“Where else would we be?” Pancho asked innocently. And she disconnected the radio link with Selene.

Amanda worked on the launch sequence program, her manicured fingers tapping dexterously on the touchscreen.

“Three minutes to launch,” she said calmly.

“Gotcha,” said Pancho.

Despite himself, Dan felt his palms go sweaty. Standing there behind the two pilots, ready to ride a man-made star out farther than any sane man had ever gone before, he said to himself, Everything I’ve got is riding on this bird. If we don’t make it, I’ve got nothing to come back to. Not a double-damned thing. He looked at Fuchs. The kid was smiling fiercely, like an old-time warrior watching the approach of an enemy army, waiting for the battle to begin, eager to get into it. He’s got guts, Dan thought admiringly. We picked the right guy. “Two minutes,” Amanda called out.

“They must be goin’ apeshit down there by now,” Pancho said, grinning.

“Nothing they can do about it,” said Dan. “They can’t shoot us down.”

“Couldn’t they send a Peacekeeper vessel after us?” Fuchs asked. “Once we light the fusion rocket,” Dan answered, “nothing in the solar system will be able to catch us.”

“Till we come back,” said Pancho.

Dan frowned at the back of her head. Then he relaxed. “When we come back, we’ll be rich.”

“You’ll be rich, boss,” Pancho said. “The rest of us’ll still be employees.”

Dan laughed. “You’ll be rich, too. I’ll see to that. You’ll be rich.”

“Or dead,” Pancho countered.

“One minute,” Amanda said. “I really think we should pay attention to the countdown.”

“You’re right,” said Pancho.

Dan watched it all on the displays of the control board. The fusion reactor lit up as programmed. Star-hot plasma began generating energy. Through the MHD channel it roared, where a minor fraction of that heat energy was turned into electrical power. The ship’s internal batteries shut off and began recharging. Cryonically-cold liquid hydrogen and helium started pumping through the rocket nozzles’ cooling walls. The hot plasma streamed through the nozzles’ throats. “Ignition,” Amanda said, using the traditional word even though it was now without physical meaning.

“Thrust building up,” Pancho said, Dan watched the curves rising on the thrust displays, but he didn’t need to; he could feel weight returning, feel the deck gaining solidity beneath his feet.

“We’re off and running,” Pancho announced. “Next stop, the Asteroid Belt!”

SPACEPORT ARMSTRONG

Flanked by his chief of security and the head of his legal department, Martin Humphries arrived at the spaceport just in time to see Starpower 1 light up and break orbit.

He stood at the rear of the control center, arms folded across his chest, and watched the telescopic view of the fusion ship displayed on the main wallscreen. It was not a spectacular sight: Starpower 1’s four rocket nozzles glowed slightly, and the ship drifted away so slowly that Humphries had to check the numbers running along the right edge of the screen to be certain that it was moving at all. A smaller screen on the side wall showed a lunar jumper approaching the spaceport.

Four rows of consoles took up most of the control center; only three of the consoles were occupied, but Humphries could sense the consternation and confusion among the controllers.

“Jumper Six, answer!” the controller on the left was practically shouting into his headset mike.

The ponytailed, bearded man sitting in the middle of the trio was whispering heatedly with the woman on his other side. Then he whipped around in his swivel chair and grabbed his own headset from the console.

“Pancho!” he yelled in a rumbling basso voice. “Where the hell are you people?

What’s going on?”

Humphries knew perfectly well what was going on.

The woman controller looked up and saw Humphries standing there. She must have recognized him. Her face went white and she jabbed the chief controller’s shoulder, then pointed in Humphries’s direction.

The chief literally jumped out of his chair, sailing high enough almost to clear the console behind his station. But not quite. He banged his shins painfully on the top edge of the console and went sprawling in lunar slow motion into the unoccupied chair behind it, ponytail flying. He was enough of a lunik to reflexively put out his hands and grab the chair’s arms to break his fall. But the chair rolled backward into the last row of consoles, and the chief controller crashed ungracefully to the floor with a loud thud and an audible, “Ooof!”

Humphries’s security chief instinctively hustled down to the fallen controller and yanked him to his feet while Humphries himself and his lawyer stood impassively watching the idiotic scene.

The security man half-dragged the controller, limping, to Humphries. “Mr. Humphries,” the controller babbled, “we don’t know what’s going on—”

“Isn’t that Starpower 1 accelerating out of its orbit?” Humphries asked frostily. “Yessir, it is, but it wasn’t scheduled to launch for another half-hour yet and I think Pancho Lane and three other people are aboard it and they don’t have the authorization for a crewed flight. The IAA is going to—”

“Is there any way to get them back?” Humphries asked, deadly calm. The chief controller scratched his beard, blinking rapidly.

“Well?”

“Nosir. No way in hell, Mr. Humphries.”

“Who else is aboard her?”

“That’s just it, we don’t know if they’re aboard the vessel! They might be on the jumper but they’re not answering our calls. Maybe their radio broke down.”

“They are aboard Starpower 1” Humphries said flatly. “Who else was with Pancho Lane?”

“Um…” The chief controller turned to his two assistants, wincing. The woman called, “Amanda Cunningham, co-pilot; Lars Fuchs, planetary astronomer; and C. N. Barnard, flight surgeon.”

“And you allowed them to go aboard my ship?” Humphries asked, his voice sharp as an icepick.

“They had proper authorization,” the chief controller said, sweating noticeably. “IAA approval.” The other two controllers, still standing at their stations, nodded their agreement.

“Amanda Cunningham was definitely with them?”

All three nodded in unison.

Humphries turned and started out of the control center. The chief controller exhaled a relieved sigh. His coveralls were stained with sweat. But Humphries stopped at the doorway and turned back toward him. “I want you to know that the so-called Dr. Barnard is actually Dan Randolph.” All three of the controllers looked stunned.

“You never bothered to check their identifications, did you?”

“We never…” The controller’s deep voice dwindled into silence under Humphries’s furious glare.

“I know you work for Selene, and not for me. But I’m going to do my best to see to it that you three incompetent morons never get within a thousand kilometers of a control center again.”

Then he went through the door and headed for the tunnel that led back to Selene proper.

“Shall I start the proceedings for the Astro takeover?” Humphries’s lawyer asked him.

He nodded grimly.

With a satisfied smile, the lawyer said,”He won’t have any part of the corporation by the time he gets back here.”

“He’s not coming back,” Humphries said darkly. “None of them are.” Sitting in the tiny wardroom behind Starpower’s bridge, Dan Randolph felt truly relaxed for the first time in months. The ship was accelerating smoothly. Fuchs looked a lot better now, with the feeling of weight that came from the acceleration. No more floating in zero-g; they could sit in chairs without having to strap themselves down.

He marveled at his good mood. The Earth’s melting down, your corporation is going broke, you’ve busted every regulation the IAA ever wrote, Humphries is after your scalp, you’re heading out for parts unknown, and you’re sitting here with a grin on your face.