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  He double-checks that he’s aimed Intrepid’s nozzles in the right direction, and holds the ship steady with a massive force of will, playing a video game with life-or-death consequences in keeping the tiny dot in the “V” on the attitude indicator screen. The nose slowly comes up, changing the rocket engine’s thrust vector from all horizontal deceleration to a mix of both vertical and horizontal, keeping gravity from yanking Intrepid too rapidly back toward Earth.

  The engine should cut out, the checklist says, when he’s at eighty degrees nose up, still flying backward, at an altitude of ninety miles and dropping at less than three hundred miles per hour, with almost no forward speed. Intrepid, he knows, uses fuel and thrust to slow down instead of trading speed for heat—using the type of red-hot thermal braking through the atmosphere that incinerated the shuttle Columbia years ago. He’ll have less than a minute, when the fuel runs out and Intrepid begins to freefall, to use the reaction thrusters to raise the tail and turn the space plane completely around. Then he’ll be falling like some sort of man-made leaf into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, belly first, never going fast enough through the thickening air to melt the structure with frictional heating.

  It’s a hard concept to grasp, this frictional heating and airspeed. He knows, because he tried to explain it to Julie for a school science report one night as Sharon rolled her eyes and left for bed. He reruns the memory, every word of it ringing clear in his head, even as he works the control stick and watches the forward panel.

  “Honey, below four hundred thousand feet above the planet Earth—eighty miles high—the atmosphere begins with just an occasional molecule of air. On a space shuttle reentry, every molecule gets hit at nearly orbital speed as the spacecraft descends lower and lower into more and more air, and with each tiny collision, there is a transformation of the massive speed of the collision into heat. At four hundred thousand feet it doesn’t amount to much, but hitting two hundred thousand feet, where the still-thin air molecules are much more closely packed together means a lot more of those tiny heat-producing collisions are happening, and the heat begins to raise the temperature of the spacecraft itself thousands of degrees, each collision stripping away electrons from the molecules and creating a super-heated plasma that can be seen from the ground as a long trail of fire. It was at two hundred and seven thousand feet over Texas,” he told her, “that the Shuttle Columbia began to break up, killing the crew.”

  Julie had seen Sharon’s response, and it had limited her attention span. He never had the chance to talk about airspeed, and why a spacecraft flashing through those edge-of-space altitudes at thousands of miles per hour could show an indicated airspeed of less than a hundred miles per hour, something that always fascinated him.

  A calculation he needs to make in his head snaps him away from the memory. He was four minutes late firing the engine, and so the result will be a landing somewhere in eastern Arizona. He needs to know soon where he is, what state he’s over. Unlike the shuttle, which starts down around the California coast in order to land in Florida, he remembers from his indoctrination that with Intrepid, he’s just dropping into whatever state he’s over.

  There’s a button to be pushed on the HSI—the horizontal situation indicator—when he turns the ship around nose down, and the screen is supposed to show the airfields he can reach, but he’s getting ahead of himself with the engine still firing, and right now all he can do is play the video game and hang on, battling the feeling that he’s not really here.

  The three minutes elapse, feeling like ten. The nose-up angle is nearly thirty degrees now as he slowly arcs backward toward the planet. The numbers on the screen indicating forward velocity are down below eight thousand miles per hour, the stars still visible outside the window.

  The chilling thought that keeps running through his head is that with or without the help of the map computer, he’ll have only one shot at finding a place for Intrepid to land—let alone figure out how to fly her there.

  But so far his control movements are steady, competent, even professional, and he can’t figure why. He doesn’t know nearly enough to do this. Yet here is his right hand, moving the stick with calm competence, as if he’s channeling a real astronaut—a golden connection, a reserve of assurance and intellect from somewhere beyond himself.

  Suddenly the noise and thrust and shaking and moving numbers that are the cacophonous reality of this descent back to Earth begin to recede, as if a sound engineer somewhere was moving the master volume down slowly. He feels an unexpected tranquillity descending over him like a warm blanket—reassuring, comforting, validating that his hands really do have it under control and his mind is free to float so he can turn and watch himself. He’s being enfolded by a peace he’s never felt, and along with it there seems to be a rising, gentle chorus of voices against the sound of a thousand strings, like the most magnificent space movie on the most amazing screen he could ever dream up, the orchestral and choral harmony all around him now, as if the unity and connectedness of uncounted souls are trying to put his fear in a perspective he’s never imagined.

  It’s a crystalline moment of aching, indescribable beauty, and, as has happened several times in this odyssey, tears come unbidden to his eyes.

  They are, he realizes, tears of appreciation for just being, and for the first time in his life he finds himself overflowing with a love of the moment and of life as it is akin to nothing he’s ever experienced—a love so deep, so complete, that even if it all ends within seconds, the contentment will have too much force not to live on. It’s a place he’s never been, a moment he never wants to leave, and one he’s quite sure he was never supposed to glimpse.

  Kip Dawson’s mind returns to the reality of Intrepid’s cabin, the sounds rising in volume around him but altered now and somehow incapable of threatening him, even as his adrenaline flows like a flood-stage river.

  He shakes his head against the steady g-forces. There’s a strange comfort, he thinks, in the force of this rocket-propelled deceleration pressing him down in the seat—an affirmation that Newton’s laws are still relevant. Back in the Mojave ground school he’d thought the math beyond him and was astounded to discover how straightforward the equations are for the dynamics that are shaking him now. So many thousands of pounds of thrust out of the engine nozzles for so many seconds in the absence of air raises or lowers speed predictably, and he’s filled with awe that, in essence, Intrepid is merely coming to a stop before dropping back into the atmosphere. No screaming trail of charged, burning plasma across the sky. No three-thousand-degree temperatures to be absorbed and deflected. Just a small, private ship dropping back in like a badminton birdie.

  The countdown to engine cutoff is on the screen and less than forty seconds away, the nose-up angle approaching sixty degrees. Forward speed is coming under a thousand five hundred miles per hour, and still he’s hanging on and holding the dot in the V.

  He wonders if any radar facility will pick him up, or if anyone at Mojave even has a clue he’s not still in his stable orbit. If he can’t find an airport and ends up hurt or dead in the back country of Arizona, he figures they won’t find him for days or weeks.

  Or maybe even years.

  Poor old Kip, he thinks with a smile, the boy just disappeared while on orbit and no one ever knew why.

  And still he can feel the serenity growing within. It doesn’t matter. Everything is as it should be.

  Ten seconds to cutoff. He almost doesn’t want the thrust to stop, but the noise has been deafening and he looks forward to quiet.

  Engine shutdown catches him by surprise, kicking him forward. Again he’s in zero gravity and it seems wrong. Shouldn’t he feel the downward pull of Earth—the increase of thirty-two feet per second in speed every second?

  Technically he’s still in space, just nowhere near high enough or fast enough to stay there any longer.

  Kip checks the descent speed. Two hundred sixty feet per second. He sees the target dot on the ADI, att
itude deviation indicator, blinking red as it starts moving down. He moves the sidestick controller to follow, startled when the Earth swims back into view. Intrepid’s nose changes pitch from near vertical through the horizontal and continues downward to twenty degrees below the horizon. He wants to look at the surface below and try to figure out where he is, but his eyes have to stay riveted on the ADI until he feels the ship stabilize. Funny how suddenly it seems so easy, and just a few days ago he’d been spinning out of control like a crazed gyro.

  The steadiness of the ship now that the engine is quiet is almost unnerving, and he remembers to consult the checklist Velcroed to his knee before reconfiguring the space plane and raising the tail structure to keep down the speed of reentry. Instead of his finger shaking like before as he points it at the next section of the reentry checklist, his hand is now steady, and his index finger tracks the next few steps as he reads through the verbiage, and triggers a small hydraulic pump.

  A tiny whine akin to an energetic mosquito begins complaining from somewhere aft, confirming its operation. Lights illuminate on the forward panel and a series of lighted pushbuttons that control the process of feathering the ship light up as well. He pushes them in sequence, checking and rechecking each step and feeling the change in the tail structure as the twin-boomed empennage begins to rise to a nearly eighty-degree upward deflection.

  Kip recalls the explanation almost verbatim: “As the air molecules begin to flash past, the tail will align vertically, leaving the body almost horizontal into the relative wind, the tremendous drag keeping the speed from building too high. Like a shuttlecock,” the instructor had added, sending Kip to the dictionary only to discover that “shuttlecock” essentially meant the same thing as “badminton birdie.”

  Four hundred thousand feet…eighty miles, Kip thinks, the upper beginning of the atmosphere.

  His gaze takes in the horizon once again as he uses the sidestick to bring the nose up, stopping at ten degrees down.

  Speed is what? Okay, five hundred twenty knots and accelerating.

  In less than five minutes, Intrepid’s heat-coated belly will peak at a temperature of just over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit—as long as he holds the right attitude. He thinks he can feel the molecules of air beginning to impact the fuselage, even though Intrepid’s relative, indicated airspeed is still not even registering. But the true speed through the near vacuum around him is now just under twelve hundred miles per hour.

  The curvature of the Earth is still pronounced, the darkness of space beyond still stark and amazing, and he realizes he’s seeing the same view as those who ride suborbitally to the same height.

  Three hundred fifty-one thousand!

  The ship seems to be moving ever so slightly now, not unlike an airplane in stable flight, but he knows the motion will increase along with the sound of the high-speed air impacting his fuselage.

  Where am I? The question now becomes urgent. He cranes his neck to see better through the forward windscreen, looking for anything identifiable. The map display should be showing what he’s over, but for some reason it’s switched to some diagnostic screen and Kip punches first one, then another of the buttons around the perimeter to get the map back.

  Oh my God, the seat!

  He’s almost forgotten to reposition it, rotating the bottom upward and leaning it back in accordance with the checklist and tightening his seat and shoulder harness against the five-g peak deceleration to come.

  The thought of Bill Campbell’s lightly restrained body behind him suddenly flashes in his consciousness. Only small Velcro straps are holding the plastic bag to the back bulkhead, and up to now all the deceleration has been backward. But when the real atmospheric braking starts, the body will tumble forward, and he wonders how to secure it.

  He could strap it into his passenger seat close behind, but it’s too late to get out of the harnesses. The thought of the body crashing forward and into his hand on the control stick worries him, but he’ll deal with it when, and if.

  Three hundred five thousand, velocity twenty-four hundred feet per second…sixteen hundred miles per hour straight down!

  He can see a line of snow-covered mountains far below, and as he looks north, one of them resembles Pikes Peak and he wonders if he’s coming down in the middle of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo range.

  But when he looks more closely, he realizes Colorado is apparently much farther north.

  He could twist the sidestick controller around and yaw left or right to see better, but he’s afraid of disobeying the V on the ADI in front of him and he stifles the need. He’ll wait until Intrepid is an aircraft again with the tail aligned before looking for airfields.

  A hint of slipstream noise is becoming more pronounced, a clear rising protest of assaulted atoms of nitrogen and oxygen shoved aside by a bow wave, a supersonic bow wave, as he descends below three hundred thousand feet, no longer in space but clearly still in the far upper reaches of the atmosphere. The speed is fairly steady now, just under Mach 3, and the indicated airspeed has begun to move upward in single digits.

  A red symbol has begun blinking urgently on the forward display and Kip leans forward to read it.

  WARNING: LEFT STRUT UP-LATCH NOT LOCKED.

  He understands. The twin tail booms are in the up position for reentry, yet the left one is not locked, and the increasing pressure of the airflow is trying to force it down. If that happens, he’ll start spinning and speeding up until either the gyroscopic forces or the overheating kills him.

  Kip pulls the other checklist to his lap from its storage slot and pages through, amazed that he isn’t frantic. He flips to the section covering major emergencies and locates the one labeled “Strut Up-latch Unsafe Warning during Reentry.” The first step is to verify the hydraulic pump is still on, and he looks at the appropriate part of the panel.

  The switch is on. But the pressure is zero, indicating the pump has failed.

  Ever so slowly, as he looks at the horizon, Intrepid begins to rotate to the left.

  Chapter 43

  ABOARD INTREPID, MAY 21, 10:48 A.M. PACIFIC

  There is a manual procedure, Kip sees, listed in the text, and at first it confuses him. Apparently a cable of some sort can be pulled to secure the up-latch, but the g-forces have already begun to build, and, as the gyration to the left begins to become noticeable, the reentry deceleration force is progressively raising the weight of the arm he has to use to open a panel he’s never seen beneath his left leg.

  The fact that in less than a minute he’ll be pinned to the command seat by upward of five g’s registers, and Kip snaps off his seat belt and shoulder harness and dives forward, his hand scrambling around the lower left kick panel, finding several different recessed latches. He struggles to peer over the edge of the seat and read the verbiage on each of them, holding on to the checklist with his right hand. Constant control of the sidestick is unnecessary during this phase, he was told, and he hopes he’s remembered that correctly. The aerodynamic forces are now gripping Intrepid, and the flipped-up twin booms of the tail are the only thing keeping the space plane correctly aligned.

  And clearly, the left boom is starting to retract under the air load.

  The first panel yields nothing but switches and circuit breakers, but the second is the right one, and Kip finds the left boom T-handle and grabs it just as Bill Campbell’s body tears loose from the Velcro and tumbles forward, slamming into the panel and jamming the little access door partially closed with Kip’s hand still inside.

  He feels a flash of pain, along with a burst of unpleasant odor, as the mass of plastic covering Bill’s remains pins his arm, the loads now exceeding two g’s. Kip releases the checklist from his right hand and struggles to shove the body back away from his trapped left hand. There is only one pull possible, and if the boom isn’t in the completely extended position the moment he pulls, he’ll close the locking jaws on nothing.

  His fingers close on the checklist.

 
“Ensure aerodynamic control automatic engagement has occurred.”

  There is a light somewhere on the screen. No, not a light, a lighted message. His eyes are blurry, his body straining forward against two and a half g’s now, but he finally sees the words.

  Okay. Engaged.

  “Pull nose up momentarily to twenty degrees nose high, then pull T-handle.”

  Oh, Jesus! Simultaneously, then.

  He understands what has to happen. Intrepid is now spinning at several revolutions per minute to the left, and it will get worse as he pulls nose up. But with nose up, the boom should be slammed into the up-locks, and if he pulls on the T-handle at exactly the right moment…

  There is no time to think about it and Kip stays hunched over in the seat and unrestrained as he grabs the stick and pulls it back, feeling an amazing increase in g-forces as the belly of the space plane becomes perpendicular to the relative airflow, slowing him. The spin to the left becomes a blur, and he’s having to pull almost to the stops to get twenty degrees nose high.

  Now!

  His entire body is protesting at the elephant of force that’s just jumped on his back, crunching him down as he hears the boom clang into position. He yanks hard on the T-handle, pulling it out to the stop before the sickening feeling of a broken cable registers in his head. Intrepid has transitioned back to slightly nose down again, and he realizes the T-handle has come completely out with no resistance on the line.

  Oh no!

  Something on the forward panel has changed, though, and as he strains to look, the warning light is gone. Somewhere on the left is supposed to be a locked indication, but he feels himself about to pass out, his vision reducing to a tunnel ahead of him as he leans forward against what feels like five g’s, and finally spots it.