"Jinny, it's Doug. I need to talk with you, right away."

"I know," she said, her voice sobering.

"Where are you?"

"In the university office."

"Please meet me in my place in fifteen minutes."

"Right."

Doug turned and started along the edge of the construction pit, heading for the airlock in swift, gliding strides. Brudnoy kept pace beside him.

"It's started," he said.

I'll inform your mother," said the Russian.

With a bitter smile, Doug replied, "She already knows, I'm sure. They couldn't declare war on us without her knowing about it."

TOUCHDOWN MINUS 115 HOURS 55 MINUTES

"So they've done it," said Jinny Anson, with a challenging grin. "Damn flatheads."

Anson, Brudnoy and Doug's mother Joanna were sitting before Doug's desk. Anson was leaning back in her webbed chair almost casually. Wearing comfortable faded denim jeans and an open-collar velour blouse, she looked vigorous and feisty, her short-cropped hair still golden blonde, her steel-gray eyes snapping with barely suppressed anger.

Joanna seemed calm, but Doug knew that her composed expression masked an inner tension. She had let her shoulder-length hair go from ash blonde to silver gray, but otherwise she looked no more than forty. She was dressed elegantly, as usual: a patterned coral skirt, its hem slightly weighted to make it drape properly in the soft lunar gravity, and a crisply tailored white blouse buttoned at the throat and wrists, where jewelry sparkled.

Seated between the two women was Brudnoy, his long face with its untidy gray beard looking somber, his baggy eyes on Doug. Brudnoy's dark turtleneck and unpressed denims seemed almost shabby, next to his wife's impeccable ensemble. His gray lunar softboots were faded and shiny from long use.

Although Doug's office was little larger than a cubbyhole carved out of the ringwall mountain's flank, its walls were smart screens from padded tile floor to smoothed rock ceiling; flat, high-definition, digital display screens that could be activated by voice or by the pencil-sized laser pointer resting on Doug's desk.

Doug kept one eye on the screen covering the wall to the left of his desk; it was scrolling a complete checkout of Moonbase's entire systems. He needed to reassure himself that everything was operating normally. The other two walls could have been showing videos of any scenery he wanted, but Doug had them displaying the security camera views of the base, switching every ten seconds from one tunnel to another and then to the outside, where the teleoperated tractors were still working in the pit as if nothing had happened. The wall behind him was blank.

Feeling uneasy as he sat behind his desk, Doug said, "Now I don't want people getting twitchy about this. The base should run as normally as possible."

"Even though Faure's declared war on us?" Anson cracked.

"It's not that kind of a war," Doug snapped back. "There's not going to be any shooting."

"Not from our side, anyway," said Anson. "The best we could do is throw rocks at 'em."