Doug stared at his mother. She was sitting bolt upright in the chaise longue she had brought from her home in Savannah as part of the elaborate furnishings for her two-room suite at Moonbase. Leaning toward her from the delicate little Sheraton sofa on which he sat, Doug shook his head unhappily.

"Faure won't make any deals. He intends to use the Peacekeepers to toss us out of here and then have the UN itself run the base."

Joanna gave her son a pitying smile. "Doug, he'll need trained personnel to run this base. He'll have to use the people who are here."

"That doesn't include thee and me."

"Don't be so sure," Joanna said. She seemed actually happy with Doug's news; pleased that Faure wanted to take over Moonbase.

"He'll want to continue to manufacture Clipperships, of course," Joanna mused. "That's where the profits are. Every transportation line on Earth wants our Clipperships and he can pump the profits into the U.N."

"Or his own pocket."

"Maybe," Joanna agreed. "Even better. The more venal he is, the easier it'll be to deal with him."

Doug shook his head again. "That's what the German industrialists thought about Hitler."

"Faure's no Hitler. He's not a fanatic. He isn't even going to stop our nanomachines. He just wants to run them for his own profit."

Getting to his feet, Doug said, "I'm still assuming that we'll have to handle the Peacekeepers, and we've got less than four days to figure out how to do it."

"What do you intend to do?"

He shrugged. "I've asked Zimmerman and Cardenas to meet me in my quarters. Lev and Jinny Anson, too. And one of the aquaculture technicians, the only guy in the base who's had any military experience at all."

"All right," Joanna said, looking up at her son from the chaise longue. "You do that. I'm going to put in a call to Faure. He'll negotiate. I know he will."

"Don't commit us to anything until I get a chance to see what it is, okay?"

Joanna nodded absently. "Oh, I don't think Faure will agree to anything concrete until the Peacekeepers get here and take over the base."

"That's what I'm trying to prevent."

"Good," she said. "If we could somehow keep the Peacekeepers out of here it would strengthen our hand tremendously."

"I'll see what we can do," said Doug.

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 90 HOURS 11 MINUTES

Moonbase had started as a clutch of temporary shelters, little more than aluminum cans the size of house trailers, dug into the lunar regolith on the floor of the crater Alphonsus and then covered over with rubble to protect them from the radiation and temperature swings between night and day. And from the occasional meteoroid strike. Meteor showers that were spectacular light shows in the night sky of Earth were potentially dangerous volleys of celestial machine-gun fire on the airless Moon.