Mills barely looked at the picture and he did not look at her. He held the stack out for Ruth to take back.
“I know it’s not enough room,” she said.
A ten-minute drive from town, the county airport offered less than 5,000 feet of runway. It was never intended for large commercial flights, much less space shuttles careening down at 220 miles per hour. If they’d begun construction the previous spring, Ruth supposed there might have been something usable by now — but she didn’t have the right to blame them for being too busy.
“It’s never going to be enough room,” she told him. “Not before we’re out of air.”
Mills jiggled the stack with an irritated grunt, about to drop it. Ruth reached in quickly but was careful to touch only the top picture, peeling it back.
“Here,” she said. “We land here.”
From above, the terrain around Leadville resembled a giant bathtub that had been filled with clay and left under the shower for eons. The Continental Divide ran nine miles east of the city and curled around to wall it in on the north as well. Just six miles west of downtown stood another immense range, and most of the area within this vast, bent tub was a jumble of hills and lumps and gullies, scoured by the unimaginable amounts of rain and snowmelt that formed the headwaters of the Arkansas River.
A railroad track and two-lane highway ran north together along the river, until the highway dodged east into Leadville, where it split in two. From town, Highway 24 shot north again to rejoin the railroad in a wide marsh basin.
Colorado roads tended to swerve through the shapes of the land, but this basin covered four square miles and some tired draftsman must have simply laid down his ruler. The highway cut straight through.
“It’s perfect,” Ruth said. “We can come in out of the southeast like we were hitting Runway 33 at Kennedy.”
Mills finally looked her in the face.
“The angle’s almost exact,” she said. “Look at it. And the prevailing winds are out of the north just like you’d want.”
“This hill at the south end could be trouble,” he answered, and Ruth fought down a hopeful laugh and let him continue. He held the photos in both hands now. “The road isn’t wide enough, either,” he said. “What is it, sixty, seventy feet? The wingspan is almost eighty.”
The runways at Denver International, where Leadville planned for them to touch down eventually, were twice as wide as Highway 24 yet still only half the breadth of the strips at Kennedy Space Center. All in all, if they did try to land without permission, without ground support, Denver International might be slightly less risky than Highway 24—but then what? The Mile-High City wasn’t high enough. They could only hit Denver if there was a plane ready to fly them up to Leadville.
Ruth moved closer and tapped one finger on the photo. “We can overshoot that hill,” she said. “There’s plenty of room.”
“There’s a bridge over this fucking railroad right in the middle. No way. It’s fifty feet wide at the most.”
She had been relieved that the tracks ran under the highway instead of vice versa. Obviously you didn’t want to squeeze the shuttle beneath a train trestle at any point during a landing — but Ruth had figured that the overpass was no different than the highway itself. “What’s the problem, the guardrails? Our wings will clear them easy.”
“It’s not like landing—”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s not a plane, stop saying that! I know more about this than you think. If you come in on target we’ll zip straight down the center. And if you’re off a bit, the nosewheel can pull us back in line.”
The approach was everything. The shuttles had long been compared to flying bricks. They were not only clumsy in atmosphere — unlike conventional aircraft, the Endeavour would be unpowered during touchdown. Essentially the machine became a hang glider that was too heavy for the updraft of its body and stubby wings. Worse, the shuttles had no go-around capability. A pilot who didn’t like what he saw did not have the option of goosing his jets and regaining altitude to circle back. Once committed, it was do or die.
“You’ll have to pull off the best fucking touchdown in history,” she said, making herself use his favorite swear word and afraid it sounded forced.
He didn’t answer. Ruth hoped he was visualizing his approach. Derek Mills was something of a hotshot, or had been a year ago. That was why he’d been sent up here, like all of them, and she knew he’d kept himself as sharp as possible, running simulations, talking through an occasional exercise with Leadville. Maintaining hand-eye coordination had been his excuse for playing video games instead of cleaning or doing inventory.
Mills shook his head before he spoke, then swept his hand over the photo from left to right. “There’s a rainstorm coming out of California right now, and another one behind it.”
He had been prepping for the situation himself!
Ruth felt a wave of adrenaline and involuntarily bent both arms into her chest as if to contain the feeling, aware of that wild laugh bashing at her insides again.
Mills was the key. Building a majority vote would be impossible, given her relationship with Doc Deb and the hard discipline shared by Ulinov and Wallace. But if she could tempt Mills onto her side along with Gus, it would be three to three and she’d have the tiebreaker. She’d have the pilot.
He said, “We can’t do anything in weather.”
“It’ll pass.” Ruth could almost feel his desire, feel him wavering. Should she say something more?
“That’s just the top of the checklist,” he continued.
Her heart wouldn’t quit. She was afraid to let him fall back on the methodical caution that NASA had ingrained into his thinking, but she’d already played her best card, the legend he could become among fliers everywhere.
“The big problem is FODs.” He said it as one word, fauds, Foreign Object Debris.
“Birds won’t be an issue here like at Kennedy.”
“I’m thinking cars. People.”
“I’ve got more pictures,” she said. “You can see there’s almost no traffic at all. And they’ll know we’re coming. It’s ninety minutes minimum for reentry, right? Or as much as we want if we announce before we leave the station.”
Mills flipped through the next several photos, stopped when he reached the shots of the other tiny airports in Eagle-Vail and farther north near Steamboat Springs. Ruth wished she hadn’t said anything about an early announcement. Was he worrying over what Ground Control might say? His career? Leadville could block the road and force them to stay…
“If we give them an hour,” she said, “they can walk a thousand people over the highway picking up every piece of everything. You know they’ll do it. They’ll have to.”
“I guess.”
She wanted to add that it was unlikely that more than a handful of soldiers would precheck the Denver runways. Leadville just didn’t have the suits or the canned air for a larger effort, but she wasn’t going to be the first to say Denver. She didn’t dare distract him.
“I guess if we force their hand,” Mills said, “they’ll use all the resources they have anyway.”
“Yes.”
“I could use a fucking beer.”
The unsteady laugh escaped this time, but she knew it was okay. Mills would think she liked his joke. He flashed a grin and Ruth realized what she had to say next, I’m buying. Could she build him up enough that Ulinov and Wallace wouldn’t sway him back to their side?
Ulinov scuffed through the interdeck hatch directly behind them and banged one hand against the ceiling to catch himself as Ruth turned, blinking, confused to find her fears manifested.