He parked the tractor and walked along the side of the construction pit, gliding in the dreamlike, floating strides of the Moon’s low gravity. Turning his attention back to the work at hand, Doug saw that the digging was almost finished. They were nearly ready to start the next phase of the job. The tractors were best for the heavy work, moving large masses of dirt and rock. Now the finer tasks would begin, and for that the labs were producing specialized nanomachines.

He wondered if they would ever reach that stage. Or would the entire base be abandoned and left suspended in time, frozen in the airless emptiness of infinity? Worse yet, the base might be blasted, bombed into rubble, destroyed for all time.

It can’t come to that! I won’t let that happen. No matter what, I won’t give them an excuse to use force against us.

“Greetings and felicitations!” Lev Brudnoy’s voice boomed though Doug’s helmet earphones.

Startled out of his thoughts, Doug looked up and saw Brudnoy’s tall figure approaching, his spacesuit a brilliant cardinal red. The bulky suits smothered individual recognition, so long-time Lunatics tended to personalize their suits for easy identification. Even inside his suit, though, Brudnoy seemed to stride along in the same gangly, loose-jointed manner he did in shirtsleeves.

“Lev—what are you doing here?”

“A heart-warming greeting for your stepfather.”

“I mean… oh, you know what I mean!”

“Your mother and I decided to come up now, in case there’s trouble later on.”

Nodding inside his helmet, Doug agreed, “Good thinking. They might shut down flights here for a while.”

“How is the suit?” Brudnoy asked.

Doug had forgotten that he was wearing the new design. “Fine,” he said absently, his attention still on the digging.

“Do the gloves work as well as my engineers promised me they would?” Brudnoy asked, coming up beside Doug.