“And after someone sabotaged your plane.”
“For pity’s sake.” I slammed the glass back onto the table. Marlowe lifted his head and stared at me with wide golden eyes. I ran a hand down his spine, but I couldn’t tell you if that was to reassure him, or me. “It was a partial engine failure. These happen. I was trained to—”
“The mechanic called.” Kenneth gripped the edge of the bowl. “While you were driving back from the airfield. The mechanic called, which would have been a helluva way to find out that you’d had a crash, I have to say.”
“It was a controlled landing.” Not that my status as a pilot was my chief concern, but it was easier to correct him there. “And you’re changing the subject away from your heart attack by manufacturing a crisis.”
“So you put engine oil in your gas tank.”
I stopped with my mouth open. Engine oil? That would be consistent with the intermittent engine failure. It would go through in bits and foul up the engine completely. Only the oil pan and the fuel tank were nowhere near each other. “How much was in there?”
“Three or four liters. No telling how much at the beginning.” He measured salt into the bowl and started mashing the garlic with a pair of forks. “He tried to tell me that ‘the little lady’ probably didn’t know any better. Apparently, your species gets confused easily.”
I could not think of any reason for oil to be in my gas tank. Even if someone had a reason to touch my plane while I wasn’t there, all of the women in the 99s were accomplished pilots who would never make a mistake like that. “You’re thinking of Icarus.”
The muscles in Kenneth’s forearms flexed as he tore and pressed the garlic in the bowl. “Airplane. Training ‘accident.’ Manifesto.” He looked up at me. “I’m thinking Nathaniel wasn’t the target.”
“I thought it might have been aimed at you.”
“The Manifesto talks about ‘astronettes.’ Of those, you’re the wife of the governor. An original astronaut. If I wanted to take down the IAC, then targeting you wouldn’t be a bad strategy while discrediting the program as a whole through accidental deaths.” Kenneth dumped an anchovy fillet into the bowl and began mashing it into the garlic paste.
“Poison is an outlier.”
“Yes. But I am one of the most vocal advocates for the space program. If you died…” Kenneth reached for an egg and stood there, holding it without moving for a long minute. He cleared his throat. “Leaving aside the question of how it would affect me, if you were poisoned in our own home, the press would raise the question of if I had done it.”
People will think our marriage is in trouble …
Marlowe squawked and jumped out of my lap. Wisps of his fur clung to the sweat on my clenched fists. “Shit.”
“True.” Kenneth lifted the egg and cracked it against the bowl. The brittle snap of the shell was shockingly loud. “Everything the FBI identifies as Icarus has happened in Kansas City. You’ll be safer on the Moon than you are here.”
“You can’t possibly think I’ll leave you, not after telling me that you’ve had a heart attack.”
“Nicole.” Kenneth set the fork down and wiped his hands on a clean white towel. “Nicole, if I hadn’t told you about the heart attack and just said that I’d changed my mind, would you argue with me about going?”
“That’s neither here nor there.” I would have been relieved. But he had told me about the heart attack and that changed everything. I wasn’t going to abandon him here, and especially not to save my own skin.
“I am trying—I want you to understand that I could have ‘managed’ you. And I didn’t. You want me to be honest with you and this is the price for that.” He shrugged. “You want me to not protect you? Here we are. I had a heart attack months ago. You were on the Moon and I’m fine. The fact that you weren’t here? It changed nothing. I’m fine.”
It changed nothing. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? I wiped my hands on my trousers, brushing the sweat and cat fur off on them. “So, just to sum up for clarity: you want me to go to the Moon because I will be safer and have no Earthly use.”
He rolled his eyes. “Come on…”
I winced. “No. You’re right. I’m sorry.” I rubbed my forehead and turned my grimace to the floor. “I know you were trying to reassure me. But without my sass, that’s essentially the shape of things. In this context, I’m more useful on the Moon than here. And if I go, it will provide an illusion of normalcy, as a side effect, which is politically advantageous right now.”
“Yes.” He shook his head. “I thought about not telling you. About the heart attack. And I know it seems unfair to tell you now, but if I didn’t do it tonight … I’ve put it off for months, waiting for the right time. There’s not going to be a right time and—the lie was filling my brain constantly. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sure if I should thank you for telling me or yell at you for not telling me.”
He cocked a finger at me. “You already yelled.”
Not enough. But I also understood. I had planned to wait to tell him about my unpowered landing. If the right time had never come … I sighed. “Thank you for telling me.”
“So you’ll go?”
I didn’t feel relief or delight or anything except despair. “I’ll go.” I leveled my own finger at him. “I’ll go, if you promise to tell me if it happens again.”
“I promise I’ll tell you.”
“And you won’t wait.” I glared at him with all the formidable power of a Swiss finishing school education coupled with lessons from my mother. It is a glare that tells the viewer that I am not planning on murdering them, but that they are already dead and I’m trying to find their next of kin. “I know your feelings about private codes right now, but if you aren’t willing to tell me in the clear, I want a code.”
Kenneth inhaled as if he were going to start an impassioned address to the senate. He held it. It escaped in a long, slow sigh and I knew I’d won. “Fine. But not for exchanging letters. I’ll … if it happens again, I’ll send a message telling you that the ‘flowers are blooming.’”
I wanted to push for more, so help me, but this would do. For now.
PART II
THIRTEEN
RIOTERS SEIZE BUILDING
KANSAS CITY, April 9, 1963—Demonstrators ended a seven-hour invasion of the United States capitol today after a personal appeal by Kansas’s governor, Kenneth T. Wargin. About 100 demonstrators had holed up in the building, some threatening to burn themselves and the building if police tried to evict them. The rioters said at first that they would not leave until the president agreed to use emergency powers to reallocate resources to states still impoverished by the effects of the Meteor. But the demonstration came to a surprising end with the arrival of the governor. He spent time praying with individual protesters and making handwritten notes of their concerns. One by one they walked out of the building, although one demonstrator said afterward that the group would meet with the governor later and would try to return to the building if the meeting was unsatisfactory. Governor Wargin is widely discussed as a possible front-runner for the presidential races in 1964, although he has not yet declared if he will run for office.
The entire time we were in Brazil, I kept waiting for something to go wrong. Nothing did. Our team had been drastically reconfigured, with the thinnest of public rationales, to remove anyone who might be a potential “bad actor.” I was used to teams that had worked together for months before a launch. Now I had a mixed bag. I had known some of the new team members for years, others were going to the Moon for their first time.
The night before we launched, I slid into the phone booth for my scheduled call with Kenneth. The Brazilian astronaut quarters had substantially better views than the Kansas center. It was a three-story home, with stairs leading down to a private beach. Outside the phone booth, the waters of the Atlantic lapped against steep ruddy cliffs. In the distance, a sailboat cut through the waves with its yellow-and-red sail ta
ut in the wind.
The phone barely rang once before Kenneth picked up. “Hello?”
I melted a little at the sound of his voice, but even in those two innocuous syllables, I could hear the strain. “Hello, love. Everything down here is going swimmingly. How’s life at home?”
“Good. Good. I’ve got Marlowe sitting on my lap. He misses you.”
“Scratch his ears for me?”
“Already there. Here…” The phone fumbled and shushed as the receiver brushed against something and then a steady purring filled my ear.
I closed my eyes and put my hand over my mouth to keep the weeping inside.
The purr faded and my husband’s voice returned. “Could you hear that?”
“Yeah.” I wiped the skin under my eyes and sniffed to clear my nose. “I miss you so much.”
“Me, too.” I could picture him sitting in his wingback chair in his study, head leaning against the side, with Marlowe curled in his lap. In one hand, he held the phone, eyes half-closed, while the other hand made circles through dense black fur. All of the unsaid things crackled on the phone lines between us. Kenneth cleared his throat. “How are things in Hell?”
I laughed. For unknown reasons, the Brazilian spaceport was called Barreira do Inferno—literally, the Barrier to Hell. “I had a mango daiquiri yesterday. Truly my life is so difficult here.”
He chuckled as if this were a normal conversation and not my last night on Earth. “Ready for launch tomorrow?”
“Yes. Everyone has been great about all the changes and we’ve really pulled together as a team, I think.” All of that was true, but it was the flat surface of the situation. Everyone was tense and stressed about the changes because they didn’t understand what was happening, but they had guesses. You can’t send a group of terrifyingly brilliant people in to talk to the FBI, make changes to the launch schedule and staffing, and expect them to think that everything was nominal. “How about you? Any flowers in the garden?”
“No. Everything is a healthy, verdant green, but nothing is blooming.” He cleared his throat. “You don’t have to ask me every day, you know.”
“When I’m on the Moon, I promise to only ask once a week.”
He laughed. “You only get one phone call a week.”
“But there’s teletype. I could ask you every day in the mail, so count your blessings.”
“I do. Every day, I do.” He didn’t tell me that he was praying for my safe return, but I could hear it in his voice. “In other news, Nathaniel is out of the hospital. I stopped by with Reynard and we played some poker. Hershel, by the way, is a wicked player. I’m convinced he counts cards.”
“If he has half of his sister’s math skills, he probably just intuits the probabilities without thinking about it.”
“Well, he now has a very nice jar of cocktail onions to show for it.” He sighed into the receiver. “Keeping up with the news down there?”
I grimaced. “The situation at the capitol? Yes … Is the news making it sound better or worse than it really was?”
“A mix. It was mostly peaceful, but the contingent that turned violent was very effective at their mayhem. I think Denley is going to set a curfew. I think that’s going to make things worse, but … but it’s also easier to police if there are fewer people on the streets.”
“Are you mostly staying in Topeka?”
“It’s been a lot of back and forth. Honestly, I’m home tonight to take your call.” He shifted the phone. “Would you … I think I might need to publicly declare for office before you come back. Is that … is that all right?”
The room went cold. I’d been there for every opening rally. When he ran for mayor, and state senator, and then for senator of the new post-Meteor government, and governor. If I wasn’t there, it would be remarked upon in the news cycle. He would be going in burdened by speculation that our marriage was in trouble. That I wouldn’t be able to fulfill my duties as the First Lady if I was on the Moon.
But I also understood why.
“You need to shift the news.” Things were going to shit, and once he declared, his voice would be amplified beyond Kansas. I closed my eyes, blocking out the ocean and the beach. “Would it help if I did a broadcast from—”
Someone banged on the door, and then Birgit threw it open. “Nicole! The sun is out.”
Beyond the window, a rare break in the perpetual clouds had formed. Golden light bathed a patch of the coast, turning the water from silver to a painful azure. Astronauts and technicians flooded out of the house. Michael Lin pulled his shirt off and fell back on the grass. Curtis Frye sank to his knees lifting his face to the sky in what looked like prayer. Eugene spun Myrtle, laughing, in a circle.
“Oh, I—”
In the phone, Kenneth said, “I heard. Go. Quick. Before the clouds close.”
“I love you!” What a world we live in, that sunshine was rarer than being able to talk to my husband from the Moon.
* * *
I’m sure it will surprise no one that I am happiest when I am in control. I’ve become accustomed to being a passenger when we launch on the big rockets, but I don’t enjoy it. I miss the days when it was just three people in a capsule and I had an actual job. Today, I was lying on my back, strapped securely into my launch couch and listening to the comms piped in from the pilot compartment up above. This was our fourth attempt to launch. We’d been scrubbed thus far by a lightning strike, a wayward plane invading the IAC’s airspace, and a stuck relay switch.
At least I had an aisle seat.
Eugene’s voice crackled over the speakers. “Two minutes downstairs; flight attendants stop beverage service and prepare for launch.”
Laughter rippled through the cabin. There were no flight attendants. Just twenty-eight astronauts and colonists, strapped into couches with our feet in the air and a desperate need to pee. I reached up to close my visor, the polycarbonate hissing against the rubber seals. It clicked into place, leaving me with the metallic tang of bottled air, the hum of my suit fan, and the crackle-pops of rookies triggering their VOXs with excited breaths.
Imelda Alva Corona lay to my right, her long dark hair pulled tight beneath her “Snoopy cap.” She stared out the window at the ocean and sighed.
“You okay?”
“Oh. Yeah.” She jumped, probably startled that I could hear her sigh with her helmet closed, but it had triggered her VOX. She gave me a little shrug. “The ocean is just … I grew up in the plains. I saw the space station before I went to the beach.”
Across the aisle from us, Luther Sanchez said, “Even for oceans, Brazil’s coast is pretty impressive. I grew up with long flat beaches. This whole jungle, then cliff, then water thing is disorienting.”
No one asked him where he was from originally. Post-Meteor, a lot of people didn’t talk about home anymore, because it was a reminder of too many dead friends. From going through all the files with Clemons, I knew that Luther had been from Florida. The panhandle was still fine, mostly, but tidal waves had been hard on the coast. His hometown was just gone. He’d been in Europe with the Air Force when the Meteor hit. First person in his family to graduate from college and leave town.
“I grew up in Detroit and we’d vacation at the Great Lakes.” We had a vacation house where we’d escaped the summer heat. “I thought I knew surf, until the first time I went to California. So wrong. I was so, so wrong.”
Behind me, Faustino Albino Rios said, “I am not sure I ever heard you say you were wrong about anything.”
“I was wrong about liking you.”
At the starboard window seat of our row, Imelda said, “Oh! There goes the LOX arm.”
Much as some people might wish that it meant they’d loaded the ship with smoked salmon, it was the liquid oxygen supply arm retracting. I couldn’t see it from my vantage point. A faint mechanical whir reverberated through the cabin, and at the port window of our row, Aahana flinched in her seat.
There are things that no amount of simu
lation can prepare you for. I leaned toward her, but my voice would carry over crew comms to the rest of the people in the cabin. “That’s the yarmulke cap being pulled.”
Nathaniel had made a joke about that early on, and it stuck as official nomenclature for the cap that kept the rocket stable on the pad until right before launch. I hoped he would be all right. Hershel said he was still having trouble keeping food down.
“Thanks.” Aahana smiled, and it was a little tight. “I should have known.”
“Someday, they’ll make a simulator that includes everything. Until then … Think of them as delightful surprises.” I wished, not for the first time, that we hadn’t needed to take new people up to the colony on this trip. If Clemons had cut all the first-timers, people would have noticed. People would have lost even more confidence in the program.
Outside the window, a huge gust of white haze vented, wiping away the ocean. Conversation vanished underneath the harsh hiss. From somewhere in the cabin, a man yelped, “Mother of God!”
“Liquid oxygen vent,” I murmured to Aahana. “Totally normal.”
“This is your captain speaking. Please make sure your seat belts are fastened and your tray tables stowed.” Eugene was such a ham. “One minute. I repeat. One minute, downstairs.”
Luther Sanchez tugged on his harness, which was adorable. “Upstairs” in the command module, they would be doing final checks while those of us “downstairs” in the passenger module had been locked into our seats for the better part of two hours.
“Cabin pressure is probably going to give us an alarm.” Eugene had barely finished speaking before a klaxon blared through the cabin.
I heard multiple people gasp—the problem with the colonists is that their training time was significantly shorter than ours. I say that, but I am also lying. Every noise, every alarm made me tense in ways that they normally did not during a launch. With each one, I was certain that something that looked like a routine problem was about to kill us all.
The Relentless Moon Page 12
