Claire tried to smile for him, but she wondered if her husband really had the strength to do what he promised.

"We've got a second-stage burn!" the comm tech yelped.

Wicksen jerked with surprise. "What?"

"Second-stage burn," she repeated. "They held off on it until they made their midcourse correction. Accelerated by a factor of two, at least. Computer's chewing on the numbers."

"How much time do we have?" Wicksen asked, feeling frightened for the first time.

"Looks like… forty-two minutes."

"By all the saints in heaven," Wicksen muttered. "All right, thanks for the bad news."

Banging the suit-to-suit key on his wrist pad, Wix called out, "New data. We've got forty minutes, max."

The four spacesuited figures all turned toward him.

"I know it's not enough time," Wicksen said. "Power up the magnets. Check out all the connections. I'll slave the pointing system to the control center's radar plot."

"Better warn the base they're gonna get browned out," one of his assistants said.

"Right," said Wicksen, running as fast as he could in the cumbersome spacesuit to the jury-rigged set of pointing magnets.

This has got to work the first time, he said to himself. It's got to! If there's a saint in heaven who can cancel Murphy's Law for a few minutes, now's the time to do it.

It was as close to prayer as Wicksen had ever come.

eVersion 1.1 — see revision notes at end of text

Jack Killifer fidgeted nervously in the kitchen of Joanna Brudnoy's house. The closer he got to his goal, the more jittery he felt.

Stop it! he commanded himself. Calm yourself down.

He wasn't afraid to kill Joanna Brudnoy, nor her Russian feeb of a husband. It was getting away with it that worried him. Sure, his ID in the Masterson files had been artfully faked. Anybody looking for his picture or prints in the computer would get a totally artificial set of pixels. Nobody was going to trace him that way.

It was the other security personnel that worried him. They knew his face. Even with the moustache and change in his hair color, they'd be able to identify him.

General O'Conner'll take care of me, he tried to assure himself. The Urban Corps had plenty of resources. They could provide him with a complete alibi, show the police that Killifer had been on assignment in Tacoma or Timbuktu, all neatly filed in their computer records.

They had outfaced Interpol, for God's sake, when the international investigators had come asking about Tamara Bonai's death. Thanks to O'Conner's people, Killifer had an iron-clad alibi and Doug Stavenger's identification had been tossed aside. The cops didn't trust virtual reality evidence, anyway: too easy to fake or spoof.

But why did O'Conner insist on me doing this alone? Killifer asked himself again and again.

'God's work has to be done by God's people, Jack.' the general had told him. 'It would be wrong to bring in an outsider. Wrong, and dangerous. The fewer people know about this, the better off we are.'