The lab was a small complex of offices and industrial buildings on the outskirts of town. Phil led Harold through the main entrance and outside again, crossing a grassy area. They approached a tall white box of a building with no windows. A massive loading-bay door dwarfed the human-sized door next to it. Phil swiped them in.

  A short concrete hallway gave way to a large window facing a cleanroom, and the two men stopped to look inside. Suspended on heavy chains was a squat conical rocket, maybe 30 feet tall. Four spindly landing legs were folded up the sides, and a pair of oblong view ports could be seen near the top. The whole thing was attached to a compact cylindrical structure below made of some sort of woven material. Harold recognized it as an inflatable heat shield, currently packed and stowed. In fact, he recognized all of it.

  Phil waved at the technicians inside and got a wave back.

  “I know this hardware,” Harold said. “How did you get your hands on this?”

  “This magnificent machine was going to be the lander for Martian Successor V. NASA had landers in the works for Successor VI and VII too, but this one was almost flight ready when the disaster happened with Successor IV. Of course everything was mothballed after the hearing, but we were able to outbid a museum to get ahold of it.

  “A lot of the work we do here has been tearing this thing down to its bolts and rebuilding it, testing systems and recertifying it to be flight-ready. Of course… it’ll never get to Mars without a mothership to carry it.

  “We didn’t steal this one,” he added.

  Harold admired the lander for a long moment. Everyone knew about the Successor missions, everyone who was alive at the time remembered the day the transmission was lost, the investigation, the official cause of failure. Every engineer had his own opinions about what had really happened.

  Riding out on a stolen ship, what a miserable way to honor that legacy. “Is your organization aware of your… plans?” Harold asked.

  “No, not yet. I was hoping to have a more solid idea before floating that one by everyone.”

  Harold gave Phil a hard look, “Are you really willing to spend the rest of your life in prison for this? Is your obsession with Mars worth that to you?”

  “I admit I’m not thrilled about that aspect of this plan. But if I can make it there, and make it back, I’ve blazed a trail. And the next guy won’t have to steal a ship. He’ll be able to point to me - in prison and ideally very famous - and say ‘look, this miserable asshole did it, why can’t we?’ and the funding will come. First you’ll get the scientists, then the engineers building bigger and better bases for the scientists, then the corporations with their awful company towns and the fringe religious cults with their compounds and by then you have a proper colony.

  “If I can make this work, the funding will come for all that. I think I could live life in prison knowing I opened the door like that.”

  “Then I’ll join you,” Harold said. “On one condition. I want to be the first. If I stick my neck out and help make this happen, then stick my neck out even more and try to fly to Mars with you and whatever miserable excuse for a crew you’ve found, I want to be the first one out the door when that lander touches down. I want to be the first one to walk on the surface.

  “But I’m not sharing a cell with you when we get back.”

  At this point Phil’s eyes went wide. He scratched the back of his head, then turned and looked through the window for a moment, seeming to focus on the lander, or maybe some point behind it. “Alright,” he said finally, “Alright you have a deal.”

  He reached over and shook Harold’s hand, then patted him roughly on the shoulder.

  “Welcome to the club,” he said, grinning.

  * * *

  It was the next afternoon when they walked into the crowded lecture hall. A relic from when the lab complex was a small technical college. Phil Cardano loved holding meetings here, it reminded him of his university days.

  He and Harold made their way through the crowd towards the front of the room. Engineers, technicians, and administrative staff from the lab mixed with the spacers currently in training to be the crew. They all started to settle into the rows of seats, some pulling out tablets and notebooks.

  Phil picked up the stylus and started to write on the screen. Nothing showed up. When one of the engineers in the front row made a move to get up and help, Phil waved him down. Putting the stylus away, he walked over to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and began to write from memory:

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  “Translunar Shipping Company, Western Star Lines, Space Network Express…”

  By the time he was done the 30 largest cargo shipping companies were on the board. Finally turning away from the board, Phil gave Harold a quick smile and addressed the room.

  “Good afternoon everyone. On the board behind me you’ll find a list of every freight company flying a ship with enough endurance to take us to Mars. We’ve hit a bit of a snag, though. It seems none of these fine companies are willing to loan us one.

  “It just so happens that we can’t get to Mars without a suitable ship. That’s why Mr. Davies and I have created a plan to locate one that would fit our needs and… borrow it - temporarily and involuntarily - from its owners.”

  There was a commotion as half the room started talking at once. Phil waited a moment or two before waving down the noise.

  “Given our present course of action, if anyone would like to leave now, we will consider you as never having been in this room 30 seconds ago to hear my plans. However, anyone that stays had damn-well better be willing to face the consequences of aiding in the theft of a multi-billion dollar cargo ship.” Phil stopped to think for a moment. “I suppose the courts would consider that piracy.”

  Again the room was filled with talk, but this time it was low conversation and murmurs. Again Phil waited a few moments. Men and women in the rows started to quiet down, and there was a quiet shuffle as people looked around the room.

  Apparently nobody had decided to get up and leave.

  Phil felt some of the tension melt away. He had been dreading this moment. Glancing over, he caught a look of quiet surprise from Harold.

  “Since Mr. Davies here has been helping me with this plan, I’ll let him answer the obvious question: ‘how does one steal a 2000 ton freighter?’”

  Harold spoke up. “This is going to be a three-step process. First, we pick a target company and a target ship, then we pay to have our lander loaded as cargo meant for the Moon. It’ll have to be one of the big boys, with big enough tanks to accommodate a lot of extra propellant. Second, we make arrangements with the Spacer’s Union to make sure our crew has been assigned to that ship. Finally, once we’re out of visual range of the transfer station we drop any unneeded containers. We’ll rendezvous with a Union tanker, overload our propellant tanks, and change course for Mars.

  “Now for the question of avoiding detection. As you know, all commercial freighters operating in translunar space have a pair of navigational beacons. One main beacon and one for backup. Before we divert from the planned flight path, we’ll launch a small drone from the main ship carrying the backup beacon. Then we’ll disable the ship’s main beacon and swap to the backup on the drone. The drone needs to have enough fuel to complete the original flight path to the moon - I’ll leave the details to engineering.

  “By the time the drone enters visual range at the lunar transfer station, we’ll have escaped Earth’s gravity well and be on our way to Mars. Nobody could possibly catch us.”

  Phil nodded, and let the plan sit for a minute. “Thank you, Mr. Davies,” he said. “Well that’s the plan in a nutshell, any questions?”

  A hand went up. “Aaron, what have you got?” Phil asked.

  One of the engineers sitting in the front row cleared his throat, “Thanks Phil. Well what if somebody on the ground happens to point a telescope at our target ship and notices it’s off course? There’s a pretty sizable community of ship-spotters, it’d only take a few clear nights to get enough observations to realize we aren’t headed for the Moon.”

  “Great question, honestly haven’t thought of that one. My gut says we wouldn’t get reported, or that the reports from some ship-spotters wouldn’t be taken very seriously. Why don’t you run a risk analysis on that and get back to me.”

  One of the crew this time, a cargo specialist, spoke up. “The beacons on container ships are picked up with passive sensors, but transfer stations - and other ships for that matter - also have active radar. What happens when somebody decides to scan the wrong region of space and sees a bunch of discarded containers? Or sees our ship in the wrong coordinates with the wrong heading?”

  “You have experience on ports, right?” Harold asked, jumping in. “How often did you fire up the long range radar system while working there? All the ships have beacons, so what’s the point of checking their position manually? Yes, there is a risk there, but I don’t think anyone’s building time in their duty schedule to do something like that.”

  This seemed to satisfy some of the group, but others seemed to need more convincing.

  Phil spoke up. “He is right, but I’d like to add that there’d be no reason to suspect anything. In the 100-year history of lunar transport there have been theft of goods, theft of money, a couple of murders - very interesting reads, I can send you some links - and of course smuggling. But there’s never been any attempt to steal an entire ship. It’s insane and nobody’s expecting it, which is why we think it can work.”

  Phil hoped this sounded convincing. The murmurs in the room seemed to take on a more positive tone. He and Harold had gone back and forth on this point and eventually landed on a 20% chance of being picked up by a scan from a station or a passing ship. Good, but not a guarantee.

  A woman in the front row stood up, it was Deidre Maxwell, one of the pilots. She looked at the room behind her as she spoke. “Aren’t we all forgetting something? There’s absolutely somebody who could ‘catch’ us. What about the ISTO? They track everything, down to the size of a bolt. We can’t count on laziness there, and we can’t hide a 2000-ton civilian ship.

  She locked eyes with Phil but addressed the room, “What’s it going to look like when they see us stealing one of these massive freighters? It’s going to look a little like terrorism, don’t you think?”

  She turned again and asked the group of spacers in the back, the crew. “What do you think? Are they going to ask questions first or just wipe us out with a few thousand rounds of ammunition fired into the crew compartment?”

  Phil rubbed the back of his hand. It was time to come clean. “As to the military question… we haven’t figured that one out yet,” he admitted. “If we can’t mitigate this particular risk, of course we won’t be flying our mission.”

  He watched as Deidre shook her head and walked past him out the doors. Clapping his hands together he turned back to the room. “Well that’s where we’re at, folks. Mr. Davies and I will be meeting with your department chiefs later this afternoon, they’ll fill you in on specific changes to our program…”