"Yuri," the radio crackled, "don't--"

"Pavel's got his men out of the hangar, Sergei. I can see on my screen.

I'm going cold mike now. No distractions. Just wish me luck."

There was a click as he switched off the communications in his helmet.

He missed a new radio voice by only a second. It was speaking in English.

"Dr. Vance, what is going on? He's just cut his radio link with Flight Control. He's deranged. I order you to halt the flight sequence. He could destroy both planes by going to afterburners in the hangar. I demand this be stopped."

Vance glanced up at the TV monitors. An auxiliary screen showed Tanzan Mino standing at the main Flight Control console, surrounded by more_ kobun_, who had muscled aside the Russian technicians. He also noticed that a lot of Soviet brass were there too.

"Looks like you've got a problem."

"I'm warning you I will shut you down. I can activate the automatic AI override three minutes after takeoff. The plane will return and land automatically."

"Three minutes is a long time." Vance wondered if it was true, or a bluff. "We'll take our chances."

"You'd leave me no choice."

"May the best man win."

"Petra, brake release." Yuri Androv's voice sounded from beneath his helmet.

_"Acknowledged_."

Vance looked across to see his left hand signal a thumbs-up sign, then reach down for the throttle quadrant. The vehicle was already rolling through the wide doors of the hangar, so if there were an explosion now, at least they'd be in the clear.

Androv paused a second, mumbled something in Russian, then shoved the heavy handles forward to Lock, commanding all twelve engines to max afterburner. The JP-7 fuel reading whirled from a feed of three hundred pounds a second to twenty-one hundred, and an instant thereafter the cockpit was slammed by the hammer of God as the monitor image of the hangar dissolved in orange.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Friday 9:31 A.M.

"One small step for man."

Vance felt his lungs curve around his backbone, his face melt into his skull. He didn't know how many G's of acceleration they were experiencing, but it felt like a shuttle launch. He gripped the straps of the G-seat and watched the video feed from the landing-gear cameras, which showed the tarmac flashing by in a stream of gray. The screen above him had clicked up to 200 knots, and in what seemed only a second the _Daedalus _was a full kilometer down the runway. Then the monitors confirmed they were rotating to takeoff attitude, seven degrees.

They were airborne.

Next the screens reported a hard right-hand bank, five G's. The altimeter had become a whirling blur as attitude increased to twenty degrees, held just below stall-out by Petra's augmented control system.

When the airspeed captured 400 knots, the landing gear cameras showed the wheels begin to fold forward, then rotate to lie flat in the fuselage. Next the doors snapped closed behind them, swallowing them in the underbelly and leaving the nose cameras as their only visual link to the outside. The screens displayed nothing but gray storm clouds.

Landing gear up and locked, came Petra's disembodied voice.

"Acknowledge gear secure," Androv said, quieting a flashing message on one of the screens.