"That will be entirely your fault, not mine," he said, very seriously. With that, he reached one arm around her shoulders and the other beneath her legs.

"All right!" Joanna yelped. "All right! I'll go upstairs. I'll go with you."

Brudnoy straightened up. "Good," he said, offering her his hand.

And as she allowed her husband to help her up from the sofa and started for the bedroom, Jack Killifer—watching from the dining room door that he had opened a crack—also said, "Good," in a whisper that only he could hear.

Doug was nervously munching a sandwich, sitting on one of the spindly chairs in front of a console in the control center. Like his mother, like the millions of people Earthside watching Global News, like the men and women who had gathered in The Cave to wait out the battle, Doug was watching the camera views from Mount Yeager.

"They're not doing anything," he murmured.

Bam Gordette, standing slightly behind Doug like a bodyguard, said, "That's the army: hurry up and wait."

Doug thought that the thirty-klicks-per-hour pace of the Peacekeepers' vehicles hardly qualified for hurrying up, but they were definitely waiting now.

The control center had settled into a waiting mode also. Everything that could be done to prepare Moonbase's defenses had been done. Nick O'Malley paced nervously a few consoles away, hoping that his dust would work as he had promised. Vince Falcone and his crew had finally come back from Wodjo Pass, grumbling and griping about the foamgel's intractability but satisfied that they had covered as much of the pass as they could.

Wix and his people are still working on the particle gun, Doug knew. They're the key to our defense, the crucial link in the chain. If they can't stop that nuclear missile we might as well surrender. We'll have to surrender.

Nothing had moved out on the Mare Nubium for at least an hour.

"They're waiting for the missile strike," Doug said to no one in particular.

As if in response, one of the comm techs sang out, "They've launched! Rocket flare from L-l. Their missile's heading our way."

MASS DRIVER

Robert T. Wicksen was still outside, checking the wiring connections from the main magnets to the hastily installed switching panel, when the word came from the control center:

"L-l's launched their bird."

By reflex, he looked up. Instead of the sky he saw the inside of his helmet, dark and confining.

"How much time do we have?" he asked calmly.

"Wait one," the comm tech's voice said in his earphones. Then he heard her muttering, "Doppler plot… burn rate…acceleration—looks like… one hundred fifty-six minutes, according to the computer."

"Two and a half hours, plus six minutes."

"If they don't light a second stage."

"Keep me informed."

"Will do."

Switching to the suit-to-suit frequency, Wix told the four volunteers still working with him, "We have two and a half hours. Double check everything."