Orbit

limits. He’ll have to think about that. John Kent has years of fight left, but—as he’s loved to put it over the years— his get up and go has, this time, really “got up and went.”

“Griggs? We’ve got Miss Sheehan here.”

He snaps to mentally, being careful not to change his relaxed, almost slouched position in his swivel chair. There are times to sit on the throne behind the desk, and there are times to come around to the chair facing his small couch and be more approachable. This is one of the throne times.

“Everyone come on in.”

A somber delegation files into the room and he sees Dorothy Sheehan’s been cuffed. The head of security for the space center follows with one of his officers, trailed by Cully and the head of the legal staff. Sheehan’s glare is meant to melt steel, but the fear in her eyes is ruining her act.

“For God’s sake, Nelson, take those cuffs off this lady. What’s she going to do? Run out and steal the shuttle?”

“We did catch her trying to run out of the front gate, so to speak,” the security chief says while pulling out his cuff key and unlocking her.

“Twenty miles per hour is hardly running out the front gate,” Dorothy says, her voice subdued and tense.

“Have a seat, Miss Sheehan,” Griggs says, motioning to the couch.

She complies, her eyes boring into his face as he looks at the others with a smile and then locks on hers.

“You’re familiar,” Griggs begins, “with the old term ‘red-handed’?”

“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re doing…”

Griggs raises his hand, stopping her. “Honey…” he sees the lawyer and the human resources chief stiffen at the term and throws a smile at them. “Hey, guys, lighten up. I run this place.” He looks back at Sheehan. “So, Miss Sheehan, would you care to tell us precisely why you were attempting to sabotage the launch of our little rocket out there?”

“I was doing no such thing!”

The moment has arrived, Griggs thinks, and he comes forward slowly in his chair, letting his stocky build shift toward her like an old grizzly leaning forward to sniff its frozen, terrified prey.

“Honey, let’s get one thing really straight, okay? We have you. We have the evidence to put you in a federal prison, probably for life, and the only thing that you have to cling to right now is the hope that if you tell me who, what, where, when, how, and why—including every conversation in exquisite detail you had with Mister Geoffrey in Washington leading up to your actions—I might decide it’s the bigger fish who need frying. Now you’re a big girl. Nod your pretty little head if you understand, and let’s cut the bullshit and get to, as they say out in West Texas, the nut-cuttin’.”

“You want to deal?” she asks, triggering a broad grin from Griggs.

“You have no idea how much,” he says. “So you cut the cards, Ma’am.”

She nods, her eyes on her manicured fingernails drumming the table in front of her. The drumming stops and her jaw clenches. Her eyes become mere slits as she fastens them on his and speaks through tightened lips. “If I’m allowed to walk, I’ll give him to you in a sealed box.”

“You do that, Sheehan, you walk. You’ll never set foot on a NASA installation again in this life, but you won’t have to limit the rest of your days to having an intimate relationship with a cell mate.”

“Please cut the sexist crap and answer one question,” she snaps. “Do we have a deal?”

“Well, if you can deliver, l’il sister, then yes. We have a deal.”

She nods. “All right. So happens, I have tapes of just about everything Shear and I discussed. And because of where they were made, they’re admissible.”

Chapter 40

ASA MISSION CONTROL, MOJAVE INTERNATIONAL AEROSPACE PORT, MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA, MAY 21, 10:10 A.M. PACIFIC

Diana Ross stands in silent shock at the back of the reactivated Mission Control room, recalling the story of Lazarus. If Kip can be brought back to Earth, there would be room for the word “miraculous.”

Yet, if he doesn’t reenter Intrepid before an hour and a half are up, all the cosmonauts will be able to do is recover bodies.

News that the telemetry downlinks from Intrepid are working again took a few minutes to reach her office, and she figures it is some sort of overwrought misinformation. But there it is, she thinks, live and in color, the data streams moving across the screens as if nothing had ever been amiss—with the exception of voice communication, which has not been restored.

She thinks back to the shock hours ago upon reading of his intent to leave the ship and the frustration she felt at not being able to scream at him to hang on, that help was coming.

In the background she hears ASA Mission Control’s repeated attempts to hail Intrepid rolling over and over again like some sort of exotic Tibetan prayer. But no answer from Kip, and no further typing, and the world is, quite literally, waiting on the collective edges of a billion seats for the next act.

Diana moves into the back of the room with a newfound ability to stand away just a bit and observe. She’s had too much opportunity in the last four days to think. Endless hours in her office waiting to be useful, and she’s been reading and rereading every word that her would-be poster boy composed.

The shock of Intrepid’s sudden telemetry reactivation is still ping-ponging back and forth among the fine technical minds in the room and despite the obvious, there is still no widespread willingness to accept the idea that Kip Dawson, a rank amateur, has actually repaired Intrepid’s radios.

“Is there a master circuit breaker for all the radios he could have pushed back in?” one of the structural experts asks, wondering why the rest of the group merely shake their heads as if the question is technically embarrassing—which it is. She hears the ongoing discussions of the oxygen and nitrogen mix and the CO₂ levels, the adequacy of the remaining fuel, and the fact that all systems except voice communication appear to be working as if nothing had ever impacted the ship and killed its pilot.

“The external airlock door is showing open,” Chuck Hines reports.

“You didn’t see that before?” Arleigh asks over the interphone.

Chuck turns and addresses him directly. “It just now came up on the telemetry readout. The inside door is still closed, inside atmosphere still breathable.”

“Dammit, he’s got less than fifteen minutes of air left to get back in there,” Arleigh is saying, as much to himself as to the control room.

Over and over again Diana hears them returning to the almost hushed discussion of the apparent “far out” reality of how Intrepid’s downlinks have sprung back to life—the “impossible theory” first fueled by the startling decision Kip Dawson had written about several hours ago:

I’m going to wiggle into Bill’s space suit and see if there’s anything I can do outside to patch up the damage.

“How could he know? Do we cover how to do an emergency spacewalk in ground school, Arleigh?” Chuck Hines is asking.

“Yes, to the same extent airline passengers are schooled on emergency evacuation.”

“If I wasn’t looking at all this stuff streaming down,” Chuck says, “I’d tell you the chances he successfully put on Bill’s suit and went outside and repaired the ship are zero. But you tell me, which is more likely? He did it, or the problem was cured by mystical equipment self-repair uncontaminated by human contact?”

“I’d vote for Kip.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Me, too.”

Diana tunes out the discussion, focusing on the numbers cascading down on one side of the screen while her