Launch (6 page)

On July 1, 2047, Claire and David reported for
active duty at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Their assigned quarters
were on the base in an apartment building housing young married couples without
children.

The following Monday, Claire reported to Wright
Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for eight weeks of training to become a flight
surgeon. Meanwhile, David completed refresher training in Wraiths at Holloman.

Every Friday evening, he flew to Wright
Patterson to spend the weekend with her.

▼

Claire reported back to Holloman after she
completed her training and was assigned to duty at the base hospital. Then in
early September, she and David received orders to report to NASA for
interviews.

Her preliminary interviewer asked, “Didn’t you
rescue a cougar cub in the Grand Canyon last year?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll bet that was exciting. Do you prefer
Doctor or Captain?”

“Either is fine, sir.”

After all interviews and tests had been done, Claire
and David were among the top ranked couples who had applied to fly
Origin
.
To help it make a decision, NASA decided to train Claire and five other
applicants to fly the Winddancer, the same supersonic jet trainer used by the
Air Force.

Claire loved dancing with the wind, and she
graduated at the top of her class.

On November 2, Claire and David were notified
that they were one of three couples who would be trained to fly the first
starship.

That night they called Joanne and Michael and
told them about Quad Fusion Thunder. Joanne cried.

▼

During their celebration dinner at Holloman’s
Officers Club the next evening, Claire said, “I’m going to triple my birth
control.”

“How?”

“An additional mechanical device and injections.”

David looked concerned. “Will that be a
problem?”

She laughed. “You’re just worried about your
sex life.”

“Guilty as charged,” he said. “I’m also
concerned about you taking meds and wearing so much hardware.”

“Not a problem,” she said. “The things I’ll be
using have proven to be innocuous. We’ll have more than two years of experience
with them before launch. And, speaking of launch, I need to start learning
about
Origin
.”

“Okay. We can start tonight, before bedtime. We
can do a bit every night, make it painless.”

She grinned. “Painless? Do you use that line on
all the girls?”

“Just the one and only.”

▼

Claire said, “It looks like a triangular
pyramid with six equal edges, four equal sides, and golf balls on the four
points: a modified regular tetrahedron. Why is it such an odd shape? Why not the
typical phallus shape?”

 “Are we going to talk about the starship or
sex?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t communicate well when I’m horny,” he
said.

“Yes, you do. I’ve always known exactly what
you wanted.”

“Do you want me to answer your questions before
we go to bed?”

“Yes. You can scratch my back, too,” she said.

He scratched her back and said, “It has four
sides so any one side can shield the other three.”

“Lower and to the right. . . . Oh, that’s good.
. . . Why does it need a shield?”

David said, “
Origin
will be cruising
though random atomic particles in interstellar space at near the speed of
light. It’ll be like a target in an atom smasher for almost five hundred
years.”

“Lower,” she said.

“That’s not your back.”

“You’re very observant,” she said. “Where are
the windows?”

“There are no windows.”

She moved closer to the picture. “No windows.
How can you see to fly it?”

“Monitors,” he said. “It has twelve sensor
arrays, three on each side, transmitting to monitors in the cabin.”

“But why no windows?”

“The ship will be about the size of six
supertankers. The cabin is in a sphere at the center of the ship,” he said.
“It’s surrounded by storerooms surrounded by fuel tanks surrounded by shields
built into the sides. There’s no place to put an outside window, but with
twelve sensor arrays, it will be like having a dozen windows. You’ll be able to
see clearly in any direction.”

“So we’ll be cooped up in there for three
years?”

“It’s the safest place to be.”

“What if the monitor system fails?”

“Systems: A dozen. Operational redundancies
with spare parts in storage,” he said. “If they all fail, one of us has to sit
in a door open to space with a sextant and a walkie-talkie.”

“Very funny. Why did you quit caressing my
bottom?”

“You moved.”

“No excuse. Your arms are long enough to keep
up. The engines are pointing in four different directions. How’s it going to
get anywhere?”

“Each engine has thirteen nozzles. Working
together, they can accelerate the ship in any direction.

“
Origin
will look like a flying pyramid
when it launches, from flat on one side straight up toward the point engine. When
it’s about two thousand feet over the ocean, it will hover and rotate so it
will look like a wedge flying into space with its sharp edge up. Travelling at
high speed in interstellar space, it will fly toward a side and look like a
pyramid flying upside-down.”

 “The engines must be extremely powerful to
launch a ship that big with full fuel tanks,” she said.

He shook his head. “They don’t have that much
power. Sometime after the first test flight,
Origin
will lift an empty
fuel tank into orbit. After that, the ship will launch with all the fuel it can
lift on each test flight and transfer excess fuel to the orbiting tank. Just
before departing for Minor, the starship will dock with the orbiting tank and
fill up.”

“Where did you learn so much about it?”

“I’ve been reading everything I could find
about it since the idea was first proposed.”

“Clever,” she said and kissed him.

Claire was on duty at Holloman’s base hospital the next Sunday afternoon
when the phone rang. “Medical Duty Officer Captain Archer speaking, sir.”

“This is the county dispatcher, Captain. We have a multiple casualty
train wreck in a mountain pass with helicopter-only access. Your base is the
nearest facility.”

“Yes, ma’am. Hold on a second please while I push the emergency klaxon.”
She pressed the mute button and shouted, “Sergeant Thomas. Wake up! We have an
emergency!”

Claire double-checked the coordinates with the dispatcher and hung up as
a sleepy-eyed sergeant appeared at her door. She briefed him and told him to
wind up the duty helicopter and all the PJs, Pararescue Jumpers, he could find.
Then she said, “After you’re done with that, call the backup medical duty
officer. I’m going.”

The sergeant said, “Yes, ma’am,” started to turn away and then turned
back. “You’re going ma’am?”

She was dialing the phone and without looking up, she said, “That’s
correct, Sergeant.”

Claire left a message on the phone in her and
David’s quarters. He was playing golf, and she did not want to disturb his game
by calling his cellphone.

▼

The helicopter blades started to turn when Claire
arrived with a large bag of medical supplies. She climbed aboard after the supplies
were loaded, handed the pilot the destination coordinates, and told him to lift
off when ready.

The leather jacket she wore was a gift from
David. It had captain’s bars on each shoulder, a flight surgeon’s badge on the
left front, and a name tag on the right side. Ignoring surprised expressions,
she buckled herself into the seat between the flight engineer and the PJ. When
her safety belt was fastened, she looked up to see the pilot and copilot looking
at her over their shoulders. She looked the pilot in the eye, and with the heel
of her right hand on her right thigh, she slowly tapped her fingers. He and the
copilot turned to face forward, and the helicopter lifted off.

Claire put on a headset and used the attached microphone
to brief everybody. Then she said to the PJ, “You were the only one they could
find?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m low man on the totem pole. I
had the duty. Everybody else was bugged out.”

“After this is over, I’ll buy you all a drink
at the low-man’s club.”

▼

On short fall days in the mountains, the sun
sets early, and it was dark when they arrived over the train wreck in the
mountain pass. A semicircle of fire flickered in the wreckage and reflected
from the adjacent mountainside, which blocked the only way out of the flames. Four
passenger cars and an engine were off the track on the inside of a curve, as if
an inside track had failed. That was the good luck, because the other side was
a cliff, and it was several hundred feet to the river below. The bad luck was
that people could be seen surrounded and trapped by the burning wreckage. Some
were lying down.

The fire’s turbulent updraft jolted the
helicopter and caused it to pitch and roll as it hovered over the fire. That
caused the PJ to swing in wide arcs at the end of the hoist cable while he was
being lowered. He turned to face the direction of his swing as he neared the
ground and made a running landing while simultaneously disconnecting from the
cable.

The pilot, who had been working hard to keep
his machine steady over the fire and avoid hitting the nearby mountain, said,
“You’ve got it.” The copilot, wearing night vision goggles, took control and
flew into the dark canyon’s smoother air while the cable was retrieved.

Next, the large bag of medical supplies was
lowered. As they circled back into clear air, Claire began putting on a harness
and said, “I’m going down next.”

After a brief silence, somebody said, “Ma’am?”

“You can all testify as witnesses. The black
box recorder will back you up. This is a direct order. I am going down next.”

There was no “Yes, ma’am” response, but the
flight engineer checked her harness and connected it to the cable while the
copilot circled back to the fire.

Approaching the circle of flames, the pilot
took control again. He hovered over the flames, and Claire began her descent. Despite
the cold air, light from the instrument panel and fire were reflected from perspiration
on the pilot’s forehead as he fought to keep the helicopter steady.

Claire swung at the end of the cable. At times,
it appeared she was going to land in the fire. Trembling with fear, she told
herself,
You can do this
.
You can do this!

As she swung in a big arc near the ground, the
PJ caught her with one strong arm around her waist. Her momentum lifted him off
the ground while he disconnected her from the cable. Then he released her and
made sure they were far enough apart so each could make a safe parachute
landing fall.

Gratefully, she noted his name tag as they
stood up.
But before she could thank him, he shouted, “What the
fuck are you doing?”

She looked him in the eye and said, “That
language is not appropriate when speaking to a superior officer, Sergeant
Bing.”

“What the fuck makes you think you’re superior
to me here?
”

“I know more about medicine, Sergeant.” His
eyes flicked down to her flight surgeon’s badge. He did not say anything, but
his face was still clouded by anger. She thought her descent into the ring of
fire must have scared him, too.

“Where do you need me?” she asked.

He gestured to a group of people who appeared
to be injured. He said, “They haven’t been examined. Supplies are in the
middle.” And then he walked away without another word.

It was a bloody mess. Claire and Sergeant Bing
worked hard to triage everybody and treat the critically injured as best they
could. Then they left the less serious injuries to crawl through the wrecked
train and search for other casualties. She could see that getting in front of
him made him angry, so she tried not to do that. They were both burned as they
rescued six more people, including two with critical injuries.

Two civilian fire department helicopters
arrived during the night. Four paramedics and their equipment were lowered. One
broke his right ankle when he landed.

▼

Rescuers arrived by train at dawn and cleared a
path through the still smoldering wreckage.

David was on the train. He found Claire holding
a little boy who was wearing her jacket and had a splint on his left leg.
Though both of them were wrapped in a blanket, she was shivering in the below
freezing cold, smeared with soot, and wearing bandages on her burns.

▼

Claire and Sergeant Bing wound up in adjacent
beds, separated only by a curtain in a small town hospital’s crowded ward.

David was sitting in a chair and had his head
on her bed. He and Claire were holding hands and dozing when the curtains were
pulled back. Her commanding officer congratulated her and Bing for a job well
done.

She said, “Sir, I would like to report Sergeant
Bing.”

The colonel’s expression turned serious.
“Report?”

Claire glanced at the other bed. A shocked
expression was on the sergeant’s face. “Sorry sir, wrong word,” she said. “I
would like to commend Sergeant Bing and recommend him for a Distinguished
Flying Cross.”

She grinned at Bing, and he laughed.

▼

On the Monday before Thanksgiving, Claire and
David received orders transferring them to NASA and giving them leave over the
Christmas holidays. They attended two parties before they left: One was a going
away party given for them at the Officers Club. Claire was delighted to receive
a pair of Air Force blue bunny slippers as a going away present. The second
party was given by Claire and David in a rented motel ballroom near the base.
She put a sign with big letters on the door, “The Low-Man’s Club.” They invited
friends, Sergeant Bing, and the crew of the helicopter on the night of the
fire. The dress code was civilian casual.

At the party, Bing gave Claire a maroon beret
with a Pararescue Flash. With tears in her eyes, she hugged him. His eyes went
wide with shock, and he held his arms away and straight.

“Hug her,” David said. “You saved her from a
broken neck or worse. You’re entitled.”

The big Sergeant lifted the Captain off her
feet. When he put her down, she knew she had been hugged, and they were both
smiling.