Kyle and Darlene strolled hand in hand along a serpentine strip of sand. Combers rolled lazily into the lagoon of the lonely atoll. Wind sighed through the fronds of palm trees. Stars sparkled overhead, all the brighter for the pallor of the altered moon. Both were barefoot, wearing only thin shirts over swim suits. Humidity had frizzed her hair.
"You shouldn't be here, you know." The gentle squeeze he gave her hand belied his words. "It's dangerous."
She snorted. "Yeah, I can see what hardship duty this is."
"It didn't tell you something that the only way you could come was to be lowered in a harness from a helicopter?" And that the chopper pilot then jettisoned the cable, a very long cable, instead of rewinding it?
"I missed you, too."
They'd talked for hours. Cat anecdotes. Weather disasters possibly caused by the microwave onslaught. The paperwork minutiae of modern life. Cat anecdotes. Radioed progress reports from the submerged lab. There was, at last, some unmitigatedly upbeat news: discovery that the nanotech was optimized for unfiltered-by-atmosphere sunlight. The nannies, should any escape, would spread much slower on Earth than on the moon.
With miles of tropical beach to themselves and, for the moment, perfect weather, apocalyptic scenarios and civilization's routines seemed equally improbable. Kyle whistled softly to himself, at peace with the world.
Darlene stopped short. "I know that look."
"What look?"
"That cat-that-ate-the-cardinal expression." Stripes was quite the huntress; and there were no wild canaries in Virginia. "Like someone who thought his hidden agenda for refueling shuttles in space was, well, hidden."
"You knew?"
"Honey, we all suspected." She pecked his cheek. "Retrieving the masersat was the right thing to do. It didn't matter that the capability to do so might also make other things possible."
"And you never said anything." He said it wonderingly—one who conspired had no standing to complain about others holding their tongues.
"So . . . about that look of yours."
"We, mankind, have no choice but to develop a major lunar presence. People manufacturing robots and dispersing them across the moon's surface." He rotated slowly, drinking in the beautiful night sky. This near the equator, many of the constellations were unfamiliar. It still took him a moment to get his celestial bearings. "Maintaining that human presence will mean mining the ice in the eternal shadows, the forever nanotech-safe shadows, of the moon's polar craters. If permanent defeat of the alien nanotech does not come quickly—and nothing about this battle has gone smoothly—supporting lunar outposts will mean more space travel, to harvest icy asteroids. But that's okay, because just as reaching low Earth orbit is most of the work of getting to the moon, a lunar base is the hard part of reaching the planets."
His thoughts churned faster than he could find words. His mind's eye pictured mechanisms for aiming banks of masers, rather than simply blinding their sensors. Steer the microwaves to antenna farms in the deep desert, where water vapor won't be increased, and the moon became Earth's solar-energy power plant. And if research could recover the original programming of the Krulchukor laser cannons? It would mean human sail-equipped spacecraft.
"Swelk never meant Earth any harm, so the outcome is fitting. The result of her visit will be, not disaster, but a rebirth of human exploration. I sincerely believe that her legacy will be mankind's dominion over the solar system."
"Keep going."
"Huh?" Gentle amusement wasn't the reaction he'd expected to his impassioned speech.
"Don't even try to bluff a diplomat. It's never going to work." She peered at the ghostly crescent overhead. "Since long before we met, the moon has been your obsession . . . yet you've scarcely glanced at it since I arrived. So I want to know, what has taken its place in your always scheming mind?"
He indicated a brilliant red spark near the horizon. A telescope for the object's proper study topped his wish list for the next airdrop. "I don't expect it to be me personally"—not that I expected to go to the moon, either—"but that is what. That is mankind's next big step.
"Mars."