’s it going to do us to prevent their Clippership from leaving the Moon? We want to stop them from getting here.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 11 HOURS 45 MINUTES

Zoltan Kadar sat bleary-eyed in the middle of his monitoring screens, almost in tears as he squinted at the drawing of the Farside observatory. A beautiful dream, he told himself. My crowning achievement. It would be called the Kadar Observatory some day.

But it’s only a dream. I can’t even get an observation satellite to survey the ground.

For more than three days and three sleepless nights Kadar had hounded Doug Stavenger, to no avail. Most of his calls were intercepted by Jinny Anson, who sternly told him not to bother Stavenger.

“He’s got too much to do, Zoltan, to worry about your satellite shot.”

Twice he actually got to Stavenger himself, by tracking down Doug’s movements through the length and breadth -and depth—of Moonbase.

The first time, he accosted Stavenger as Doug was talking with the technicians in the control center. Doug listened patiently to Kadar’s complaints, then gripped the astronomer’s slim shoulder.

“Dr Kadar—”

“Professor Kadar!”

Doug almost laughed in his face. “Professor Kadar, I understand how upset and frustrated you must feel. But you’re not the only one. All our outside activities have been shut down, except for our preparations for defending Moonbase against the Peacekeepers. I’m afraid your survey of Farside is just going to have to wait.”

And with that, a solidly built, grim-faced black man took Kadar’s other arm and firmly led him to the door. Kadar glared at him, and when that didn’t work, he stared at the man’s nametag on his shirt front.

“Mr Gordette,” Kadar said with as much dignity as he could muster,’there is no need for you to leave your fingerprints on my arm.”

Gordette released him. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Just wanted to make sure you leave Doug alone. He’s got a lot to do, you know.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Late that night Kadar actually got Stavenger on the phone. If I can’t sleep, Kadar told himself, why should he?

But Stavenger didn’t seem to be sleeping. His image came up immediately on the smart wall of Kadar’s quarters. Stavenger was sitting at a desk in his own quarters, wide awake.

“Dr Kadar,” Doug said as soon as he recognized his caller’s face.

“I’m sorry to call so late—”

“It doesn’t matter. I was just going over our inventories of supplies.”

“My satellite is ready for launch,” Kadar said. “All I need is your approval and—”

“With all due respect, Professor Kadar, there’s no chance in hell of your getting your satellite launched until this crisis with the Peacekeepers is resolved.”

“It’s only one small rocket. They’ll see that it’s going into a lunar orbit.”

“I’m not going to debate the point, Professor. No launch.”

“You’re standing in the way of science!”

Wearily, Doug replied, “Maybe I am. It can’t be helped. If it’s any consolation, there are a lot of other frustrated people in the base right now. We’ve got a whole troupe of ballet dancers here who can’t return Earthside until this mess is resolved.”

Ballet dancers did not assuage Kadar’s feelings. But as he sat amidst his monitoring screens, admiring the drawings of what would someday be the Kadar Observatory on the far side of the Moon, he suddenly realized that frustrated ballet dancers might be more appreciative of his predicament than the management of Moonbase.

Ballet dancers. Kadar pulled himself up from his console chair and headed for his quarters. A shower, a shave, some clean clothes—if I must spend this crisis in frustration, perhaps there is a charming ballerina or two who can understand me and offer consolation.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 9 HOURS 45 MINUTES

“I’ve never felt so frustrated in my whole life!” Joanna slapped her palm against the ornate little table that stood at the end of her couch.

Startled, Lev Brudnoy looked across the room at her.

“No one answers my calls,” Joanna complained. “No one even acknowledges that they’ve received my calls! It’s like shouting into a deep, dark mine shaft!”

Brudnoy turned off the wall display he had been studying, got up from his chair and went to sit beside his wife.

“Faure’s people are in control of the commsats,” he said gently. “Most probably they are not letting your messages get through to Earth.”

“But I’ve beamed calls directly to the World Court in The Hague. I’ve even had our own people in Savannah relay my messages to Holland. No response. Not even a flicker.”

Brudnoy shrugged his bony shoulders. “Faure isn’t going to let the World Court consider our claim of independence until his Peacekeepers have taken control of Moonbase.”

“And turned it over to Yamagata to operate,” Joanna growled.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Fists clenched, Joanna jumped to her feet and started striding across the furniture-crowded living room. “That little turd! He’s in with Yamagata. It’s been a Yamagata operation all along, from the very beginning. They’ll end up operating Moonbase under a U.N. contract and we’ll be out in the cold.”

“Expropriated,” muttered Brudnoy.

“It’s illegal! It’s illegal as hell! But he’s going to get away with it.”

“How is your board of directors taking this?”

She glared at him. “I’ve asked for an emergency meeting of the board, but they’re taking their sweet time getting everybody together.”

“Perhaps—”

“They know Doug can’t live on Earth!” Joanna blurted. “He’ll be a marked man.”

“We’ll be able to protect him,” Brudnoy assured her.

But Joanna shook her head. “No, they’ll get to him. Fanatics. Assassins. Just because he’s got nanomachines in his body. They’ll kill him, sooner or later.”

“Zimmerman won’t be safe from the nanoluddites, either,” Brudnoy pointed out. With a sigh, he added, “None of us will.”

“We can’t let them send us back to Earth, Lev! It’d be a death sentence for Doug, for Zimmerman, for all of us!”

“If only—”

The phone chime interrupted Brudnoy.

“Answer,” Joanna snapped.

The phone’s computer voice said, “Call from Mr Rashid, in Savannah.”

“Put him on!”

Ibrahim al-Rashid’s swarthy face with its trim little beard appeared on the wall screen. To Brudnoy, the man looked like the crafty pirate chieftain of his childhood tapes.

He smiled at Joanna. “You’ll be pleased to know that the emergency board meeting is scheduled to start in ten minutes.”

Joanna sank back onto the couch beside her husband. “Good,” she breathed. “Good.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 8 HOURS 57 MINUTES

Rashid hated these electronic meetings. He sat at the head of the nearly-empty board table while the walls around him displayed the images of directors who were in their homes or offices in California, London, Buenos Aires, the middle of the Pacific Ocean—and one, of course, on the Moon.

Only three of Masterson Corporation’s directors lived close enough to Savannah to come to this emergency meeting in person, and one of them had to be ferried by a special medevac tiltrotor plane because he was on life support, awaiting a heart transplant.

“We have got to get the World Court to issue an injunction to stop the Peacekeepers from invading Moonbase!” Joanna was saying, her voice urgent, somewhere between cajoling and pleading.

McGruder, the old man on life support, wheezing through his clear plastic oxygen mask, said testily, “The World Court doesn’t work that way. They have no power to issue injunctions or control the Peacekeepers.”

“Only Faure can direct the Peacekeepers,” said the director from London, a well-preserved matron whom Rashid had pursued amorously from time to time.

“With the oversight of the General Assembly,” the man from California added. “If they don’t like the way he’s handling things, they can override him or even replace him.”

Fat chance, Rashid thought.

Tamara Bonai, sitting on her patio on Tarawa with palm trees behind her swaying in the trade wind, asked, “But what about the news media? Couldn’t we put some pressure on the UN by exposing this plot to the media?”

Rashid said, “Most of the world’s media has been effectively muzzled by Faure. Here in the United States the media executives I’ve talked to tend to see this as a struggle between a giant corporation—which is bad by definition—against the poor people of the world, represented by Faure and the U.N.”

Joanna’s anguished face almost filled the far wall of the board room, like a giant portrait or a hovering djinn.

“Do you mean that they’re ignoring our declaration of independence?” Joanna demanded.

“Yes,” said Rashid, dipping his chin slightly. “They see it as a transparent ploy of Masterson Corporation to maintain control of Moonbase and continue using nanotechnology.”

The meeting room fell silent. What Rashid had told his board was not entirely true, he knew. Yes, the media executives he had spoken with knew that Masterson still controlled Moonbase, despite the legal fiction that the base was owned by the Kiribati Corporation. Tamara Bonai’s beauty and earnestness were not enough to disguise the maneuver that the Moonbase people had pulled to evade the nanotech treaty. But when Rashid had met with his friends among the news media in New York to brief them on the Moonbase situation, he had conveniently overlooked the independence angle.

And from all the communications beamed from Moonbase to Masterson corporate headquarters in Savannah, Rashid had carefully excised all mention of independence before sending them on to the news outlets.

Of all the members of Masterson’s board of directors, Rashid was the least surprised to learn that Yamagata was behind Faure’s grab of Moonbase. Let them have Moonbase, he thought. We still have the patents on the Clipperships. Let Yamagata manufacture them with nanomachines on the Moon; we will still get the patent royalties and our costs will drop to zero. Nothing but profit for us.

And, of course, sooner or later Yamagata will want to initiate a merger with Masterson Corporation. That’s when I will become wealthy enough to retire in true style.

Joanna’s insistent voice snapped him out of his pleasant reverie.

“Once the Peacekeeper troops land here and take over the base we won’t have a chance of stopping Faure from turning Moonbase over to Yamagata.”

“We will be compensated for the takeover,” Rashid pointed out.

And now we have to wait three infernal seconds for her reply, he grumbled to himself.

Joanna stared down the length of conference table at him, her eyes ablaze. “Compensated? You mean it’s all right with you if Faure screws us as long as he pays for the pleasure?”

Rashid’s own temper rose, but he maintained his composure. “I believe it is an ancient piece of oriental wisdom, Joanna: When rape is unavoidable, you might as well relax and enjoy it.”

Joanna stared into Rashid’s beady eyes and battled with every ounce of self-control she possessed to keep from screaming at him.

All across the walls of her living room, the images of the board members were watching her, some sympathetic, some apathetic, a few looking tense with apprehension.

“Omar,” she said, deliberately using Rashid’s belittling nickname, “you might enjoy getting raped, but I don’t, and I don’t think the other members of this board do, either.”

Raising her voice slightly, she said, “I move we take a vote of confidence in our chairman.”

For three tense seconds she waited for a response. None came. No one seconded her motion. Brudnoy, sitting off in a corner of the room where the camera could not pick him up, looked at her with growing pain in his expression.

That’s it, Joanna told herself. Rashid’s in control of the board and I’m not. He’s been using this crisis to solidify his position and undermine mine.

“Very well,” Joanna said at last. “It’s clear that this board is not going to support Moonbase. We’ll have to defend ourselves in spite of you.”

When Rashid heard her words he smiled thinly. “And how to you propose to defend Moonbase, may I ask?”

“We’ll fight with everything we’ve got!”

Rashid smile widened. “You sound like Churchill after Dunkirk, Joanna. “We shall fight them on the beaches and the landing fields. We shall fight them in the cities and the streets.” Do you intend to turn Moonbase into a battlefield?”

“If I have to,” she snapped.

Before Rashid could respond she added, “Churchill won his war. I intend to win mine.”

And she banged the manual switch that cut off the transmission. The smart walls went dark.

Brudnoy got up from his chair and walked across the small room to sit beside his wife. “At the end of that famous speech that Churchill gave,” he said, “he supposedly added, under his breath, that the British would have to throw beer bottles at the Nazis, because that’s all they had left to fight with.”

Joanna looked into his sad eyes.

“We don’t even have beer bottles, I’m afraid,” Brudnoy said softly.

“I know,” said Joanna, fighting back the tears that wanted to fill her eyes. “I know.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 6 HOURS 11 MINUTES

Captain Munasinghe pushed the plastic plug deeper into his ear and waited impatiently for his laptop to finish decoding the message from New York.

At last the computer’s synthesized voice said, “Com-mander-in-Chief, United Nations Peacekeeping Forces to Commander, Lunar Expeditionary Force: Urgent and Top Secret. Message begins. Latest intelligence on enemy intentions. Sources indicate Moonbase will resist your force with all means available to them. You are advised to take every precaution and to be prepared for armed resistance. Message ends.”

Munasinghe nodded to himself and glanced at the American newswoman sitting across the aisle from him. She seemed deep in earnest conversation over her own comm link back to Earth.

He floated out of his chair, fighting back the queasiness that still assailed him whenever he moved. Hovering in the aisle next to his second-in-command, he said, “Start them checking their weapons.”

“Now?” The Norwegian lieutenant blinked his ice-blue eyes at Munasinghe. “We still have six hours before touchdown.”

“Now,” Munasinghe said firmly. “I want the grenades and other explosives checked out and parcelled among the troops. All guns checked. Then start them getting into their spacesuits. We must be prepared for hostile action the instant we land. Fully armed and fully prepared.”

Edith Elgin was furious.

“What do you mean you can’t run the interview?” she hissed into the pin mike that almost touched her lips.

The spacecraft was so far from Earth that it took seconds for her boss’s answer to come back to her.

The decision was made on the twentieth floor, Edie. Nothing I can do about it.”

“But the captain as much as admitted that they’re going in shooting!” Edith wanted to shout, but she had to whisper. It made the whole situation doubly frustrating. “He’d just as soon blast Moonbase with a nuke, if he had one.”

Again the agonizing wait. “Don’t you think I want to run the piece, Edie? It’s great stuff. But my hands are tied! The suits upstairs want to play ball with Faure and the Peacekeepers. At least for now.”

Yeah, Edie said to herself. And after this bloodthirsty captain wipes out Moonbase the suits will want the interview burned because it’ll show what shitheads they are.

“They’re coming right down the pipe,” said the landing controller.

Doug leaned over her shoulder and looked at her radar screen. Only one blip, the Peacekeepers’ Clippership. It was precisely aligned on the grid of thin glowing lines that represented Moonbase’s landing corridor. The spaceport control complex was dark and empty except for this one console. Still, Doug felt the tension that the one solitary blip generated.

“You’ve told them that all four pads are occupied?” Doug asked.

“Yep,” the controller replied without turning from her screen.

“No response from them?”

“Not a peep. They’re not gonna turn around just because we haven’t laid out the welcome mat for them.”

“No,” Doug admitted. “I guess not.”

“Six hours, four minutes,” the controller said, pointing to the digital time display on her console.

“Keep sending them the message. I don’t want them to crash on landing.”

The controller turned in her little chair and looked up at him for the first time. “Why the hell not?” she asked.

The mercenary was sweating as he slipped the fingernail-sized chip into the computer on the desk in his quarters. Electronic germ warfare, he thought: a computer virus.

He was far from being a computer expert, but the chip he had carried in the heel of a shoe was supposed to be totally self-sufficient. Just get access to the right program and stick the chip’s virus into it. Easy, they had told him. Still, the mercenary sweated as he worked his way into the guarded programs that ran Moonbase’s vital systems.

It had been no big deal to ferret out the necessary passwords and coded instructions. Security at Moonbase was a joke. A couple of rounds of expensive real beer, hauled up from Earthside, and a guy was your buddy for life, even if you were black.

The computer program that ran Moonbase’s electrical distribution system was an expert system, with built-in fault diagnosis. The virus was designed to infiltrate the fault diagnosis subprogram and indicate that a dangerous overvoltage had suddenly appeared in the main trunk that connected the solar farms with the base transformers. That would cause the computer to lower the voltage throughout Moonbase: a brown-out. When the virus insisted that the voltage was still too high, the computer would be forced to shut down the main distribution system altogether and throw Moonbase onto its backup fuel cell systems, which were good for only twelve hours, maximum.

By the time they debugged the computer the Peacekeepers would be running the base.

The only light in the mercenary’s quarters was the glow from the display screen, projecting onto his face the multi-colored lines and nodes of the distribution system’s schematic diagram like the warpaint of a Sioux brave.

The mercenary nodded to himself. You bet you got a system anomaly, he said silently to the computer.

Go right ahead and check your ass off, he told the machine. Check yourself into a nervous breakdown.

“What?” he yelped aloud. He jabbed at the keyboard, expanding the message.

Goddamn, 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.

The mercenary banged his fist on the console hard enough to make the screen blink. Damn! he said to himself. Goddamn virus they gave me isn’t worth shit. Fuckin’ expert system is smarter than the fuckin’ 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 Clippership’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 spaceflight, 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, Massachusetts. 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 shipping 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 hell sitting in the damned Clippership with nothing to do but listen to Munasinghe’s nitpicking worries. Killifer had spent as much time as he could roaming through the ship, but it only took ten minutes to see everything there was to see: The passenger 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 unisex toilet.

He thought about popping into the cockpit, 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 passenger cabin, Killifer told himself, friggin’ cockpit’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 horny.

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 bitch 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 spacesuited 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.

For maybe half an hour, a sardonic voice in his head sneered. They’re not dummies. They’ll figure it out soon enough.

It’s the best we can do, Doug admitted silently. It’s the best we can do.

Nervously, a feeling of dread gripping him like the freezing hand of death itself, Doug programmed the smart walls to show him every square centimeter of Moonbase. He inspected each of the corridors, the water factory, the environmental control center, the rocket port, the solar farms and the mass driver out on the crater floor, the labs, the workshops, The Cave, where a handful of people were taking a meal in desultory silence, the control center, where tense men and women monitored every part of the base.

“Hold there,” he said.

The walls froze on a panoramic view of the garage. It had been a natural cave in the mountainside, enlarged and smoothed over by Moonbase construction crews. Now it served as a shelter for the tractors that worked out on the surface, a storage area, even a playing arena for the annual low-gee basketball matches. It also served as a buffer between the corridors that housed the living and working areas and the airless lunar surface, outside.

Doug leaned back in his swivel chair and stared at the main airlock. Big enough to let tractors through, its heavy metal surface was dulled and scratched from years of constant use. On the other side of the airlock was the open crater floor. On the opposite side of the garage were the smaller airlocks that led to the individual corridors of Moonbase.

A buffer zone.

“Phone!” Doug called out. “Find Jinny Anson, Professor Cardenas, Lev Brudnoy and Leroy Gordette. Urgent priority. Tell them to report to my office immediately.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 1 HOUR 57 MINUTES

“But it’s crazy,” Anson snapped.

Doug sat straight up in his chair and stared across his desk into her steel-gray eyes. “Jinny, a very smart man once said, “Just because an idea is crazy doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s right, either.”

“Do you have something better in mind?”

“If we’re going to do anything,” Brudnoy said, “it should be done out on the crater floor, as far away from us as possible.”

“What can we do out there, Lev?”

The Russian thought a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

Doug looked at Cardenas for support, but she merely sat silently in the sling chair in front of his desk, looking thoughtful. I’m putting a lot on her shoulders, he thought. She doesn’t want to commit herself, one way or the other.

He turned to Gordette, sitting off to the side of his desk, slightly separated from the others. “Bam, you’re the only one here with any military experience. What do you think?”

Gordette’s dark face looked utterly serious. “What do I think? I think you’re blowing smoke. All of you. There’s no way in hell you can keep those Peacekeeper troops out of here.”

Doug broke into a grin, his automatic reaction to a challenge. “We’ll see,” he said.

“You’re going to do it?” Anson asked.

“Yep,” said Doug. “We’ve got less than two hours and we’ve got to do something.”

“But it won’t work! It’ll backfire and—”

“Jinny,” Doug interrupted, “I understand that the four of you are against it. But like Lincoln said when his whole cabinet voted against the Emancipation Proclamation and he was the only one in favor: The ayes have it.”

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 32 MINUTES

In his cermet spacesuit Doug stood on the rock floor of the garage as the last of the tractors trundled through the open hatch of the main airlock.

“Only thirty-two minutes left,” Brudnoy said.

Doug had to turn his whole body to see his stepfather’s cardinal red spacesuit standing beside him.

“We’ll make it,” he said. “Cardenas is ready to start laying down the bugs.”

“For what it’s worth, commander, I wish you wouldn’t do this. It’s too risky.” Brudnoy’s voice sounded more morose than usual, in Doug’s earphones.

“I wish I didn’t have to do this,” Doug admitted, “but I can’t see what else gives us a chance to get the Peacekeepers off our backs.”

“It won’t work.”

“Come on, Lev! It’s worked for Mother Russia all through history.”

Brudnoy was silent for a moment, then he replied, “May I point out that Mother Russia had thousands of kilometers of territory to absorb the invader’s armies. We have—what? Ten thousand square meters?”

“Forty-three thousand and sixteen,” Doug answered promptly. “I checked it in the base plans.”

“I should have known you would.”

Encased in his bulky spacesuit, Captain Munasinghe had to squeeze through the hatch to get into the cockpit. His eyes widened with sudden terror as he looked past the two astronauts through the narrow forward window. The rugged, bare rock surface of the Moon was hurtling up to meet him.

He swallowed hard, not wanting to show the two astronauts that he was afraid.

Before he could speak, the pilot—in the left seat—told him, “We’re programmed to rotate in twelve minutes, so take a good look at the view while you’ve got the chance.”

Munasinghe would rather not. It looked as if they were going to crash and kill everyone aboard.

Forcing his voice to remain even, he asked, “Are you still receiving transmissions from Moonbase?”

“Yeah,” said the copilot. “They say all four of their landing pads are occupied and there’s no place for us to put down.”

“Is that believable?”

“Sure,” the pilot said. “Why the hell not?”

The astronauts were both civilians from the transport line that had provided the Clippership to the U.K. For a fat fee, of course. Munasinghe resented their informality with him. True military personnel would have been preferable. And properly respectful.

“Then how will you land?” Munasinghe asked.

“We’re coming down on a trajectory that’ll put us on their landing pad number three. At T minus fifteen we’ll start scanning the Alphonsus crater floor. If all of their pads really are occupied we’ll pick out a smooth area to set down.”

“You can do this in fifteen minutes’ time?” Munasinghe demanded.

The copilot chuckled. “Don’t you fret none. We can do it in fifteen seconds if we have to.”

“Fifteen seconds!” Munasinghe’s knees went weak at the thought.

The pilot explained, “What he means is, we can hover over the crater floor and pick out our landing site, then jink over to it and sit her down. Nothing to it.”

“Piece of cake,” said the copilot.

“Ten minutes to rotation,” said a synthesized voice from the speaker overhead.

“Enjoy the view while you can,” the pilot said to Munasinghe.

“I must get my troops ready,” he replied. He thought he heard the astronauts laughing at him as he closed the cockpit hatch behind him.

Edith Elgin felt as if she’d been swallowed by some weird creature made of plastic and metal. The spacesuit helmet smelled kind of like a new car, and she could hear the tiny buzz of air fans from inside the suit, as if there were some gnats droning in there with her.

She had been relieved when Munasinghe’s order for everyone to suit up had finally interrupted Killifer’s nonstop monologue of hate. With a smirking grin, Killifer had offered to help Edith get into her spacesuit, but she declined as politely as she could manage, unwilling to give the man a chance to play grab-ass with her. Instead, Edith asked two of the women troopers to help her worm into the spacesuit and check out all the seals and connections.

Killifer did not suit up, she saw. He was going to remain aboard the Clippership with the two astronauts in the cockpit.

Looking through the open visor of her helmet, she saw what appeared to be a collection of fat, bulbous snow monsters, all in white, with human faces peeping out at their tops. Funny, she thought: all the times I’ve been to space stations I’ve never had to get into a spacesuit. Good thing, too. I must look like a roly-poly eskimo in this outfit.

She knew from her Earthside briefings that the backpack she now wore massed fifty-two kilos. One hundred and fourteen point four pounds. In zero gravity it weighed nothing, but Edith was surprised at how difficult it was to move, once the backpack was loaded onto her.

She saw that she was one of the last people still hovering weightlessly in the cabin’s central aisle. Most of the troopers were back in their seats, spacesuits and backpacks and all. And weapons. Each trooper carried a rifle and a bandolier of various types of grenades strung around their shoulders. One of the women had explained the different types: concussion, fragmentation, smoke, and—what was the other one?

Oh, yes: flare. It made a brilliant light that blinded people temporarily.

Slowly, feeling as if she were pregnant with an elephant, Edith pushed herself back into her seat. The backpack forced her to sit on the front few centimeters of the chair.

Munasinghe came through the hatch up forward, from the cockpit. He looked at the watch set into the left cuff of his suit.

“Touchdown in twenty-three minutes,” he announced.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 15 MINUTES

“All buttoned up,” said the chief of the monitoring crew.

Standing behind him, Doug turned his glance from the chief’s set of display screens to the giant electronic wall schematic of the entire base. Every system was functioning within normal limits, every section of the base was secure, almost all the personnel were in their quarters instead of at work, every airtight hatch along each corridor was closed, all the airlocks sealed shut.

Except the main airlock in the now-empty garage.

“They’ve rotated,” said the controller’s voice, from the rocket port. “Coming down the pipe.”

Doug stared at the radar plot that was displayed on the chief’s center screen. Eight smaller screens were arrayed around it, like the compound eye of some strange electronic insect. Each showed a different view.

Leaning over the seated chief’s shoulder, Doug said as calmly as he could, “I want to talk to the controller, please.”

Wordlessly, the chief touched a keypad on the board of his console and the controller’s face suddenly appeared in the upper leftmost of his set of display screens, replacing a view of the crater floor outside.

“I want you to get out of there as soon as they touch down,” Doug reminded the controller. “Shut down all your equipment and get back here as fast as you can.”

“Don’t worry, boss,” she said, with a nervous grin, “I’m not gonna hang out here until they barge in, believe it.”

The rocket port was more than a kilometer away from the base proper. Its underground chambers were connected to the base by a long, straight tunnel. The plan was for the lone controller to drive the old tractor that was used as a taxi to the base, after shutting down all her systems and sealing the two airlocks that opened onto the crater floor. Once she was safely through the airtight hatch at the Moonbase end of the tunnel, the technicians in the control center would pump the air out of the rocket port facility and the connecting tunnel.

“There they are,” said the chief, pointing to a screen on the upper right corner of his complex.

Doug saw a speck of light against the darkness of space, a glint of sunshine reflecting off the curved diamond surface of the Clippership. That ship was built here at Moonbase, he realized. It’s returning home.

Swiftly the glimmer took shape. Doug could see the spacecraft was coming down tail-first.

“Still heading for pad three,” the controller’s voice said, a hint of nervous excitement in her normally laconic tone.

Doug glanced at the screen that showed pad three. A pair of empty tractors sat on it. No way a ship could land there.

“Hovering.”

The spacecraft’s rocket exhaust glittered bright and hot. The ship hung in emptiness, as if thinking over the whole business.

Translating.”

It moved sideways in a quick series of jerky little bursts. Then it slowly descended on tongues of silent flame, blowing a fair-sized blizzard of dust and grit from the crater floor as it settled.

“Show me the map of their landing site,” Doug said to the chief monitor.

“Checking the coordinates… there you are.”

The geological map of the area where the spacecraft was landing came up on the chief’s center screen. It was half a kilometer from the quartet of landing pads. A sinuous rille ran off to the left, like a dry stream bed. The ground looked strong enough to hold the spacecraft’s weight; no problem there. A few minor craterlets scattered around the area, and the ubiquitous rocks strewn across the ground.

“They’re down,” came the controller’s voice. “I’m splitting.”

“Right,” said the chief into his lip mike. “Give me a positive call when you close the tunnel airlock behind you”

“Will do.”

Doug took a deep breath. Okay, he said to himself. They’re down. They’re here. Now the fight starts.

TOUCHDOWN

The descent was so smooth that Captain Munasinghe could not tell the precise instant when the ship’s landing pads actually touched the ground. He realized that he could feel weight again; after nearly five days in zero gravity it felt almost odd.

As he slowly got up from his seat, awkward in the cumbersome spacesuit, he realized that it was odd. He felt weight, yes, but it was very slight. Almost negligible.

The moon’s gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth, he reminded himself. That is why our boots are studded with weights, to keep us from jumping and stumbling when we try to walk.

“Good luck,” Killifer said, still sitting in his chair. Munasinghe barely heard his words, muffled by the spacesuit helmet. He nodded at Killifer, who had a strange, tight smile on his face. Was he pleased that the troops were going out to take Moonbase? Or pleased that he didn’t have to go with them? Probably both, Munasinghe thought.

Sergeants barked commands and his platoon got to their feet and lined up in the central aisle. The newswoman got up too, and stood beside Munasinghe. He glanced at her. She seemed calm enough.

“You must stay by me at all times,” Munasinghe reminded her.

“You bet I will,” Edith promised. No smile. No glamour now, inside the spacesuit. She was entirely serious.

His two lieutenants stood at the head of the aisle and saluted. “The troops are ready for debarkation, sir,” said the senior of them, the Norwegian. The other was a short, squat, dour-faced mestizo woman from Peru.

“Visors down,” Munasinghe said, “Check the suits for leaks.”

“What’re they doing in there?” Jinny Anson demanded.

A small cluster of people had gathered around Doug and the chief controller: Anson, Lev Brudnoy, Professor Cardenas, even Zimmerman had come out of his lair and found his way to the control center. Doug also saw Gordette hanging on the fringe of the little crowd, watching everything the way an eagle glares out at the world from its aerie.

The controller’s central screen showed a telescopic view of the Clippership standing out on the crater floor. The other screens showed interior views of the base: corridors, labs, workshops, the rocket port’s underground chambers, the garage—all empty, silent, still.

Brudnoy answered, “I doubt that many of those Peacekeepers have been in space before. They must be checking out their suits very carefully.”

They don’t seem very scared of us,” Doug muttered.

“Yeah,” Anson agreed. “They’re not worried we’re going to zap their ship.”

“Is anything happening?”

They all turned to see Joanna striding into the control center, looking radiant in a clinging metallic gold dress and silk scarf decorated with colorful butterflies.

Zimmerman grunted. He was wearing his usual baggy gray suit; the others were in coveralls or jeans and pullovers.

“You look as if you are going to a party,” Zimmerman grumbled.

Joanna gave him a frosty look. “If I’m going to be taken prisoner by Faure’s troops, I at least want to look presentable.”

Doug almost laughed.

“Hey!” Anson snapped. “Lookit! Both hatches are opening!”

Edith had covered enough military operations to know that all armies operated in the same way: hurry up and wait. Munasinghe’s platoon was in the hurry-up mode now.

“Go! Go!” she heard a sergeant’s grating yell in her helmet earphones.

The troopers were clumping into the twin airlocks down at the end of the passenger cabin. They could go through the airlocks only one at a time, no matter how loudly their sergeants screamed at them. They moved awkwardly in the spacesuits, and once through the outer airlock hatch they had to negotiate their way down the ladders that led to the ground. Not easy to do, encased in the cumbersome suits and carrying rifle, grenades and ammunition belts.

She and Munasinghe were at the end of the line, the last to go outside. Edith’s nose twitched at the metallic tang of the air she was now breathing. It was supposed to be the same mix of oxygen and nitrogen that the ship had been using for the past five days, but somehow it felt drier and colder. It made her nostrils feel raw.

She clumped down the aisle behind Munasinghe in her weighted boots, reaching up to check the minicam she had attached to her helmet. It would show whatever she looked at. If it worked right.

When at last the outer airlock hatch opened, Edith could see that it was brilliant daylight out there. Harsh unfiltered sunshine glared off the rocks and Alphonsus’s dusty floor. The Peacekeeper troops were spreading out across the pockmarked floor of the huge crater, moving slowly, cautiously toward the tractors that seemed to be scattered haphazardly across the ground. She noticed a partially-built Clippership sitting out there, too.

“They thought that they would prevent us from landing by placing their machines on the landing pads,” Munasinghe said, his voice sounding higher-pitched in her earphones than it had previously. “All they have done is to give us cover from any fire they might aim at us.”

Indeed, the farthest troopers had stopped at the parked tractors, huddling behind them as if expecting to be shot at.

“Your troops are afraid of being fired on?” Edith asked, flicking on the backup recorder at her waist. It was patched in to her suit radio’s circuitry.

“We are taking all the necessary precautions,” Munasinghe said. “There is no sense taking chances when we face an enemy of unknown capabilities.”

“But I thought there weren’t any weapons in Moonbase,” she prodded.

That is what our intelligence reports have indicated,” Munasinghe admitted. “But nevertheless, it is better to be cautious than surprised.”

“What on earth are they doing?” Brudnoy asked, genuine puzzlement in his voice.

Doug turned to Gordette and motioned the black man to his side.

“They’re acting as if they expect us to shoot at them, aren’t they?” Doug said, half-questioningly.

Gordette nodded solemnly. “They’re also setting up fields of fire so they can sweep the area if they have to.”

“Absolute nonsense,” Joanna huffed.

“They know we don’t even have spitballs to throw at ’em,” said Anson.

With a tight smile, Gordette replied, “They think you don’t have anything to throw at them. But they’re not taking any chances. Standard operating procedure.”

“Their guns can fire in vacuum?” Zimmerman asked.

“No problem. Cartridges’ powder is like a solid rocket propellant. They’ll fire in vacuum, all right.”

“And their impact velocity will be higher than on Earth,” Doug added, “because there’s no air resistance to slow down the bullet.”

“H’mph,” Zimmerman grumped.

“Well, are they gonna come in here or just stand outside and have a cookout?” Anson asked.

“They’ll be here,” Gordette said. “Don’t think they won’t be.”

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 23 MINUTES

Munasinghe saw that his troops were well positioned. Better still, there had been no sign of opposition from Moonbase. The base might just as well be abandoned and empty, for all the resistance they had offered so far.

Good, he thought. The troops had been most vulnerable when they were coming out of the spacecraft. If Moonbase could do us any real harm, that was the moment for it. Now we are on the ground, deployed well, and ready to advance.

He was standing behind a massive bulldozer, its heavy metal body a comforting shield between him and the unknown. The machine had been anodized a brilliant Day-Glo orange, but years of use had dulled its finish and spattered it with gray lunar dust. Munasinghe had been warned about the dust; it clung to everything and got into the hinges of spacesuits, it even clouded spacesuit visors, if you weren’t careful. But he estimated that they wouldn’t be out in the open long enough for the dust to be a problem.

Off to one side there was an enormous hole in the ground, a deliberate excavation. Some kind of a trap the Moonbasers were trying to build? he wondered. It looked empty, abandoned, whatever it was supposed to be. He decided it could be ignored—and avoided.

His two lieutanants crouched behind him, although they could only bend partway down in their suits. The newswoman had stayed at his elbow all the way from the spacecraft hatch to their present position.

“Very well,” he said into his helmet microphone, “our forward command post is established. Now we start the advance to their main airlock.”

Peering over the back of the bulldozer, he fumbled for the binoculars clipped to his equipment belt. Even the simplest tasks were troublesome in the bulky gloves. Finally he got the binoculars free, only to bump them jarringly against his visor when he tried to put them up to his eyes.

Hoping that neither his lieutenants nor the newswoman noticed his clumsiness, he held the binoculars steady while their rangefinder automatically focused the optics. Munasinghe made the fine adjustment with a gloved finger and…

The airlock hatch was open!

Munasinghe blinked and stared, not quite believing his eyes. The massive metal outer hatch had been swung open. And the inner hatch, as well. He could see the area inside, it was brightly lit. It looked entirely empty.

Of course, he thought. They took all their equipment out of the garage area to place it on the landing pads, hoping to prevent us from landing.

But why would they leave the airlock hatch open? That means the entire garage area must be in vacuum. Is this some sort of trap?

With the press of a thumb he activated the binoculars’ rangefinder. Its readout appeared in the lower left of his view in red alphanumerics: one point six-six kilometers.

Munasinghe put the binoculars down and studied the ground between him and the open airlock hatch. Not much cover in the area, only a few small rocks, not enough to shelter a man from enemy fire. But there was no other way to reach the main airlock.

The open hatch bothered Munasinghe.

He pressed the stud on his forearm that opened the comm channel back to the ship and asked for Killifer.

“Killifer here.”

“Can you see the main airlock?” Munasinghe asked.

“Yeah. I’m in the cockpit; I can see it on the panel display screen.”

“The hatch is open!”

“Yeah. It is.”

“What does this mean?” Munasinghe demanded.

“Damned if I know.”

“Is it a trap?”

Killifer’s voice sounded exasperated. “How the hell should I know? It sure ain’t normal operating procedure, I can tell you that much.”

Munasinghe thought over the situation for a few moments, wishing he had more information, more options, more time to make a decision. At last he turned to the Norwegian, obviously the taller of his two lieutenants, even in the impersonal spacesuits.

“Move your squad up to the airlock hatch,” Munasinghe commanded. “Second squad will cover you.”

The lieutenant hesitated only the slightest fraction of a second, then replied, “Yessir.”

It looked to Edith as if the airlock hatch was open. She hadn’t thought to bring binoculars with her, and she knew Munasinghe wouldn’t loan his even if she asked. It was a little hard to see in the glare of the lunar daylight, but she could make out the brightly-lit interior of the base against the dark rock face of the mountainside.

Some of the troops were moving up, hip-hopping in the low gravity when they tried to run, despite their weighted boots.

“Is the airlock open?” she asked Munasinghe.

No answer. He was probably on a different frequency, talking to his troops.

Edith thought it over for half a second, then moved away from Munasinghe, around the corner of the bulldozer, and headed across the crater floor, following the advancing troops to the airlock hatch.

It was open. She could see it clearly now. The first of the troopers had reached the open hatch and stopped, dodging around to its sides where they had some protection if anyone inside the big empty chamber tried to shoot at them.

“Where are you going?” she heard Munasinghe’s voice yelling in her earphones. “Stop! I command you to stop!”

Edith grinned and kept on going toward the open airlock hatch.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 38 MINUTES

The control center felt hot and stuffy to Doug. Everyone was watching the chief controller’s main screen, which showed the spacesuited Peacekeeper troops lumbering warily from the tractors scattered across the crater floor to the edge of the open main airlock.

“They won’t go in until their commanding officer comes up and looks around for himself,” said Gordette.

Doug licked his lips. “Are you ready?” he asked Kris Cardenas.

Sitting at one of the control center’s consoles, she nodded slowly.

“Okay then,” Doug told her. “Start the bugs.”

“This had better work,” Jinny Anson muttered.

“It’ll work,” Cardenas said as her fingers moved carefully across the console keyboard. But to Doug she sounded a trifle defensive, as if she weren’t entirely certain.

Brudnoy quipped, “If it doesn’t work we can always surrender.”

Joanna gave her husband a disapproving frown.

It was a big empty chamber carved into the mountain, Edith saw. Glareless strip lights ran across the rough rock ceiling. The floor was stained here and there; probably some sort of garage, she figured. But now it’s empty and all their vehicles are parked outside.

Not a soul in sight.

And painted on the floor in bright blood-red letters she saw:

She stared at the words, neatly stencilled on the smooth rock floor.

Munasinghe’s angry voice grated in her earphones. “You were to stay behind me! You had no right to run up here on your own!”

Turning, she saw the captain galumphing awkwardly toward her. Edith grinned inside her helmet: the leader of the troop has to run hard to stay abreast of his troopers.

Ignoring his pique, Edith pointed to the lettering on the garage floor. “Look,” she said.

She could not see the captain’s face behind his gold-tinted visor, but she imagined his red-rimmed eyes bugging out.

“What does this mean?” Munasinghe was panting from the exertion of running.

“They don’t want us to go in.”

“Of course! But—nanomachines? What nanomachines? Where is the danger?”

His voice sounded frightened to Edith. Nanomachines had such a bad reputation virtually everywhere on Earth that the mere mention of them was enough to worry almost anyone.

The tall Norwegian, recognizable by the lieutenant’s insignia on his nametag, pointed a gloved finger.

“Look!” he said, his voice shaking slightly.

A big grease stain on the garage floor was noticeably shrinking.

And then the stencilled letters of the warning sign started to get ragged around the edges, as if something was chewing on them.

“My God,” Munasinghe breathed.

“They’re not going into the garage,” Brudnoy said. “Not yet,” Gordette replied. “Do you think they will?” Doug asked him.

Gordette nodded. “They’ll fuss around a bit, but they’re not going to be stopped by some paint and a few grease stains.”

“You don’t think so?”

“They’ll come in. And once they’re past the garage, we’ve got nothing to stop them.”

Munasinghe had to make a decision. Instead of a trap, this was starting to look like a ruse to him. Yes, nanomachines had killed people, he knew, but what danger could nanomachines pose to armed troops encased in spacesuits? This is nothing but a ruse, a desperate attempt to keep us from entering Moonbase.

Still, he switched from the suit-to-suit frequency to call Killifer, back at the ship.

“Nanobugs, huh,” Killifer said.

“Can they truly be dangerous to us?” Munasinghe demanded.

No answer for several heartbeats. Then, “Well, yeah, if they’re programmed to gobble organic molecules.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they’ve spread nanobugs across the garage floor to eat up oil stains and paint and stuff like that, the same bugs might be able to eat up the rubber and plastic materials in your spacesuits.”

“Nothing but the soles of our boots will touch the garage floor,” Munasinghe said.

“Uh-huh. And what’re the soles of your boots made of? Plastics, aren’t they? Organic molecules.”

“But there is a layer of metal mesh inside the plastic sole.”

“Sure. That mesh’ll look like a gang of wide-open doorways to the nanobugs. They’re the size of viruses, y’know.”

“They can rupture our suits, then?”

“Right. And then start chewing on the organic molecules of your bodies.”

Munasinghe shuddered involuntarily.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 51 MINUTES

“They’re not coming in!” said Jinny Anson, almost exultant.

“They’ll come in,” Gordette assured her. “Soon’s they work up the nerve.”

Doug agreed with him. Sooner or later they would try to get past the garage. He pulled up a wheeled chair and sat beside the chief tech.

“Have you figured out their suit frequency?”

“Yep. Wanna listen to ’em?”

“No. I want to talk to them. Patch me in.”

Munasinghe was in an agony of indecision. To come all this way, nearly half a million kilometers, and be stopped by what may be a clever trick—it was intolerable. Worse still, his superiors back at headquarters would never stand for it. Munasinghe saw himself broken, perhaps even cashiered from the Peacekeepers altogether and sent home to rot in shame the rest of his life.

On the other hand, nanomachines could kill. Wasn’t that why the U.N. banned them? Wasn’t that why they had been sent here to Moonbase in the first place, to stop these renegades from developing deadly nanomachines? How could he order his troopers into such danger?

Munasinghe had been in firefights. He had been shelled by rocket artillery and bombed by smart missiles. He was not a coward. But nanomachines! The thought made him shudder. Invisible, insidious. If they got inside his suit and started eating his flesh…

“What are your orders, sir?” the Norwegian lieutenant asked, his voice low and earnest. “We can’t stand out here forever,” he added, needlessly.

Suppressing a reflex to snap at his arrogant criticism, Munasinghe made up his mind. After all, he had sent men into battle before. Soldiers took risks, deadly risks. It was part of the profession.

“Take your squad through the open area to those airlock hatches on the far wall. Get those hatches open as quickly as you can. Don’t waste time; use the grenades.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” A strange voice sounded in Munasinghe’s earphones. From the way the lieutenant’s spacesuited form twitched, he must have heard it too.

“Who said that?” Munasinghe demanded.

“This is Douglas Stavenger, of Moonbase. The floor of our garage is covered with nanomachines that will devour the materials of your spacesuits. The airlock hatches are coated with them, too.”

“You are bluffing,” Munasinghe snapped.

“No, I’m not. We use the nanobugs routinely to clean up grease and oil stains that accumulate on the garage floor. You happened to pick a time when our semiannual cleanup is just starting.”

“I don’t believe you!” Munasinghe snapped.

“Don’t send your troops to their deaths. The nanomachines will destroy them before you can get our airlock hatches open.”

Hot boiling anger replaced Munasinghe’s indecision. Hatred welled up inside him. This smug upstart is trying to bluff me into ruining my career!

“Surrender your base!” he raged. “Now! You have fifteen seconds to surrender!”

More than ten seconds passed before the voice in his earphones said, “You’re sending your troops to their deaths needlessly. We have no quarrel with you. Return to Earth and leave us in peace.”

Practically quivering with fury, Munasinghe jabbed the Norwegian lieutenant’s shoulder with a gloved finger. “Get your squad moving! If you go fast enough the nanomachines won’t have a chance to harm you.”

“That’s not true,” Doug said.

“Go!” Munasinghe screamed. “That’s an order!”

The Norwegian scuttled away, gathered his squad, and started them into the garage. The warning sign was almost completely gone, Munasinghe saw; nothing left but a few streaks of red.

“You’re making a serious mistake,” Doug said in the captain’s earphones.

“No,” Munasinghe snapped. “You are. I will destroy Moonbase and everyone in it before I leave here.”

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 59 MINUTES

Edith was getting it all on her digital recorder and minicams. In addition to the camera fastened to the top of her helmet, which saw whatever she looked at, she held another in her gloved hands, almost forgotten in the excitement of the moment.

She watched, wide-eyed, as the squad of troopers thumped in their heavy boots and spacesuits across the wide expanse of the empty garage.

It would have been funny if it weren’t so scary. The Moonbase guy who spoke to them was Douglas Stavenger, the one who carried swarms of nanomachines inside his body. Was he telling the truth? Were the bugs on the garage floor capable of ruining spacesuits? Killing people?

She remembered that Stavenger’s father had died on the Moon a quarter-century ago, killed by runaway nanobugs.

This could get hairy, she thought.

Two troopers had outraced the others and reached one of the dulled metal hatches of the airlocks that led into the base proper. They rested their rifles against the wall and started to unpack the grenades they carried on their equipment vests.

“Look at your boots,” Doug Stavenger’s voice said, with just a touch of urgency in it. “Your boots are being digested by nanomachines.”

One of the troopers awkwardly lifted one foot and tried to bend over far enough in his spacesuit to see the sole. His buddy looked down, and dropped the set of grenades she’d been handling.

Edith heard a panicky jabbering in a language she didn’t understand.

“Speak English!” Munasinghe’s voice demanded.

“The boots… they’re coming apart!”

“My glove!”

The other troopers in the garage stopped in their tracks. For an idiotic moment, each of them tried to inspect his or her boots.

“The nanomachines!”

“They’ll kill us all!”

Stavenger’s voice came through again, strong and calm. “Get out of the garage. Ultraviolet light deactivates the nanobugs. Get out in the sunlight where the solar UV can save your lives.”

Munasinghe screamed, “No! No!”

“If you don’t get out now,” Stavenger’s voice urged, “the nanobugs will eat through your boots and start digesting your flesh. Once that begins there’s no way to stop them.”

“I order you to blow those hatches!” Munasinghe screeched.

Military discipline is often a fragile thing. For several seconds the troopers stood immobile, torn between the ingrained reflexes of their training and the hard-wired drive for self-protection. One trooper, in the middle of the garage, threw down his rifle and ran out into the sunshine.

That was all it took.

The entire squad bolted like green soldiers facing enemy fire for the first time. The troopers stomped and stumbled back across the garage floor, streamed past their raging captain, and flung themselves down on the dusty regolith, raising their legs high so the sunlight could get to the soles of their boots.

I’ll have you court-martialed for this!” Munasinghe raged. “Cowardice in the face of the enemy! You’ll be shot! Each and every one of you!”

“Why don’t you go in?” Stavenger’s voice asked calmly.

Edith turned to face the captain squarely, so that her helmet-mounted camera would capture this moment in its entirety. Munasinghe was shaking, visibly shaking even with the cumbersome spacesuit enveloping him. Whether he quaked with fear or fury, Edith could not tell.

I’ll show you!” Munasinghe screeched, fumbling on his equipment vest for one of his grenades. I’ll show you all!”

The Norwegian lieutenant, last to leave the garage, reached a hand toward him. “Captain, wait—”

Edith watched, wide-eyed, as the lieutenant tried to calm Munasinghe. But the captain struggled free of the taller man’s grasp and ran a staggering few steps to the entrance of the garage, the grenade in his gloved hand.

I’ll destroy you all!” Munasinghe screamed, tugging at the grenade’s firing pin.

“Don’t!” the lieutenant was saying. “You can’t reach the hatches from here. It’s too far—”

But Munasinghe stumbled on, into the garage, and tried to throw the grenade. Encumbered by his spacesuit and the clumsy gloves, his throw went only a few yards. The grenade bumped on the garage floor, rolled once, then exploded.

The lieutenant had thrown himself down on the ground, a curiously slow, dream-like fall. Edith involuntarily ducked behind the rock face at the side of the airlock hatch. She saw a flash but heard nothing.

She looked out into the garage again. Munasinghe was still standing, turning slowly to face her. The lieutenant was clambering to his feet.

Edith saw that the front of Munasinghe’s spacesuit was shredded. The man took a faltering step, then another, and pitched face-forward, slowly, slowly falling to the smooth rock floor of the garage.

The lieutenant did not hesitate for an instant. He raced into the garage, grabbed his captain’s inert form under the shoulders, and dragged him outside into the sunlight.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 1 HOUR 11 MINUTES

Edith hefted her minicam. I’ll have to know.”

“Hansen,” he said bleakly. “Lieutenant Frederik Hansen, from Kristiansand.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Lieutenant Hansen looked down at the body of Captain Munasinghe, lying stiffly in his torn spacesuit on the dusty lunar ground. “What a waste,” he muttered. “What a waste.”

Doug stared at the display screen. “He killed himself,” he whispered.

No one in the control center moved or said a word.

“He went crazy and killed himself,” Doug said, his voice still hollow with shock.

“He was trying to blow one of the hatches,” Joanna said.

“And fragged himself instead,” Anson added.

Doug shook his head. “I don’t know if he meant to, but he committed suicide.”

“That tall guy did a gutsy thing,” Gordette said, “dragging him out of the garage like that.”

“But I never meant for anybody to get killed,” Doug said.

“It’s not your fault,” said Joanna firmly. “The idiot went berserk.”

“He was trying to kill us,” Brudnoy pointed out.

“But I never meant for anybody to get killed,” Doug repeated.

The Norwegian lieutenant assumed command of the mission and sent a radio report Earthside.

“What happens now?” Edith asked him.

“We wait for orders from Peacekeeper headquarters,” said the Norwegian, his voice low but even.

“I didn’t get your name,” Edith said.

His spacesuited shoulders moved slightly in what might have been an attempt at a shrug. “What difference does that make?”

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 1 HOUR 24 MINUTES

“Mexican standoff,” Jinny Anson said. “They’re not coming in, but they’re not going away, either.”

“We can sit tight inside the base longer than they can stay out on the crater floor,” said Brudnoy, the slightest hint of optimism in his low voice.

“This won’t do us any good,” Joanna said. “We’ve got to get them to leave, go back to Earth.”

Still sitting on the wheeled chair, Doug turned it around to face them.

“They’re waiting for instructions from Earthside,” he said. “This might take some time.”

“How much oxygen can they be carrying with them?” Anson wondered.

Doug said, “They’ve suffered a casualty. That changes everything. We’ve got to give them an honorable way out, something that they can take back Earthside with them to show that their mission hasn’t been a complete failure.”

“Why bother?” Joanna scoffed.

“Because otherwise, even if this troop leaves, Faure will just send another force, bigger and better prepared. Or maybe he’ll drop a few missiles on the solar farm, just to get our attention.”

“They’ll be out for blood next time.” Gordette agreed.

“Like they weren’t this time?” Anson shot back.

“What do you suggest, Doug?” Kris Cardenas asked.

Doug took a deep breath. He had been thinking about this for more than four days now. The first part of his plan had been accomplished: the Peacekeeper troops had been kept out of Moonbase. But it had cost the life of their captain. That raised the risks for all of them.

“When I read about the Cuban Missile Crisis of Nineteen sixty-two, I saw that the American president was willing to make some concessions, as long as he achieved his major objective, getting the Soviet missiles out of Cuba.”

“Ancient history!” Anson complained. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

Doug looked up at her and refrained from quoting Santayana. He saw that Brudnoy understood.

“We should be willing to give up something that we can do without, if the Peacekeepers agree to leave,” Doug said.

“But what do we have that we can give up?” Cardenas asked. “We can’t give up the nanomachines, and that’s what Faure’s after, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Doug. “From what he told you, Mom, he wants Moonbase to continue using nanomachines—under Yamagata’s control.”

Joanna scowled with the memory. “That’s right. Faure may think he’s running the U.N., but Yamagata’s running him.”

Leaning back in the little wheeled chair far enough to make it squeak, Doug said, “So we need someone who can negotiate with Faure—and with Yamagata, behind Faure.”

“And who might that person be?” Brudnoy asked, needlessly.

Everyone in the little group turned to Joanna.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 1 HOUR 45 MINUTES

“We can’t stay out here forever.” Edith heard the Norwegian’s words in her helmet earphones. He sounded uptight, tense.

It had been nearly a half-hour since he’d sent his report Earthside. No orders had come up from Peacekeeper headquarters.

They were standing off to one side of the open airlock hatch, in the shadow of the mountain’s glassy-smooth flank. The troopers were spread around the crater floor, silent, waiting like obedient oxen, ashamed of their panicked flight from the garage. Edith wondered if they blamed themselves for Munasinghe’s death. Apparently the harsh sunlight bathing the crater floor actually did stop the nanomachines from damaging their suits further.

“If we had missile launchers with us we could blow those inside hatches from here,” Lieutenant Hansen said, “and then run through the garage and inside the base before the nanomachines could do any real damage.”

“But we don’t have missile launchers,” Edith said. “Do you?”

Edith could sense the Norwegian shaking his head inside his helmet. “Well, we can’t remain out here forever. We must do something.”

Then Edith heard Stavenger’s calm, almost pleasant voice again. “I’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge of your operation, please.”

For some seconds no one replied. Finally, “I am Lieutenant Hansen.”

“I want you to know,” Stavenger said,’that we regret very deeply the death of your captain.”

Hansen replied, That’s good of you.”

“We seem to have an awkward situation on our hands,” Stavenger said evenly. “I suggest we try to negotiate some way to solve it.”

“You could surrender to us,” Hansen suggested mildly.

But Stavenger merely responded, “That isn’t negotiating, sir. That is demanding.”

I’m awaiting orders from Peacekeeper headquarters.”

“I’m afraid those orders won’t reflect the actual situation here. The real question is, what can you accomplish? We don’t want you to have to retreat back Earthside with nothing at all to show for your mission.”

“Except a dead captain,” Hansen said.

For a long moment there was no response. Then Stavanger answered, “Yes, except for that.”

Hansen seemed to draw himself up straighter. “What do you suggest?”

Edith listened, fascinated, as Stavenger slowly, gently led Hansen to the possibilities of salvaging something from his captain’s failure to capture Moonbase.

He wants to get the Peacekeepers to go on back to Earth, Edith realized, before they do any real damage to Moonbase. He’s smooth, this Stavenger guy, Edith told herself.

For nearly an hour Stavenger talked with Lieutenant Hansen, soothingly, sanely, trying to move from confrontation to compromise.

Then a new thought struck Edith. If Stavenger’s successful, we’ll all pack up and go back to Earth. I’ll never see the inside of Moonbase! I’ll never get to interview any of their people. All I’ll have is a story about the Peacekeepers being humiliated, and the suits upstairs might not even want to run it!

The hell with that, she told herself. I’ve got to get inside the base. I’ve got to see this Stavenger guy and the other rebels.

But how?

There was only one way that she could think of. Hansen was still talking with Stavenger, the other lieutenant standing glumly by him, the rest of the troopers out on the crater floor, standing, sitting, pacing restlessly.

Slowly, without calling attention to herself, Edith sidled away from the Peacekeeper officers, toward the lip of the open airlock hatch. It was much bigger than anything she had expected to see at Moonbase, big enough to allow two tractors through, side by side.

They wouldn’t let me die from their nanobugs, Edith reassured herself. They didn’t want any of the troopers to get killed, after all. They’ll come and get me. If they don’t, I’ll just run back out here again.

If I have time, she added.

Okay, Edith asked herself. How big a risk are you willing to take for an exclusive interview with the Moonbase rebels?

She hesitated one moment more. Hansen and Stavenger were still talking: something about Mrs Brudnoy coming back Earthside with the Peacekeepers to negotiate face-to-face with Faure.

Edith took a deep breath of canned air, then started to run as hard as she could in the cumbersome spacesuit across the smooth rock floor of the Moonbase garage. The floor that still teemed with deadly nanobugs.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 2 HOURS 6 MINUTES

Doug tried to keep the tension out of his voice. It felt weird, trying to negotiate with someone you can’t see. Why did the lieutenant decide to stay off to one side of the hatch, where our outside cameras can’t pick him up? Is there a reason for that, or is it just a fluke?

His throat was getting dry from so much steady talking. Somebody handed him a tumbler of water and he sipped at it gratefully.

No one had left the control center. They were still gathered around him. Doug could feel the heat of their bodies, the sweat of their anxiety.

On the screens before him Doug saw the empty garage and a good swathe of the floor of the crater, where most of the Peacekeeper troops seemed to be milling about aimlessly. We should count them, he thought as he talked with Hansen, make certain they’re all accounted for.

“Mrs Brudnoy is willing to accompany you back Earthside,” he was saying as he reached for the keyboard and began typing. “She’s a member of the board of directors of Masterson Corporation, and its former chairperson. She could negotiate this problem directly with the secretary-general.”

On the screen to his right appeared his message: COUNT THE TROOPERS. MAKE SURE NONE ARE MISSING. THEY COULD BE TRYING TO FIND THE EMERGENCY AIRLOCKS.

Hansen was saying, “I will have to communicate with my superiors. I don’t have the authority to make such a decision.”

“Of course,” Doug said. Anything, so long as they don’t get the notion to cut the power lines from the solar farms, or damage the farms themselves.

The mercenary watched Doug’s performance with grudging respect. He just might pull it off, he told himself. He just might get the Peacekeepers to haul ass out of here and leave us alone.

The mercenary looked at the faces of the people gathered around Doug. Anxiety, plenty of it. But there was hope in their perspiration-sheened faces, too. And more than hope: admiration. Unadulterated admiration for this young man who was shouldering the burdens of leadership for them, and succeeding at it.

Deep within himself, the mercenary felt a tangled skein of conflicting emotions. He admired Doug Stavenger, too. But he knew that the more successful Doug was, the closer he was moving to death. If he really does drive the Peacekeepers off, then I’ll have to kill him, like it or not.

It was strange. For the first time in his life he approached an assassination reluctantly.

But then he realized that it was Stavenger himself who would force the issue. Like all prey, Stavenger was moving willingly toward his final moment. The mercenary wasn’t stalking him; Stavenger was coming to him, seeking death. If the kid would just let the Peacekeepers come in and take over I wouldn’t have to touch him, the mercenary told himself.

But no, he’s going to outsmart the Peacekeepers and make himself a hero. A dead hero.

“Hey, what’s that?”

Doug caught the flicker of movement in the upper right screen and jerked his attention away from his dialogue with Lieutenant Hansen.

A spacesuited figure was running into the garage. A kamikaze? Doug’s heart clutched in his chest. A suicide trooper clutching explosives to blow the hatch to one of the corridors?

“I’m Edie Elgin from Global Network News!” the figure shouted as she ran clumsily toward the hatch to corridor one. “I’m not a soldier, I’m a news reporter and you’ve got to let me in!”

“Get out of there!” Doug yelled. “The nanobugs will eat out your suit and kill you!”

“No!” Edith shouted back. “I’m a reporter and I want to talk with you people face-to-face!”

She reached the hatch and skidded to a stop.

“The nanobugs are already chewing on your boots,” Doug said. “Get back outside while you still have a chance!”

“No! You come and let me inside the base.”

“Flathead,” Jinny Anson growled.

“It’s a trick,” said Joanna.

“But she’ll die!” Brudnoy said.

“Let her! It’s her own damned fault.”

Doug stared at the display screen showing the spacesuited figure standing defiantly at the hatch. If she were nervous or frightened it didn’t show through the suit. She just stood there, arms folded across her chest.

“Jesus Christ,” someone muttered.

Kris Cardenas leaned over Doug’s shoulder. “The bugs will work their way through her boots in a couple of minutes, Doug.”

“You can’t let her kill herself.”

“Why not?” Anson snapped.

“Bad publicity,” Joanna answered.

While they argued above his head, Doug flicked to the Peacekeepers’ suit-to-suit frequency. Hansen and several others were bellowing to the reporter to get back into the sunlight before the nanobugs killed her. She did not reply to them. Probably not even tuned in to the suit-to-suit freak, Doug thought.

He looked up at Brudnoy. “Lev, get a team of people down to that airlock. Bring a UV lamp to deactivate the bugs.”

Brudnoy nodded once and started off.

Doug called after him, “Do not let any part of her suit inside the base! Understand? Her suit stays in the airlock chamber until we can make absolutely certain it’s been fully decontaminated.”

Zimmerman lumbered off, too.

“Where are you going, Professor?” Doug asked.

“To meet this foolish woman, where else?”

Doug turned back to the display screens on the console. Hansen and the others were still jabbering on their suit-to-suit frequency.

“Lieutenant Hansen!” Doug broke in. “Lieutenant, this is Douglas Stavenger.”

“She’s going to kill herself,” Hansen said grimly.

“We’re going to take her inside,” Doug said. “Don’t try to take advantage of the situation.”

“I assure you,” Hansen said,’that this insanity is entirely her own doing. I want no part of it.”

“Fine,” said Doug. Yet in his mind’s eye he saw this as a ploy by the Peacekeeper lieutenant. Get us to open the hatch to save the life of a nutty reporter and they rush a squad of troopers to get to the hatch before we can close it again.

“Just to be on the safe side,” Doug said, “I would appreciate it if you and your troopers began filing back toward your Clippership.”

“You don’t trust me?” Hansen’s voice sounded surprised.

“It’s easier to trust,” said Doug, “when I can see that you’re not going to rush that hatch.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you’ll bear the responsibility for the reporter’s death.”

That was a stretch, Doug knew. We can’t let a reporter die, he told himself. Bad enough their captain killed himself. Everybody on Earth would be turned totally against us. Reporter killed by Moonbase nanobugs. They’d nuke us and feel justified about it.

“I will order my troopers to stand clear of your airlock,” Hansen said. “That will have to do.”

Nodding wearily, Doug said, “Okay. I can accept that.”

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 2 HOURS 11 MINUTES

Lev Brudnoy tapped Gordette’s shoulder as he started out of the control center.

I’ll need your help,” he said to the black man.

Gordette looked startled, but quickly recovered and followed Brudnoy as the old ex-cosmonaut hurried along the corridor toward the cross-tunnel that led to corridor one.

Brudnoy stopped at one of the wall phones only long enough to call security and ask for an emergency team with a pair of UV lamps to meet them at airlock one.

“Why two lamps?” Gordette asked as they started trotting down the corridor toward the airlock.

“In case one fails,” Brudnoy said, puffing.

“Redundancy.” Gordette understood. An astronaut’s way of thinking.

The emergency team was not there yet when they got to the end of the corridor. Brudnoy muttered under his breath in Russian.

“Here they come,” Gordette said, pointing up the corridor.

With a tight glance, Brudnoy reached out his long fingers and touched the MANUAL OVERRIDE stud on the airlock control panel set into the wall.

“Tell Doug that I am cycling the airlock manually,” he said to Gordette as he pressed the stud that opened the outer hatch.

Gordette picked up the wall phone and spoke into it with a hushed urgency. “He’s telling her to step inside the airlock,” he said to Brudnoy.

The emergency team came up. Its leader, a roundish dark-haired woman, was panting.

“We were in The Cave with everybody else when the call came through. Hadda run all the way down to the storage lockers to find a second ultraviolet lamp. Why the hell do you need two?”

Brudnoy ignored her. “Is she inside?” he asked Gordette.

“Yeah, you can close the outer hatch now.”

Edith never doubted for a moment that they would let her inside. Stavenger sounded too level-headed, too organized to do something stupid.

“We’re going to open the outer hatch,” his voice said in her helmet earphones. “Get inside quickly, because we’ll need to shut it before any of your Peacekeeper buddies can make a charge for it.”

The hatch slid open before she could reply. She stepped into what looked like an empty telephone booth with walls of smooth blank metal, lit by a single lamp set into the metal ceiling.

Soundlessly, the hatch slid shut again.

Nothing happened. It was like being in a spacious metal coffin. Room enough for two; maybe three, if you really squeezed it.

Edith heard a throbbing sound. She didn’t really hear it so much as feel it through the soles of her boots. I wonder if the nanobugs really are chewing up my boots, or is the whole thing just an elaborate trick?

She could really hear a pump chugging away now, and the hiss of air.

“In a minute or so the inner hatch will open,” Stavenger’s voice told her. “Don’t move. Do not step through the hatch. Understand me? Do not step through.”

“I understand,” Edith said. He sure sounds uptight all of a sudden.

“Good,” Stavenger said. “One or two men will come into the airlock with you and help you out of your suit. Do exactly what they tell you.”

“Okay, sure.”

“We’re risking the safety of this entire base and everybody in it,” Stavenger said. “If the nanobugs infesting your suit get inside we’ll all be dead.”

Edith blinked with surprise. He really means it! He’s putting the whole base in jeopardy to save my neck.

The hissing and chugging noises stopped, and for a long moment she stood alone and still in the metal sarcophagus.

Then the inner door slid open and a lanky, grave faced old man with a ratty gray beard stepped inside. Behind him was a shorter Afro-American, solidly built. He looked somber, too.

“Welcome to Moonbase,” said the old man, breaking into a boyish smile. “It is my pleasant duty to help you take off your clothes.”

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 3 HOURS 25 MINUTES

Wilhelm Zimmerman scowled at the woman. She was pretty, in an All-American, blonde, coltish way. And completely stupid.

“You came this close to killing yourself,” he growled at Edith, holding his thumb and forefinger a bare millimeter apart.

Sitting on the examination table, wrapped in nothing but a thin sheet, Edith nodded somberly. “I didn’t realize I’d be putting the whole base at risk.”

“You think perhaps all this is a game?”

“Not hardly.”

Zimmerman locked his hands behind his back and stared at the readouts on the display screens lined above the exam table. Everything looked normal. The UV lamps had deactivated the nanomachines infesting her boots. None of them had penetrated to the inner soles. This woman was clean of nanobugs. Her boots and the rest of her spacesuit were in the nanolab, down in the old section of Moonbase. Zimmerman wanted to inspect those boots personally, to see how much damage the gobblers had done to them. He intended to play back the video of the reporter’s dash through the garage and establish a time-line to determine the rate at which the nanobugs ate through the plastic of the boots.

“When can I get my clothes back?” Edith asked, clutching the sheet under her chin.

Startled out of his thoughts, Zimmerman waved a pudgy hand in the air. “Now. They were not contaminated.”

With a shy smile, she asked, “Then where are they?” Zimmerman scowled again. “Am I your valet? How should I know where they are?”

Hansen had returned to the Clippership and spent a weary hour discussing the situation with his superiors. He started with his commanding officer at the Peacekeeper base in Corsica, then was bucked up to Peacekeeper headquarters in Ottawa and finally to the U.N. secretary-general, Georges Faure himself.

Patiently he explained how Captain Munasinghe had been killed. Faure listened, a strange little smile playing about his lips.

“The captain died in battle against the rebels, then.” Faure made it a statement, not a question.

“He killed himself accidentally,” Hansen corrected.

Faure’s expression hardened once he heard the lieutenant’s words. “No, no, no. He died in battle. How it happened is of little consequence. If the Moonbase rebels had not resisted, he would not have been killed.”

Hansen let the point pass. More than one soldier had become a hero after the fact, he knew.

“Tell me then,” Faure said, “what do you propose to do now?”

“Our only alternatives,” he reported, “are to return to Earth with our mission unfulfilled, or to destroy Moonbase’s electrical power equipment, which will force them to surrender within a few hours.”

Faure’s face, on the cockpit’s small screen, looked perfectly composed. Only the slightest tremble in his voice hinted at the seething rage boiling within him.

“And if you destroy the electrical equipment,” Faure asked, with exaggerated patience, “what happens to the people of Moonbase?”

Hansen said, “They will be forced to surrender.”

Three seconds passed. Faure asked, “Why will they be forced to surrender?”

“Because without electricity their air-recycling system will shut down and they will soon have no air to breathe.”

Another three seconds. “And once they surrender, do you have air for them to breathe? Do you have space aboard your ship to carry two thousand men and women back to Earth?” Faure’s voice rose to a snarl. “Or do you propose to let them all die, choking to death while you watch?”

Hansen stared back evenly at the secretary-general’s image. “I was merely stating what our options are, sir. I was not recommending a course of action.”

While waiting for Faure’s response, Hansen glanced at Killifer, who seemed grimly amused. “Friggin’ politicians want to have their cake and eat it too,” Killifer whispered. “And when they can’t, they blame it on you.”

“Attend to me, Lieutenant,” Faure snapped. “You were sent to Moonbase to take over its operation and remove its leaders from control. It now seems that you cannot accomplish that task.”

“Not without destroying the base, sir,” Hansen replied. “And killing everyone in it.”

Faure seemed to mull the situation over. “You say that Mrs Brudnoy is willing to accompany you back to Earth?”

“To negotiate directly with you, yes, sir.”

The secretary-general toyed with his moustache. Then he asked, “And this news reporter, this Edie Elgin, she is still in Moonbase?”

“Apparently she intends to stay there. She says she does not wish to return with us.”

Hansen thought he might be mistaken, it was hard to tell on this small screen, but Faure’s face seemed to be getting quite red. As if he might explode into fury at any instant.

But instead, the secretary-general said mildly, “Very well. Bring Mrs Brudnoy back with you. Leave the news reporter. The mission is a failure, Lieutenant. A complete and utter failure.”

Then he added, “Except, of course, for the martyrdom of Captain Munasinghe.”

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 4 HOURS 48 MINUTES

“At least we don’t have to pack anything,” Joanna said as she sat at her delicate curved writing desk of light walnut and booted up her personal computer.

“Are you sure?” Lev Brudnoy asked, from the doorway to their bedroom.

“Of course,” she answered, without even glancing up at him. “We’ll go to the house in Savannah. My God, I’ll be able to go shopping again!”

Brudnoy ambled into the living room and sat on one of the little Sheraton sofas. “Are you sure we’ll get to Savannah?”

Joanna looked up from her computer. “What do you mean?”

“We’re being carried Earthside on a military transport. It will land at the Peacekeeper base in Corsica. Has it occurred to you that we might be held there, incommunicado?”

“Incom- what makes you think Faure would do that?”

Brudnoy shrugged. “It’s easier to negotiate with someone when you have him in prison.”

“Are you serious?”

“Very.”

“Lev, I’m not some nobody that Faure can hide from public view. I’m Joanna Brudnoy! There’d be an uproar if he tried anything like that.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’m just a worried old man. But,” Brudnoy ticked off on his fingers, “One: Faure has controlled the news media very effectively. Two: As far as everyone Earthside is concerned, you are at Moonbase. Faure isn’t telling anyone that you’re returning with the Peacekeepers. Three: You would make a very good hostage.”

“I’m sending word to Savannah right now,” Joanna said. “The board of directors will know that I’m coming back with the Peacekeepers.”

“Can you trust Rashid to inform the board?”

Joanna stared at her husband for a long, silent moment. Then she nodded. “I don’t think he’d have the guts to keep this information from the board, but just in case, I’ll send the word to each individual board member.”

“Good,” said Brudnoy.

“And the news media, too.”

Brudnoy gave her a sad smile. “Don’t expect a brass band when we arrive in Corsica. Or reporters, either.”

“You really are a reporter for Global News,” Doug said, feeling foolish even as the words left his lips.

“I really am,” said Edith Elgin, sitting in front of his desk.

She was back in the coveralls that the Peacekeepers had given her: sky blue with white trim. The color showed off her thick blonde hair very nicely, Doug thought. Her eyes were her best feature: big, lustrous, emerald-green eyes. Startling eyes. Eyes that made you want to believe whatever she told you. Long legs. She must be almost as tall as I am.

Edith was studying Doug, too. She saw an earnest-looking six-footer in his mid-twenties (which she knew from checking his bio before coming to the Moon). Olive skin, nice smile, dark hair, gray-blue eyes. Broad shoulders. His coveralls were a couple of shades darker than her own.

“I’m glad you decided to come into Moonbase,” Doug said, “although your presence here is a little awkward for us.”

“Awkward?”

He made a gesture with both hands. “You don’t have any clothes except what you’re wearing. And I’m not quite certain what to do with you, now that you’re here.”

“Do with me? I want to interview you and the others here. I want to beam your story back to the news media on Earth.”

“The media haven’t paid any attention to us,” Doug said. “They even ignored our declaration of independence.”

“Declaration…? You’ve declared independence?”

“Five days ago, when Faure told us he was sending Peacekeepers here to take over the base.”

“I didn’t hear a word about it!” Edith seemed genuinely shocked.

“You see what I mean?” he said. “The media have smothered us.”

“Well, they won’t now,” she said. “Not with Global News’ top personality on the scene.”

Doug almost laughed. She seemed serious, and not at all embarrassed at describing herself that way.

“There’s more to it, though,” he said, sobering at the thought.

“More? What?”

“Well…” he hesitated, then decided he might as well let her know. “You might be a spy.”

“A spy?” Edith’s emerald eyes went wide. Then she burst into full-throated laughter.

“You find that funny?” Doug asked, feeling a little disconcerted.

“Man, I’ve never kept a secret in my life! Some spy.”

Doug found himself grinning back at her. But he heard himself saying, “Look at it from my point of view. The Peacekeepers just happen to bring a news reporter along with them. Once it becomes obvious that they can’t muscle their way into Moonbase, this reporter talks her way into the base—”

“By risking her neck,” Edith pointed out.

“By depending on the good graces of the Moonbase people,” Doug countered.

“And now this reporter is in your midst, and she’s going to stay with you while the Peacekeepers are leaving.”

Doug nodded.

“That doesn’t make me a spy.”

“Probably not, but the thought has crossed my mind.”

Edith stared at him. He was pleasant and charming and very careful. He took his responsibilities seriously.

“For one thing,” Edith said, “how would I get information back to Earth, if I’m a spy?”

“In your news broadcasts.”

“Really?”

“In code, I guess.”

She could feel her brows knitting. “Are you serious or are you just pulling my leg?”

“I’m serious,” Doug said, “although I’ve got to admit that the more I think about it, the less likely it all seems.”

“Good. I’m not a spy.”

“I hope not.”

“In fact, I can do you some good. I can get your story out. The media can’t ignore me.”

Doug nodded and decided that, whether she was a spy or not, she might be useful at that. And it’s going to be fun showing her around Moonbase, he thought.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 8 HOURS 3 MINUTES

Georges Faure took Rashid’s call in his office atop the U.K. secretariat building because his comfortable, luxurious apartment was a wreck.

The secretary-general had spent long, agonized hours speaking with the timid lieutenant who had taken command of the Moonbase mission. Faure had felt his blood pressure rising, his innards burning with rage and frustration as the Peacekeeper officer reluctantly admitted his failure to capture the base.

Struggling to keep his temper under control, Faure had left his office and had his chauffeur drive him the three blocks through Manhattan’s noise and filth to his penthouse apartment on the East River. He had given the driver the rest of the evening off, smiled his usual condescending smile at the heavily armed doorman, and gone straight to the private elevator that rose directly to his penthouse apartment.

Once safely inside, with the door locked and the phone’s answering machine on, Faure took off his pearl gray homburg and flung it across the room. He stripped off his suit jacket and slammed it to the carpet, then stamped on it. He grabbed the vase by the doorway and smashed it against the wall. He went through the apartment like a one-man band of vandals, smashing, tearing, breaking everything he could lay his hands on.

He spoke not a word, made no sound except for the gasping of his labored breath. Paintings came down from the walls and were torn to shreds. Chairs were overturned, kicked, pummelled. The coffee table was splintered, the bedclothes ripped.

Only his clothes closets were spared his ravages. And the bathroom. When at last he was too weak to continue, sweating and gasping for breath, Faure tore off his sodden clothes, showered, then slowly dressed in an immaculate suit of dove gray. Dressing always soothed him. He found his homburg in the litter of the living room, picked it up, dusted it off, and set it carefully on his head. Feeling almost relaxed, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and asked the concierge to call another limo for him. He had a dinner engagement with six delegates from Latin America.

“By the way,” he told the concierge, “please send a team of people to clean up my apartment. It has been wrecked.”

And he left the astounded young man sitting at his little desk in the marble-floored lobby, open-mouthed.

After dinner, he went to the secretariat building instead of the apartment. He would sleep in the suite adjoining his office, and give the cleaning team the whole night to put his apartment back in order.

A telephone message from Ibrahim al-Rashid, chairman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation, awaited him. Faure toyed with the idea of waiting until the morning to return Rashid’s call. Then he decided not to; I will interrupt his evening, instead.

Now he looked across his office at the image of Rashid’s somber, darkly bearded face on the flat screen wall display. It certainly looked as if Rashid were in a house or apartment, not an office. Faure smiled inwardly, pleased with himself.

“I am sure that I don’t have to remind you,” Rashid was saying,’that Mrs Brudnoy is not only a leading citizen of the United States, but a very important member of the board of directors of Masterson Aerospace Corporation.”

“If you do not have to remind me,” Faure said testily, “then why are you reminding me?”

“Believe me,” Rashid replied, “I don’t enjoy this any more than you do. But it is my duty to make certain you understand that Mrs Brudnoy is be treated with every respect.”

Faure felt his blood pressure rising again. He opened his right-hand desk drawer slightly and reached for the weighted silver balls that he kept there. They were supposed to help calm him. Fondling them in his hand, he felt no relief from the frustrated anger building inside him all over again.

“I assure you, Monsieur Rashid, that Madame Brudnoy is not being brought back to Earth as a prisoner. She will be brought to New York to discuss the Moonbase situation with me, personally. She will be accorded every courtesy.”

Rashid nodded once, barely. His eyes looked bleak. “My board of directors has instructed me to tell you that we expect Mrs Brudnoy to have full freedom of movement and association. She will want to go to her home in Savannah, of course—”

“Of course,” said Faure, trying to smile.

“And she will not want to have Peacekeeper or United Nations personnel escorting her.”

Faure did not reply.

“Mrs Brudnoy is quite capable of getting herself to New York for her meeting with you. She is in no way a prisoner or a hostage.”

Studying Rashid’s face as the man spoke, Faure realized that the chairman of Masterson Corporation’s board was no more pleased with this situation than he was.

“Monsieur Rashid,” Faure said, relaxing slightly as he jiggled the silver spheres in his right hand, “let us be candid with one another.”

“By all means.”

“Madame Brudnoy represents the illegal and immoral rebels of Moonbase who are defying international law. A Peacekeeper officer has been killed by them, you know.”

“I was told he was killed in an accident he himself caused,” Rashid replied warily.

“I am sure that is what you were told,” said Faure. “However, the inescapable fact is that he was killed because Moonbase is resisting international law.”

Rashid nodded gravely.

Faure resumed, “I am perfectly willing to treat Madame Brudnoy as an ambassador plenipotentiary, and accord her diplomatic immunity.”

“Good,” said Rashid, tonelessly.

“But technically, she is a criminal. Just as all the leaders of Moonbase are.”

Rashid hesitated, passed a hand across his neatly trimmed beard. Then he asked, “If that is your attitude, then to what avail are the negotiations going to be?”

“None,” Faure said, feeling cheerful for the first time since Lieutenant Hansen had reported the failure of the Peacekeepers’ mission. “None whatsoever.”

“I see,” said Rashid slowly. It seemed to Faure that he did not look displeased at all.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 12 HOURS 26 MINUTES

In the old days, when he’d been just a teenager, Doug had liked to come out to the rocket port and watch the ships arriving or departing in the eerie silence of the Moon. He would climb up the narrow ladder to the observation bubble, a tiny dome of clear plastic, and get a worm’s eye view of landings and liftoffs.

The old rocket port was a set of storage chambers now. The new port was not much bigger, and had been dug into the floor of Alphonsus more than a kilometer from the flank of Mount Yeager, where the main plaza was going to be built.

Doug drove on the spring-wheeled crawler down the long tunnel to the port, his mother and Lev Brudnoy seated behind him, the reporter at his side.

“Does the head of the base work as a taxi driver very often?” Edith asked, grinning at him.

The tunnel was long and straight and bare. Strips of fluorescent lamps lined its unfinished rock ceiling, their light making everyone’s skin look sickly, almost green.

“I’m not the head of the base anymore,” Doug answered lightly. “And around Moonbase, everybody pitches in and does what needs doing.”

“I thought you were Moonbase’s director,” Edith said, her grin replaced by a puzzled frown.

“I was, but I gave it up for the duration of this crisis.”

“Then what’s your title? How do I identify you for your interview?”

Doug lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Damned if I know. Titles don’t mean all that much around here.”

“Call him the chief administrator of Moonbase,” Joanna said, leaning forward slightly in her seat.

“Generalissimo,” Brudnoy joked.

Edith was serious. “Chief administrator. That sounds good. And who’s the director of the base? Or is there one now?”

“Jinny Anson,” Doug said. “You’ll want to interview her, too.”

“And my wife’s title is ambassador plenipotentiary,” Brudnoy said, “while my own title is luggage handler.”

Edith fingered the minicam in her lap. “I want to squeeze in an interview with you before you take off, Mrs Brudnoy.”

“It’ll have to be a quick one,” Doug said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Liftoff’s scheduled for twenty-six minutes from now.”

With a laugh, Edith said, “Twenty-six minutes is an eternity in video news, Doug.”

But she got down to business immediately and began questioning Joanna about what she hoped to accomplish in negotiations with Faure.

“It’s very simple,” Joanna said. “I’m going to New York to get the U.N. to recognize Moonbase’s independence.”

“And if they refuse to recognize it?” Edith prompted.

Joanna shook her head. “We are independent. Physically, we are self-sustaining. All we’re asking is for the United Nations to recognize reality.”

“And if they don’t?”

For a heartbeat, Joanna did not reply. Then she said, “Then we’ll have to prove to Faure and the rest of the U.N. that we won’t be intimidated.”

“Do you think the U.N. will send more Peacekeeper troops to try to take over Moonbase?”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Joanna said.

“But it will,” Doug added, realizing the truth of it as he spoke the words. “We’ve won the opening skirmish, but this war won’t be over for a long time.”

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 12 HOURS 52 MINUTES

Jack Killifer stood in the open hatch to the cockpit, trying not to sound as if he were pleading with the two pilots.

“You gotta let me ride up here with you,” he said. “On the jumpseat.”

The copilot’s eyes were fixed on the control panel’s gauges. He and the command pilot had lifted the Clippership from its landing spot on the regolith to one of Moonbase’s rocket port pads, where the spacecraft was being refueled for the flight back to Earth.

The command pilot looked up at Killifer. “We’re not supposed to take passengers up here. We got work to do.”

Killifer wheedled, “Come on, guys. You’re making a high-energy burn, aren’t you? Friggin’ flight’s only gonna take nineteen hours, right?”

“Why d’you want to ride up here, instead of in a nice comfy seat with the rest of the passengers?”

“You’re bringing two extra people along, right? Mr and Mrs Brudnoy, right?”

“That’s Lev Brudnoy, isn’t it?” asked the copilot, without taking his eyes off the control panel. “He used to be a cosmonaut back in the old days, didn’t he?”

It was Brudnoy’s wife that bothered Killifer. Joanna. She’ll recognize me, he knew. Haven’t seen her in damned near eight years, but she’ll recognize me if she sees me. Especially if we’re locked up in this sardine can for nineteen hours. She’ll see me. She’ll remember who I am.

“And you got the captain’s body, too,” Killifer said.

“He goes in the cargo bay.”

“Yeah, but you need two extra seats for the Brudnoys. Mine and the reporter’s. Makes it all come out even.”

The pilot glanced at his copilot, then looked up again at Killifer. “Okay, I guess it’ll be all right. Just don’t chatter at us while we’re taking off.”

“Okay!” said Killifer, a surge of gratitude gusting through him.

“Or re-entry,” said the copilot.

“Or landing,” the pilot added.

“Okay, okay.” Killifer laughed shakily. I can sit here for nineteen hours and never go out into the passenger compartment, he told himself. They got a relief tube here in the cockpit. I can go nineteen hours without taking a crap.

He had never acknowledged it before, but he was deeply afraid of Joanna Brudnoy. It was irrational, but he feared her. That realization made him feel shame. And a burning, relentless hate.

The mercenary lay slouched in his bunk and watched his wall screen display of the Peacekeeper ship taking off. He was startled by the suddenness of it. One instant the big Clippership was sitting out on the floor of the crater, sunlight glinting off its curved diamond body. The next, it was gone in a puff of hot exhaust gases and blown dust and pebbles. When the dust cleared the crater floor was empty. The ship was on its way.

Got to hand it to the kid, the mercenary thought. He faked them out and got them to turn tail. Peacekeeper troops ought to be tougher than that; letting the threat of nanobugs panic them.

He lifted his feet off the floor and wormed off his softboots, then swung his legs onto the bunk. Get some rest, he told himself. The next few days are going to be tough.

He considered his options. There was no way out of it, Doug Stavenger was going to die. The only questions were when and how. Can I do it without getting caught? Maybe make it look like an accident. Or will it be more effective if they all know that he’s been assassinated?

Even if they catch me at it, about all they’ll do is ship me back Earthside. Or will they? That Jinny Anson’s a pretty feisty broad. Would she have guts enough to execute me? Yeah, maybe so, if she’s pissed enough at my killing Stavenger.

Maybe I ought to get her first, he thought. But then he shook his head. No way. Knock off Stavenger first. He’s the key, especially with his mother back Earthside. Knock him off, and then afterward get Anson and anybody else you can reach.

So they kill me, he told himself. I’ve been running toward death all my life. I’ll take a lot of them with me.