Wolf slid off his robe and threw it on the chair by his bed, sliding gently in beside Marag and tenderly kissing a satin shoulder before lying all the way down.  He felt restless but didn’t want to wake her.   The planning session had taken awhile and he still wasn’t sure what had him so spooked.  There was that cold finger of doubt up his spine because of . . . something said or done.  He went back over who said what and tried to mentally see them like actors in a play.

 “Wow, you really are concentrating.”  Marag’s sleepy voice wafted up from her pillow and he felt a gentle kiss on his shoulder, right over the crooked scar from the last mortar attack.  “What’s wrong?”

 “Another threat.”

 “Oh no, not again.”  She rose up on one elbow and gazed down at him.  “Directed at Ruth, I suppose.”

 “Called her the Whore of Babylon and threatened death to her and ‘all her works’.  Jane gave us the name of a detective agency that she used a while back.”

 “You don’t trust them?”

 “No, it’s not that.  They have a good reputation.”  He focused on her face, letting go for a moment the sense of wrongness.  Her hair fell over a shoulder like an auburn cascade of pure silk.  He loved touching it, carding his hands through it and letting it tickle him in unexpected places.  Suddenly he had it.  “She gave in too easily.  When has Ruth ever taken the easy way out?  The safe way?”

 “What do you mean, Simon?  She always thinks of us first, before herself.”

 “I know but she wasn’t surprised by the threats.  Not even upset by the first one because it only threatened her.  But this one attacked the base so she immediately gave up and allowed us to start planning.”  Wolf scowled.  “I thought we’d nipped that particular theory of hers in the bud.”

 “The ‘I don’t matter’ theory because sooner or later she has to pay for the changes she’s bringing to Earth.”  Marag sounded so matter of fact that he gazed at her open- mouthed in amazement.  “Only a man would consider for one moment that she’d given up expecting to pay for this advance with her life.  She’s no saint, Simon, but she’s the closest thing to a Joan of Arc that we have in this day and age.  She’s the unexpected leader that challenges the status quo and the established powers of the world.  And Earth has never treated those leaders kindly.”

 “But we’re all in this together.  Each of us doing what we can to build the future.”

 “Oh, honey, I do love you.”  She leaned down and kissed him tenderly.  He could taste the spicy sauce of her lasagna overlaying her own piquant flavor.  They feasted on each other for a long moment before she parted their lips and smiled down on him.

 “Okay, what am I missing?  What are all of us men missing?”

 “Ruth truly believes that she was only given the memories of her past lives so that she could effect a great change in the world.  Just as she’s done three times before.  And we all know how those lives came out.  There is always a price to be paid for every step forward that humans take.  It’s the price that every mother pays when her children leave the nest and strike out on their own.”  She trailed her fingers over his chest, tickling the black hairs that grew there in such profusion.

 “And we’ve just taken the grand-mother of all steps out into the universe so the price paid will be correspondingly great.”  Wolf sighed.  “I wish she wasn’t right.  But I kind of feel the same way myself.  That’s why she brought Father Adam along and encourages the debates in the senior classes.  So we have balance between what came before and what will come.”

 “Exactly.  By the way, have I said thank you yet for the musical instruments?”

 “No problem, they were just surplus going to waste.”

 “Un-huh.  Surplus.  Brand-new-with-the-tags-still-on-them surplus.  I don’t think so.”  She began to tickle him in that treacherous spot on his side and he writhed away from her fingers.

 “I give, I give.  They were kind of surplus instruments that the Red Stallion biker club had set aside for Christmas.  But these were left over and so I talked them out of a few.”  He grinned sheepishly and wondered why he’d ever thought he could sneak them onto the base without somebody finding out.

 “Well, we’ll have the music students write thank you cards for them so they can see what good use they’re being put to.  These kids are a positive joy to teach.  Some of them have a really good ear for music.”  She settled comfortably against his side, snuggled into the crook of his arm with her head a welcome weight on his shoulder.

 “Okay, have you distracted me enough from what we were talking about so we can go back to it?”

 “Damn.  That usually works with the kids.”

 “Did you just call me a kid?”  Now it was his turn to rise up on an elbow and smooth his hand over her stomach with a barely concealed intent to tickle.

 “No, dear.”  She tried for contrite but he could feel her trying to shift out from his hand.  Increasing the pressure a bit, he watched her give in and start to talk.  “There’s not a lot we can do except watch her like a flock of hawks.  She . . . sees things that we don’t.  Maybe the Goddess is giving her lessons at night or something but she’s committed to this enterprise heart and soul.  We just have to make sure that she doesn’t pay for it with either.”

 Wolf leaned down and kissed her.  “I love you, Marag Campbell.  Perhaps this whole thing was just one big matchmaking attempt on the part of the Goddess with Ruth as Her Cupid.  I mean, look at the couples she’s brought together.”

 Marag’s eyes regained their sparkle.  “I saw Penelope arguing with Running Elk this afternoon.  Really going at it hammer and tongs about her class in comparative philosophy.”

 “Wow.  Now that’s not a pairing I would have thought of.”  Wolf began a series of light kisses to her eyes, cheek, chin, the hollow of her throat, down to the v-neck of her satin nightgown.

 “Could be explosive.”  She husked out.  “Oh, there.  Right there.”

 “Here?   Or here?  Maybe, here?”  His lips moved from one breast to the other, suckling her nipples through the soft material.  Hands slid under the hem, sliding the nightgown up and over her hips.  The calluses on his fingers made her wriggle enough to help him bring the confining material up and over her head.

 Her brilliant green eyes went sultry while her hands began to return the caresses.  “How about . . . everywhere?”

 “Everywhere, it is.”

***********************

 The next morning brought Jane Hyde and half the camera crew down the spoke they were just finishing up.  Wolf took a moment to rest, watching her speak with Jim Moon while he showed off where his burn had been.  He wondered what it was about people with green eyes that they were so good at getting below the surface of things.

 When she headed his way, he felt the urge to run and hide but fought it off.  Okay, time for my five minutes of fame.

 “Hi, Wolf, or do you prefer Simon?”  She didn’t wave a microphone under his nose but she did have her notebook out.

 “Wolf is fine, Ms. Hyde.  What do you want to know?”  He hoped he didn’t come across as defensive as he felt.

 “Supplies for a growing community have to be hard to come by.  May I ask just what kind of solutions you’ve come up with so far?”  She smiled up at him and he relaxed a fraction.

 “The big problem is paying for them, not getting them.  The water we need has already been stored for the foreseeable future.  But our gardens don’t produce nearly enough food to feed the four hundred and sixty five souls we have living here now.  And there will be more coming up at the end of the week.”  He paused when she opened her mouth then closed it.  “Go ahead.”

 “Well, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for the people who have been selected for Moon Base.”

 He couldn’t stop his grin and he motioned her back down the corridor away from the mining equipment that had just started to power up again.  Ducking into one of the rooms they’d hollowed out, he drew them all in.  “Little quieter here.  Now, I’d say half the people here want to be here while the other half are needed here.  Living on the Moon has to be one of the top ten fantasies of people who grew up watching the Apollo missions.  They fired our imaginations like no other event, except for the fall of the Berlin Wall, ever did.  Men and women thought for sure by the year 2000, we’d be in outer space.”

 “But it didn’t happen except for the occasional space shuttle mission.”  She nodded.

 “Exactly.  And after the Challenger disaster, most of us put that dream aside.  Then the scientists said that there probably was no intelligent life out there and that killed a little more of the dream.  Until Ruth - until the Ikiiri showed up and widened the universe by a factor of about a million.”  He shook his head and thought back to his own urge to help her.

 “The others tell me that you were one of the ones who made first contact?”  It wasn’t quite a question.

 “Yes, I was.  Joe and I got Ruth on her way but when Sam and Seth showed up on her trail, we asked ourselves along.  Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

 “Why did the meeting take place at the North Pole?”

 “Because that’s where Ruth was.”

 “And why was she there?”

 “I don’t know.  The Ikiiri don’t like the cold much.  And the weather was odd, to say the least.  Ruth would know for sure.”

 “Fair enough.  I’ll ask her myself.  Now, getting back to the supply issue.”

 The next hour passed quickly while they went over the storage rooms and he detailed some of the avenues of commerce he’d taken.  When she left him for a tour of the command center with Seth, he breathed a sigh of relief and said a silent thank you to the universe that he’d already shut down those supply lines.  Her report would provide any enemy with a blueprint of their distribution system that could have been devastating.

 Lunch was with Marag and a distracted Peter who was watching the clock while Solantha took Joshua on his solo flight out to the asteroids.  He offered a job to keep him busy and Peter took him up on it.  The mining equipment did the main job of boring the tunnels wide and tall enough to fit the Ikiiri but the slag left had to be hauled out the old fashioned way for disposal on the moon’s surface.

 One of the astronaut scientists was doing a survey of the slag to see if there were minerals that they could use.  Titanium was a useful by-product as well as iron and magnesium.  They were going to need a full smelter plant to make the minerals into useful sheets of workable materials.  They speculated on setting up a forge for a blacksmith in the not too distant future.

 But for now, the slag was hauled to the airlocks off this spoke.  They’d been constructed first and set up so the material didn’t have to go through the living quarters. Half the crew had suited up in the same space suits that NASA had sent up when the astronauts came.  They took the heavy slag on sleds that maneuvered easily in the moon gravity outside and piled it neatly on the other side of the crater they called home.

 Crater Plato was aptly named, Wolf thought when he and Peter suited up to take their turn on the outside.  Once out from under the dome on the dark surface of the crater floor, looking up at the dark sky overhead made a man wax philosophical.  It was three days into the two-week night cycle and with no atmosphere to haze the sky, the stars shone brightly.  After they maneuvered the slag into the ever-growing pile, he and Peter took a moment to enjoy the show.

 “You should bring Jane out here to see this.”  Wolf asked hesitantly, unsure if they’d come to an agreement to forget the past.  Somehow, Marag had gotten the whole story of their engagement and what happened after to pass on to him.

 “She’d love it.  I’m glad that we’ve finally put our past behind us.  She’s really something.”  Even through the thick eye shield, Wolf could see his smile.

 “That’s great.  I wonder if the camera crew could get this shot of the night sky with Earth hanging there like a blue-green moon.”

 “They’re good.  I’ll bet they could.”  Peter smiled again and led them back across the dark moon soil to the air locks.  “Did you hear that they’re going to broadcast their first piece tonight?  Jane said they were going to edit this afternoon so they could air it at East Coast prime time.”

 “I wonder how it will play on Earth?”  Wolf mused while they waited for the outer door to finish cycling open.

 The lights of two ships whispering overhead interrupted Peter’s reply.  They stopped and watched both ships settle gently into their landing bays.  A sigh came over Wolf’s communicator and they exchanged a relieved look.  This was a big step in the right direction.  With two pilots now qualified for flying and a third ship recalibrated for humans, they had the nucleus of a space fleet.

 Wolf was rated on a couple of aircraft back home but until now he’d never experienced the urge to fly one of the Ikiiri craft.  But watching the sleek round craft glint in the dim earthlight, he suddenly felt that old ache - the ache that whispered to him of far vistas he had yet to explore.  He reined it in and put it aside.  He had too much to do here and for the first time in a long time someone to share his life with.

 Grinning, he followed Peter back into the airlock and the family they were creating anew.

********************

 “This is David Elliot reporting live from the Moon.  Jane Hyde and I with our intrepid camera crew have been here since early Friday and I have to say that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this amazing community . . .”

 Wolf kept part of his attention on the screen while he tinkered with a portable sonic cleaner.  He was trying to find a way to keep it from shocking him across the room if he opened his mouth.  There had to be a way and he wasn’t the only one working on it since most of them had a mouth full of metal of one sort or another.

 “Wolf, could I have a moment?”  Ruth’s voice broke his concentration.

 He looked up to see her hovering in the doorway, an oddly hesitant look on her face.  “Sure, come on in.  Excuse the mess, please.  I’m trying to figure out how to brush teeth with one of these things without inflicting pain at the same time.”

 She smiled faintly and sat down across the table.  “I have a favor to ask.”  Then she stopped and began rubbing her cheek.

 He recognized the gesture and realized that she was worried about something. Putting down the equipment, he reached across the table for her left hand.  It was ice cold and she snatched it from him quickly.

 “Don’t.  I’m barely under control as it is.”  Her voice was tight and she gripped the edge of the table with white knuckled fingers.  “Lenora began to miscarry and I got it stopped but had to almost drain myself to do it.  Her little boy is going to be a holy terror when he’s born.”  Her faint smile contrasted with the controlled tension of her body.  “I need to get back to Earth.  Soon.  I’ve tried replenishing from the minerals here but I’m not attuned to them.  People can only give me so much of their own energy before they begin to be affected.”

 “What does Sam say?”

 “I haven’t told him and Lenora doesn’t even realize what the cramps meant.  She just knows that I stopped them from getting worse.  You’ve got a re-supply shipment in a couple of hours and I need to be on it.”  She closed her eyes and he watched a shudder rack her from head to foot.  “You’ll be landing in Jamaica and that’s just about perfect for me.  The combination of earth and water should recharge my neural batteries in a couple of hours.”

 “All right.  But why come to me?  Why not just show up and walk aboard?”

 “Because my . . . shadows wouldn’t let me go alone.  And I need the solitude almost as much as I need to touch Mother Earth.”

 “You’re not going to tell them?”

 “No.”

 “They’ll kill me slowly.”  Wolf was appalled at the thought of what might happen to her, especially now that the threats were growing in intensity.

 “No, they won’t.  I told them that I needed some meditation time and they promised that short of the sun imploding, they won’t interrupt me.”  She sighed and aged before his eyes to an old woman.  “Please, Simon, don’t make me hurt all of you with my incessant energy needs.  I don’t want to become an energy vampire to my friends.”

 Wolf got up to pace the perimeters of the living room filled with some of his furniture and some of Marag’s.  He was torn in two directions.  Half of him understood what she was asking but the other half could only think of the horrible consequences if something went wrong.  When he completed the second circuit of the room, he stopped and sat down heavily.

 Now it was his turn to rub his face.  “We’re going to have to come up with some kind of disguise for you.  Seth always has one of his men check the ship going out and coming in.  And they’d all recognize you.”

 That faint smile came back.  “I have one.  I’ll be back here in two hours so I can get ready.”  She stood up and had to hold onto the back of the chair for a moment.  Shaking her head at the hand he automatically extended, she took a deep breath and released it.  “Thank you, Simon.  I think I can promise that I will come to no harm, Goddess willing.”

   He nodded and watched her leave, wondering just how much trouble he was in.  The sonic unit could no longer hold his interest and he paced the room, trying to think of something that might take his mind off the coming journey.  When Marag entered, he had just about decided to go down to the gym and work out.

 “Honey, what’s wrong?”  She came to him, holding out her arms and hugging him.  He hugged her so tightly she squealed.  “What is it, Simon?  You’re scaring me, here.”

 The inner debate was short and sweet.  To tell or not to tell, that was the question.  He suddenly felt a kindred spirit with Hamlet.  “Ruth needs to get to Earth right away and she doesn’t want anyone to know.  I’ve promised to sneak her aboard the supply-run ship.”

 “What happened?”

 “She stopped Lenora from miscarrying.”  He gentled his hold at her gasp.  “But she won’t accept our energy because she’s afraid she’ll drain us dry and the moon soil doesn’t renew her like earth and water do.”

 “She pays a high price for caring so much.”  Marag leaned her head against his shoulder.  “If something happens to her . . .”

 He shivered.  “Tell me about it.  But I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.  She says she has a disguise ready and she’ll be back here at midnight to get prepared.”

 “All right.  I’ll help her and go along with you.”

 Wolf started to protest then bit his tongue.  Hard.  “Okay, but I don’t like it.”

 “I know but she’s going to need someone to watch her back and you can’t.  Those supplies are needed too badly and you’re the only one that can handle that end of it.”  Marag reached up and kissed him gently.  “If I thought I couldn’t help, I’d stay here.  But you know I can.”

 “I know.  Doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better.”
 “Well, we have almost an hour and a half.  I bet I could make us both feel a whole lot better.”  She smiled at him and pulled him towards the bedroom.  “I promise.”

******************

 Wolf kept sneaking peeks at the woman sitting by Marag.  If he hadn’t seen Ruth go into the bathroom, he would have never believed that this was she.  Gone were the black eye patch, short white hair and thin red scars.  In their place was a short woman with two brown eyes, a brown pageboy haircut and creamy skin, wearing a denim skirt, a red turtleneck, hose and sandals.

 He marveled at the glass eye and contact that gave her the look of still having two good eyes.  The longer hair seemed to change the whole shape of her head and the makeup revealed a woman with dimples when she smiled.  Part of him chastised himself for being so superficial while his other half thought about the masks that women in his culture chose to wear for their men.

 “Simon . . . yoo-hoo, anyone home?”  Marag’s voice teased him.

 “Um, yeah.  What’s up?”  He shifted sheepishly in his chair and hoped that Ruth never knew what he had been thinking.

 “You need to tell Solantha to drop us off on Windward Island at the south beech before you head on to Jamaica.”

 “Right.”  He unbuckled and headed to the cockpit to give their pilot the change of course.

 Fifteen minutes later, they were hovering two feet over a white sand beach and he was kissing Marag goodbye while trying not to watch Ruth strip off her clothes and wig.  The vision he carried with him for the next four hours was of her striding into the warm Caribbean waters.

 The supplies were almost ready at the old hangar that smugglers still used from Columbia and further south.  He bargained the price down from the grinning merchant he knew from the old days.  A tour of the ship and a promise that his grandson would be considered for a place on the Moon helped to bring the actual cash amount to a bearable level.

 Although not quite low enough, Wolf contemplated the diminished level of his bank account.  He’d floated the base two loans already and his reserves were just about tapped out.  Something would have to be done soon about their finances or the supply line would dry up.  Maybe they needed to sell stock or float a bond issue or something; he mused while he helped stuff the ship full of as much as it would hold.

 What they really needed was a billionaire with a heart of gold.
 He said his good-byes and told Solantha to fly east first before switching on their radar scrambler and heading back to the island where they’d left Ruth and Marag.  Ten minutes later, Solantha was edging the ship into a clearing about a hundred yards from the beach.  They left the ship secured and walked through the gloom of predawn light down to the sound of gentle waves.

 Marag was standing on the sand wearing a sarong wrapped around her body.  Her greeting was distracted while her eyes never left the water.  “Simon, look at her.  I’ve never seen her totally relaxed before.”

 “Where is . . . oh, my god.”  Wolf strained to see the white head.  And when he did, he could hardly believe his eyes.

 A pod of bottle-nosed dolphins bobbed in and out of the water around her.  Their chuckling and her laughter echoed in the still predawn air.  Wolf put his arm around Marag and they watched while Ruth played with the sleek shapes that danced half in and half out of the water.  As the sun peeked above the horizon, they tried to answer Solantha’s questions about the sea life.

 Hearing their voices, Ruth turned and waved.  “Come on in.  They want to meet Solantha.”

 Marag unwrapped her sarong and waded in while Wolf hastily pulled off his clothes.  Solantha moved gingerly into the warm waters, splashing through the blue-green waves until he was in up to his neck.  Ruth moved closer, chirruping to her swimming companions who gazed curiously back at the large Ikiiri and circled him with soft questioning chirrups.

 Reaching out a six-fingered hand to one of them, Solantha stroked his hide with delight.  “They feel like me.  SSSoft and sssmooth.”

 “Yes, they do.  They want to play with us.  Will that be all right, Solantha?”

 “Yesss!”

 Wolf and Marag joined in swimming and sporting with the warm-blooded mammals of the sea.  The sun rose sparkling above the cove while they played with their new friends.  For the moment, Wolf realized, all was right with their world.  Their problems could be safely tucked away for later.

 Hopefully, much later.

*****************************
End of chapter 28