Cardenas put her fork down and took a sip of lemonade. Then she looked out across the tables scattered over the grass, most of them empty, and finally returned her gaze to Holly. Her brilliant blue eyes looked sad, not angry; they seemed to be looking beyond Holly, peering into a painful past.

“I don’t want it on the record,” she said. “I’ll tell you about it, but only if you promise to keep it out of my dossier.”

Holly was about to agree when she realized, “I’ll have to tell my boss about it.”

Cardenas shook her head. “Then forget it. I’ll tell you about it, Holly, but I don’t want it to go any farther. If you tell your boss, they won’t let me do any nanotech work here.”

“Why not?”

“Because I helped to kill a man,” Cardenas said, flat and hard and cold.

Holly felt her jaw drop open.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Cardenas explained. “But what I did was bad enough.”

As if an emotional dam had burst, Cardenas told Holly her entire story. How she’d been exiled at Selene, unable to return to Earth because of the nanobugs swarming inside her body. How her husband had refused to come up to the Moon, how her children turned against her, how she had never seen her grandchildren. Her anger. Her pain and tears and the bitter, searing rage against the fools and self-satisfied know-nothings who used the people’s fear of nanotechnology to destroy her life.

She told Holly of Martin Humphries’s offer. “He said he’d get me back to Earth if I helped him sabotage a rival’s spacecraft. God knows he was rich enough to buy anything. I thought he’d help me. I didn’t think damaging a spacecraft would cause a man’s death. So I let Humphries buy me and his biggest rival died when the spacecraft malfunctioned.”

“Did you ever get back to Earth? See your family?” Holly asked, her voice low, hollow.

“Never,” Cardenas said. “When I heard that Dan Randolph had died because of what I’d done, I told Selene’s leaders everything. I even tried to commit suicide, but I flubbed that. My punishment was to be locked out of Selene’s nanotech lab. So I went out to Ceres, to the frontier, and worked with the rock rats for years. No nanotech work. I swore I’d never do any nanotech research again.”

“But you’re doing it now. Here.”

Cardenas nodded, still dry-eyed but looking as if the weight of the world was crushing her. “I decided I’d done enough penance. I can help you people here. I want to start my life over again.”

Holly murmured, “Sort of like me.”

“We’re two of a kind, in a way.”

“I guess.”

Cardenas fixed her with those bright blue eyes of hers. “So what are you going to tell your boss?”

Holly didn’t have to think for even a millisecond. “Nothing,” she said. “I’ll just say that you decided of your own free will to go to Ceres and work with the rock rats. Which isn’t really a lie, is it?”

For the first time, Cardenas smiled. “No, it’s not a lie. It’s not the truth, not the whole truth, at least. But it’s not a lie.”

Still smiling, Kananga stepped to within arm’s reach of Don Diego. “No, I’m not from the Maintenance Department,” he repeated.

“I plan to inform the Maintenance Department of my work here,” Don Diego said, “but I haven’t—”

With the swiftness of a pouncing leopard, Kananga punched the old man squarely in his solar plexus. Don Diego collapsed with barely a sound.

Kananga caught the old man in his arms and lifted him easily. No drag marks, he thought. No evidence of foul play.

He carried the gasping, dazed Don Diego down the dirt embankment to the concrete edge of the canal. The old man coughed and moaned, his legs moved feebly, his eyes fluttered open.

Kananga knelt and pushed him face down into the canal, holding the back of his head carefully, almost tenderly, to keep him in the water. Don Diego sputtered a bit, flailed weakly, then went limp. The water bubbled a little, then became still. Kananga continued to hold him, counting slowly to a hundred, before he let go.

Satisfied that Diego Romero was dead, Kananga got to his feet. Not bad, he thought, looking around. No gouges in the dirt, no scuff marks on the concrete, no signs of a struggle.

No one will ever know.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 323 DAYS

Holly discovered the body. She left Cardenas at the Bistro and headed out to the canal where Don Diego had been working. At first she saw no sign of him. Then she spotted his body sprawled down at the bottom of the embankment, half underwater.

She did not scream. She did not even cry until hours later, in the privacy of her own quarters, long after she had dragged the old man’s body out of the canal and the emergency medical team had pronounced him dead.

She dreamed that night of the father she could not remember. Sometimes, in her dream, he was Don Diego; sometimes he was a shadowy, faceless figure of a man, huge and almost menacing. At one point the faceless male had his back to her and she was a little child, barely able to walk. Pancho was somewhere in the dream with her but what Holly wanted more than anything was to have her father turn around so that she could at last see his face. She tried to call to him but no sound would come from her throat. She reached out for the man and when he finally did turn to face her, she saw that it was Malcolm Eberly staring coldly down at her.

Holly sprang up in her bed, suddenly awake, the disturbing dream slowly dissolving like a cloud on a summer day. She showered and dressed quickly, skipped breakfast, and went straight to the habitat’s small hospital to see the doctor who had examined Don Diego’s body. She knew she should call Morgenthau and inform her that she’d be late for work, but she didn’t bother.

The hospital was quiet, calm, unhurried. The habitat’s personnel were mainly in good physical condition, youthful physically despite their calendar ages. The main medical problems were accidents and psychological ailments. And the sudden death of a ninety-eight-year-old man, Holly added mentally.

Dr. Yañez’s normal happy smile disappeared once Holly explained that she wanted to know about Don Diego.

“Very unfortunate,” he said. “Very sad. He was a wonderful man. We had many long talks together.”

He grasped Holly gently by the elbow and led her to the doors that opened onto the hospital’s inner courtyard garden.

Holly said, “I don’t want to take you away from your work.”

“There is not that much to see today, anyway,” he said. “Our people are disgustingly healthy.”

He walked Holly outside the two-story hospital building and around the courtyard’s carefully planted flower garden. Holly thought of how Don Diego would have made the gardens look wilder, more natural.

Pushing his hands into the pockets of his white jacket, Yañez said, “Don Diego’s death puzzles me. He must have tripped and fallen into the water and drowned.”

“Why didn’t he just get up?” Holly asked.

He shrugged. “He might have hit his head. He might have fainted — low blood pressure, a minor stroke. He was a pretty old man.”

“Were there any signs of a stroke?”

“No, but a minor stroke doesn’t leave a lot of damage to be seen. We’d have to look specifically for it, and even then we might not catch it. This isn’t New York or Tokyo, you know. We don’t have expert pathologists on the staff.”

“I guess.”

“It’s a great tragedy. A great loss.”

“You’re certain it was an accident?” Holly asked.

Yañez looked startled momentarily. “Yes. Of course. What else could it be?”

“I don’t know.”

The physician looked up at Holly. “He was my friend. If there had been foul play I would have found it, I assure you. It was an accident. Unfortunate. Regrettable. But just an accident, nothing more.”

The more the doctor talked, the more Holly wondered if it really had been an accident. But that’s crazy, she said to herself. How could it be anything except an accident? Who would want to kill Don Diego?