Astro Wars

Free Online Space Strategy Game

Real Time - Web Based - Massive Multiplayer Game

Astro Wars is a Free Multiplayer Space Strategy Game. After registration you start at the edge of the galaxy. Now you can build up, colonize and take over planets in competition with thousands of players from all over the world!


Astro Wars runs in Real-Time and is Web-Based so you can play it from everywhere with no installation. The game also has a WAP interface.

Play Astro Wars

Game Story
 
In orbit, the first rule of survival is: act slowly. In an emergency, take time to assess your options; act with deliberation but not haste. Your instincts may tell you to act fast, but your instincts will kill you if you don't think.


You ignore this rule at your own peril.

The explosion was a flash of white followed by the flickering glitter of debris spinning off into space. I was loading film canisters onto the Sundancer and happened to be looking the right way to see it.

One of the pieces was a space-suited body.

In an instant it shrank away to a speck and vanished. I flicked on the rendezvous radar and swiveled it around to try for a trajectory fix.

The worker who had been flung away from the station had been slightly further out from the rotation axis than Sundancer. I punched my radio in to the suit bands, meanwhile running Sundancer down the cable to the spot that would match his outward velocity. I'm an astronomer, not a pilot, but I'd trained on the simulators enough to fly it in an emergency. I ran an abbreviated preflight check. The red LED display indicated Sundancer had full tanks. While it carried fuel only for orbital adjustments, not major burns, there was enough to get back to Antaeus if I didn't use up too much in the rendezvous. Nothing on the suit bands.
 

I flicked my radio to the control com channel. "Control, this is Virginia Talens on Sundancer. I'm going for a rescue. Out." I flipped the radio off before anybody on Antaeus could tell me not to.


Peggy smiled silently at me from her spot taped to the control panel. I smiled back at her at her and pulled the emergency release. Ninety-seven seconds--exactly one third of a revolution--after the explosion, Sundancer blew free of her cradle. The observatory shuddered from the shock of disengagement, and gee dropped away to freefall. In the viewport, the lazily rotating bolo of Antaeus shrank away against the brilliant crescent of the Earth.

There really wasn't any choice. The station had no tugs, and no shuttles were docked at the moment. Sundancer was the only vehicle available with enough delta-vee for a rescue.

Sundancer was a free-flying solar observatory designed to be boosted by ion-tug into an eccentric solar orbit, aphelion at Earth's orbit, perihelion inside Mercury's. It had been in assembly at a docking-and-repair station about a third of a gee down the cable from Antaeus's rotation center--high enough gees to keep things from floating around, not enough to be bothersome.
 
Sundancer's heart was the PB-4 automatic camera. The mission was to make close-in, high-speed telescopic observations of the surface and corona of the sun. The PB-4 ran at twenty-thousand frames per second: at top speed, the film runs through the camera well over the speed of sound. That's fast. We could kill a kilometer of film in just about the time it would take you to sneeze. The film itself was a cross-linked carbide polymer. It had to be, to take the stress of feeding through that camera.


I looked back at Antaeus station. It was unlikely and beautiful, a spindly, three-armed white octopus studded with antennae, docking ports, windows, and manipulator arms. Humans don't absolutely need gravity, but it is convenient for many industrial operations--try pouring molten steel in zero gee, for example--and it is useful to do your exercising under gee to avoid space adaptation: bone calcium loss and reduction of muscle mass. To simulate gravity, you make the station radius large and spin it slowly; otherwise the spin causes dizziness and disorientation whenever you stand up or turn your head. Antaeus consisted of one-gee living quarters on the ends of twenty-kilometer cables, with lower-gee stations dotted up and down the cables and a large spherical manufacturing station at the hub counterspun for zero gee. Two-person emergency re-entry pods clung in bunches like grapes around the living quarters.

They were little more than a foam-glass heat shield and a parachute, but in an emergency station personnel could suit up and let Antaeus's rotation toss them into the atmosphere.


The station design has another advantage. By moving to the appropriate spot and letting go, a ship can be flung just about anywhere in Earth orbit. The rotating station could also catch upcoming shuttles traveling at less than orbital velocity, and fling them back into reentry orbits when they leave, although angular momentum management for that can get rather tricky sometimes.

I looked back at Earth. It was apparent that the unlucky construction worker had been flung outward and slightly posigrade relative to the station. I plugged the computer into the radar to see what sort of orbit we were in. Not good; it intersected the Earth's surface. But the orbital period left plenty of time for rendezvous and rescue before the approach of atmospheric entry.

I'd cut lose from the station a few meters farther out from the center than the point the doppler reading said the overboard worker had been, so I should be closing at a meter per second or so. After a few minutes the scan radar picked up a blip. It wasn't tumbling, so whoever it was had survived the explosion at least long enough to kill his spin.
 
I made a correction burn to adjust my trajectory, and then focused the high-gain antenna on him. "Hello? Can you hear me?" Static. "Hello, this is Virginia Talens on Sundancer, can you hear me?"


"Roger, Sundancer, loud and clear." The voice had a distinct western drawl, although with the reception quality it was hard to tell much more. "Where are you? Over."

"You should be able to see me in a moment or so. I'm coming at you from about thirty degrees positive of the disk. Are you okay?"

"Roger, Sundancer, I'm fine. Explosion knocked me off my perch and cut my tether, but no other damage. I do 'preciate your coming out to give me a ride back home, though. Name's Cowboy, by the way. Over." "Pleased to meet you, Cowboy."

"My pleasure, believe me, Sundancer." A short pause. "Reckon I'm seeing you now. Over."

I glanced out the viewport. "Right, I have visual contact on you as well." He was wearing a bright red p-suit, the solar panels fully extended like butterfly wings to power the oxygen regen system. As I watched, the panels retracted. "Be there in a moment. By the way, can you tell me what happened?"
 
A chuckle. "Sundancer, from where I was it was a little hard to tell, you know? I think one of the welding tanks blew. Ha! That was some ride. Over."


I stopped chatting and concentrated on killing my momentum for the rendezvous. When I was down to a few centimeters per second relative I rotated the vehicle around so that the lock was forward. In a moment I heard a thump, and shortly afterwards the lock cycled.

She was a compact brunette wearing a red piezoelectric spacesuit with "Orban Construction" embroidered in gold letters down the sleeves. Cowboy? Funny name for a woman, but then high construction workers always were a trifle peculiar. She couldn't have been older than maybe twenty. She unsealed her helmet and took it off, then shook out her short brown hair with a sigh of relief. "Ah, that's better." I looked her over intently, but her hair was too dark, her eyes the wrong shade of gray. She touched a control and the skintight suit loosened.

"We can chat on the way back," I said. "We'd better make haste, we're getting farther away by the moment. Brace yourself for gee." The computer had the burn already computed. I keyed in the firing command, and the position thrusters kicked in at a hundred milligees. "Here we go," I said.

And then they died.

"Trouble?"


"Don't know." No trouble lights. I opened the control system access panel. "Give me a moment."

In a few minutes I found the problem. Sundancer was still being completed; it wasn't supposed to be ready for a test run for another two weeks. The control panel--as I found out--had yet to be fully wired. The thrusters were hooked in, all right, but behind the panel the wires from the fuel gauge on the panel floated freely. They weren't connected to anything. The "Full" reading on the panel was meaningless. The tanks had never been filled.

I called up a display of our trajectory on the nav screen. The orbit we were in--if you want to call it an orbit--was essentially a parabolic arc terminating on the Earth's surface. Sundancer was a deep-space station. It would break apart entering atmosphere. "I think," I said, "it's time to call home for advice." I turned on the radio.

At Antaeus, control had been tracking me on radar and frantically trying to get in radio contact. I'd left the mission-control radio off; I'd been concentrating on using the high-gain antenna to pick up signals from Cowboy's suit radio.
 
The mission communicator told me, in colorful detail, all about my failings, from taking off with no flight plan up through the crowning stupidity of relying on a single reading from a single instrument. I was supposed to have been checked out for space, how could I forget that? I listened meekly. I could hardly object; he was clearly right.


When he paused for a moment I said, "How soon can you come out to get us?"

"We're working on it," said control.

"What do you mean, you're working on it?"

"I mean, we're looking at options now. There's a problem."

"Problem?"

"As far as we can tell, there are no ships available that can get to you before you re-enter."

Great. I flipped the radio to standby.

"So we are in trouble," said Cowboy.

"Looks like it," I said. "But things aren't desperate yet. We still have time; wait a few minutes and they'll think of something."

"Okay," said Cowboy. She started her post-EVA suit check. "Anyway, I wanted to ask you something. Right as I took off my helmet, you gave me a peculiar look. Like if you thought maybe I was someone else." "Oh. Yeah. Maybe I did."

"How come?"


"It's a long story."

"Okay."

"Well, it's this way." I paused and licked my lips. How to tell it?

"When I was a kid, I had a sister, Peggy. She was two years younger than me, but we were still pretty close." I gestured at the control panel. "That's her, over the attitude set panel." Cowboy floated over and looked at the faded picture in silence. It wasn't really a good likeness, but it was the best I had. "One day, when I was fourteen--this was back in the '80s--she ran away from home."

"I reckon that's something everybody has to do," said Cowboy. "Part of growing up. Did it once or twice myself."

"Yeah. So did I, once. It was over some trivial matter, I hardly even remember what anymore. So my parents weren't too worried when Peg ran away. She'd threatened to do it before, and never stayed away more than an afternoon. This time she was gone for a day, and a night, and another day. Finally they called the police."

"And?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "Nobody knows. In those days, people sometimes just disappeared. She was always the adventurous one in the family; I used to wonder if maybe she ended up someplace exotic, Tahiti or Alaska or Katmandu, and just didn't want to come back.
 
Every day I'd run to the mailbox, hoping for a postcard. For years and years I used to look carefully at everybody I saw on the street, wondering if it might be her. I guess I still do, a little bit."


"Oh. So you were hoping I might be her?"

"Not really." I sighed. "Not consciously, anyway. I know she'll never come back. But I felt guilty for a long, long time, because she'd told me she was going to run away, and I didn't try to stop her. Eventually I got over it. Mostly."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

I shrugged my shoulders again. "It's okay."

I was still lost in the past when the radio beeped at me. I flicked it on. "This is Control. Are you there?"

"Roger, Sundancer here," I said. "Where else would we be?"

He ignored the attempt at humor. "We've been investigating the possibility of doing a rescue launch from the surface." Oh oh, I thought. If they had to go for a surface launch, we were in some serious trouble. "We've just had confirmation that there are no vehicles in position to make a rendezvous with you before reentry. Sorry."

"You're worried about your observatory."

"Damn it, Sundancer, the observatory can be replaced! We'll sacrifice it in an instant if that's what it takes to do the rescue.
 
We're worried about you. Damn it, Talens, you shouldn't have risked your life to go out after a castaway. That's not your job."


"I was the only one in position to do it, and I had a radar fix."

"And now there's two of you in trouble, not just one. Bright move."

It would have been worth the risk if it worked, I thought, but I didn't say it. Besides, I didn't think our situation was desperate yet. "Control, we've been thinking of an idea here, and we want to get your opinion on it." Actually, "we" was a politeness. I was the one doing the figuring; Cowboy was just floating in the corner. "We have about two kilometers of PB-4 film here, and we've been wondering if we can use it to do a tether reboost off Sundancer to lift ourselves out of the reentry envelope."

"Copy that. We'll look at it."

The idea is straightforward. Consider two objects in orbit, connected by a rope--in our case, the film. One of the objects, Sundancer, say, is slightly closer in than the other, two people in p-suits. Orbital mechanics tells you that the object in the lower orbit will try to move faster. The tether won't let it separate, though, so it pulls them forward, increasing their orbital velocity. Think of it as a whiplash effect. Just before perigee, cut the tether. The people on the high end of the tether get tossed into a higher orbit, while Sundancer reenters slightly earlier. But could we be thrown into an orbit high enough to avoid reentry?

The radio beeped. "Sundancer, please verify. You have two kilometers of film on board?"


"Roger. Is that enough?"

"Have you checked for more?"

"Roger, we checked. Not too many places to look here, Control."

"Sorry, Sundancer. Our simulations show that two kilometers won't do it. The best you can do is to delay reentry by about eight minutes." There was a pause. "Good idea, though. Keep on thinking. Over."

After a while I had the beginning of another idea. "Cowboy?" I said. "How did you get that nickname?"

"Guys on my first crew gave it to me when they heard I grew up in big sky country. Wyoming. 'Fact, I was junior division rodeo champion of my county one year, back in high school. Guess maybe I should never have left."

"Maybe." I keyed up the radio. "Hello? Anybody there?"

"Control here." A pause. "Where else would we be?"

So he had been listening. "You said that our trajectory doesn't pass near any tugs or satellites, right?"

"Roger."

"When you say 'near,' you mean near in space and near in delta-vee, right?"
 
"Right." Rescue in space is more than just a matter of getting to the right place at the right time. You also have to be in matching orbits. Close isn't good enough if delta-vee is too high to match velocity.


"Does that mean that there are some satellites we pass close to in space, but not in velocity?"

"One moment." He didn't ask why I wanted to know. "Roger on that. We show one satellite, Molnyia 78, a dead communications satellite. The trajectory passes close enough that if you make a burn with your attitude thrusters, you could spit on it as it goes by. Relative velocity at closest approach is point six two kilometers per second."

"Thanks, control. I have an idea here, and I'll get back to you. Could you send through the orbital elements of that satellite and a schematic of the external configuration?"

"Roger on that. I'm downloading it to you now."

"Thanks. Can you do one more thing for us? Could you get somebody to look up for me the elastic properties of type PB-4 film?"

"Copy, Sundancer. We'll have somebody get back to you on it."

I looked over the specs on the satellite. It was an odd-shaped object, with solar panels and parabolic antennae sticking out here and there. Good enough.

"Cowboy, how good are you with a lasso?"

"You kidding? If I can see it, I can rope it."

"That's exactly what I want to hear."


Cowboy floated free, about a hundred meters from Sundancer. I stood in the airlock. If this worked, I'd have to jump free in a hurry. About a kilometer of film snaked between us, firmly attached to her suit harness and to mine. The slack was needed for an elastic buffer. She had a portable radar screen to watch the approach. I softly counted down the time, trying not to be nervous. "Twelve seconds. . . eleven. . . ten--"

"I have it on screen." Actually, what she was doing only had the vaguest resemblance to lasso-throwing. The film was in a huge loop floating in the satellite's path. As I watched she adjusted the positioning slightly to place it more exactly where the radar said the satellite would pass.

"Three. . . two--" The satellite grew impossibly fast, from a tiny bright dot to a tumbling clutter of bright knobs and antennae. It passed in a silent flash and disappeared back into the darkness. I looked at our noose, floating undisturbed by the satellite's passage. A clean miss.

"Sorry, partner," came Cowboy's voice, "Looks like I missed. What do we do now?"

"Better hope there's another bronco out there to rope, Cowboy." I triggered the motor to start winding the floating loops of film back on the reel.

The best available was an old SDI satellite whose eccentric orbit had gradually decayed into reach. Control guaranteed that its proximity defenses had long been deactivated. I hoped so.


Unfortunately, it would not pass close enough. The fly-by was only thirty kilometers, but Sundancer was now completely out of attitude thruster fuel.

Mission control hadn't thought of any better ideas, though. We took all the gas cylinders we could pry loose from Sundancer. Not for air--the oxygen regen on the suits was plenty effective as long as we had sunlight--but for thrusters. Compressed gas makes a lousy rocket, but in a pinch it would be better than nothing. At last we were ready to jump.

Sundancer dwindled into the distance, a misshapen sphere lumpy with telescopes. It disappeared against the gibbous disk of the Earth. I felt sad to see her go. It was an unworthy fate for a fine machine, betrayed by her pilot. "Well, we're committed," I said.

"We ought to be committed," said Cowboy. "This is the craziest stunt i ever heard o. It doesn't work, we're in a whole heap of trouble."

We were a little past apogee. Cowboy readied the loop of film. Tied to her suit were spare gas cylinders. Using the figures from the portable radar, Cowboy had used her suit thrusters to position herself close to the satellite path, and the tether between us was laid out to nearly its full kilometer length. As I counted down, she gently tossed out her lasso.
 
The satellite flashed by--right into the noose.


"Got it!" Cowboy shouted. The tether whipped out and snapped taut. Cowboy was jerked away, and the film between us began to straighten. Not fast enough. "Negative!" she said, angrily. "It slipped off."

The stars below began to slowly rotate around me. "I think," Cowboy said slowly, "that we're in a heap of trouble."

We were on opposite ends of a long rope, spinning slowly about each other, darkness and stars below our feet. If I could keep myself from thinking about what would happen as soon as we hit atmosphere, it would almost have been beautiful. The radio faded as the relay on Sundancer passed behind the Earth. We were alone.

"Virginia, you there?"

"Yeah," I said. I didn't bother laughing. Where else would I be? "Call me Ginny, though."

"Okay. Keep talking, will you? I just want to hear your voice."

"What should I say?"

"I don't care. Just talk."

"Okay. Say, Cowboy? What's your name, your real name?"

"Kimberlea, but don't call me that. I hate it. Nobody ever calls me that. In school they called me Lee."

"Oh." Silence. I couldn't think of anything to say. After a while she spoke.

"I don't mind dying, you know? I'm not afraid. It's kind of peaceful out here. The stars swinging slowly past, and all that." "I'm not afraid of dying either," I said, "but I didn't want to do it right exactly at this minute."


"I hate being alone. I'm a pretty poor cowboy, aren't I? Cowboys are supposed to love solitude. I hate it. I came from a huge family, ten kids. I guess I never got used to being alone."

"So why did you come out here to the big empty?"

"Not for solitude, that's for sure. Out here you're never alone. Packed into a living module with seven other construction crewers--hell, you can't even piss in private. Even outside, you're never far away from anybody, and there's always plenty of chatter on the radio." She paused. I watched the stars go by. "How did you end up out here?"

I shrugged. "I didn't plan it. It just happened. I was finishing up my dissertation--"

"Dissertation. . . you're a Ph.D?"

"Yeah, solar physics. So, I was finishing, and this opportunity came up, and it seemed to be the logical thing. So here I am."

"Wow. Guess you must be real smart, then."

"From the evidence," I said, "Not very. Some are, some aren't. Some people get through grad school by intelligence, some just by never allowing themselves to give up.
 
I knew a few people who were just astonishingly smart, so bright it was almost frightening. Others were just ordinary people who stuck with it. In the end, I couldn't see that it made much of a difference."


"Which were you?"

"A little of both, I guess." Another long pause.

""What are you thinking about?"

"That there's got to be a way out of this," I said. "If only we were smart enough to think of it."

"Oh. One thing you learn out west. Not every problem has a solution. Sometimes there just isn't a way out. And then you die."

"Depressing philosophy."

"Sometimes you gotta take what's coming to you," she said. "You know, I just wish you could hold my hand. We're so close, but so far apart. I just want to be touching somebody. Do you ever feel that way?"

"Yeah." Well, why not? She was only a kilometer up the tether, and we were spinning so slowly that centrifugal force was only milligees. "Cowboy? Wind in your film. I'll meet you in the middle."

"Okay."

At first it was easy. After about a quarter kilometer it felt like the force was getting stronger. Another hundred meters and it was definitely stronger. The winder motor was beginning to stall. I geared it down to a lower speed and continued winding.

Now I had a definite sense of vertigo. The stars below were very clearly down, and they were spinning much faster than before. I geared down again. Two hundred meters apart, and I was trying to pull myself and the spare oxygen canisters up against almost a full gee. I stopped winding. Above, I could see Cowboy do the same.


"Ginny? Why is the gravity getting stronger when we get closer to the center? Shouldn't it be getting weaker?"

I looked up the rope, thought about angular momentum, and did a mental calculation. A hundred meters, two gee... twenty meters, ten gee... Five meters, forty gee. I explained while I worked it out. "It's not like the station, where the centrifugal gravity reduces close to the center. It's like a figure skater pulling in her arms to spin faster. The closer to each other we get, the faster we spin." There was no way we would be able to meet in the center; we'd black out from the gees first. The slippery satellite had given us too little momentum to save us, but too much for us to ever get together.

Or could we? If we went back down, the suit thrusters and the gas cylinders together might have enough impulse to kill the spin. No, wait. I wasn't thinking clearly. Suddenly it was all clear. "Cowboy?"

"Yep?"

"You still have your lasso?"
 
"Right here."


"Good. Listen, wind yourself back down to the end of the tether, okay? Then use your suit rockets to increase our spin. I'm going to do the same. Got it?"

"Don't you mean to decrease the spin?"

"Negative. Increase it. There may be a way out of this yet." A way out for one of us, anyway, I thought. But I didn't say it.

She didn't ask any more questions. After a while it was done. "Okay, Cowboy," I said. "Now lower the empty tank down on your lasso." Now we were three objects spinning-- the gas canisters on one end, me on the other, and Cowboy in the middle. I cut a five-meter strip of film off my end of the tether and put it in my work-pouch, then tied my empty gas cylinders securely to the remaining end of the film strip. I left them hanging and began to climb.

After a while the climb got to be dizzying. I ignored it. The stars were spinning faster. I closed my eyes and kept climbing. I started feeling light. Something grabbed my arm. I grabbed back. It was Cowboy.

We spun around each other. It was dizzying, but there were no gee forces. All the angular momentum was in the gas canisters, swinging on the ends of kilometer-long tethers of high-strength film. I took my spare piece of film and tied one end to myself, the other end to her.
 
Next came the hard part, trying to keep Cowboy from figuring it out too soon. I began winding.


"What are you doing?"

"Pulling in my gas canister."

"You want me to pull in mine too?"

"No. If we wind them both in, we get about a hundred gees. Don't know about you," I laughed humorlessly. "Me, I can't take that much."

"Oh."

I continued to wind. When the gas bottles were in my arms, I felt a small but significant pull. Cowboy was up. I decided not to look down.

"I think I see what you're thinking of. But if one of us is flung out, the other has to go down, right?"

Damn. She figured it out. "Right."

"I guess that's better than nothing. What are we going to do, draw lots?"

"No. You go out, I go down."

"Why?"

"Because it's my plan, and I get to make the choices of who goes where, okay?"
 
"No. Not okay. You risked your life to rescue me; it's not fair that you should have to sacrifice yourself for me."


"Who said anybody was going to be sacrificed? Antaeus is going to be coming up behind and below us. If we stay in this orbit, we reenter before it comes up on us, but if I fling you forward, I get flung backwards, right toward the station."

"Which will have a delta-vee of several kilometers per second."

"Actually under a kilometer per second, but keep in mind that it's spinning. As I pass by, one of the arms of the bolo will be nearly a stationary target, and I'll lasso it as I go by. Hell, I'll be home before you will."

She thought about it for a second. "Hey, that sounds good. Except for one thing. I'm the one can throw a lasso. So I go down and in; you go up and out."

"Yes, but I can calculate orbits a lot faster than you can. I may need a midcourse correction. And your suit thrusters are empty. It's got to be me, Cowboy."

Cowboy sounded dubious, but she eventually agreed. I explained to her the next step.

"Okay. Now pull in your cylinder." My apparent weight began to get heavier as the other tank came in and our spin increased. The point was to get as much linear momentum on me as possible.
 
Earth, sun, stars flashed by. Two gees, three. Earth, sun, stars, Earth sun stars. Hang on. Five. Six. EarthsunstarsEarthsunstars. Blood rushed away from my brain. My piezo suit contracted on my torso and legs to compensate, but the world was still getting dark. Seven? Hang on, hang on. Just a little longer. A little more. Don't black out. Time it for Earth to swing by. Now! I cut the tether, and blacked out.


I awoke spinning in free fall. I couldn't have been out very long; as I spun around I caught a flash of something disappearing in the distance, and could just convince myself it was Cowboy spinning around the remaining gas bottles. Now it was up to her to repeat the maneuver I'd just done, drawing in her gas bottles to further increase her spin, then cutting the tether to put them into a reentry orbit, and herself outward as far as possible. I hoped she'd make it.

The plan to lasso Antaeus station on the fly was a damn good idea, I thought. It might even have worked, except for one thing--Antaeus wouldn't be there. It was behind and below us, all right, but after I gave Cowboy enough momentum to put her into a safe orbit, I wouldn't pass within a hundred kilometers of it. It didn't matter anyway. I'd used up my suit thrusters the same time she did, spinning-up the tether. Too bad. I'd made it sound so plausible, I almost believed it myself.

"Good-bye, Peggy." For answer there was only static. I'd paid my debts, in the only coin that the void would accept.
 
I drifted through space, waiting for the Earth to reclaim me.


The sling maneuver managed to put Cowboy into an orbit that was high enough to avoid reentry and let an ion-tug make a rescue. She returned to Earth on shift rotation, and I went out to the spaceport to meet her shuttle, along with Jon Wintham, another astronaut. She was surprised to see me. "Ginny! You made it!" She hugged me. "When I got back to Antaeus and you weren't there, I figured your talk about making it back to Antaeus was just a ploy so you could sacrifice yourself to save me. God, I am so glad to see you alive!"

My smile was rueful. "Actually, it was just a ploy." She looked at me. "No way I could have made it to Antaeus. The maneuver flung me in the right direction, but not anywhere near close enough."

"Then how did you--"

Jon stepped in. "You see, you two were out of radio contact, but as soon as the station came over the horizon we picked you up on radar." I could see Cowboy's startled look as she recognized his voice. He'd been rescue mission control at Antaeus. "We could see what you were doing, and eventually we figured it out. You weren't the only ones who were desperately trying to think of ways to get you two back alive. Ginny managed to fling herself just far enough backward that we could drop an escape capsule to intersect her course and match speeds."

"And, believe me," I said, "Was I surprised to see him!"
 
"There was no way to get back to the station, but," he shrugged, "we didn't have to get back to Antaeus anyway. All we really needed was a heat shield and a parachute."


"So you did lie to me," said Cowboy.

"In a good cause," I said. "I figured I would pay for my mistake."

"Fortunately," said Jon, "we thought differently."

"I owe you one," Cowboy said.

"With luck," I said with a laugh, "it'll be a long, long time before I have to collect that debt."