Luna (3 page)

4 | Rocket Man

James arrived an hour before he was told he had to be there on the day of the launch. He stood in the parking lot, taking in the scene, quietly meditating. The sky over New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto basin was so clear he could almost see himself in it. Gazing skyward, the FAA man spotted not a single cloud waiting for its moment to sneak past the sun and drop a bit of rain to delay the launch. He admitted to himself that he could have used an extra day or two. Cold feet in the hot desert, butterflies battling for pole position in the pit of his stomach. More than a few times he thought:
I wonder if Pete Stenson felt this way? If he still feels that way, right now up there on the moon? And Blake, the first time he went up?

Martin Hughes was next to arrive, and it both comforted and frightened James to learn that this brilliant man was every bit as terrified as he was. Knowing Martin was perhaps the least superstitious man on the planet, James felt at liberty to speak his fears aloud.

“I don’t know what it is,” he told him, “just this gut feeling that something crucial won’t go as planned. I’ve read too many airliner crash reports, I guess.”

The famous atheist didn’t say anything, merely continued staring into the blue over the Spaceport.

Awkwardly, James said, “I take it your gut didn’t relay the same message to you?”

“Oh, I don’t listen to my gut, Mr. Burton. It does nothing but growl. And I sure as hell don’t let my gut
think
for me, I’ll tell you that.”

While they waited, James surveyed the grounds upon which the spaceport was built, nearly thirty square miles which were considered part of the southwest state’s Land of Enchantment. Blake Garner, as well as a consortium of other space business interests, had reached an agreement with New Mexico’s governor some seventeen years ago, a deal which ultimately provided more than three hundred million dollars of taxpayer money for use in constructing the spaceport.

James and Martin watched the road for the arrival of Blake Garner, but they heard his approach before they saw it. The sound fractured the silence of the pale blue sky with such violence that it startled James.

Martin grinned at him. “You think that’s loud, wait until you hear the launch.”

Blake’s helicopter descended as rapidly as it had appeared. By the time it touched ground, the force of the rotor wash was so strong he feared it would knock him down.

When the ‘copter door opened, he expected to see Blake first, as he’d seen him so many times on television, blowing out of the machine and waving, much like the President of the United States when Marine One set down in the Rose Garden.

But today it was a female who first stepped onto the helipad. A beautiful female with features he immediately recognized. As she came toward them, Dr. Asami Imura smiled at the two men standing there.

Next off the ‘copter was Blake Garner, his ubiquitous smile replaced by a severe scowl James would witness often in the days to come. Blake skipped the pleasantries; in fact, skipped James and Martin altogether, walking briskly straight for the Spaceport instead.

A casual shrug of the shoulders from Hughes convinced James to follow. Minutes later, they walked silently through a cavernous hangar, then stepped out onto a platform with a full view of the launch pad.

It was the first time James had seen the craft firsthand, and despite the critical detachment from the operation he did his best to maintain, he had trouble suppressing his emotion. He was truly standing at the dawn of a new era for mankind.

The custom Boeing looked as futuristic today as it did a decade ago when Blake’s fledgling company first introduced 3D renderings to the public. Standing vertically, its nose aimed straight at the sky, the spacecraft appeared more like a missile than a shuttle.

On its hull, the words
Outer Limits
screamed to be read and respected. Only then did it finally hit James that no matter what happened today or in the days to follow, he was about to make history. Unless, that is, the Black Sky mission succeeded first. Then he supposed he’d be relegated to a footnote of history, a passenger on the Number Two outfit to take people who were not professional astronauts to the moon.

But the notion awakened something inside Burton he barely dared to acknowledge. Was he secretly rooting for Outer Limits to beat Black Sky because he, James Burton, lowly FAA administrator, would make more of a name for himself? Forget cigars and quality liquor, even high-priced call girls—all of which had been thrown his way at one time or another in the line of duty. Immortality...going down in history. He had to admit, it was downright intoxicating to think that he could be remembered—really
remembered
—outside of some dusty protocol files buried deep within the FAA’s offices.

Then Blake Garner was waving an arm for everyone to follow him inside, and James strode into the building on his way to the moon.

Another day at the office, right?

5 | Countdown

“T-minus thirty minutes and counting…” A synthesized female voice with a soothing tonal quality echoed around the spaceport and through the network of communications channels radiating from the Flight Control building like so many nerves from a brain.

Inside the spaceship, Command Module Pilot Caitlin Swain adjusted her headset as she heard the voice and glanced at a small video monitor set into a control panel above her head. A small woman with a head of thick, black curly hair, she cracked a crooked smile before turning to her two fellow crew members seated in the cramped Control Deck of the capsule they occupied atop the massive rocket.

“Here come our passengers. Is it just me or does it look like Blake has his hand on Imura’s ass?”

The two men sharing the crew space with Caitlin snickered as they glanced at a different monitor closer to them, showing the same view as Caitlin’s. On the tiny screen, Blake held his free hand out in a thumbs-up gesture while he grinned up at the closed-circuit camera. Besides Imura, Caitlin could see that he was phalanxed by the other four passengers who kept their eyes straight ahead as they walked the plank, as it was known—down the hall onto the elevator that would take them to the top of the rocket—the famous exobiologist, Blake’s marketing guru, the renowned selenologist, and,
ugh
—the FAA drone.

“She probably can’t feel that through her spacesuit,” Paul Abbott, the mission’s Commander, quipped as he flipped some switches.

“We could have Flight pipe in her heart rate data, see if it did anything for her.” Dallas Pace was a thirty-four year-old African American who served as their Lunar Module Pilot as well as the flight’s medical doctor.

Caitlin appreciated the moment of levity. Although they were highly trained for this mission with decades of combined experience between them, she was well aware of the ever-present litany of Things That Could Go Wrong. The takeoff, the lunar landing, Earth reentry. And not just in space either, she reflected. She’d reviewed the Russian flight in the 1960s that made history as the first-ever spacewalk. The spacewalk itself had gone great. But upon return to Earth, the craft had landed off course in a densely forested mountain region and the two cosmonauts had been forced to spend a night in the freezing wilderness, fending off wolves until their ground crew could get to them. Then there was the Apollo splashdown where the capsule hatch had blown prematurely and the capsule almost sank in the ocean, taking an astronaut with it. You just weren’t safe until you were all the way back home.

All three of the crew were ex-NASA, members of the ever-growing Astronauts-Who’ve-Never-Been-to-Space club the agency seemed to cultivate thus far in the 21
st
century. They’d each made the personal giant leap to the private space industry in the hopes of seeing the fabled black sky through a window instead of on a screen in their professional lifetimes. With Outer Limits, and definitely with Black Sky, it seemed they’d hit the jackpot.
The moon.
Mars was also a target, but so far, too far away into the future. The moon was doable right here, right now.

Caitlin turned to her associates. “Well, boys, after this trip we’re space virgins no more.”

Paul clicked a dial through various positions while staring at a digital readout. “You know what they say,” he said without looking up from what he was doing. “You never forget your first time.”

A new voice crackled through the communication loops, that of a throat clearing. “Ahem, gentlemen and
lady
, let’s stay focused here, okay?” Ray McCullough, one of a half-dozen Flight Controllers, spoke to them from behind the blue mirrored glass of the Flight Control Building a hundred yards away. Caitlin flashed on last night at
Dos Pueblos
as she matched Ray’s scruffy face with the voice
,
ensconced in the cactus-shrouded back patio at a table for two over plates of enchiladas and prickly pear margaritas, the evening air still 100 degrees, her emotions even hotter.

She keyed her transmitter. “Copy that, Ray, all systems nominal, monitoring countdown, passengers boarding. Command Module standing by, over.”

Caitlin saw an indicator light blink on in front of her. She watched as the capsule door slid open below them and Blake Garner stepped into the passenger bay followed by his handpicked team. Well, handpicked except for James Burton, that is. One by one they crossed over the threshold. Burton in particular seemed a little freaked out.

Meanwhile, the artificial voice continued her emotionally flat countdown.

6 | Liftoff

Caitlin Swain finished running through yet another checklist and turned to look down on the passenger bay as The Voice told her it was T-minus five minutes. The six passengers had taken their respective launch stations but presently an argument —maybe that was too strong a word — but a
disagreement
of some sort had been building between Blake and his Marketing VP, Suzette Calderon. Caitlin had worked with Suzette before for numerous Outer Limits promotional productions, and knew that the woman was a fiery Latina who insisted on getting her way – and that Blake was used to giving it to her.

There wasn’t a lot of small talk. The rest of the passengers seemed preoccupied with triple-checking their launch seat harnesses while Blake pointed an accusatory finger Suzette’s way. “I’m not blind. That camera doesn’t fit into the restraint, it’s too large. That’s not the one we spec’d out.”

Suzette shrugged. “It’s a bit bigger, but it has way more megapixels, so it’s entirely worth it.” With some effort, she snapped the device into a bulkhead recess and settled back into her seat, apparently satisfied.

Caitlin tuned out the conversation before she had the chance to hear Blake acquiesce as she knew he would. She did a final visual sweep of the passenger bay before her attention would be consumed completely by the control panels that surrounded her. James Burton was the last of them to stop obsessing over his restraint harness and now he fixated on Blake’s interaction with Suzette.

Martin Hughes gazed blankly at the wall, completely content. She had no idea how the hell he remained so tranquil. It wasn’t drugs, she knew; all eight of them had been subjected to the mandatory testing this morning. Forging out into the cosmos, she supposed. It wasn’t just a look of serenity. Hughes seemed to be positively beaming due to some kind of inner peace.

Meanwhile, the FAA man frowned as he watched the Blake-Suzette exchange and wrote something down in a small notepad. He’d been told that, as with commercial airline flights, no electronic devices of any kind would be permitted during sensitive operations like takeoffs and landings. Caitlin agreed with this, but at the same time she thought it was Blake’s way of limiting the FAA’s in-flight record-keeping capabilities. She agreed with that, too. Especially when it came to Burton, she thought, watching him underline something he wrote with a flourish.

And then it was time.

“…
minus twenty, nineteen, eighteen
…”

Caitlin willed the butterflies from her stomach, the “
this-is-it-it’s-finally-happening
” thoughts making her want to scream with joy and cry at the same time. A lifetime of devotion, training and singular focus was culminating with this launch. She looked over at her fellow crew; their steely-eyed gazes roving the sea of switches, knobs, buttons and lights filled her with confidence. They were good men. No,
great
men.

And then, over the comm loops she heard Ray’s throaty rasp confirming some expected weather activity in the mid-atmosphere.

There’s another great man. If only…

She had to abort her train of thought as The Voice demanded her utmost concentration.

“…three, two, one…ignition. Have a pleasant spaceflight
!”

Caitlin felt the familiar rumble as the vibrations of the Boeing consumed her. There were scarcely words to describe the incredible, unnatural amount of power coming to life beneath their feet. She cleared her mind of all things extraneous. As always, she would be mentally prepared for anything.

Outside, Caitlin could picture the support apparatus that held the great machine in place on the launch pad falling away. She felt the rocket lift from the ground. Then a rush took hold, a sense of duty combined with a familiar set of tasks she was capable of completing almost by rote, and she gave her mind over completely to the job of being an astronaut.

Two minutes later, passing through a cloud layer, she glanced back at the passengers and noticed a thin line of blood on the selenologist’s forehead. Immediately, Caitlin heard the woman cry out through her headset. Caitlin was about to say something when a flash of bright light made her head turn.

The master alarm rang in her ears and her warning panel lit up like the tree at Rockefeller Center.