Zeus Station, Orbiting Capital

Phillips shut off the recorder and stared across his desk at George. "That came in fifteen minutes ago. We have about another fifteen minutes left until we have to send the shut-down signal, since the actual anti-ship missiles are about ninety light minutes away. So. Ignoring the question of how he knows you're here, ignoring the fact that Larson somehow knew the top-secret fact that Starsight was enroute, and has been since before the battle began, ignoring the fact that Starsight is overdue, ignoring a hundred other things my suspicious Intelligence officer's mind thinks of, do you trust and believe this Larson?"

George squirmed in the visitor's chair and felt the cold sweat of fear pouring out of his body. He was just a dumb engineer who liked playing with gadgets and didn't like to see people get hurt. Now he was mixed up in the fate of worlds. And, intentionally or not, he had betrayed Mac and the League. George knew, deep down in his gut, that League people had died because of his run for Capital. Who could blame Mac if he did scheme for revenge, if this was all an elaborate plot to get the Capital defenses down so the League fleet could pour through and bomb the planet down to radioactive cinders? The League had just demonstrated they could and would blow up a planet. If George wrongly trusted Mac, Capital was a corpse of a world.

But this was Mac. And if George wrongly distrusted Mac, Capital was just as doomed by the Nihilist plague. George was plenty ready to believe they could invent a disease that could wipe everyone out. The risks were equally balanced.

And then, suddenly, in the middle of his knot of fear and turmoil, George found his answer. George could kill millions if he answered either way and was wrong. He had no control over that. But he, and only he, had control over whether he had faith in people. And if Mac was telling the truth, then Mac was deliberately putting his life in George's hands.

George decided he could live with himself, somehow, if millions died because he made an honest mistake. But he couldn't live with himself if he let a friend down. You had to have a little faith in people. Admiral Thomas had scrawled that across the bottom of George's Britannic Navy commission papers. Well, if he had betrayed the admiral's trust, here was the time to make amends.

"I trust Mac Larson," George said in a strong, firm voice that was nonetheless near tears. "I would, and do, trust Terrance MacKenzie Larson with my life and the life of every human being on this planet."

Phillips stared hard at George, and realized the fifty-fifty odds, the head-or-tails gamble with the fate of Capital was now in his hands.

Then Phillips remembered that he trusted George Prigot. Trust was trust—there was no middle ground to it, no way to water it down and have it be any use to anyone. He reached out and picked up the intercom phone. "Get me the defense control room,” he said.

Both men felt a great burden rise off their shoulders. It was up to others now.