“It’s the first one you’ve earned.”
The muscles in my right arm burned with the desire to punch him. The urge pulled the breath out of me. If I moved at all, I would lose the battle, and I’d never punched anyone before, so I had no idea if I would be any good at it. “Do you practice being offensive? Or do you come by it natural?”
He winked. “For you? I practice.” Parker looked past me to smile and wave at someone. “I’ll be honest. I needed someone who knew how to talk to women and children. And while I may not like your whole Lady Astronaut routine, you do it well.”
“Two compliments in one day? You’re slipping.”
“Then let me leave you with this. You’re never going into space if I have anything to say about it.”
That was so much blunter than anything I had expected from him. Sniping at each other, sure. But actually coming out and saying he’d keep me grounded? I couldn’t even fire back. “Why?”
“Really?” He shook his head, brows drawn together. “You tried to have me court-martialed, and you think that’s not going to have consequences?”
“What—I didn’t. I never tried … What are you talking about?”
He spread his hands on the cafeteria table and leaned toward me. “What, exactly, did you think was going to happen when you reported me for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer’? Did you think I wasn’t going to go on trial? Please. You’re a general’s daughter. You know exactly what happens with that kind of charge.”
“Yes.” I kept my voice clipped and low, conscious of all the kids behind us. “Yes. It gets ignored. I wasn’t the first person to report you for harassing women.”
“You’re the only one I know about.” Parker pushed back from the table, spreading his hands as if he could brush it all away. “And when they looked into it, you know what? None of the girls had a problem with me. None of them.”
A laugh came out of nowhere. “They were afraid of you. They were afraid they’d be grounded.”
“And you weren’t? Please.”
“I wasn’t. Because, as you say, I was a general’s daughter.” I shook my head and backed away from him. “How did you ever get anyone to marry you? Or—maybe that explains why no one ever sees your wife?”
His face hardened and closed. “My wife is off limits.”
“I’ll bet she is.” I turned my back on Parker and walked over to rejoin the other wives. Anger was shaking my veins with the force of my pulse. Bastard. Self-centered, self-righteous bastard. He thought he could keep me from joining the astronaut corps? I’d like to see him try.
And then the anger bled into cold resignation. He already had. And it was working well.
The IAC sent Nathaniel to a hotel that night, with a military guard, just in case someone decided to take a shot at the program’s lead engineer. That was a depressing thought. I went with him, and the agency sent someone to our apartment to get clean clothes for us.
He sat on the edge of the hotel bed in his stocking feet, staring at the carpet. I sat next to him, leaning into his warmth. “Can we pretend this is a vacation?”
Nathaniel laughed, sliding an arm around my back to pull me closer. “The agency is doing something wrong. We have to change the way we’re selling the space program to the public.”
“There’s always going to be someone who disagrees.”
“Someone with a bomb?” He flopped back onto the bed, pulling me with him. “I think we’re going to relocate the center.”
I was willing to follow Nathaniel to whatever random place his thoughts took him. Turning so that I was on my side, I nestled against him and rested my hand on his chest. “That seems a little extreme.”
“Clemons was already talking about it before this. He was going to use the Orion disaster to try to get us away from population centers.”
“May I put in a request for somewhere equatorial?”
“Still trying to get a vacation, huh?”
“Trying to get better orbital trajectories.” The button on his shirt shifted under my hand, and I rolled my fingers around it. “Where were you thinking?”
“It’s all Clemons. I just build the rockets. While we were waiting for the situation to resolve”—which was such an engineer way to describe a bomber—“Clemons was going on about how many jobs we create … I don’t know. It might actually turn into a bidding war.”
“So, equatorial location and a pony?”
“Heh.” His hand came up behind my back and pulled me closer. “You know … I kept having flashes of what it would have been like if you were on that rocket.”
“Well, that’s a worry you can put out of your head.” I rolled away from him to stare at the pebbled plaster ceiling. It might be the surface of some unfamiliar planet. “Parker declared today that he was going to do everything in his power to keep me from being an astronaut.”
“What?” Nathaniel sat up, staring down at me. “He said what?”
What, exactly, did you think was going to happen when you reported me … I cleared my throat. “He said something about how I was never going into space if he could help it. But, sweetie, don’t say anything about it.”
“Don’t—why the hell wouldn’t I?”
I sat up to face him. “Because it was just him and me. No one else heard, and you know how he can play things off.” As the first man in space, the agency had good reason to want to keep his image spotless. If they had to sacrifice a computer for him? I knew what would happen, and Daddy wasn’t here to make sure it didn’t. “Besides, at the moment, they aren’t even accepting women as astronauts. When they do? Then we’ll talk about it.”
Two months passed. The U.S. committee that had looked into the crash finally voted to continue the United States involvement with the IAC, in part, I think, because they were afraid the other nations would colonize the moon without us. There were changes, of course, which we implemented over the winter.
Higher security at the IAC required a fancy new electric fence and armed guards roaming the edges. Clemons used the bomb and the Williams farm tragedy like budgetary weapons to get upgrades and add staff.
As Nathaniel predicted, the IAC pushed to relocate the launch facilities to Brazil to limit vulnerabilities. Mind you, we’d asked for this at the beginning, but hadn’t been able to get building a new launch site through the budget because the U.S. was afraid that other countries would use rocket technology for weaponry.
The rockets would be assembled and tested at the Sunflower facility in Kansas, then shipped to the new center near the coast in Brazil for launch. It finally got us near the equator, which was going to help with the moon and Mars programs.
And it meant that the computer department was busy redoing all of our trajectories to account for the new launch site, although it would likely be another two years until it was fully operational. I was hunched over a page double-checking my differential equations when a shadow fell across my desk.
Blinking, I looked up. Nathaniel stood by my desk. He had that serious, constipated expression, as if there were a secret he couldn’t share.
“Sorry to bother you, Elma, but I thought you’d like to see this.” He laid a single sheet on the desk in front of me. “It’s a carbon, so you can keep it.”
Across the table, Basira lifted her head and gasped. She was staring at the same line I was.
PRESS RELEASE: IAC DIRECTOR ANNOUNCES NEW CALL FOR ASTRONAUTS: WOMEN ENCOURAGED TO APPLY.