Joanna sank back into the sofa, stunned with the realization that Lev understood Doug better than she did.

And in the security office in the servants' wing of the house, Jack Killifer leaned over his partner's shoulder, grinning at the camera display of the Brudnoys in their living room.

Rodriguez glanced up at Killifer. "You ought to be in the kitchen. That's your post, not here."

Killifer grinned at him. "The entertainment's better in here."

MOONBASE

"There they are."

Doug stared at the smart wall display in Jinny Anson's office. Three columns of tracked vehicles had come up over the horizon and were moving majestically across the barren plain of Mare Nubium, churning up plumes of dust from the regolith. He realized that the dust had lain there undisturbed for billions of years. No, not really undisturbed, he reminded himself. Meteroids fell into the regolith constantly, adding to it, grinding it up, creating the dust that the cleated tracks of the Peacekeeper force were now violating.

The cameras atop Mount Yeager and two other peaks in the Alphonsus ringwall showed the approaching attackers clearly. Ahead of the middle column rode a smaller tractor, clean white except for a blue patch on its side.

"Can we get a close-up of that lead vehicle?" he asked quietly.

Anson worked her keyboard and the view zoomed in on the first tractor. The blue square was the U.N. emblem: a polar projection map of Earth on a sky-blue background, surrounded by a pair of olive branches.

Doug snorted with disdain. Olive branches. The symbol of peace. Leading three columns of soldiers and weaponry devoted to conquering Moonbase.

"We'd better get down to the control center," Anson said. Her voice was hushed, strained, just as Doug's.

"Right," he said tightly.

Robert T. Wicksen got the news in his helmet earphones.

Automatically he looked across the crater floor toward Wodjohowitcz Pass. From where the mass driver stood, the pass appeared as little more than a dimple in the ring of rounded smooth mountains.

"What about the missile at L-l?" he asked, his voice shaking just slightly.

"Still sitting there," came the voice from the control center.

Wicksen puffed out a relieved breath. "Keep me informed, please."

"Will do."

Clicking to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wicksen called out. "Listen up, people. The Peacekeeper troops are coming across Mare Nubium. The balloon will be going up very soon now."

A dead silence greeted his warning. None of his exhausted team had a word to say.

Vince Falcone was swearing under his breath, but his mut-terings were loud enough for one of his technicians to ask, "Repeat, please. I didn't get it."

"You don't want it," Falcone said into his helmet microphone.

He and six picked assistants were trying to spread the smart foamgel across the narrowest portion of Wodjohowitcz Pass from storage canisters on the backs of the tractors they were driving. The work was slow, tedious, and made exasperatingly difficult by the fact that the gel tended to clot in the hoses instead of flowing smoothly, as the chemists had promised.