“Mr. Humphries, that’s something I just plain can’t do. This isn’t a business deal, I can’t talk her into doin’ something she doesn’t want to do. Nobody can. Except maybe you.”

“But she won’t see me!”

“I know, I know,” she said, as sympathetically as she could. “It’s just too much pressure for her, what with the mission and all.”

“That’s why I want her off the mission.”

“Don’t do that to her. Please.”

“My mind’s made up.”

Pancho sighed unhappily.”Well, you’re just gonna have to talk to Dan Randolph about that. He’s the boss, not me.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Humphries said firmly.

“I wish you wouldn’t. Whyn’t you let us go out to the Belt. When we get back Mandy’ll be able to give you her full attention.”

“No.” Humphries shook his head. “You might not get back.”

“We will.”

“You might not. I don’t want to take the chance of losing her.” Pancho looked into his eyes. They were still cold, unreadable, like the eyes of a professional card shark she’d known once while she’d been supporting herself through the University of Nevada in Las Vegas by working at one of the casinos. Not the eyes of a lovesick swain. Not the eyes of a man whose heart might break.

“Better talk to Randolph, then,” she said.

“I will.”

Feeling weary and more than a little afraid of what was going to happen with Mandy, Pancho got to her feet. Humphries stood up, too, and she noticed that he was several centimeters shorter than she’d thought him to be. Glancing down at his sandals, she thought, the sumbitch must have lifts in his regular shoes. “By the way,” Humphries said, his voice hard-edged, “someone’s hacked into my private files.”

She was genuinely surprised that he’d found out so quickly. It must have shown on her face.

“Randolph is a lot smarter than I thought he was, but it won’t do him any good.”

“You mean he’s the one who hacked you?”

“Who else? One of his people, obviously. I want you to find out who. And how.”

“I can’t do that!” Pancho blurted.

“Why not?”

“I’ll get caught. I’m not a chip freak.”

His eyes bored into her for a painfully long moment. “You find out who did it.

And how it was done. Or else.”

“Or else what?”

With a grim smile, Humphries answered, “I’ll think of something.”

ASTRO CORPORATION OFFICES

If he finds the account I set up for him to pay the rent on my sister’s dewar I’m toast,” Pancho said as she paced across Dan’s office.

Sitting behind his desk, Dan said, “I’ll get George to scratch the program. Astro can pay the storage fees for your sister.”

Pancho shook her head. “That’ll just call attention to what I did.”

“Not if we erase the subroutine completely. He’ll never know.”

“No!” Pancho insisted. “Don’t go anywhere near it. It’ll tip him off for sure.” Dan could see how agitated she was. “You just want to leave it there? He might stumble across it any minute.”

“He knows I did it,” Pancho said, crossing the room again in her long-legged strides. “I know he knows. He’s just playin’ cat-and-mouse with me.”

“I don’t think so. He’s not the type. Humphries is more a sledge-hammer-on-thehead kind of guy.”

She stopped and turned toward Dan, her face suddenly white, aghast. “Jesus H.

Christ… he might turn off Sis’s life support! He might pull the plug on her!”

Dan knew she was right. “Or threaten to.”

“That’d give him enough leverage to get me to do whatever he wants.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants Mandy. He wants her scrubbed from the mission so he can talk her into marrying him.”

Dan leaned back in his desk chair and stared at the ceiling. He’d had the office swept for bugs only an hour earlier, yet he had the uneasy feeling that Humphries knew everything that he said or did. Pancho’s not the only Astro employee he’s recruited, Dan reminded himself. My whole double-damned staff must be honeycombed with his snoops. Who can I trust?

He snapped forward in the chair and said into the phone console, “Phone, find George Ambrose. I want him here, now.”

In less than a minute Big George came through the doorway from the outer office.

“George, I want this whole suite swept for bugs,” Dan commanded.

“Again? We just did it an hour ago.”

“I want you to do it this time. Yourself. Nobody else.”

Scratching at his shaggy beard, George said, “Gotcha, boss.” It took a maddening half hour. Pancho forced herself to sit on the sofa while George went through the office with a tiny black box in one massive paw. “Clean in here,” he said at last.

“Okay,” said Dan. “Close the door and sit down.”

“You said you wanted the outer offices done, too,” George objected.

“In a minute. Sit.”

Obediently, George lowered his bulk into one of the cushioned chairs in front of Dan’s desk.

“I’ve been thinking. Tonight, the three of us are going to move a dewar out of the catacombs,” Dan said.

“Sis? Where—”

“I’ll figure that out between now and then,” Dan said. “Maybe somewhere else on the Moon. Maybe we’ll move her to one of the space stations.”

“You’ve gotta have the right equipment to maintain it,” George pointed out.

Dan waved a hand in the air. “You need a cryostat to keep the nitrogen liquified.

Not much else.”

“Life support monitors,” Pancho pointed out.

“Self-contained on the dewar flask,” said Dan.

“Not the equipment,” Pancho corrected. “I mean you need some people to take a look every few days, make sure everything’s running okay.” With a shake of his head, Dan said, “That’s a frill that you pay extra for. You don’t need it. The equipment has safety alarms built in. The only time you need human intervention is when the flask starts to exceed the limits you’ve set the equipment to keep.”

“Well, yeah… I guess,” Pancho agreed reluctantly.

“Okay, George,” Dan said. “Go sweep the rest of the place. We can all meet here for dinner at…” he called up his appointment screen with the jab of a finger,”… nineteen-thirty.”

“Dinner?” Pancho asked.

“Can’t do dirty work on an empty stomach,” Dan said, grinning mischievously. “But where are we taking her?” Pancho asked as she disconnected the liquid nitrogen feed line. Despite its heavy insulation, the hose was stiff with a rime of frost. Cold white vapor hissed briefly from its open end, until she twisted the seal shut.

“Shh!” Dan hissed, pointing to the baleful red eye of the security camera hanging some fifty meters down the corridor.

This late at night they were quite alone in the catacombs, but Dan worried about that security camera. There was one at each end of the long row of dewars, and although the area was dimly lit, the cameras fed into Selene’s security office where they were monitored twenty-four hours a day. Pancho figured that, like security guards anywhere, the men and women responsible for monitoring the cameras seldom paid them close attention, except when a warning light flashed red or a synthesized voice warned of trouble that some sensor had detected. That’s why they had hacked into the sensor controls on Sis’s dewar and cut them out of the monitoring loop.

Dan and George were sweating with the effort of jacking up the massive dewar onto a pair of trolleys. Even in the low gravity of the Moon, the big stainless-steel cylinder was heavy.

“Where’re we goin’?” Pancho repeated.

“You’ll see,” Dan grunted.

Pancho plugged the nitrogen hose into the portable cryostat they had taken from one of the Astro labs, several levels below the catacombs. “Okay, all set,” she whispered.

“How’re you doing, George?” Dan asked.

The shaggy Australian came around the front end of the dewar. “Ready whenever you are, boss.”

Dan glanced once at the distant camera’s red eye, then said, “Let’s get rolling.” The caster wheels on the trolleys squeaked as the three of them pushed the dewar down the long, shadowy corridor.