"No, no, of course not, colonel. I have every confidence in you."

Of course you do, Giap said to himself, now that our jump-off for the attack is only hours away.

"What you're looking at," said Edith into her pin mike, "is almost certainly a nuclear-armed missile."

The monitor screen in the little editing booth showed what Moonbase's astronomical telescope was focused upon: the clutch of spacecraft hovering around the big space station at the L-l libration point some fifty-eight thousand kilometers above the Moon's surface. The picture, with Edith's commentary, was being broadcast live over Global News Network.

"Despite international agreements that date all the way back to 1967 banning nuclear weapons in space, the United Nations has brought a nuclear-armed missile here to use against Moonbase. Although Moonbase's residents…"

Doug watched Edith's performance as he suited up for another surface excursion. It's one thing to reveal to the world that Faure's going to nuke our solar energy farms, he told himself, it's something else to try to knock out the missile once they launch it against us.

Doug hitched a ride on one of the tractors carrying a team of construction workers out to the mass driver. It took the better part of half an hour to trundle the few kilometers in one of the electrically-driven tractors. Doug thought that once this war was over, one of his immediate priorities was going to be developing faster ground vehicles. This is asinine, creaking along at a top speed of thirty klicks per hour.

Then he realized that the Peacekeeper battalion was chugging along at pretty much the same low speed, and he didn't feel so bad about it. Besides, he added silently, by the time this war is over there might not be a Moonbase and you just might be dead.

The Sun was up over the ringwall mountains, bathing the crater floor in harsh, brilliant light that cast long slanting shadows. It would remain daylight for another twelve days. The Peacekeepers remembered that the nanobugs Moonbase had used against them the first time were deactivated by solar ultraviolet.

The mass driver was crawling with spacesuited figures. Laser welding torches flashed against the dark bulk of the long metal machines. Doug clambered down from the tractor, leaving the construction team to drive a few hundred meters on, to where their cohorts were digging a trench for the prefab shelter for Wicksen's people.

The suit-to-suit radio frequency was alive with chatter, but Doug found Wicksen visually, from his slight form and the bright blue WIX stencilled on his backpack. There was so much crosstalk on the regular suit-to-suit frequency that

Doug walked up to the physicist and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.

Wicksen seemed to recognize Doug's suit and held up three gloved fingers. Doug tapped frequency three on his wrist panel.

"I've saved this freak for private conversations," Wicksen's voice said in his earphones.

"How's it going?" Doug asked.

"Have they launched yet?"