She came without a murmur and stood before him, an anonymous, sexless figure in a white spacesuit. Giap connected their two helmets with a communications wire, so they could speak without using their suit radios.

"I want to know," he said without preamble, "how reliable you and your comrades are going to be."

Without hesitation she replied, "Faithful unto death. That is our motto."

"A motto is one thing. Soon we will be in action."

This time her response took a few moments. At last she said, "We are pledged to give our lives to the cause of eliminating the scourge of nanotechnology. When the time comes, we will not hesitate to act."

"I'm certain," Giap said. "What concerns me is—what if the time does not come?"

"Does not… I don't understand."

"Soon a pair of missiles will knock out Moonbase's entire electrical generation capability. They will be forced to surrender, or die within a few hours from lack of air to breath. There will be no need for you to sacrifice yourselves."

"Oh, I see. You want to know if we will obey your orders."

There will be no need to blow up Moonbase—and yourselves."

"If all goes as you have planned."

"Well?"

"You have nothing to fear," she said easily enough. "Our pledge includes that promise to obey the authority over us. For the time being, that authority is you, Colonel."

All well and good, Giap thought. But still he had no inkling of why this woman—or any of her comrades—was willing to throw away her life.

As if she could read his mind, she said, "You are wondering why I am not married and mothering children, or building a career for myself."

"Yes," he confessed. "Why have you volunteered to kill yourself?"

"Because I want to die."

"But why?"

Without hesitation she began to tell him: of her abused childhood, of her disastrous first marriage, of her slowly evolving awareness that she was homosexual, of her second husband's violence, of the years she spent in mental hospitals, of the casual rapes by hospital staff and the even more casual applications of mind-altering drugs in an effort to'rehabilitate' her.

Giap wanted to vomit long before she was anywhere near finished. He realized why she thought quick death preferable to continued life.

To interrupt her, he looked at the watch on his wrist pad. Stopping her unbroken flow of misery, he said, "We must return to the tractor now. The missiles will be reaching their targets soon."

"It's the wiring, all right," said Wicksen's assistant. "My fault, Wix. I did a damned sloppy job. I was so rushed-"

"No time for that now," Wicksen said. Pointing to the equipment still strewn on the ground around the mass driver, he said, "We've only got a few minutes to get it fixed."

The man seemed to freeze for several heartbeats, standing immobile in his spacesuit. Then he said only, "Right.' And started for the equipment.