An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.
-- Henry Clay
It was the afternoon of the next day in Somalia, thanks to the international dateline, and someone's fist pounded on the door to Chad Haley's office. Haley stared blankly at weight-and-balance screens for Pod Sixteen, the last one to be closed out for launch preparedness.
Through the door burst Jon Franck. His intense agitation showed plainly.
"Chad!" he said breathlessly. "Somebody's launched!"
Haley sprang to his feet to demand, "Who? Where?"
"I saw it on TV in the break room. Launched from New York City!"
"New York?" Haley switched his computer screen to the menu, said, "Give me TV, satellite, GSN, news report, keyword 'rocket.' " The computer complied and the news popped up on the screen. As the story played, he buzzed Grant and Donahue.
"Meet the winners," he said as the other two raced into the office.
Grant watched only long enough to see the videotape of the liftoff.
"What the hell is that?" Joscelyn exclaimed. "A flying beanie-prop?"
"Jo-Don," Grant said, heading for the door. "Keep track of the fed's response. Tap into NORAD when you can. Chad -- I want final inspections completed within twelve hours, everything secured for launch."
"What?"
He paused at the doorway long enough to say, "That launch just put every government on notice that they're not the only ones who can get a toehold in Space. If we don't launch now while they're still reeling from the surprise, they'll be ready for us." He raised a fist. "It's a one-two punch. And unless I've gravely underestimated him, Larry Poubelle will be aiming to launch today, too."
Larry Poubelle lay in bed when the news arrived. Not asleep, though. Chemar groaned with annoyance as one of the arms wrapped tightly around her naked back warbled gently.
"If that thing has a fax shoot out of it I'll kill you," she whispered in his ear.
Without interrupting the rhythm of their lovemaking, he pressed a button on his arm and said sharply, "What?"
"Rocket launch from the South Bronx," said one of Poubelle's secretaries assigned full-time to monitoring news broadcasts and military communications. "Three college kids achieved orbit twenty minutes ago."
"Scramble the ground crew for launch prep." He switched off the phone and pulled Chemar closer to him. "Seems I may have to come up with five hundred million in real money."
"That's not all you have to come up with," she breathed into his ear.
"Vixen."
"I mean that you promised USC a bundle, too."
At a neuromuscular command, his robotic arm tingled ever so pleasantly with a mild galvanic charge. He traced a fingertip down her jawline, down her graceful sternocleidomastoid neck muscle, down to her breasts; he outlined her dark areolæ, eliciting a gasp of electrified shock from her.
"I won't have any problem coming up with anything," he said, reaching lower still.
"Apparently not," she moaned. "Mon dieu...!"
Colonel Vladimir Tuchapski had just finished lunch when he saw news of the liftoff. He performed a quick estimate of the spacecraft's orbital inclination, enough to realize that it posed no threat of rendezvous with Mir. The game, however, had just changed radically. The Americans were not as complacent as he had hoped.
Nor was GRU.
Hiding the missiles in the vast Russian deserts had been easy at first, but one could not hide from surveillance satellites forever. The purported high resolution of the Russian Soyuz Karta did not worry him as much as the known resolution of the sophisticated sensors onboard American and European craft such as Landsat-7 and SPOT. His only hope was that GRU would not be able to move through the financial and bureaucratic maze attached to enlisting foreign cooperation in tracking down the renegade colonel and his cumbersome pilferage.
He had taken the actions necessary to procure the missiles before their destruction by INERT or their seizure by this new monster, UNITO. He lacked any detailed plan beyond that. Stranded in the less-than-bucolic Rubcovsk, with his missiles erected inside a grain elevator, he now awaited word from Brajnikoff of their efforts to acquire the precious cargo vital to their reactivation of the Russian space station.
And to wait while watching the ultimate insult -- school children orbiting a homemade space helicopter! He admired them, though, for hiding right under the noses of the ruling class. How daring to build a rocket in one of the most populous cities on Earth! Who would notice their comings and goings until too late?
Tuchapski lacked not for skepticism, however. His military mind immediately doubted the official version broadcast on the airwaves. Regardless, they announced the launch for some reason, if only as a backdoor to unraveling the Interplanetary Treaty.
"Colonel Tuchapski!" Capt. Brajnikoff crisply spoke upon entering the farmhouse that served as their secret headquarters. The younger man wore drab peasant clothing of coarse wool. He hefted tattered canvas shopping bags crammed full with anomalously sophisticated electronic devices.
"Sergei," the colonel said with greater relief than he dared admit. "Tell me you have it!"
The bags thumped victoriously to the kitchen table, joining the television set and ancient laptop computer. "We have latest navigation system software from Taiwan, Korean digital camera back, American artificial intelligence neural net for environmental control, and a jar of year-old beluga caviar to celebrate."
"Oxygen tanks?"
"Denkov is loading."
"Food other than caviar?"
Brajnikoff's smile faded. "Very little freeze-dried. Mostly canned borscht and vegetables. Some meat. Six month's supply at best."
Tuchapski sighed. "Canned is heavy. We'll have to leave behind some water bottles to compensate." He pointed toward the TV. "We'll not be alone."
Sergei stared wordlessly at the screen.
"GRU," Tuchapski said, "may be watching for us to launch now, rather than to export weapons to some foreign power. We may have to outrace our own anti-missile defenses."
"When do we launch?"
"Sooner than we expected, I fear."
Sherry Cooper arose early that morning, working on final plans for Aurora's launch. Delayed yet again from a Friday liftoff to the coming Monday, she took the opportunity to review her plans. Thom Brodsky pounded on the motel room door, startling her.
"They did it!" He whipped past her to switch on the TV.
Placing her hand on her sternum, she took a worried breath and said "Did what?"
"Orbited an SSTO! Listen."
The live broadcast from space showed a young man -- his face high-cheeked and ruddy from the effects of weightlessness -- dressed in raccoon-fur hat that refused to remain on his head and a buckskin jacket the fringes of which swayed this way and that like seaweed as he addressed the planet's billions.
"Our mission is peaceful. We only mean to orbit the Earth for a day, then return to a safe, powered landing. Our spacecopter was built entirely with volunteer labor, though we forthrightly admit that some of the components were... involuntarily lent to us by New York University and several other sources. And we lifted the orbital helicopter design entirely from other sources."
"Amazing," she whispered. "Space on a shoestring. Gerry would have been proud to know them."
Thom put an arm around her shoulder as she stood and stared at the screen, then at him. "Are you still prepared to go through with our plan?"
Brodsky nodded. He did not voice his main reason for agreeing to go through with her plan: that any fate they suffered as a result could be no worse than the price Gerry Cooper paid for his dreams.
"And Leora?"
He pursed his lips, then said, "I think she is one seriously disturbed travel agent, so I guess that means she's with us."