Gravity

A death spiral.

She heard Hewitt groan, heard Kittredge say, with flat resignation, ‘I’ve lost her.’

Then the fatal spin accelerated, plunging to an abrupt and shocking end.

There was only silence.

An amused voice said over their comm units, ‘Sorry, guys. You didn’t make it that time.’

Emma yanked off her headset. ‘That wasn’t fair, Hazel!’

Jill Hewitt chimed in with a protesting, ‘Hey, you meant to kill us. There was no way to save it.’

Emma was the first crew member to scramble out of the shuttle flight simulator. With the others right behind her, she marched into the windowless control room, where their three instructors sat at the row of consoles.

Team Leader Hazel Barra, wearing a mischievous smile, swiveled around to face Commander Kittredge’s irate crew of four. Though Hazel looked like a buxom earth mother with her gloriously frizzy brown hair, she was, in truth, a ruthless gameplayer who ran her flight crews through the most difficult of simulations and seemed to count it as a victory whenever the crew failed to survive. Hazel was well aware of the fact that every launch could end in disaster, and she wanted her astronauts equipped with the skills to survive. Losing one of her teams was a nightmare she hoped never to face.

‘That sim really was below the belt, Hazel,’ complained Kittredge.

‘Hey, you guys keep surviving. We have to knock down your cockiness a notch.’

‘Come on,’ said Andy. ‘Two engines down on liftoff? A broken data bus? An APU out? And then you throw in a failed number five computer? How many malfs and nits is that? It’s not realistic.’

Patrick, one of the other instructors, swiveled around with a grin. ‘You guys didn’t even notice the other stuff we did.’

‘What else was there?’

‘I threw in a nit on your oxygen tank sensor. None of you saw the change in the pressure gauge, did you?’

Kittredge gave a laugh. ‘When did we have time? We were juggling a dozen other malfunctions.’

Hazel raised a stout arm in a call for a truce. ‘Okay, guys. Maybe we did overdo it. Frankly, we were surprised you got as far as you did with the RTLS abort. We wanted to throw in another wrench, to make it more interesting.’

‘You threw in the whole damn toolbox,’ snorted Hewitt.

‘The truth is,’ said Patrick, ‘you guys are a little cocky.’

‘The word is confident,’ said Emma.

‘Which is good,’ Hazel admitted. ‘It’s good to be confident. You showed great teamwork at the integrated sim last week. Even Gordon Obie said he was impressed.’

‘The Sphinx said that?’ Kittredge’s eyebrow lifted in surprise. Gordon Obie was the director of Flight Crew Operations, a man so bafflingly silent and aloof that no one at JSC really knew him. He would sit through entire mission management meetings without uttering a single word, yet no one doubted he was mentally recording every detail. Among the astronauts, Obie was viewed with both awe and more than a little fear. With his power over final flight assignments, he could make or break your career. The fact that he had praised Kittredge’s team was good news indeed.

In her next breath, though, Hazel kicked the pedestal out from under them. ‘However,’ she said, ‘Obie is also concerned that you guys are too lighthearted about this. That it’s still a game to you.’

‘What does Obie expect us to do?’ said Hewitt. ‘Obsess over the ten thousand ways we could crash and burn?’

‘Disaster is not theoretical.’

Hazel’s statement, so quietly spoken, made them fall momentarily silent. Since Challenger, every member of the astronaut corps was fully aware that it was only a matter of time before there was another major mishap. Human beings sitting atop rockets primed to explode with five million pounds of thrust can’t afford to be sanguine about the hazards of their profession. Yet they seldom spoke about dying in space; to talk about it was to admit its possibility, to acknowledge that the next Challenger might carry one’s name on the crew roster.

Hazel realized she’d thrown a damper on their high spirits. It was not a good way to end a training session, and now she backpedaled on her earlier criticism.

‘I’m only saying this because you guys are already so well integrated. I have to work hard to trip you up. You’ve got three months till launch, and you’re already in good shape. But I want you in even better shape.’

‘In other words, guys,’ said Patrick from his console. ‘Not so cocky.’

Bob Kittredge dipped his head in mock humility. ‘We’ll go home now and put on the hair shirts.’

‘Overconfidence is dangerous,’ said Hazel. She rose from the chair and stood up to face Kittredge. A veteran of three shuttle flights, Kittredge was half a head taller, and he had the confident bearing of a naval pilot, which he had once been. Hazel was not intimidated by Kittredge, or by any of her astronauts. Whether they were rocket scientists or military heroes, they inspired in her the same maternal concern: the wish that they make it back from their missions alive.

She said, ‘You’re so good at command, Bob, you’ve lulled your crew into thinking it’s easy.’

‘No, they make it look easy. Because they’re good.’

‘We’ll see. The integrated sim’s on for Tuesday, with Hawley and Higuchi aboard. We’ll be pulling some new tricks out of the hat.’

Kittredge grinned. ‘Okay, try to kill us. But be fair about it.’

‘Fate seldom plays fair,’ Hazel said solemnly. ‘Don’t expect me to.’

Emma and Bob Kittredge sat in a booth in the Fly By Night saloon, sipping beers as they dissected the day’s simulations. It was a ritual they’d established eleven months ago, early in their team building, when the four of them had first come together as the crew for shuttle flight 162. Every Friday evening, they would meet in the Fly By Night, located just up NASA Road 1 from Johnson Space Center, and review the progress of their training. What they’d done right, what still needed improvement. Kittredge, who’d personally selected each member of his crew, had started the ritual. Though they were already working together more than sixty hours a week, he never seemed eager to go home. Emma had thought it was because the recently divorced Kittredge now lived alone and dreaded returning to his empty house. But as she’d come to know him better, she realized these meetings were simply his way of prolonging the adrenaline high of his job. Kittredge lived to fly. For sheer entertainment he read the painfully dry shuttle manuals. He spent every free moment at the controls of one of NASA’s T-38s. It was almost as if he resented the force of gravity binding his feet to the earth.

He couldn’t understand why the rest of his crew might want to go home at the end of the day, and tonight he seemed a little melancholy that just the two of them were sitting at their usual table in the Fly By Night. Jill Hewitt was at her nephew’s piano recital, and Andy Mercer was home celebrating his tenth wedding anniversary. Only Emma and Kittredge had shown up at the appointed hour, and now that they’d finished hashing over the week’s sims, there was a long silence between them. The conversation had run out of shop talk and therefore out of steam.

‘I’m taking one of the T-38s up to White Sands tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You want to join me?’

‘Can’t. I have an appointment with my lawyer.’

‘So you and Jack are forging ahead with it?’

She sighed. ‘The momentum’s established. Jack has his lawyer, and I have mine. This divorce has turned into a runaway train.’

‘It sounds like you’re having second thoughts.’

Firmly she set down her beer. ‘I don’t have any second thoughts.’

‘Then why’re you still wearing his ring?’

She looked down at the gold wedding band. With sudden ferocity she tried to yank it off, but found it wouldn’t budge. After seven years on her finger, the ring seemed to have molded itself to her flesh, refusing to be dislodged. She cursed and gave another tug, this time pulling so hard the ring scraped off skin as it slid over her knuckle. She set the ring down on the table. ‘There. A free woman.’

Kittredge laughed. ‘You two have been dragging out your divorce longer than I was married. What are you two still haggling over, anyway?’

She sank back in her chair, suddenly weary. ‘Everything. I admit it, I haven’t been reasonable either. A few weeks ago, we tried to sit down and make a list of all our possessions. What I want, what he wants. We promised ourselves we were going to be civilized about it. Two calm and mature adults. Well, by the time we got halfway down the list, it was out-and-out war. Take no prisoners.’ She sighed. In truth, that was the way she and Jack had always been. Equally obstinate, fiercely passionate. Whether in love or at war, the sparks were always flying between them. ‘There was only one thing we could both agree on,’ she said. ‘I get to keep the cat.’

‘Lucky you.’

She looked at him. ‘Do you ever have any regrets?’