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Celeste 3 is the first commercial passenger carrying space/aircraft to go beyond the Earth's atmosphere for any length of time. This advance in travel didn't come easily as the two previous prototypes demonstrated and so there's much interest as the date of each of its flights approaches. Two people are paying closer attention than the rest of the world's population due to the presence of a certain passenger as much as the vehicle itself. One of the high rollers will be the ruthless Russian billionaire Karenkov. Gregory Topozian and Jack Smith have seen friends and colleagues die at his whim so they have a bone to pick and an ambitious way to do it… as long as nothing and no one gets in the way.

So the question is what do you do if you want to take revenge on an untouchable Russian oligarch/gangster? Answer: you wait for him to sign up for a flight in a revolutionary aircraft and then steal the whole thing. At least that's our hero Gregory's plan and, giving Chris his due as an author, he makes it sound a lot more plausible than I just did. For a start the Celeste 3 itself is a possibility, being just a step or two beyond the existing 'vomit comet' aircraft that NASA use to train astronauts in a weightlessness. The differences are that the Celeste stays beyond the Earth's atmosphere for longer and can only have one passenger in unsecured floating mode at a time to prevent people crunching into each other. (Yes, health and safety going mad indeed!)