Moonwar

THE HAGUE

“Telephone for you, Senator. The White House.”

Jill Meyers looked up from her computer screen. Despite the fact that she had not been a member of the U.S. Senate for nearly six years now, her private secretary still called her ‘Senator’.

“Who is it?” she asked warily.

“The President,” he replied, in his usual near-whisper.

Jill grinned at her oldest assistant, “I guess I can make time for the President.”

Almost instantly the face of an intense young man appeared on her desktop screen. “Justice Meyers? One moment, please, for the President.”

His image disappeared and the screen showed the seal of the President of the United States on a royal blue background. The American eagle held a sheaf of arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other: war or peace.

It took more than a moment for the President to come on, of course. The power trip. The President doesn’t get on the horn until she’s absolutely certain that the party she wants to talk to is already on the line. No flunkies.

Jill glanced up at her private secretary and realized with a pang that he’d been a fresh-faced kid just out of law school when he’d first come aboard as a senatorial aide. We’re all getting old, she thought, catching her own reflection in the phone screen. Her face was round and ordinary as a pie pan, she thought, with mousey brown hair as straight and limp as overcooked spaghetti. And still that scattering of freckles across her snub of a nose, like a tomboy version of Huck Finn.

“Jill,” said the President, “You’re looking very pensive today.”

The President looked elegant, as usual. Silver-gray hair swept back stylishly, bright blue eyes sparkling. Her latest facelift had tightened the sagging flesh beneath her chin and made her seem ten years younger.

“What can I do for you, Mrs President?” Jill asked, genuinely curious about the reason for this call. It had to be nearly 7.00 a.m. in Washington, early for her.

“It’s this request for extradition—”

“Oh. The Killifer business.”

“Yes. I don’t understand what you’ve got to do with it.”

“I’ve been asked to intercede, in my official capacity as a justice of the World Court.” Jill said.

“Asked? By whom?”

“Joanna Brudnoy.”

“I see.” The President’s tone went decidedly frosty.

“The Justice Department has apparently refused to extradite the man to Kiribati.”

“We have no treaty of extradition with that nation,” the President said.

“That’s why the World Court has been asked to intercede,” said Jill.

“I see.”

“Killifer was identified as the man who raped and murdered Tamara Bonai, yet the American government has refused to extradite him to Kiribati to stand trial. The victim was Kiribati’s head of state, for God’s sake.”

“That’s a very serious charge,” said the President.

“There’s an eye-witness.”

“Douglas Stavenger, I know. But he’s on the Moon and his so-called eye-witnessing was done through a virtual reality link. Any competent defense lawyer will make mincemeat of that.”

“I’m not so sure,” Jill said. In any event, I’d think you’d want the sonofabitch to be brought to justice.”

The President did not flinch at Jill’s deliberate profanity.

“Jill, this is all tied up with the Moonbase business.”

“Which means it’s all tied up with the New Morality people, right?”

“Those are my supporters, Jill.”

“And they’re protecting a murderer?”

The President’s face was a smooth, blank façade. She gave away nothing. “An alleged murderer,” she said coolly.

“I may not be a lawyer,” Jill countered, “but I do know a few points of law. You’re protecting Killifer. Why?”

“Jill, I thought you were one of my supporters, too. I know you don’t agree with everything the New Morality does, but you’ve always been on my side.”

“Why are you protecting this man?”

There’s much more here than you’re aware of, Jill.”

“Wait a minute,” Jill said. “I’ve served time at Moonbase. I was there with Paul Stavenger when it was nothing but a bunch of tin cans stuck in the ground.”

“You had an affair with Paul Stavenger,” the President murmured.

“Name me one woman who served at Moonbase in those days who didn’t,” Jill rejoined happily. “He was one helluva guy before he married Joanna.”

“Joanna,” the President said, with obvious distaste.

“If I were still in the Senate instead of stuck here in the World Court, I’d be fighting you on this Moonbase business. You’re making a bad mistake.”

With the ghost of a smile, the President said, “That’s the thanks I get for nominating you to the International Court of Justice?”

“Come off it, Luce.”

“You backed me on the nanotech treaty when you were in the Senate.”

“Because I didn’t want nanotechnology turned into a new arms race,” Jill said. “I never thought the treaty’d be used against Moonbase. They can’t exist without nanomachines and you know it.”

The President sighed. “So I suppose you’ll vote in favor of their independence if the question comes up before the World Court?”

“It’s on our docket for November. I’ve tried to get an emergency session to hear the matter, but I was voted down.”

“It doesn’t matter, Jill. By November the question will have been settled conclusively. In fact, it should be settled in about a week or so.”

“You’re going to do it, then? Attack Moonbase?”

“The United Nations is doing it, not me.”

“But you’re not raising a protest? If you hollered, Faure would have to listen.”

“I am not going to interfere with a U.N. operation,” said the President.

Jill fumed in silence for a moment, then grumbled, “Well, I hope you don’t expect to get re-elected.”

This time the President’s smile showed teeth. “The New Morality will re-elect me because I backed the enforcement of the nanotech treaty.”

“You think so?”

“All the polls show it conclusively.”

“So you’re not going to let Killifer be extradited?”

“Under no circumstances.”

“Damn! If I were Doug Stavenger I’d come down there and hang the man myself.”

“Vigilante justice? From a judge of the World Court?”

“Justice,” Jill snapped. “When your own government won’t give you justice, you’ve got the right to make your own move. Jefferson wrote that into the Declaration of Independence, remember?”

“But Jill dear, Stavenger and the rest of his Lunatics don’t regard us as their government anymore. Do they?”

Jill had no answer. Luce always was the better debater; she could score points off the devil himself whenever she chose to.

MOONBASE

Jinny Anson’s office was crowded. Doug sat at the foot of the table that butted against her desk, flanked by Zimmerman and Cardenas, the heads of Moonbase’s major departments, and the physicist Wicksen. There was no room at the little table for Edith, so she sat slightly behind Doug and to his right.

Bam Gordette sat alone on the couch by the door, separated from all the others by a meter of empty floor space and an uneasy distrust that was almost palpable. The others are treating Bam as if he’s a leper, Doug thought.

“You’re certain the Peacekeepers are gonna make their move so soon?” Jinny Anson was asking.

“We’ve got maybe a week, if we’re lucky,” Doug replied grimly. “What can we accomplish in that time?”

A gloomy silence filled the office. Even the normally perky Anson looked downcast.

“Wix?” Doug asked. “We need the beam gun up and working in a week.”

The physicist shook his head slowly, his big soulful eyes staring straight at Doug. “I told you it would take two lunar days… two months.”

“You’ve got seven Earth days,” Doug said. “Maybe less.”

Wicksen started to shake his head.

“Put every man you’ve got onto it,” urged Doug. “And every woman.”

“We’re already working flat out.”

“How close are you?”

The physicist shrugged uncomfortably, more like a writhing.

“The beam collimator is finished. The aiming circuitry is ready to be tested. Then we’ve got to bring the kloodges out to the mass driver and mate them. Then we need to test the complete system.”

“Kloodges?” Edith asked. “What are they?”

“Ramshackle collections of hardware,” Harry Clemens answered in his laconic twang before Wicksen could respond. “Clinking, clanking, caliginous collections of junk.”

“Oh.”

“Makeshift hardware,” Wicksen said, grimacing slightly at Clemens. “Slapped together quickly, without worrying about how it looks.”

“Kloodges,” Edith repeated.

Doug demanded, “Can you put it all together by the end of this week?”

“We have to test—”

“We don’t have time for testing!” Doug said sharply. “Get the hardware together, make it functional. You can test it after it’s completely assembled, if the Peacekeepers give us enough time.”

Wicksen’s big eyes widened even further. “You’d hang the survival of this base on untested equipment?”

“If it doesn’t work, we’re dead anyway,” Doug pointed out. “Right?”

The physicist thought it over for a moment, his big tarsier’s eyes staring at Doug. At last he admitted, “Right.”

“Wait a minute,” Anson said, from behind her desk. “Wix, will you have enough time to rig the control system so you can operate the beam gun from inside, here?”

“No. We’ll have to run it manually, out there at the mass driver.”

“In suits,” said Vince Falcone.

Wicksen nodded solemnly.

“With a nuclear warhead coming at you,” Falcone added.

Another grave nod.

Anson said, “So if the beam gun doesn’t work you and your people get fried by the nuke.”

“That’s right,” Wicksen said slowly. “We’ll be operating an untested apparatus, in the open, in surface suits, and if it doesn’t work the first time we’ll all be toast.”

All eyes turned to Doug.

“The alternative is to let the Peacekeepers nuke our solar farms,” he said. But he was thinking, I can’t force Wix and his people to go out there under the gun. I can’t order him to do it.

Wicksen smiled a strange, enigmatic smile. “Well… I can see that we’ll have to make the apparatus work the first time.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “I’d better get back to the workshop. We have a lot to do and not much time to do it.”

The others watched him walk out of the office and slide the door shut softly behind him.

Anson shook her head. “The Japs aren’t the only ones who’ve got kamikazes.”

Falcone, his swarthy face set in a scowl, said to Doug, “You’re gonna let him go out on a suicide job?”

“Do you see any alternatives?” Doug returned, forcing himself to sound much firmer than he felt.

Before Falcone could answer, Doug added, “Except surrender?”

“Okay, Wix has made his decision,” Anson said. “Let’s move on.”

Gratefully, Doug turned to Zimmerman. “Professor, what have you cooked up for us?”

“Nothing,” said Zimmerman flatly.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing that can be ready in a week.”

Doug turned to Cardenas. “Kris?”

“We’re ready to inject therapeutic nanomachines into anyone who’ll accept them. After your recent experience,” she glanced inadvertently at Gordette, “lots of people have come to realize that nanomachines can be extremely helpful to them, healthwise.”

“Good,” said Doug.

“But there’s a downside, too,” Cardenas added, raising a warning finger. “Most of the people here intend to return Earthside, sooner or later. They’re scared of trouble down there if they’re carrying nanomachines in them.”

Doug slumped back in his squeaking little plastic chair. “So what’s the bottom line, Kris?”

“Most of our people refuse to be injected. But we’re ready for emergency nanotherapy for people who’re hurt or wounded.”

The stupid fools, Doug thought. Then he realized his own fears of returning Earthside, where nanoluddite assassins waited. Like Killifer. Like the fanatics who murdered anyone who publicly espoused nanotechnology.

“Okay,” he said wearily. “I assume you’re working with the medical staff.”

Cardenas grinned. “All three of ’em.”

Neither Debbie Paine nor Harry Clemens had anything useful for Moonbase’s defense. By the time Doug reached Vince Falcone, though, the burly, swarthy engineer had a knowing glint in his eyes.

“I been thinking,” Falcone said.

“I thought I smelled wood burning,” quipped Clemens.

“They’ll be comin’ over Wodjo Pass, right?” Falcone asked rhetorically.

Doug looked over at Gordette, who nodded warily.

“Maybe we can block the pass,” said Falcone.

“Block it?”

“Sure. You know the foamgel we use for insulation and whatnot? Smart hydrogel is what it is. Expands or shrinks, depending on how you set it up.”

Doug remembered that foamgel had been used on his sabotaged spacesuit. He glanced over at Gordette again; Bam was staring at him with unwavering eyes.

Falcone was grinning now with self-satisfaction. “Suppose we spray a ton or so of the glop along Wodjo Pass, see? The Peacekeepers are coming across the pass in tractors, right? When they’re in the middle of the pass we radiate the gel with microwaves from the antennas on Mount Yeager.”

“And the gel swells up to a couple hundred times its original size!” Anson said eagerly.

“You got it,” said Falcone. “Their tractors are caught in the glop like flies in a spiderweb. Like trucks stuck in deep mud.”

“You can stop their tractors?” Doug asked. It was the first piece of good news he’d heard.

Still grinning, Falcone said, “I think so.”

“But couldn’t the troopers get out and walk across the foam?” Debbie Paine asked. “It hardens like concrete, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Falcone admitted.

Doug turned to Gordette. “Bam, what do you think?”

The room fell utterly, uncomfortably silent.

Gordette spoke up, “Even if they can get out and walk to the crater floor, they’d have to leave most of their heavy equipment behind, in the tractors.”

“Heavy equipment?” Clemens asked.

“Missile launchers,” said Gordette. “Artillery. Ammunition cases. They could only bring what the troopers could carry. That’s a big advantage to us.”

“Can you produce that much foamgel in a few days?” Doug asked.

Falcone scratched at his stubbly chin. “We got some in inventory already… I’ll get the chem lab to turn out as much as they can.”

“But will it be enough?”

“Dunno,” Falcone answered. Then he brightened. “Wait a minute,” he said, looking excited. “It could get even better.”

“What?”

“If we can divert enough power from the solar farms to the microwave antennas on Yeager—”

“Assuming Wix’s beam gun works and the farms aren’t nuked,” Anson interjected.

“Yeah, yeah,” Falcone said impatiently. “Anyway, gimme enough power for the microwave transmitters and we can fry the Peacekeeper troops while they’re still up in the pass.”

Doug felt his brows knitting. “What’re you saying, Vince?”

“The troops’ll be in suits, right? Lotsa metal in their suits. A microwave beam of sufficient strength’ll heat up the metal, even penetrate the suits and cook the guys inside!”

Anson nearly came up out of her chair. “You can wipe ’em out up there in the pass before they ever get near us!”

“No!” shouted Edith.

Surprised, Doug turned toward her.

“No, you can’t do that,” Edith said, her face set with determination.

“Whattaya mean we can’t?” Falcone snapped. “I haven’t gone through the numbers but I’m willing to bet—”

“You mustn’t kill any of them,” Edith said.

“Mustn’t kill…?”

“How can we fight ’em if we can’t kill ’em?”

Edith edged forward slightly in her seat. “The worst thing you can do, the absolute worst, is to kill any of the Peacekeepers.”

Doug realized what she was driving at. “Captain Munasinghe,” he muttered.

“Right. Faure tried to make a martyr out of him, tried to use him to work up public opinion against you.”

“But he killed himself,” Debbie Paine said. “It wasn’t our fault.”

“Okay,” said Edith. “Now imagine what happens if you cook a hundred Peacekeeper troops. Picture what the media Earthside will do with that.”

Silence descended on the office again, gloomier and deeper than before.

“We’ve been working for weeks now to present Moonbase’s side of this story to the media, the weak little guys being bullied by the big, bad U.N. and Peacekeepers,” Edith said. “And it’s starting to work. Public relations polls in the States and Europe show that the people are rooting for us and against the U.N.”

“With that and five bucks I can buy a cup of coffee,” Falcone grumbled.

“Your claim of independence is coming up before the World Court in a few months,” Edith went on. “You need to have the best possible public image.”

“And that means we can’t kill the soldiers attacking us?” Anson demanded.

“That’s exactly what it means,” said Edith heatedly. “Right now a lot of people Earthside are on your side. The underdog always get sympathy. But you start sending body bags back to Earth and your support will evaporate damned quick.”

“So we could win the battle and lose the war,” Doug said.

Nodding, Edith answered, “That’s what it comes down to. Kill Peacekeeper troops and you’ll just convince everybody Earthside that Faure is right. They’ll come at you with still more troops. Or missiles, or whatever it takes to wipe you out.”

“So we can’t kill the Peacekeepers,” Falcone muttered, unbelievingly.

“Then how do we keep them from taking over?” Anson wondered aloud.

Doug echoed her. “How can we win the battle without killing any of the enemy?”

“Damned good question,” Clemens murmured.

For long moments no one said a word. Finally Doug turned to Gordette.

“Bam, how can you stop soldiers without killing them?”

They all turned to Gordette, still sitting by the door. Doug saw the distrust, the outright repugnance on their faces; he wondered what Gordette saw, what he felt.

Gordette looked them over with a gaze that swept the small, crowded office. Then, turning to face Doug squarely, he said, “You’ll have to incapacitate them.”

“How?”

Gordette cocked his head to one side, thinking. “They’ll all be in spacesuits. They’ll be linked by their suit radios. Can you jam their communications?”

Doug said, “We ought to be able to do that.”

“If they can’t talk back and forth they’ll lose their cohesiveness. Instead of a battalion they’ll be a handful of individuals.”

“Like ants!” Paine exclaimed. “One ant by itself is pretty useless. But a whole nest of them can mount an invasion of another nest.”

“Cut off their communications,” Doug repeated.

“Not enough,” said Falcone. “You’ll still have few hundred soldiers armed with guns and whatnot. They can be directed by hand signals, for chrissakes.”

“Not if they are blind,” rumbled Zimmerman.

“What?”

“I have been stupid,” Zimmerman said, shaking his jowly head. “Invisible I cannot make you… but I can make them blind!”

“Blind them? How?”

“Simple,” said the professor. “Let them come into our tunnels. We fill the air with nanomachines that cling to their visors and darken them so they cannot see.”

Doug immediately asked, “Can the bugs cling to their suits, too? Jam up their joints, immobilize them?”

“Like the dust outside!” Anson said.

“Yah! Better than dust,” Zimmerman replied. “My nanos will turn them into statues!”

“But only once they’re inside the base, in the corridors,” Clemens said.

“Yah. The nanos must have air to float in.”

“So we can make them deaf, dumb and blind,” Falcone said.

“And immobile,” Cardenas added.

“Freeze ’em in their tracks,” said Anson.

“Can you produce these nanos in a week?” Doug asked.

For the first time since Doug had known the old man, Zimmerman’s fleshy face looked uncertain. “One week? Not possible! But I will try.”

Doug nodded, but he though that it was awfully risky to allow the Peacekeepers into the base in the hopes that Zimmerman’s nanobugs could neutralize them. Assuming Zimmerman could make the bugs and they worked as advertised. Even then, everything depended on Wix’s beam gun stopping the incoming nuke. And Falcone’s foamgel stopping the Peacekeepers’ heavy equipment up at Wodjohowitcz Pass.

One untested idea on top of another, Doug realized. And if any of the Peacekeepers gets killed, we’ve lost everything.

NIPPON ONE

Colonel Giap tried to suppress the distaste he felt for the Yamagata volunteer.

The man was Japanese, short and wiry, quite young. He had an air of superiority about him, an aura of other-worldliness, as if all of Giap’s responsibilities and worries did not matter at all.

The slow build-up of three hundred Peacekeeper troops -and these seven special volunteers—had strained Nippon One’s facilities to the breaking point. Never a large or comfortable base, its cramped little compartments were now jammed with the extra personnel. Four people were sleeping in cubicles designed for one. Peacekeeper troops even slept in the tunnels on thin foam mattresses or tatami mats.

Giap’s ‘office’ was a storage bin that had been half-emptied by the enormous drain on the base’s logistics. We had better move on Moonbase within the week, the colonel told himself. There will be no food left for us in eight days.

He looked directly into the dark brown eyes of the Yamagata volunteer and saw a placidity, an almost amused sense of superiority. This man is actually looking forward to his death, Giap realized. Then he wondered how much of his bravery of fanaticism came from narcotics. The Sacred Seven, as the suicide volunteers called themselves, lived by themselves, crammed into a single cubicle; they had brought their own food and drink. And so-called medicines.

Three Japanese, three Americans, and an Iranian made up the Sacred Seven. One of the Americans was a woman. All of them were either serenely other-worldly, as their leader was, or brittle and wired, with eyes that glittered with the burning intensity of fanaticism. All of them wore a shoulder patch that showed a fist clutching a bolt of lightning.

There was no space for a desk in the compartment. The two men sat on the floor, cross-legged, facing one another barely centimeters apart, Giap in his light blue uniform, the Japanese volunteer in a gym suit—with the shoulder patch. Above them rose stacks of half-empty shelving. Giap’s personal computer, hardly bigger than his fist, lay on the bare stone floor at his side.

“My orders,” Giap was saying, “are to capture Moonbase intact.”

“If possible,” the volunteer added.

Giap seethed inwardly at the man’s smug attitude. He knows what my orders are. Someone has been leaking the information to him.

“It will not only be possible,” Giap hissed, “but inevitable.”

“Assuming all goes according to your plan.”

“My plan is very thorough.”

“Of course,” said the volunteer airily. “However, should the assault fail, for any reason, my team will destroy Moonbase for you.”

“And destroy yourselves in the doing of it.”

“That is nothing. To give our lives in the service of God is the greatest good.”

Giap wondered whose god this man thought he was serving. These zealots all professed loyalty to the New Morality even though their individual religions must obviously be different from one another.

“I want you to understand that you are not to make any move whatsoever unless and until I order it,” Giap said.

The volunteer nodded benignly.

“You and your people are under my command. You will obey my orders.”

“Yes, of course. But you will assign a squad of your troops to help us open up the old plasma exhaust vents.”

It was not a question, Giap knew.

“Yes, as soon as we have secured the main garage area,” he replied.

“Good. Then we will climb into the vents and make our way to the key Moonbase facilities: the water factory, the environmental control center, the control center, the farm, and the nanolabs. I myself and one of the Americans will knock out the nanolabs.”

“Only if I order it,” Giap insisted.

“Of course,” said the volunteer, with his maddening patient smile. “We will need your troopers’ assistance to climb up into the vents, won’t we?”

Giap nodded slowly. The volunteers will each be carrying a hundred kilos of high explosive. Not an easy burden to shoulder in a spacesuit, he knew.

Suicide bombers. The idea rankled him. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command did not trust him to capture Moonbase. Someone in the Yamagata chain of command was working for the New Morality in addition to the corporation. Whoever it was had added these insane volunteers to make certain that Moonbase would be eliminated if it couldn’t be taken intact.

SAVANNAH

The two women were taking lunch on the patio, shaded by a pair of ancient oaks and cooled by a breeze generated from hidden fans built into the brick walls that edged the meticulously cultivated garden of show flowers.

Joanna Brudnoy wore a light sundress of rose pink; Jill Meyers a tailored blouse and knee-length skirt. They had known each other since Jill had been a NASA astronaut working with Paul Stavenger in the very earliest lunar shelters that eventually became Moonbase; long enough so that neither felt the need to try to impress the other.

“We’re in summer recess now,” Jill Meyers said.

“And how long will that last?” Joanna asked, glancing out at the two men working in the garden. One of them actually was a gardener, the other a security guard in disguise.

Jill gave her a freckle-nosed grin. “The International Court of Justice has its own calendar, Jo. Officially, it’ll stay summer until November, when we reconvene.”

“And that’s when you’ll hear Moonbase’s petition?”

Justice Meyers nodded.

“Isn’t there any way of hearing it sooner?” Joanna pleaded. “A special session, perhaps?”

“I tried, Jo,” said Jill. “I went all-out, but I got outvoted, ten to five.”

Joanna toyed absently with the salad in front of her. “Is that how they’ll vote in November, do you think?”

“No, not at all. They just didn’t want to go to the trouble of a special session, that’s all.” Before Joanna could comment, Jill added, “And they’re waiting to see if Moonbase can last until November. If Moonbase survives that long, it’ll be a strong indication that they really can be independent.”

Joanna let go of her fork and it clinked against the glass dish. “Faure’s going to attack them again any day now.”

Nodding, Jill agreed, “That’s what I hear, too.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“I talked with the President. She’s not going to lift a finger.”

“We’ve been putting as much pressure on our Senators as we can,” Joanna said. “But Moonbase is a private operation, not part of the government.”

“There’s not much they can do about it,” Jill said.

“But there must be something!”

“Wait,” Jill said gently. “Wait and pray.”

Joanna eyed her. “You sound like a New Morality convert.”

Jill took it with a smile. “You don’t have to be a New Morality fanatic to believe in the power of prayer, Jo.”

Several miles away, in the riverfront headquarters of Masterson Corporation, Jack Killifer sat tensely in one of the tight little stalls that passed for offices among the corporation’s personnel department employees.

“I’m taking an awful chance, Mr Killifer,” said the young woman sitting at the desk. She spoke in a near whisper; the padded partitions that marked off her tiny space did not extend all the way to the ceiling. Soft music purred from the hand-sized radio on her desk next to her computer monitor screen.

“Like I’m not?” Killifer snapped, low enough to avoid eavesdroppers, he hoped. His appearance had changed: his gray pony tail was gone; now his hair was dark and clipped short, military style. He had also grown a bushy moustache that he had darkened to match his hair.

“I found your personnel record,” she said, looking worried, “but, lord’s sake, it’s almost nine years old!”

“I don’t want my old record,” he almost snarled. “I want you to generate a new one.”

“But that would be a total fabrication.”

“So what?”

“What if my supervisor checks on it? What could I say?”

Killifer had thought it all out beforehand. “I won’t be around long enough for anybody to notice. A week, maybe less.”

“It’s an awful risk,” she repeated. “For both of us.”

“No risk at all for you,” Killifer said, getting fed up with her fears. “If anybody complains you just tell ’em I showed you documentation.”

“Documentation?”

Killifer pulled a thin sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket. They were not forged, since they were written by a bona fide personnel executive from the Urban Corps’ headquarters in Atlanta. The information in them, however, was completely false.

“Here, scan these into your records before you piss yourself.”

“Sir!”

Killifer sighed. These damned New Morality uptights. Can’t even spit without them getting wired over it.

“Forgive me,” he said.

“Forgiveness is the Lord’s work,” she chanted. Then she turned to her keyboard and activated the scanner.

Good, Killifer thought as he handed her the falsified personnel documents. By the time I walk out of here I’ll be on the payroll as a member of the Masterson security staff. If this uptight little broad doesn’t faint on me first.

MASS DRIVER

“Everything takes longer to do in these suits.” Wicksen’s voice was calm, not complaining, not making excuses; it was as if he were reading a report aloud.

Doug watched the men working at the end of the mass driver. While those who worked on the surface regularly had personalized their spacesuits one way or another, Wicksen’s physicists and technicians were in unmarked, anonymous suits straight off the standby racks.

At Doug’s insistence, a team of construction engineers was building a makeshift shelter for Wicksen’s people a few dozen meters from where they were busily putting together the equipment for the beam gun. Like one of the old tempos, the shelter was dug into the ground and would be covered with loose rubble from the regolith. Wicksen and his assistants could run the beam gun from there. Maybe the shelter would protect them from the radiation of a nuclear explosion, if the gun didn’t work.

“How’s it going?” Doug asked.

“Slowly,” said Wix. “But we’re making progress. We connected the beam collimator this morning. By tomorrow the aiming circuitry should be functional. Day after tomorrow, at the latest.”

“And then you’re ready to shoot?”

Wicksen’s flat, unruffled voice came through Doug’s helmet earphones, “Then we’ll be ready to see if anything really works. After testing the assembly we can power up the magnets and see if the circuitry can handle the load without shorting out.”

“But your calculations—”

“Mathematics doesn’t necessarily reflect the real world,” Wicksen said. “Physics is more than numbers in a computer.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I remember when I was a kid in high school, we had a volunteer teacher’s aide come in and help us in our science class. He was retired, used to be a big-time physicist. His daughter was a famous folk singer.”

Doug wondered what this had to do with the defense of Moonbase, but hesitated to interrupt Wicksen.

“He took us out to the gym and attached a bowling ball to one of the climbing ropes. The rope was hanging from a beam ’way up on the ceiling. Then he carried the bowling ball up to the top tier of the benches where we sat during the basketball games.”

“What was he doing?” Doug asked, curious despite himself.

“Teaching us physics. The law of pendulums. He held that big old bowling ball a centimeter in front of his nose, and then let it go.”

“And?”

“It swung on that rope all the way across the gym, like a cannonball, then swung right back toward him again. We all started to yell to him to duck, to get out of the way. But he just stood there and grinned at us.”

Wicksen paused dramatically. Doug waited for him to finish the story.

“The bowling ball stopped a centimeter in front of his nose, then started swinging back again. And he said, “See? It works that way every time. That’s physics!” And I was hooked for life.”

Doug thought he understood. “The demonstration was a lot more convincing than reading the equations about pendulums, right?”

“Right,” said Wicksen. “Of course, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. You’ve got to release the bowling ball without pushing it even the slightest little bit. If you push it, it’ll come back and smash your head in.”

“Is the gun going to work?” Doug asked.

He could sense Wicksen trying to shrug inside his suit. “We don’t know. All the equations check out, but we won’t know until we try it.”

“And you probably won’t get a chance to try it until a nuclear warhead is falling on our heads.”

“Probably.” If that thought perturbed Wicksen in the slightest, it didn’t show in his voice.

He’s actually happy about this, Doug realized. He’s running an experiment that might get himself and all his people killed, but the whole project excites him. Like a hunter tracking down a lion in thick underbrush: dangerous, but what an adrenaline rush!

Doug took his leave of the physicist, wishing he could be as fatalistic as Wicksen. As he climbed into his tractor and trundled away from the mass driver, heading back toward Moonbase, he tried to see things the way Wicksen did. Either the experiment works or we all get killed. Is that the way he really thinks? Or is it that he’s so absorbed in the experiment itself that he’s not thinking at all about the consequences.

Doug’s first stop after getting out of his spacesuit and cleaning it was the control center. Everything looked normal in the big, dimly lit room. The quiet hum of electronics. Rows of consoles monitored by men and women staring at the screens, pin mikes at their lips and earphones clamped to their heads. A controlled intensity, with the big electronic wall displays that showed schematics of the entire base looming over all of them.

He saw Jinny Anson bending over the shoulder of the chief communications technician.

Walking over to her, he asked, “What’s up, Jinny?”

She straightened up and Doug saw that her face was somber. “Lot of activity at L-1,” she said, gesturing toward the comm tech’s center screen.

Doug saw a radar plot of the space station that hovered nearly sixty thousand kilometers above them. Several additional blips clustered around the red dot marking the station.

“Resupply?” Doug mused.

“Not likely,” said Anson. “Their regular resupply run took place on schedule last week. No, they’re delivering something to the station, but it’s not life support supplies or propellant.”

Doug took in a deep breath. “The nuclear missile?”

“Maybe more than one.”

For a moment Doug was silent, thinking. Then he said, “I’m going to call Harry Clemens. It’s time to pop an observation satellite so we can keep an eye on Nippon One.”

Anson nodded, then grinned ruefully. “You might not like what you see, boss.”

Gordette was sitting in The Cave, nursing a mug of the stuff that passed for coffee at Moonbase. It was midday, and the cafeteria was filling up with the lunchtime crowd. But no one sat at Gordette’s table. No one came near it; a ring of empty tables surrounded him.

Pariah, he said to himself. That’s the word. For days he’s been trying to recall the term. At last it came swimming up from his subconscious. Pariah. Outcast. Murderer. Assassin. That’s me and they all know it.

It would’ve been better if Doug had let me die, Gordette told himself. He says he trusts me, but none of these others do. They all know about me now, or they think they do. And they all hate me.

Then he saw Paula Liebowitz carrying a tray in both hands, making her way through the crowded tables, heading straight toward him. She walked with a determined stride and an odd, tenacious expression on her face, right up to Gordette’s table.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” she asked, almost truculently.

Gordette spread his arms to take in all the empty chairs. “Be my guest.”

Liebowitz plopped her laden tray on the table and took the chair next to Gordette.

“Is it true? Did you really try to kill Doug Stavenger?”

Gordette couldn’t make out what was in her eyes. It wasn’t anger, exactly. But it wasn’t tenderness, either.

“It’s true,” he said flatly.

“You’re a hired assassin? A hit man?”

He puffed out a sigh. “When I first met you I was trying to sabotage Doug’s suit.”

“Son of a bitch,” Liebowitz said. She wasn’t calling Gordette a name, he realized; merely expressing her emotions.

He tried to shrug. “That’s what I was sent here to do.”

“And when you invited me to dinner, that was part of it? You were going to try to use me to help you kill Stavenger?”

“No,” he answered slowly. “I invited you to dinner because I liked you.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Even trained assassins need some human companionship now and then,” Gordette told her.

“Don’t try to make a joke out of this!”

“It’s no joke, believe me.”

“Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Why do you ask me, then?”

“I liked you,” Liebowitz said. “I was even thinking about going to bed with you.”

“Get your kicks with a black man, huh?”

She frowned with puzzlement. “What?”

“I’m black.”

“And I’m a Jew. What’s that got to do with anything?”

Gordette thought it over for a moment. “Nothing. Nothing’s got anything to do with anything.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said, getting irritated with her cross-examination. “So I liked you and you liked me. So what?”

“Stavenger’s letting you stay here? You’re still working with him?”

Gordette nodded.

“He trusts you? After you tried to kill him?”

“I told him the story of my life,” Gordette said, acid in each word, “and he decided he’s gonna reform me. Start me a new life here on the Moon, where everybody loves me and trusts me.”

“Yeah, you’ve made it so easy to be loved and accepted.”

“The only thing I’ve made easy is being black, so you can spot me at a distance.”

“What the hell’s this black business got to do with it?”

“You see any other black people up here?”

Liebowitz almost laughed at him. “My supervisor’s black. There’s dozens of Afro-Americans and blacks from other countries here.” She turned in her chair and pointed. “Look. Black people. And Asians. Hell, they even let Italians up here!”

“Very funny.”

“The first American astronaut on Mars was black.”

“Big deal.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Okay. Good advice. I’ll do that,” he mumbled.

Liebowitz glared at him like a disappointed mother. “You really tried to kill him?”

“I slit his throat. All right? Is that what you wanted to hear? My fuckin’ confession?”

He said it loudly enough so that people at the nearest tables turned to stare at him.

“What I want to hear,” Liebowitz said, her voice low, “is where you’re going from here.”

“Straight to hell,” Gordette said.

“So you’re going to isolate yourself, build a wall and not let anybody near you.”

He pointed to the ring of empty tables around them. “You see anybody trying to make friends with me?”

“I am,” she said.

He blinked, uncomprehending.

“I’m having lunch with you, aren’t I?” Liebowitz said. “Maybe you can tell me the story of your life and make me believe that you’re something more than just a hired killer.”

Arrrrrrrrrrrgggh and no arrivals of lunar cargo carriers. The manufacturing facility had shut down for lack of raw materials. No lunar transfer vehicles needed maintenance or repair; they were all hanging silent and useless in weightless geodesic cocoons that protected them from incoming radiation and the occasional meteoroids that peppered cislunar space. The tourist hotel was still running, but its business had dropped sharply since the war against Moonbase had started.

Jill Meyers gazed sadly through an observation port in the hotel module. She had helped to build Masterson, back in the days when she’d been a government astronaut. She was accustomed to seeing spacesuited figures bustling from module to module, jetting along in solo maneuvering units or riding the bare-bones shuttlecraft called broomsticks. But now the whole region was quiet, empty. This war was costing Masterson Corporation millions of dollars per day, and even though the U.N. promised reparations, Meyers knew that nothing could repay time lost, careers interrupted.

“There you are!”

Jill turned from the circular glassteel observation port to see Edan McGrath standing in the hatch. His sizable bulk almost filled the hatchway, the lighting from the central corridor silhouetting him dramatically.

“You finally got here,” Meyers said, taking a step toward him.

“I’ve been looking all over this tin can for you,” he replied gruffly. “Come on, let’s eat. I haven’t had a bite since breakfast.”

The hotel’s restaurant was nearly empty. Only two other couples sitting at the elegant tables, and a family of four off in the farthest corner, where the children wouldn’t annoy other diners. They’ve got more waiters than customers, Meyers noticed as she scanned the richly-decorated room. Windowall screens displayed astronomical scenes, glorious interstellar nebulas glowing delicate pink and electric blue. Meyers realized that real windows would have shown the scenery outside spinning lazily; not the most soothing background for flatland tourists to eat and drink by.

McGrath had ordered champagne. They clinked their fluted glasses and toasted each other’s health. Meyers had dressed in comfortable tan slacks and a loose blouse embroidered with flowers. McGrath wore a bulky white turtleneck sweater over jeans that looked stiffly new.

With a lopsided grin on his beefy face, McGrath asked, “Do you come here often?”

It was a corny line and they both knew it.

Meyers laughed politely. “I used to, in the old days.”

“I understand you were quite a hell-raiser back then,” he said.

Her smile turned reminiscent. “Back then,” she murmured.

The waiter brought them oversized menus. McGrath ordered three courses and more wine, Meyers only a salad.

“Okay,” he said, after the waiter had left, “you asked me to meet you here. What’s up?”

Meyers looked into his pale blue eyes. “Edan, you know that if I were still in the Senate I’d be raising all kinds of hell about this war against Moonbase.”

“I’d hardly call it a war,” he said.

“That’s what your network calls it.”

McGrath shrugged. “That’s show business, Jill. You know how it is.”

“I need your help to put pressure on the President,” she said.

His brows rose slightly. “I thought you were on her side. You’re the same party—”

“Not on this,” Meyers snapped. “I’ve never been a blind supporter of the New Morality and she knows it. She named me to the World Court to get me out of the Senate because she knew I’d raise hell about going after Moonbase.”

“Why don’t you raise hell now? I’d give you all the air time you want.”

“I can’t,” Meyers said, shaking her head. “As a judge in the International Court of Justice I’ve got to stay strictly out of politics.”

With a laugh, McGrath asked, “What you’re doing now isn’t politics?”

“This is private, just between you and me.”

“And Global News and the White House,” he added.

Meyers gave him a disdainful look. “You know what I mean, Edan.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “But what more can I do? Global’s been airing Edie Elgin’s reports from Moonbase. Faure’s pissed as hell with me over that.”

“You could start by showing what a ghost town this space station has become,” Meyers said. “American jobs are down the tubes because of Faure.”

“And the New Morality’s insistence that the nanotech treaty be enforced even on the Moon.”

“Right.”

“You want me to take on the New Morality?”

She hesitated, studying the expression on his face. McGrath had been handsome before he’d let himself start going to fat. He still looked pretty good. But is he strong enough? Meyers wondered.

Carefully, she said, “I want you to show the American public—the world public, really—how much this war against Moonbase is really costing.”

The waiter brought McGrath’s first course. Once he left, McGrath lifted his soup spoon, but instead of digging in he jabbed it in Meyers’ direction.

“You know,” he said, “There’s nothing like a really good controversy to boost ratings.”

Meyers grinned at him.

MOONBASE

“What on Earth are you doing?” Claire Rossi blurted.

Nick O’Malley was dragging a bulky container into their one-room quarters. It looked like an oversized piece of soft-sided luggage, and it made their little compartment crowded.

“Emergency procedure,” O’Malley said, pushing the container into the corner between the bunk and the desk. Still it took up almost half the floorspace.

Rossi watched impatiently as her husband knelt on one knee and began to rip open the Velcro seams of the container. She leaned over his broad shoulder and looked inside.

“A spacesuit!”

“Right,” O’Malley said. “I’m going to show you how to get into it, in case you need to while I’m not here.”

“Why would I—oh.”

As he hauled the torso and leggings of the suit out and spread them on the bunk, O’Malley said, “When the attack comes we might lose air pressure. This gadget here will yowl when the pressure drops below a safe minimum.”

He put a small gray box on the shelf carved into the stone wall above the bunk.

“When you hear this go off, you get into the suit as fast as you can. Here, I’ll show you how.”

“But suppose I’m in the personnel office when it happens?” she asked.

O’Malley shook his head. “When the Peacekeepers start their attack everybody not on essential duty will go to their quarters. That’s orders from management.”

She almost started to twit him about her personnel job being considered non-essential, but the dead serious expression on her husband’s face stopped her.

Instead she asked, “Is everybody getting a spacesuit?”

“Not enough to go around,” he answered, shaking his head.

“Then why do I get special treatment?”

He smiled bleakly at her. “Because you’re a special person. You’re married to me. And you’re pregnant.”

“But that means somebody else will have to go without a suit.”

His lips were a grim, pinched line. “Claire, hundreds of people here are going to go without a suit. But you’re not. Now let me show you how to put it on properly.”

She knew better than to argue with him. He’s trying to protect me, she told herself. And the baby. But if the air pressure goes down, lots of people will die here. And how long will the suit keep me?

Aloud, as she struggled into the clumsy leggings, she asked, “Where will you be when the shooting starts? Not operating the tractors, of course.”

He scowled. “No. I’ve been assigned to help Professor Zimmerman, for the sake of St Ignatius.”

“Zimmerman?”

“I think Doug Stavenger wants me to be the old man’s bodyguard.”

“Is the professor getting a suit?” Rossi asked as she tugged on the boots.

“There isn’t one in the base that’d fit him.”

“Oh dear.”

As he knelt at her feet and helped her zip the boots and leggings together, O’Malley said, “After just half a day with the old bugger, I almost wish somebody would knock him off.”

“That’s no way to talk, Nick.”

“He’s impossible.”

“He’s a genius and geniuses have their quirks.”

O’Malley made a sour face. “You know what I’ve been doing for him all morning? Collecting dust!”

“What?”

“I’ve been teleoperating a tractor all damned morning, scooping up dust off the regolith for him to experiment with.”

“That sounds crazy.”

“Tell me about it. He wants to build nanomachines that behave like dust particles, so he tells me he needs samples of dust to work with.”

Rossi wormed her arms into the suit’s torso, then popped her head through the neck ring.

“Why does he want to make nanomachines that behave like dust particles?” she asked.

“Because he’s ’way beyond quirky, that’s why. He’s outright daft.”

SAVANNAH

“It’s easy duty,” said the security chief. “Four men outside, two inside. Pretty soft, really.”

Jack Killifer sat in the stiff little plastic chair in front of the chief’s metal desk, trying hard to keep his face from showing what he was feeling inside. I’m in Joanna Brudnoy’s house! he exulted. Okay, it’s just the servants’ wing of the house, but still—here I am.

The security chief wore a tan summerweight uniform with epaulets and shoulder patches and even a couple of medals pinned above his left breast pocket. Tin soldiers, Killifer thought.

He himself was in a baggy shirt and Levis, the “uniform of the day,” as instructed.

The security chief kept glancing at the array of display screens that made up one whole wall of the bare little office. They showed security camera views of the grounds around the house, the garage, the pool area, and every room inside except the master bedroom.

“The only thing you’ve got to remember,” the chief said, swivelling his attention back and forth between the screens and Killifer, “is that she doesn’t like to see uniformed guards around the place.”

“So we dress like gardeners,” Killifer said, putting just a hint of disdain in it.

“Yeah. Both chauffeurs are on the team, of course, and the butler’s supposed to be a black belt. He carries a nine-millimeter, too. All the time.”

They had issued Killifer a brand-new Browning machine pistol: fifty rounds, either semi- or full-automatic. It still smelled of packing grease.

“But the butler only works the day shift, doesn’t he?” Killifer asked.

The chief hiked an eyebrow. “The butler works until they both go to bed. He don’t sleep until they do.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So all you’ve got to do is patrol outside, make yourself look like a gardener, and keep an eye out for strangers.”

“What about people coming up to the house in cars?”

“You don’t have to worry about that. The two inside guys take care of that. And the butler.”

One of the inside ‘guys’ was a terrific-looking redhead, Killifer had already discovered. Hard as nails, though.

“What’s she need all this security for?” he asked, probing for weak spots in the security system. “You don’t need six people and machine pistols for burglars.”

The chief shrugged carelessly. “I don’t ask and they don’t bother to let me in on their secrets. It’s a cushy job, so don’t knock it.”

Killifer shrugged back at him. “Yeah, okay, but I’d kinda like to know what I’m supposed to be looking out for.”

Eying the display screens, the chief muttered, “Religious fanatics.”

“What?”

“She’s worried about fanatics from the New Morality trying to kill her.”

“No shit?”

The chief’s tic of displeasure told Killifer that he was probably a Believer himself.

“If some religious nutcase wanted to kill her, why not just drive a car bomb into the house?”

“Not their style,” said the chief. “The fanatics do their killing face-to-face, and they don’t believe in taking out innocent people when they hit somebody. Besides, she’s in and out so much—travels all the time, really—you can’t be sure she’s home unless you actually see her.”

“Yeah,” said Killifer. “I guess that’s right.”

“Listen,” the chief said, suddenly intense, leaning across his desk to stare directly into Killifer’s eyes. “Don’t judge the New Morality movement by the actions of a few crazies. Most of those assassins are foreigners, not Americans. Fanatics.”

Killifer nodded, knowing that the chief was certainly a Believer. Wonder what he’d say if I told him I worked for the Urban Corps. And that General O’Conner his own God-almighty self has sanctioned the assassination of Joanna Brudnoy.

It had been ridiculously easy to get hired onto the Masterson security team that guarded Joanna’s house. New Morality adherents had faked his employment record in the corporation’s computer files and provided a lucrative transfer to one of the women employed in the house guard detail. Killifer had miraculously popped out of the personnel files and been taken on within two days.

The weakest link in the security system is the system itself, Killifer knew. Manipulate the system and make it work for you.

The next step is to get into the house, on the night detail, when the butler’s asleep and Joanna’s in her bedroom where there are no cameras watching.

MOONBASE

“Well, how much of the stuff can you make?” Vince Falcone asked, his patience obviously fraying.

“How much time do I have?” asked the head of the chemistry lab.

“I don’t know.”

“Then I don’t know, either.”

“Days,” said Doug, stepping between them. “Maybe only two days, maybe a few more.”

“Two days?” the chemist gasped. She pushed back a strand of dark blonde hair from her forehead. “Only two days?”

Doug wondered where she’d been all this time. “We’re expecting the Peacekeepers’ attack before this week is out,” he said.

She looked past Doug to Falcone. “How much do you need?”

“Four tons.”

She blinked, swallowed. Then, straightening her back, she said, “We’ll have to get the processing plant devoted completely to the job.”

Falcone’s frowning, swarthy face relaxed slightly. “Maybe three tons’ll do.”

The chemist shook her head. “Still, that’s impossible to produce in two days. We don’t have any time to lose.”

“Can you come close?” Doug asked.

She was a petite wisp of a woman, her orange coveralls stained and faded from hard use. “We generate the foamgel as part of the process for making the insulation tiles we use for flooring and wall covering and all.”

The insulating tiles were a small but consistent export to the space stations in Earth orbit, Doug knew. Moonbase also exported an even smaller but growing trickle of them to building contracting firms on Earth.

“We’ll have to shut down the back end of the production line,” the chemist was musing, “and rev up the foamgel production end.”

She looked up at Falcone again. To Doug they seemed like a dark lumpy storm cloud and a light graceful swirl of cirrus.

“I can put all the raw stock we have on hand into producing foamgel, but I’ll need more raw materials. Every tractor you can get scooping regolith.”

“You got it!” Falcone promised.

Doug left them huddled together over her phone console and hurried down the corridor to Zimmerman’s nanolab. One of the base’s best tractor teleoperators, Nick O’Malley, had been assigned to work with the professor. But if we need every tractor scooping outside, I’ll have to shift Nick back to his regular job.

He could hear their arguing voices from fifty meters down the corridor. Zimmerman’s heavy rumbling and O’Malley’s higher-pitched yells. Nick’s not taking any guff from the professor, Doug thought as he pushed through the door marked NANOTECHNOLOGY LABORATORY—PROF. ZIMMERMAN—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“So you are the expert here and not me?” Zimmerman was bellowing angrily.

“I know more about it than you do, damned right I do!” shouted O’Malley, red-faced.

“Stop it!” Doug commanded. “Shut up, both of you!”

Zimmerman whirled on Doug, his loose jacket and vest flapping like sails with the wind taken out of them.

“An assistant you gave me? A führer you gave me! A dictator!”

“What’s the problem?” Doug asked as calmly as he could.

“He thinks he is the professor and I am his student!” Zimmerman complained loudly.

“I only said—”

“You are not to say!” Zimmerman roared. “You are to do. You are my assistant, not my colleague!”

“Professor, please!” Doug insisted. “What is the problem?”

Gesturing with both hands, Zimmerman grumbled, “He thinks to tell me what I should do. He thinks he is the expert here.”

“All right, all right,” Doug said, trying to be soothing. He turned toward O’Malley. “Nick?”

“I just said that if he needs nanobugs to act like dust, why doesn’t he just use the flaming dust itself?”

“You see!” Zimmerman snapped.

“Wait a minute,” said Doug. “Nick, what do you mean?”

O’Malley sucked in a deep, deep breath. Doug realized he was trying to hold onto his own temper. He was a big man, and if he got truly angry there could be real trouble.

“What I mean,” he said slowly, “is that we don’t need to invent nanomachines that behave like dust particles. We can pump the corridor sections full of regular lunar dust. Run ’em through an electrostatic grid so they’ll stick to the Peacekeepers’ suits and visors just like you want ’em to.”

“An electrostatic grid?”

“We can rig that up easy; just need to connect some electricity to the air filter screens in the corridors.”

“We, he keeps saying,” Zimmerman muttered.

Doug put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Professor, I think he’s right.”

“And I am wrong?”

Forcing a smile, Doug said, “No, but we don’t have time to produce your specialized nanomachines. Nick’s worked out on the surface; he knows how the dust clings to suits.”

“So I must sit back and retire like a useless old man?”

“No, not at all,” Doug said. “You can work with Kris Cardenas on the medical side. We’re going to need your nanomachines to take care of the injured and wounded.”

Zimmerman huffed out an enormous sigh. “You expect injured and wounded? How many?”

“I have no idea,” Doug answered truthfully.

The professor turned away and walked a few steps deeper into his lab. Then he spun around and pointed a trembling finger at O’Malley. “Very well! Go play with your verdammt dust! I will stay here and do important work!”

O’Malley started to reply, but one glance at Doug and he shut his mouth with an audible click of teeth.

“We need you, professor,” Doug said softly. “You know that. I need you. Moonbase needs you.”

“Yah. While you and this young lummox here go out to fight, I sit here like a dreamer.”

“It’s your dreams that we’re fighting for,” said Doug. Then he took O’Malley by the arm and led him out of the nanotechnology laboratory.

Harry Clemens seldom showed tension. Word around Moon-base was that he didn’t have any bones, that’s why he always looked so relaxed.

But he was sitting rigidly in one of the little swivel chairs in front of a console in the control center, eyes riveted on the screen that showed the little tubular rocket vehicle, as the launch computer counted aloud: “…four… three… two… one… zero.”

Clemens saw a flash of smoke and dust. The rocket was gone when it cleared.

“Radar track on the line,” said the technician sitting to his right. He saw the radar display on the screen just above his view of the now empty launch pad.

“Looks good.”

He swivelled slightly to see Jinny Anson standing behind him.

“Now we’ll see if they try to shoot it down,” Anson said tightly.

“L-1’s painting it,” the radar tech called out.

“I launched it retrograde,” Clemens said to Anson,’so L-1 won’t have more than a few minutes to calculate its trajectory.”

The Moon rotates on its axis so slowly that very little momentum was lost by launching a rocket in the direction opposite to its spin. On Earth, a launch westward could cost four kilometers per second of precious velocity, or more, depending on the launch site’s latitude.

“They won’t need more than a few seconds to nail your orbit,” Anson said flatly. “Besides, they know goddamned well it’s gonna pass over Copernicus. They got lots of time to focus a laser on it.”

Clemens’ high forehead wrinkled. “You think they’ll zap it?”

“If the Peacekeepers’ve put a big enough laser at L-1, yeah, they will.”

“Do you think they’ve put weapons-strength lasers in Nippon One?”

Anson gripped Clemens’ shoulders and grinned down at him. “We’ll find out pretty soon, won’t we?”

Edith was reviewing her day’s shooting in the video editing booth at the lunar university’s studio facility. The studio itself was dark and empty; no lectures or demonstrations, no interactions with Earthside students had taken place since the U.N. had cut off regular communications. The editing booth felt almost like home to Edith, though. Even though she was alone in it, she enjoyed working the big control console. When she had first started in television news, sitting at the console with all its switches and keypads made her feel like the captain of a starship in some futuristic drama. Now it just felt like a familiar, comfortable place where she could edit her work until it was a finished, polished piece of TV journalism. The fact that she was doing the work on the Moon no longer impressed her.

She was splicing together scenes from three separate shoots, trying to put together a coherent report on the preparations that Moonbase was undertaking to face the impending Peacekeeper attack—without betraying any of the steps that might tip off the U.N. about what to expect. Her footage dealt almost entirely with the human side of the coming battle: the tiny medical staff getting ready to handle wounded men and women; the highly-trained technicians and engineers and scientists moping in The Cave, their work, their careers, their lives in limbo until this war was settled one way or the other; the silent emptiness of the construction pit where the grand plaza was going to be built. Nothing was moving there now, not even a teleoperated tractor. All work on Moonbase’s future had been stopped.

She had scrupulously avoided the nanotech labs and the plastics processing center where Falcone was driving the chemists to produce tons of foamgel. She had done a long interview with Claire Rossi, already known to TV viewers Earthside as Moonbase’s first bride. Now Edith revealed that Claire was pregnant, but could not return Earthside because of the impending battle.

Good, human interest stuff, Edith thought as she edited Claire’s interview. It’s a shame I couldn’t get her to cry, though.

The phone’s chime startled her out of her concentration. She swivelled her chair from the editing screens to the phone screen and tapped the ANSWER keypad.

A young male comm tech’s face appeared on the screen. “A call for you, Ms Elgin. From Earthside.”

“Earthside? I thought all links were shut down.”

“This is coming in on a special laser tight beam, from Atlanta: a Mr Edan McGrath.”

Edith felt her eyes go wide. “McGrath? Put him on!”

Someone had once called McGrath the sexiest bald-headed man on Earth. Looking at his image in the phone screen, Edith thought he wasn’t really sexy, but he sure radiated energy and power.

“Mr McGrath,” she said, surprised at how humble she sounded.

Three seconds later he said, “Edie, I wanted to tell you that I think you’re doing a fine job up there. An excellent job! I’m proud of you.”

She blinked with surprise. The top boss doesn’t break a U.N. blackout just to praise one of his reporters, Edith told herself, even if I am his number one on-screen personality.

“Thank you,” she said. Again, timidly.

McGrath hadn’t waited for her response. He kept on talking. “After this is all over and you get back here, I’m going to personally see that you get a regular prime-time slot for yourself. No co-host, all yours. And a fulL-1ength documentary on your experiences up there. And a book deal, too. The only reporter at Moonbase. I’ve got to hand it to you, kid. You’re the greatest.”

It was the ‘kid’ that broke Edith’s spell. He wants something, she realized. Of course he does! He wouldn’t go to the trouble of establishing a clandestine laser link unless he wanted something from me.

“I’m glad that you like what I’m doing,” she said. “Now what’s the reason for your call?”

When her words reached him, McGrath’s brows hiked. Then he broke into a big, boyish grin.

“Can’t fool you, can I?” he said, brushing at his moustache. Edith thought it had been considerably grayer the last time she’d seen him. He must be coloring it.

“The Peacekeepers’ attack is imminent,” he went on. “From what I’ve been able to find out, they’ll come at you in another few days. A week, at most.”

He stopped, waiting for her reply. Edith nodded and said, “That’s the way it looks here.”

“Okay,” he said after the delay. “Here’s my question. Can you cover the battle for us?”

“Cover the battle?”

He hadn’t stopped for her reply. He was saying, “I know you’re only one person, Edie, but I’ve been thinking maybe you could get some of the Moonbase people to handle cameras, give us a blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute eyewitness account of the fight. Like Ed Murrow did in London during the Blitz.”

Edith knew who Edward R. Murrow was, but she wasn’t certain of what the Blitz might be. She didn’t fret over it. McGrath wants real-time coverage of the battle! I’ve got to tell Doug. This could be the biggest publicity break of all for Moonbase, showing the brave unarmed Lunatics desperately trying to hold off an army of U.N. Peacekeepers with their missiles and guns and all. Wow!

“Can you do it?” McGrath asked, almost plaintively.

“Mr McGrath,” Edith said, slowly, feeling the strength welling up inside her,’do you realize that if we show the battle in real-time it’s going to give Faure and the U.N. a terrible black eye? I mean, they’ll look like monsters, attacking these unarmed people.”

The three seconds were agony now. At last McGrath nodded grimly. “That’s right. I’m fully aware of it. I was wrong to back Faure against Moonbase. It may be too late to save the base, but I want the Global’s viewers to see what the little shit is doing to you. I want the world to see it!”

“Okay!” Edith said happily. “You’ve got it!”

He broke into a fleshy grin when her acceptance reached him. “Can you do it? How much of the battle can you actually show?”

Grinning back at him, Edith replied, “Moonbase has security cameras in every corridor, in every lab and workshop. And outside, too. I can show you the crater floor outside the base and even a view of the Mare Nubium, on the other side of the ringwall mountains. We’ll get it all, don’t worry.”

Three seconds ticked by, then McGrath said, “Great! Do it. Don’t worry about expenses.”

She signed off, almost delirious with joy. But as she hurried down the corridors to find Doug and tell him that Global News was now on his side, she realized that what she would really be showing the world was how the Peacekeepers marched into Moonbase and either accepted a surrender or blew the place apart.

BASE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE

“Take a look,” said Jinny Anson.

She touched the keyboard on her desk and the wallscreen lit up to show a satellite view of the beautiful crater Copernicus.

Doug paid no attention to the crater’s symmetry, however. He stared at the array of tractors and other vehicles parked on the plain of Mare Imbrium, just outside Yamagata’s base, Nippon One.

“No wonder they’re not flying here on Jobbers,” Anson muttered. “There aren’t enough rockets on the whole Moon to lift that much equipment.”

Doug felt almost breathless. “There must be enough transport there for a thousand troops.”

Bam Gordette, sitting on the other side of the table that butted Anson’s desk, said quietly, “Not that many. More than half those vehicles’ll be carrying food, water, air, ammo, missiles—logistics.”

Doug sank back in his chair. “How many troops do you estimate, then?”

Gordette waggled a hand. “Three hundred, three-fifty, tops.”

“That’s enough to do the job,” Anson said. To Doug. She pointedly kept from looking at Gordette.

Staring at the mass of vehicles parked out on the open mare, Doug muttered, “What we need is a good solar flare to knock out them out.”

“That would only postpone the inevitable,” Anson said.

Doug looked at her, sitting behind her desk. “Jinny, you used to be a lot of fun to talk to. You’re getting morose.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed that, too,” she answered, straight-faced. “Wonder why?”

“How old is this information?” Doug asked, pointing at the wallscreen.

“This is real-time,” she said. “The bird’s made four passes over the region, so far.”

“And they haven’t tried to blind it or knock it off the air?”

“Why bother?” Gordette said. “If I was running their operation, I’d want you to see how much stuff we got.”

“It is kinda depressing,” Anson agreed. Again, without looking Gordette’s way.

“Who else has seen this?” Doug asked.

“Nobody,” she replied sharply. “The bits are transmitted from the satellite to our computer and straight to my office. That’s why I asked you to come here and see it. Not even Harry Clemens is getting this data.”

“Good,” Doug said. “It certainly is depressing.”

“Three hundred troopers,” Anson mused. “With missiles and all the other goodies.”

“Well,” Doug said, trying to brighten the mood, “at least we know they’re still at Copernicus. They’re not on their way here yet.”

“Take ’em about two days to cover the distance?” Gordette asked.

“Just about,” Doug replied.

“Two Earth days,” Arisen said. “Forty-eight hours. Maybe a little less if they push it.”

Steepling his fingers almost as if in prayer, Gordette said, “Well, if they’re gonna knock out your satellite it’ll be just before they haul ass and start on their way here.”

“Why bother?”

“Standard operating procedure. No commander wants the enemy watching his route of march, if he can help it.”

Anson looked from Gordette to the wall screen and back again. “So if our bird goes off the air…”

“That means they’re starting on their way here,” Doug finished for her.

As if on cue, the wallscreen display broke into wild jagged streaks and then went blank.

The three of them rushed down to the control center, once they were certain that the reconnaissance satellite had actually been knocked out, and the dead wallscreen wasn’t merely a malfunction somewhere in the communications system.

“You want to launch another recce bird?” Anson asked as they dashed along the corridor, hurrying past startled people.

“Not much sense to that,” Doug said over his shoulder.

“Yeah,” Gordette agreed. “Just be target practice for them.”

The control center was calm, with its usual air of controlled intensity, the quiet hum of consoles, the flickering of display screens in the dimly-lit chamber. Doug automatically glanced at the big wallscreen that displayed a schematic of the entire base. The usual scattering of red and yellow lights, but otherwise everything was operating normally.

Doug knew from hours of studying the ballistics that a nuclear-tipped missile could be launched from the L-1 station and reach Moonbase in less than an hour. Even faster if the Peacekeepers wanted to goose it, but Doug thought that they would want to take at least an hour so that they would have time to make pinpoint mid-course corrections. If his reasoning was correct, they would want the nuke to go off over the solar farms inside Alphonsus’s ringwall after the Peacekeeper assault force had arrived on the other side of the mountains, shielded from the nuke’s radiation pulse, and ready to cross Wodjohowitcz Pass as soon as the explosion had knocked out Moonbase’s main electrical power supply.

The radar view of L-1 showed the same cluster of spacecraft hovering around the space station that Doug had seen the last time he’d looked.

“Can we get a visual?” he asked Jinny. “Turn one of the astronomical’scopes on it?”

She nodded and walked off toward the technician who was monitoring the automated astronomical equipment sitting out by the central peak in the middle of Alphonsus.

Edith came tearing into the control center, breathless.

“Doug,” she said, puffing as she skidded to a stop next to him, “McGrath wants me to pipe the battle Earthside in real time!”

“Who’s McGrath?”

“The top boss! He owns Global News!”

Doug shifted mental gears as fast as he could; still, it took a few moments for him to realize what Edith was telling him.

“You’ll show what’s happening here when the Peacekeepers attack?”

“To the whole blazin’ world!” Edith said, exultant.

For the first time in what seemed like years, Doug felt a genuine smile curving his lips. “Faure’s not going to like that… not at all.”

Through her sitting room window, Joanna could see a soft twilight descending on the garden and the woods beyond it. The trees had been planted there to cover up the view of Savannah’s skyline and give the occupants of her house the feeling that they were truly out in the countryside rather than half a mile from the Interstate.

“Global’s going to broadcast the confrontation?” she asked Doug’s image, grinning at her from the Windowall screen above the fireplace. She could not bear to use the word battle or attack. She knew that Moonbase could not win a battle or survive an attack.

“Edan McGrath himself called Edith and asked her to do it,” Doug said after the three-second lag. “Real-time coverage; blow by blow.”

“I’ve already got a pocketful of senators demanding an investigation of the President’s handling of the Moonbase crisis,” Joanna mused. “Coverage of the confrontation will show the voting public how you’re being attacked by the U.N.’s Peacekeepers.”

“This has got to stay confidential,” Doug was saying, not waiting for her response. “We don’t want Faure to know about it beforehand.”

Joanna’s brows knit. “But, Doug, maybe if we leaked the information Faure would call off the attack.”

She watched her son’s image in the display screen. Once he heard her words he shook his head. “The Peacekeepers are already on their way here, Mom. No one’s going to call off the attack. Not now.”

Alarm tingled through Joanna like an electric current. “You’re certain?”

“In forty-eight hours or less we’ll be able to see them coming across Mare Nubium.”

Joanna suddenly felt as if someone had ripped out her insides. All these weeks she had known it would come to this, yet she realized now that she had desperately clung to an unconscious hope that it could all be averted.

“You’ll have to surrender to them, then,” she said dully.

Three seconds passed. Doug replied, “Maybe.”

“You can’t fight them! You don’t have any weapons.”

Again the agonizing wait. Doug said, “We don’t have any guns, that’s true enough. But we’re not beaten yet.”

“Doug, what are you thinking of? You can’t fight an armed battalion of trained Peacekeeper troops! You’ll get yourself killed! You’ll destroy Moonbase!”

He hadn’t waited for her response. He was saying, in a calm, carefully measured tone. “I can’t tell you what we’re planning, Mom, because even a tight laser link spreads enough for some snooper to eavesdrop. But we’re not going to obediently open our hatches and let the Peacekeepers take over Moonbase.”

“Doug, they’ll kill you!”

He smiled at her words. “If we surrender and have to return Earthside, I’m a dead man anyway.”

Joanna started to reply, then realized that her son was right. He had nothing to lose by fighting for Moonbase.

“Naw, I don’t mind working the night shift,” Killifer was saying. “At least I’ll be indoors, under the roof, if it rains.”

The security chief looked slightly uneasy. “I don’t usually put newcomers inside the house,” he said, “but Jonesie’s come down with some virus and we need a replacement for him right away.”

“It’s okay,” Killifer repeated, trying hard not to sound eager. I’ll take his shift.”

“You already did you regular shift; I don’t like asking you to double up.”

Killifer shrugged as carelessly as he could. “Four to midnight is easy. I wouldn’t go to sleep until after midnight, anyway.”

The chief swivelled back and forth slowly in his desk chair, making it squeak slightly, eying Killifer as if he weren’t certain he was doing the right thing. Killifer sat in front of the little desk, doing his best to appear nonchalant.

Then he got an inspiration. “I get overtime pay for this, don’t I?”

The chief visibly relaxed. “Yeah, sure. Time and a half.”

Killifer nodded as if the money was his reason for agreeing to the extra shift so readily. “Double shift isn’t so bad,” he said. “It’s only for a few days, right?”

“Yeah,” said the chief. “Until Jonesie comes back.”

“I’d just be spending my pay in some bar or someplace,” Killifer said. “This way I make plastic instead of spending it.”

“All right,” the chief said, still uneasy. “Go downstairs and change into a regular uniform. You work with Rodriguez. He monitors the screens, in here, and you sit in the kitchen until she and her husband go to bed. Then you patrol the rooms once every half-hour. Check all the windows and doors. Except the master bedroom; just make sure their door’s shut tight. Pay particular attention to the sliders that go out to the pool deck.”

“Right.” Killifer nodded.

“Remember, she doesn’t like to see us. Stay in the kitchen until they go up to the master bedroom.”

“What about the butler?”

“He’ll go to bed after they do,” said the chief.

“Okay. Good.”

Again the chief hesitated. Killifer could feel his pulse throbbing in his ears as he sat facing the man across the pathetic little metal desk.

At last the chief said, “All right. Go downstairs and get into your uniform.”

Killifer got up from his chair slowly, turned and went to the office door.

“And thanks for filling in,” the chief said. Reluctantly.

“Nothing to it,” Killifer replied over his shoulder. He pulled the door open, then added, “I can use the extra plastic.”

The bastard suspects something, Killifer said to himself as he stepped out into the hallway. Not enough to turn me down, but this doesn’t sit right with him.

Then he grinned as he clattered down the metal spiral staircase. What the hell! Let him worry all he wants to. I’m in the house for two to three nights and she’s home with her creaky old man. Once the butler goes to bed I’ll scope out the house and figure out the best way to get to her and then get away. Shit, they’ll be paying me to do it. Overtime.

NANOLAB

Keiji Inoguchi was surprised by Professor Zimmerman’s call. He hurried to the nanolab, eager to accept Zimmerman’s invitation before the crusty old man changed his mind.

“I am most honored that you have asked me to visit your laboratory once again,” he said, after he had bowed to the professor.

Zimmerman dipped his chin in acknowledgement. “I am asking for more than a visit, my friend. I need your help.”

Inoguchi sucked in his breath. “My help? In what way can I help you?”

Zimmerman led the Japanese scientist back into the bowels of his lab. They walked past rows of computer screens and gray, bulky cryogenic tanks beaded with moisture, Zimmerman in his usual gray suit, grossly overweight, dishevelled, looking distracted and unhappy; Inoguchi in an immaculate white turtleneck shirt and sharply-creased slacks, lean and eager, his eyes snapping up every piece of equipment as if they were cameras.

Hands jammed in his trouser pockets, Zimmerman said heavily, “I am relegated to assisting my former student, Professor Cardenas.”

“Yes?”

“She has asked me to prepare nanomachines capable of repairing wounds inflicted by gunshot or shrapnel—flying metal from explosions.”

“And you want me to assist you in this?” Inoguchi asked.

“I realize you represent the United Nations and are not to take part in the fighting,” Zimmerman said. “But for medical work perhaps you are allowed to use your skills, yah? For humanitarian reasons.”

“Of course,” Inoguchi said without an instant’s hesitation. “Humanitarian purposes come before politics and other considerations.”

Zimmerman stopped in front of a lab bench that supported a massive metal sphere connected to a desktop computer by hair-thin fiber optic cables.

“My staff,” Zimmerman gestured to the sphere.

Inoguchi understood immediately. “Your processors.”

“Yah,” said Zimmerman, lowering his bulk onto a spindly-looking stool. “Now we must teach them to build other nanos that will seal wounds quick, before the patient bleeds to death.”

“Can you do this?”

The old man nodded slowly. “Yah. I have already done it once. Now I must do it again—in a day or so.”

Inoguchi grinned at the professor. “We have much work to accomplish, then.”

Colonel Giap did not relish being under Faure’s direct supervision. The man is a politician, what doeshe know of military tactics? Giap asked himself. I should report to General Uhlenbeck, through the normal chain of command. Instead I must bear with this politician questioning every breath I draw.

He tried to reassure himself with Clausewitz’s dictum that war is merely an extension of politics. It was scant consolation. Yes, politicians such as Ho Chi Minh successfully directed the liberation of Vietnam from the imperialists, he knew. But that was generations ago, and besides, Ho and his comrades had military experience of their own. Faure had probably never even fired a pistol at a target range.

“Was it wise to incapacitate their satellite?” the U.N. secretary-general was asking.

Giap, sitting on the bare floor of his closet-turned-office, replied to the image on his laptop’s screen with all the patience he could muster, “It was necessary. Their satellite could observe our time of departure and our route of march. That would be giving the enemy more information than we want them to have.”

He waited the three seconds, watching Faure twiddle his moustache. Then the secretary-general replied, “But by disabling their satellite, you have told them that you are ready to march.”

“Yes. What of it? Don’t you think they have cameras atop their ringwall mountains looking for us to appear over their horizon?”

Faure’s face creased deeply once he heard Giap’s comment. “Then of what good was it to cripple their satellite? I do not understand your reasoning.”

They went around the subject twice more, Giap resolute and implacable, Faure irritable and demanding.

At last Giap said, “Sir, you may consider my action premature or even mistaken, but it has been done and argument will not undo it.”

Faure flushed angrily once he heard the colonel’s words.

Before he could say anything, Giap added, “If you wish to remove me from command, I understand entirely.”

The secretary-general’s eyes widened momentarily, then he quickly asserted his self-control. Forcing a smile that narrowed his eyes to slits, Faure made a soothing gesture with both hands.

“No, no, of course not, colonel. I have every confidence in you.”

Of course you do, Giap said to himself, now that our jump-off for the attack is only hours away.

“What you’re looking at,” said Edith into her pin mike, “is almost certainly a nuclear-armed missile.”

The monitor screen in the little editing booth showed what Moonbase’s astronomical telescope was focused upon: the clutch of spacecraft hovering around the big space station at the L-1 libration point some fifty-eight thousand kilometers above the Moon’s surface. The picture, with Edith’s commentary, was being broadcast live over Global News Network.

“Despite international agreements that date all the way back to 1967 banning nuclear weapons in space, the United Nations has brought a nuclear-armed missile here to use against Moonbase. Although Moonbase’s residents…”

Doug watched Edith’s performance as he suited up for another surface excursion. It’s one thing to reveal to the world that Faure’s going to nuke our solar energy farms, he told himself, it’s something else to try to knock out the missile once they launch it against us.

Doug hitched a ride on one of the tractors carrying a team of construction workers out to the mass driver. It took the better part of half an hour to trundle the few kilometers in one of the electrically-driven tractors. Doug thought that once this war was over, one of his immediate priorities was going to be developing faster ground vehicles. This is asinine, creaking along at a top speed of thirty klicks per hour.

Then he realized that the Peacekeeper battalion was chugging along at pretty much the same low speed, and he didn’t feel so bad about it. Besides, he added silently, by the time this war is over there might not be a Moonbase and you just might be dead.

The Sun was up over the ringwall mountains, bathing the crater floor in harsh, brilliant light that cast long slanting shadows. It would remain daylight for another twelve days. The Peacekeepers remembered that the nanobugs Moonbase had used against them the first time were deactivated by solar ultraviolet.

The mass driver was crawling with spacesuited figures. Laser welding torches flashed against the dark bulk of the long metal machines. Doug clambered down from the tractor, leaving the construction team to drive a few hundred meters on, to where their cohorts were digging a trench for the prefab shelter for Wicksen’s people.

The suit-to-suit radio frequency was alive with chatter, but Doug found Wicksen visually, from his slight form and the bright blue WIX stencilled on his backpack. There was so much crosstalk on the regular suit-to-suit frequency that Doug walked up to the physicist and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

Wicksen seemed to recognize Doug’s suit and held up three gloved fingers. Doug tapped frequency three on his wrist panel.

“I’ve saved this freak for private conversations,” Wicksen’s voice said in his earphones.

“How’s it going?” Doug asked.

“Have they launched yet?”

“Not as of half an hour ago.” Then he added, “I would’ve gotten a call if they’d launched while I was riding out here.”

“We should have this kloodge put together in another ten or twelve hours.”

“Good.”

“But there won’t be any time to test it.”

“Then it better work right the first time,” Doug said.

He could sense Wicksen shaking his head inside his helmet. “Nothing works right the first time. Haven’t you ever heard of Murphy’s Law?”

Ignoring that, Doug asked, “How soon will you have the extra electrical power connected?”

Pointing past the mass driver’s long metal track, Wicksen answered, “The extra men you assigned me are doing that now. You’re going to have a temporary brown-out when we fire the gun.”

“Better than having a nuclear explosion inside the crater,” Doug said grimly.

Wicksen was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Thanks for putting the construction crew to work for us.”

“The numbers that the safety people ran on their computer said that four meters of regolith rubble should protect you from the radiation blast—if they got the yield from the bomb right.”

“Whether it works or not, we all feel a lot better knowing we can sit in the shelter while we’re running the gun. Thanks a lot.”

“Nothing to it. The construction people have nothing else to do.”

Turning back toward the mass driver, Wicksen made a wistful little sigh. “I sure wish we had time to test this beast.”

“So do I,” Doug said fervently. “So do I.”

SAVANNAH

“But I must speak to Seigo Yamagata,” said Ibrahim al-Rashid. “It is most urgent.”

Rashid’s office had once belonged to Joanna Brudnoy, when she had been chairman of Masterson Corporation’s board of directors. Many was the time that she had summoned him into her sanctum and he had dutifully scurried to her in response. Once he had acceded to the chairmanship, however, Rashid had completely refurnished and redecorated the office. His desk was a sweeping, curving modernistic work of glass, his high-backed black leather chair custom-built to his measurements. The walls were adorned with tapestries from Persia and India, the windows were actually wall screens that could display any of thousands of scenes stored in his personal computer’s memory.

One of those screens now showed the image of a young Japanese man in an open-neck white shirt and tastefully checkered sports jacket, sitting at a desk in an office panelled in what appeared to be teak.

“Seigo Yamagata is not available at present,” he said in the homogenized American English of a television announcer. “I am Saito Yamagata, his eldest son. May I be of assistance to you?”

“I must speak to your father,” Rashid demanded.

The younger Yamagata smiled gently and said, “I regret to tell you once again that he is not available.”

Rashid felt as if he were talking to a brick wall. Or worse, a large soft pillow that absorbed his words without being moved by them in the slightest.

“This is important!”

“Of course it is,” Yamagata agreed readily. “That is why the staff has routed your call to me, rather than some underling.”

Rashid blinked with surprise. “You mean that you are in charge?”

His face going serious, the young man replied, “My father left instructions that you are to be received by his personal representative and no one else. That personal representative is me.”

Sinking back in his cushioned leather chair, Rashid recognized the oriental manner of stonewalling: polite, gracious, accommodating, but stonewalling just the same.

“How may I help you?” Saito Yamagata asked solicitously.

Bowing to the inevitable, Rashid said, through gritted teeth, “I have received information that among the Peacekeeper troops marching on Moonbase there is a special contingent of Yamagata suicide bombers who intend to blow up Moonbase.”

Yamagata’s brows rose a couple of millimeters.

“Destroying Moonbase is idiotic!” Rashid snapped, unable to contain his temper any longer. “Our entire operation, my whole understanding with your father, depends on Moonbase providing helium-three for your fusion generators. How can they provide anything if the base is blown to bits?” He fairly shouted the question.

Saito Yamagata’s expression had gone from polite interest to mild surprise to the absolute blank face of a man who has much to hide.

“Is your information trustworthy?” he asked softly.

“I have my sources both in United Nations headquarters and the Peacekeepers’ chain of command.”

“I see.”

“This is a betrayal of our understanding,” Rashid said harshly. “It also destroys the very thing that your father wants so badly—Moonbase.”

The young man nodded. “The suicide bombers are not Yamagata employees. They are volunteers from the Bright New Sun, an organization of fanatics that is allied with your own New Morality movement.”

“Then how are they allowed to be with the Peacekeepers? Who permitted them to come to Nippon One?”

“My father accepted their…” Yamagata searched for the right word, “…their help, most reluctantly. You must understand that even in Japan, religious zealotry is a very powerful force.”

“But you’re going to allow them to destroy Moonbase!”

Yamagata smiled thinly. “Not at all. My father is not stupid. He bowed to the pressures of the Bright New Sun and allowed them to add a squad of kamikazes to the Peacekeeper force. But they will not be permitted to damage Moonbase. The Peacekepers will take the base and there will be no need for suicide bombers.”

Rashid closed his eyes for a few moments, trying hard to think it all through.

“Suppose,” he said at last,’that the Peacekeepers fail to take Moonbase.”

“Impossible,” said Yamagata.

“They drove off the first attack, didn’t they?”

Yamagata smiled again. “This time there are three hundred troops, armed with missiles and heavy weapons. A nuclear bomb will knock out Moonbase’s electrical supply. This time they will not fail.”

“But those people at Moonbase are very clever,” Rashid insisted. “Suppose they stop the Peacekeepers?”

With a slight shrug, Yamagata said, “Then there will be no option except allowing the kamikazes to blow up as much of Moonbase as they can.”

“But that is lunacy!”

“A clever play on words,” the young man said, although his expression showed no humor.

“You can’t let them blow up Moonbase!” Rashid yelled.

“The forces are in motion,” said Yamagata. “How they will play out remains to be seen. Even if Moonbase is entirely destroyed, it can be rebuilt.”

“But… but—”

“Patience is a virtue, Mr Rashid. Yamagata Industries will receive the U.N.’s mandate to operate Moonbase, no matter what condition the base may be in when the fighting is finished. If necessary, we will rebuild it. The important thing is that Moonbase will be in our hands.”

It was not until that instant that Rashid realized he had put his future into the hands of ruthless men.

Only a few miles away, Joanna paced restlessly through the living room of her home.

“A new exercise regime?” Lev asked, stretched out on the big sofa across from the unused fireplace.

“How can you just sit there?” she blurted. “The Peacekeepers have already started their march to Alphonsus.”

Her husband made a wry face. “What can we do about it? The decisions are in Doug’s hands. Working ourselves into heart seizures won’t help.”

“If only we could get there…”

“And give Doug two more useless people to worry about?”

She whirled and rushed toward him. “Lev, call him. Talk to him. Make him understand that he’s got to surrender! He can’t fight the Peacekeepers! They’ll kill everyone in Moonbase.”

Slowly, like a weary old man, Lev swung his legs off the sofa and sat up. He grasped Joanna’s wrist and pulled her down onto the cushion beside him.

“Listen to me, dear one. Doug understands the situation as well as we do, or better. He knows what he can do to defend the base—”

“Against missiles and nuclear bombs? You saw the news broadcast!”

Lev put a finger on her lips, silencing her for the moment.

“It isn’t our decision to make,” he said softly. “If I called him, not only would it distract him from the thousands of vital things he must think about, but I would end up agreeing with him—victory or death!”

Joanna stared at him as if he had gone mad. “Victory or… what are you saying?”

“Doug believes in Moonbase with all his soul,” Lev replied. “To him, it is his world, his life. He won’t want to live in a world without Moonbase.”

“No,” Joanna said, feeling weak with shock. “That can’t be. Doug can come back here. He can live with us. I’ll protect him, guard him…” Her voice faded into silence.

Lev shook his head. “Not all the fanatics belong to the New Morality, my darling. In his own very rational way, your son is a fanatic, too. That’s what it takes to fight hopeless odds.”

Joanna sank back into the sofa, stunned with the realization that Lev understood Doug better than she did.

And in the security office in the servants’ wing of the house, Jack Killifer leaned over his partner’s shoulder, grinning at the camera display of the Brudnoys in their living room.

Rodriguez glanced up at Killifer. “You ought to be in the kitchen. That’s your post, not here.”

Killifer grinned at him. “The entertainment’s better in here.”

MOONBASE

“There they are.”

Doug stared at the smart wall display in Jinny Anson’s office. Three columns of tracked vehicles had come up over the horizon and were moving majestically across the barren plain of Mare Nubium, churning up plumes of dust from the regolith. He realized that the dust had lain there undisturbed for billions of years. No, not really undisturbed, he reminded himself. Meteroids fell into the regolith constantly, adding to it, grinding it up, creating the dust that the cleated tracks of the Peacekeeper force were now violating.

The cameras atop Mount Yeager and two other peaks in the Alphonsus ringwall showed the approaching attackers clearly. Ahead of the middle column rode a smaller tractor, clean white except for a blue patch on its side.

“Can we get a close-up of that lead vehicle?” he asked quietly.

Anson worked her keyboard and the view zoomed in on the first tractor. The blue square was the U.N. emblem: a polar projection map of Earth on a sky-blue background, surrounded by a pair of olive branches.

Doug snorted with disdain. Olive branches. The symbol of peace. Leading three columns of soldiers and weaponry devoted to conquering Moonbase.

“We’d better get down to the control center,” Anson said. Her voice was hushed, strained, just as Doug’s.

“Right,” he said tightly.

Robert T. Wicksen got the news in his helmet earphones.

Automatically he looked across the crater floor toward Wodjohowitcz Pass. From where the mass driver stood, the pass appeared as little more than a dimple in the ring of rounded smooth mountains.

“What about the missile at L-1?” he asked, his voice shaking just slightly.

“Still sitting there,” came the voice from the control center.

Wicksen puffed out a relieved breath. “Keep me informed, please.”

“Will do.”

Clicking to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wicksen called out. “Listen up, people. The Peacekeeper troops are coming across Mare Nubium. The balloon will be going up very soon now.”

A dead silence greeted his warning. None of his exhausted team had a word to say.

Vince Falcone was swearing under his breath, but his mut-terings were loud enough for one of his technicians to ask, “Repeat, please. I didn’t get it.”

“You don’t want it,” Falcone said into his helmet microphone.

He and six picked assistants were trying to spread the smart foamgel across the narrowest portion of Wodjohowitcz Pass from storage canisters on the backs of the tractors they were driving. The work was slow, tedious, and made exasperatingly difficult by the fact that the gel tended to clot in the hoses instead of flowing smoothly, as the chemists had promised.

When the clotting problem had first surfaced, hours earlier, Falcone had told his people merely to increase the pressure on the nitrogen gas they were using to force the gel out of the storage tanks. But nitrogen was rare and precious on the Moon, and Falcone quickly saw that they weren’t going to have enough to do the job. He had originally wanted to use oxygen for the pressure gas, it was plentiful and cheap, but the chemists had worried that oxygen would react with the gel and change its chemical properties too much.

“Helium would be best,” the chief chemist had mused. “If only we had enough helium…”

So they had settled on nitrogen, raiding the life support backup supplies for two dozen tanks of it. And now it wasn’t doing the job.

Time and again, Falcone and his cohorts had to stop their tractors and physically clean out the jammed hoses with wire brushes that the chemists had provided them.

“Everything in chemistry comes down to plumbing,” Falcone muttered to himself. “Might as well be cleaning a goddamned latrine.”

A voice crackled in his earphones. “What I don’t understand is why nobody’s hardening the microwave antennas against radiation.”

Falcone looked up from his work and tried to identify the questioner as his voice continued, “I mean, like what good is this goop gonna do if the antennas are knocked out by the nuke’s radiation pulse?”

Newman, Falcone decided. He never could see past his friggin’ nose. “What happens if Wix’s smart guys don’t stop the nuke?” he demanded.

For a moment no one replied, then Newman said, “The warhead goes off above the crater floor, right?”

“And what happens then?”

“Uh… it knocks out the solar farms.”

“And where do the antennas get their electricity?”

“From the… oh, yeah, I get it. If the nuke goes off the antennas are dead anyway, right?”

“So there’s no sense sending anybody up to the top of Yeager to harden the antennas. Capisce?’

No response, although Falcone thought he heard stifled giggling from somebody.

A few minutes later his earphones chimed, so he dropped his brush and let the kinked hose fall gently to the ground as he tapped the keypad on his wrist.

A comm tech’s voice announced, “Peacekeeper vehicles are in sight, crossing Mare Nubium.”

“How long before they reach the pass?” he asked.

“Unknown. The thinking here is that they’ll stop and camp at the foot of the ringwall until the nuke from L-1 hits.”

Grunting an inarticulate reply, Falcone arched his back slightly and looked through his visor up to the top of Mount Yeager, where the microwave transmitters stood. For the first time he realized that this entire ‘blue goo’ business was totally untested.

Christ, I hope it works, he said to himself. If that nuke isn’t stopped by Wicksen’s zap gun, the microwave transmitters’ll be knocked out and all our work will have gone for nothing.

And, he added as he bent stiffly to pick up the jammed hose again, we got a damned good chance of still being out here and getting fried to a crisp by the mother-humpin’ nuke.

The control center was changed. The same hushed intensity, the same low-key lighting, the same hum of murmuring voices and purring electronic machines. Yet the air crackled now; the very smell of the control center was different: nervous, sweaty. It wasn’t fear that Doug sensed from the technicians monitoring their consoles, so much as a focused motivation, anxiety masked by the duties of the moment.

Jinny Anson slipped into an unoccupied chair next to the U-shaped set of communications consoles, while Doug paced slowly through the big chamber, walking behind the seated technicians, glancing at each individual display screen. On one side of the room glowed the huge schematic display of Moonbase’s systems. The opposite wall showed camera views of the approaching Peacekeeper armada and the spacecraft hovering around the L-1 space station.

Doug completed his circuit of the center and returned to Anson’s chair.

“Everything we can do, we’re doing,” he said.

Anson looked up at him. “It’s sweaty palms time now.”

Looking at the view of the approaching Peacekeeper vehicles, Doug said, “The longer they take, the better it is for us. Time’s on our side.”

“For now,” said Anson.

He nodded. “Better put out an announcement that all personnel without specific tasks for the defense of the base should meet in The Cave.”

Anson hiked her brows. “Not stay in their quarters?”

“No, get them into The Cave. Food’s there, and it’ll be easier to deal with them if they’re all together instead of strung out in their individual quarters. There might be fighting in the corridors; I don’t want anybody hurt unnecessarily.”

“Collateral damage,” Anson muttered, turning to the console keyboard.

The editing booth felt hot and stuffy. Edith sat at the big board, watching the array of display screens half-surrounding her, showing views of the approaching Peacekeepers and the spacecraft at L-1.

“The first shot in this battle has already been fired,” she was saying into the microphone that sent her words Earthside. “The U.N. Peacekeepers knocked out a reconnaissance satellite that Moonbase had placed in orbit to observe the Peacekeepers’ movements.”

She pressed the stud that sent the view from Mount Yeager’s camera Earthward. “Now the Peacekeeper assault force is moving across Mare Nubium, approaching Moonbase. What you are seeing now…”

Georges Faure was far from composed as he sat in his office, watching the broadcast of Global News. He fidgeted in his big chair, seething with anger. To think that this woman, this slut of a reporter who had seduced him into allowing her to accompany the original Peacekeeper force to the Moon, to think that she was such a traitor, such a propagandist for the rebels—it exasperated him.

Yet a part of him was thrilled at the sight of the Peacekeeper armada crossing Mare Nubium. These are my troops, Faure told himself, marching under my orders. Let the news media say what they will, in a matter of hours Moonbase will be under my control, as it should be.

And if those rebellious fools attempt the resistance, they will be crushed. As they should be.

Colonel Giap compared the electronic map on the display screen of his tractor’s cab with the view of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains looming before him. His tractor cab was pressurized and armored, so he could ride with the visor of his spacesuit helmet open. He could have made this journey in shirtsleeves, had he chosen to, but that would have meant that he would have to don his spacesuit once they arrived at their designated campsite. He had decided to endure the discomfort of forty-three hours in the spacesuit, instead.

Most of the trip he had spent worrying about nanomachines. Moonbase had no weapons to speak of, he knew, but what kind of devilish weaponry could their nanoscientists devise? Nanomachines had driven off the first Peacekeeper attack. Giap had chosen broad daylight to make his assault, but inside the tunnels of Moonbase the purifying effect of solar ultraviolet did not penetrate. That is why Giap had included special teams of civilians with powerful UV lamps to accompany his troops. He did not intend to be run off by invisible, insidious nanoweapons.

Their base camp location had been carefully chosen to position them close to the two easiest passes over the ringwall mountains, while still placing them within the sheltering lee of the mountains themselves. Those solid piles of rock would protect them from the radiation pulse of the nuclear explosion. There was no need to worry about blast effects in the lunar vacuum, but even if there were the mountains would shelter them, just as it will protect us from the radiation and heat pulse, Giap assured himself.

Still, a tendril of worry gnawed at him. The missile must be accurately aimed. And its warhead must be fused at precisely the correct altitude. If it goes off too soon, or its aim is a fraction of a degree off-target, we could be hit by the heat and radiation.

He reached out a gloved hand to touch the armored roof of the tractor’s cab. Enough protection against a slightly mis-aimed nuclear warhead? he wondered. More likely the metal would serve as an efficient oven, to roast us all to death.

Shaking his head inside the helmet, he tried to push such fears away by attending to his duties. He established communications contact with L-1, although the link was weak and strained with harsh bursts of static. The tractor comm sets were far from satisfactory and sunspots or some other esoteric phenomena could hash up communications quite maddeningly.

The image of a Peacekeeper junior officer appeared on the little screen, wavering slightly and streaked with electronic snow.

“We are on schedule,” Giap informed the junior officer. “All my vehicles will be at their assigned base camp positions within two hours.”

“Very well,” came the woman’s voice, through hissing static. “Missile launch will proceed on schedule unless you order otherwise.”

“Yes, launch on schedule,” said Giap, wondering how firm a comm link they would have once his vehicle was parked up close to the ringwall mountains.

THE WHITE HOUSE

“Mrs President, you’ve got real troubles with this Moonbase business.”

The President gave her staff chief a chilling look, the kind that had been known to cause lesser men to write out their resignations.

The chief of the White House staff was an old hand at this kind of thing, though; he had been with the President since she had first run for the Senate, many elections earlier.

“I mean,” he said, hunching forward in the Kennedy rocker in front of her broad, modern desk,’the poll numbers are changing so fast we can’t keep up with them.”

“The trend?” she snapped.

“Swinging steadily in favor of Moonbase. Those news broadcasts Global’s airing are turning the public’s opinion around a hundred eighty degrees.”

The President turned her chair away from this man she knew so well, away from his earnest, worried face and the problems that slumped his shoulders. She looked out through the long windows to the flower garden that had soothed both Roosevelts and everyone else who had sat at this apex of power in the Oval Office.

“I mean it, Luce,” her staff chief said,’this has turned into real trouble.”

“What about the New Morality?” she asked, still without looking at him.

He did the unthinkable. He got up from the rocking chair and walked around her desk, forcing her to face him.

Bending his knees slightly and leaning his liver-spotted hands on them so his eyes were on the same level as hers, he said gently, “They’re not going to be enough, Luce. The public’s demanding that you do something.”

She glared at him and swung back to the desk. He returned to the rocking chair.

“Are you telling me that O’Conner and Previs and all the other New Morality leaders are abandoning me on this?”

“No, not at all,” he said, raising his hands. “The hard core of the Faithful are with you as much as they’ve ever been. They see this fight on the Moon as the battle between the forces of good and the evils of nanotechnology.”

“So where’s my problem?”

“It’s the peripherals,” he said with a sigh. “You’ve got the hard core, they’re solidly with you. But the hard core isn’t that many votes, Luce! The New Morality’s real strength has been in its numbers, yeah, but most of those numbers aren’t fanatics. They’re ordinary folks who think the New Morality’s ideas about cleaning up crime and vice are pretty good.”

“And now?”

“Now they’re looking at their television screens and seeing the big, bad U.N. attacking poor little Moonbase. And most of those people at Moonbase are Americans.”

“Who use nanomachines.”

The staff chief shook his head. “The voters don’t care that much about the nanomachines. What’s getting them worked up is the sight of a bunch of Americans getting attacked by the Peacekeepers—who are mostly foreigners.”

“But they elected me because I pushed the nanotech treaty.”

“That’s not important to them now. As long as the Moon people keep their nanomachines on the Moon, the average American voter doesn’t care a gnat’s fart about it.”

The President glared at her staff chief for long icy moments.

He gave her a weak grin. “Don’t blame the messenger for the message,” he said.

She huffed at him, then reached out and flicked on her desktop computer. “I want to see these numbers for myself.”

The staff chief leaned back in the rocker and watched her face as the data from the constantly ongoing public-opinion poll flickered across her screen.

When she finally looked up at him she asked, “What should I do?”

“Call Faure and tell him to back off, maybe?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! It’s much too late for that.”

“At least tell him that you’re concerned about the safety of the American citizens at Moonbase.”

“But they’ve declared their independence! They don’t want American citizenship!”

“We don’t know if that’s just a ploy or not. Either way, there’re probably a lot of men and women up there who want to keep their citizenship and come back to the States as soon as they can.”

The President shook her head. “I can’t weasel on Faure. I’ve been one of his strongest supporters! If I turn on him now, the word of this Administration will be worthless all around the world. Nobody would trust us again.”

“I’m thinking about your re-election campaign.”

She waved a hand in the air. “That’s next year, for God’s sake. By that time Moonbase will be under U.N. control and this whole flap will be forgotten.”

Her staff chief still looked worried.

“All right,” the President said,’so Yamagata will be running Moonbase and taking over the spacecraft market. If Masterson Corporation goes for it, what am I going to do about it?”

“Once the opposition starts gnawing on that bone…”

She shook her head stubbornly.

“They’re already starting to make noises in the Senate,” he insisted. “Joanna Brudnoy’s been talking with half the committee chairmen on the Hill.”

“It’s a fait accompli,” the President said curtly. “In another forty-eight hours or so the Peacekeepers will have taken over Moonbase and this whole problem will resolve itself.”

“Maybe,” the staff chief said softly. “But what happens if Moonbase drives the Peacekeepers off? They did it once, you know.”

She scoffed at him. “That’s impossible and you know it.”

“Yeah. But still…”

“Don’t you intend to sleep?” Lev Brudnoy asked his wife.

Joanna sat in the exact center of the largest sofa in their living room, her eyes riveted to the big Windowall screen above the dark fireplace.

“I couldn’t sleep if I tried, Lev,” she replied. “Not with this going on.”

The screen showed the view from the cameras atop Mount Yeager. The Peacekeepers’ vehicles were slowing to a halt at the base of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains. They were arranging themselves in a single thin, undulating line that snaked along the flank of the mountains, each newly arriving tractor taking its position at the end of the constantly growing line. The cameras’ resolution was fine enough to spot individual soldiers, if any appeared, but the vehicles stayed tightly buttoned up. Joanna could see the spokes of their springy wheels and the cleats on the tractors’ treads, but no person got out of the vehicles.

They’re waiting, Joanna thought. Waiting for the missile that will be launched from L-1. Then they’ll attack. They’ll storm Moonbase, and Doug will try to stop them and they’ll kill my son and destroy everything.

Brudnoy sank his lanky frame onto the sofa next to her, murmuring, “At least we could go upstairs and watch from bed. Nothing is going to happen for another nine or ten hours, at least.”

“You go if you’re getting sleepy,” Joanna said, not moving her eyes from the screen. Edie Elgin had been speaking for nearly an hour, but now her voice had stopped and the screen was silent.

He shrugged and sat beside her for several minutes. “This is like watching ice melt,” he grumbled. “It’s hypnotic. Don’t you feel your eyes growing heavy? Sleepy? Drowsy?”

Joanna poked at him with her elbow. “Stop it, Lev!”

“At least come up to bed,” he urged. “The screen up there will show the same picture, I assure you.”

“No.”

Brudnoy got slowly to his feet, then bent down to put his bearded face in front of Joanna’s, noses almost touching.

“My darling wife,” he said, blocking her view of the screen. “I have seldom insisted on my rights as your lord and master—”

“My what?”

“But there comes a time when a man must do what a man must do. Either you come up to the bedroom with me or I will be forced to carry you.”

“We’re not on the Moon, Lev,” Joanna said, smiling at him despite herself. “You’ll give yourself a hernia.”

“That will be entirely your fault, not mine,” he said, very seriously. With that, he reached one arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her legs.

“All right!” Joanna yelped. “All right! I’ll go upstairs. I’ll go with you.”

Brudnoy straightened up. “Good,” he said, offering her his hand.

And as she allowed her husband to help her up from the sofa and started for the bedroom, Jack Killifer—watching from the dining room door that he had opened a crack—also said, “Good,” in a whisper that only he could hear.

Doug was nervously munching a sandwich, sitting on one of the spindly chairs in front of a console in the control center. Like his mother, like the millions of people Earthside watching Global News, like the men and women who had gathered in The Cave to wait out the battle, Doug was watching the camera views from Mount Yeager.

“They’re not doing anything,” he murmured.

Bam Gordette, standing slightly behind Doug like a bodyguard, said, “That’s the army: hurry up and wait.”

Doug thought that the thirty-klicks-per-hour pace of the Peacekeepers’ vehicles hardly qualified for hurrying up, but they were definitely waiting now.

The control center had settled into a waiting mode also. Everything that could be done to prepare Moonbase’s defenses had been done. Nick O’Malley paced nervously a few consoles away, hoping that his dust would work as he had promised. Vince Falcone and his crew had finally come back from Wodjo Pass, grumbling and griping about the foamgel’s intractability but satisfied that they had covered as much of the pass as they could.

Wix and his people are still working on the particle gun, Doug knew. They’re the key to our defense, the crucial link in the chain. If they can’t stop that nuclear missile we might as well surrender. We’ll have to surrender.

Nothing had moved out on the Mare Nubium for at least an hour.

“They’re waiting for the missile strike,” Doug said to no one in particular.

As if in response, one of the comm techs sang out, “They’ve launched! Rocket flare from L-1. Their missile’s heading our way.”

MASS DRIVER

Robert T. Wicksen was still outside, checking the wiring connections from the main magnets to the hastily installed switching panel, when the word came from the control center:

“L-1’s launched their bird.”

By reflex, he looked up. Instead of the sky he saw the inside of his helmet, dark and confining.

“How much time do we have?” he asked calmly.

“Wait one,” the comm tech’s voice said in his earphones. Then he heard her muttering, “Doppler plot… burn rate…acceleration—looks like… one hundred fifty-six minutes, according to the computer.”

“Two and a half hours, plus six minutes.”

“If they don’t light a second stage.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Will do.”

Switching to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wix told the four volunteers still working with him, “We have two and a half hours. Double check everything.”

The spacesuited figures bent to their work.

“That’s the nuke,” Doug muttered.

“Must be,” said Jinny Anson. Like Doug, she was staring at the screen showing the blunt-nosed missile. It seemed to be hanging in space now that its rocket engine had shut down; the stars in the background did not move.

Two and a half hours, Doug thought. What have we forgotten to do? Looking up, he traced the glowing lines on the electronic map of the base that covered one entire wall of the control center. Water factory, environmental control center, electrical power—they’re as protected as they’ll ever be. Turning to the insect-eye array of screens at the console he had commandeered, Doug saw displays of Wodjohowitcz Pass and the crater floor. Off near the brutally short horizon he could barely make out the ant-like forms of Wix and his volunteers still tinkering at the mass driver.

Another screen showed the crowd in The Cave. They seemed calm enough. They’re safe, he told himself. Even if Wix’s gun fails and the nuke blasts out the solar farms, they’ll be unharmed. We’ll have to surrender, I guess, but they’ll be safe.

Then a new fear assailed him. If they knock out our electrical power we’ll only have a few hours’ worth of juice from the backup fuel cells. The Peacekeepers must have emergency power generators with them. They’ve got to! Otherwise everybody here will die in a couple of hours, asphyxiated from lack of air to breathe.

The Peacekeepers won’t want to kill us all, he told himself. They’ll have emergency power supplies with them. Otherwise this’ll be a slaughter.

“Why aren’t you in The Cave?” Kris Cardenas asked.

Zimmerman looked up from the scanning probe microscope’s image-intensifier screen at his unexpected visitor. Keiji Inoguchi, on the other side of the room at the processor control board, stared at the sandy-haired, trim-figured Cardenas as if she were a video star.

“And why should I be at The Cave? Am I expected at a party?”

“Everyone who’s not assigned to a defense task is supposed to go to The Cave.”

“Pah!” Zimmerman snapped his fingers.

“Doug Stavenger’s orders,” Cardenas said.

“So why are you not in The Cave?” Zimmerman demanded.

She grinned as if she enjoyed fencing with him. “I’m on duty at the infirmary. I just ran up here to see how much of a supply of therapeutic nanobugs you had left for us.”

“We are still working on them,” Zimmerman said.

Turning her cornflower blue eyes to Inoguchi, Cardenas asked, “And you’re helping him?”

Inoguchi bowed deeply, then replied, “It is my privilege to assist Professor Zimmerman, yes.”

“But you’re one of the U.N. inspectors, aren’t you?”

“Yes, that is true. But the medical work we are doing here is beyond the scope of politics.”

Zimmerman scowled. “He’s learning everything he can in preparation for running the nanolab once Yamagata takes over the base.”

Inoguchi looked stricken. “I am assisting you for humanitarian reasons!”

“You are spying on me,” Zimmerman grumbled.

“Now Willi,” Cardenas intervened, “you can’t attack Professor Inoguchi like that! It’s not polite and it isn’t fair.”

“Yah. Of course. Only it is true.”

“It’s not Professor Inoguchi’s fault that we’re being attacked,” Cardenas said. “I think it’s very generous of him to assist us.”

Inoguchi said, “I am most honored to work with you both.”

“And looking forward to running this lab once the Peacekeepers have driven us out,” Zimmerman insisted.

Squaring his shoulders visibly, Inoguchi said, “Yes, that is true. What would you expect me to do, go back to Japan and allow someone else to take over this laboratory?”

Cardenas laughed. “He’s right, Willi. Why shouldn’t he want to run this facility? It’s the most advanced in the world.”

“In the solar system!” Zimmerman corrected.

To Cardenas, Inoguchi said, “I have offered a position here to Professor Zimmerman. I would be most honored if you, a Nobel Laureate, would remain here to continue your work.”

Cardenas replied, “Assuming that the Peacekeepers actually do take over the base.”

“And hand it over to Yamagata Industries,” Zimmerman groused.

Inoguchi snapped his chin down in a nod that almost became a little bow.

Her smile fading, Cardenas said, “Would you offer a position to my husband, as well? He’s a neurosurgeon. I won’t stay here if he can’t.”

Inoguchi immediately answered, “Yes, of course.”

“Most of the work Pete’s done has been by virtual reality link Earthside, since we’ve come up to Moonbase,” Cardenas mused, thinking out loud. “If he can continue doing that he’ll stay. Otherwise we’ll have a problem.”

“Perhaps I can obtain an appointment with Tokyo University for him,” Inoguchi said. “Or Osaka. He could remain at Moonbase indefinitely and work with his colleagues through electronic links.”

“Is your husband at The Cave?” Zimmerman asked sourly.

“No,” Cardenas said, turning her attention to the old man. “He’s at the infirmary, ready to help the medics with any surgery that might be needed.”

“I sincerely hope that it will not come to that,” Inoguchi said.

“So do we all,” said Cardenas.

Claire Rossi felt as if she were in a nightmare. She moved through the crowd milling around in The Cave with nothing to do, nowhere to go, and the vision of that missile hanging over her head in the big wall screens.

“Can I buy you lunch?”

Whirling, she saw Nick O’Malley, big, lumbering redhead, grinning down at her.

“Nick! Why aren’t you in the control center?”

“They let me out to eat now and then,” he said, sliding an arm around her waist. “Come on, I’ll buy you the best soyburger in town.”

He kept up a cheerful patter as they picked up trays and made their selections from the stainless steel dispensers. Once they were seated at a table for two off in a far corner of The Cave, O’Malley dug into his burger.

But Claire found she had no appetite. “I can’t eat anything,” she said, sliding her plate away from her.

O’Malley pushed it back. “Hey, you’re eating for two, you know. Got to keep up your strength.”

She looked up at the wall screen, with the missile hanging there like the ringer of death pointed at them.

“They’re going to kill us all, aren’t they?” she said, her voice choking in her throat.

O’Malley clutched her hand. “Nobody’s going to get killed. We’re safe and snug in here.”

“Don’t try to kid me, Nick. Without electrical power we’re done.”

“If they nuke the solar farms—and that’s an if, mind you -Doug will surrender and the Peacekeepers will come in without firing a shot. Nobody’s going to die in defense of Moonbase, don’t you worry.”

“You’re certain?”

O’Malley’s florid face turned solemn. “Listen, Claire darling. I’m stationed in the control center, running the dust. I’ll be right beside Stavenger. If he doesn’t surrender I’ll clout him on the head and take over. I’ll surrender for him, if I have to.”

Claire tried to smile for him, but she wondered if her husband really had the strength to do what he promised.

“We’ve got a second-stage burn!” the comm tech yelped.

Wicksen jerked with surprise. “What?”

“Second-stage burn,” she repeated. “They held off on it until they made their midcourse correction. Accelerated by a factor of two, at least. Computer’s chewing on the numbers.”

“How much time do we have?” Wicksen asked, feeling frightened for the first time.

“Looks like… forty-two minutes.”

“By all the saints in heaven,” Wicksen muttered. “All right, thanks for the bad news.”

Banging the suit-to-suit key on his wrist pad, Wix called out, “New data. We’ve got forty minutes, max.”

The four spacesuited figures all turned toward him.

“I know it’s not enough time,” Wicksen said. “Power up the magnets. Check out all the connections. I’ll slave the pointing system to the control center’s radar plot.”

“Better warn the base they’re gonna get browned out,” one of his assistants said.

“Right,” said Wicksen, running as fast as he could in the cumbersome spacesuit to the jury-rigged set of pointing magnets.

This has got to work the first time, he said to himself. It’s got to! If there’s a saint in heaven who can cancel Murphy’s Law for a few minutes, now’s the time to do it.

It was as close to prayer as Wicksen had ever come.

Jack Killifer fidgeted nervously in the kitchen of Joanna Brudnoy’s house. The closer he got to his goal, the more jittery he felt.

Stop it! he commanded himself. Calm yourself down.

He wasn’t afraid to kill Joanna Brudnoy, nor her Russian feeb of a husband. It was getting away with it that worried him. Sure, his ID in the Masterson files had been artfully faked. Anybody looking for his picture or prints in the computer would get a totally artificial set of pixels. Nobody was going to trace him that way.

It was the other security personnel that worried him. They knew his face. Even with the moustache and change in his hair color, they’d be able to identify him.

General O’Conner’ll take care of me, he tried to assure himself. The Urban Corps had plenty of resources. They could provide him with a complete alibi, show the police that Killifer had been on assignment in Tacoma or Timbuktu, all neatly filed in their computer records.

They had outfaced Interpol, for God’s sake, when the international investigators had come asking about Tamara Bonai’s death. Thanks to O’Conner’s people, Killifer had an iron-clad alibi and Doug Stavenger’s identification had been tossed aside. The cops didn’t trust virtual reality evidence, anyway: too easy to fake or spoof.

But why did O’Conner insist on me doing this alone? Killifer asked himself again and again.

‘God’s work has to be done by God’s people, Jack.’ the general had told him. ‘It would be wrong to bring in an outsider. Wrong, and dangerous. The fewer people know about this, the better off we are.’

He wouldn’t have to bring in outside people, for crap’s sake, Killifer growled to himself. He could get a dozen Urban Corps volunteers or people from one of the other New Morality groups. Shit, they’ve knocked off hundreds of people over the past few years. Why do I have to take on Joanna Brudnoy alone?

Because you’re the one who wants to do her, the answer came to him. O’Conner doesn’t give a fuck about Joanna; this is your vendetta, not his. That’s why he won’t give you any support, any backup.

Okay, he told himself, trying to steady his trembling hands. She’s in the bedroom with her old man. You’re the only security guard inside the house, except for Rodriguez monitoring the security cameras down in the servants’ quarters. You just go upstairs and pop her. The husband, too. Maybe they’re screwing and you can get them both with one shot. He almost laughed at the thought.

But what then? Killifer had rehearsed his moves a thousand times in his mind, but it still didn’t come out right. Rodriguez won’t hear the shots, he’s too far away, too many walls between him and the bedroom.

Okay. Once you leave the bedroom Rodriguez can see you on the security cameras. So you go back to the kitchen and out to the garage, just like you’re doing your regular rounds. Only, you get into your car and get the fuck out of here before he figures out that they’re dead up in the bedroom.

And then what? Drive straight to Atlanta, he told himself. Straight to Urban Corps headquarters and General O’Conner. Let them hide your car. Stick close to the General, make sure he’ll protect you if the cops or Masterson’s security people come after you.

That’ll work, he tried to assure himself. It’ll be okay. O’Conner’ll have this killing on me, but I’ll have something on him, too: his helping me to get away with it.

Grimacing, he slid the heavy machine pistol out of the oiled holster at his hip and popped its magazine. Fully loaded, ready to go. He slid the magazine back into place, then worked the action with a metallic click-dick, jacking a round into the firing chamber.

Making certain the safety was off, Killifer carefully slipped the pistol back into its holster, then pushed himself up from the kitchen table and started off toward Joanna Brudnoy’s bedroom.

CONTROL CENTER

The astronomical telescope’s view showed the incoming missile pointing at them, more and more of a nose-on view as it sped to its target in the crater Alphonsus. Doug watched the display screen almost as if hypnotized.

“For what it’s worth,” came a man’s voice from beside him,’the dust containers are all in place.”

Turning, Doug saw Nick O’Malley’s muscular form sitting beside him. The man seemed much too heavy for the little wheeled chair; it looked as if the chair would collapse under him at any moment.

“Back from The Cave so soon?” Doug asked.

O’Malley nodded. “Nobody’s got much of an appetite just now.”

Doug saw Gordette standing a few paces away. “Bam, when’s the last time you took a break?”

“I’m okay,” Gordette said, folding his arms over his chest.

“Go grab a bite to eat,” Doug ordered. “While there’s still time.”

“I’m okay,” Gordette repeated stolidly.

“That’s the nuke?” O’Malley asked, pointing to the screen on Doug’s console.

That’s it.”

“How soon?”

“Should hit in twenty-five minutes or less.”

“What’s Wicksen waiting for?”

“He knows what he’s doing,” said Doug, wishing he felt as confident as he was trying to sound.

Then the overhead lights, always dim inside the control center, went off altogether. The display screens wavered and faded, hundreds of electronic eyes blinking, then steadied. A low moaning gasp echoed through the rock-walled chamber. “It’s okay!” Doug yelled. “Wicksen’s powering up the beam gun. We expected this. The auxiliary power system’s cut in.

Still he felt the cold hand of fear clutching his innards.

“Power’s up to ninety percent,” said the physicist.

Wicksen, bending over the makeshift control board inside the buried emergency shelter, saw a swathe of green lights interspersed with a handful of yellows. No reds, he told himself. So far, so good.

“Power to max,” he said quietly.

There was no whine of generators spinning up, no vibration from powerful machinery. Just the low background hum of electrical gadgetry in the cramped, round-ceilinged little shelter. The five of them had taken off their helmets; there’d been no time to get out of the suits entirely. Nor any inclination to do so.

Two red lights suddenly glowered at Wicksen. “Main buss has cut out,” he said, tension edging into his voice.

“On it,” said the only woman among his assistants. I’ll have to run a diagnostic.”

“No time. Go to the backup.”

“Right.”

The red lights remained, but a new pair of greens lit up. Wicksen glanced at the countdown clock: fourteen minutes remaining until impact.

“How’s the pointing system?” he asked.

“It’s tracking okay. Hardly any movement, the bird’s coming right down our throats.”

“Makes life simpler,” Wicksen murmured.

“Magnets are at full power.”

He nodded, blew out a breath through puffed cheeks, then leaned his right index finger on the firing button.

A multitude of red lights sprang up on the board.

“What the hell?”

“Main buss shorted out!” the woman shouted. “Backup’s malfunctioned!”

Wicksen swore under his breath. Murphy’s law. Turning toward her, he saw that her face look agonized.

“What’s the problem?” he asked calmly. Twelve minutes to impact.

“I don’t know,” she said, voice jittery, as she stared at the instruments in front of her.

Three minutes later Wicksen had satisfied himself that the main buss itself was functioning properly.

“It’s the wiring,” he said, reaching for his helmet. “The connections must have come loose.”

“That can’t be!” said the man who had done the wiring job.

“Can’t be anything else,” said Wicksen simply, as he pulled his helmet over his head.

“You’re not going out there! With the nuke less than ten minutes from detonation!”

“Somebody’s got to.”

“Let me,” said the man who had done the wiring. “It’s my responsibility.”

“We’ll both go,” said Wicksen.

Colonel Giap had taken the precaution of having the seven suicide volunteers placed in the same tractor with him. He wanted them under his eye; he was not willing to take chances that such fanatics might strike off on their own once the action started.

The American woman especially intrigued him. She was not young, and she certainly did not seem fanatical. Giap wondered what could have happened in her life to make her want to embrace death.

So he asked her. There was scarcely any privacy in the tractor, crowded with troops and the seven volunteers, all in spacesuits, but once they were safely parked in the lee of Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains, Giap clambered down onto the dusty regolith soil for a quick inspection of his vehicles.

Once satisfied that all the vehicles were properly positioned and there were no problems with the troops—except the usual complaints of soldiers everywhere—he returned to his own tractor. Instead of re-entering it, however, he ordered the American woman outside.

She came without a murmur and stood before him, an anonymous, sexless figure in a white spacesuit. Giap connected their two helmets with a communications wire, so they could speak without using their suit radios.

“I want to know,” he said without preamble, “how reliable you and your comrades are going to be.”

Without hesitation she replied, “Faithful unto death. That is our motto.”

“A motto is one thing. Soon we will be in action.”

This time her response took a few moments. At last she said, “We are pledged to give our lives to the cause of eliminating the scourge of nanotechnology. When the time comes, we will not hesitate to act.”

“I’m certain,” Giap said. “What concerns me is—what if the time does not come?”

“Does not… I don’t understand.”

“Soon a pair of missiles will knock out Moonbase’s entire electrical generation capability. They will be forced to surrender, or die within a few hours from lack of air to breath. There will be no need for you to sacrifice yourselves.”

“Oh, I see. You want to know if we will obey your orders.”

There will be no need to blow up Moonbase—and yourselves.”

“If all goes as you have planned.”

“Well?”

“You have nothing to fear,” she said easily enough. “Our pledge includes that promise to obey the authority over us. For the time being, that authority is you, Colonel.”

All well and good, Giap thought. But still he had no inkling of why this woman—or any of her comrades—was willing to throw away her life.

As if she could read his mind, she said, “You are wondering why I am not married and mothering children, or building a career for myself.”

“Yes,” he confessed. “Why have you volunteered to kill yourself?”

“Because I want to die.”

“But why?”

Without hesitation she began to tell him: of her abused childhood, of her disastrous first marriage, of her slowly evolving awareness that she was homosexual, of her second husband’s violence, of the years she spent in mental hospitals, of the casual rapes by hospital staff and the even more casual applications of mind-altering drugs in an effort to ‘rehabilitate’ her.

Giap wanted to vomit long before she was anywhere near finished. He realized why she thought quick death preferable to continued life.

To interrupt her, he looked at the watch on his wrist pad. Stopping her unbroken flow of misery, he said, “We must return to the tractor now. The missiles will be reaching their targets soon.”

“It’s the wiring, all right,” said Wicksen’s assistant. “My fault, Wix. I did a damned sloppy job. I was so rushed—”

“No time for that now,” Wicksen said. Pointing to the equipment still strewn on the ground around the mass driver, he said, “We’ve only got a few minutes to get it fixed.”

The man seemed to freeze for several heartbeats, standing immobile in his spacesuit. Then he said only, “Right.” And started for the equipment.

It’s not going to do any good, Wicksen thought. We can’t get this wiring repaired and then power up the magnets again and get everything running in ten minutes. It’s just not enough time. But he bent to his task, forcing all other thoughts out of his mind.

Until his earphones screeched, “Here it comes!”

He jerked up, saw nothing but the looming dark hulk of the mass driver. Then something jarred him off his feet. He sailed like a feather, floating, floating, until he slammed painfully into the ground.

He saw stars flashing, then nothing but darkness.

I’m dead, Wicksen thought. The nuclear warhead went off and it killed me. But why does my head hurt?

Doug and the others in the control center had been sitting tensely, waiting for Wicksen’s beam gun to disable the nuclear warhead.

The main overhead lights came on.

“What the hell?” Anson muttered loudly enough for Doug to hear.

“They’ve powered down the beam gun,” a technician’s voice said.

“Did they hit the warhead?” Doug wondered aloud.

“How could they know whether they’ve knocked it out or not?” Anson demanded. “They oughtta be shooting at it until it hits the frickin’ ground.”

Getting up from his chair, Doug called to the chief communications technician, several seats way from his own, “Can you get Wicksen for me?”

She nodded and worked her keyboard. All eyes in the control center focused on her—or on the screens showing the missile warhead streaking toward them.

“No joy,” said the comm tech.

The whole chamber shuddered. Doug felt the solid rock floor beneath his feet vibrate as if a major moonquake had struck.

“The missile hit!” a technician’s voice rang out. “Dove straight into the friggin’ ground.”

“But there wasn’t any flash,” someone said.

“Radiation counters are quiet.”

“Our nuclear reactor just went off-line,” said another technician, his voice high and quavering. “Backup power system is down.”

Doug looked from one screen to another in the insect-eye array on the console before him. It took him a few moments to realize what had happened.

“It wasn’t the nuke!” Jinny Anson’s voice sounded exultant. “They sent the conventional bomb first!”

“To check their guidance accuracy,” Doug said, his breath shuddering. He half-collapsed back onto the wheeled chair.

“And to see what we had to throw against it,” Gordette added.

Doug looked across to O’Malley. Sweat was trickling down his beefy cheeks.

“It wasn’t the nuke,” O’Malley echoed, sounding relieved, grateful.

“Yeah, okay, but they got our backup generator,” Anson said. “Now if they knock out the solar farms we’re out of it.”

“Another launch from L-1,” a comm tech announced.

’That’s the nuke,” said almost everyone in the control center, simultaneously.

MASS DRIVER

Slowly, Wicksen pulled himself up to a sitting position. If I’m not dead yet I soon will be, he thought. Radiation poisoning.

Except for the throbbing pain in the back of his head, though, he felt all right. He tried to rub his eyes but his gloved hands bumped into the visor of his helmet. Feeling sheepish, he looked around. His assistant was on his knees, getting slowly to his feet.

“You okay?” Wicksen asked.

Before the man could answer, Wicksen’s helmet earphones buzzed with an incoming message. He punched the proper key on his wristpad, noting with a bit of a shock that his radiation dose patch was still a pale chartreuse.

“Wicksen here,” he said, surprised that his voice sounded so calm.

“This is Doug Stavenger,” he heard in his earphones. “What happened?”

“We didn’t have time to fix-wait a minute! Are you running on auxiliary power or not?”

“The missile took out our nuclear generator. It was a conventional warhead. Their nuke is on its way, launched four minutes ago.”

“You mean we’ve still got two hours to get this kloodge working?” Wicksen felt elated.

“Can you do it?”

Despite his cumbersome spacesuit Wicksen jumped to his feet, not so difficult a trick in the low lunar gravity. “We’ll do our best,” he cried, overjoyed at still being alive.

Killifer checked his wristwatch before starting out on his regular rounds through the house. With Rodriguez watching everything through the security cameras, Killifer wanted to make it all seem normal, dull routine. Don’t give the dumb spic any reason to think anything’s out of the ordinary.

It was a big house, and Killifer didn’t want to look hurried. He made his way from the kitchen through the dining room and living room, then into the foyer, where he carefully checked the front door to see that it was properly locked. Across the front hall and into the library, then the entertainment room, checking each of the French windows that opened onto the patio.

Unconsciously licking his lips, he started up the back stairs, past the monstrosity of a grandfather’s clock where the security team kept a pair of submachine guns stashed away. Maybe I should take one of them, he mused. But he decided against it. His pistol held fifty rounds, plenty to do the job. Besides, taking one of the stutter guns from the clock would alert Rodriguez—if he was watching the screens instead of his favorite video show. Be just my luck to have him spot me.

So Killifer passed the loudly-ticking clock on the landing and went on up to the second floor. All the bedrooms up there were unoccupied, he knew, except the master bedroom, but his job was to enter each one and check each window.

His palms felt slippery with sweat as he neared the master bedroom. Rodriguez can see me go in there, if he’s watching the screens like he’s supposed to. I’ll have to do it fast and then duck out before he figures out what’s going down. Quite deliberately, Killifer switched off the palm-sized two-way radio he kept in his shirt pocket.

At last he stood before the master bedroom’s double doors. He had memorized the electronic lock’s combination from the list kept in the security office.

Okay, he told himself, licking his lips once again. Don’t just stand around. Do it!

Swiftly he tapped on the miniature keyboard and saw its light turn green. He pushed the door open.

It was a spacious room. Lev Brudnoy law sprawled on the oversized bed, stark naked. Nothing but gray mottled skin and bones, Killifer saw, and that ratty little beard. The wall screen on the other side of the room showed a view from the Moon, the crater floor of Alphonsus, it looked like. No sound; either it was muted or nobody was saying anything from Moonbase.

“What is it?” Brudnoy said, sitting up, frowning, reaching for the bedsheet to cover himself.

Joanna was nowhere in sight. Killifer looked across the room: chaise longue, little desk and chair, a couple of upholstered chairs, bookcases, bureaus, mirrors—but no Joanna Brudnoy.

“Where is she?” Killifer hissed, sliding the pistol from his holster.

Brudnoy’s eyes widened. Killifer saw several doors: closets, all closed. And one other door, half ajar. The bathroom.

“Get out of here!” Brudnoy shouted, reaching for the phone console on the night table.

“Where is she?” Killifer yelled back, heading for the half-open bathroom door.

Brudnoy banged the red emergency button on the phone console as Killifer strode swiftly cross the bedroom carpeting.

“Joanna!” Brudnoy hollered. “Look out!”

And Killifer felt something thump against his shoulder. Whirling, he saw Brudnoy reaching for another book to throw at him, a skinny naked old man trying to stop him by throwing books.

With a wild laugh, Killifer fired twice. Brudnoy’s chest erupted in blood and he jerked back against the bed’s headboard, arms and legs flailing like a rag doll. Killifer pumped another two shots into him for good measure.

Joanna screamed. Killifer turned and saw her standing naked, frozen, in the bathroom doorway.

“Remember me?” Killifer taunted, levelling his gun at her. For a moment he thought how much fun it would be to rape her, to make her kneel to him, turn herself inside out for him, before he blew her head off. But there wasn’t time.

In that moment Joanna slammed the bathroom door. Killifer heard its lock click.

Laughing even louder, he fired three shots into the lock, then kicked the door open. He stepped into the bathroom-

And Joanna, standing beside the door, drove the point of her hair-styling scissors into his wrist with every molecule of strength in her. Killifer’s hand went numb and he nearly dropped the gun. Her face white with fury, Joanna snatched a hairbrush and whacked it as hard as she could against his bleeding wrist.

Killifer felt pain flaming up his arm. The gun fell from his fingers. He staggered back, but not before Joanna grabbed the end of the scissors still sticking in his wrist.

“Bastard,” she snarled, working the scissors back and forth. “Murdering bastard!”

Pain searing his whole arm, Killifer cuffed her with his free hand, driving her back against the marble sink. But she held firmly onto the scissors, yanking it from his bleeding wrist.

The gun was on the tiled floor. Killifer bent to reach for it but Joanna kicked it away.

That’s not going to help you, bitch,” he growled at her. “I’m not leaving here until you’re dead.”

He lunged at her, but Joanna raked the point of the scissors up his chest and throat and lodged the blades in the underside of his jaw.

Yowling with pain, Killifer staggered back into the bedroom.

Rodriguez was at the hallway door, submachine gun levelled at Killifer’s waist.

“You killed them!” Rodriguez shouted, eyes wide.

“No…” Killifer choked. “No, wait…”

“General’s orders,” Rodriguez said. He fired half a dozen rounds into Killifer’s midsection.

Killifer felt nothing. The bedroom tilted and he was staring at the ceiling. It faded, though, slowly turning dark. He thought of General O’Conner telling him, ‘The fewer people know about this, the better off we are.’

Rodriguez is one of them, Killifer realized. That sonofabitch O’Conner planted him here to get rid of me once the job’s done.

It was his last thought.

CONTROL CENTER

“When we power up,” Wicksen was telling Doug, “you’re going to be totally blacked out.”

There was no video from the mass driver; Doug spoke to a blank screen.

“We’re plugging in the fuel cells,” he said. “They can keep us going for the few minutes your gun will be running.”

He sensed Wicksen nodding. “Well, we’re doing everything we can here. That missile blast shook half our connections loose and the other half aren’t all that sound, either.”

Doug grimaced, then recalled, “I remember a professor of mine saying that if something scratches or bites, it’s biology; if it stinks or pops, it’s chemistry; and if—”

“If it doesn’t work,” Wicksen finished with him, “it’s physics.”

Neither of them laughed.

“We’re going to power up in fifteen minutes,” Wicksen said. “Will you have the fuel cells on line by then?”

“If we don’t I’ll call you.”

That only leaves us six minutes to fire at the nuke,” the physicist said, “assuming they hold off detonation until the warhead’s only three hundred meters above the crater floor.”

“If they detonate higher they’ll shower the Peacekeeper troops with radiation.”

They’re not digging in?”

Doug shook his head. “No, they’re staying buttoned up tight inside their vehicles, as far as we can see.”

I’ll bet they’re praying for a low-altitude detonation even more than we are.”

“Probably so,” Doug agreed.

“All right,” said Wicksen. “I’ve got work to do. Call me if you can’t get the fuel cells patched in.”

“Will do.”

Jinny Anson leaned over Doug’s shoulder. The fuel cells are up and ready, no sweat.”

“Good,” he said, wondering if Wicksen heard her before he clicked off.

For the thousandth time Doug checked out every corner of Moonbase through the screens on the console before him. It felt as if the wheeled typist’s chair on which he sat had welded itself to his butt and spine. The level of tension in the control center was palpable, but it had been so electrically high for so long that it seemed almost normal. People went about their duties mechanically, studying their screens or fingering their keyboards. Hardly a word was spoken now, and no voice rose above an edgy, tightly-controlled murmur.

Doug saw that The Cave was almost filled with men and women milling about aimlessly, sitting huddled in small groups, staring up at the wall screens. Must be really tough on them, Doug thought, waiting with nothing to do. Then he looked at the camera view from Mount Yeager; the Peacekeeper troops were also waiting, and the nuclear missile that would end everyone’s suspense was hurtling toward Alphonsus now.

They’ve won the first round, Doug realized. They aimed at our nuclear generator and hit it. Our backup power system is gone. There must be a considerable amount of radioactive debris splattered across the far side of the crater floor.

But they don’t suspect we’ve got a beam gun to knock out their nuke, he told himself. Almost bitterly, Doug admitted that their big success so far had been that Wicksen’s beam gun hadn’t worked. Our ace in the hole, he thought wryly. They don’t know we might be able to prevent their nuclear warhead from going off.

He leaned back in the squeaking little chair, trying to ease the stress that was knotting the muscles of his neck and shoulders. Nanomachines can’t relieve anxiety, he thought.

Staring up at the dimly-lit rock of the ceiling, Doug asked himself, Who am I trying to kid? There are at least three hundred armed and trained troops on the other side of the ringwall. A nuclear bomb is heading toward us. Not a nation in the world has lifted a finger to help us. How on earth can I pretend that we can stand up to the Peacekeepers? We don’t have a chance, not a prayer, against the force of the United Nations.

Why not just let them walk in here and take over? Why risk the lives of two thousand people? Over what? My own ego? My own fear that once they ship me Earthside some New Morality fanatic’s going to murder me? So what? I’m dead either way. They can kill me here, trying to defend Moonbase or kill me back on Earth. At least if I surrender to them the rest of the people here will live.

And Moonbase dies. Yamagata takes over and turns it into his private clinic instead of using it as a springboard to push the frontier outward.

He shook his head. You’re debating philosophy when a couple of thousand lives are hanging in the balance. That’s not fair. It’s stupid.

The phone light at the bottom right corner of his set of screens began winking yellow. Shaking himself from his inner misgivings, Doug reached for his headset and slipped it on.

“Incoming call from Savannah,” a comm tech’s voice said. “Urgent top priority.”

“Put it through.”

Doug saw his mother’s face on the lower right screen: hair dishevelled, eyes red and swollen, skin ashen, a silk robe pulled tight around her.

“What’s wrong?” he blurted.

But Joanna was already telling him, “Lev’s been killed. Murdered. He was trying to kill me but I’m all right. But your stepfather’s dead.”

“Killed? Who did it? Why? Are you really all right?”

The three seconds it took for her reply stretched like hours.

“We don’t know who it was. The security guard got him.

We’re checking it out. It all happened just a few minutes ago…” Joanna seemed to be gasping, her words barely getting out of her mouth.

“Are you hurt? Do you have a doctor there?”

She’s holding back tears, Doug realized, watching his mother’s agonized face. She won’t let herself cry.

“Paramedics are here and my personal physician’s on his way,” she said, seeming to pull herself up straighter. “I’m not hurt. But Lev…”

Joanna turned away from the screen. A man’s face slid into view, square jaw unshaved, narrow eyes hard and bitter. “This is Captain Ingersoll, I’m with Masterson security. Your mother’s physically unharmed, sir, although she’s had a tremendous psychological shock. I’ll see to it that she calls you back as soon as her doctor’s looked her over and we’ve had a chance to sort things out a bit. Thank you.”

The screen went blank.

Doug sat there in stunned silence. If anyone overheard his phone conversation, if anyone tried to talk to him or question him, he didn’t know it. He merely sat staring blankly at the array of screens, his thoughts spinning.

They tried to kill her. Who was it? Part of Faure’s scheme? Or maybe Yamagata, trying to get her out of their way so they can take control of Masterson Corporation more easily. No, not even Yamagata would go that far. Would they? New Morality zealots, more likely. Fanatics who knew that Mom was backing Moonbase and nanotechnology. Maybe they even knew she’d had a few nanotech treatments herself, over the years.

She’s all right, though. Lev’s dead but she’s all right. They murdered Lev. Killed him.

Jinny Anson was shaking his shoulder. “Wix is ready to power up.”

He looked up at her. “Okay,” he said dully. “Okay.”

Anson peered at him. “Are you all right, Doug?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m okay. Don’t worry about me. Tell Wicksen to shoot the hell out of that missile.”

Anson looked surprised, but she said merely, “Right.”

Claire Rossi looked up as the overhead loudpseakers blared through The Cave:

“WE’RE GOING TO AUXILIARY POWER IN SIXTY SECONDS. LIGHTS WILL GO DOWN TO EMERGENCY LEVELS. ALL UNNECESSARY EQUIPMENT WILL BE POWERED DOWN. THIS SHOULD LAST APPROXIMATELY TEN TO FIFTEEN MINUTES.”

The Cave buzzed with conversations. When the lights suddenly turned down, a chorus of ‘ooohs’ surged through the crowded cafeteria.

Then somebody called out, “The lights are low! Time for an orgy!”

Claire didn’t laugh. Neither did anyone else.

The lights flickered briefly in the nanolaboratory, then steadied and returned to their normal brightness.

“See?” Zimmerman said to Inoguchi. “We are essential. We stay at full power.”

Inoguchi looked up from his work. “I am afraid that the power surge has knocked out the timing circuitry in the assembly feeder,” he said apologetically.

“What?” Zimmerman bellowed, rushing across the lab to the Japanese scientist’s side.

“The timing circuitry must be reset,” Inoguchi said. “This batch of nanomachines—”

“Ruined!” Zimmerman roared, pounding a fist on the lab bench so hard that Inoguchi nearly jumped off his stool. “A microsecond pulse of electricity! Ruined!” He lapsed into German.

Inoguchi could not understand his words, but the tone was painfully clear.

“Power at ninety-two percent.”

Wicksen was inside the cramped shelter again. This time he had not bothered to take off his helmet, he merely slid the visor up.

“Can you goose it higher?” he asked, eyes on the makeshift control board.

“When I do,” the woman replied,’the needle starts wobbling. I think ninety-two’s the best we can do without risking another shorting out.”

“Okay,” Wicksen said softly. “Hold it at ninety-two.”

“Holding and stable.”

“How’s the radar plot?”

The man standing to his left was bent over a screen that displayed a single lurid red spot against a spiderweb of concentric circles.

“Coming straight at us, practically zero deflection,” he said tightly. “Pointing system’s holding good, slaved to the radar.”

Wicksen scanned the board full of gauges and telltale lights: mostly green, a handful of ambers, two reds but they had been cut out of the circuitry.

“Anybody see a reason why we shouldn’t shoot the cannon?”

Dead silence. No sound in the low-ceilinged little shelter except the hum of the electrical equipment.

“Okay. Here goes.” Wicksen leaned on the red firing button.

Nothing in the shelter changed. No new noise, no vibration, no sense of having accomplished anything.

“Power holding steady.”

“Beam collimation looks good.”

“Just hold together, baby,” Wicksen pleaded, almost cooed, like a father urging a baby’s first tottering steps. “Just stay together for another five, six minutes. You can do it, baby, you can last that long. You’re a good little pile of junk, you are, you’re working just fine. Keep it up, baby, keep those protons moving.”

His assistants had never heard Wicksen speak like that, never heard anything remotely like this cooing, coaxing, imploring tone that he was half-whispering, half-singing to the impassive electronics and machinery they had slapped together. They stood in shock for fully five minutes as Wicksen kept up his impromptu lullaby, his supplication, his prayer that the beam gun would work right and do the job they intended it to do.

As the clock on their control board showed five minutes and nine seconds, Wicksen’s female assistant called out, “Starting to get arcing on the main buss.”

Wicksen raised one hand in a gesture of patience.

“It’s going to short out again!”

“Hold it as long as you can,” he said calmly.

Half the needles on the board’s gauges suddenly spun down toward zero.

“It’s gone,” said the man to Wicksen’s right.

“Main buss shorted.”

“Power down,” Wicksen said, with a sigh. “If we haven’t knocked out the nuke’s fusing circuitry by now we never will.”

A small tremor shook the shelter, like the passing of a train nearby.

“Ground impact.”

“Yeah, but did the nuke go off?”

ASSAULT FORCE

Colonel Giap studied the watch built into the keypad on his spacesuit’s wrist. The nuclear bomb should have exploded almost a full minute earlier.

His command center inside the tractor was little more than a windowless metal box shoehorned between the tractor’s cab and its rear bed, where a dozen Peacekeeper troops and the seven suicide volunteers sat wedged together like sardines in a tin.

“Where is the confirmation from L-1?” Giap demanded of tech sergeant in charge of communications.

The sergeant said through the upraised visor of his spacesuit, “L-1 wants to speak to you, sir.”

With an impatient huff, Giap took the laptop comm rig from the sergeant. “We are scheduled to push off in three minutes,” he said sharply. “Where is the confirmation of the nuclear blast?”

The officer’s image in the small, snow-streaked screen looked strained, worried. “There is no confirmation of the blast, sir,” she said, her voice scratchy with static.

“No confirmation!”

“Diagnostics are negative,” the officer said dolefully, “and there is no visual confirmation of the detonation.”

Giap demanded, “Did the bomb go off or not?”

“As far as we can tell, sir, it failed.”

“Failed! Then Moonbase’s electrical power system is still intact.”

“As far as we can tell, sir.”

Giap angrily slammed the laptop shut and shoved it back into the sergeant’s gloved hands. It doesn’t matter, he told himself. It would be better if their electrical power was cut off, but it really doesn’t matter. We will march across the mountains and blast open their airlocks if they refuse to surrender to me.

He held up his wrist again. At precisely the second called for in his schedule, he commanded, “Start engines. All vehicles are to move to their assigned locations on the crater floor. Go!’

Grins and thumbs-up gestures filled the control center; the overhead lights were back to full brightness.

“It didn’t go off!” Jinny Anson crowed, exultant, almost jumping up and down.

“Wicksen did it,” said Doug, still only half believing it.

O’Malley got up from the chair beside him. “I’m going to check out the dust dispersal systems one more time. Looks like we’ll need ’em now.” He was grinning broadly as he strode out of the control center.

“Put through a call to Wicksen,” Anson said. “We ought to congratulate him.”

Doug nodded, but asked, “How much damage did the warhead do when it hit the ground?”

A technician’s voice answered, “The bird bullseyed on the central solar farm. Knocked out eleven panels and a main feeder line. Our power capacity is down by two percent.”

“We can live with that,” Anson said quickly.

Yes, Doug thought. We can live with that. We can even fight with that.

In the tight confines of the editing booth, Edith had followed the telescope view of the incoming missile warhead, holding her breath, not daring to speak. But when she saw no flash of an explosion and the warhead clunked into the middle of one of the arrays of solar panels spread across the ground, she whooped an involuntary Texas victory yell.

“It didn’t go off!” she said into her headset microphone, hovering a centimeter from her lips. “Moonbase’s missile defense system worked!”

She reached out across the control board and activated a chip that held a pre-recorded interview with Wicksen, explaining how the particle beam accelerator at the mass driver could be turned into a beam gun. While the canned interview played out, Edith checked with Doug at the control center.

“He’s on another call,” said the comm tech. From the radiant smile on the technician’s face Edith knew that she’d been right; the nuclear warhead hadn’t exploded.

“I just want confirmation from him that the nuke didn’t go off,” Edith explained.

“It didn’t.”

“Yeah, right. But I need to get his handsome face on Global Network for the whole world to see him saying it didn’t go off.”

“I’ll give him your message.”

“Do that,” Edith snapped, feeling nettled. But then she thought, Doug must be up to his scalp in snakes. He won’t have time for the news media.

She put through a call to Wicksen, out at the mass driver, instead.

“I swear to you, Joanna, I knew nothing of this,” said Ibrahim al-Rashid.

He was perched nervously on one of the upholstered chairs in Joanna’s living room. It was two in the morning. Rashid looked baggy-eyed, his clothes hurriedly thrown on. The house was still swarming with police and Masterson Corporation security people. Lev’s body had been taken away, zippered into a black body bag. His murderer’s body, cut almost in half by the submachine gun bullets that had killed him, remained up in her bedroom while the police and security team took fingerprints and photographs.

“He was a Masterson security guard,” Joanna said, her voice venomously low. “He was trying to kill me.”

“Joanna,” Rashid said, almost pleading, “You can’t believe that I had anything to do with this!”

“I don’t know what to believe,” she replied, staring hard at him. She was sitting tensely on the sofa, still wearing nothing more than the silk robe she had pulled on upstairs.

“He must have been a New Morality fanatic,” Rashid said.

“Or an assassin from Yamagata.”

“No! Why would Yamagata want you assassinated?”

“I don’t know,” Joanna said tightly. “I intend to find out.”

“I’m so sorry about Lev,” Rashid said, his head drooping. “I liked him.”

“He looked familiar to me,” Joanna murmured.

“Familiar?”

The security guard, the assassin. He’d been around the house for several days and I thought that somehow he looked familiar but I couldn’t place where I’d seen him before.”

“Are you sure…?”

“I should have told the security chief then and there,” Joanna said in a choked whisper, speaking more to herself than to Rashid. “I should have realized something wasn’t right.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Rashid said.

She focused her gray-green eyes on him, like a pair of guns. “Then whose fault is it?”

“Not mine!” Rashid fairly yelped. “Joanna, I know we’ve had our differences over corporate policy, but I would never - I mean, something like this…”

Joanna leaned back against the sofa’s soft pillows. “I want to believe you, Omar. I hope you’re telling me the truth.”

Rashid swallowed visibly. There was nothing he could say to erase the suspicion in her eyes.

“Mrs Brudnoy?” Captain Ingersoll called from the dining room doorway.

She looked up at him. “Yes? What is it?”

Stepping slowly, hesitantly into the living room, Ingersoll held up a hand-sized computer. “I think we’ve made a positive ID on the killer.”

“Who is it?”

Aiming his hand set at the Windowall screen above the fireplace, Ingersoll said, “We ran a computer check on his fingerprints…”

The big screen atop the mantle showed two sets of inky whorls.

“He used to work for the corporation years ago, mostly up at Moonbase.”

The fingerprints were replaced by two photographs: both ID pictures, taken twenty-five years apart.

“Jack Killifer!” Joanna gasped.

“That’s his name,” Ingersoll agreed, nodding. “The photo on the right was taken when he joined our security department, few weeks ago. You can see he trimmed down his hair, darkened it, and grew a moustache.”

“Jack Killifer,” she repeated. “He’s hated me all these years… hated me enough to kill me.”

“You think his motivation was personal, then?” Ingersoll asked.

She glanced at Rashid before answering. The man looked puzzled. Of course, Joanna realized; Omar doesn’t know anything about Killifer or his history.

“Yes,” she said to Ingersoll. “Personal.”

“Can you tell me something about it?” the captain asked.

“Tomorrow,” Joanna said. “Call me tomorrow, around noon.”

“Because we still got a problem here,” Ingersoll went on, slow, measured, not easily deterred.

“A problem?”

“The other security guard, Rodriguez.”

“The one who shot Killifer.”

“Yes’m. He’s nowhere to be found. Apparently took off for parts unknown. We found the stutter gun he used, he left it on the kitchen table, nice and neat. But his car’s gone and him with it.”

Rashid’s brows knit. “Why would he run away?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Ingersoll.

“Tomorrow,” Joanna said firmly.

Ingersoll seemed to think it over for a heartbeat or two, then nodded and walked back into the dining room.

“Omar, thanks for coming over,” Joanna said to Rashid. “I’m sorry if it looked as if I suspected you. It’s been… it’s been a terrible few hours.”

Rashid knew he was being dismissed and he felt grateful for it. Getting to his feet, he asked, “Will you be all right? Do you need anything?”

“My doctor’s here,” she said, remaining seated on the sofa. “He’s already dosed me with tranquilizers and God knows what else. He’ll stay here in the house and there are the servants, of course.”

“Of course,” Rashid murmured, eager to get away, glad that the burning fury of her suspicion had passed over him.

Joanna summoned the butler, who accompanied Rashid to his car, then returned to the living room.

“What else can I do for you?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “That’s all for now. Go get yourself some sleep.”

“And you…?”

“I’ll sleep here,” Joanna said.

“I’ve had the guest suite prepared for you,” the butler suggested.

She shook her head. “No, I don’t want to go upstairs. Not just yet. I’ll sleep here on the sofa. I’ll be fine.”

The butler left, silent as a shadow, then returned a moment later with a downy white blanket and a flowered pillow. Joanna watched him place them on the end of the sofa, then leave the room again.

I should cry, she told herself. I should let it come out. Lev didn’t deserve this. It was me he was after. Lev died trying to save my life.

Instead of crying, she reached over to the phone console and told its voice-recognition system, “Get Seigo Yamagata for me. No intermediaries. This is an emergency call for him and no one else.”

It’s time to end this war, Joanna told herself.

EDITING BOOTH

“Moonbase has survived the Peacekeepers’ missile attack,” Edith was saying into her microphone. “But not unscathed. The first missile destroyed Moonbase’s backup power generator. That was a conventional explosive warhead and it hit the buried generator precisely.”

The display screens running across the top of the control board showed the quiet frenzy of Moonbase’s control center, the crowd milling around in The Cave, a view of the crater floor where Wicksen and his crew were riding back to the main airlock in a jouncing tractor, and the scene from Mount Yeager showing the Peacekeeper assault force’s vehicles trundling up toward Wodjohowitcz Pass.

Selecting the view of Wicksen’s tractor, Edith continued without missing a beat, “The U.N.’s second missile was a nuclear weapon, aimed to wipe out Moonbase’s main electrical power solar panels, which are spread across the floor of the crater. The people here call them solar farms. Thanks to the brilliant work of a handful of scientists and technicians …”

She praised Wicksen and his people, explained how the beam gun had deactivated the nuclear warhead and turned it into a dud.

But her eyes were pinned on the screen showing the Peacekeepers’ vehicles creeping up the outer slope of the ringwall mountains.

Vince Falcone was watching the same view, sitting at a console in the control center. He was sweating, perspiration beading his upper lip and forehead, trickling down his swarthy cheeks.

This has gotta work, he kept telling himself. It’s gotta work. Otherwise they’ll be able to bring their missile launchers right up to our front door and blast it open.

For the twentieth time in the past half-hour he checked the circuitry to the microwave antennas atop Mount Yeager. One of the bright young short-timers had done a computer simulation that showed the microwaves would be reflected by the rock walls of Wodjo Pass and effectively reach all the foamgel goo they had spread there. The rock absorbed some of the microwave energy, of course, but reflected enough to get the job done.

Falcone hoped.

He looked across the row of consoles to where Doug Stavenger was sitting, deep in conversation with somebody on his screens. The kid’s got all this responsibility on his shoulders, Falcone told himself. Least I can do is get this mother-lovin’ foamgel to work.

He returned his attention to the screen showing the approaching Peacekeeper force. And felt a shock race through him.

They’re splitting up! Falcone saw. The vehicles were dividing into two columns, one of them coming up toward Wodjo Pass, but the other snaking around the base of the ringwall mountains toward the steeper notch some two dozen kilometers farther away.

And it looked like a small party was starting out on foot to climb Mount Yeager, where the microwave antennas were.

Stupid shitfaced bastards, Falcone raged, offering the assessment both to the Peacekeepers and his own shortsightedness. They’re only sending part of their forces across Wodjo. The rest of ’em will get through without being stopped by the goo. And if they knock out the antennas up on Yeager the goo won’t do us any fucking good at all.

The earphone of the headpiece clamped over his thickly curling hair suddenly crackled. “Vince, this is Doug Stavenger. They’ve divided their force.”

“Yeah, I can see it.”

“It looks like that second group’s heading for the northwest notch.”

“And they’re sending a team up Yeager.”

“They’re going to get through with no trouble, aren’t they?”

Falcone nodded bitterly. “Even if we could spray some goo over that pass the microwaves from Yeager couldn’t reach it. Assuming they don’t disable the antennas before we want to us ’em.”

“Well, what can we do?” Doug asked.

Falcone wished he had an answer.

We should have known they’d split their forces, Doug raged at himself. I should’ve figured that the Peacekeepers wouldn’t send their whole force through Wodjo. That was wishful thinking, nothing but wishful thinking.

“It’s not so bad,” Gordette said, pulling up a chair to sit beside him.

“Bad enough,” said Doug.

“Their main force is coming across Wodjo Pass,” Gordette said, pointing to the screen. “The second force is a lot smaller, looks like.”

“But if they disable the antennas…”

“It’ll take them an hour to get to the top of Yeager, at least.”

“But still…”

Gordette said, “Count the missile launchers. That’s their heavy artillery. Looks to me like almost all of ’em are coming through Wodjo.”

Doug studied the screens for a few moments. “Maybe the secondary force is going to head for the mass driver?”

Gordette shrugged, then said, “Whoever’s in charge of the Peacekeepers probably wants to keep the secondary force as a reserve.”

Doug wished he could believe Gordette’s assessment. He’s just trying to cheer me up, Doug thought. Trying to lighten the load. It doesn’t matter what the secondary force’s mission is, once their main group gets in trouble in Wodjo Pass, they’ll still have these other troops to attack us. With all their weapons.

Maybe Falcone was right and we ought to fry them as they come through Wodjo Pass. Get them before they knock out the antennas. Kill as many of them as we can while we’ve got the chance. They’re here to kill us. They killed Lev, they tried to kill Mom. Why shouldn’t we kill them?

The blinking message light on the console told him that people were waiting to talk with him. He pulled up the list on the comm screen. Wicksen, Edith, Kris Cardenas down in the infirmary, four others.

Edith. Doug recalled her urging against killing any of the Peacekeepers. She’s right, he knew. Kill some of their troops and the whole world will turn against us. They’ll keep sending armies here until they beat us. Faure won’t stop until he wins, not if he has the world’s public opinion behind him. And once we start sending coffins Earthside world public opinion will swing totally against us, no matter how much people may be rooting for us now.

Beat them without killing them. Even though they’re trying to kill us.

He had put through a call to Savannah earlier, but it had not been answered so far. Is Mom all right? What happened down there? Who killed Lev? Is Mom safe?

They should’ve stayed here, Doug told himself. Then he realized the absurdity of it. Yes, stay here where all we have to worry about is being attacked by a small army of Peacekeeper troops.

Looking at his top left screen he saw that the first of the Peacekeeper vehicles was already entering Wodjohowitcz Pass. Doug glanced over at Falcone, staring grimly at the same view on his console.

Gordette was right; those troopers climbing Yeager won’t get to the antennas for another hour, at least.

He got up from his chair, spine creaking after being seated for so long, and walked stiffly to Falcone’s post.

“Wait until you’ve got as many in the trap as possible. Then spring it.”

Falcone nodded without taking his eyes from his screens. They had been over this a hundred times, at least.

“It’s your show, now, Vince,” he said, gripping Falcone’s burly shoulder.

“Right, boss,” said Falcone, his eyes still fixed on his screens.

Colonel Giap had learned long ago not to be the first in line of march through enemy territory. His tractor was the third in line as they threaded up the flank of the mountains and into the narrow defile of the pass.

“Force B, report,” he said into his helmet microphone.

All his communications were relayed through the L-1 station, hovering nearly forty thousand kilometers above. There was a noticeable, annoying little lag as the electronic signals bounced back and forth.

“Force B reporting,” crackled in his earphones. “No opposition. Proceeding on schedule.”

“Good. Report any problems immediately,” said Giap.

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel nodded inside his helmet. Keeping to schedule was important. He had planned the conquest of Moonbase down to the minutest details, and included every contingency he could imagine in his plans. The nuclear bomb did not go off, Moonbase still enjoyed its full capacity of electrical power. Giap had included that possibility in his planning. It made no difference. His primary force would batter down their main airlock and enter the garage area precisely on schedule, while Force B deployed on the crater floor as a strategic reserve, after sending a small contingent to take the mass driver—which Giap expected to be undefended.

His special team of mountain climbers would disable all of Moonbase’s communications antennas, cutting off the rebels’ reports to the news media back on Earth. Faure had insisted on that, and for once Giap agreed with the secretary-general. Cut out their tongues.

The first wave of assault troops would include the decontamination squads with their powerful ultraviolet lights, to deactivate any nanomachines that the Moonbase rebels might try to use. Giap smiled thinly at the memory of how the rebels had used nanomachines to panic the first Peacekeeper force sent against Moonbase. That trick won’t work a second time, he assured himself.

His earphones buzzed. Switching to the tractor’s intercom, Giap asked testily, “What is it?”

“Sensors are picking up an unusual level of microwave radiation, sir,” his surveillance officer reported.

In the cramped confines of his windowless command center, Giap barely had room to turn and face the woman. Even so, sealed inside her spacesuit, he could not see her face, merely the reflection of his own helmet in her closed visor.

“A dangerous level?” Did the rebels have exotic weapons, after all?

“No, sir, nothing dangerous. It’s more like a radar scan, but it’s coming at us from all directions, as if the microwaves are reflecting off the mountains walls around us.”

Giap felt his brow wrinkle. Microwaves? What are they trying to accomplish?

“Lead tractor calling, sir,” said his communications sergeant. “Emergency.”

Giap switched to the proper frequency. “Sir! Our tractor is stuck. We can’t move!”

“Can’t move?”

The voice in his earphones sounded more puzzled than worried. “It’s as if we hit some deep mud…”

“There is no mud on the Moon!” Giap snapped.

“Yessir, I know. But we’re mired in something. We can’t move forward or back. My engineer is afraid of burning out the drive motors.”

Giap’s own tractor lurched and slowed noticeably.

“What’s going on?” he yelled to his comm sergeant.

“I don’t know!”

Within minutes the first twenty-two tractors in the assault force reported being stuck fast. Several burned out their drive motors trying to force themselves through whatever it was that had mired them down.

“Get out and see what it is!” Giap screamed at his own driver as he motioned his sergeant to open the overhead hatch.

In his anxiety, Giap forgot the gentle lunar gravity and pulled himself up so hard he nearly soared completely out of the tractor. He sprawled across the roof of the cab, legs dangling inside his shoebox-sized command center.

Pulling himself up to a sitting position, Giap looked around. His first sensation was relief at being out of the metal coffin of the command center. He saw smooth-walled gray rock mountains and a dark, star-strewn sky.

Then he looked down and saw that his tractor, and every other one up and down the line that he could see, were engulfed halfway up their drive wheels in a weird, bright blue sea of spongy-looking stuff.

“Sergeant!” he yelled into his helmet mike. “Get up here.”

The sergeant popped the hatch to his cab and scrambled up to sit on the roof next to him.

Pointing at the sea of blue, Giap commanded, “Climb down the side of the tractor and test the consistency of that material.”

“What is it?” the sergeant asked. Then he added, “Sir.”

“If I knew what it was I wouldn’t need you to test it!”

“Maybe it’s some sort of Moon creature,” the sergeant said, his voice hollow.

“Don’t be stupid!” Giap barked. “It’s man-made. It’s something the rebels have cooked up to slow us down.”

The sergeant climbed down the ladder built into the tractor’s side, slow and awkward in his cumbersome spacesuit. Very gingerly, he touched the blue surface with a booted toe.

“It feels soft, sir,” he reported.

“How soft? Can you walk on it?”

The sergeant pushed his boot in deeper, then—still grasping the ladder rungs with both hands—he tried standing on it. His boots sank in until their tops were covered in blue.

“Well?” Giap demanded.

He heard his sergeant puffing and grunting. “I’m stuck in it, sir. I can’t pull my feet out.”

In the half-hour it took for Seigo Yamagata to answer Joanna’s call, she paced the living room, trying to burn up some of the fear and anger and grief that the tranquilizers had dulled but not removed.

While she paced she watched the Global News channel that was devoting full time to live coverage of the battle for Moonbase. Edie Elgin’s voice sounded strained, slightly hoarse from long hours of nonstop talking, but she was still going strong.

Joanna learned that the Peacekeepers’ nuclear missile attack had failed and Moonbase’s electrical power supply was still intact. Now she watched the view from atop Mount Yeager as the main Peacekeeper assault force came to a halt in Wodjohowitcz Pass.

“The smart foamgel will set to the consistency of concrete,” Edie Elgin was saying. “Wodjohowitcz Pass is effectively blocked, as far as the Peacekeepers’ vehicles are concerned.”

As she paced and watched, Joanna thought about getting dressed in something more substantial than her thin white robe, but that would have meant going upstairs. Even though the police were finished now with the bedroom, Joanna found she could not willingly go in there, not yet, not with Lev’s blood still staining the bedclothes. Tomorrow, maybe. After they’ve cleaned everything up.

The phone chimed at last and she went to the sofa where the camera could focus on her. Seigo Yamagata’s lean, lined face appeared on the screen above the fireplace, replacing Edie Elgin’s report from the Moon. It was impossible to tell what time it might be in Tokyo from the wide window behind Yamagata’s desk; the downtown city towers were drenched in driving rain.

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” Joanna began.

Yamagata raised a hand. “It is of no consequence. I have just been informed of the attempt on your life. Please accept my deepest condolence for the loss of your husband.”

Rashid must’ve phoned him, Joanna thought swiftly. Or maybe not. He’s got his own sources of information, certainly.

“I’ve decided that Moonbase isn’t worth the loss of more lives,” Joanna said, holding herself together with a conscious effort of will. “This war must end before more people are killed.”

Yamagata drew in a breath. “I sincerely regret what has happened. This was not of my doing.”

“I understand that,” Joanna replied, a slim tendril of doubt still in the back of her mind. But she pushed it away. “What kind of an agreement can we reach?”

Rubbing his chin in apparent perplexity, Yamagata said slowly, “The Peacekeepers are already attacking Moonbase. The battle has started.”

“I know that.”

“Within a few hours,” Yamagata said, “Moonbase will be under U.N. control.”

“I don’t know that,” Joanna replied coldly. “And neither do you.”

“Surely you do not believe that your people can hold out against several hundred trained Peacekeeper troops.”

Joanna allowed a ghost of a smile to curve the corners of her lips. “The Peacekeepers’ nuclear missile failed. And now their assault force is bogged down in the ringwall mountains. I’d say there is a fair chance that Moonbase will hold out quite well.”

Yamagata shook his head. “No. It is not possible. Despite their temporary successes, Moonbase will fall within a few hours.”

WODJOHOWITCZ PASS

Colonel Giap was in a frenzy of frustrated anger. Not only was his main assault force mired in this devilish blue muck that had hardened to the consistency of concrete, trapping his main assault force in the narrow defile of the mountain pass, but now Georges Faure was demanding that he get on with the conquest of Moonbase.

“It is unacceptable,” Faure was saying, his moustache bristling. “Entirely unacceptable.”

Giap glowered at the secretary-general’s pale image in the small screen of the laptop. The colonel was sitting atop his tractor, buttoned up in his spacesuit. A meter or so from him, where his sergeant still stood hopelessly imbedded, six Peacekeeper troops were chipping away at the hellish blue slime with makeshift implements from the tractor’s tool kit. Two of the troopers were even using the butts of their rifles to bash the sludge in their attempts to release the boots of their sergeant.

“I agree,” Giap said to Faure, tightly reining his anger. “It is unacceptable. But in battle the unacceptable is commonplace.”

Faure sat behind his desk, trembling with rage as he stared at the faceless image of the Peacekeeper colonel in his blank-visored spacesuit. How can a handful of rebels stop a fully-armed column of Peacekeeper troops? It is unthinkable, a farce, a disaster. Everyone will be laughing at me, unable to quash a tiny group of scientists and technicians, powerless to bring them under the rule of the law, impotent.

“I tell you this, mon colonel,” Faure said, seething. “If you cannot take Moonbase, then you are to release the volunteers. Do you understand what I am saying?”

In three seconds, Giap replied harshly, “You would rather destroy Moonbase than see it repulse us.”

“Exactly!” Faure snapped.

While he waited for Faure’s reply to reach him, Colonel Giap turned slightly to watch the activity he had ordered. Troopers were placing metal panels scavenged from the marooned tractors’ flooring from the roof of one cab to the tail of the next tractor, forming a bridge across which they could march to the front of the column of stalled vehicles. From the leading tractor they slid more panels across the treacherous blue slime, to where the dusty gray regolith lay bare—and safe.

“Exactly!” Giap heard Faure’s reply.

Taking in a deep breath and then releasing it slowly, to calm himself, Giap said, “There is no need to call on the suicide volunteers as yet. I am extricating most of my troops from the pass. We will march down into the crater floor on foot.”

Faure’s image was a red-faced thundercloud with a quivering moustache.

Before the secretary-general could speak again, Giap went on, “We will meet our secondary force on the crater floor and march on Moonbase. Our numbers will be diminished by less than five percent.”

There, he thought, let the pompous little politician chew on that for three seconds. I am the military commander here. I will counter the enemy’s moves. It was I who insisted on splitting the force. Only a fool of a politician would send his entire force through a single mountain pass that could be guarded or blocked by the enemy so easily.

When Faure’s response came it was a little more restrained. But only a little. “And your equipment? Your missile launchers and other heavy weapons? Your men carry them on their backs, I presume.”

“No,” Giap said, bristling at Faure’s sarcasm. “We will not need them. If the rebels do not open their airlocks to us, we have enough firepower to blast them apart.”

Three seconds later, Faure asked, “Without the heavy missiles?”

“We have the shoulder-launched anti-tank rockets. They will knock down an airlock hatch, I assure you.”

The secretary-general seemed to fidget unhappily in his chair. He riddled with his moustache, smoothed his slicked-back hair, adjusted the collar of his shirt. Giap sat motionless atop the tractor cab, waiting.

“Well…” Faure said at last. “Perhaps you can carry it off, after all. I hope so, for your sake.”

Giap restrained a bitter reply.

Faure went on, “Remember the volunteers. If all else fails, use them! Moonbase must not survive this day!”

“They’re assembling on the crater floor.” Jinny Anson stated the obvious.

Anson, Gordette, O’Malley and several others were clustered around Doug’s console now, watching the screens over his shoulders. Command central, Doug thought. Wherever I am is the nerve center.

He punched up the imagery that Edith was sending out to Global News and saw the same view: a couple of dozen white Peacekeeper vehicles inching across the floor of the crater, each of them piled high with Peacekeeper troops who had marched down from Wodjo Pass.

“The invaders are moving cautiously,” Edith’s voice was saying. She sounded tense, edgy, her voice raw and strained. She ought to take a break, Doug thought. But I can’t spare anybody to relieve her.

Then his eye caught the screen still showing the crowd in The Cave. Maybe there’s somebody there who could take over for her for a while. But Doug immediately put that thought aside. He didn’t have time to go recruiting. And, knowing Edith, she’d sooner burn her vocal chords out entirely than surrender this once-in-a-lifetime chance to narrate a battle on the Moon.

“They’ll deploy around the main airlock,” Gordette said. “Ought to be knocking on our door in less than an hour.”

Doug nodded. “Okay, we’re ready for them. Right?”

Everyone nodded and murmured assent. Doug focused on O’Malley. His dust was going to be crucial.

“Remember,” Doug said, “all we have to do to win is survive. We don’t have to kill any of the Peacekeepers. We don’t have to drive them off the Moon. All we have to do is survive. Like the Confederacy in the American Civil War; they didn’t have to conquer the North, all they had to do was prevent the North from conquering them.”

With a grunt, Gordette shot back, “Which they failed to accomplish.”

The others stared at him. O’Malley looked downright hostile. Anson turned and walked away a few steps. Doug thought, Barn’s not winning any popularity contests.

But he admitted Gordette’s point with a shrug. Moonbase against the United Nations, he thought. That’s what it boils down to. Moonbase against the world.

So far, so good, he told himself. We’ve still got our electricity and we’ve forced the Peacekeepers to abandon their heavy weapons.

But as he watched the implacable approach of the Peacekeeper troops, Doug realized that what had happened so far was just the preliminary phase of this battle. The real fighting was about to begin.

Then the screen showing Edith’s broadcast Earthside winked off.

CRATER FLOOR

Colonel Giap held the electro-optical binoculars to his visor and carefully studied the main airlock to Moonbase. The massive hatch had been slid wide open; the garage inside was brightly lit, clearly visible.

They could be hiding behind the tractors parked in the garage, Giap reasoned, waiting to pick us off as we enter the garage.

Pick us off with what? he asked himself. They have no guns. A few industrial lasers, of course, but those make awkward weapons. Trained troops could silence them in a few minutes.

“The men are deployed and waiting for your orders, sir,” said his sergeant. Not his original aide; that poor devil was still back at the mountain pass, freed at last from the blue slime but in no emotional condition to be relied upon.

“Men and women, sergeant,” Giap reminded him. “It is better to use the word ‘troops’.”

“Yessir,” the sergeant’s apologetic voice hissed in Giap’s helmet earphones. “The troops are waiting for your orders, sir.”

Giap’s timetable was a shambles, but that no longer mattered. They were about to penetrate Moonbase’s perimeter defense.

Putting down his binoculars and letting them dangle from the cord around his neck ring, Giap turned to face his team of officers. Three captains, six lieutenants. His second-in-command, a South African major, had been left with the stalled vehicles up in the mountain pass. We have too many officers anyway, Giap thought. The Peacekeepers are top heavy with brass.

His nine officers straightened to a semblance of attention, a posture difficult to accomplish in their spacesuits and virtually impossible to maintain.

“Stand easy,” Giap said mildly. “We will attack in two waves. First platoon will advance through the airlock and into the garage area on tractors. Second platoon will follow on foot. Third platoon will remain in reserve. Any questions?”

A tenth figure had joined the little group, uninvited. “What are we volunteers to do?”

Giap turned on the questioner. In his spacesuit it was difficult to determine which of the suicide fanatics it might be; the voice sounded American.

“You are to return to the command tractor and remain there, all of you, until I summon you,” Giap said firmly.

“How will we know what to expect?”

Giap allowed himself a sneering smile, knowing that no one could see it behind his tinted visor. “You can follow the progress of the battle on Global News, just like everyone else on Earth.”

Just at that moment his earphones buzzed, signalling an incoming message. Tapping the keypad on his wrist, Giap asked his replacement communications sergeant, “What is it?”

“Report from the mountain-climbing team, sir. They have reached the summit and cut the power lines to all the antennas up there. Moonbase has been silenced.”

For the first time in hours Giap smiled with genuine pleasure. “Good,” he said. “Send them my congratulations and tell them to report back to me on the crater floor as soon as they can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Nodding inside his helmet, Giap told himself that Moonbase was now entirely cut off from the Earth. At last.

The President looked bleary-eyed as she sipped at her first cup of coffee of the morning and stared at the muted wall screen that showed Global News’ coverage of the Moonbase battle.

“You’re up early,” said her chief of staff, taking his customary place in the Kennedy rocker.

“So’re you,” said the President.

“I haven’t been to sleep all night,” he said, running a hand over his bald pate. From behind her desk, the President could see that he was perspiring.

“It’ll all be over in a few hours,” she said, gesturing toward the wall screen with the hand that held her coffee mug.

“No it won’t,” said the staff chief gloomily.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Luce, we’ve got a shitstorm of public opinion coming down on us. I spent the whole damned night trying to calm down committee chairmen, media reporters, umpteen different governors and state party officials, even some goddamned church leaders are yelling that we ought to pressure the U.N. into letting Moonbase go!”

The President knew that her loyal assistant never used profanity in her presence unless he was truly upset—or trying to make a crucial point.

But she shook her head. “Harry, it’s just too late to do anything. The Peacekeepers are already there. Look.”

She pointed to the wall screen again. Turning in the rocker, her staff chief saw a dozens of tracked vehicles advancing slowly toward the main airlock hatch of Moonbase.

Suddenly the picture winked off.

“What the hell…?”

Before the President could reach the remote control unit on her desk, the screen flicked a few times, then showed a harried-looking announcer in a suit and tie.

“We regret to report that technical difficulties have cut off Edie Elgin’s report from Moonbase. We are trying to re-establish contact.”

As the scene switched to a news anchorwoman, who began to summarize what they had been watching live, the President eased back in her desk chair and cast a knowing look at her staff chief.

“It’s all over bar the shouting, Harry. Moonbase is finished and all those jerks who were yelling at you will forget about it by this time tomorrow.”

Doug wished he could talk with Edith, now that her marathon performance had been cut short, but he had no time for that. He watched the advancing Peacekeeper troops. So did everyone in Moonbase. In the control center, in The Cave, in the infirmary and labs that were still working, every resident of Moonbase looked at the screens and held his or her breath. Doug had never heard the control center so absolutely silent. Even the hum of the machinery seemed muted.

The white Peacekeeper tractors edged cautiously through the airlock. Big as it was, the airlock could only accommodate two vehicles at a time, so the invading tractors came in pairs, then deployed around the edges of the garage.

“They’re expecting us to fire at them,” Gordette said, almost whispering. Still, his voice broke the silence jarringly.

“With what?” Anson muttered acidly.

Doug looked past Vince Falcone to Nick O’Malley. “Ready with the dust?” he asked, also in a near reverent whisper.

“Ready and waiting,” O’Malley replied firmly.

Doug nodded as he thought: Waiting. We’ve been waiting a long time. But we won’t have to wait much longer.

“The garage is clear,” Giap heard in his earphones. “No enemy troops.”

The colonel had established his command post just outside the main airlock, where he could see easily into the broad, brightly-lit garage.

Four teams of specialists were sweeping the garage floor with powerful ultraviolet lamps. So far there was no sign of nanomachines, but Giap did not want to take any chances. His teams would sterilize the hatches on the other end of the garage, as well, the hatches that led into Moonbase’s corridors.

No opposition so far, Giap mused. Either they intend to surrender once we enter the corridors and occupy their critical centers, or they have a trap waiting for us inside.

He played his plan through his mind once again. The first wave of troops were to open the corridor hatches. They were airlocks, of course, double hatches that protected the corridors from the vacuum outside. They had been built as a secondary level of protection, since usually the garage was pressurized and vehicles and personnel left it for the lunar surface through the oversized main airlock.

If the rebels have sealed the hatches, Giap’s men were under orders to blast them open. If they had been able to bring their missile launchers with them they could have blown the hatches apart from where he was standing, outside the main airlock. As it was, the lighter, shoulder-fired missiles would have to do the job. The troops also had grenades. The hatches would pose no problem, Giap told himself.

Once inside the base proper, his troops would quickly move to the water factory, the control center, the electrical distribution station and the EVC—their environmental control center. Hold those, and you command Moonbase. For good measure, Giap had assigned squads to the underground farming area and the nanolaboratories.

“Sir, the airlocks seem to be operating normally,” one of his captains reported. “The outer hatches are not sealed. Repeat, not sealed.”

Giap suppressed a thrill of elation. So the rebels were going to surrender, after all.

“Have the outer hatches been UV sterilized?” he asked, still worrying about nanoweapons.

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Open all the outer hatches,” he commanded, “and check the inner hatches—after they’ve been UV treated.”

“Yes, sir.”

Don’t congratulate yourself too soon, Giap warned himself. There could still be ambushes, traps, inside those corridors.

But he doubted it. What could the rebels do against armed troops in their midst?

CORRIDOR ONE

Ulf Jansen’s only distinguishing feature was that he was the tallest trooper in the Peacekeeper battalion. At one hundred ninety-three centimeters, he towered over the Asians and Africans and Latinos who made up the bulk of the force. He dwarfed his commanding officer, Colonel Giap, and was a full head taller than Sergeant Slavodic, who headed his squad with an even-handed ferocity.

An easy-going, likeable Norwegian, Jansen had joined the Peacekeepers mainly to earn a U.N. scholarship to engineering college. In the four years of his enlistment he had been to Cyprus, Sri Lanka, the Malvinas Islands (which the British still insisted on calling the Falklands) and now he was on the Moon. Another three months and his enlistment would be over; he could start college in the winter semester.

He had been wounded slightly by an antipersonnel mine in Cyprus; otherwise his duties with the Peacekeepers had not been truly dangerous. He had to wear a germproof bio-suit most of the time in Sri Lanka, a real misery in all that heat, but it had been better than coming down with the man-made plagues that both sides had used in the last round of their civil war.

Now he clumped into a smooth, metal-walled airlock, wearing a spacesuit that was much more comfortable than the biological protection gear from the Sri Lankan expedition. And everything was so light on the Moon! Jansen hefted his assault rifle as easily as he’d carry a toothpick.

“Move it up, move it up,” his sergeant growled, in the English that was the Peacekeepers’ basic language. The whole squad was filing through the airlock, one man at a time. So far there’d been not the slightest sign of enemy opposition. As far as Jansen could tell, Moonbase might have been abandoned and left empty.

Both airlock hatches were fully open. The Moonbase rebels had pumped all the air out of the corridor on the other side of the hatches, so the troopers were filing through the airlock as quickly as they could.

The corridor on the other side of the hatch was dimly lit. Jansen could see another airlock about a hundred meters down the tunnel.

The sergeant brought up the rear. Once he stepped through the airlock he hustled up to where the officers—two lieutenants and a captain—were standing, poring over a book-sized computer.

“The water factory is on the other side of this hatch here,” Jansen heard the captain saying as he tapped a gloved finger on the computer’s tiny screen. “Down this corridor and through the cross—”

Jansen’s earphones erupted with a brain-piercing screech, like electronic fingernails on an electronic blackboard. Jagged bursts of noise blasted at him. He put his hands to his ears, banged them into his helmet instead. The noise was painful, cutting through his skull like a surgeon’s bone saw.

He saw the other troopers clutching at their helmets, reeling, staggering under the agonizing assault of noise. Even the officers were flailing around helplessly.

His eyes streaming tears from the pain, Jansen fumbled for the control stud on his wrist and shut off his suit radio.

The noise cut off immediately. Blessed quiet.

“What is it?” Giap screamed. “What’s going on?” The noise assaulted his brain like a thousand rock concerts, all out of tune. Like a million jet planes taking off. He couldn’t hear anything else. He couldn’t speak to anyone.

He couldn’t think.

All around him, the troops of his third wave were pawing at their helmets, tottering across the dusty lith in obvious agony, some of them falling to their knees.

Giap did the only thing he could think of. He switched off his suit radio. The silence was like a soothing balm, even though his ears continued to ring.

“Turn off your radios!” he commanded, then felt immediately foolish. His own radio was off, his words never got farther than the padding inside his helmet.

But he saw, one by one, his troopers were stopping their gyrations, standing still. Giap knew he himself was panting from the unexpected onslaught. He suspected the other troopers were, too.

He waved the captain of the third wave over to him as he yanked a communications wire from the thigh pouch of his suit. Plugging the wire into his helmet port, he handed it to the captain, who connected it to his own helmet.

“Now we can talk without need of the radios,” Giap said.

“Yes, sir,” replied the captain. Giap could hear his breathing, still heavy.

“The rebels think they can stall our attack by jamming our suit radio frequencies,” the colonel said, with a hint of contempt.

“Yes, sir,” the captain said.

“They didn’t think that we can communicate directly by wire, without using the radios.”

“Yes, sir. But sir, if I may ask: We can speak to each other through the wire, but how will you communicate with the rest of the troops? Especially the first and second waves?”

Giap blinked behind his gold-tinted visor. The first and second waves were inside Moonbase, out of reach, even out of sight.

Jansen stood patiently as the sergeant went down the line, plugging his comm line into a trooper’s helmet, speaking a few words, then unplugging and going to the next trooper.

When his turn came at last, the sergeant said gruffly, “No radio. Follow the original plan. Watch my hand signals.”

“Right, Sarge,” Jansen had time to say before the sergeant popped the comm line out of his helmet and went to the next man in line.

Once the sergeant had relayed his message to every trooper in the squad he hustled back up to the front with the officers. He looked funny in the spacesuit, a short thickset figure in the heavy white suit, like a snowman with an assault rifle and a bandolier of grenades flapping lazily against his sides with every stride he took.

Jansen realized that no one could hear anything he said. Grinning delightedly, he called out, “You look stupid, Sarge!”

No reaction from anyone.

“You look like a fat white grub! You and the idiot officers, too!” he said in Norwegian.

The sergeant turned his way and for an instant Jansen’s heart froze in his chest. But then the sergeant pointed to the hatch up ahead and motioned for the squad to follow him.

“Seal the hatches,” Doug commanded quietly.

“We got ’em in the cages,” said Anson, leaning over his shoulder. “Now we lock ’em in.”

“Airlock hatches sealed,” came the voice of one of the control technicians.

Doug turned to O’Malley. “Start your dust.”

“Right,” said O’Malley, tight-lipped.

Something made Jansen turn around as he started marching toward the next hatch. To his surprise, he saw the airlock they had already passed through sliding shut.

“Hey!” he yelped. “It’s closing!”

No one heard him.

He stopped, and the trooper behind him bumped into him, jostling them both.

Jansen pointed and hollered louder, “They shut the hatch behind us!”

The whole line, from Jansen to the rear, came to a stop. Jansen turned toward the officers up front and waved his arms. “They shut the hatch behind us!” he screamed.

They paid not the slightest attention until they stopped at the closed hatch up front. Then, turning, they seemed to jerk with surprise—whether from seeing the hatch to their rear closed off or from seeing half the squad loitering down the corridor, it was impossible for Jansen to tell.

He pointed at the closed hatch, jabbing his gloved hand in its direction several times. The sergeant came clomping down the corridor toward him, radiating anger even though his spacesuit.

“It’s closed,” Jansen said to the unhearing sergeant.

The lights seemed to be going dimmer. Jansen blinked and reflexively wiped at his visor. His glove left a dark smear across the tinted plastiglass.

“What’s happening?” he asked, feeling the edge of panic. He was going blind. The world outside his helmet was nothing more than a misty blur. And it was getting darker by the second.

“What is happening in there?” Giap demanded.

The captain, the only person who could hear him, pointed across the expanse of the garage. “It looks as if the inner hatches have closed.”

“Closed?” Giap fumbled with his binoculars, got them to his visor, and swept his field of view across the four airlocks. The inner hatches of each of each of them was sealed tight.

“Get teams to each of those hatches. If they can’t be opened manually, blast them open!”

The captain unplugged the communications line from his helmet, leaving it dangling across Giap’s shoulder, and trotted off, fumbling in his thigh pouch for his own comm line.

This is absurd, Giap fumed. We are reduced to speaking to each other like children with a couple of paper cups connected by a length of string.

Everything took so damnably long! Commands had to be relayed from one officer to the next, down the chain of command, one person at a time. Fuming inside his spacesuit, Giap summoned a sergeant from the squad waiting as reserves.

Not bothering with the comm line, Giap pressed his helmet against the sergeant’s, like embracing a loved one.

“Sergeant, pick six troopers and bring them to me. I will use them as runners.”

“Runners, sir?”

“To carry messages, fool!”

“Ah! Runners! Yes, sir. Right away, sir.” The sergeant was still babbling as he headed back to his squad.

Everything slowed down to the pace of a nightmare. Giap ordered a runner to find out what the captain was doing at the airlock hatches. It took long minutes before the woman came back, puffing, picked up the colonel’s comm line and plugged it into her own helmet.

“The captain says the inner airlock hatches are closed, but they don’t appear to be locked or sealed. He thinks he can open them manually.”

“Why hasn’t he already opened them?” Giap demanded.

“He’s waiting for your orders, sir.”

“Tell him to open those hatches and get the second wave into the base! And I want a report on what the first wave has accomplished.”

“Yessir.”

The trooper hustled off across the garage floor, looking to Giap more like a white humpbacked alien cyclops than a human being.

Edging closer to the wide-open hatch of the main airlock, Giap once again put his binoculars to his visor. It took agonizingly long, but at last the sergeant seemed to have gotten his order across to the captain. Gesticulating severely, the captain motioned one of his troopers to work the controls of the inner airlock hatch.

Giap saw the trooper step into the metal chamber and tap a button. At last! he thought, as the inner hatch started to slide open.

A ghostly gray mist seemed to waft out of the darkness from beyond the hatch. The trooper inside the airlock, the captain standing just outside it, the runner and several other troopers nearby began to paw at their visors. Giap watched as they staggered backward, gloved hands swiping at their visors like people trying to knuckle dust from their eyes.

Then they stretched their arms out, tottering uncertainly like blind men. The captain bumped into the runner and fell backwards in a dreamy, lunar slow motion until his rump bounced on the smooth rock floor of the garage.

Horrified, Giap shouted inside his helmet, “What’s happened to them? They act as if they’re blind!”

CONTROL CENTER

“It’s working!” Anson said excitedly.

Doug nodded without taking his eyes off the console screens. The Peacekeepers inside the tunnels were truly deaf, dumb and blind now. Helpless. Even a few out in the garage had been blinded by the dust when they’d opened one of the inner airlock hatches.

“You did it!” Doug called over to O’Malley. He grinned boyishly and his cheeks reddened slightly.

“Are your people suited up?” Doug asked Anson.

“Ready to go,” she replied.

He felt a touch on his shoulder and, turning in the little wheeled chair, saw Edith smiling wearily down at him.

“They cut me off,” she said tiredly, her voice raw and cracking.

“You did a great job, Edith,” Doug said, clutching her hand. “A wonderful job.”

“You’ll get an Emmy,” Anson said, patting her shoulder.

“A Cronkite,” Edith croaked. “It’s more prestigious.”

“Whatever.” Anson pulled up a chair at the next console and slipped a headset over her blonde curls.

Gordette slid a chair to Edith, who half-collapsed into it. “I forgot to time myself,” she complained hoarsely. “I don’t have the exact number for how long I was on the air nonstop.”

“We’ll dig it out of the computer,” Doug said.

“Might be a record.”

“You ought to get some rest. Go back to our quarters and take a nap. You’ve earned it.”

“No,” she murmured. “I want to stay here and see it all. I need a couple of cameras…”

The security cameras are logging everything that’s going on in here. Grab a bite at The Cave and then get some rest.”

“I’ve got to go back to the studio. Get a camera. You guys ought to be immortalized for future generations and good ol’ Global News.”

Before Doug could stop her, Edith got to her feet and stumbled toward the door.

He watched her briefly, feeling a sudden urge to get up and put his arm around her, help her, share the comfort of closeness. But he fought it down and turned back to his screens. He had more important things to do.

Jansen fought down the urge to unseal his visor. He could see nothing, hear nothing, and no one could see or hear him, he was certain. It was scary. If only I could see! On Earth, he would have night vision goggles and infrared systems attached to his battle helmet. But they wouldn’t fit inside a spacesuit so the battle helmets had been left aside.

Something inside him was starting to shake. Lost. Alone. No one to give him orders. No one to tell him what to do. Maybe the others are all dead! Or maybe they all got out okay; you might be the only one left in the tunnel.

An enticing voice in his head urged, Just open up the visor and see what’s happening out there.

But he knew the tunnel he was in had no air in it. Open your visor and you kill yourself.

But I’ve got to do something! his mind screamed. I can’t just stand here, blind and deaf. Maybe I can feel my way out, back to the garage…

He tried a few steps, holding his arms out stiffly in front of him like a blind man. His gloved hands touched something solid and smooth. A wall. Which way to the outside? he asked himself. He started walking along the wall, keeping one hand on its reassuring solidity, taking small, frightened, hesitant steps.

And bumped into another figure. He stepped back and tripped over something: someone’s legs, a body on the floor, he had no idea what it was. He lost his balance and began to fall in the slow, nightmarish languid gravity of the Moon.

He sprawled on the tunnel floor, yelling and cursing, tangled in somebody’s limbs, hollering all the louder because nobody could hear him. His shouts became panicky; inside the total isolation of his helmet he heard his own voice screaming wildly, swearing, pleading for light and help and mercy. He wanted to cry; he wanted to beat his head against the wall that he could no longer find.

Something tapped at his helmet. He fell silent, trembling inside. Then he felt the poke of a communications line being inserted into the port on the right side of the helmet.

“Just relax, trooper. Everything will be fine.” It was a woman’s voice, but Jansen had never heard this woman before. A stranger.

“We’re going to take care of you,” she was saying, soothingly. “But first you have to let us take your rifle and other weapons.”

“What’s happening to me?” he asked, shocked at how high and weak his voice sounded. Like a frightened little boy’s.

“Your officers have surrendered to us,” said the woman. “Once we get these weapons off you, we’ll bring you out to the crater floor and return you to your own people.”

Jansen felt his rifle being lifted from off his shoulder. Other hands took his bandolier of grenades and ammunition. Then they helped him to his feet.

“Okay, just walk this way… easy now.”

Jansen let the strangers lead him blindly down the corridor. There was nothing else he could do. His spacesuit felt oddly stiff, the way an arthritic old man must feel. He thought he heard a grinding, rasping noise whenever he flexed his left knee.

Colonel Giap watched helplessly as, one by one, his troopers were led out of the tunnels by spacesuited rebels. The troopers had been disarmed, their weapons were nowhere in sight. They had not raised their hands above their helmeted heads, but it was clear that they had surrendered. They were prisoners. Defeated.

One of his runners trotted up to him and held up the communications line from his helmet. Impatiently, Giap gestured for him to plug it into his comm port.

“Sir! The Moonbase commander wishes to speak with you. On the radio, sir.”

Giap felt his brows rise. “They have stopped the jamming?”

“The Moonbase officer that I spoke with said they will stop the jamming once you agree to speak to their commander.”

Giap nodded inside his helmet. “Tell them I will speak to their commander.” What else could he do?

The runner headed back into the garage. Giap turned and walked to a small rock, then sank down carefully onto it. He had been standing for hours, and even in the low gravity of the Moon, his legs were aching.

He watched as, one by one, his troopers were led out of the tunnels and into the garage like a collection of blind beggars, helpless and disarmed. He had to turn his entire body to see his reserve troops, loitering around their tractors out on the crater floor, some of them sitting on the cab roofs, watching and waiting.

His runner came back at last and told him, “The jamming will stop at precisely thirteen hundred hours, sir.”

Giap peered at his wrist. Seven minutes from now.

“We’ve got all of ’em out,” said Anson, from the console next to Doug’s. “And we’ve got all their weapons.”

“Those are shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets,” Gordette said, pointing to one of the screens. “We could hit their tractors with ’em.”

Not that we’ll use them, Doug said to himself. But their commander doesn’t know that. I hope.

His eye on the console’s digital clock, Doug gestured to Anson to cut off the jamming signal at precisely fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds after noon. Ten seconds later, he opened his radio channel to the Peacekeepers’ suit-to-suit frequency.

“This is Douglas Stavenger, chief administrator of Moon-base,” he said. “Am I on the proper frequency to speak with the commander of the Peacekeeper forces?”

“I am Colonel Ngo Duong Giap,” came the reply. “This frequency is good.”

There was no video; Doug’s comm screen remained blank.

“Colonel Giap,” he said, “I believe it is time we discussed an armistice.”

“Armistice?” The colonel’s surprised reply came immediately. The radio link between the Peacekeepers in the crater floor and the control center did not need to be relayed through L-1; the antennas built into the face of the mountain, just above Moonbase’s main airlock, handled the link directly.

“Truce, armistice, whatever you want to call it,” Doug said, feeling the tension and hope in the people clustering about him.

This time the Peacekeeper commander hesitated before replying.

Doug added, “Your attack has failed. Your troops had to surrender to us. We’ve let them return to you, but as you’ll see, their spacesuits are heavily contaminated with dust. They can’t see, and the joints of their suits will soon fail.”

“That was merely my first wave,” Colonel Giap snapped.

“The same thing will happen to your second wave,” Doug replied. “And your third and fourth and fifth. We can blind your soldiers and jam your radio communications. We can gum up the joints of their spacesuits to the point where they’ll quickly become immobilized. There is no way you can get through our tunnels.”

“Nonsense!” spat the colonel. “We have enough weaponry to blast through your tunnels whenever we choose to.”

Glancing at Anson and the others crowding around him, Doug said darkly, “And we have the weapons of your first wave soldiers now. We can shoot back. And men in spacesuits are extremely vulnerable. We won’t need sharpshooters.”

Giap sputtered something unintelligible.

“We have no desire to harm anyone,” Doug said. “All we want is for you to withdraw and leave us alone.”

After several heartbeats, Giap said, “This situation is beyond my authority. I will have to discuss this with my superiors.”

“Fine,” Doug replied. “I’ll call again in exactly one hour. Until then, your suit-to-suit frequencies will be jammed again.”

The nerve-shattering screech of the jamming pierced Giap’s skull like a pair of icepicks driven into his eardrums. He banged on his wrist keypad to shut off his suit radio. As he got to his feet he saw that the other officers were doing the same.

Stomping angrily to the tractor that he had commandeered to be his command center, Giap clambered up into its cab. His communications sergeant was nowhere in sight; he would have to work the laptop himself. Worse still, he would have to face Faure.

No, he realized. There was something even worse. The insufferable Sacred Seven. Their young Japanese leader was waiting for him in the tractor’s cab, sitting in the rear seat. Giap recognized the shoulder patch symbol on his spacesuit: a fist holding a lightning bolt.

And the volunteer was holding the end of a communications wire that was already plugged into his own helmet.

Reluctantly, Giap took the proffered wire and inserted into his own helmet’s comm port.

“Your attack failed,” said the young Japanese. He sounded almost pleased.

“That was merely the first wave—”

“It failed,” the volunteer said. “And I heard what the Stavenger person said to you. Now they have your first wave’s weapons to repel your second wave.”

Giap pulled the laptop communicator from the shelf under the tractor’s dashboard. “I must contact the secretary-general.”

“No need,” said the volunteer. “Let us go in. We will destroy Moonbase and turn your defeat into a victory.”

“I am not defeated!” Giap snarled. “Not yet!”

The volunteer leaned forward and rested his arms on the back of Giap’s seat. The colonel could sense the young man’s tolerant, insufferable smile.

“Why wait?” he said calmly, softly. “You have the means to destroy Moonbase at hand. Why not use it now, without asking permission from your superiors?”

Giap took several long breaths before replying, trying to calm himself. At last he answered, “I am a soldier, sir, not a savage or a madman. I fight to achieve a political goal, not merely to destroy.”

“But you cannot fight without killing, without destruction, can you?”

“Death and destruction are the constant companions of soldiers, that is true,” Giap admitted. “But they are not our purpose! They are not our goal! We fight because the politicians have failed to keep the peace. We do not fight for the love of killing, for the delight of destruction!”

“Admirable,” said the young volunteer. “I am almost convinced that you truly believe that.”

Giap’s hands clenched into fists. For a burning moment he was ready, anxious, to give this young fanatic the death he was seeking. But the moment passed and he flipped his laptop open.

“I must speak with the secretary-general,” he muttered, yanking the comm wire out of his helmet before he could hear the volunteer’s sneering reply.

UNITED NATIONS HEADQUARTERS

It had been a hot, humid, hazy summer day in New York City. The kind of day when, in earlier times, before the Urban Corps, children would have turned fire hydrants into neighborhood sprinklers.

Now an early-evening thunderstorm was booming across Manhattan, sending people scurrying indoors, slowing traffic on the streets and throughways, washing the city better than its maintenance workers ever did.

In his climate-controlled office George Faure was not bothered by the weather. Indeed, he had not even glanced out the dramatic ceiling-high windows since the Peacekeeper assault force had started its trek across Alphonsus’s ringwall mountains.

The assault had not started well and Faure had been spitting with helpless rage as the Peacekeeper colonel reported being stalled in the pass across the mountains. But events had progressed better as the hours wore on.

The frustrating thing was that Faure had to watch the progress of the battle on Global News television, narrated by that turncoat slut Edie Elgin. But then her broadcast had been abruptly cut off, and Faure celebrated with a little dance across his office carpeting from his desk to the built-in bar, where he poured himself a stiff Pernod and water.

Now, slumped in his desk chair, he realized that his celebration had been premature. Colonel Giap was on his wall screen, reporting in morose detail the defeat of his attack on Moonbase.

“In the tunnels my troops were blind and cut off from all radio communications. They ceased to be a cohesive military unit and were reduced to helpless individuals.”

Faure stared at the faceless image of the spacesuited colonel, his chin sinking to his collar. He could hear his pulse thundering in his ears; burning fury seethed inside him like lava bubbling up from the depths of hell.

But he kept his silence. Moustache twitching, face glowering red, eyes narrowed to slits, he stared at the wall screen until Colonel Giap finished his report.

“And what are your options?” Faure asked once he realized the colonel was waiting for him to say something.

For three long seconds the secretary-general stared at the image of the Peacekeeper officer.

At last Giap replied, “I can send in the second and third waves, but I believe the results would be the same. Once in Moonbase’s tunnels, my troops are at the mercy of the rebels.”

“And you did not foresee this?” Faure snapped.

Again the interminable wait. Then, “I did not foresee that the enemy would be able to blind my troops. I had considered the possibility that they might jam our suit radios, but the blinding was a surprise.”

“So what do you recommend, mon colonel?”

The gold-tinted visor of Giap’s spacesuit might as well have been a blank piece of modernistic sculpture, Faure thought. He would get no brilliance from this man, no military genius.

Giap said, “I recommend that we cut the electrical lines from their solar cell arrays into the base itself. That will cut off their electrical power and force them to surrender.”

“No.” Faure was surprised to hear his own response.

He realized that he had made his decision before he consciously recognized it. Yamagata wants Moonbase intact, so he can take it over and use it for his own purposes. I want Moonbase destroyed, Faure finally understood. Utterly destroyed. Its inhabitants killed. I want it levelled the way the Romans razed Carthage. And then salt strewn across the ruins to assure that nothing will grow there again.

Moonbase has defied me, and for that they must be punished.

Why should I allow Yamagata to have it as a gift? He will continue to use nanotechnology and show all the world that I am merely his puppet. But that is not the case, no, not at all. Georges Henri Faure is no one’s puppet! I am secretary-general of the United Nations and Moonbase must bow to my will or be destroyed. And Yamagata must understand that I do not serve him; he serves me.

Giap was asking, “You don’t want me to cut off their electrical power?”

“No,” Faure repeated, realizing that it was all playing into his hands. Everything was going to be exactly as he wanted it. “Use ths volunteers.”

It was all falling perfectly into place, after all, Faure thought. Instead of accepting Moonbsse’s surrender I will smite them. The nanotechnology treaty will be enforced; Yamagata will not be allowed to make a mockery of it. Or of me.

“Sir, I want to be certain that I have understood you correctly,” Giap said. “Are you ordering me to use the volunteers?”

“Yes, mon colonel, that is an order.”

The delay from Giap seemed to take longer than three seconds this time. “They will destroy Moonbase,” he said, his voice hushed. “There will be many casualties.”

“So be it,” Faure replied. Better to destroy Moonbase than to allow Yamagata or anyone else to make a farce of my power, he told himself.

“Their hour’s almost up,” Anson pointed out.

Doug had been pacing around the control center, getting some circulation back in his legs, working out the stiffness of his back and shoulders.

The center had been in a state of suspended animation since Doug’s discussion with Colonel Giap. Is it over? Have we won? Or will there be another attack, something new, something we haven’t thought of, something we’re not prepared to meet?

Why haven’t they tried to cut the lines from the solar farms? Doug asked himself. Is it because they thought their nuke would do that job for them? We’re still vulnerable, still hanging by a thread.

Unbidden, a line from a literature class came to him: ‘The ides of March are come,’ Caesar says to the soothsayer, as he goes into the Senate, deriding the old man’s warning. ‘Ay, Caesar,’ says the soothsayer; ‘but not gone.’

We’ve stopped them, Doug told himself. But for how long?

They were all watching him: Jinny, Falcone, even Gordette, standing alone off by the wall. Every technician and specialist in the control center had his eyes on Doug. I wonder were Edith is? he asked himself. Did she go to our quarters for a nap? Bet not.

Edith was napping, but not in the quarters she shared with Doug.

She had tottered back to the university’s studio, dog tired now that the adrenaline of being on the air had drained out of her, but intent on getting a camera and recording the doings in the control center.

She looked in on the editing booth, still hot and sweaty from her hours in it, feeling slightly nettled that she didn’t know for certain how many hours she’d spent broadcasting to Global News and, through Global, to the world.

She started for one of the hand-sized cameras resting in its rack, but Zimmerman’s big plush couch looked too inviting to resist. Just a few minutes’ snooze, she told herself. Stretching out on it, she was asleep within seconds.

“You heard the secretary-general’s orders,” said the volunteer. ‘We will bring you victory.”

Giap turned to the leader of the self-styled Sacred Seven, sitting beside him on the tractor’s bench.

“Not victory,” he snarled. “Annihilation.”

The young Japanese must have smiled behind his helmet visor. “As the secretary-general said, so be it.”

The colonel had no reply. Yet he was thinking, I could still cut their electrical power lines. How long could they hold out then? A few hours, at most. They would have to surrender to me. That would be better than allowing these insane suicide bombers to kill everyone.

“I suggest,” the volunteer said,’that you re-establish negotiations with the Moonbase commander, while your troopers help us to break into the plasma vent tunnels, as per our plan.”

Giap noticed a slight but definite stress on the word our.

Precisely one hour after his conversation with the Peacekeeper commander ended, Doug sat at his console again and re-opened the communications link.

“Have you spoken with your superiors, Colonel?” he asked.

“Yes. They are reluctant to admit that we have reached a stalemate here,” came the colonel’s voice.

Doug wished he could see the man’s face. He sensed a tone he hadn’t heard in their first discussion.

“What are you trying to say?” he asked.

“I am responsible directly to the secretary-general of the United Nations,” Giap said. “My orders come directly from him.”

Doug leaned forward anxiously in his chair. “And what are those orders?”

“He expects me to accept your surrender.”

Doug heard Anson mutter behind him, “When he can breathe vacuum, that’s when we’ll surrender.”

He said mildly to the blank screen, “Your first wave had to surrender to us, colonel.”

Giap seemed to hesitate. Then he replied, “It would be quite easy for us to cut off your electrical power supply.”

There it was, at last. Doug almost felt relieved. “Not as easy as you may think, Colonel,” he replied. “We’ve buried secondary lines to take over if the primaries are cut.”

“We have sensors that will find all the lines.”

“And we have your first wave’s weapons,” said Doug, putting some steel into his voice. “Don’t force us to use them.”

“So we will have a firefight? I believe my troops have more guns—and more ammunition for them.”

“How much oxygen do they have?” Doug asked.

“What do you mean?”

“How long can you remain out on the crater floor, colonel? Remember, we have some of your shoulder-fired missiles now. We can hit your tractors.”

“We have all the logistics we need. You should surrender to me and avoid useless bloodshed.”

Before Doug could reply, Gordette leaned over his shoulder and pointed to the screen showing the floor of the crater. “There’s some activity out there.”

Doug glanced at the screen. “Wait a moment, Colonel,” he said. I’ll be back with you in a few minutes.”

Cutting the connection to the Peacekeepers, Doug punched up a request to rerun the outside camera view.

“Look,” Gordette pointed. “Over there.”

A dozen spacesuited figures marched purposefully toward the main airlock. As they approached they walked out of the camera’s field of view.

“What do the cameras inside the garage show?”

Checking on them, Doug and Gordette saw that the view from inside the garage did not show the dozen troopers at all.

“They stopped outside, off to one side of the main airlock,” Doug said.

“Why?” asked Gordette.

“I’ll try to find out,” said Doug.

Colonel Giap was alone in the tractor’s cab now. Through his binoculars he could see a squad of his troopers helping the Sacred Seven up an aluminum ladder they had placed against the face of the mountain, just to the side of Moonbase’s main airlock. They were struggling to open the square hatch that led into the old plasma vents.

Giap had studied Moonbase’s layout until he knew it as well as the face of his beloved mother. The plasma vents were from Moonbase’s earliest days, when the builders were excavating tunnels by boiling away the rock with high-temperature plasma torches. The vents let the ultra-hot vapors blow out into the vacuum outside. The vents had not been used, as far as Giap knew, in years. Yet they threaded through the rock above the main corridors of Moonbase. Crawling through them, a man could reach every critical part of the base.

The volunteers will penetrate the base before the rebels know they are being infiltrated. Their first warning will be when the fanatics begin to blow themselves up. Themselves, and every crucial part of Moonbase.

“Colonel Giap?” Stavenger’s voice sounded in his earphones.

“I am still here,” he answered.

“We saw a dozen or so of your troops move off to one side of the main airlock. Now they’re out of our camera’s view. What’s going on?”

Giap was prepared for the question. “They are setting up a maintenance station to repair the spacesuits your dust has fouled. They are trying to remove the dust from their faceplates and joints.”

Stavenger did not reply immediately. Does he believe my lie? Giap wondered.

“Let’s get back to the main point,” the Moonbase commander said at last. “Are you willing to withdraw and leave us in peace?”

“I am not allowed to do so,” Giap stalled. “My orders do not permit it.”

“If you try to cut off our electricity we’ll be forced to fire on you.”

Giap thought the man’s voice sounded very reluctant.

“Then I suggest you surrender, now. While you have the chance.”

“…While you have the chance,” Giap’s voice had an urgency to it that made alarm bells ring in Doug’s head.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “You won’t accept a surrender if you’re able to cut off our electricity?”

No answer for several long moments. Then the colonel replied, “If you fire upon my troopers, if a firefight is started, who knows what will happen next? A battle is not a predictable thing. There will be many deaths.”

Doug got the distinct feeling that there was a hidden subtext in the colonel’s words. He wants me to read between the lines, Doug thought. What’s he trying to say?

“Colonel, I wonder what—”

The control center shook so abruptly that Doug nearly toppled off his chair. A low rumble echoed through the rock chamber. The lights flickered.

“What was that?”

“A quake?”

“An explosion!”

Doug scanned his screens with newfound intensity. The solar farms seemed intact; no one was even near them.

“The water factory!” a technician yelped. “We’ve lost contact with the water factory.”

“The bastards have blown up the water factory!”

CONTROL CENTER

“Give me a view of the water factory!” Doug yelled.

“Cameras are out,” a technician hollered back.

Doug saw a blank screen where the view of the factory should have been.

“Jinny, get a repair team in there!”

“Already on their way,” Anson yelled over her shoulder, halfway to the door.

“How did it happen?”

“Rerun the security camera.”

With Gordette grasping both his shoulders from behind him, Doug saw the camera’s view of the automated water factory. A blur of a figure dropped out of the top of the picture; a flash and then the camera went dead.

“What was that?” Doug asked.

“A man,” said Gordette. “A person, anyway.”

“In a spacesuit,” someone else said.

“Spacesuit…?” Doug’s heart clutched in his chest. “The plasma vents! He came in through the old plasma vents!”

“What the hell are plasma vents?” Gordette asked.

The explosion staggered Zimmerman in his nanolab. A metal cylinder rolled of the bench and crashed to the tiled floor. Inoguchi grabbed the edge of the lab bench where he was standing to steady himself.

“A bomb?” Inoguchi asked.

“Or an accident of some sort,” said Zimmerman. The two scientists had been working flat out on producing therapeutic nanomachines for Cardenas and the medical team in the infirmary. They had not followed the course of the battle. Zimmerman had insisted that he didn’t want to know, not until it was over and decided, one way or the other.

“Should you try to find out?” Inoguchi said, looking worried. “Perhaps we should evacuate this laboratory?”

“Leave?” Zimmerman’s shaggy brows shot up. “Before we have finished this batch? Abandon our work? Never!”

Inoguchi edged toward the nearest phone console. “Perhaps we should at least attempt to determine what has happened.”

“Good. You call. I want to check the progress—”

An overhead panel ripped open with a blood-freezing screech of metal upon metal and two spacesuited figures dropped down in dreamy lunar slow-motion into the middle of the lab.

’Gott in Himmeir Zimmerman roared. “What is this? How can I work with such interruptions?”

The two figures walked slowly among the lab benches, turning every which way like children wandering through a toy store, as they approached the two scientists. Their spacesuits were bundled around their middles with bulky packages wrapped in plastic, with a simple small black box taped to them.

Inoguchi saw a red pushbutton on the black box of the intruder nearest him. Detonators! he realized.

The person nearest Zimmerman raised the visor of his helmet, revealing the face of a handsome young man with a neatly clipped dark beard.

“This is the nanotechnology laboratory?” he asked, in Oxford-accented English.

“Who are you?” Zimmerman demanded. “What are you doing in here?”

“Bombs,” Inoguchi gasped, backing away toward the door to the corridor. “Suicide bombers!”

“Do not move!” the bearded young man commanded. Inoguchi froze in his tracks.

The other intruder raised her visor. “You are Professor Zimmerman, aren’t you?” she asked in a sweet, lilting voice.

“Yes, and you are interrupting work of the utmost importance,” Zimmerman blustered.

The young woman smiled. “God is great,” she said, and pushed her detonator button.

Zimmerman saw a flash and then nothing.

The second explosion rattled the control center even harder than the first.

“They got the nanolab!”

“We’re under attack!”

The plasma vents, Doug thought, remembering how he himself had crawled through the old vents, years ago, to get to the environmental control center before his insane half-brother could destroy it.

There’s a double hatch in the face of the mountain, he recalled, a sort of primitive airlock. The vents are filled with air, but they can be opened to vacuum from here in the control center. Then he recalled that the intruder who dropped in on the water factory was in a spacesuit.

Someone was replaying the security camera view of the nanolab. Two spacesuited figures dropped in from the overhead vent.

Zimmerman! Doug suddenly realized.

“You’ve killed Professor Zimmerman!” he bellowed into his microphone. “You’ve killed Professor Zimmerman!”

Sitting alone in the cab of his tractor, Colonel Giap heard Stavenger’s agonized wail.

“What are you doing to us?” the Moonbase leader howled. “Why? Why kill that old man?”

Why, indeed? Giap asked himself. Because a politician in New York ordered me to do it and I obey my orders. A soldier must obey orders, no matter how distasteful they may be. Without iron discipline no army can endure.

“This isn’t war,” Stavenger was shouting in his earphones. “It’s butchery. It’s indiscriminate slaughter.”

“Yes,” Giap said, so softly that he wasn’t certain he said it at all. “Their intention is to wipe out Moonbase and everyone in it.”

“You’re going to kill us all.”

“Not I,” Giap said. “This is not my doing, not my wish. I am only following orders.”

“So was Himmler and Bormann and all the other Nazis.” Stavenger’s voice was acid.

Giap was silent for a moment, thinking, I have no orders that forbid me from telling him what he is facing. Faure did not command me to silence. Perhaps…

The colonel heard himself say, “You are being attacked by suicide bombers. Fanatics. Not Peacekeeper troops. Volunteers from the New Morality.” His words came in a rush, as if he were afraid that if he stopped for an instant, took a breath or even a thought, he would close his mouth and say no more. “There are seven of them: one each for your water factory, environmental control center, electrical distribution station, control center and farm. Two for the nanotechnology laboratories.”

Stavenger’s voice was instantly calm, hard. “They’re coming in through the old plasma vents?”

Giap nodded inside his helmet as he said, “Yes.”

“And even if we surrender, they’re going to blow up so much of Moonbase that we’ll all be killed.”

Again Giap nodded, but this time he couldn’t force even the one syllable past his lips.

He turned off his radio connection with Moonbase. Further discussion would be fruitless, purposeless, ridiculous, he told himself. Now it is up to the people of Moonbase to defend themselves, if they can. I have told them more than I should. Now we will see what they can do with my information. If anything.

A screech of metal on metal startled Edith from her nap. She jerked up to a sitting position, blood running cold. Again! Like fingernails across a chalkboard.

As she blinked and looked around the darkened studio, a man in a spacesuit floated down from the shadowy ceiling and landed with a thump that buckled his knees.

Edith got up from Zimmerman’s wide couch and went to the man, helped him to his feet.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

His reply was muffled by his helmet. Something about the control center, she thought.

“Can’t hear you. Lift up your visor, you don’t need to be sealed up inside your suit.”

He lifted his visor. He was young, oriental.

“This is the control center?” he asked.

Edith shook her head. “You’re ’way off base. The control center’s almost half a—”

She stopped. She realized that this stranger was wrapped in what looked like explosives.

The main door to the water factory was warped by the explosion. Jinny Anson had to get two of the biggest men she could find among the maintenance crew to push the damned door open.

Inside was nothing but carnage, a smoking wreckage of pipes and pumps, water gushing out into a crater ripped into the rock floor. Water! Being wasted, sloshing around across the floor, running out of pipes blasted loose and dangling from shattered supports.

Coughing as she advanced into the smokey ruins, Anson saw that the blast had dug a crater into the rock floor and water from the broken pipes was rushing into it.

“Get those pipes shut off,” she said to the maintenance team. “Turn off that water flow.”

“Water could leak into the tunnel below,” one of the men said.

Anson shook her head. “Doesn’t look like the crater’s deep enough. The blast didn’t penetrate into the lower level.”

A woman engineer pointed out, “Maybe so, but the water’s flowing into the piping and conduits between levels. Could short out the electrical lines.”

“Jesus on jet skis!” Anson growled. “If water seeps into the main distribution station…”

“Blackout,” said the engineer.

“First thing is to stop the incoming flow,” she said, pointing to the maintenance crew already working on the ends of the shattered pipes.

This water’s come all the way from the south pole, Anson told herself. And some brain-dead geek has to blast the factory apart and splash it all over the base. It was sacrilegious to her, to any of the old-time Lunatics, to waster precious water.

“How can we remove the water that’s already pooling in the crater?” the engineer asked. “It must be seeping along the conduits already.”

Anson’s answer was immediate. “We vacuum it out!”

“Huh?”

Doug sat frozen in front of his console, his mind spinning. Suicide bombers. Religious fanatics. How do we stop them? They’ve already knocked out the water factory and Zimmerman’s lab. The EVC and the electrical center and the farm are farther inside the base; the kamikazes haven’t had time to reach that far yet. But the colonel said one of them is supposed to hit the control center. Why isn’t he here yet?

“Bam,” he said, turning to Gordette. “Get teams of people to guard the EVC—”

“And the other points, I know,” Gordette replied. “We can use the guns we captured. Shoot the bastards soon’s they open the ceiling vents.”

“If you can do that without setting off their explosives.”

Gordette shrugged. “Don’t make that much never-mind, one way or the other, does it?”

Reluctantly, Doug admitted, “No, I guess not. But we’ve got to try something.’

“True enough,” Gordette agreed.

A comm tech’s voice in his earphone called, “Urgent call from Anson at the water factory.”

“What is it, Jinny?” Doug asked.

There was no video from the water factory, only Anson’s tight, excited voice.

“You’ve got to open the plasma vents to vacuum,” she said, without preamble. “That’s the only way to suck the loose water out of here. Otherwise it’s going to seep down to the electrical distribution station and short out the whole goddamned base, I betcha.”

“Open the vents to vacuum?”

“Right.”

“But you’ve got people in the water factory.”

“We’ll be outta here in five minutes, tops. The place is a complete wreck. Got a team turning off the incoming stream but there’s a crater filling up with water and it’s seeping into the pipes and conduits between levels.”

Doug glanced at the big electronic schematic of the entire base on the wall above him. The water factory was dark, and he saw that one section of living quarters on the lower level had already blacked out.

“We’re getting shorts in residential tunnel two,” he said.

“Open the vents!” Anson urged. “Before the whole damned base shorts out!”

“Will do,” he said, adding silently, If the controls still work.

“Give me five minutes to get my people out of here,” Anson added.

“Will do,” Doug repeated.

It took almost that long to call up the ancient program that operated the plasma vent baffles. There were two out at the mountain face, and single baffles spaced almost haphazardly along the old vents, hinged to flap open in one direction only—outward—like the valves in a human body’s arteries.

He remembered that many of those partitions had been very tough to open when he’d crawled through the vents, seven years earlier. Hinges caked with lunar dust, almost welded shut. Will their motors work? Will they respond to the program commands?

A shadow fell across him and he looked up. Gordette was standing over him with an assault rifle held across his chest.

Before Doug could ask, Gordette smiled grimly and said, “I’m guarding the control center. Security’s sent teams out to the other areas to guard them. They told me to stay here with you; they didn’t want me with them.”

Doug didn’t have time to worry about Gordette’s feelings.

Blinking with a sudden idea, he said, as much to himself as to Gordette, “If we open all the plasma vents we might flush out any of the kamikazes crawling through them.”

Gordette’s brows rose a half-centimeter, but he said nothing.

“Especially if we start pumping high-pressure air into the far end of each of the vents,” Doug muttered. “We’ll turn those old vents into wind tunnels!”

He called Vince Falcone over to him, hurriedly explained what he wanted, and then hunched over his keypad and began banging away at it.

PLASMA VENT TUNNEL

It was easy to become disoriented in the dark, empty plasma vent tunnels. Crawling along inside a spacesuit with a hundred kilos of explosive strapped to your waist did not make the job any simpler.

But I’ll get there, Amos Yerkes told himself. I have the most difficult assignment, but I’ll carry it out. They gave me the farthest target, the hardest one to reach, because they know I’m the best of the batch. The others needed drugs to buck up their courage but I’ve never touched them. I’m better than they are and they know it. That’s why they’ve entrusted me with the most demanding task: blowing up their environmental control center.

Yerkes was twenty-two and considered himself a failure as a son and as a man. But this is one thing I will not fail at. “Nothing in my life,” he slightly misquoted Shakespeare, “will so become me as my leaving of it.”

In the light of his helmet lamp he saw another of those dreadful partitions. It had taken him far longer to open the last few than he had thought it would. Hours, it seemed. They were all stuck fast, and he had been sweating inside his spacesuit before he could pull them down on their creaking hinges. Then, once he had crawled over them, they had each snapped shut again with a startling clang that could probably be heard over the length and breadth of the base.

This partition was no different: a thin baffle of metal, hinged on the bottom. Stuck fast with caked dust. Yerkes brushed doggedly at the dust with his gloved fingers, wishing he could open his visor and blow the stuff out of his way. But he had been ordered to keep his spacesuit sealed, just in case the vent tunnels did not hold air as they believed.

As he worked, sweat stinging his eyes, he pictured the services that would be held in his honor back in Atlanta. General O’Conner himself will give the eulogy, he thought. My parents will cry and wish they had treated me better.

Vince Falcone was grateful for the Moon’s low gravity as he and six other men trundled heavy cylinders of oxygen down the corridor toward the environmental control center.

Doug’s idea was wild, Falcone thought, but he couldn’t think of anything better.

This had better work, he told himself. Otherwise we’ll all be dead in another half-hour or so.

“You will take me to the control center,” the spacesuited Japanese said.

“I can’t,” Edith blurted.

He grabbed her wrist hard. “Why not?”

Thinking as swiftly as she ever had, Edith lied, The corridors are guarded. We’d both be shot the minute we stepped outside.”

He glared at her.

“And we’re so far away from the control center,” Edith quickly added,’that your bomb wouldn’t touch it if you set it off in here.”

Still glaring, he looked around at the studio’s cameras and fake-bookcase sets. Not a worthy target.

“You’re hurting my wrist,” Edith said.

He let go. “You are my hostage,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, looking around the empty, sparsely lit studio. Nowhere to hide, nothing here but video and VR equipment. Even if I grabbed a camera or tripod or something and tried to bash him, he’s protected by his helmet. And he might set off his bomb.

“You will call the control center and tell them to surrender to me,” the young man said, his voice harsh, guttural. “If you refuse I will kill us both.”

“Oh, I’ll call them, don’t worry about that.”

Doug fidgeted on his chair, waiting for Falcone to report he was ready to pump high-pressure oxygen into the plasma vents.

“We’re clear of the factory,” Jinny Anson reported from a corridor wall phone. “Had to seal the whole section of corridor, “cause the door to the factory’s been damaged by the blast.”

“Okay, fine,” Doug said. “We ought to open the vents to vacuum in a few minutes.” Silently he added, Come on, Vince!

“Call from the university studio,” a comm tech’s voice said in his earphone.

Edith, he knew. Doug nodded and touched the proper keypad.

Edith’s face appeared on his central screen. She looked strained, worried. Then Doug saw, behind her, the face of an oriental in a spacesuit helmet.

“Doug, I’m a hostage—”

The intruder pushed her aside. “You must surrender to me immediately! If you don’t, I will blow up this chamber with this woman in it!”

Doug felt as if someone had pushed him off a cliff. His mouth went dry. It took him two swallows to work up enough moisture to reply, “Hold on. I’ll surrender. Just don’t do anything foolish.”

“I must speak to the commander of Moonbase!” the suicide bomber insisted. “No underlings!”

“I’m Douglas Stavenger, the chief administrator of Moon-base.”

The Japanese’s eyes widened momentarily. “Douglas Stavenger? The one whose body is filled with nanomachines?”

“Yes, that’s me.” Doug felt Bam Gordette’s presence behind him, strong, protective.

“You must come here and surrender to me personally!”

“I understand.”

“Now! Quickly! Otherwise I kill her!”

“Okay, I’m on my way,” Doug said. He cut the connection and jumped up from his chair.

Gordette stood in his way. “You go in there, he’s gonna set off his explosives.”

“If I don’t go, he’s going to kill Edith.”

ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL CENTER

Falcone and his team threaded their way through the maze of piping and pumps that recycled and circulated air through Moonbase, dragging the cylinders of high-pressure oxygen clunking loudly along the narrow metal mesh walkways that twined through the throbbing equipment.

“There it is!” one of his men shouted, pointing to a metal hatch set into the rock ceiling.

Falcone squinted up to where the man was pointing. The ceiling was shadowy, criss-crossed with pipes.

“Naw,” he said. “Farther back. We want the last one of the hatches. The very last one.”

The man grumbled but moved on, deeper into the EVC.

“Is this really gonna work?” asked the guy just behind Falcone, gasping with exertion as he dragged a bulky oxygen cylinder.

“High-pressure gas on this end, vacuum on the other end. Oughtta blow out anything in the vents that ain’t fastened down.”

“Oughtta,” the man puffed.

Oughtta, Falcone said to himself. If the team with the friggin’ hoses shows up in time.

Doug spoke into his hand-held phone as he ran along the corridor toward the university studio.

“How soon?” he demanded.

“Got the hoses, finally,” Falcone’s voice crackled. “Gimme five minutes.”

“We’ve got to open the vents to vacuum, Vince! Water’s shorting out half the sections on level two.”

“Three minutes.”

“Call the control center when you’re ready. Jinny’s back and she’ll handle it.”

“What about you?”

Glancing at Gordette, loping along beside him with his assault rifle gripped tightly in his hands, Doug replied, “I’ve got other problems.”

As far as Amos Yerkes could tell, this was the last partition between him and the environmental control center. Blinking at the sweat trickling into his eyes, telling himself he should have thought to wear a head band, he pulled out the schematic map of Moonbase and tried to check out where he actually was.

Yes, that should be the end of the tunnel, on the other side of this partition. One more to go and he’d be directly over Moonbase’s environmental control center.

When I blow that up, he thought happily, they won’t have any air to breath. I won’t go alone; I’ll take all of them with me!

He started working on the partition with newfound energy.

Face streaked with grease, Jinny Anson sat at the same console Doug had been using, finger hovering over the keypad that would open all the plasma vent baffles.

Come on, Vince, she grumbled to herself. Move it, you big ape.

As if he’d heard her, Falcone’s swarthy face appeared on the screen showing the environmental control center.

Grinning broadly, he said, “All connected. We’re ready anytime you are.”

Anson let out a grateful sigh, then said, “Ten seconds?”

“Ten seconds,” Falcone said, teeth flashing.

“On my mark…” She glanced at the console’s digital clock. “Mark!”

“Ten seconds and counting,” Falcone said.

As they approached the double doors of the studio, Doug said to Gordette, “Are you a good-enough shot to get him without hitting the explosives?”

Gordette grunted. “Which eye do you want me to hit?”

Doug almost stopped running. We’re going to kill a man, he realized. Deliberately kill him. Or try to.

“Besides,” Gordette added,’they’re most likely carrying plastic explosives. Bullets won’t set ’em off.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yep,” said Gordette, without missing a stride.

As he worked on the final partition, Yerkes wondered how the other volunteers had done. He had felt the rumble of two explosions, it seemed like hours ago. Since then nothing. The others must be having the same troubles I’ve had, he thought. But they don’t have as far to travel as I do. I’ll blow up my target before they even get to theirs.

The thought pleased him.

The partition was loosening, he could feel it as he dug the accumulated dust away from its hinges. Not merely loosening, it was shaking, flapping-

It sprang open, banging on his helmet, half stunning Yerkes. He heard a rushing sound, like wind, like a roaring hurricane.

He was sliding along the vent, skidding backwards on his belly, being pushed by some giant hand faster and faster. The dim circle of light thrown by his helmet lamp showed the vent walls speeding past.

Desperately he tried to stop himself, dig his gloved fingers into the vent floor, but there was nothing to grab onto. He reached out sideways toward the tunnel walls but the force of the wind tore at his hands, his arms, and he skidded along backwards, screaming now in fear as he slid down the vent like a feather caught in a tornado.

Colonel Giap had climbed up onto the roof of his tractor’s cab. There had been no word from Moonbase since he’d told Stavenger about the suicide bombers. His troops loitered around their vehicles, waiting for the inevitable. The ground had trembled twice, more than an hour earlier. Then nothing but silence and stillness.

Giap looked at the watch on the wrist of his spacesuit. They’re all dead in there by now, he thought. Dead or dying. I should send the troops in, perhaps we can save a few.

Something caught his eye. He blinked, not sure of what he was seeing. A cloud of glittering sparkles was erupting slowly from the hatch that opened into the plasma vents. The ladder that his troops had placed there toppled slowly, like a stiff, arthritic old man, and fell flat on the crater floor in complete silence, sending up a puff of dust.

It was like a geyser, Giap thought, but a geyser of scintillating little jewels that flashed and twinkled in the harsh sunlight. On and on it went, spewing slowly out from the plasma vent hatch across the dark lunar sky, a thousand million fireflies flickering in all the colors of the rainbow.

Then something solid and heavy came shooting out of the hatch. Giap saw arms and legs flailing. A spacesuit! A man! One of the suicide volunteers, he realized. The body soared across the crater floor and landed with a thump that raised a lazy cloud of dust. It did not move once it hit.

Giap stared, not knowing what to think, what to do. Another body came flying out, tumbling like a pinwheel, landing helmet-first on the regolith. And then a third, limbs hanging loosely, already unconscious or dead. It fell near the other two.

THE STUDIO

Doug stopped in front of the double doors marked LUNAR UNIVERSITY VIDEO CENTER: DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHT IS FLASHING.

As he reached for the door pull, Gordette grabbed at his hand.

“Hold it,” Gordette said. “Look before you leap.”

Doug nodded and went to the wall phone next to the doors. Calling the control center, he asked for the security camera view of the studio.

The wall phone’s screen was tiny. It showed the panoramic view of the studio from the ceiling.

“Maximum zoom,” Doug ordered, “and pan across the room.”

The picture tracked across the studio, shadowy and dim in its spotty lighting. Cameras, monitors, racks of electronic equipment, the editing booth—empty—the sets where Zimmerman and Cardenas and others had given their lectures and demonstrations, also empty.

The thought of Zimmerman sent a pang through Doug, but he swiftly suppressed it. Edith is in there with a crazy man, he reminded himself. That’s what important now.

“Hold it there,” Gordette snapped.

The camera stopped. Doug could see Zimmerman’s extra-wide couch had been pulled from the wall; Edith and the spacesuited suicide bomber were crouched behind it.

“Well, he’s no fool,” Gordette muttered. “Dug himself in as far from the door as he could. Long as he stays behind the couch I won’t be able to snipe him. Have to spray the whole couch.”

“And kill Edith?”

“Maybe you can talk him into letting her—oh, oh!”

“What?”

“Is that the best magnification we can get?”

“Yes,” Doug said. “What is it?”

Squinting hard at the little screen, Gordette said, “Looks like he’s already got his thumb on the detonator button.”

“So?”

“That arms the detonator. When he takes his thumb off the button the bomb goes off.”

Doug felt his insides sink. “So if you shoot him it explodes?”

“Yeah.”

“What can we do?”

“Talk him into disarming the detonator.”

Doug knew how futile that was. “Or into letting Edith go.”

Gordette inclined his head slightly in what might have been a nod. “There is that.”

Anson peered at the screen showing the camera’s view of the crater floor just outside the main airlock. Spacesuited Peacekeeper troops were gathering around the three unmoving bodies sprawled on the ground.

“Two hit the nanolabs,” she said, ticking off on her ringers, “one did the water factory. That’s three. One’s in the studio, that’s four. And those three make seven. That’s all of ’em.”

“The water’s out of the factory,” said the technician next to her. “Maintenance crews are re-establishing electrical power in the areas that were shorted out.”

Vince Falcone trudged into the control center, a bright grin slashing across his dark stubbly face.

Anson got up from her chair, yanked off her headset, and threw her arms around Falcone’s neck. “We did it!” she said, then kissed him soundly.

Despite his swarthy complexion, Falcone blushed visibly. “Yeah, okay, we flushed out the garbage,” he said. “But there’s still one of the bastards in the studio, isn’t there?”

Colonel Giap was almost glad when he told Faure, “They have defeated us. There is nothing more we can do.”

Faure’s image on the colonel’s laptop screen was nearly purple with rage. “But there must be something! Your second wave of troops! The solar farms! Something!”

Resignedly, Giap said, “If I send more troops into those tunnels they will be blinded and neutralized just as the first wave was. If I try to destroy their solar energy farms they will engage us in a firefight that will cause unacceptable casualties.”

Then he waited three seconds, watching Faure’s helpless frustration. Perhaps the little man will give himself a stroke, Giap thought.

Faure’s reply was explosive. “Who are you to decide how many casualties are unacceptable! I am your superior! I make such decisions!”

“Throwing away lives will be pointless,” Giap said. “I will not do it.”

As he waited for Faure’s reply, Giap reflected that battles are won or lost on the moral level. One side loses the will to fight, and that’s what has happened to me. Why should I throw away my troopers’ lives for that pompous little politician in New York? To destroy Moonbase? To kill two thousand civilians?

“Are you saying to me,” Faure replied at last, voice barely under control,’that you would refuse my direct order?”

“I am saying that I will resign my commission before carrying out such an order,” Giap said, almost surprised to hear his own words.

We could tear up their radiators, he thought. Or simply cut the pipes that connect the radiators to the inside of the base, and then leave. That would take only a few minutes and it would leave them to cook in their own waste heat. There would be no firefight, not if we left immediately afterward. But what good would that do? They would come out and repair the damage.

No, he said to himself, best to leave now while the entire force is alive and unhurt. The Sacred Seven have killed themselves, that’s enough. No sense killing more.

“It’s me he wants,” Doug said, reaching for the studio door again. “He’ll trade Edith for me.”

“Maybe,” Gordette replied.

“It’s the only chance we’ve got.”

“What’s this ‘we’, white man? He wants to blow you away!”

“I can’t stand out here and let him kill Edith.”

Gazing at him with red-rimmed eyes, Gordette said softly, “I know.”

Gordette seemed to relax. He let go of the assault rifle with one of his hands, holding it only by its barrel, letting its butt touch the floor.

“You stay out here, Bam,” said Doug. “If he sees you with the gun he might touch himself off.”

“Yeah,” Gordette said, with a resigned sigh. “Go ahead.”

He watched Doug open the door and step inside the dimly-lit studio, thinking to himself, Doug wants to die. He’s ready for it. They’ve worn him down to the point where he’s willing to give them his life in exchange for hers. Then Gordette realized that it wasn’t merely in exchange for Edith. It’s for Moonbase, he understood at last. He’s willing to give his life for ours. All of us. For chrissakes, he’s willing to die for me.

And what am I willing to do for him? Gordette asked himself. Then a new thought touched him: If he dies, what happens to me? The rest of the people around here don’t trust me. They hate me. They’ll even blame me for not protecting Doug. But what can I do? What do I want to do? Am I willing to get myself killed for him?

Doug, meanwhile, had taken a few steps inside the dimly-lit studio. He called out, “Edith, are you all right?”

She rose to her feet slowly. “I’m okay.” Her voice was shaky.

The suicide bomber poked the top of his head above the couch’s back. Doug saw that he had taken off his spacesuit helmet, but couldn’t see where his hands were.

“You are Douglas Stavenger?”

“I am Douglas Stavenger.”

The man hissed with satisfaction. “Kami wa subarashi! You will come here, to me. Now!”

“First you’ve got to let her go,” Doug said.

“When you are here beside me I will allow her to leave.”

“No,” Doug said. “You release her first. Once she’s safely out of this room, I’ll come and stand beside you.”

“You do not trust me?”

Doug almost smiled. “I want to make sure that she’s safe. That there aren’t any… accidents.”

“Why should I trust you? You are filled with the devil machines!”

And you are filled with hate, Doug thought. Or is it fear? Can I work on his fear or will that just make things worse?

“My nanomachines can’t harm you or anyone else,” he said.

“It makes no difference,” the young man said. “Soon we will both be dead.”

“Yes, that’s true. But let the woman go. She has nothing to do with what must happen between you and me. She’s a visitor here, trapped here by the war. Let her go.”

“When you come to me, she can go.”

Stalemate. Then Doug thought, “At least allow her to get a camera and make a video record of our last moments together. So the whole world can see what you did.”

Even from across the half-lit studio Doug could see the young man’s eyes brighten. He started to respond, then hesitated.

Doug felt his pulse thundering in his ears.

At last the suicide bomber said gruffly, “Very well, she can video our last moments.”

If Edith minded that both the men were talking about her in the third person, she didn’t show it. Without another word being said, she walked purposefully from behind the couch to the rack of electronic equipment near the door.

The suicide bomber remained almost totally hidden behind the couch. Is there enough of him showing for Bam to get a shot off? Doug wondered.

“Now you come here!” the young man commanded.

“No!” Gordette roared.

Wheeling, Doug had just a split-second to see Gordette’s fist coming at his jaw. Then everything went blurry and he felt himself sagging to the floor.

“Get out of here!” Gordette yelled to Edith. Take him with you!”

“No! Stop!” the suicide bomber screamed. “I will kill us all!”

Doug felt Edith’s arms clutch him, dragging him toward the door. It was only a few steps away but it seemed like miles.

“Wha…” he heard himself mumble, still dazed, legs stumbling awkwardly. “Wait, don’t…”

“Stop! Who are you?” the suicide bomber yelled, ducking behind the couch again.

Walking deliberately toward the couch, assault rifle levelled at his hip, Gordette said, “I’m the angel of death, man. You want to die? Well, so do I.”

Gordette smiled as he realized the beautiful, inevitable truth to it. I’m the one who’s been rushing toward death, he knew at last. I’m the one who needs to die. At least now my death will mean something, accomplish something.

“I’ll kill us all!” the bomber screamed.

“You go right ahead,” Gordette answered calmly.

Doug was struggling to his feet out in the corridor while Edith was sliding the door shut. He heard the chatter of the assault rifle and then an explosion ripped the doors off their slides and flung Edith across the corridor.

It took fully half an hour for Georges Faure to calm himself to the point where he could touch his intercom keypad with a trembling finger and say, his voice hardly shaking at all:

“I see that several calls have accumulated while I was speaking with the Peacekeepers on the Moon. Tell them all that I am unavailable.”

His aide replied from the outer office, “Mr Yamagata is most insistent, sir.”

Faure saw that Yamagata’s name was at the top of the list on his desktop screen.

“I am unavailable,” he repeated sternly.

“Yes, sir.”

For long moments Faure sat there in his desk chair, feeling cold sweat soaking him. I must look terrible, he thought. He pushed himself to his feet and tottered across the thick carpeting to his lavatory.

In the mirror over the sink he saw the face of a defeated man. The Moonbase rebels have won the victory, he told himself.

He splashed water on his face, mopped it dry, then carefully combed his hair. I must change the clothes, he thought. This suit is wrinkled and damp.

As he reached for the cologne, the phone beside the sink chimed. He ignored it.

Moonbase has won the battle, he said to himself, patting the musk-scented cologne on his cheeks, but not the war. Straightening his slumped spine, squaring his shoulders, he repeated to his image in the mirror, No, not the war.

The phone chimed again. And again.

Banging its keypad, Faure snarled, “I told you that I am unavailable!”

His aide’s awed voice said, “But it’s the President of the United States, sir.”

Faure’s shoulders sagged. Perhaps the war is lost after all, he thought.

THE INFIRMARY

Edith swam up out of the black depths and tried to open her eyes. They were gummy, as if she’d been asleep a long, long time. A figure was standing over her, its face a blur. Blinking, she brought it into focus.

“Doug,” she croaked. Her voice sounded strange to her, as if she hadn’t really spoken at all but merely mouthed the word.

He smiled down at her, and she noticed that he had a jagged red line running across one side of his forehead. He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the lips. His mouth moved but no sound came out of it.

Still smiling, he reached toward her. She felt him pushing something into her ear.

“Can you hear me now?” he asked. His voice sounded tinny, as if it were coming through a bad radio. And there was an annoying ringing sound in the background.

She nodded.

“The explosion deafened both of us,” he said, as if his voice were coming through a tunnel from Mars. “My nanomachines fixed me up in a couple of hours, but you’ll have to wear an earplug for a few days.”

Edith realized that her vision was partially blocked by a large white lump, a bandage. She put her hands to her face; they were both heavily bandaged.

“You got pretty badly banged up, saving my life,” Doug said. “You got me out into the corridor, but when the doors blew they knocked you into the opposite wall.”

“My face?” she asked.

“The best plastic surgeon in the States is on his way here.

You’ll be good as new in a few weeks. Faster, if you’ll accept nanotherapy.”

“Nano—” Suddenly what he was saying clicked in her mind. “A surgeon from the States? The blockade’s over?”

“The war’s over,” Doug said. “We’ve won. Sort of.”

Edith tried to push herself up to a sitting position, but a jagged bolt of pain made her sink back onto the pillows. Doug reached for her.

“Take it easy,” he said. “You’re not ready to go dancing yet.”

“You are.”

“I get a little help from my friends,” Doug said.

“You can put nanos in me? Help me recover?”

“Yes,” he said. “Kris Cardenas will talk to you in a little while about it.”

“What about the war? We won?”

“The Peacekeepers have gone back to Nippon One, with the bodies of three of the suicide bombers. Japan and the United States have both demanded a Security Council review of Faure’s actions against Moonbase. The World Court has agreed to hear our petition for independence in November. They’ve ordered Faure to leave us alone until they make their decision.”

“We’ve won,” Edith said. It seemed to take what little strength she had. “You’ve won, Doug.”

“It’s cost us a lot. Zimmerman, the water factory, Bam Gordette.”

She remembered those last moments in the studio. “When he hit you, I thought he’d turned traitor again. I thought he was on their side.”

“He saved the two of us,” Doug said. “He gave his life for us.”

“He wanted to die,” Edith remembered. “He said so. Just like the suicide bomber.”

Doug shook his head sorrowfully. “Bam. Zimmerman. My stepfather, too: Lev. And Tamara.”

“You’ve lost a lot.”

“We can rebuild the water factory,” he said, his voice low, mournful. “But the people can’t be replaced.”

“All because of Faure.”

“No, it’s not just him. He couldn’t have gotten anywhere it he didn’t have the backing of so many people. You’re the real hero of this war, Edith. You turned public opinion onto our side and against Faure.”

“All I did was blabber.”

A faint smile tweaked his lips. “Damned good blabber.

She pretended shock. “Profanity? Out of you?”

Doug’s smile widened a bit. “It’s been a long, hard day. And then some.’.

“That’s all right,” Edith said. “It’s been worth it. Despite everything, it’s been worth it.”

He nodded. “Maybe you’re right. I hope so.”

CHRISTMAS EVE

Doug checked his wristwatch against the digital wall clock as he paced the empty lounge of the rocket port.

It’s going to be close, he said to himself. Razor close.

As he waited impatiently, he thought back to the days when he’d sneak out to the old rocket port just to watch the lunar transfer vehicles land or take off. It was not even eight years ago, but it seemed lost back in the hazy mists of ancient history.

Now he watched a wall-sized screen in the underground lounge of the rocket port as the LTV carrying his mother gracefully descended on invisible jets of rocket exhaust, kicking up a small storm of dust and pebbles around the concrete landing pad. The big ungainly spacecraft settled slowly on its strut-thin legs. With its bulbous plastiglass pods for the crew and passengers, it looked to Doug like a giant metallic insect squatting on the lunar surface.

Okay, they’re down. Now get the access tube connected. We don’t have a minute to spare.

The newly-decorated lounge was empty, except for him. His mother and the medical team were the only passengers on this LTV, except for the body of Lev Brudnoy.

Doug had expected his life to simplify once the war was over, but it had become more hectic. While Joanna and Seigo Yamagata personally negotiated a merger between Masterson Aerospace Corporation and Yamagata Industries, Ltd., Doug was drawn into the whirl of establishing a government for the independent Moonbase and handling the delicate personnel problems of men and women who wanted to remain on the Moon without giving up their Earthside citizenships.

Tomorrow Toshiro Takai was scheduled to arrive from Nippon One, his first visit to Moonbase in the flesh after years of virtual reality contacts. Doug was going to broach the extremely sensitive subject of inviting Nippon One to join Moonbase and declare its independence from Japan. He doubted that Takai would be able to carry that off, but he knew his VR friend would feel slighted if he didn’t at least ask.

And there was so much to do before Takai arrived. Again Doug looked at the wall clock. Its digital numbers seemed to be leaping ahead.

At last one of the port technicians entered the lounge, ambling too slowly to please Doug, and tapped at the wall pad by the access tunnel hatch. The gleaming metal door popped open a few centimeters, with a sigh of air blowing in from the slightly overpressurized tunnel.

Feeling nervous, anxious, Doug watched as the LTV’s two pilots pushed the hatch fully open from the other side. The medical team was right behind them, four doctors, two men and two women. They looked self-assured, competent in their Earthside business clothes as the port technician led to them the tractor that was waiting to whisk them to the infirmary.

At last Joanna stepped through, looking years older than the last time Doug had seen her, but still regally splendid in a Yuletide green dress that glittered in the light from the ceiling panels.

“Welcome to Moonbase,” Doug said ritually, then embraced his mother.

She was tired, he could see, dark rings circled her eyes. But he urged her, “Come on, we don’t have a minute to lose.”

“My things…”

“The ground crew will take care of them. I briefed them myself. They know what to do.”

She nodded, just a trifle hesitant, but let Doug take her by the wrist and lead her out to the tunnel that ran back to the main section of the base. He helped her up into the old standby tractor, then climbed into the driver’s seat and started its electric motors.

“I hope we’re not too late,” Joanna said.

“We’re shaving it close.”

As they drove through the long, straight, featureless tunnel, the wide-spaced overhead lights casting shadows across their faces like the phases of the Moon, Joanna told her son about the negotiations with Yamagata.

“We’ve got to be able to continue manufacturing Clipper-ships,” Doug said. “That’s the important thing. That’s Moon-base’s economic lifeblood.”

“Seigo’s agreed to that,” Joanna said. “He’s all in favor of it, now that Faure’s stepping down from the U.N. We’re even talking about manufacturing automobiles.”

“With nanomachines?”

“In Japan.”

“Wow! Things really have changed!”

“In fact,” Joanna continued, “it turns out that one of the major reasons why he wanted control of Moonbase was your nanotechnology capability.”

Doug shot her a puzzled frown. “But I thought—”

Joanna silenced him with an upraised hand. “Seigo has a genetic predisposition to cancer. He wants to be able to come up here and have nanotherapy to remove any tumors he may develop.”

“That’s why he wanted Moonbase?”

She nodded. “That’s his real reason. He was willing to go along with Faure to gain control of Moonbase, as long as he could have nanotherapy in secret.”

“And he killed Zimmerman in the process.”

“Kris Cardenas is still here.”

Anger simmering in his guts, Doug grumbled, “Why should we let Kris help him? He killed Zimmerman! He might even have been involved in Lev’s murder.”

Joanna seemed strangely unperturbed. “Don’t leap to conclusions, Doug. Seigo’s not the devil incarnate. Have some Christmas charity.”

He stared at her as the lights flashed by. “What’s going on between you two?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “Except -I think we’ve learned to respect each other. And he had nothing to do with Lev’s death. That was strictly the New Morality’s doing.”

“You’re sure?”

“My security people found that the corporation is honeycombed with New Morality zealots. That’s why I’ve decided to live up here permanently.”

“Can’t you do anything about them? Back Earthside, I mean.”

Joanna said matter-of-factly, “There are too many of them, Doug. As long as we can operate here on the Moon and use nanotechnology, let them stew in their own juices for a generation or two. They’ll get what they deserve.”

“You sound like Jinny Anson,” he said. “If she had her way, we wouldn’t have any contact with Earth at all.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad, at that.”

Doug suddenly saw the full Earth in his mind’s eye, hanging in the dark lunar sky, shining bright and beautiful.

“We can’t let them strangle themselves,” he murmured.

“Doug, there’s more than ten billion people on Earth,” Joanna said. “We can’t save them.”

“Yes we can,” he insisted. “We can try, at least.”

She shook her head. “I thought you wanted to look outward and push the frontier.”

“That’s the best way to help them. Create new knowledge, new wealth. Keep the safety valve open for anyone who wants to use it.”

Joanna took a deep breath. “You almost sound religious.”

He broke into grin. “Well, it is Christmas—almost.”

She had no reply and they rode to the end of the tunnel in silence. As they got down from the tractor, Doug said, “I hope the medical team got there in time.”

He had to slow his pace to accommodate his mother, a little wobbly in the low gravity despite the weighted boots she wore. As they approached the infirmary Doug saw that a small crowd had gathered outside: Anson, Falcone, even Zoltan Kadar was out there, waiting.

Doug pushed through them and into the infirmary’s observation room, Joanna right behind him.

Nick O’Malley was just stepping through the door from inside the infirmary, stripping off a surgical mask. His face was sweaty, pale.

“I hope I never have to go through that again,” he said, his voice shaking.

Kris Cardenas and her husband Pete, the neurosurgeon, came out right behind O’Malley.

“Your Earthside team was too late,” Kris said, smiling broadly.

As O’Malley sank into one of the chairs along the far wall, Pete Cardenas announced, “It’s a six-pound, five-ounce baby girl.”

“Mother and daughter are both fine,” Kris added. “Natural childbirth without the obstetrics team you brought in from Earthside.”

“The first baby born on the Moon,” Joanna said, sitting in the chair next to O’Malley.

“Congratulations, Daddy,” Kris said to him.

Doug held out his hand and O’Malley took it in a limp, weary grip. “Never again,” he muttered.

“Look!”

Turning to the observation window, Doug saw Edith holding a conglomeration of blankets in her arms with a tiny, red, squirming bald baby in the middle of it.

“I got the whole thing on camera,” Edith said through the window. “She’ll be on Global News in a few hours.”

O’Malley brightened a bit and pushed himself to his feet. “She’s kinda beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Even in the midst of life, we are in the midst of death,” intoned Robert Wicksen. Doug had been surprised when Wix had volunteered to preside at Lev Brudnoy’s burial service. The physicist was also a lay minister, he had revealed.

Now they put Lev’s remains into the soil of the farm he had lovingly tended over the years.

“Ashes to ashes,” Wicksen murmured. “Dust to dust.” Doug stood at his mother’s side. Joanna sobbed quietly as Lev was lowered into the ground where he had planted the Moon’s first flowers.

Hours later, after dinner, Edith and Doug joined practically everyone else in Moonbase in decorating the three-meter-tall aluminum tree that had been erected in the middle of The Cave. There was plenty of rocket juice going around, and God knows what else. The party went from festive to raucous as the hours wore on.

Long after midnight, Doug walked beside Edith as they headed for their quarters. The alcohol he had consumed was quickly and efficiently broken down by the nanomachines inside him. Doug regretted that he couldn’t get drunk even when he wanted to.

Edith seemed quite sober, as well. The gashes on her face were completely healed, not even the slightest trace of a scar, thanks to the nanotherapy Kris Cardenas had supervised.

“You’re pretty quiet,” Edith said.

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Post-partum blues?” she kidded.

He looked at her: smiling blonde Texas cheerleader. “Pre-partum blues,” he replied.

“Pre… I don’t get it.”

“Claire’s had her baby. You’ve got your Christmas story. The nanomachines have been cleaned out of you. There’s not much reason for you to stay here now, is there?”

Edith’s face went serious. “You know about the offer Global made me.”

“Jinny told me about it. Managing editor of the entire news department and your own prime-time show every week.”

“I don’t want to be managing editor,” Edith said. “That’s more headache than anything else.”

“But prime time…”

“Yep. That’s the real plum.”

Doug knew that the LTV sitting at the rocket port would have space for her to return Earthside.

“I’ve talked it over with Jinny and Kris,” Edith went on. “We’ll have to haul in some new equipment from Earthside, but the studio oughtta be able to handle it.”

He stopped in the middle of the corridor. “You mean you’ll do your show from here? From Moonbase?”

“Sure,” Edith answered. “You didn’t think you were going to get rid of me, did you?”

He grabbed her and kissed her mightily. Two Lunatics passing by muttered something about mistletoe.

As they lay in bed in the darkness, warm and pleasantly tired, Doug whispered to Edith, “By the way, Merry Christmas.”

“And to you, sweetheart.”

“We’ve got a new year coming in a week. A new era, really.”

“Hey, now that you’re an independent nation, what’re y’all gonna call yourselves? You can’t call a whole nation Moonbase.”

“No,” Doug said. “We’re going to call ourselves Selene.”

“Selene?”

“A Greek moon goddess, from ancient time.”

“Selene,” Edith repeated. “Sounds neat. Where’d you find it?”

“I read it in a book, when I was a kid.”

“I like it.”

“Good. Now get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

“Lots of big days coming up,” said Edith.

“Yes,” Doug agreed. “Lots of really big days.”