Giap felt his brow wrinkle. Microwaves? What are they trying to accomplish?

"Lead tractor calling, sir," said his communications sergeant. "Emergency."

Giap switched to the proper frequency. "Sir! Our tractor is stuck. We can't move!"

"Can't move?"

The voice in his earphones sounded more puzzled than worried. "It's as if we hit some deep mud…"

"There is no mud on the Moon!" Giap snapped.

"Yessir, I know. But we're mired in something. We can't move forward or back. My engineer is afraid of burning out the drive motors."

Giap's own tractor lurched and slowed noticeably.

"What's going on?" he yelled to his comm sergeant.

"I don't know!"

Within minutes the first twenty-two tractors in the assault force reported being stuck fast. Several burned out their drive motors trying to force themselves through whatever it was that had mired them down.

"Get out and see what it is!" Giap screamed at his own driver as he motioned his sergeant to open the overhead hatch.

In his anxiety, Giap forgot the gentle lunar gravity and pulled himself up so hard he nearly soared completely out of the tractor. He sprawled across the roof of the cab, legs dangling inside his shoebox-sized command center.

Pulling himself up to a sitting position, Giap looked around. His first sensation was relief at being out of the metal coffin of the command center. He saw smooth-walled gray rock mountains and a dark, star-strewn sky.

Then he looked down and saw that his tractor, and every other one up and down the line that he could see, were engulfed halfway up their drive wheels in a weird, bright blue sea of spongy-looking stuff.

"Sergeant!" he yelled into his helmet mike. "Get up here."

The sergeant popped the hatch to his cab and scrambled up to sit on the roof next to him.

Pointing at the sea of blue, Giap commanded, "Climb down the side of the tractor and test the consistency of that material."

"What is it?" the sergeant asked. Then he added, "Sir."

"If I knew what it was I wouldn't need you to test it!"

"Maybe it's some sort of Moon creature," the sergeant said, his voice hollow.

"Don't be stupid!" Giap barked. "It's man-made. It's something the rebels have cooked up to slow us down."

The sergeant climbed down the ladder built into the tractor's side, slow and awkward in his cumbersome spacesuit. Very gingerly, he touched the blue surface with a booted toe.

"It feels soft, sir," he reported.

"How soft? Can you walk on it?"

The sergeant pushed his boot in deeper, then—still grasping the ladder rungs with both hands—he tried standing on it. His boots sank in until their tops were covered in blue.

"Well?" Giap demanded.

He heard his sergeant puffing and grunting. "I'm stuck in it, sir. I can't pull my feet out."

In the half-hour it took for Seigo Yamagata to answer Joanna's call, she paced the living room, trying to burn up some of the fear and anger and grief that the tranquilizers had dulled but not removed.