Talking with his father always brought those terrible moments back to mind. And the gasping, choking paralysis that clamped his chest like a merciless vise. He reached into the top desk drawer for his inhalator and took a desperate whiff of the cool, soothing drug.

All right, Humphries thought, waiting for his breathing to return to normal, trying to calm himself. He’s going to stay down there and try to fight the New Morality until they burn him at the stake. Nothing I say will budge him a millimeter. Very well, then.

I’ll stay here in Selene where it’s safe and everything’s under control. No storms, no rain; a world built to suit me in every detail. From here I can pull the strings just as effectively as if I were down in New York or London. Better, really. There’s no reason for me to go Earthside anymore.

Except for the divorce hearing, he remembered. I’m supposed to show up in the judge’s chambers for that. But I can do even that from here, get my lawyers to make the excuse that I can’t return to Earth, I’ve been on the Moon too long, it would be dangerous to my health. I can get a dozen doctors to testify to that. No sweat.

Humphries laughed aloud. I won’t have to be in the same room with that bitch!

Good! Wonderful!

He leaned back again and stared up at the ceiling. It was set to a planetarium display, the sky as it appeared above Selene. Briefly he thought about calling up a porno video, but decided instead to put on the latest informational release from the International Astronautical Authority about the microprobes searching through the asteroids in the Belt.

The IAA’s motivation for investigating the asteroids was to locate locks that might one day hit the Earth. They had good tracks on all the hundreds of asteroids in orbits that brought them close. Now they were sorting through the thousands of rocks out in the Belt big enough to cause serious damage if they were ejected from the Belt and impacted Earth.

The good news was that so far they had not found any asteroid in an orbit that threatened the homeworld — although the asteroids in the Belt were always being jostled by Jupiter and the other planets, perturbing their orbits unpredictably. A constant watch was a vital necessity.

The better news was that, as a byproduct of the impacter watch, the IAA was getting detailed data on the composition of the larger asteroids. Iron, carbon, nickel, phosphorus, nitrogen, gold, silver, platinum, even water was out there in vast abundance. Ripe for picking. Waiting for me to turn them into money, Humphries told himself, smiling happily.

Dan Randolph will send a team out to the Belt on a fusion rocket. The first mission will fail, of course, and then I’ll have Randolph where I want him. I’ll take control of Astro Corporation and we can put Randolph out to pasture, where he belongs.

Then a thought clouded his satisfaction. It’s been damned near six months since I hired Pancho Lane to keep an eye on Randolph. Why haven’t I heard from her?

“Aren’t you nervous?” Amanda Cunningham asked. Sitting beside her as the Clippership returned to Earth, Pancho shook her head. “Nope. You?”

“A bit.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I mean… meeting the head of the corporation. It’s rather exciting, don’t you think?”

Pancho and Amanda had been summoned to Astro Manufacturing’s corporate headquarters in La Guaira, on an island across the strait from Caracas. Something about a new assignment that Dan Randolph himself would decide. “Well, meeting the big boss is important, I guess,” Pancho said as nonchalantly as she could manage.

They were riding the Clippership down from the aging space station Nueva Venezuela to the landing field at La Guaira, riding comfortably in the nearly empty passenger cabin with a sparse handful of paying customers rather than in the cramped cockpit where the crew worked. Amanda reveled in the luxury of spacious seats and entertainment videos; Pancho figured that something important was waiting for them when they landed, something important enough for Astro to undergo the expense of letting them ride deadhead from Selene. Well, she said to herself, the pilots up in the cockpit are really deadheading, too. Clipperships flew under control from the ground; they didn’t need an onboard crew any more than a ballistic missile did. But even after all these years — decades, really — the politicians refused to allow spacecraft that carried passengers to fly fully automated. The pilots had to go along; there had to be a cockpit and full controls for them even though they had absolutely nothing to do. Don’t complain, she said to herself. If the aerospace lines didn’t need to hire pilots you wouldn’t have gotten a job in the first place. You’d still be sitting in front of a display screen in some cubicle back in Lubbock doing tech support and barely making enough money to keep Sis alive.

Amanda was flicking through the entertainment channels, eyes locked on her little pop-up screen. Pancho eased back in the comfortable passenger’s chair and closed her eyes.

Why me? she asked herself. Why has the CEO of Astro Manufacturing called me all the way back from Selene to see him in person? Amanda I can understand. One look at her ID vid and the Big Boss prob’ly started panting like a dog in heat. Still, in the six months since they’d first met, Pancho had acquired a healthy respect for Amanda’s piloting skills, boobs notwithstanding. This is her first job and she’s already as good as I am… well, almost. I’m the best pilot Astro’s got, flat out, but what’s that got to do with seeing the CEO? Why does he want to see me? Does Humphries have anything to do with this? He wants me to spy on Astro, which means he prob’ly wants me to spy on Randolph himself. So maybe he’s worked things out so’s I get to see Randolph face-to-face. Is Humphries pulling strings inside Randolph’s own company?

It never occurred to Pancho that Dan Randolph wanted to see her for reasons of his own.

The Clippership rode smoothly through re-entry, with only a few moments of turbulence as it plunged into the Earth’s atmosphere like a squat, cone-shaped meteor, plummeting so fast that the very air outside the craft heated to incandescence. We’re a falling star, Pancho told herself as she sat tightly buckled into her seat while the ship shuddered and jounced. She could hear the muted howl of the tortured air on the other side of the hull, mere centimeters from her seat. A falling star. Some kid down there’s prob’ly making a wish on our trail. The shaking and banshee wail of re-entry ended swiftly and the flight smoothed out.

“We’ll be landing in four minutes,” the captain’s rich baritone voice announced over the intercom. “Don’t be alarmed by all the banging and roaring. It’s just the retrorockets and the landing struts deploying.”

Pancho smiled. That’s what we need the crew for: reassuring announcements. It felt as if they were falling until the retros fired briefly, pushing Pancho deep into her seat. Another drop, so short she barely had time to feel it before the retros roared out a longer blast. Then everything went silent and still. “We’re on the ground,” the captain said, sounding relieved. Pancho had expected that she and Amanda would be sent directly to Randolph’s office for their interview with the CEO, or at least to the personnel department for a briefing on what they should expect. Instead, once they cleared the access tunnel they were met in the terminal by a good-looking young Latino in a business suit who led them out to the garage and a sleek-looking sedan. “Your luggage is being picked up and will be waiting for you in your quarters at the corporate housing center,” he said in impeccable American English, opening the car’s rear door for the two women.

As she and Amanda got into the back seat, Pancho saw there was a driver sitting behind the wheel. The young man slid in beside him.