Chapter 4

Sterling monitoredthe preparations of the Stella for mission operations closely.

There were odd starts and stops to the standard procedures that he was unable to isolate and account for. There were function pauses and restarts in patterns for the loading and stocking that mimicked no preparation he’d ever witnessed.

Then, just when he began to wonder what other element was at work, a sudden burst of activity convinced him he’d imagined the whole thing.

In moments Stella was ready and Olmsted requested clearance for operations.

He authorized it and watched as she backed out of the Alice habitat-can’s hangar, then maneuvered clear of Luna and rotated toward deep space. He opened a feed on her spatial coordinates. The ship didn’t twist toward a point and then fine tune her final aim. The team was far too skilled at flying for that; they did a combined roll and flip, coming to rest like an arrow ready to be launched.

Between one tick of the clock and the next, eighty meters of ship lanced into the darkness under human-pinning thrust—not high enough to black them out, but not low enough to let them move either. He watched as she ran her four massive G-Lev T14 engines at five-Gs for half a day. She was hustling along at a thousand kilometers a second before she released her burn and, as far as he could see, her course made absolutely no sense at all…at least not until he mapped it out. Then he realized that either Captain Olmsted was even better than he’d thought or his earlier guess about the Stella was…

He returned to other tasks, but kept a lookout upsystem whenever he could manage.

No answer to the hidden addendum he’d placed on the orders.

He must have been wrong.

But it didn’t feel as if he was wrong. Which left his thoughts still tracking the team as they raced toward the asteroid belt.