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-l," 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-l?" Giap demanded of tech sergeant in charge of communications.

The sergeant said through the upraised visor of his spacesuit, "L-l 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</p>

"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-l 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 youcannot 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-l; 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."