"

"Nothing else I can think of, sir."

"Then good luck. We'll be standing by."

"Yes, sir. Foster off."

Rip disconnected and turned up his helmet communicator, repeating the
conversation to his men. Koa came and stood beside him. "Lieutenant, how
do we set off this next charge?"

There was only one way. When the time came to blast, they would be too
close to the sun to take to the boats. The blast had to be set off from
the asteroid.

"We'll get underground as far away from the bomb as we can," Rip said. He
surveyed the dark side, which was rapidly growing less dark. "I think the
second crater will do. Kemp can square it off on the side toward the blast
to give us a vertical wall to hide behind."

Koa looked doubtful. "Plenty of radiation left in those holes, sir."

Rip grinned mirthlessly. "Radiation is the least of our problems. I'd
rather get an overdose of gamma than get blasted into space."

A yell rang in his helmet. "Here comes the Connie!"

Rip looked up, startled. The Consops cruiser passed directly overhead,
about ten miles away. It was decelerating rapidly. Rip wondered why they
hadn't spotted it earlier and realized the Connie had come from the
direction of the hot side.

The enemy cruiser was probably the same one that had attacked them before.
He must have lain in wait for days, keeping between the sun and Terra.
That way, the screens wouldn't pick him up, since only a few observatories
scanned the sun regularly. To the observatories, the cruiser would have
been only a tiny speck, too small to be noticed. Or if they had noticed
it, the astronomers probably decided it was just a very tiny sunspot.

The Planeteers worked with increased speed. Kemp welded the final plug
into place, then hurried to the crater from which they would set off the
charge. Dominico and Dowst connected the wires from the rocket head to a
reel of wire and rolled it toward the crater. Nunez got a hand-driven
dynamo from the supplies and tested it for use in setting off the charge.
Santos stood by the rocket launcher, with Pederson ready to put another
rack of rockets into the device when necessary.

Rip and Koa watched the Connie cruiser. It decelerated to a stop for a
brief second, then started moving again, with no jets showing.

"That's the sun pulling," Rip said exultantly. "They'll have to keep
blasting to maintain position."

The Consops commander didn't wait to trim ship against the sun's drag. His
air locks