“Look,” Ruth said, trying again, “sooner or later we have to leave. We have to go down.”
Ulinov’s frown never changed. “The president ordered us.”
“Orders are to beat the locust. Your orders are to support me in any way. That’s all that’s important.”
“So quit wasting time,” Deb said behind her.
In the beginning Ruth had been vaguely glad to have another woman aboard. She’d even smiled when Deb and Gustavo became an item. Then Gus broke it off in a storm of silence. The two of them got back together, swore it was over, reunited again. Ruth recognized the pattern. They just needed something to do.
Maybe what happened next was inevitable, given the close quarters and their complete separation from any normal society. Deb had bounced to Derek Mills. Back to Gus.
Ulinov tried to stop it. He talked to each of the men and he made jokes about American customs and he threatened to inform Colorado. Sexual promiscuity went against all their training, and rightly so. It had turned each of them, in different ways, into the components of a time bomb.
Ruth was hardly conventional, and she was not a prude. In her junior year she had been among the girls in the dormitory who stripped down to their underwear for most of spring semester after the air-conditioning blew out. Some years later, on an apartment balcony just three floors above the Miami traffic, she had given her stepbrother a hand job with SPF 45 coconut sunblock. More and more she had taken to contemplating the line of Ulinov’s shoulders and the breadth of his hands, the smooth, ruddy bump that was his lower lip.
Amazing, that six people hurtling around a dying planet in a tiny metal shell could find new ways to torment themselves— but whether Deborah Reece with her blond hair and her neat little hips had acted out of boredom or a physician’s urge to heal, the truth was that Wallace had burrowed deeper into his grief as Mills became distracted and hostile. Poor Gus, always a churning supply of words, developed a stammer in Deb’s presence.
“Wasting time, you, do you have an appointment?” he asked. “Let Ruth say what she has to.” Gustavo had folded himself into the corner like a crab, shying away from open room, and Ruth worried how he’d react back on Earth, exposed to miles of sky and land. It made her appreciate his support all the more—
Deb snorted and kicked toward the exit. Mills, blocking her path, grabbed new handholds with a neat pull-and-push movement that carried him aside to clear her way yet also backed him farther from the group.
“Stop.” It was risky, but Ruth had nothing left except a blunt assault. “You’ll be back,” she told them. “You’ll all be able to come back here again.”
Mills looked directly at her for the first time, a mix of emotion cutting across his face.
Ruth said, “I can beat this thing, I swear it, but I need to be on the ground.” Then she lost eye contact with Mills as Deb moved between them, and fought to keep from raising her voice. “We’ll have spaceflight again in no time! There was hardly any industrial damage, they’ll want the most experienced crews. .”
Deborah turned to stare and missed her handhold, but Mills caught her waist — and despite everything that had or hadn’t happened between the doctor and the pilot, neither reacted to each other’s touch. The ungodly echoing drone of the air circulators made their silence all the louder.
Too far. Ruth had gone too far and she knew it, and she’d barely touched the surface of what she felt was the real problem — their pride, their vanity. She should have been flown down to join the other scientists in Leadville a month ago or even earlier, as soon as the snowpack could be cleared, yet Colorado had kept them in orbit for the same reasons that the astronauts wanted so badly to stay, prestige, power, a reasonable fear that the human race might be trapped in the mountains forever and only look at the moon and stars with fading memory.
She also had no doubt that the crew was terrified of being without purpose. Couldn’t they see that they’d actually have more value on the ground? Engineers, pilots, radiomen, doctors, these were everything that would allow Ruth and her colleagues time to defeat the locust.
Ulinov broke the quiet, thumping his big palm against a supply cabinet. “We are following orders to stay,” he said.
Ruth shook her head. “There’s nothing more I can do here.”
“What if you are wrong?”
“I, but— What if you’re wrong?”
“New data comes up every hour. Tomorrow they may find what you need, what only works in zero gee.” His frown wavered as he watched her face, but then he struck the cabinet again. “I decide,” he said. “I tell you no.”
* * * *
Seventeen days hadn’t been enough for Ruth. Since learning of the FBI’s new data pinpointing the locust’s birth, she’d ramped up her campaign to sway opinions in Leadville, making as much of a nuisance of herself as possible for someone in orbit. Unfortunately, at best she was 250 miles above Colorado. At worst there was an entire planet between them. And the men and women down there had no reason to engage in a conversation they didn’t want to have if they could win simply by not talking to her.
Yesterday her fears and frustration had reached a new pitch.
Yesterday, Gus had intercepted a series of transmissions between Leadville and a C-130 cargo transport on its return flight from California. They’d done it. They’d sent a team of Army Rangers west in search of the lab where the locust had been created — and the soldiers had remained in Stockton for more than five hours after their air tanks ran out, refusing to accept failure. One young man had been partially blinded. All for nothing. They hadn’t found a single clue and Ruth could still hear the last words of the recording Gus had played for her, the terse exhaustion of the soldier’s voice: “No go, it’s no go.”
What if Leadville chose not to risk more men, more equipment, more jet fuel? What if they stuck to the conservative path that had trapped her up here for so long and let their greatest opportunity slip away?
Ruth decided she’d been working on the wrong people. It was too easy for everyone on the ground to ignore her — but if she could convince the astronauts, everything changed.
There wasn’t anything Leadville could do to stop them from abandoning the ISS.
* * * *
Derek Mills had fled to the Endeavour, and Ruth cornered him there. He sat in the low, cramped flight deck, strapped to his chair, the rattle of his laptop’s keyboard masking her approach through the interdeck hatch behind him.
She froze halfway out of the floor. He’d dimmed the up-lights but didn’t seem to notice her shadow laid over the console before him, until she knocked and quickly moved closer.
Mills tilted one glance up at her, his jaw set. Ruth didn’t bother with words. She passed him the bound sheaf of photographs she’d wanted to share back in the hab module. The station’s cameras were incredible stuff, worthy of James Bond, able to count the legs on a bug.
She’d clipped the picture of the Leadville county airport to the top of the stack because she wanted to stir his interest. She needed to engage him with the challenge of it.
Two bulldozers and several hundred people both in and out of uniform were expanding the lone runway, fighting into the hill on the south side because a big DC-10 had sunk into the mud fifty yards beyond the north end. They were also bringing in a crane to deal with the wreck, but it was having trouble maneuvering through the jam of other aircraft.