There was a moment of charged silence. Media coverage was a de facto part of any shuttle mission, but that didn't mean that any of them regarded the press as anything but the bane of their collective existence. They'd all been burned by the incautious remark in front of the wrong reporter, and they'd all learned to keep a discreet distance, especially lately, when astronaut adultery and boozing on the job, not to mention sabotage, were making more headlines than successful missions. The news that they would be spending seven days cooped up in the small confines of a shuttle on orbit with an owner of one of the largest and most influential international television networks in the world was news they did not welcome. In fact, "Oh, fuck me," Laurel said, and slammed out of the room. Mike wasn't far behind her and his language was even more colorful.
Bill looked at Rick. "Well, that went over well."
"They'll be all right," Kenai said loyally, and spoiled it by saying, almost pleadingly, "Is he going to be broadcasting on orbit?"
"Ya think?" Rick said.
They sat in gloomy silence for a moment. "The sun's about over the yardarm," Bill said.
Rick looked at the clock on the wall. "It's five o'clock somewhere," he said, and looked at Kenai. "Join us?"
"Building 99?"
Rick shook his head. "Too touristy. I know a place."
THEY GATHERED AROUND A TABLE IN A SMALL, DARK DRINKING establishment where the varnished wooden bar had a brass foot rail and the booths were upholstered in real leather. The bartender knew Rick by name, and the two people sitting at opposite ends of the bar looked up briefly and incuriously and then got back to the more serious business at hand. Bill had scotch, no ice, Kenai had a beer, and everyone had a good laugh, including the bartender, when Rick ordered a cranberry cosmopolitan. "I like the color of it," Rick said, refusing to be shamed into a more manly drink. "It looks like the sky over the folks' ranch at sunset."
They drank while reading their part-timer's bio. "He's studied communications and aviation, it says."
"Where?"
Bill tapped the bio. "It says here."
"Where here?"
Bill shrugged and handed Kenai the folder. "Doesn't name any schools. Doesn't say if he soloed. Doesn't say if he stuck it out anywhere long enough to pick up a degree. Looks like a kid with ADD whose daddy has too much money."
The bio was only a page long, and even that had been padded." 'Hobbies include skiing, scuba diving, and polo'?" Kenai tossed the bio on the table. It slid into a puddle of beer, and the paper quickly absorbed it, leaving a big brown stain. "Oh yeah. This is gonna be fun."
The two men were veterans of military aviation programs and both had seen action in the Gulf. Kenai wasn't military but she had spent the last five years in rigorous training, including flying in the backseats of T-38s, training in vacuum chambers and sea survival, and she'd been CAPCOM on the last shuttle flight. They'd all stood up under severe stress and performed, and performed well. Rick, Mike, Kenai, Bill, and Laurel had worked together, played together, partied together, and on occasion, mourned the loss of a comrade together. They knew each other and they trusted each other not to screw the pooch in an emergency situation, of which there had to be six or eight on offer every second of any mission.
Now they were being asked to accommodate a stranger, an unknown, unschooled, untrained, 330 miles up, for over two point one million miles, for seven days, one hour, six minutes, and sixteen seconds, with nothing between them and vacuum but a thin metal shell. It was an awfully long time, during which one error could put all their names on the Astronaut Memorial at the KSC Visitor Center. It was not one of the honors to which Kenai, a type A competitor like any other astronaut, had ever aspired.
"This is basically your NASA sales incentive," Bill said. "We'll give you a seat on the shuttle if you hire us to launch your satellite."
"Pretty much," Rick said. It wasn't anything that hadn't been done before, but no one liked it, least of all the astronauts. It burned mission specialists in particular, because the line to get into space was already long enough, and to have someone unqualified, inexperienced, a joyrider for crissake, jump in ahead of them was almost unbearable. A few couldn't bear it and quit. Everyone else stuck it out but none of them were happy about it.
And it was a mission commander's nightmare. "We'll run him through shuttle emergency escape procedures, how to eat, sleep, use the toilet." Rick fixed them with a beady eye. "But mostly we make it very, very clear that he doesn't touch anything. If he can be trained to take a shit without his ass touching the seat, do it."
They finished their drinks and went home, not as light of heart as a newly named Prime Crew ought to have been.
THE NEXT WEEK KENAI AND BILL WERE SCHEDULED FOR ONE OF THE unending meet-and-greets that astronauts were assigned to around the country, to show the NASA flag to the various services and contractors that designed, built, maintained, and manned the infrastructure that made shuttle operations possible, and to remind them of the real men and women flying the craft and operating the equipment the contractors built. They strapped into a T-38, Bill on the stick, Kenai in the backseat, and took off for Miami and the U.S. Coast Guard base there.
The Coast Guard was a substantial presence offshore during shuttle launches, deflecting clueless sailors, gaping rubberneckers, and on occasion even alligator poachers from taking their boats in too close to the Cape during countdown and launch. Rick's first launch had been put on hold at T minus thirty when a charter boat skipper in a thirty-five-foot Carolina Classic pretended to have lost power and was drifting ashore with the current, all the better for his four drunken clients to snap photos of themselves in front of the shuttle standing white and gleaming against the gantry. At eight hundred dollars a day each they were probably expecting something other than being boarded by a Zodiac full of irritated Coasties, their skipper arrested and their boat commandeered, but that was what they got, and the shuttle raised ship after only a sixty-minute delay, which had to be some kind of record. Rick told them that the astronauts on that mission had been of one mind when informed of the reason for the hold: to limber up the big gun on the foredeck of the cutter and blow the offending boat out of the water.
Today they landed in Miami and were picked up by a starstruck chief petty officer who couldn't take his eyes off Kenai, who had to remind him more than once that he was veering over the line into oncoming traffic. It was only after Bill offered to drive that the CPO managed to focus on the road. When they got to District 7 headquarters they discovered that the CO had mustered the entire workforce in the parking lot to greet them, many of whom wanted their pictures taken with the astronauts. Bill said a few words, Kenai said a few more, and many, many photographs were taken, after which ordeal Kenai's new love slave hustled them out to the Munro, a high-endurance cutter 378 feet long that would head up offshore security during their launch.