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People hurried towards her. They helped her up. Gabbled at her.

‘Hanna,’ she gasped. ‘It’s Hanna. He – I think he was planning to escape with the Charon.’

‘Did he say anything?’ Palmer asked urgently. ‘Did he say anything about the bomb?’

‘He—’ Whatever you do, don’t seem too unruffled, Dana! Best to make a drama
of the situation, so she staggered exaggeratedly, letting the others catch her. ‘I was outside. I saw him running from the base towards the spaceport. First I thought it was Wachowski, but from his size it could – it could only be Hanna—’ She shook off the hands supporting her, took several deep breaths. ‘Then I ran after him, called him on the radio. He ran out onto the landing field—’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘Yes, when – when I caught up with him. I was trying to stop him, and he shouted that this whole place was about to blow up, and – that’s when he attacked me. He just jumped at me, he was going to kill me, what could I have done?’

‘Shit!’ Palmer cursed.

‘I had to defend myself,’ Dana wailed, putting a note of hysteria into her voice. Kyra Gore took her by the shoulders.

‘You did good, Miss Lawrence, what you did was incredibly brave.’

‘Yes, it was,’ Palmer said, pacing back and forth for a moment, then he stopped dead and clenched his fists. ‘Crap! Damn the guy! He’s dead now, the bastard. What are we going to do?
What are we going to do?
’

DeLucas felt carefully at her face. Glistening crimson liquid slicked her fingertips. Blood. Her blood.

The woman was mad!

Lynn Orley had unfolded like a flick-knife and launched herself at her, swiping her fingernails across DeLucas’ face and slicing her cheek open, then tried to run out of the control room. She had chased after the fleeing woman, grabbed hold of her and shoved her up against the lift-shaft.

‘Miss Orley, stop it! It’s me. Minnie!’

Then all of a sudden shouts for help were coming over the loudspeakers, snatches of words, Dana Lawrence, Palmer’s voice.

Lynn tore free, swung an arm and hit DeLucas on the nose so hard that for a moment all she saw was a red haze. When she could see clearly again, Lynn was just leaving the control room. Her head pounding, DeLucas ran after her, caught hold again and clutched her tight, doing what she could to dodge the rain of blows from her fists. Lynn stumbled against Wachowski’s empty chair, looked at the lift-shaft and started backwards, her eyes wide.

‘Everything’s okay,’ DeLucas said, coughing. ‘Everything’s okay.’

Lynn’s lips opened. Her eyes darted from her to the lift-shaft, and back again.

‘Can you understand me? Miss Orley? We have to get out of here.’

Cautiously, she stretched out her right hand.

Lynn scurried backwards.

‘You have to come with me,’ DeLucas said firmly, even as she felt a thick trickle of something warm running down her upper lip. She put her tongue out, automatically, and licked at it. ‘Come next door. Put on your spacesuit.’

All at once, there was sanity and comprehension in Lynn’s eyes. She moved her lips again and put out a trembling finger.

‘That’s where he came from,’ she rasped.

DeLucas followed her gesture. The woman was obviously acutely frightened of the lift-shaft, or more exactly of someone who had come out of it.

‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Wachowski?’

Lynn shook her head. DeLucas felt a cold fear grip her.

‘Who, Lynn? Who came out?’

‘He just shot him,’ Lynn whispered. ‘Just like that. He could have shot me too.’ She began to hum a tune.

‘Who, Lynn? Who shot who?’

‘Minnie? Tommy!’ Palmer’s voice from the loudspeakers. ‘Please come in, we have a problem.’

Lynn stopped humming and stared at DeLucas.

‘What do you want from me anyway, you silly cow?’ she snapped.

‘Leland, I’m having trouble with Lynn Orley.’

‘Oh great, that too! What about the rest of them?’

‘They must be ready by now.’

‘Then get them out of there, Minnie!’ Palmer paced up and down impatiently, with Hanna’s corpse at his feet. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Something seems to have happened to Tommy,’ DeLucas said. ‘Lynn claims that somebody appeared in the control room and shot some other person, she’s scared out of her wits and—’

‘Hanna,’ Palmer snarled.

‘I think she’s been trying to tell me that Tommy’s been shot. But he’s not here, nor is anybody else.’

‘Crap,’ murmured Gore.

‘We have to make a decision,’ Palmer said. ‘Dana’s managed to stop Hanna from escaping. She had to kill him to do it, but before that he said—’

‘I caught what he said,’ DeLucas interrupted. ‘That this place is about to blow.’

‘So stop jabbering,’ Dana spat at her. ‘Will you kindly ensure that my guests are evacuated!’

‘I can’t be everywhere at once,’ DeLucas snapped back. ‘Tell her—’

‘Listen, Minnie, I’m not going to give up the base as easily as that, but she’s right, you have to get those people out of there.’

Palmer stopped dead and gazed upwards at the shimmering oceans of stars, fading out over to the east where the sun glowed low on the horizon. He simply couldn’t imagine that all this might end.

‘Could be we still have time,’ he said. ‘Hanna must have given himself long enough to get away.’

‘He was in a hell of a hurry,’ Dana remarked.

‘Whatever. We’ll search the area while Kyra flies the guests to a safe distance on the Io.’

‘And where should I fly them to?’ Gore asked.

‘Take them to meet Callisto. Tell her to turn round right away. You should be in radio contact as soon as you’re up there. Then go back to the Chinese base.’

‘That’s madness,’ Dana said. ‘Forget it. How do you expect to find a bomb on a huge installation like this?’

‘We’ll look for it.’

‘Sheer idiocy! All you’re doing is putting your people in danger.’

‘You’ll be flying with the Io anyway.’ Palmer paid her no further attention, and turned to his crew. ‘Does anybody else want to fly with them? You have a free choice – we’re not the army here.
I’m
going to look for the thing. The bastard must have given himself at least half an hour!’

Dana spread her arms to concede defeat.

‘Leland?’ Minnie DeLucas. ‘If what Lynn was telling me is true, maybe Hanna came up from underground. From the Great Hall.’

‘Good.’ Palmer nodded grimly. ‘Let’s start there.’

Had his suspicion been right, or did
MoonLight
really just mean ‘MoonLight’? There was uproar and disagreement in the Big O. The Moon was still besieged by the bot army, with no end in sight. No contact with Peary Base or Gaia. Merrick was hurrying, burrowing, scurrying from satellites to ground stations, but getting nowhere.

Meanwhile the MI6 delegation were in a feeding frenzy over the theory that China might be behind the attack. It was a beautiful theory, it fit everything so neatly, temptingly. Gaia, well indeed, why would China have Gaia in their sights, but Peary Base – if that were destroyed, a substantial part of America’s lunar infrastructure would be knocked out. Not an attack on Orley, but on Washington’s supremacy. Knock the enemy off his feet. Weaken the American helium-3 industry. It
had
to be China! Beijing, or Zheng, or both of them.

The CIA had barely joined the list of potential suspects than it was off again.

‘Whatever the truth of it,’ Shaw said, ‘we’ve reached a whole new level of helplessness.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Yoyo.

Security departments at Orley subsidiaries worldwide were reporting back to the London situation room, but there were no concrete leads on further attacks. Norrington insisted that the corporation had to take every conceivable precaution. He hadn’t come up with any more information on Thorn. A photograph of Kenny Xin had been distributed which his own mother wouldn’t have recognised. A shuttle had set out from the OSS to the Moon, but it would take more than two days to reach Peary Base.

‘Norrington looks nervous to me,’ Jericho said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes, he’s fighting on too many fronts, opening up one campaign after another.’ Yoyo got to her feet. ‘If he carries on like this, he’ll bring the whole operation to a grinding halt.’

Just a few minutes ago, another crisis meeting with MI5 had broken up, since the agencies now reckoned that domestic security was threatened. There wasn’t even a pause to draw breath. One discussion led straight into the next. The air twanged with the buzz of ideas, urgent purpose and determination. But there was an undertone too, a feeling that all this to-do was deluded, based on the belief that being there and acting busy would lead to answers.

‘So why’s he doing that?’ Jericho mused, following Yoyo outside. ‘Is he so worried?’

‘You don’t even believe that yourself. Norrington’s not an idiot.’

‘Of course I don’t believe it. He wants to put a spanner in the works.’ Jericho looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to them. Norrington was making phone calls in his room, and Shaw was doing the same in hers. ‘I just haven’t the first idea who we should trust to talk to about him.’

‘You mean that they could all be in it together?’

‘How would we know?’

‘Hmm.’ Yoyo looked across at Shaw’s open office door, dubious. ‘She doesn’t exactly look like a mole.’

‘Nobody looks like a mole, apart from moles.’

‘Also true.’ She fell silent for a while. ‘Good. Let’s break in.’

‘Break in? Where?’

‘The central computer. The drives we aren’t authorised for. Norrington’s patch.’

Jericho stared at her. Somebody scurried past them, talking urgently into a phone. Yoyo waited until he was out of earshot, and dropped her voice in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Simple enough, isn’t it? If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles; if you know yourself but do not know your enemy, then for every victory you gain you will suffer a defeat.’

‘Is that yours?’

‘Sun Tzu,
Art of War
. Written two and a half thousand years ago, and every word is as true as the day it was written. You want to know who’s pulling the strings? I’ll tell you what we’ll do, then. Your charming friend Diane will fish for Norrington’s password, and we’ll have a look around his parlour.’

‘You’re pulling my leg! How is she going to do that?’

‘Why are you asking me?’ Yoyo raised her eyebrows, all innocence. ‘I thought you were the cyber-detective.’

‘And you’re the cyber-dissident.’

‘True,’ she said, unruffled. ‘I’m better than you.’

‘How’s that?’ he asked, stung.

‘Aren’t I? Stop moaning, then, and give me some ideas.’

Jericho glanced around. There was still no one paying them any attention. He might just as well have gone off to sleep somewhere, popping up every couple of hours with more ominous news to set them all scurrying.

‘Right then,’ he hissed. ‘We only have one chance, if that.’

‘We’ll do it, whatever it is.’

Twelve minutes later Norrington left his glassed-in cubicle and joined one of the
working groups, which was busy making telescopic observations of the Moon. He talked to them about this and that, and then went to fetch a coffee. Then he went to see Shaw in her office, briefly, and went back to work at his own desk.

Access denied
, said the computer.

Baffled, he clicked on the file again, with the same result. It was only then that he realised he wasn’t logged on.

But he hadn’t logged out when he left the room.

Or had he?

He glanced around the control room. Everybody was looking busy, except for the Chinese girl, who was standing not far from one of the workstations as though she didn’t know where to go.

Norrington felt a gnawing doubt. Uneasy, he restarted the system to log himself in.

* * *

Yoyo watched him out of the corner of her eye. Nobody had noticed her slip into his office and log him out – it had only taken a few seconds. She pretended to be absorbed by one of the wall monitors, and pressed a button on her phone to send a signal up to the roof.

* * *

Jericho gave Diane the command to start recording.

* * *

Data coursed through the processors in the Big O. Nobody in the whole building had their own computer in the sense of an autonomous unit. All employees had a standardised hardware kit, a portable version of the boxy lavobots that Tu Technologies used. Everybody could access the Big O central computer from any jack or port, simply by logging in with name, eight-character password and a thumbprint. But not everybody had access to all the drives. Even the powerful sysadmins who managed the superbrain and issued passwords couldn’t access the whole machine. The ebb and flow of data in the Big O was like the roar and hum of traffic in a big city, and of course, the roar was loudest during normal working hours.

If you knew how, you could listen to the roar. Not by listening to every part of it at once. The information that coursed through the network was encoded of course, in bits and bytes. But if you knew the precise moment when a piece of information would be sent from A to B, you could record that transmission and then set to work painstakingly filtering out individual data packets, then you could apply powerful decoder programs to unlock the words and images inside. At the moment the system was fairly quiet, so that it was easy enough to isolate Norrington’s data packet right at the moment when he logged on. And Diane began her calculations.

Six minutes later, she had the eight-character password. It took her another three minutes to crack the software that had carried Norrington’s thumbscan to the central processors, and now she had his print as well.

Jericho stared at the prize. Now there was only one more hurdle to clear. Once logged on, nobody could log in again using the same personal data without raising a flag – no more than you could ring your own front doorbell while you were already inside in the living room.

They had to lock Norrington out again.

* * *

The chance came a little while later. Norrington was called to a pow-wow, but he spent a long time lingering near the workstations which gave him a view of his office. Edda Hoff chivvied him along. He hemmed and hawed, but finally gave up his watchpost and went into the room, not without casting one last, mistrustful look behind himself.