Brown, Dale - Independent 01 (8 page)

           
“About
what?”

           
“About you.
Your shuttle flight.” He paused. “I still can’t believe it. My daughter, a
shuttle astronaut—”

           
“C’mon,
Dad....”

           
“No, now
wait a minute. I’m not going to get all gushy over you. I just want to—”

           
“Yes?”

           
“Ann, I’ve
heard things. There’s real concern about your mission, about this Skybolt laser
you’re working on.”

           
“I really
can’t talk too much about Skybolt, Dad. Not even to you. You can understand—”

           
“I know, I
know, but dammit, you know I’ve never been too happy about your decision to fly
to this Space Command station. The dangers are—”

           
“Keep ’em
barefoot and pregnant?”

           
“Ann,
honey, you’re not listening.”

           
“I’m sorry,
that was a cheap shot, I know you don’t go for that male chauvinist stuff. But,
face it, if you were talking to a son....” “I’d still be damned worried. This
space station project of yours is dangerous. Things are happening, weird
things. I just wish you’d—”

           
“Stay on
the ground? Safe from the action. Away from my
work”
Ann shook her head. “Whatever you say, you still think it’s
okay for men to go off and face whatever’s out there, but not women—”

           
He looked
at her. “Could be, honey. I guess I am a bit old-fashioned.”

           
“You’re a
damn sight better than most, but you have tended to put Mom and me on a
pedestal. We’re not china dolls. We won’t break. I’m a scientist. Mom is your
wife. We’re both pretty tough. No kidding.”

 
         
Her father shrugged, knew she was
right even if he couldn’t buy all of it.

           
“And Dad, I
know about the dangers. We get briefings, too.”

           
The
loudspeaker gave another warning for visitors to clear the ship. Ann took her
father’s hands.

           
“I’ll be
thinking of you up there,” he said. “And I still wish you weren’t going.”

           
“And I wish
you weren’t going on this cruise... to the
Persian Gulf
.”
The mention of the
California
's
classified destination startled him.

           
“How
... ?”

           
“It doesn’t
matter,” she said quickly. “But you have about as much chance of keeping me
from going on the
Enterprise
as I have of dragging you off your ship.... Now,”—she stood on tiptoes and
kissed her father on the cheek—“have a safe cruise and hurry home.”

           
He
straightened, hugged her. “And success and a safe trip to you, Ann.”

           
The Marine
escort guided her to the wide covered main gangplank on the
California
's
starboard gunwale. A small knot of
reporters were waiting for her when she stepped off the platform onto the dock
but she ignored them and quickly found her mother standing near the raised
officer’s wives’ railed greeting area.

           
“He’ll be
all right,” Ann said quietly. Her mother’s eyes never left the bridge as the
USS
California
began slowly to slide
away from its mooring toward the
Golden Gate
.

 
          
June 1992

           
VANDENBURG
AIR FORCE BASE,
CALIFORNIA

 
          
“Lift
off. We have lift-off of the Space Shuttle Challenger, STS Mission 51-L.lt has
cleared the tower....”

           
The Challenger’s pilot ran his fingers down
the Space Shuttle Main Engine, the SSME status readouts on his computer
monitor. “All main engines look good. ...”

           
The young woman beside him acknowledged with
a nod. No NASA simulator could ever fully prepare a person for the feeling of a
space shuttle at lift-off. Noise. Incredible, ear-splitting, thundering noise.
Vibration enough to feel intestines shake. . . .

           
As the stowed service arm and gantry slid
from view out the forward windscreens, Ann Page could even see a few seagulls
scurry from the fiery behemoth as it lifted upward. The sight of the petrified
sea gulls made her smile despite the adrenalin coursing through her, tightening
her muscles, constricting her throat.

           
“Instituting roll maneuver.. . roll maneuver
complete, Challenger, you look beautiful....”

           
On hearing the last report from Ground
Control, Ann reached up through the gradually building “g” forces to the upper
left of her left forward instrument panel and flicked the ADI attitude switch
to LVLH. “ADI attitude switch to local vertical, local horizontal, ” she
announced over interphone. Her pilot in the right seat nodded and did the same
on his panel.

           
“Thank you, Dr. Page, ” the pilot said over
interphone, and suddenly the pilot looked young—very young. Like a guy she had
known in high school.

           
Ann watched the mach meter on her main
instrument panel while at the same time checking her number-one cathode ray
tube computer monitor and panel C2, the computer control panel and manual main
engine controls. The engine control sequence for launch and ascent was
controlled by computer, but she was obliged to be ready for any malfunction
right up to complete engine failure. If that happened, it would be up to her
and her pilot to control the engines manually and set up her shuttle for an
RTLS—Return to Launch Site abort. As she watched her instruments she kept in
mind her training—think “abort, abort” until five minutes into the flight,
after that think “orbit, orbit. ”

           
Forty seconds after takeoff the shuttle
exceeded the speed of sound, and Ann saw the main engines throttle back automatically
to sixty-five percent.

           
“Control, this is Challenger. Main engines
at sixty-five percent. Confirm.”

           
“Challenger, we confirm SSMEs at six-five
percent, right on the mark.”

           
They were approaching a critical phase of
flight when all aerodynamic forces affecting the shuttle—thrust, drag, gravity,
and lift— were exerting equal pressure on the ship all at once. It was “max Q.”
The main engines were throttled back to avoid tearing the shuttle apart as it
reached, then exceeded max Q. The shuttle's computers would control the
delicate transition as the huge craft sliced its way skyward.

           
A few moments later Ann could see the pilot
give a sigh of relief as the main engines began to throttle up under strict
computer control.

 
 
         
“Control,
this is Challenger. Max Q. Main engines moving to one hundred percent ”

           
“Copy that, Challenger. Max Q. Max Q. Max Q.
..

           
A blinding flash of light, a sensation of
warmth, a feeling of weightlessness. ... “Max Q., max Q.. .

 
          
Ann was suddenly awake, waves of pain
lancing through her abdomen. The rumpled sheets felt like damp mummy’s shrouds,
strangling her. She fought back the pain and kicked the sheets free.

           
“A damned
nightmare,” she said half-aloud, her breath coming in gasps. After months of
briefings, simulators, studying, she had finally had a
Challenger
nightmare.

           
Exhausted,
drained, she rolled across the bed and glanced at her watch on the nightstand.
Two a.m.
That made the eighth time in five hours
she had been forced awake by butterflies invading her stomach and her dreams.
Butterflies?
Those things were dive-bombers, nuclear
explosions, earthquakes. Forget it, sleep was impossible.

           
They had
warned her about
Challenger
nightmares, everyone from mission commanders to local food-service
people—nearly everyone even remotely involved with the rejuvenated space
shuttle program seemed to get one. But she figured it was even worse for her...
a civilian mission specialist with very little flight-deck training. Well, even
though she had two hours until her alarm would go off, she crawled out of bed
and into the bathroom. Trying to sleep would only prolong the punishment.

           
Feeling as
drained as if she had run a marathon, Ann stripped off her nightshirt and
panties and stood in front of the mirror in the glare of the bathroom’s single
light bulb. Her doomed attempts to wrestle a few hours sleep had left her, she
noted, with light brown circles under her dark green eyes.... “Too bad they
don’t wear helmets in space any more, at least the visor would hide this,” she
told the unappetizing mirror image. In fact, little she saw in a mirror ever
pleased her. People said she was always her worst critic, but still.... She
frowned at the too-round green eyes, the straight auburn hair, the unremarkable
breasts, the too-skinny legs.. .although the ankles were good. (But great
ankles never got a girl a date.) All right, she wasn’t bad, but nothing to
write home about either. A seven. Maybe a seven and a half...?

           
Besides, a
body was not something to show off—it had always been something to work on, to
operate. She had exercised hard all through high school and college, not
because it was the thing to do but because she wanted to excel at one
thing—running. She had trained her body to perform well in track and field
events, not to win beauty contests. She even had a few trophies on display at
her parent’s house. The results of her efforts were a healthy if less than
spectacular body, a daily running habit—and dates too few and far between. Who
was it who said you couldn’t be too thin or too rich? Half-right, whoever it
was....

           
She
unwrapped clear plastic from a drinking glass, filled it with lukewarm tap
water and took a sip. She could feel the liquid go down, then seem to solidify
in an acid lump in her throat. Wouldn’t go down and it wouldn’t come up. Great
way to start the day. Strange, she hadn’t thought about high school or college
or her social life in months. Even the shuttle pilot who’d popped into her
dream had been a long-forgotten high school boyfriend. On a day like today
she’d better be thinking of something else.

           
She took
her time after her shower, drying herself and combing her long red hair, and
still found herself with an hour to go before her planned wake-up time—two
whole hours before her taxi was due.

           
She dressed
in thin cotton long underwear, cotton gym socks, and her powder blue NASA
flight suit. She put up her hair in her trademark ponytail, redid it twice to
kill time. It didn’t help. Still an hour and forty minutes until the taxi was
to arrive. Nothing on TV at three in the morning.

           
Once again
her stomach started to gnaw at her.... To hell with waiting for the taxi. She
slipped on her black flying boots, left the room key on the bed, turned out the
lights and closed the door behind her.

           
In the lobby
of the Vandenburg Air Force Base Visiting Officers Quarters, she had to cough
twice to get the clerk’s attention. “Can you call the base taxi and get me a
ride to the
Shuttle
Flight
Center
?”

           
The clerk
stared at her shuttle crewmember flight suit and did a double take—even with
one-a-month shuttle launches from Vandenburg, a shuttle crewperson was an
unusual sight. “Transportation is swamped on a launch day,” the clerk said.
“The
Shuttle
Flight
Center
will pick you up—”

           
“At
four a.m.
I want... I have to go out there now.”

           
The clerk
caught the hesitation in Ann’s voice, and her expression changed from bored to
irritated
. “I’ll check.”

           
As the
clerk dialed a desk phone Ann wandered through the lobby and over to a wide,
floor-to-ceiling window facing the
Pacific Ocean
. Washed
clean by the night air and lingering
Santa Ana
winds, the predawn sky glistened with hundreds of stars. A tiny sliver of moon
was about to dip a horn into the cold water, and the big bright planet Jupiter
sparkled brilliantly.

           
“Miss?”
The clerk had to raise her voice to get Ann’s
attention. “Transportation says they can’t get out earlier than four-thirty.”

           
“Never
mind,” Ann said, heading for the door. “I’ll walk.”

           
“Walk?
To the
Shuttle
Center
?
That’s ten miles....” But Ann was already out the door....