Zip pursed his lips, and his brow furrowed under his red hair—a common expression for the leader of the Starman team. “This has to explain why Zimbardo was looking for you,” he said. “No one outside the pirates knows as much as you about his asteroid. That didn’t seem to bother Troy Putnam, but Zimbardo must consider you a threat. But I can’t understand why he has taken us prisoner. Zimbardo has no heart of mercy whatever. I would have expected him just to silence you for good. Obviously he is preparing this place for some new and big enterprise and is probably occupied, but now I think we’ll be hearing from him before too long. Before that happens, I think we’d better be gone.”
“Escape? You talking about escape, Zip? From here?” asked Joe with amazement.
Zip addressed St. George. “Tell us everything you know about how this asteroid works. Leave out no detail whatever. Everything you can remember. Joe and Mark, pay close attention! We have to come up with a plan!”
A full day had passed since Richard Starlight had called the special meeting in his office in the towers of Starlight Enterprise. Now he sat silent and alone in one of the chairs around the great table. Suddenly he spun the chair around and stared through the clear wall in front of him. His gaze went far past the lunar mountains into the distant sky where Mars was just rising, a tiny red point.
The President had issued his commands earlier that morning. A secret communication had been issued to the commanding officers of all the bases of Space Command. A similar message had been sent to the heads of large commercial enterprises such as Starlight Enterprise and Nolan Mining Enterprise, as well as the local authorities of population centers in the Asteroid Belt and on Mars. The communication had provided what information was known about the threat that the pirates manifested. It ordered Space Command and urged the private parties to keep the information secret so as to avoid panic and to prevent the pirates from learning that their sheathing apparatus had been observed in action, and advised all parties to prepare for any attack the pirates may launch. They were put on high alert for visual attack and to be ready for instant defensive response.
In Amundsen City, Keith Seaton sat at his desk, scanning the Asteroid Belt with his telescope. His strong build filled the chair in which he sat.
“There’s Ceres,” he said quietly as the image of the Belt’s largest asteroid came up on the screen. Charlie Taylor and Allen Foster, who were sitting next to him, nodded. The fathers of the three Starmen weren’t conversing much that night, but all were greatly comforted by each other’s presence.
On Ceres, Sim Sala Bim received the encrypted message on tight beam, and felt immense sadness come over him as he read it. “Where are those three young Starmen now?” he wondered.
In the laboratories of Starlight Enterprise’s main center on the Moon, scientists were working around the clock to devise a method by which their ships could track distant objects by sight instead of radar. Additionally, under a very rare Presidential command, technicians were working frantically under Earth’s pre-eminent astrophysicist, Stephen Hoshino, trying to devise an advanced means of detecting a ship that was invisible to radar.
The Inner Planetary system was waiting for a strike which its defenders knew would surely come—but not when, where, or how.