"When can we strike?" Cianelli asked suddenly. "This entire strategy depends on the rebels' allowing us to send a shuttle to Alpha."
The angry man mused, "Intelligence reports that many nations have forwarded requests for emigration to the lunar rebels. There have even been some Americans asking for exit permission."
"Americans?" Sullivan looked shocked.
"We have always had fools and traitors in our midst," the burly man said. "This will be a good way to get them to 504 identify themselves to us. Then they can be re-educated."
"Christmas Eve," Colt said.
"What?"
"Or Christmas Day. Get Kinsman to accept the first flight of immigrants to the Moon on Christmas Day."
"Impossible!" Cianelli shook his head. "We can't pick shock troops and train them for this mission and modify a shuttle by tomorrow or the next day."
Colt frowned. "Kinsman's a sentimentalist, a romantic. He would buy the Christmas thing."
"What about New Year's?" Sullivan asked.
The three of them looked at Colt, waiting for his reaction. "New Year's Eve," he said. "That way they can start the first day of the new century, the new millennium, aboard the space station in their new nation."
"Didn't I read somewhere that the new millennium doesn't really start until the next year—2001? Is that right?" Sullivan wondered.
"Doesn't matter," Colt countered. "Kinsman will buy the New Year's Eve bit. And everybody counts the change from 1999 to 2000 as the millennium. Nobody gives a crap about the purists." Colt used the slight profanity very deliber- ately. No one reacted to it at all. You got 'em, baby! he told himself.
"New Year's Eve it will be, then," said the burly man.
Before the sun set that day Colt's guards disappeared. He was ushered into plush quarters and a big office where he found a pair of silver colonel's eagles on his gleaming new desk, together with the paperwork for the promotion.
"They work fast," he muttered to himself. Fingering the eagles, "Only two pieces of silver. Judas got thirty."
He looked out the window of his new office, and he could see the pale outline of the Moon rising over the low hills in the still-bright sky.
"I ain't gonna hang myself, though." His voice sounded bitter, even to himself.
Saturday 25 December 1999:
1612 hrsUT
