Like Doug, she was seated behind a desk. Her life-sized image on the wall in front of him made it look as if Doug's office opened onto her office on Tarawa: lunar rock and smart walls suddenly giving way to Micronesian ironwood and bamboo.

"When I visited Moonbase," she said, "the trip took only one day."

"We brought you up on a high-energy burn," said Doug. "The Peacekeepers are coming on a minimum-energy trajectory."

It took almost three seconds for his words to reach Earth and her reply to get back to his office at Moonbase. Usually Doug relaxed during the interval but now he sat tensely in his padded swivel chair.

Bonai smiled slightly. "The Peacekeepers are trying to save money by taking the low-energy route?"

Doug forced a laugh. "I doubt it. I think they want to give us as much time as possible to think things over and then surrender."

Her lips still curved deliciously, Bonai asked, "Is that what you will do: surrender?"

"No," said Doug. "We're just about self-sufficient now. We can get along without Earth for a long while."

If she was surprised by Doug's answer, it did not show on her face. Doug wondered if anyone was eavesdropping on their conversation. It was being carried by a tight laser beam, but still the tightest beam spread a few kilometers across over the four-hundred-thousand-kilometer distance between the Earth and the Moon. The island of Tarawa was tiny, but still big enough for Rashid or someone else to pick up the beamed signal.

"You are prepared to fight Peacekeeper troops?" she asked.

"We're not going to surrender Moonbase to them."

She seemed genuinely worried. "But they will have guns … other weapons. What weapons do you have?"

"There isn't even a target pistol in all of Moonbase," Doug admitted. "But we've got some pretty good brains here."

Once she heard his words, she shook her head slightly. "You can't stop bullets with words."

"Maybe we can," Doug said. Not waiting for a response from her, he went on, "We're going to declare our independence and apply to the General Assembly for admission to the U.N."

Her delay in responding to him was longer than three seconds. At last Bonai said, "It's my fault, isn't it? You're in this trouble because I bowed to the U.N.'s pressure and signed the nanotech treaty."

"You did what was best for your people," Doug replied. "You did what you had to do."

Masterson Corporation had owned and operated Moonbase from its beginning as a set of half-buried shelters huddled near the mountain ringwall of the giant crater Alphonsus. Nanotechnology made it possible for the base to grow, and begin to prosper.

Virus-sized nanomachines scoured the regolith of Alphonsus' crater floor, extracting oxygen and the scant atoms of hydrogen that blew in on the solar wind. Once ice fields were discovered in the south polar region, nanomachines built and maintained the pipeline that fed water across more than a thousand kilometers of mountains and craters. Nanomachines built solar cells out of the regolith's silicon, to supply the growing base with constantly increasing electrical power. Nanomachines had built the mass driver that launched payloads of lunar ores to factories in Earth orbit.