And now we wait again, the secretary-general fumed, staring at the colonel's image on his desktop screen.

Colonel Giap's face was a study in oriental patience: calm, expressionless; his hooded eyes showed no emotion whatsoever.

"You have your full complement of troops," Faure blurted, not waiting for the colonel's reply. "All the weapons have been delivered, have they not?"

Giap might have been a statue of teak, for all the response he showed. Faure fidgeted in his swivel chair, fighting the urge to pick up one of the mementos adorning his desk and fling it into the phone screen.

"The battalion is now at full strength, quite so," the colonel said at last, "and all our logistics are in place. Also, the special force that Yamagata Industries organized has arrived."

"Then why do you wait? Strike! Strike now!"

The colonel had not stopped talking: '… necessary to train the combined team in the precise tactics we will use to take Moonbase. Also, all of the troops must become fully acclimatized to the lower gravity here on the Moon and to working in spacesuits. It is crucial that they are able to function as easily and as well as they would on Earth, even in spacesuits."

Faure sank back in his chair as the colonel painstakingly reviewed every step of his planned conquest of Moonbase: the deployment of the Peacekeeper troops outside Alphonsus's ringwall mountains; the nuclear strike that will knock out Moonbase's solar power farms; the missile with the penetrating warhead to destroy their buried nuclear generator; the routes over the ringwall and across the crater floor to the base itself, the assault on the main airlock and the penetration of the base's corridors, the seizure of Moonbase's key nerve centers.

"By the time we enter their corridors," Giap was reciting from his action plan,'the people in Moonbase will have less than an hour's worth of electrical power available to them. They must either surrender to us or die of asphyxiation."

"What if they decide to blow themselves up?" Faure demanded. "A final grand suicidal gesture of defiance."

When Giap finally heard the question he almost smiled. "That is most unlikely. Psychological profiles of all Moonbase personnel have been made available to us, through the Masterson Corporation. Those people are not fatalists. Suicide, even on an individual basis, would never occur to them."

Faure nodded agreement. He had personally requested the psychological files from Ibrahim al-Rashid. Nominally, the files belonged to the Kiribati Corporation, but it was apparently a simple thing for Rashid to appropriate them through Masterson's computers.

Giap continued, "However, the special Yamagata force is quite ready for its suicide mission, if our frontal assault is not immediately successful."

Faure knew that Yamagata's special force had been recruited from nanoluddite fanatics in Japan and elsewhere.

"We will bring two nuclear power generators in tractors over Wodjohowitcz Pass and offer to provide electrical power," Colonel Giap went on, "in the event that Moonbase surrenders to us."

"And if they refuse?"