TOUCHDOWN MINUS 9 HOURS 45 MINUTES

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

Startled, Lev Brudnoy looked across the room at her.

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

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

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

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

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

"And turned it over to Yamagata to operate," Joanna growled.

"Yes, I suppose so."

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

"Expropriated," muttered Brudnoy.

"It's illegal! It's illegal as hell! But he's going to get away with it."

"How is your board of directors taking this?"

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

"Perhaps-"

"They know Doug can't live on Earth!" Joanna blurted. "He'll be a marked man."

"We'll be able to protect him," Brudnoy assured her.

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

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

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

"If only-"

The phone chime interrupted Brudnoy.

"Answer," Joanna snapped.

The phone's computer voice said, "Call from Mr Rashid, in Savannah."

"Put him on!"

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

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

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

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 8 HOURS 57 MINUTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fat chance, Rashid thought.

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

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

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

"Do you mean that they're ignoring our declaration of independence?" Joanna demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We'll fight with everything we've got!"

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

"If I have to," she snapped.

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

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

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

Joanna looked into his sad eyes.

"We don't even have beer bottles, I'm afraid," Brudnoy said softly.

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

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 6 HOURS 11 MINUTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edith Elgin was furious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They're coming right down the pipe," said the landing controller.

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

"You've told them that all four pads are occupied?" Doug asked.

"Yep," the controller replied without turning from her screen.

"No response from them?"

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

"No," Doug admitted. "I guess not."

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

"Keep sending them the message. I don't want them to crash on landing."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SYSTEM ANOMALY DETECTED

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

CHECKING SYSTEM ANOMALY

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

SYSTEM ANOMALY REJECTED

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

Goddamn, he said to himself. The display screen showed that the program had automatically checked the overvoltage message against independent sensors built into the electrical lines and decided that the message was false.

VIRUS LOCATED, the display screen announced, with no emotion whatever.

VIRUS ELIMINATED

The mercenary banged his fist on the console hard enough to make the screen blink. Damn! he said to himself. Goddamn virus they gave me isn't worth shit. Fuckin' expert system is smarter than the fuckin' virus.

He tried to insert the virus twice more, and both times the fault diagnosis subprogram identified the virus and erased it. Wondering if the program kept a record of attempts to bug it, and if so, whether it automatically notified the security department, the mercenary angrily yanked the chip from the computer slot and decided to toss it into the garbage reprocessor.

That's all it's good for, he thought. Garbage.

He slumped down on his bunk and turned on the wall screen. Stavenger was piping the radar plot from the landing control complex onto the base's general information channel. Less than six hours until the Peacekeepers landed.

He's a strange one, thought the mercenary. He's a couple years younger than me, but he's old beyond his years. Or maybe it's just that most guys his age haven't faced any real responsibilities, so they still act like kids.

Stavenger knows what responsibility is. Got to respect him for that. Like me, a little. We both know what it feels like to have a load on your shoulders.

Over the past several days there had been four times when he had been alone with Stavenger, when he could have snapped Stavenger's neck or driven the cartilage of his nose into his brain with a single sharp blow from the heel of his hand. He'd be dead before he hit the floor.

Yet the mercenary had stayed his hand. Not yet, he had told himself. Don't kill him yet. Let the virus do the job. He's not ready to die.

But the virus has failed. Now it's up to me.

Stavenger did not act like a man seeking death. The young man brimmed with life, with energy and purpose. Wait, the mercenary advised himself, wait until the precise moment.

They were so unprepared to fight, these men and women of Moonbase, so totally lacking in weapons and skills and even the will to resist, that the mercenary found it almost laughable. Why kill Stavenger or any of the rest of them when the Peacekeepers will be able to walk in here and take over without firing a shot?

Wait. Watch and wait. If it actually comes down to a fight, then that will be the time to take out Stavenger and as many of the others as he could reach.

It would be a shame, though. He was getting to like Stavenger. Almost.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 4 HOURS 4 MINUTES

Loosely restrained by her seat harness, so that she floated lightly in her seat, hardly touching its plastic surface, Edith looked across the Clippership's aisle at the man sitting beside Captain Munasinghe. He was a civilian, and a few hours after they had lifted off from Corsica he had made a point of introducing himself: Jack Killifer.

He was coming on to her, but Edith frosted him off with a polite smile and buried her nose in her notebook computer. I'm not spending the next four days getting groped by some stranger in front of forty soldiers, she decided.

There was something grim about him. He didn't seem fazed in the slightest by the zero gee of spaceflight, the way Munasinghe and the other troopers were. Instead he looked as if he were impatient to get to Moonbase and get the job over with. A lean, lantern-jawed, intense man, Edith thought. A man with a personal agenda.

The personnel list in her notebook gave only his name and place of residence: Boston, Massachusetts. Well, that's a starting point, Edith thought. She went hunting through the background database that she had put together before leaving Atlanta. And soon she found his history, in the material that her source in the Masterson Corporation had given her.

Killifer had been a Masterson employee, she saw. Worked for eighteen years at Moonbase, coming back to Earth only long enough for the mandatory health checks and then shipping back to the Moon immediately. Then, seven years ago, he had abruptly taken early retirement and never went back to Moonbase again. Until now.

Digging deeper, Edith found that Killifer had become an executive in the New Morality movement, one of the key pressure groups that pushed the nanotech treaty through the U.K. and got the U.S. Senate to ratify it.

He's anti-nanotechnology, Edith realized. But, glancing at him across the aisle, she thought he looked as if he had personal demons driving him. There's more to it than a religious conviction, she thought. I wonder what's really itching him?

It was boring as hell sitting in the damned Clippership with nothing to do but listen to Munasinghe's nitpicking worries. Killifer had spent as much time as he could roaming through the ship, but it only took ten minutes to see everything there was to see: The passenger cabin, filled with a mongrel lot of Peacekeeper troops, most of whom couldn't even speak English. The galley where their tasteless prepacked meals were microwaved. The cargo bays, stuffed with enough weapons to blow Moonbase into orbit. The head, with the seatbelt and stirrups on the unisex toilet.

He thought about popping into the cockpit, but he figured that the astronauts up there weren't looking for company, and there wouldn't be all that much to see, anyway. It's crowded enough here in the passenger cabin, Killifer told himself, friggin' cockpit's about the size of a shoe box.

There was only one bright spot in the whole mess, and that was the good-looking blonde reporter sitting across the aisle from him. Killifer had tried to strike up a conversation with her, but she didn't seem interested.

Yet now, as he sat wedged in beside the ever whining Munasinghe, she seemed to be giving him the once-over. Killifer laughed to himself. After four days in this sardine can she must be getting horny.

Only about four hours to go, Edith thought. I can handle Killifer for that long. So she smiled the next time he looked her way and, sure enough, as soon as Munasinghe left his seat to see to some problem, Jack Killifer unstrapped and floated out into the aisle beside her.

"Boring trip, isn't it?" he said, grinning down at her wolfishly.

Edith turned up the wattage on her smile a little. "I'd rather be bored than scared to death."

Without asking, Killifer pulled himself into the empty seat beside her. "It won't be long now," he said.

"You've been to Moonbase before, haven't you?" Edith prompted, as she quietly clicked on the audio recorder built into her electronic notebook.

Killifer huffed. "Spent the better part of eighteen years there."

"Eighteen years?" she said, wide-eyed. "Wow! You must have been there right at the very beginning."

"I sure was. Lemme tell you…"

That was all it took to get Killifer talking about himself and Moonbase. But as he talked, the dark brooding anger that simmered inside him started to rise to the surface.

"Joanna Stavenger," he growled. "She's the bitch that runs the whole thing up there."

"I thought Douglas Stavenger was in charge of Moonbase," Edith said innocently.

"Hah! Maybe he thinks he's in charge, but it's his Mama who's the real boss. The spider woman."

"Isn't her name Brudnoy now?"

"Sure," Killifer answered. "He's her third husband, you know. The first two died on her."

"Really?"

He chuckled unpleasantly. "I wonder how long this one'll last."

Edith asked, "Douglas Stavenger… isn't he the one who has the nanomachines in his body? He nearly was killed on the Brennart expedition to the south lunar pole, wasn't he?"

"I was on that expedition," Killifer said. "I was Brennart's right-hand man."

"Really? Wow!"

For nearly four hours Killifer gabbled away and Edith realized that his nanoluddite leanings were merely the surface manifestation of a deep hatred for Joanna Brudnoy and her son, Doug Stavenger.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 2 HOURS 38 MINUTES

Sitting alone in his office, Doug watched the smart wall's view of the crater floor, where teams of spacesuited men and women were desperately setting up microwave transmission equipment to back up the hard-wire system that carried electrical power from the solar farms to the base's electrical distribution center.

The microwave transmitters were dark, flat plates, innocuous looking. They were aimed at relay transceivers being set up atop the ringwall mountains, a circuitous route that Doug and his cohorts hoped would fool the Peacekeepers. They can blow the wires, he told himself, but they won't recognize the backup equipment for what it is.

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

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

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

"Hold there," he said.

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

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

A buffer zone.

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

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 1 HOUR 57 MINUTES</p>

"But it's crazy," Anson snapped.

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

"Doesn't mean it's right, either."

"Do you have something better in mind?"

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

"What can we do out there, Lev?"

The Russian thought a moment, then shrugged his shoulders.

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

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

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

Doug broke into a grin, his automatic reaction to a challenge. "We'll see," he said.

"You're going to do it?" Anson asked.

"Yep," said Doug. "We've got less than two hours and we've got to do something.'

"But it won't work! It'll backfire and-"

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

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 32 MINUTES

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

"Only thirty-two minutes left," Brudnoy said.

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

"We'll make it," he said. "Cardenas is ready to start laying down the bugs."

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

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

"It won't work."

"Come on, Lev! It's worked for Mother Russia all through history."

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

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

"I should have known you would."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is that believable?"

"Sure," the pilot said. "Why the hell not?"

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

"Then how will you land?" Munasinghe asked.

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

"You can do this in fifteen minutes' time?" Munasinghe demanded.

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

"Fifteen seconds!" Munasinghe's knees went weak at the thought.

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

"Piece of cake," said the copilot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Touchdown in twenty-three minutes," he announced.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 15 MINUTES

"All buttoned up," said the chief of the monitoring crew.

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

Except the main airlock in the now-empty garage.

"They've rotated," said the controller's voice, from the rocket port. "Coming down the pipe."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hovering."

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

Translating."

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

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

"Checking the coordinates… there you are."

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

"They're down," came the controller's voice. "I'm splitting."

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

"Will do."

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

TOUCHDOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Visors down," Munasinghe said, "Check the suits for leaks."

"What're they doing in there?" Jinny Anson demanded.

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

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

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

They don't seem very scared of us," Doug muttered.

"Yeah," Anson agreed. "They're not worried we're going to zap their ship."

"Is anything happening?"

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

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

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

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

Doug almost laughed.

"Hey!" Anson snapped. "Lookit! Both hatches are opening!"

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

"Go! Go!" she heard a sergeant's grating yell in her helmet earphones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But I thought there weren't any weapons in Moonbase," she prodded.

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

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

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

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

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

"Absolute nonsense," Joanna huffed.

"They know we don't even have spitballs to throw at 'em," said Anson.

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

"Their guns can fire in vacuum?" Zimmerman asked.

"No problem. Cartridges' powder is like a solid rocket propellant. They'll fire in vacuum, all right."

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

"H'mph," Zimmerman grumped.

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

"They'll be here," Gordette said. "Don't think they won't be."

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 23 MINUTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The airlock hatch was open!

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

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

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

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

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

The open hatch bothered Munasinghe.

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

"Killifer here."

"Can you see the main airlock?" Munasinghe asked.

"Yeah. I'm in the cockpit; I can see it on the panel display screen."

"The hatch is open!"

"Yeah. It is."

"What does this mean?" Munasinghe demanded.

"Damned if I know."

"Is it a trap?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is the airlock open?" she asked Munasinghe.

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

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

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

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

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

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 38 MINUTES

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

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

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

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

"Okay then," Doug told her. "Start the bugs."

"This had better work," Jinny Anson muttered.

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

Brudnoy quipped, "If it doesn't work we can always surrender."

Joanna gave her husband a disapproving frown.

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

Not a soul in sight.

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

WELCOME TO MOONBASE

PLEASE DO NOT ENTER

ROUTINE CLEAN-UP PROCEDURE IN PROGRESS DANGER! NANOMACHINES IN OPERATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

"They don't want us to go in."

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

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

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

"Look!" he said, his voice shaking slightly.

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

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

"My God," Munasinghe breathed.

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

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

"You don't think so?"

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

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

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

"Nanobugs, huh," Killifer said.

"Can they truly be dangerous to us?" Munasinghe demanded.

No answer for several heartbeats. Then, "Well, yeah, if they're programmed to gobble organic molecules."

"What do you mean?"

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

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

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

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

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

"They can rupture our suits, then?"

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

Munasinghe shuddered involuntarily.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 51 MINUTES

"They're not coming in!" said Jinny Anson, almost exultant.

"They'll come in," Gordette assured her. "Soon's they work up the nerve."

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

"Have you figured out their suit frequency?"

"Yep. Wanna listen to 'em?"

"No. I want to talk to them. Patch me in."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who said that?" Munasinghe demanded.

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

"You are bluffing," Munasinghe snapped.

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

"I don't believe you!" Munasinghe snapped.

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

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

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

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

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

"That's not true," Doug said.

"Go!" Munasinghe screamed. "That's an order!"

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

"You're making a serious mistake," Doug said in the captain's earphones.

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

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 59 MINUTES

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

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

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

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

This could get hairy, she thought.

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

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

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

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

"Speak English!" Munasinghe's voice demanded.

"The boots… they're coming apart!"

"My glove!"

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

"The nanomachines!"

"They'll kill us all!"

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

Munasinghe screamed, "No! No!"

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

"I order you to blow those hatches!" Munasinghe screeched.

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

That was all it took.

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

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

"Why don't you go in?" Stavenger's voice asked calmly.

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

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

The Norwegian lieutenant, last to leave the garage, reached a hand toward him. "Captain, wait-"

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

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

"Don't!" the lieutenant was saying. "You can't reach the hatches from here. It's too far-"

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

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

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

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

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

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 1 HOUR 11 MINUTES

Edith hefted her minicam. I'll have to know."

"Hansen," he said bleakly. "Lieutenant Frederik Hansen, from Kristiansand."

"Thank you," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

"And fragged himself instead," Anson added.

Doug shook his head. "I don't know if he meant to, but he committed suicide."

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

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

"It's not your fault," said Joanna firmly. "The idiot went berserk."

"He was trying to kill us," Brudnoy pointed out.

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

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

"What happens now?" Edith asked him.

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

"I didn't get your name," Edith said.

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

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 1 HOUR 24 MINUTES

"Mexican standoff," Jinny Anson said. "They're not coming in, but they're not going away, either."

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

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

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

"They're waiting for instructions from Earthside," he said. "This might take some time."

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

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

"Why bother?" Joanna scoffed.

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

"They'll be out for blood next time.' Gordette agreed.

"Like they weren't this time?" Anson shot back.

"What do you suggest, Doug?" Kris Cardenas asked.

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

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

"Ancient history!" Anson complained. "What's that got to do with anything?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone in the little group turned to Joanna.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 1 HOUR 45 MINUTES

"We can't stay out here forever.' Edith heard the Norwegian's words in her helmet earphones. He sounded uptight, tense.

It had been nearly a half-hour since he'd sent his report Earthside. No orders had come up from Peacekeeper headquarters.

They were standing off to one side of the open airlock hatch, in the shadow of the mountain's glassy-smooth flank. The troopers were spread around the crater floor, silent, waiting like obedient oxen, ashamed of their panicked flight from the garage. Edith wondered if they blamed themselves for Munasinghe's death. Apparently the harsh sunlight bathing the crater floor actually did stop the nanomachines from damaging their suits further.

"If we had missile launchers with us we could blow those inside hatches from here," Lieutenant Hansen said, "and then run through the garage and inside the base before the nanomachines could do any real damage."

"But we don't have missile launchers," Edith said. "Do you?"

Edith could sense the Norwegian shaking his head inside his helmet. "Well, we can't remain out here forever. We must do something."

Then Edith heard Stavenger's calm, almost pleasant voice again. "I'd like to speak to whoever's in charge of your operation, please."

For some seconds no one replied. Finally, "I am Lieutenant Hansen."

"I want you to know," Stavenger said,'that we regret very deeply the death of your captain."

Hansen replied, That's good of you."

"We seem to have an awkward situation on our hands," Stavenger said evenly. "I suggest we try to negotiate some way to solve it."

"You could surrender to us," Hansen suggested mildly.

But Stavenger merely responded, "That isn't negotiating, sir. That is demanding."

I'm awaiting orders from Peacekeeper headquarters."

"I'm afraid those orders won't reflect the actual situation here. The real question is, what can you accomplish? We don't want you to have to retreat back Earthside with nothing at all to show for your mission."

"Except a dead captain," Hansen said.

For a long moment there was no response. Then Stavanger answered, "Yes, except for that."

Hansen seemed to draw himself up straighter. "What do you suggest?"

Edith listened, fascinated, as Stavenger slowly, gently led Hansen to the possibilities of salvaging something from his captain's failure to capture Moonbase.

He wants to get the Peacekeepers to go on back to Earth, Edith realized, before they do any real damage to Moonbase. He's smooth, this Stavenger guy, Edith told herself.

For nearly an hour Stavenger talked with Lieutenant Hansen, soothingly, sanely, trying to move from confrontation to compromise.

Then a new thought struck Edith. If Stavenger's successful, we'll all pack up and go back to Earth. I'll never see the inside of Moonbase! I'll never get to interview any of their people. All I'll have is a story about the Peacekeepers being humiliated, and the suits upstairs might not even want to run it!

The hell with that, she told herself. I've got to get inside the base. I've got to see this Stavenger guy and the other rebels.

But how?

There was only one way that she could think of. Hansen was still talking with Stavenger, the other lieutenant standing glumly by him, the rest of the troopers out on the crater floor, standing, sitting, pacing restlessly.

Slowly, without calling attention to herself, Edith sidled away from the Peacekeeper officers, toward the lip of the open airlock hatch. It was much bigger than anything she had expected to see at Moonbase, big enough to allow two tractors through, side by side.

They wouldn't let me die from their nanobugs, Edith reassured herself. They didn't want any of the troopers to get killed, after all. They'll come and get me. If they don't, I'll just run back out here again.

If I have time, she added.

Okay, Edith asked herself. How big a risk are you willing to take for an exclusive interview with the Moonbase rebels?

She hesitated one moment more. Hansen and Stavenger were still talking: something about Mrs Brudnoy coming back Earthside with the Peacekeepers to negotiate face-to-face with Faure.

Edith took a deep breath of canned air, then started to run as hard as she could in the cumbersome spacesuit across the smooth rock floor of the Moonbase garage. The floor that still teemed with deadly nanobugs.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 2 HOURS 6 MINUTES

Doug tried to keep the tension out of his voice. It felt weird, trying to negotiate with someone you can't see. Why did the lieutenant decide to stay off to one side of the hatch, where our outside cameras can't pick him up? Is there a reason for that, or is it just a fluke?

His throat was getting dry from so much steady talking. Somebody handed him a tumbler of water and he sipped at it gratefully.

No one had left the control center. They were still gathered around him. Doug could feel the heat of their bodies, the sweat of their anxiety.

On the screens before him Doug saw the empty garage and a good swathe of the floor of the crater, where most of the Peacekeeper troops seemed to be milling about aimlessly. We should count them, he thought as he talked with Hansen, make certain they're all accounted for.

"Mrs Brudnoy is willing to accompany you back Earthside," he was saying as he reached for the keyboard and began typing. "She's a member of the board of directors of Masterson Corporation, and its former chairperson. She could negotiate this problem directly with the secretary-general."

On the screen to his right appeared his message: COUNT THE TROOPERS. MAKE SURE NONE ARE MISSING. THEY COULD BE TRYING TO FIND THE EMERGENCY AIRLOCKS.

Hansen was saying, "I will have to communicate with my superiors. I don't have the authority to make such a decision."

"Of course," Doug said. Anything, so long as they don't get the notion to cut the power lines from the solar farms, or damage the farms themselves.

The mercenary watched Doug's performance with grudging respect. He just might pull it off, he told himself. He just might get the Peacekeepers to haul ass out of here and leave us alone.

The mercenary looked at the faces of the people gathered around Doug. Anxiety, plenty of it. But there was hope in their perspiration-sheened faces, too. And more than hope: admiration. Unadulterated admiration for this young man who was shouldering the burdens of leadership for them, and succeeding at it.

Deep within himself, the mercenary felt a tangled skein of conflicting emotions. He admired Doug Stavenger, too. But he knew that the more successful Doug was, the closer he was moving to death. If he really does drive the Peacekeepers off, then I'll have to kill him, like it or not.

It was strange. For the first time in his life he approached an assassination reluctantly.

But then he realized that it was Stavenger himself who would force the issue. Like all prey, Stavenger was moving willingly toward his final moment. The mercenary wasn't stalking him; Stavenger was coming to him, seeking death. If the kid would just let the Peacekeepers come in and take over I wouldn't have to touch him, the mercenary told himself.

But no, he's going to outsmart the Peacekeepers and make himself a hero. A dead hero.

"Hey, what's that?"

Doug caught the flicker of movement in the upper right screen and jerked his attention away from his dialogue with Lieutenant Hansen.

A spacesuited figure was running into the garage. A kamikaze? Doug's heart clutched in his chest. A suicide trooper clutching explosives to blow the hatch to one of the corridors?

"I'm Edie Elgin from Global Network News!" the figure shouted as she ran clumsily toward the hatch to corridor one. "I'm not a soldier, I'm a news reporter and you've got to let me in!"

"Get out of there!" Doug yelled. "The nanobugs will eat out your suit and kill you!"

"No!" Edith shouted back. "I'm a reporter and I want to talk with you people face-to-face!"

She reached the hatch and skidded to a stop.

"The nanobugs are already chewing on your boots," Doug said. "Get back outside while you still have a chance!"

"No! You come and let me inside the base."

"Flathead," Jinny Anson growled.

"It's a trick," said Joanna.

"But she'll die!" Brudnoy said.

"Let her! It's her own damned fault."

Doug stared at the display screen showing the spacesuited figure standing defiantly at the hatch. If she were nervous or frightened it didn't show through the suit. She just stood there, arms folded across her chest.

"Jesus Christ," someone muttered.

Kris Cardenas leaned over Doug's shoulder. "The bugs will work their way through her boots in a couple of minutes, Doug."

"You can't let her kill herself."

"Why not?" Anson snapped.

"Bad publicity," Joanna answered.

While they argued above his head, Doug flicked to the Peacekeepers' suit-to-suit frequency. Hansen and several others were bellowing to the reporter to get back into the sunlight before the nanobugs killed her. She did not reply to them. Probably not even tuned in to the suit-to-suit freak, Doug thought.

He looked up at Brudnoy. "Lev, get a team of people down to that airlock. Bring a UV lamp to deactivate the bugs."

Brudnoy nodded once and started off.

Doug called after him, "Do not let any part of her suit inside the base! Understand? Her suit stays in the airlock chamber until we can make absolutely certain it's been fully decontaminated."

Zimmerman lumbered off, too.

"Where are you going, Professor?" Doug asked.

"To meet this foolish woman, where else?"

Doug turned back to the display screens on the console. Hansen and the others were still jabbering on their suit-to-suit frequency.

"Lieutenant Hansen!" Doug broke in. "Lieutenant, this is Douglas Stavenger."

"She's going to kill herself," Hansen said grimly.

"We're going to take her inside," Doug said. "Don't try to take advantage of the situation."

"I assure you," Hansen said,'that this insanity is entirely her own doing. I want no part of it."

"Fine," said Doug. Yet in his mind's eye he saw this as a ploy by the Peacekeeper lieutenant. Get us to open the hatch to save the life of a nutty reporter and they rush a squad of troopers to get to the hatch before we can close it again.

"Just to be on the safe side," Doug said, "I would appreciate it if you and your troopers began filing back toward your Clippership."

"You don't trust me?" Hansen's voice sounded surprised.

"It's easier to trust," said Doug, "when I can see that you're not going to rush that hatch."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then you'll bear the responsibility for the reporter's death."

That was a stretch, Doug knew. We can't let a reporter die, he told himself. Bad enough their captain killed himself. Everybody on Earth would be turned totally against us. Reporter killed by Moonbase nanobugs. They'd nuke us and feel justified about it.

"I will order my troopers to stand clear of your airlock," Hansen said. "That will have to do."

Nodding wearily, Doug said, "Okay. I can accept that."

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 2 HOURS 11 MINUTES

Lev Brudnoy tapped Gordette's shoulder as he started out of the control center.

I'll need your help," he said to the black man.

Gordette looked startled, but quickly recovered and followed Brudnoy as the old ex-cosmonaut hurried along the corridor toward the cross-tunnel that led to corridor one.

Brudnoy stopped at one of the wall phones only long enough to call security and ask for an emergency team with a pair of UV lamps to meet them at airlock one.

"Why two lamps?" Gordette asked as they started trotting down the corridor toward the airlock.

"In case one fails," Brudnoy said, puffing.

"Redundancy.' Gordette understood. An astronaut's way of thinking.

The emergency team was not there yet when they got to the end of the corridor. Brudnoy muttered under his breath in Russian.

"Here they come," Gordette said, pointing up the corridor.

With a tight glance, Brudnoy reached out his long fingers and touched the MANUAL OVERRIDE stud on the airlock control panel set into the wall.

"Tell Doug that I am cycling the airlock manually," he said to Gordette as he pressed the stud that opened the outer hatch.

Gordette picked up the wall phone and spoke into it with a hushed urgency. "He's telling her to step inside the airlock," he said to Brudnoy.

The emergency team came up. Its leader, a roundish dark-haired woman, was panting.

"We were in The Cave with everybody else when the call came through. Hadda run all the way down to the storage lockers to find a second ultraviolet lamp. Why the hell do you need two?"

Brudnoy ignored her. "Is she inside?" he asked Gordette.

"Yeah, you can close the outer hatch now."

Edith never doubted for a moment that they would let her inside. Stavenger sounded too level-headed, too organized to do something stupid.

"We're going to open the outer hatch," his voice said in her helmet earphones. "Get inside quickly, because we'll need to shut it before any of your Peacekeeper buddies can make a charge for it."

The hatch slid open before she could reply. She stepped into what looked like an empty telephone booth with walls of smooth blank metal, lit by a single lamp set into the metal ceiling.

Soundlessly, the hatch slid shut again.

Nothing happened. It was like being in a spacious metal coffin. Room enough for two; maybe three, if you really squeezed it.

Edith heard a throbbing sound. She didn't really hear it so much as feel it through the soles of her boots. I wonder if the nanobugs really are chewing up my boots, or is the whole thing just an elaborate trick?

She could really hear a pump chugging away now, and the hiss of air.

"In a minute or so the inner hatch will open," Stavenger's voice told her. "Don't move. Do not step through the hatch. Understand me? Do not step through."

"I understand," Edith said. He sure sounds uptight all of a sudden.

"Good," Stavenger said. "One or two men will come into the airlock with you and help you out of your suit. Do exactly what they tell you."

"Okay, sure."

"We're risking the safety of this entire base and everybody in it," Stavenger said. "If the nanobugs infesting your suit get inside we'll all be dead."

Edith blinked with surprise. He really means it! He's putting the whole base in jeopardy to save my neck.

The hissing and chugging noises stopped, and for a long moment she stood alone and still in the metal sarcophagus.

Then the inner door slid open and a lanky, grave faced old man with a ratty gray beard stepped inside. Behind him was a shorter Afro-American, solidly built. He looked somber, too.

"Welcome to Moonbase," said the old man, breaking into a boyish smile. "It is my pleasant duty to help you take off your clothes."

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 3 HOURS 25 MINUTES

Wilhelm Zimmerman scowled at the woman. She was pretty, in an All-American, blonde, coltish way. And completely stupid.

"You came this close to killing yourself," he growled at Edith, holding his thumb and forefinger a bare millimeter apart.

Sitting on the examination table, wrapped in nothing but a thin sheet, Edith nodded somberly. "I didn't realize I'd be putting the whole base at risk."

"You think perhaps all this is a game?"

"Not hardly."

Zimmerman locked his hands behind his back and stared at the readouts on the display screens lined above the exam table. Everything looked normal. The UV lamps had deactivated the nanomachines infesting her boots. None of them had penetrated to the inner soles. This woman was clean of nanobugs. Her boots and the rest of her spacesuit were in the nanolab, down in the old section of Moonbase. Zimmerman wanted to inspect those boots personally, to see how much damage the gobblers had done to them. He intended to play back the video of the reporter's dash through the garage and establish a time-line to determine the rate at which the nanobugs ate through the plastic of the boots.

"When can I get my clothes back?" Edith asked, clutching the sheet under her chin.

Startled out of his thoughts, Zimmerman waved a pudgy hand in the air. "Now. They were not contaminated."

With a shy smile, she asked, "Then where are they?" Zimmerman scowled again. "Am I your valet? How should I know where they are?"

Hansen had returned to the Clippership and spent a weary hour discussing the situation with his superiors. He started with his commanding officer at the Peacekeeper base in Corsica, then was bucked up to Peacekeeper headquarters in Ottawa and finally to the U.N. secretary-general, Georges Faure himself.

Patiently he explained how Captain Munasinghe had been killed. Faure listened, a strange little smile playing about his lips.

"The captain died in battle against the rebels, then.' Faure made it a statement, not a question.

"He killed himself accidentally," Hansen corrected.

Faure's expression hardened once he heard the lieutenant's words. "No, no, no. He died in battle. How it happened is of little consequence. If the Moonbase rebels had not resisted, he would not have been killed."

Hansen let the point pass. More than one soldier had become a hero after the fact, he knew.

"Tell me then," Faure said, "what do you propose to do now?"

"Our only alternatives," he reported, "are to return to Earth with our mission unfulfilled, or to destroy Moonbase's electrical power equipment, which will force them to surrender within a few hours."

Faure's face, on the cockpit's small screen, looked perfectly composed. Only the slightest tremble in his voice hinted at the seething rage boiling within him.

"And if you destroy the electrical equipment," Faure asked, with exaggerated patience, "what happens to the people of Moonbase?"

Hansen said, "They will be forced to surrender."

Three seconds passed. Faure asked, "Why will they be forced to surrender?"

"Because without electricity their air-recycling system will shut down and they will soon have no air to breathe."

Another three seconds. "And once they surrender, do you have air for them to breathe? Do you have space aboard your ship to carry two thousand men and women back to Earth?" Faure's voice rose to a snarl. "Or do you propose to let them all die, choking to death while you watch?"

Hansen stared back evenly at the secretary-general's image. "I was merely stating what our options are, sir. I was not recommending a course of action."

While waiting for Faure's response, Hansen glanced at Killifer, who seemed grimly amused. "Friggin' politicians want to have their cake and eat it too," Killifer whispered. "And when they can't, they blame it on you."

"Attend to me, Lieutenant," Faure snapped. "You were sent to Moonbase to take over its operation and remove its leaders from control. It now seems that you cannot accomplish that task."

"Not without destroying the base, sir," Hansen replied. "And killing everyone in it."

Faure seemed to mull the situation over. "You say that Mrs Brudnoy is willing to accompany you back to Earth?"

"To negotiate directly with you, yes, sir."

The secretary-general toyed with his moustache. Then he asked, "And this news reporter, this Edie Elgin, she is still in Moonbase?"

"Apparently she intends to stay there. She says she does not wish to return with us."

Hansen thought he might be mistaken, it was hard to tell on this small screen, but Faure's face seemed to be getting quite red. As if he might explode into fury at any instant.

But instead, the secretary-general said mildly, "Very well. Bring Mrs Brudnoy back with you. Leave the news reporter. The mission is a failure, Lieutenant. A complete and utter failure."

Then he added, "Except, of course, for the martyrdom of Captain Munasinghe."

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 4 HOURS 48 MINUTES

"At least we don't have to pack anything," Joanna said as she sat at her delicate curved writing desk of light walnut and booted up her personal computer.

"Are you sure?" Lev Brudnoy asked, from the doorway to their bedroom.

"Of course," she answered, without even glancing up at him. "We'll go to the house in Savannah. My God, I'll be able to go shopping again!"

Brudnoy ambled into the living room and sat on one of the little Sheraton sofas. "Are you sure we'll get to Savannah?"

Joanna looked up from her computer. "What do you mean?"

"We're being carried Earthside on a military transport. It will land at the Peacekeeper base in Corsica. Has it occurred to you that we might be held there, incommunicado?"

"Incom- what makes you think Faure would do that?"

Brudnoy shrugged. "It's easier to negotiate with someone when you have him in prison."

"Are you serious?"

"Very."

"Lev, I'm not some nobody that Faure can hide from public view. I'm Joanna Brudnoy! There'd be an uproar if he tried anything like that."

"Maybe. Maybe I'm just a worried old man. But," Brudnoy ticked off on his fingers, "One: Faure has controlled the news media very effectively. Two: As far as everyone Earthside is concerned, you are at Moonbase. Faure isn't telling anyone that you're returning with the Peacekeepers. Three: You would make a very good hostage."

"I'm sending word to Savannah right now," Joanna said. "The board of directors will know that I'm coming back with the Peacekeepers."

"Can you trust Rashid to inform the board?"

Joanna stared at her husband for a long, silent moment. Then she nodded. "I don't think he'd have the guts to keep this information from the board, but just in case, I'll send the word to each individual board member."

"Good," said Brudnoy.

"And the news media, too."

Brudnoy gave her a sad smile. "Don't expect a brass band when we arrive in Corsica. Or reporters, either."

"You really are a reporter for Global News," Doug said, feeling foolish even as the words left his lips.

"I really am," said Edith Elgin, sitting in front of his desk.

She was back in the coveralls that the Peacekeepers had given her: sky blue with white trim. The color showed off her thick blonde hair very nicely, Doug thought. Her eyes were her best feature: big, lustrous, emerald-green eyes. Startling eyes. Eyes that made you want to believe whatever she told you. Long legs. She must be almost as tall as I am.

Edith was studying Doug, too. She saw an earnest-looking six-footer in his mid-twenties (which she knew from checking his bio before coming to the Moon). Olive skin, nice smile, dark hair, gray-blue eyes. Broad shoulders. His coveralls were a couple of shades darker than her own.

"I'm glad you decided to come into Moonbase," Doug said, "although your presence here is a little awkward for us."

"Awkward?"

He made a gesture with both hands. "You don't have any clothes except what you're wearing. And I'm not quite certain what to do with you, now that you're here."

"Do with me? I want to interview you and the others here. I want to beam your story back to the news media on Earth."

"The media haven't paid any attention to us," Doug said. "They even ignored our declaration of independence."

"Declaration…? You've declared independence?"

"Five days ago, when Faure told us he was sending Peacekeepers here to take over the base."

"I didn't hear a word about it!" Edith seemed genuinely shocked.

"You see what I mean?" he said. "The media have smothered us."

"Well, they won't now," she said. "Not with Global News' top personality on the scene."

Doug almost laughed. She seemed serious, and not at all embarrassed at describing herself that way.

"There's more to it, though," he said, sobering at the thought.

"More? What?"

"Well…' he hesitated, then decided he might as well let her know. "You might be a spy."

"A spy?" Edith's emerald eyes went wide. Then she burst into full-throated laughter.

"You find that funny?" Doug asked, feeling a little disconcerted.

"Man, I've never kept a secret in my life! Some spy."

Doug found himself grinning back at her. But he heard himself saying, "Look at it from my point of view. The Peacekeepers just happen to bring a news reporter along with them. Once it becomes obvious that they can't muscle their way into Moonbase, this reporter talks her way into the base-"

"By risking her neck," Edith pointed out.

"By depending on the good graces of the Moonbase people," Doug countered.

"And now this reporter is in your midst, and she's going to stay with you while the Peacekeepers are leaving."

Doug nodded.

"That doesn't make me a spy."

"Probably not, but the thought has crossed my mind."

Edith stared at him. He was pleasant and charming and very careful. He took his responsibilities seriously.

"For one thing," Edith said, "how would I get information back to Earth, if I'm a spy?"

"In your news broadcasts."

"Really?"

"In code, I guess."

She could feel her brows knitting. "Are you serious or are you just pulling my leg?"

"I'm serious," Doug said, "although I've got to admit that the more I think about it, the less likely it all seems."

"Good. I'm not a spy."

"I hope not."

"In fact, I can do you some good. I can get your story out. The media can't ignore me."

Doug nodded and decided that, whether she was a spy or not, she might be useful at that. And it's going to be fun showing her around Moonbase, he thought.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 8 HOURS 3 MINUTES

Georges Faure took Rashid's call in his office atop the U.K. secretariat building because his comfortable, luxurious apartment was a wreck.

The secretary-general had spent long, agonized hours speaking with the timid lieutenant who had taken command of the Moonbase mission. Faure had felt his blood pressure rising, his innards burning with rage and frustration as the Peacekeeper officer reluctantly admitted his failure to capture the base.

Struggling to keep his temper under control, Faure had left his office and had his chauffeur drive him the three blocks through Manhattan's noise and filth to his penthouse apartment on the East River. He had given the driver the rest of the evening off, smiled his usual condescending smile at the heavily armed doorman, and gone straight to the private elevator that rose directly to his penthouse apartment.

Once safely inside, with the door locked and the phone's answering machine on, Faure took off his pearl gray homburg and flung it across the room. He stripped off his suit jacket and slammed it to the carpet, then stamped on it. He grabbed the vase by the doorway and smashed it against the wall. He went through the apartment like a one-man band of vandals, smashing, tearing, breaking everything he could lay his hands on.

He spoke not a word, made no sound except for the gasping of his labored breath. Paintings came down from the walls and were torn to shreds. Chairs were overturned, kicked, pummelled. The coffee table was splintered, the bedclothes ripped.

Only his clothes closets were spared his ravages. And the bathroom. When at last he was too weak to continue, sweating and gasping for breath, Faure tore off his sodden clothes, showered, then slowly dressed in an immaculate suit of dove gray. Dressing always soothed him. He found his homburg in the litter of the living room, picked it up, dusted it off, and set it carefully on his head. Feeling almost relaxed, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and asked the concierge to call another limo for him. He had a dinner engagement with six delegates from Latin America.

"By the way," he told the concierge, "please send a team of people to clean up my apartment. It has been wrecked."

And he left the astounded young man sitting at his little desk in the marble-floored lobby, open-mouthed.

After dinner, he went to the secretariat building instead of the apartment. He would sleep in the suite adjoining his office, and give the cleaning team the whole night to put his apartment back in order.

A telephone message from Ibrahim al-Rashid, chairman of the board of Masterson Aerospace Corporation, awaited him. Faure toyed with the idea of waiting until the morning to return Rashid's call. Then he decided not to; I will interrupt his evening, instead.

Now he looked across his office at the image of Rashid's somber, darkly bearded face on the flat screen wall display. It certainly looked as if Rashid were in a house or apartment, not an office. Faure smiled inwardly, pleased with himself.

"I am sure that I don't have to remind you," Rashid was saying,'that Mrs Brudnoy is not only a leading citizen of the United States, but a very important member of the board of directors of Masterson Aerospace Corporation."

"If you do not have to remind me," Faure said testily, "then why are you reminding me?"

"Believe me," Rashid replied, "I don't enjoy this any more than you do. But it is my duty to make certain you understand that Mrs Brudnoy is be treated with every respect."

Faure felt his blood pressure rising again. He opened his right-hand desk drawer slightly and reached for the weighted silver balls that he kept there. They were supposed to help calm him. Fondling them in his hand, he felt no relief from the frustrated anger building inside him all over again.

"I assure you, Monsieur Rashid, that Madame Brudnoy is not being brought back to Earth as a prisoner. She will be brought to New York to discuss the Moonbase situation with me, personally. She will be accorded every courtesy."

Rashid nodded once, barely. His eyes looked bleak. "My board of directors has instructed me to tell you that we expect Mrs Brudnoy to have full freedom of movement and association. She will want to go to her home in Savannah, of course-"

"Of course," said Faure, trying to smile.

"And she will not want to have Peacekeeper or United Nations personnel escorting her."

Faure did not reply.

"Mrs Brudnoy is quite capable of getting herself to New York for her meeting with you. She is in no way a prisoner or a hostage."

Studying Rashid's face as the man spoke, Faure realized that the chairman of Masterson Corporation's board was no more pleased with this situation than he was.

"Monsieur Rashid," Faure said, relaxing slightly as he jiggled the silver spheres in his right hand, "let us be candid with one another."

"By all means."

"Madame Brudnoy represents the illegal and immoral rebels of Moonbase who are defying international law. A Peacekeeper officer has been killed by them, you know."

"I was told he was killed in an accident he himself caused," Rashid replied warily.

"I am sure that is what you were told," said Faure. "However, the inescapable fact is that he was killed because Moonbase is resisting international law."

Rashid nodded gravely.

Faure resumed, "I am perfectly willing to treat Madame Brudnoy as an ambassador plenipotentiary, and accord her diplomatic immunity."

"Good," said Rashid, tonelessly.

"But technically, she is a criminal. Just as all the leaders of Moonbase are."

Rashid hesitated, passed a hand across his neatly trimmed beard. Then he asked, "If that is your attitude, then to what avail are the negotiations going to be?"

"None," Faure said, feeling cheerful for the first time since Lieutenant Hansen had reported the failure of the Peacekeepers' mission. "None whatsoever."

"I see," said Rashid slowly. It seemed to Faure that he did not look displeased at all.

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 12 HOURS 26 MINUTES

In the old days, when he'd been just a teenager, Doug had liked to come out to the rocket port and watch the ships arriving or departing in the eerie silence of the Moon. He would climb up the narrow ladder to the observation bubble, a tiny dome of clear plastic, and get a worm's eye view of landings and liftoffs.

The old rocket port was a set of storage chambers now. The new port was not much bigger, and had been dug into the floor of Alphonsus more than a kilometer from the flank of Mount Yeager, where the main plaza was going to be built.

Doug drove on the spring-wheeled crawler down the long tunnel to the port, his mother and Lev Brudnoy seated behind him, the reporter at his side.

"Does the head of the base work as a taxi driver very often?" Edith asked, grinning at him.

The tunnel was long and straight and bare. Strips of fluorescent lamps lined its unfinished rock ceiling, their light making everyone's skin look sickly, almost green.

"I'm not the head of the base anymore," Doug answered lightly. "And around Moonbase, everybody pitches in and does what needs doing."

"I thought you were Moonbase's director," Edith said, her grin replaced by a puzzled frown.

"I was, but I gave it up for the duration of this crisis."

"Then what's your title? How do I identify you for your interview?"

Doug lifted his shoulders in a shrug. "Damned if I know. Titles don't mean all that much around here."

"Call him the chief administrator of Moonbase," Joanna said, leaning forward slightly in her seat.

"Generalissimo," Brudnoy joked.

Edith was serious. "Chief administrator. That sounds good. And who's the director of the base? Or is there one now?"

"Jinny Anson," Doug said. "You'll want to interview her, too."

"And my wife's title is ambassador plenipotentiary," Brudnoy said, "while my own title is luggage handler."

Edith fingered the minicam in her lap. "I want to squeeze in an interview with you before you take off, Mrs Brudnoy."

"It'll have to be a quick one," Doug said, glancing at his wristwatch. "Liftoff's scheduled for twenty-six minutes from now."

With a laugh, Edith said, "Twenty-six minutes is an eternity in video news, Doug."

But she got down to business immediately and began questioning Joanna about what she hoped to accomplish in negotiations with Faure.

"It's very simple," Joanna said. "I'm going to New York to get the U.N. to recognize Moonbase's independence."

"And if they refuse to recognize it?" Edith prompted.

Joanna shook her head. "We are independent. Physically, we are self-sustaining. All we're asking is for the United Nations to recognize reality."

"And if they don't?"

For a heartbeat, Joanna did not reply. Then she said, "Then we'll have to prove to Faure and the rest of the U.N. that we won't be intimidated."

"Do you think the U.N. will send more Peacekeeper troops to try to take over Moonbase?"

"I hope it doesn't come to that," Joanna said.

"But it will," Doug added, realizing the truth of it as he spoke the words. "We've won the opening skirmish, but this war won't be over for a long time."

TOUCHDOWN PLUS 12 HOURS 52 MINUTES

Jack Killifer stood in the open hatch to the cockpit, trying not to sound as if he were pleading with the two pilots.

"You gotta let me ride up here with you," he said. "On the jumpseat."

The copilot's eyes were fixed on the control panel's gauges. He and the command pilot had lifted the Clippership from its landing spot on the regolith to one of Moonbase's rocket port pads, where the spacecraft was being refueled for the flight back to Earth.

The command pilot looked up at Killifer. "We're not supposed to take passengers up here. We got work to do."

Killifer wheedled, "Come on, guys. You're making a high-energy burn, aren't you? Friggin' flight's only gonna take nineteen hours, right?"

"Why d'you want to ride up here, instead of in a nice comfy seat with the rest of the passengers?"

"You're bringing two extra people along, right? Mr and Mrs Brudnoy, right?"

"That's Lev Brudnoy, isn't it?" asked the copilot, without taking his eyes off the control panel. "He used to be a cosmonaut back in the old days, didn't he?"

It was Brudnoy's wife that bothered Killifer. Joanna. She'll recognize me, he knew. Haven't seen her in damned near eight years, but she'll recognize me if she sees me. Especially if we're locked up in this sardine can for nineteen hours. She'll see me. She'll remember who I am.

"And you got the captain's body, too," Killifer said.

"He goes in the cargo bay."

"Yeah, but you need two extra seats for the Brudnoys. Mine and the reporter's. Makes it all come out even."

The pilot glanced at his copilot, then looked up again at Killifer. "Okay, I guess it'll be all right. Just don't chatter at us while we're taking off."

"Okay!" said Killifer, a surge of gratitude gusting through him.

"Or re-entry," said the copilot.

"Or landing," the pilot added.

"Okay, okay.' Killifer laughed shakily. I can sit here for nineteen hours and never go out into the passenger compartment, he told himself. They got a relief tube here in the cockpit. I can go nineteen hours without taking a crap.

He had never acknowledged it before, but he was deeply afraid of Joanna Brudnoy. It was irrational, but he feared her. That realization made him feel shame. And a burning, relentless hate.

The mercenary lay slouched in his bunk and watched his wall screen display of the Peacekeeper ship taking off. He was startled by the suddenness of it. One instant the big Clippership was sitting out on the floor of the crater, sunlight glinting off its curved diamond body. The next, it was gone in a puff of hot exhaust gases and blown dust and pebbles. When the dust cleared the crater floor was empty. The ship was on its way.

Got to hand it to the kid, the mercenary thought. He faked them out and got them to turn tail. Peacekeeper troops ought to be tougher than that; letting the threat of nanobugs panic them.

He lifted his feet off the floor and wormed off his softboots, then swung his legs onto the bunk. Get some rest, he told himself. The next few days are going to be tough.

He considered his options. There was no way out of it, Doug Stavenger was going to die. The only questions were when and how. Can I do it without getting caught? Maybe make it look like an accident. Or will it be more effective if they all know that he's been assassinated?

Even if they catch me at it, about all they'll do is ship me back Earthside. Or will they? That Jinny Anson's a pretty feisty broad. Would she have guts enough to execute me? Yeah, maybe so, if she's pissed enough at my killing Stavenger.

Maybe I ought to get her first, he thought. But then he shook his head. No way. Knock off Stavenger first. He's the key, especially with his mother back Earthside. Knock him off, and then afterward get Anson and anybody else you can reach.

So they kill me, he told himself. I've been running toward death all my life. I'll take a lot of them with me.