“Another campaign,” I said.

“It never ends,” Ti Sandra said.

“Sometimes I feel like such a monster, even contemplating this. Couldn’t we investigate the possibility of having a plebiscite?”

“How much time do we have?”

“Charles gives Earth a month, maybe two, with the clues they have… And he doesn’t eliminate the possibility that there are spies here. It could come much sooner. Oh, God. There is so little choice.”

“Exactly,” Ti Sandra said. “You and I are expendable. We’re working to save everybody else. Remember that, honey.”

“We need you here so much,” I said, my voice breaking. “There’s so little to keep me going any more.”

“I’m healing as fast as I can. You hold on. You’re strong.”

Just hours before dawn, on the twenty-third of Aquarius, five of the Preamble team — -Charles, Leander, myself, and two astronomers — boarded a tractor and crossed a kilometer along a new-carved track from Kaibab to a hidden Mercury launch site.

The astronomers I had met two hours before. They had just arrived from UMS. The elder of the two, Jackson Hergesheimer, specialized in the study of extrasolar planets. He had originally come from the Moon and had no BM affiliation. UMS had invited him to join the faculty twenty years ago. He was tall, knobby, gray-haired, with a worried monkey-like face and large hands.

His assistant, Galena Cameron, had come from the Belt five years before to study at Tharsis Research University . She specialized in the engineering of deep-space observatories. Some of the equipment being brought on board was hers: prototype sensors for the Martian SGO, Supraplanar Galactic Observer, a multi-BM prestige project whose launch had been postponed nine times in the past five years. Hergesheimer seemed unimpressed by what we were going to do — hiding his fear, I suspected — but Cameron’s face sported a rosy flush and her hands could not stop moving.

The launch pad revetment appeared as low dark mounds in our searchlight beams. The Mercury itself lay under a simple soil-colored tarp — the merest of camouflage. Clearly, there had been only a knee-jerk attempt to disguise what was happening here. Equally clearly, observers from the Belt or Earth or points between would have to track hundreds of such launch sites. Martian orbital space was still open to all former BMs, many of whom stubbornly maintained separate orbital shuttle fleets. A launch from what had been disguised as a reopened mining station on Kaibab plateau would not, in itself, attract attention.

The tractor driver, Wanda, a stocky, athletic woman in a bright green thermal suit, looked over her shoulder at us and smiled. “You need to be up and out in thirty minutes. Once you reach orbit, you’ll be given clearance by direct link. When you get back, we’ll use direct link to tell you where to land. We don’t want Terries tracing Mercury back to Preamble.”

“Direct link” was code talk for instantaneous communications using the tweaker. We would be using “direct link” for the first time, but only from orbit.

Charles thanked her and patted her shoulder. “Wanda was our tractor driver on the first jaunt,” he said. “We’re getting to be old hands at this.”

“I don’t ask questions,” Wanda said, brown eyes focusing on each of us in turn, lips set in mild amusement. “I just want the pleasure of seeing the results in the news.”

“No news on this one, I hope,” Charles said. “And that’s all you’ll learn today.”

“Awhh,” Wanda said, disappointed. She extended a pressurized chute between the tractor and the Mercury. The six of us clambered through on our hands and knees. Charles and Leander unloaded the equipment carefully. I helped carry the QL thinker and interpreter. We sealed for launch.

In our narrow couches, stretched side by side in two rows, we waited tensely for the rockets to fire. I hadn’t gone to orbit since my trip to Earth, lifetimes ago.

“Time to tell you something about making a leap,” Charles said. I turned to look at Leander and Charles on my left. Leander lifted his head and grinned. “It isn’t all tea and cakes. For passengers, I mean.”

“What did you leave out?” I asked.

“We won’t have any electrical activity for several minutes while we make the trip, and for a few minutes after. No heat, nothing in the suits, that sort of thing. It might get stuffy in the cabin, but we’ve made a mechanical scrubber without electrical parts, and that should take care of most difficulties for as long as ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Why the lapse?”

“We don’t know. You’ll feel a little queasy, too. It’ll pass, but all your neurons will seem to be on hold for a few minutes. It’s like a blackout, but you sort of realize what’s going on. The body doesn’t like it. Other than that — and it’s pretty minor stuff — everything is as advertised.”

I lay back on the couch. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“We had trouble enough back there.” Charles waved his hand in the general direction of the laboratory. “What would Wachsler say if we told him?”

“He’d have a fit,” I admitted. “But what will happen to everything on Mars… life support, not to mention everybody’s mental state?”

Leander interrupted what threatened to be a long discussion. “It may not be a problem in a week or two. We think it’s adjustable. We think we can fix it. But for now… be prepared.”

“Anything else I need to know?”

“You won’t even feel a lurch. Smoothest ride in the universe,” Charles said.

Mercury’s human pilot from the first mission had been replaced by a Martian-manufactured dedicated thinker. It gave us a one-minute warning. With a loud series of pops like gunshots, the vehicle lifted on a pillar of flame and steam, pushing us firmly into our couches. Through the ports and on vid displays, we watched Mars recede. The little ship swung around to target the small gray-black moon, and we enjoyed a few minutes of quiet inaction while it carried us into a high dawn.

Cameron lifted her head from her couch as far as the restraints allowed and smiled at me. “I wanted to tell you how honored we are — I am — to be included. This is incredible… Absolutely fantastic. I’m terrified.”

I smiled as much reassurance as I could muster. What we were about to do was beyond my imagination — though not beyond the calculating power of my enhancement.

Because there would be no acceleration, no force expended, a very different notion of force and work came into play — based entirely on descriptor adjustments observed in experiment. Translating into familiar terms, moving Phobos across ten thousand light-years would require stealing from the galactic treasure-chest enough energy to power a star like the sun for several years.

The approach to the moon seemed glacially slow. Phobos, across an hour, grew from a bright speck to a dark smudge as we fell again into Martian shadow.

Deceleration was more abrupt than take-off, one loud staccato burn that left bruises on my elbow where it pressed against a thinly padded metal bar. We skimmed a few hundred meters above the regolith of Phobos, ancient gray and black mottled craters, grooves, pits, and scars from early mining and research.

We would be occupying a thirty-year-old mining base near the center of Stickney crater, still viable but inhabited only by arbeiters.

If Mercury were attacked, we would have a better chance of surviving buried beneath the small moon’s bleak gray surface.

“There it is,” Leander said. Charles sat up. On one sloping side of the irregular bowl of Stickney crater, a small landing beacon flashed every few seconds, as it had for decades. Mercury shifted course with a lurch. We approached the beacon with alarming speed.

“Searching for anchor points,” the thinker announced.

Another jarring deceleration, then a gentle bump as Mercury locked down. We checked all systems in the station, found everything in adequate condition, and extended the ship’s transfer tube.