Countdown

by Julie Cannon

  “Director Finley, I’m Kenner Hutchings.” She wasn’t sure how her voice sounded as strong as it did in spite of the butterflies that were kick-boxing in her stomach. The director’s hand was warm, her handshake firm as she introduced herself as well.

  “Ms. Hutchins, thank you for coming.”

  Her voice was strong and deep, her Southern drawl stronger in person than it was over the telephone.

  “Kenner, please,” she said, and felt an odd sense of loss when Andrea removed her hand and moved to her seat at the head of the table.

  “Did you meet everyone?” she asked, her outstretched hands indicating the others.

  “Yes, I did, thank you. I introduced myself,” Kenner said, making it clear that she was the one who’d made the introductions, not the other way around.

  “All right then, let’s get started.” Andrea opened her portfolio, picked up her pen, and had everyone’s attention.

  For the next hour Andrea outlined the current status, steps that had been taken, and what was in progress in an attempt to rectify the problem. Kenner listened, not fully understanding all the technical jargon they were using. Several times Andrea was polite enough to spell some of the terms out so she could understand. It started to become very clear that there was a serious problem with the space shuttle. Holy shit. No wonder she couldn’t talk to me on the phone.

  Sitting on the opposite side of the table, Kenner admired Andrea’s control of the situation and her grasp of the elements. She never once wavered, never once sat back in her chair, and continually pressed the people in the room with solutions, however farfetched, even for a possible solution. Their marching orders clear, the meeting adjourned and everyone practically fled the room, leaving Kenner and Andrea alone.

  “I don’t expect you to comprehend all the technicalities of the situation,” Andrea said, approaching her.

  “Not at this point, no,” she answered. “But I will.”

  “There’s an office for you just down the hall,” Andrea informed her as she led them out of the conference room. “It’s set up with access to our database, the print schematics, and the programs we use. You can start with—”

  “Could you have someone show me around? You know, who does what, how it all fits together, how the shuttle gets from point A to point B, that sort of thing?”

  Kenner sensed Andrea’s irritation, and her hunch was confirmed when the said, “This isn’t the visitor center, Miss Hutchings. We don’t have a lot of time for extraneous, non-value-add activities. You need to start looking at the technical…”

  Kenner hated it when someone told her what she had to do and, equally maddening, what not to do. Don’t say that, don’t hold your pencil like that, don’t sit there, don’t pick a book from that section, don’t read ahead, don’t ask teachers questions they can’t answer, sit down, be quiet, don’t say that, sit up straight, and a multitude of other things.

  She forced herself to not snap back at her new acquaintance. Obviously Andrea was under a lot of pressure, but that was no excuse to be snotty and opinionated. “I need to see the big picture before I can drill down and figure out what’s going on. It helps my overall understanding so I’ll be able to put things in better context.” Kenner didn’t understand why she added the last statement. She didn’t need to explain herself or her work methods to this woman. She had called her to solve their problem.

  Andrea looked as if she were about to say something, then thought better of it. Her jaw was clenched when she said, “All right, this way.” Andrea pointed in the opposite direction. “We’ll start at the beginning.

  *

  “So what is your job here, exactly?” Kenner asked as they stepped into a large, cool room. The room had windows on all four sides of the room, giving the occupants a panoramic view of the entire grounds.

  Kenner could see dozens of buildings from this vantage point, the largest bearing the blue-and-white NASA logo and an even larger US flag draped down one side.

  “Prior to liftoff, the Launch Control Center at the Kennedy Space Station in Florida controls everything. Responsibility for spacecraft remains with them until the booster has cleared the launch tower, when it’s handed over to the MCC here in Houston.”

  “MCC?”

  “Mission Control Center,” she said. “I have ultimate responsibility for decisions made from that point on. Before the flight it’s mainly meetings, training, and paperwork. I lead the team whose responsibility it is to accomplish the objectives of the mission. We also train extensively on the console, so by the time we get to the real thing we’re prepared for every contingency.”

  “So you’re the big boss?” Kenner asked. Judging by the look on Andrea’s face, she wouldn’t have given herself that title.

  “The flight director on console is the mission’s ultimate authority on the ground, with the final word on any decisions that must be made,” Andrea replied calmly, even though the fire in her eyes told a different story.

  “So tell me how all this works,” Kenner asked, picking up a model of the shuttle from a side table.

  “Is this really necessary, Ms. Hutchings? We’re wasting time.”

  Kenner forced herself not to throw it back in this woman’s face that it was her time they were intruding on. “I’m a big-picture thinker. I need to get a feel for how it all went together before I can help figure out what might have gone wrong.” Kenner didn’t see or hear anything, but she could have sworn Andrea said something like “For God’s sake.”

  “The shuttle is over one hundred and eighty feet long and consists of three major components. Most important is the orbiter, which everyone calls the shuttle. It contains the crew and the mission’s payload—the items or the equipment they’ll be using during the mission. It’s fifty-seven feet long and has a wingspan of seventy-eight feet. The large external tank holds fuel for the main engines and the two solid rocket boosters, which provide eighty percent of the launch thrust and most of the shuttle’s lift during the first two minutes of flight. The main job of the tank is to hold over five hundred thousand gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The two solid rocket boosters on either side provide most of the power to get the shuttle off the ground and out of Earth’s orbit. Depending on the mission, the overall weight can range from three million pounds to over eight million. Of course there have been a lot of upgrades and improvements since the first shuttle, including something so simple as saving six hundred pounds by not painting the tank white.”

  Andrea pointed to each of the components as she referenced them, but Kenner was more interested in her long fingers than the equipment. Trying to regain her focus she asked, “I thought it was called the shuttle.”

  “Orbiter was the official name for the vehicle. In the early of space flight that’s all it did—orbit the Earth, thus the orbiter. The nomenclature hadn’t changed throughout the years until recently. The public calls it the shuttle, and we’ve pretty much adopted the word as well.”

  Kenner wasn’t sure if she detected a slight distaste in Andrea’s mouth at her last statement. “Why do you launch from Florida?”

  Andrea had that exasperated look again. “For several reasons. First, it’s close to the equator, which because of the linear velocity of Earth’s surface gives a fuel-saving boost to spacecraft attempting to escape Earth’s gravity.”

  Kenner understood exactly what Andrea was saying. “And the second?”

  “The second reason we don’t really talk about, and that’s because we don’t fly over people that might get killed if stuff dropped off or blew up.”

  “I can understand that’s one of those need-to-know items,” Kenner said, grimacing. “And the third?”

  “Because nothing else is there. When the station was first built, only orange groves grew there. The island has good logistics and the navy base, and an army base is located not too far away.”

  “Makes sense,” Kenner said without much thought.

  “I’m so glad you ap
prove,” Andrea replied sarcastically. Kenner bit back a comment. She’d have time for that later.

  “Tell me about the orbiter, more specifics,” Kenner asked, getting to the meat of why she was here.

  “The orbiter resembles a conventional aircraft, with double-delta wings swept eighty-one degrees at the inner leading edge and forty-five degrees at the outer leading edge. Its vertical stabilizer’s leading edge is swept back at a fifty-degree angle,” Andrea said with much more enthusiasm than her previous answers to her other questions. Kenner listened intently to the rest of the details, absorbing everything Andrea was saying.

  “I thought it needed booster rockets to lift off. If it landed on the moon, how was it supposed to get back up?”

  “We’ve developed new technologies in the past fifteen years to give the shuttle more thrust per square inch. That and the fact that the gravity on the moon is only seventeen percent of the earth’s.”

  Kenner had no idea how much time had passed, but suddenly she was hungry. “How about some lunch?”

  Andrea shot up in surprise. “Ms. Hutchings,” she said, obviously exasperated. “Didn’t you grasp the gravity of the situation? Seven people are depending on us to bring them home.”

  Andrea’s accent was more pronounced when she was angry. Kenner would file that observation away for future reference. “I know exactly the gravity of the situation,” Kenner said calmly. “That’s why we’re here. So I’ll ask you the same questions I asked in the meeting. Are they in any immediate danger?”

  “No.”

  “Are they in any short-term danger?”

  “No, but—”

  Kenner held both hands up as if to stop the flow of questions. “How long can your crew,” she emphasized the word your to show Andrea that she understood her sense of responsibility to the crew, “stay up there?”

  “If resources are allocated accordingly, anywhere between eight and twelve days.”

  “Okay, then we have some time to figure it out,” Kenner said.

  Andrea stepped back and put her hands on her hips. “Let me get this straight. Because we have some time,” Andrea intentionally used Kenner’s words, “we don’t have to start figuring this out right away. And we can, what…go out to lunch?” she said, not trying to disguise her disgust.

  She’s kind of hot when she gets riled, Kenner thought. There’s something interesting behind that calm exterior. “No, Andrea, that’s not at all what I’m saying. As a scientist you can appreciate that it’s a proven fact that the body, including the brain, needs fuel to gather data, understand it, synthesize it, and know what to do with it. I haven’t eaten much the last few days. I was on a plane for God knows how many freaking hours, at your command, by the way, and I’m hungry. So I’m going to get some lunch, and you can either come along and we can talk more about this problem, or you can open your peanut butter and jelly sandwich or whatever you bring for lunch. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Kenner waited a beat, then shrugged in a way that said “up to you,” turned around, and headed to the exit door. When she didn’t hear footsteps behind her, she stopped and asked the security officer at the desk the location of the cafeteria. A facility this size had to have one, and even though she was looking forward to eating, she was looking forward to running through the gauntlet of security again even less. Kenner headed out the door and had to keep telling herself not to turn around to see if Andrea was following.

  Chapter Nine

  T-minus 09:11:01:41

  “This is fucking unbelievable,” Andrea said after Kenner left. Thankfully no one else was in the room to hear her verbalize her frustration. From the minute she’d talked to Kenner on the phone, just thirty-five hours ago, she was aggravated. She supposed it might have something to do with the fact that even though they were a cohesive team, everyone asked “how high” when she said “jump” because she was clearly in charge. However, Ms. Hutchings (Kenner, Andrea corrected herself and agreed with her boss Barry, what the hell kind of name was that) had been insolent the entire time. She’d hardly said a word during the briefing and had asked all of her questions during the site tour. My God, she sounded like a tourist. All she needed was a big hat and a fanny pack, and she’d fit right in. No, Andrea said to herself, no way would she would fit in with any crowd.

  Kenner was nothing like Andrea had envisioned her to be. She’d imagined a plump, nerdy woman with thick glasses, bad hair, and unimpressive social skills. Kenner, on the other hand, was almost as tall as she was, thin but curvy in all the right womanly places, had piercing clear green eyes, and was inquisitive. Maybe that was what had thrown her off; Kenner wasn’t at all what she’d expected. But wasn’t she being hypocritical? She probably wasn’t what Kenner had expected either.

  However, something about Kenner didn’t sit right with Andrea. She wasn’t comfortable around her and knocked her off her game. She was on edge and didn’t like it. As a result, admittedly, she’d been a little snarky when Kenner invited her to lunch. Actually, she’d probably been downright rude, but damn it, this was a serious situation. Then again, Andrea realized this wasn’t Kenner’s mission. Kenner wasn’t ultimately responsible for the crew. Kenner obviously had more work-life balance, evidenced by the traces of a hickey on the back of her neck.

  They were just different, and so many of her colleagues were just like her. They shared a certain NASA red, white, and blue that probably would make someone from the outside looking in think they were all clones. They all dressed the same, thought the same way, and had been educated in the same dozen places. Rarely did they hang out together after hours, and rarely did they chat about personal things during work. From the little she knew of Kenner, she didn’t think she would ever fit in a place like this. She would need something more thought-provoking, more exciting. And with her charm and those looks, she probably got everything she was looking for.

  Andrea hadn’t known Kenner was a lesbian, but the instant she saw her in the conference room this morning she was certain. She’d tried to hide her surprise, but the look in Kenner’s eyes had told her she wasn’t successful. She doubted any of the other people in the room saw it, and if they did they wouldn’t have recognized what it was. A lot of these people had no clue what was going on around them, and none of them knew she was a lesbian too. She never discussed it, didn’t talk about her weekends or where she went on vacation, and they never asked. For the first time she felt an uncomfortable sense of hollowness in the center of her chest. Shaking it off as either hunger or fatigue, she exited the observation room and headed to the mission-control room.

  *

  The tension in the mission-control room was thick. Working space at each specialist station was crowded with multiple technicians staring at monitors and analyzing data. What Andrea didn’t see for the first time, however, was teams talking to each other. She reflected on Kenner’s comment about needing to see the entire picture to understand how things related in order to determine the problem and ultimate solution. The teams typically worked well together, and Andrea made a note to bring everyone together when Kenner returned from lunch to discuss their findings so far.

  After listening in for a few minutes at each station, she retreated to her desk to prepare the report she needed to send to Barry by the end of the day. When she reached the section about Kenner, she let her hand grow still over the keyboard.

  What should she say about the woman who had invaded their neat, orderly world with her brilliant mind yet casual attitude, well-worn jeans and scuffed boots? Andrea knew she was smart and detected traces of her inquisitiveness and her grasp of concepts by the questions she asked. She realized she had been a little harsh when she had considered her little more than a tourist and herself nothing more than a tour guide. Regretfully she realized that her first impression, her second, and her third were probably off the mark.

  She never jumped to conclusions like this. Leaping without knowing exactly the speed, trajectory, and angle, and landing zone coul
d get you into serious trouble. Andrea’s life was as orderly and planned as the mission she commanded. She left nothing to chance, and she never made a move unless she knew exactly the outcome. Guessing and hoping was never an option, and going with her gut instinct was even less. She was a scientist. Everything had a cause and effect, and Kenner was causing an unease Andrea couldn’t shake.

  Chapter Ten

  T-minus 09:10:27:09

  “Do you come here often?” Kenner asked the woman in front of her in the checkout line. It was a ridiculous pickup line, but for some reason it always worked for her. If nothing else it was an icebreaker that immediately started conversation. Along with four or five other women in the large cafeteria, the woman was obviously a lesbian but the only one close enough to start a conversation with. The lame question worked, and she turned around and met Kenner’s eyes. They were dark brown and held no sense of amusement.

  Holding her tray with both hands, Kenner shrugged as much as she could. “Hey, I’m new here,” she replied, turning on her charm and turning on her best smile. “Just trying to get the lay of the land, you know. Who’s with who, where to sit, coveted spaces, you know, that sort of thing.”

  The woman eyed her suspiciously. Normally this approach worked, and rarely did she go home alone, but this time she wasn’t so sure. Sure, the cafeteria at the Johnson Space Center was the most unusual place she’d ever tried to pick up a woman, but she apparently wasn’t going to have any time to cruise any of the local lesbian hangouts. This place was as good as any. Unfortunately, this woman didn’t think the same way.