Grounded!

by Claremont, Chris

  Somewhere along the way, Nicole had changed. She lost a layer of self, and what was underneath was raw and prickly, too tender by half until the elements toughened it into shape. Raw steel that had gone through a single tempering but which, at heart, was still mostly malleable metal.

  And suddenly, for the first time in her life, Nicole didn’t have the slightest idea how it would come out.

  * * *

  five

  “r!T’syjan!”

  “I’m bloody trying,” she snapped back into her boom microphone, twisting the right-hand yoke as the cabin bucked around her. A sudden pitch drove her body forward against her shoulder harness, the violent compression of her diaphragm turning her words (thankfully) into an inarticulate bellow, There was so much rain hitting the windscreen even the shuttle velocity couldn’t keep it clear, and the matching turbulence made it almost impossible to get a stable fix on the panel displays. Bad enough she kept bouncing about in her seat, hard enough to snap her teeth together with an audible clack, but every so often the video images themselves would destabilize, either disintegrating into a field of incoherent static or losing V/H hold, rolling wildly through the vertical or horizontal or both. Red warning lights were lit beside all the main RNAV displays, indicating critical ionization conditions, telling the flight crew that the atmospheric conditions were wreaking havoc on the navigational electronics and that consequently none of the data being displayed could be trusted.

  The final straw, of course, was that none of that data was written in English, nor were the control surfaces designed for the human form. This was a reproduction of the Hal shuttle and the simulation scenario—designed, she was sure, by Alex Cobri, with the most maliciously sadistic delight, in concert with Matai—an approach to Edwards through the worst storm imaginable.

  An alarm went off. She couldn’t place it immediately—either in her mind or on the panel—and it took precious seconds to sort things out (cursing all the while because in one of her own ships she was sure she’d have known the answer instinctively, raging as well at the part of her self that was saying quite sagely and sanely, but in Alex Cobri’s voice—damn his eyes and face and soul—Well, L’il Loot, isn’t this what simulators are for?), found it was the sink rate. She was way below the glide path, losing too much altitude too fast.

  “Wing configuration three,” Kinsella told her from the left-hand seat. Nicole reached for the control, but a sudden swerve sent her hand flying the wrong direction and she snapped it back for fear she’d hit something else by mistake and only make matters worse. Got a second chance, did as she was told.

  “Anshdryl halach’n m’nai,” came over her headphones, Kymri acting as ground controller, telling them they were too low, which Nicole could see for herself whenever the main displays settled down. No English was being spoken on the uplink, nothing but going the other way, to get the flight crews used to coping in both languages.

  “Throttles to sixty percent,” Kinsella said, moving the four sticks herself, the cabin shakes and shudders taking on a different quality as the main engines made their presence felt.

  “Reports of major wind shear,” Nicole said, as an updraft emphasized the point by giving them an additional hundred meters altitude in what seemed like barely a heartbeat.

  “You don’t sound happy.”

  She tossed a fast glance Kinsella’s way. The Colonel’s teeth were bared in a tight, wild grin that lit up her whole face. This wasn’t a landing, it was one-on-one personal combat between her and the environment, a duel she was determined to win.

  “Colonel, the weather’s way beyond specs. Recommend we abort the approach and retrieve orbital status.”

  “I thought you were a fighter, Shea.”

  “Only when I have to, ma’am.”

  “Sounds eminently—huhnhnf—relax, I still have the vehicle, no need to worry!” So easily said, but they fought a downdraft mixed with a massive broadside gust that was like trying to crest a wave only to find yourself without enough momentum to go over the top. Nose bouncing high, tail low, the whole vehicle threatening to turtle onto its back, stall warnings wailing like banshees, Kinsella reacting faster than conscious thought, playing hand and foot controls to slew the shuttle around so they were once more nose down, with air rolling over the wings to provide them lift, yet taking care at the same time not to push things too far, lest the stall turn into a spin they had neither height nor raw power to recover from.

  “Of course,” Kinsella continued breathily, exertion and excitement making her lungs pump like a bellows, “the beauty of such a position is that it allows one an almost unlimited latitude of rationalization. So that no situation provides sufficient justification.”

  The wind was on their quarter, made worse by random killer gusts, forcing them to crab sideways towards the field. Full power landing as well, with the great wings configured for takeoff, Kinsella holding tight to her options until they were actually on the ground. Only then did she throttle back and let the shuttle coast to a final stop.

  She held up a hand for a high-five, and Nicole obliged.

  “That, youngster,” the Colonel said with satisfaction, “is how it’s done.”

  Nicole wondered, staying where she was in the co-pilot’s seat after the other woman’s departure, staring at the luminescent screen beyond the canopy as the projection system shut down, its computer-generated representation of the base fading to formless, featureless opalescence.

  “A thoughtful countenance,” Kymri rumbled behind her, and she shrugged, not all that eager for company.

  “You called for an abort,” he continued, leaning on the back of Kinsella’s seat.

  “It was a standard approach. No imperative reason for us to be down. Nothing dirtside, no in-flight emergency. With the weather scans on the board, reentry shouldn’t have even been initiated.”

  “No imperative, Shea-Pilot, to complete what you have started?”

  She took a deep breath—rather, as deep as her harness allowed, which reminded her to pull the tabs to give herself sufficient slack to wriggle loose, rolling her shoulders as she did to ease the tension in them—then said, “To my mind, Kymri, it wasn’t necessary. And if not, why proceed?”

  “Someday, you may face such a situation.”

  “Excuse me, maybe I’m missing something, but that didn’t strike me as the purpose of the exercise. We started from orbit, were given the specs and told to take things from there.”

  “At that point, you had acceptable minimums.”

  “I can read a weather fax, Kymri. The potential was there for a marked deterioration. Which is precisely what happened. We could have afforded another orbit to make sure, and if necessary diverted to our alternate. We shouldn’t have started, and once started, shouldn’t have finished. It’s just like her landing the other day, she couldn’t resist the opportunity to show off.”

  “And yet, Shea-Pilot, Kinsella-Colonel got you down.”

  “She’s very good,” Nicole conceded. “In a simulator.”

  “You still believe she was wrong.”

  “What does it matter? She’s the Colonel, I’m the Second Loot; as far as our opinions go, there shouldn’t even have to be a contest as to which of us is right.”

  “In point of fact”—the Hal pilot held out a hand, which Nicole was surprised to discover she needed to climb out of her chair, grunting at the stiffness in her joints as she hobbled after him off the flight deck—“there is not.”

  “When do we try this for real?” Kinsella asked as they emerged from the jetway. With the crew aboard the simulator, this access tunnel was withdrawn, leaving the cabin atop a hydraulic stalk some ten meters off the floor, in the center of a huge cube of a room some twenty meters square, allowing for a significant range of motion through any flight dimension. About the only regime that couldn’t be duplicated was inverted flight; those it could accomplish, however, more than made up for the lack.

  “When you are ready,” was the reply. �
�We have but the one vehicle here.” Kymri went on to explain, “We cannot afford to hazard it. Any more than you can yours.”

  The conversation stayed with Nicole as she strode from the simulator to the Experimental Surface ReEntry Vehicle Project offices, all housed in the Edwards South Complex, a massive agglomeration of hangars and test facilities initially built in the 1980s for the B-2 “Stealth” project and used ever since for anything that required a major degree of secrecy.

  Sound and motion caught her attention in the middle distance, and she paused, shading her sunglasses against the fierce midday glare for a better look. Out on the field, a jet pivoted onto the main runway, the piercing banshee shriek of its engines downshifting suddenly to a basso profundo roar, twin cones of blue flame spiking from the narrowed exhaust nozzles as the pilot kicked in the afterburners, injecting raw fuel into the combustion chamber to maximize its power. He was running on full military power, every kilo of thrust his torches were capable of producing, and was off the ground seemingly before he’d started a decent takeoff roll, arrowing straight up into a vertical climb that took him into five figures and past the sound barrier within a matter of heartbeats. Gone from sight before the echoes of its departure had faded. Nicole hoped it was fun. Had to be better than sitting at a desk, playing junior-grade flunky.

  Running the simulation proved to be the most sublime joy compared to writing up her evaluation of it: a full-range assessment of mission, vehicle, and flight crew, combining a subjective narrative recitation of the events with as objective as possible critique of every element’s performance. The further Nicole got into the report the more ambivalent she became, on the one hand more certain than ever her response had been the proper one—this was an approach that should never have been tried—yet as increasingly suspicious of the judgment behind it. Fear of failure? Jealousy over Kinsella’s continued success? Not for the first time she found herself hating composing on a display screen, yearning atavistically for the luxury of pages of scratch paper to crumple and toss to burn off some frustration. Kinsella loved risks, she was never more there physically and mentally than when she was pushing her limits to the max, possessed of a mad certainty that nothing could beat her. Much of the friction that existed between her and Nicole came from both their realizations that Nicole wasn’t cut from that mold, and refused to be fit into it.

  Yet, for all of that, Nicole had something Kinsella desperately craved, believed passionately she deserved.

  Nicole unpinned the astronaut wings from her blouse, twirled them in her fingers. Swiveled her chair around to stare out the windows at the whitewashed expanse of desert and the mountains that shimmered in the distance from the heat wash off the blistering sand. Switched images in her mind’s eye with the view from the Da Vinci surface dome. Different levels of desolation, the ultimate difference being that here she could go for a stroll outside dressed as she was. She might be uncomfortable, but unless she was ferociously stupid she wouldn’t die. Whereas on the Moon, all other elements notwithstanding, she was good for as long as she could hold a single breath.

  Here, she had the world. There—a succession of boxes, be they the main starport at Da Vinci or Ceres Base out in the Belt, or the ships that journeyed from one to the other. With the possibility that someday, she might have been lucky enough to crew a starship—another warren of boxes, oh, joy—off to another system, for a stroll on another world. But no matter where she went, it would only be for visits. Home would become the ships. Life forever in a box, a cage, a cell.

  She wondered if Kinsella ever thought about it in those terms, ever truly let herself imagine a fifty-week round-trip to Cocytus Station on Pluto, the “milk run” of a mission Nicole had been on aboard Wanderer before their encounter with the Wolfpack raiders and then the Halyan’t’a.

  Any more than Nicole herself thought about life without it.

  She took a swallow of tea, grimaced in dismay at the realization that her drink had grown cold, wondered in alarm how long she’d been sitting wrapped up in thought. The door suddenly banged open, startle-spasming her to her feet with a curse as tea sloshed over the rim of her mug, doing a final awkward flinch-step backward as it splashed off her desk.

  Amy Cobri stuck her head into the office, holding back a laugh as Nicole belatedly tried to recover herself.

  “Interrupting something important?” she asked with that small, special touch of malice kids have when they catch adults looking silly.

  Nicole hunted for an appropriate retort, then let it go with a resigned sigh. Amy grabbed a handful of paper towels off the coffee maker and handed them over, Nicole nodding her thanks while mopping up the mess.

  Staying on one knee, she reached up to the CardEx clipped to Amy’s denim overalls; it wasn’t a visitor’s tag, but one of those issued to base personnel, allowing her unrestricted access to the facilities. The only other one she’d seen like it was Colonel Sallinger’s.

  “It’s real,” Amy said.

  “I’m impressed.”

  The girl shook her head as she plonked herself down in Stu Hanneford’s chair and twirled herself around—Kinsella rated two assistants, Hanneford being a Captain Kinsella had brought with her from her old squadron. He was an ace with a word processor, so while Nicole got her fair share of the scutwork, he usually ended up handling the bulk of the correspondence. Didn’t seem to mind so much. Flying wasn’t the passion for him it was for his boss; he took his place in the standard rotation, did what was asked of him, got his jazz from the motorcycle he took off across the desert every weekend.

  “Lot less to it than meets the eye,” Amy sniffed. “Having the right to go anywhere doesn’t mean people’ll let you in.”

  “And the key to privilege is knowing when not to push your luck, hmnh?

  “Yup.” Amy looked around, making a face, and said, “Seriously sterile environment.”

  “Not as bleak as some I’ve seen.”

  “Up there,” pointing skyward.

  Nicole laughed. “Not hardly. I was thinking of some of the pits we got bounced through back at the Academy. Actually, spacer quarters are anything but bleak.”

  “I thought they were all boxes.”

  “Standard design, yes. But you’re free to do with it what you like. I remember, when I was a kid... ”

  “My age, right?”

  “Maybe a little shorter. Anyway, my uncle Rob is a skiffy buff—seriously into science fiction videos—has a collection that goes all the way back to Méliès.”

  “George’s Méliès, right, Frenchman, silent film called A Trip to the Moon?”

  “Full marks for you.”

  “Your uncle, my dad, they’re a pair.”

  “Anyway, all these films and TV shows, they picture life in space as modular components, designer uniforms, everything neat as the proverbial pin. No allowance for the human capacity for clutter. Or self-expression. Just because you can’t bring much with you doesn’t mean you can’t do all you can with what you’ve got.”

  “Sounds like Japan.”

  “Not far wrong. So what brings you down here?”

  The question got her a mischievous grin. “You said you’d teach me to play ball.”

  “I thought tennis was your game.”

  Another face, more disgusted than the one before. “In Papa’s bracket, it’s everybody’s game. Either très terribly social—wack wack wack but not so hard you sweat, have a drink and some munchies, and moan your brains out, seriously ash—or you obsesso your way to Wimbledon.”

  “No middle ground?”

  She sighed. “Not there. Not for me. ’Sides, I can play tennis. Ball’s something new.”

  “We’ll have to see. My time’s not my own.”

  “I can change that.”

  I’ll bet you can, Nicole thought, but said, casually, “Don’t. Please. Someone told me you ski?”

  “Working on it.” And here, Nicole saw what she’d come to recognize was that rarest of smiles in Amy, an actual express
ion of delight. She wanted to tell the girl how good it made her look, that it was something she should try more often, but knew how patronizing it would sound.

  “Downhill or cross-country?”

  “Downhill. Giant slalom.”

  “You any good?”

  “Yeah,” Amy said quietly with the matter-of-fact, taken-for-granted pride of someone who meant exactly what was said. “Thing with people, there’s always a way to slice ’em. Can’t do that with a mountain. You got the slope and the snow and your skis.”

  “Figure that makes it an even fight?”

  “Yeah,” she said again, the same way, with such an edge of surprise that Nicole didn’t tell her she was making a small joke.

  And looked around suddenly as a sharp voice from outside heralded Kinsella’s arrival.

  Nicole met her at the door, coffee as freshly brewed as it was poured, Kinsella taking it with barely a nod of acknowledgment as she strode past to her office. The Colonel took it black, in a mug emblazoned with the crest of her former command—a squadron of F-31 fighter-bombers, the 101st Interdictors of the Third Aggressor Wing, called themselves the “Berserkers,” because (or so they claimed) you’d never know they were about until they dropped the hammer—and Kinsella took the nickname to heart.

  She loved to wander, poking her nose wherever the fancy took her, and Heaven help the person responsible if what she found wasn’t on profile. Nicole still didn’t much like the woman, but over the past weeks she’d learned to respect the officer; Kinsella took the measure of her people right off the bat, more often than not with surprising accuracy. She had an arrogant self-confidence that was part and parcel of being a fighter jock but also the smarts not to pretend to be something she wasn’t. If Kinsella didn’t know anything, she wasn’t afraid to ask. By the same token, she had no tolerance for bullshit. And anyone who tried invariably got their head handed back on a silver platter.