"I am still here," he answered.

"We saw a dozen or so of your troops move off to one side of the main airlock. Now they're out of our camera's view. What's going on?"

Giap was prepared for the question. "They are setting up a maintenance station to repair the spacesuits your dust has fouled. They are trying to remove the dust from their faceplates and joints."

Stavenger did not reply immediately. Does he believe my lie? Giap wondered.

"Let's get back to the main point," the Moonbase commander said at last. "Are you willing to withdraw and leave us in peace?"

"I am not allowed to do so," Giap stalled. "My orders do not permit it."

"If you try to cut off our electricity we'll be forced to fire on you."

Giap thought the man's voice sounded very reluctant.

"Then I suggest you surrender, now. While you have the chance."

"… While you have the chance," Giap's voice had an urgency to it that made alarm bells ring in Doug's head.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "You won't accept a surrender if you're able to cut off our electricity?"

No answer for several long moments. Then the colonel replied, "If you fire upon my troopers, if a firefight is started, who knows what will happen next? A battle is not a predictable thing. There will be many deaths."

Doug got the distinct feeling that there was a hidden subtext in the colonel's words. He wants me to read between the lines, Doug thought. What's he trying to say?

"Colonel, I wonder what-"

The control center shook so abruptly that Doug nearly toppled off his chair. A low rumble echoed through the rock chamber. The lights flickered.

"What was that?"

"A quake?"

"An explosion!"

Doug scanned his screens with newfound intensity. The solar farms seemed intact; no one was even near them.

"The water factory!" a technician yelped. "We've lost contact with the water factory."

"The bastards have blown up the water factory!"

CONTROL CENTER

"Give me a view of the water factory!" Doug yelled.

"Cameras are out," a technician hollered back.

Doug saw a blank screen where the view of the factory should have been.

"Jinny, get a repair team in there!"

"Already on their way," Anson yelled over her shoulder, halfway to the door.

"How did it happen?"

"Rerun the security camera."

With Gordette grasping both his shoulders from behind him, Doug saw the camera's view of the automated water factory. A blur of a figure dropped out of the top of the picture; a flash and then the camera went dead.

"What was that?" Doug asked.

"A man," said Gordette. "A person, anyway."

"In a spacesuit," someone else said.

"Spacesuit…?" Doug's heart clutched in his chest. "The plasma vents! He came in through the old plasma vents!"

"What the hell are plasma vents?" Gordette asked.

The explosion staggered Zimmerman in his nanolab. A metal cylinder rolled of the bench and crashed to the tiled floor. Inoguchi grabbed the edge of the lab bench where he was standing to steady himself.