"You'd leave me no choice."
"May the best man win."
"Petra, brake release." Yuri Androv's voice sounded from beneath his helmet.
“Acknowledged.”
Vance looked across to see his left hand signal a thumbs-up sign, then reach down for the throttle quadrant. The vehicle was already rolling through the wide doors of the hangar, so if there were an explosion now, at least they'd be in the clear.
Androv paused a second, mumbled something in Russian, then shoved the heavy handles forward to Lock, commanding all twelve engines to max afterburner. The JP-7 fuel reading whirled from a feed of three hundred pounds a second to twenty-one hundred, and an instant thereafter the cockpit was slammed by the hammer of God as the monitor image of the hangar dissolved in orange.
[Chapter Twenty]
"One small step for man."