"The Moonbase officer that I spoke with said they will stop the jamming once you agree to speak to their commander."

Giap nodded inside his helmet. "Tell them I will speak to their commander.' What else could he do?

The runner headed back into the garage. Giap turned and walked to a small rock, then sank down carefully onto it. He had been standing for hours, and even in the low gravity of the Moon, his legs were aching.

He watched as, one by one, his troopers were led out of the tunnels and into the garage like a collection of blind beggars, helpless and disarmed. He had to turn his entire body to see his reserve troops, loitering around their tractors out on the crater floor, some of them sitting on the cab roofs, watching and waiting.

His runner came back at last and told him, "The jamming will stop at precisely thirteen hundred hours, sir."

Giap peered at his wrist. Seven minutes from now.

"We've got all of 'em out," said Anson, from the console next to Doug's. "And we've got all their weapons."

"Those are shoulder-fired anti-tank rockets," Gordette said, pointing to one of the screens. "We could hit their tractors with 'em."

Not that we'll use them, Doug said to himself. But their commander doesn't know that. I hope.

His eye on the console's digital clock, Doug gestured to Anson to cut off the jamming signal at precisely fifty-nine minutes and fifty seconds after noon. Ten seconds later, he opened his radio channel to the Peacekeepers' suit-to-suit frequency.

"This is Douglas Stavenger, chief administrator of Moon-base," he said. "Am I on the proper frequency to speak with the commander of the Peacekeeper forces?"

"I am Colonel Ngo Duong Giap," came the reply. "This frequency is good."

There was no video; Doug's comm screen remained blank.

"Colonel Giap," he said, "I believe it is time we discussed an armistice."

"Armistice?" The colonel's surprised reply came immediately. The radio link between the Peacekeepers in the crater floor and the control center did not need to be relayed through L-l; the antennas built into the face of the mountain, just above Moonbase's main airlock, handled the link directly.

"Truce, armistice, whatever you want to call it," Doug said, feeling the tension and hope in the people clustering about him.

This time the Peacekeeper commander hesitated before replying.

Doug added, "Your attack has failed. Your troops had to surrender to us. We've let them return to you, but as you'll see, their spacesuits are heavily contaminated with dust. They can't see, and the joints of their suits will soon fail."

"That was merely my first wave," Colonel Giap snapped.

"The same thing will happen to your second wave," Doug replied. "And your third and fourth and fifth. We can blind your soldiers and jam your radio communications. We can gum up the joints of their spacesuits to the point where they'll quickly become immobilized. There is no way you can get through our tunnels."