“Someday, maybe I can tell you,” Patrick said with a smile. “Right now, all I can tell you is this: It’s really cosmic.”

“Well, be sure to let me know when you invent a phaser and force field for cops on the beat,” Paul said, clapping his brother warmly on the shoulder before heading off to make another circuit of the room. “I’ll be first in line to try them out.”

Her touch was light and soothing, loving and caring-but her hand was warm and moist, and as if a Klaxon had suddenly gone off, Patrick was instantly awake. “Wendy?”

“I love you, sweetheart,” she answered.

Patrick pushed himself up and peered at the red LED numerals of the clock on the nightstand; it read 5:05 A.M. He turned on his bedside light. Wendy was sitting upright in bed, her right hand still touching him, her left hand gently rubbing her belly. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

But she obviously wasn’t fine. “Are you having contractions?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied, and he heard a twinge in her voice. If his wife ever used foul language, he decided, the likelier answer would have been, “Fucking-A, Sherlock, I’m having contractions!”

“How long?”

“A couple of hours. But no real pattern. Very irregular. It’s probably Braxton-Hicks again.”

“Oh. Okay.” It was a lame response, but what else do you say? ‘Gee, dear, you’re in pain, and I’m really concerned, but it’s not that pain, the official pain, so I’ll go back to sleep now’? Braxton-Hicks contractions, sometimes mistaken for real labor pains, had been a regular occurrence for Wendy all during her pregnancy. So things were stirring, but the action probably wouldn’t start for several days. Right? Wendy wasn’t due for another three weeks. And first babies were more often late than early-right?

They had left the party downtown right after midnight. They were staying in a suite at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Sacramento, not far from the tavern. During the ride back to the hotel, he sensed that Wendy seemed a bit more uncomfortable than usual, but that was probably due to fatigue-her normal bedtime was closer to nine P.M.

They probably never should have come to Sacramento at this stage-hers was the definition of a high-risk pregnancy. Wendy Tork McLanahan, an electronics and aeronautical engineer first on contract to the US Air Force and now an executive and chief designer for a small Arkansas-based high-tech aerospace firm, had spent most of the past two years in and out of hospitals after twice ejecting out of experimental military bombers, the latest just last June over the People’s Republic of China, along with Patrick and the crew’s copilot, Nancy Cheshire. Wendy had just recovered from her injuries from the first ejection when she was forced to eject from the second plane.

Thankfully, she did not lose the fetus. After a brief hospital stay and a few weeks to recuperate-and be debriefed by what seemed like every agency in the US government except the Department of Agriculture-Wendy returned to work and kept on with her duties as vice president in charge of advanced avionics design at Sky Masters, Inc. until her maternity leave began two weeks ago.

She was in great shape, the baby was fine, and she had insisted they could not miss Paul’s celebration. And after all that had happened over the past two years, Patrick wanted a family life, a normal life, more than anything else in the world. He hadn’t done much of the family thing for most of the last ten years, and he was anxious to get reacquainted with everyone.

But here they were, four hundred miles away from home, and the baby was obviously headed down the chute very soon. Decisions. Good, bad, who the hell knew? Stop waffling and deal with it now, Patrick told himself.

“I’m going to call Dr Linus in San Diego, just in case, get someone standing by,” he told Wendy. Her nod and her touch told Patrick she really didn’t think it was false labor this time, so he picked up the telephone. Time to get moving. “Jon’s got the company jet at Mather demoing that electroreactive cargo liner technology,” Patrick reminded her. “I think we should try to make it back to San Diego.” Dr Jon Masters, their boss and president of Sky Masters, Inc., was at the Aerojet-General rocket plant east of Sacramento, to demonstrate a new lightweight technology he developed for protecting an airliner’s cargo compartment from a bomb blast. “The jet can be fueled up and ready to go in less than two hours, and we can be at Mather in thirty minutes and at the hospital in Coronado in four hours.”

“All right,” Wendy responded. “I’ll get dressed.” She swung her legs out of bed and headed for the bathroom, then stopped halfway. “Dear?”

“What, sweetheart?” Patrick replied. He turned. Wendy was reaching for a towel-and then he saw the growing bloody puddle on the white tile floor, and leaped out of bed with a speed and agility he thought he had lost long ago.

He knew then that they weren’t going to make it back to Coronado.

Rocket-testing facility,

Aerojet-General Corporation,

Rancho Cordova, California

several hours later

“What’s the latest on Patrick and Wendy, Helen?” Jonathan Colin Masters, Ph.D, asked by way of a voice check. The boyish-looking chief engineer and president of Sky Masters, Inc. was setting up a small video camera in front of a first-class seat inside a Boeing 727 airliner fuselage.

“What? Jon, are you listening to me at all?” his vice president and chairman of the board of directors, Dr Helen Kaddiri, asked through the videoconference link. Kaddiri was several years older than Masters, one of the original founders of the small high-tech aerospace firm that now bore Jon Masters’s name. She tolerated his high-school antics and laid-back style of doing business because Jon knew how to build systems that the government wanted, and he knew how to sell them-but this, Kaddiri thought, was going way too far. Worse, Masters didn’t even seem to care that he was risking his life just to sell a product. He was nuts.

“Can you hear me? Is this thing working?”

“I hear you fine, Jon,” Kaddiri said.

“I asked, have you heard anything about Wendy since the message that they were heading to the hospital?” Masters repeated.

“Jon, pay attention to what I’m saying to you,” said a frustrated Kaddiri. “We have other ways of doing this demonstration-”

“Helen, we’ve been over this a million times,” Masters interrupted. “I’m doing this. Now, is there any word from Patrick and Wendy or not?”

Kaddiri closed her eyes, unable to argue any longer. Nuts-that was the only logical explanation. Insane. Definition of a death wish, of childlike feelings of invulnerability.

Kaddiri was conducting the technology demonstration briefing at a videoconference center at the Federal Aviation Administration headquarters in Washington, D.C. Several research directors of the FAA, along with aerospace-manufacturer and airline representatives, were outside the conference room awaiting the start of Masters’s remote video demonstration, beamed via a two-way datalink using Sky Masters’s low-Earth-orbit satellites, called NIRTSats (for Need It Right This Second satellites), specifically launched for this demonstration. Jon was back in California, about to conduct the demonstration itself. He was literally sitting atop a powder keg, as both of them knew, and all he could think about was Patrick and Wendy McLanahan’s new arrival.

“Stand by one, Jon,” Kaddiri replied with an exasperated sigh, then turned to her assistant, who made a phone call and came back with an answer a few moments later. “Wendy McLanahan was admitted to Mercy San Juan Hospital in Citrus Heights, east of Sacramento, this morning around five-thirty. Everyone’s doing fine,” Kaddiri responded over the videolink. “No other word. Happy?”