“Then allowing Greg to take over…?”

Hespread his hands. “It shouldn’t be a problem. O’Rourke has more experience, but your son has shown quite remarkable leadership qualities.”

Almost, Joanna blurted her fear that Greg still hated his younger half-brother. You’re being irrational, Joanna told herself sternly. Yet the fear was still there, gnawing inside her.

“This must be a very difficult decision for you,” Rashid said softly, smiling at her from an arm’s length away.

Joanna’s thoughts snapped back to the here-and-now.

“No,” she said. “No, it isn’t difficult at all. Unless you are actively opposed, Greg Masterson will replace Jinny Anson as the director of Moonbase.”

“Effective on the first of the month?” Rashid asked.

“Yes. But I want Greg to get up there right away and spend Jinny’s final days at Moonbase getting oriented.”

“How soon…?”

“Today,” Joanna snapped.

Rashid dipped his head slightly. “Harkening and obedience.”

MOONBASE

Jinny Anson felt her teeth grinding together as she looked over the graph on her desktop screen.

“Solar flare,” she said, almost accusingly.

The technician who had been monitoring the astronomical instruments in Bianca Rhee’s absence nodded unhappily.

“And it’s going to be a big mother, is it?”

“Class Four flare. Maybe a Five.”

Anson leaned back in her creaking plastic chair and glared at the young tech. “How soon?” she snapped.

The technician was barely into his twenties, still an undergraduate student who had taken a year off to make money by working at Moonbase. Standing in front of Anson’s desk in his baggy, frayed coveralls, he shuffled his feet uncertainly.

“Hard to say,” he replied. “I’ve checked with Tucson. Next twenty-four hours, for sure. Could be a lot sooner, though.”

“Great. I’ll have to alert the surface crews.”

“And, uh — Brennart’s people?”

“Yes, them too. They should have their shelters dug in by now. Will the radiation hit them?”

The young man looked miserably unsure of himself. “Hard to say,” he repeated. “Oh, they’ll get the first pulse sure enough: the ultraviolet and x-rays. But the heavy stuff — that depends on how the interplanetary magnetic field’s twisted up.”

Rankled, Anson said, “So you don’t know when the particle cloud will hit or how heavy it’ll be.”

“Nobody could tell you that,” the kid said defensively. “Not this far in advance.”

“Okay,” Anson squinted at his nametag, “Albertson. Thanks for the bad news.”

The kid fled her office as if afraid for his life.

A Class Four solar flare, she thought Maybe a Five. Just what we need. Angrily she punched her keyboard to call up the communications center. Got to get all the surface workers inside. And warn Brennart’s people.

As she spoke to the comm center, Anson pictured in her mind what they were going to be facing. The most violent event the solar system can produce, an explosion on the Sun with the force of a hundred billion megatons of TNT. More energy than the whole world consumes in fifty thousand years. Hardly a quarter-second’s worth of the Sun’s total energy output, but enough to kill anyone caught in its lethal plasma cloud. Enough to wreck unprotected equipment.

“What about cislunar traffic?” the comm technician asked.

“What’s it look like?” Anson asked back.

The tech’s face disappeared from her desktop screen and a visual display of the Earth-Moon traffic showed four green arrows representing unmanned freighters heading for the factories in Earth orbit and a single violet arrow of a passenger vehicle on its way to the Euro-Russian base at Grimaldi. There were three yellow arrows, as well: Yamagata spacecraft, two inbound, one heading Earthward.

As she watched, Anson saw a new red arrow appear on the screen. A passenger-carrying craft was leaving Earth orbit, heading for Moonbase.

“What’s that new blip?” she asked. “I don’t recall anything scheduled today.”

The technician’s voice answered, “Message just came in; it’s in your voice mail. Your replacement is on his way.

“O’Rourke’s coming now?” Anson felt puzzled, annoyed.

“It’s not O’Rourke,” the tech’s voice replied. “It’s Gregory Masterson III.” The technician pronounced the three-part name with appropriate awe in her voice.

“Shit on a shingle!” Anson exploded. “Get that poor dumb boob on the horn and tell him to abort his flight and get his butt back home where it’s safe. That’s all I need, having the boss’s son fried!”

“It’s ice, all right, but I’m afraid it’s pretty thin,” said Roger Deems.

He, Brennart, Killifer and Doug Stavenger were jammed into the analysis lab of the expedition’s main shelter. Deems was still in his cumbersome spacesuit, minus only its helmet, which made the little cubicle even more crowded. The only light came from one of the computer screens.

Doug could hear the grating patter of regolith rubble being piled on the shelter’s curving roof. Outside, the expedition’s minitractors were struggling to dig up enough surface dirt to provide the necessary coverage for radiation protection and thermal insulation. The regolith here in the south polar highlands was thin and hard, its normally powder-like texture vacuum welded into the consistency of concrete. The remotely-operated little tractors were having a hard time digging up enough of it to cover the expedition’s four shelters. Brennart had to send people out to jury-rig some of their aluminum and oxygen rocket propellants to burn into the hard rock and break it into manageable chunks.

“We should’ve brought a couple tons of plastic explosives,” one of the tractor operators grumbled.

Deems’s job, immediately upon landing, had been to lead a team to the ice field that the unmanned probes had identified and take samples.

Peering at the computer screen where the spectrograph’s analysis of the ice was displayed, Brennart said heartily, “Looks good enough to drink!”

“A lot of dissolved minerals,” Doug said, tracing a calcium line with his outstretched finger.

“You could say the same about Perrier!” Brennart snapped.

Killifer said nothing, standing between Brennart and Doug, his face in shadow.

Turning to Deems, Brennart asked, “Did you get a chance to map any of the ice field?”

“We didn’t do any mapping,” Deems said, almost apologetically. “Our mission plan called for digging some preliminary cores and bringing back the samples taken. Mapping comes later.”

“I know the mission plan,” Brennart said impatiently. “I wrote it.”

Deems glanced at Killifer, who said nothing.

“So?” Brennart demanded. “What about the cores you dug?”

“We drilled three cores. You see the analysis of the ice. It’s water, all right.”

“Is it drinkable as is, or will we have to treat it?” Doug asked.

“Looks perfectly drinkable to me,” said Brennart.

“The ice is only ten centimeters deep,” Deems said. Then he added, “Where we dug.”

“Which is at the edge of the field, right?” Brennart said.

“A hundred meters from the edge,” said Deems. “That’s what we figured was a safe walk-back distance, what with the darkness and the slick surface — even with the dust on it, there’s not much traction to walk with.”

“That field is more than ten kilometers across, isn’t it?” Brennart said, more of a statement than a question. “And there are a dozen or more other ice fields scattered about the area.”

Deems nodded. “That’s right.”

“But how deep does it go?” Doug wondered aloud.

“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Brennart said.

“Right,” said Killifer.

Brennart straightened up, his golden hair almost brushing the curving roof of the shelter. “All right, we’ve made a good start. Jack,” he turned to Killifer, “I want a complete inventory of the supplies we lost in the crash on my screen by the time I come back in for supper.”