When Mika Cole and her followers faced heavy losses, they retreated into the mountains and caves of the lunar dark side. These vast, unmapped territories became their battleground. Coalition losses began to mount. Small, difficult-to-track teams sent raiding parties to government settlements, gathering supplies such as power lamps and generators, food, battlewear, weapons and ammunition. Terrorist sympathisers began to construct or buy their own ships, hide them well and blast off from Earth’s most desolate places; deserts, woodlands, jungles, Arctic fields. No one on the space stations did anything. They were not the army, weren’t authorised to kill. Thousands of ships went on their way to the moon’s dark side to support the terrorists. Many died making the journey: ships would implode on take-off, burn up in the atmosphere; navigation systems failed and they would strike a communications satellite. Or halfway, their equipment would mysteriously die, the occupants freezing to death, their ship a slow-spinning mausoleum grasped in cold orbit. Some would come in to land too fast, crash against the powder-grey surface.

Even so, others made it. What became of them little is known. It’s assumed they succeeded in joining the terrorists, because the violence began to intensify, Earth-bound politicians began to grow increasingly worried, and the effort to quell a minor insurrection, something that should have taken less than three months by governmental reckoning, started to look as though it was never going to end.

No one knew how, but eventually Mika Cole was brought in alive. Rumours said the coalition gained a lock of her hair, isolated the DNA and paid Seneca a vast sum to develop an android clone, much like the mechanical Millhauser who beguiled us from the beginning. That the cloned Mika infiltrated dark-side mountains, sent raiding teams on false missions, sowed dissension, captured the terrorist leader and brought her to the coalition. The intention was apparently to have her returned to Earth to stand trial, although predictably enough, some said, she never made it. Media reports claimed she took her own life, poisoning herself in her cell.

A new terrorist leader, who referred to theirself only as Liberty, and sent a digitally recorded message via a reprogrammed SCR, said Mika would never have done such a thing, that she was murdered. They told the coalition the war would not be over until every last one of them was dead, or the lunar terrorists killed the government workers and army in retaliation, whichever came first. They named themself Esse Percipi: to be is to be perceived. To this day, the battle goes on.