"Looks good."

He swivelled slightly to see Jinny Anson standing behind him.

"Now we'll see if they try to shoot it down," Anson said tightly.

"L-l's painting it," the radar tech called out.

"I launched it retrograde," Clemens said to Anson,'so L-l won't have more than a few minutes to calculate its trajectory."

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

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

Clemens' high forehead wrinkled. "You think they'll zap it?"

"If the Peacekeepers've put a big enough laser at L-l, yeah, they will."

"Do you think they've put weapons-strength lasers in Nippon One?"

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

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

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

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