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that their stowaway had made his way to the lifeboats. If I was going to make a clean escape, I’d have to do it before someone in the command center locked them down.
    Hauling myself over to the control panel, I jabbed the red JET . button with my thumb, then grabbed a ceiling rail and held on for dear life. A loud whoosh of escaping pressure, the hollow clang of clamps being released, the solid thump of pyros being ignited. Through the round window of the hatch, I saw the cone-shaped cowling of the lifeboat port fall away amid a fine spray of crystallized oxygen and small debris.
    A moment later, I caught a last glimpse of the lower hull of the Robert E. Lee . Then I began to fall to Coyote.

( THREE )
    Aboard the good ship Lou Brock…
    no coffee for the wicked…
    coming in on a heat shield and a prayer…
    wherever it is you think you are, you’re not there.
    XI
    Forget everything you think you know about lifeboats; whatever it is, it’s probably wrong. The one I stole from the Lee didn’t have wings or landing gear, nor did it have particle-beam lasers for fending off space pirates; the first kind is rare, and the latter exists only in fantasy fics. Mine was a gumdrop-shaped capsule, about twenty feet in diameter at its heat shield, that bore a faint resemblance to the moonships of historic times. All it was meant to do was carry six passengers to a more or less safe touchdown on a planetary surface, preferably one that had an atmosphere. Other than that, it was useless.
    But it was a spacecraft, with a liquid-fuel engine and four sets of maneuvering thrusters, which meant I had nominal control over its guidance and trajectory. And although the Lee was still eighty thousand miles from Coyote when I took my unauthorized departure, the boat also had a life-support system sufficient to sustain a half dozen people for up to twelve hours. Therefore, I had enough air, water, heat, and food to keep me alive for three or four days.
    So as soon as I was sure that I’d made my getaway, I grabbed hold of the hand rungs upon the ceiling and pulled myself across the cabin. The lifeboat was tumbling end over end by then, but so long as I was careful not to look through the portholes, there was no real sense of vertigo. I reached the pilot’s seat and pulled it down from the bulkhead. It was little more than a well-padded hammock suspended within a titanium-alloy frame, but it had a harness and a headrest, and once I strapped myself in, it was much as if I were in a simulator back at the Academy.
    The next step was to gain control of my craft. I unfolded the flat-panel console and activated it. The board lit up just as it was supposed to, and I spent the next couple of minutes assessing the status of my vehicle. Once I was sure it was fit to fly, I pulled down the yoke and went about firing reaction-control thrusters, manually adjusting the pitch, roll, and yaw until the lifeboat was no longer in a tumble. The lidar array helped me get a firm fix on Coyote, and the navigation subsystem gave me a precise estimate of where it would be x -times- y -times- z divided by t minus so many hours later. Once I had all that lined up, I entered the data into the autopilot, then pushed a little green button marked EXECUTE .
    A hard thump against my back as the main engine ignited. Gazing at the porthole above my head, I watched the starscape swerve to the left. Coyote, still little more than a green orb capped with white blotches at either end, drifted past my range of vision until it finally disappeared altogether. I wasn’t heading toward where it was at the time, though, but where it would be. That is, if I hadn’t screwed up in programming the comp. And if the comp was in error, then I would be taking a tour of the 47 Ursae Majoris system that would last until the air ran out.
    The engine fired for four and a half minutes, giving me a brief taste of gravity, then shut down, causing my body to rise within