When I told her that I pilot a two-man shuttlecraft, Lilith Virago replied that it was a two-person vessel, thank you very much. She also warned me that she would file a charge of sexual harassment if I ever dared refer to her as my shipmate. Then she pointed out that women are better qualified for spaceflight than men are: on deep-space assignments, female-crewed missions require less oxygen than men would use. Women also require less water, less food, less life-support ... and therefore ships with all-female crews carry a more efficient payload than spaceships crewed by males.

Well, excuse me for having a Y-chromosome, and the gonads that come with it. The laws of biology give female spacemen--I mean, female spacepersons--a slight career edge over me and every other male, but I've never let my gender compromise my ambition. I was born and raised in one of the early Luna colonies: ever since I saw my first Earthrise in the night sky over my boyhood home in Tycho City, all I've ever wanted was to live and work in outer space.

If it were the other way around--if men were better designed for spaceflight than women are--I would never use that as an excuse to exclude women from the Fleet. My service record proves that I've never had any problem serving alongside female officers, or taking orders from women who outrank me. No problem, that is, until Fleet Command issued orders to mission-team me with Lilith Virago, postmodern radical feminist and intergalactic lesbian. If it were up to her, outer space would be a clubhouse for women only, with a sign reading NO BOYS ALLOWED.

During our first mission briefing, she insisted that I address her as "Ms. Virago". I outrank her by half a duty grade, so I've called her "Lilith" ever since, just to annoy her. Rank has its privileges.

Anyway, the asteroid.

We were assigned to a surveying run across the central subdivisions of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter: specifically, I was supposed to bring our shuttlecraft across a long arc between the asteroid belt's Phocaeas zone and Themis zone, while Lilith charted those regions and scanned the local 'roids for mineral deposits or water ice that could be used by the Luna colonists. Afterwards, we were scheduled to rendezvous with our command ship, the Sagan, inside the Koronis zone: a deeper region of the asteroid belt.

Somehow, during the surveying run, Lilith and I got into an argument on her favorite subject--the innate superiority of the female versus the male--and we fell behind schedule. I knew we'd never make an on-time rendezvous with the Sagan ... at least, not if we took Fleet Command's assigned route to get there.

All authorized Fleet routes through the asteroid belt use the Kirkwood gaps. Over the past four billion years, the powerful gravity well of the planet Jupiter has cleared all the debris out of several regions of the asteroid belt that are harmonic factors of Jupiter's orbital period. The Kirkwood gaps have orbital periods exactly equal to one-fourth, one-third, three-sevenths, and one-half of Jupiter's cycle ... so whenever I set course through those gaps in the asteroid belt, I can lay down some speed without bothering to watch for interplanetary boulders crossing my flight path.

But the regions of space between the Kirkwoods are chock-full of navigational hazards. To reach our rendezvous point in the Koronis zone, I would have to alternate between high-speed intervals of clear sailing and slow crawls through asteroid minefields. To hell with that. Against orders, I charted a route that would get us to the rendezvous much faster, by flying thirty degrees out of the ecliptic ... and not returning to the ecliptic until we approached the 'roid belt's Koronis subdivision.