"You must be on the Drake Hookup," Lanier said.

"I am, but this is a Deep Space Tracking picture. The Drake is still locked on the Perseus Gemstar."

"They won't turn it on the Stone?"

She shook her head, grinning wolfishly. "Feisty old bastards are on a tight schedule—won't turn it around even for a look at the biggest event of the twenty-first century."

Lanier raised an eyebrow. The Stone, as far as he knew, was just an asteroid. The oblong chunk wasn't going to hit the Earth, but if it was going to orbit, it would be in perfect position for scientific probes. That was interesting, but hardly worthy of so much enthusiasm.

"Twenty-One isn't until next month," he reminded her.

"And that's when we'll be getting busy." She turned toward him and folded her arms. "Garry, we've been working together for some time now. I trust you a lot."

He felt a tightening at the base of his spine. She had seemed tense all evening. He had dismissed the fidgeting as none of his business. Now she was making it his business.

"What do you know about the Stone?" she asked.

He thought a moment before answering. "DST located it eight months ago. It's about three hundred kilometers long, a hundred kilometers across at midsection. Medium albedo, probably a silicate body with a nickel-iron core. It had a kind of halo around it when first spotted, but that's dissipated. That made a few scientists speculate it was an exceptionally large old comet nucleus. Some conflicting reports on low density revived the old Shklovskii Mars-moon speculation."

"Where did you hear the density reports?"

"I don't remember."

"That reassures me a little bit. If you haven't heard much more than that, probably no one else has, either. DST had a leak, but we've plugged it now."

Lanier had entered her circle while working as a public relations manager for AT&T Orbicom Services. Before being employed by Orbicom, he had spent six years in the Navy, first as a fighter pilot, then flying high-altitude tankers. He had flown the famous Charlie Baker Delta route over Florida, Cuba and Bermuda during the Little Death, refueling the planes of the Atlantic Watch whose vigilance had played such a crucial role in limiting the war.

After the armistice, he had received an OK from the Navy to take his expertise in aerospace engineering over to Orbicom, which was tuning up its world-wide civilian Mononet.

There had been a few calls at first to Orbicom headquarters in Menlo Park, California, then requests for help on position papers, then an abrupt and unexpected transfer to the Orbicom building in Washington, which he later learned had been engineered by Hoffman. There was no question of romance—how often had he quelled that rumor?—but their ability to work together was remarkable in a Washington atmosphere of perpetual partisan bickering and funding squabbles.

"Why the secrecy?" he asked.

"DST has been ordered to mask all data given to the community." By which she meant the scientific community.