Countdown

by Julie Cannon

  “Get out.”

  She couldn’t deny Andrea’s anger this time. Kenner boldly took one last look at Andrea’s bare legs and left.

  WTF, Kenner thought as she walked back to the kitchen. She’d been caught looking like it was the first time she’d seen a half-naked woman. On the contrary, she’d seen more naked women than she could count, and none of them, including her first, had caused her to be as mesmerized as she’d been with Andrea. And her reaction. “Holy Christ,” Kenner said back in the kitchen. “She acted like I committed a mortal sin.” She needed to solve this work problem and get out of here and back to her vacation, fast.

  *

  The tension inside the car was suffocating. Kenner glanced at Andrea several times, noting that her white-knuckled hands strangling the steering wheel were in the correct ten-and-two position. Her jaw muscles were working overtime clenching and unclenching as the miles came and went. Andrea’s one- or two-word responses shut down Kenner’s attempt to make conversation so she gave it one last shot.

  “Is there a problem here?”

  “No,” Andrea replied, though the tightening of her lips said otherwise.

  “What did I do to you? You’ve been treating me like a piranha ever since I got here. Is it me personally or the fact that you don’t want someone intruding on your little island?”

  That got Andrea’s attention. Her head snapped to the side to look at Kenner, then back at the road just as quickly.

  “It is not my little island,” she said with barely restrained anger. “And there is nothing wrong.”

  “Bullshit.” Andrea didn’t answer. “Did you hear me? I said bullshit. If you treat everyone on this team the way you’re treating me, I’m surprised you even have a team.”

  “Really?” Andrea asked skeptically. “And just how do you think I’m treating you?”

  “Like shit,” Kenner barked, not even trying to control her anger anymore. “I don’t expect you to roll out the red carpet for me, but I do expect you to treat me with professional respect.”

  “So you expect me to what?” Andrea said, still not looking at her. “Treat you like some prima donna, some Albert Einstein who’s going to ride in on your white horse and save the day?”

  “First of all, I am not a prima donna. I’m a working stiff, just like everyone else. Second, my IQ is higher than Al’s, and I don’t have a white horse. I have a blue Harley.”

  “Hmph.” Andrea shook her head in obvious disgust.

  “And what does that mean?’

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You know you’re beginning to sound like a broken record,”

  “Ditto,” Kenner replied. “You keep spewing bullshit. And as soon as you stop, I’ll stop.”

  “You sound like a child.”

  “So now I’m a child?” Kenner replied, incredulous.

  “You’re what, twenty-four?”

  “Twenty-six, and because I happen to be the youngest one in that control room by a decade, and younger than you, that makes me a child?”

  “I didn’t say you were a child. I said you sounded like a child.” Andrea looked left, then right before proceeding into the intersection.

  “So now we’re going to get into semantics. Well, let me tell you something, Flight Director Finley. I can go toe-to-toe with you all day. I can think of bigger words than you, and I can solve your fucking problem.”

  At her final statement Andrea turned her head and looked at Kenner. “Why didn’t you say so?’

  “I didn’t say I did solve your problem. I said I can solve your problem,” Kenner stated with a look that said two could play at this game. “I don’t expect you to treat me any differently than any other member of this mission crew. And that is with respect. If you don’t, I don’t care if a hundred lives are depending on me. I’ll take my brilliant brain and leave.”

  “The president of the United States receives a daily update on the status of this issue,” Andrea said casually, but her meaning was clear.

  “I don’t care if the king of the world receives a daily update on the status of this issue,” Kenner shot back, mimicking Andrea’s words.

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. The guard at the main gate glanced at Andrea’s badge but scrutinized Kenner’s. Obviously her face wasn’t nearly as familiar as Andrea’s, and he gave her badge a thorough second and third look. They parked in the middle of the parking lot, and as Andrea gathered her briefcase from the backseat, Kenner did the same with her backpack.

  “You don’t have a reserved parking spot?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t that unusual? Aren’t you kind of in charge here?”

  Andrea didn’t even try to mask her sigh. “No, I’m not in charge. I’m just like anyone else on this mission.”

  “No, Andrea, you’re not just like anybody else on this mission.” Kenner mimicked her words. “Do you actually believe that?” The glare in Andrea’s eyes warned Kenner of the response to come.

  “Yes, I do. I have a responsibility to this mission and to those seven astronauts. I’m no different than Frank, who sits in the chair at communication, or Cynthia, the med tech, or Ron in propulsion. We all have jobs and responsibilities, and mine is no different from anyone else’s.”

  Kenner put her hands up to stop the verbal blows. “Whoa there, Andi. No need to jump down my throat on this. It was just a question.”

  Andrea stopped so suddenly, it took Kenner several steps before she realized she was no longer beside her. Andrea stepped forward and closed the gap between them.

  “Don’t ever call me that. My name is Andrea,” she said through clenched teeth. “And if you can’t remember that, then Director Finley will do.”

  Whoa, Kenner thought. Hit a hot spot, did I? Another interesting sign of emotion. She does have some fire inside. Kenner followed Andrea into the security screening area.

  By the time they got through security, Kenner’s jaws ached from clenching them to keep from saying anything else. Andrea didn’t speak to her as she walked into her office and closed the door.

  “Well,” Kenner said to the plain brown door. “Now who’s being childish?”

  *

  “God damn it. Why do I let her get to me?” Andrea said, tossing her briefcase onto her desk. The stapler slid across the wooden top and clattered to the floor. That made her angrier because she never allowed herself to lose her temper. “Fuck.” She retrieved the stapler and set it in its customary place. Then she sat down and turned on her computer.

  While she completed the familiar log-in steps on the computer screen in front of her, she tried to focus and get her head back where it needed to be—in this mission—not on the dark-haired woman who had turned her well-choreographed life upside down.

  What was it about Kenner that got under her skin so much? Over the course of her career she’d worked with all kinds of people, with equally varying personality and work styles. Why would working with Kenner be any different? She shook her head and forced herself to concentrate on the information on the screen.

  The log of activity and status of every system since she left last night was accounted for. She read through her report quickly, then re-read it carefully, focusing on the notations of the assistant flight director on duty, as well as the reports from each of the mission specialists. With the exception of the fact that the engines wouldn’t fire, everything appeared to be business as usual. The crew had slept well and had risen on time, waking to Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way.”

  She tried to focus on the rest of the evening reports, but her mind kept drifting back to Kenner standing in her bedroom offering her a cup of coffee. She didn’t like the way that had made her feel. She was more than a little surprised at the way her body had reacted. She hadn’t felt like that in the presence of a woman in, what…Andrea couldn’t remember how long. She was definitely out of practice with having a woman in her house, especially in her bedroom, but this was a simple,
friendly gesture from a houseguest. Then why had it made her feel so uncomfortable? And when she’d caught Kenner looking at her legs she’d completely overreacted. Jesus, she’d jumped down her throat like she’d kissed her in the middle of the control room. Wouldn’t that be something? And the way Kenner had looked when Andrea came out of her bedroom to leave was almost staggering.

  Kenner had been dressed in faded 501 button-fly jeans that fit her long legs perfectly, and they’d looked so comfortable and soft, it was all she could do not to cross the room and touch them. Kenner’s boots might have been brown at one time, but they too were worn. However, her long-sleeve shirt was blistering white and amazingly not very wrinkled. Her hair was damp from her shower. Thankfully she’d had her back to the room when Andrea walked in, or it would have been her turn to be caught ogling.

  Andrea turned her chair away from the monitor and gazed out the window. She liked the familiar, the process, the routine, and whenever she struggled with something regarding the mission, this view settled her. She relished the knowledge that every building was constructed with precision, every activity within its walls and on the entire site completed with perfection. There was no room for error, and that relentless structure suited her perfectly.

  A white pickup truck with a wide blue stripe and a flashing blue light on the cab was pulling an open trailer filled with boxes. Even from this vantage point Andrea saw that the boxes were strapped down securely. The driver drove exactly between the lines as he crisscrossed over the area. Whereas others would have cut a corner short or taken a shortcut, this driver stayed exactly between the lines. Andrea reflected a minute and couldn’t remember when she’d ever dared to drift outside the lines. Until Kenner Hutchings had walked into her mission.

  Andrea frowned as she thought about the way she’d reacted to Kenner. For God’s sake, they’d been together less than twenty-four hours, and all they’d done was bicker and trade verbal spars. Kenner was right; she hadn’t done anything to deserve such treatment. But something about her unnerved Andrea. Her intelligence didn’t threaten her. Far from it. Intelligent women were sexy, left-handed intelligent women even more so, and Kenner was both. But this was business, and not only was she working, but she had a serious situation on her hands. This was not the time to entertain any thoughts that didn’t pertain to solving their problem.

  Andrea had never been attracted to anyone she worked with. Her single-mindedness didn’t allow her to think about anything other than the job in front of her. An ex-girlfriend’s parting shot out the door had been that Andrea was nothing more than a clone of one of the many systems that NASA employed to keep their astronauts alive. Andrea hadn’t given any thought to the comment at the time, chalking it up to a nasty-breakup low blow. She had feelings, she had emotions. Sure, she wasn’t as carefree, as light and airy as someone like Kenner. But she wasn’t a machine either.

  She’d always been a little on the reserved side, cautious, a thinker first and then a doer. She was happy with her life. She’d reached the pinnacle of her career. Just about everything had worked out according to plan. She’d had a slight detour here and there, but each one had only given her more experience and exposure to do the job she held today. And speaking of the job, she started reading the reports on the screen in front of her out loud. She really needed to focus, and the sound of saying the words aloud made her concentrate on them, plus hearing them reinforced the material. She hadn’t had to employ this technique in years, and to do so now, with something so critical in front of her, was unsettling.

  “Get back on track, Andrea,” she said to herself, looking at the colorful graphic on the screen. Then she picked up a pen and began jotting down a few notes.

  *

  Kenner entered the control room, a cup of hot coffee in one hand, a tablet of paper and her favorite pen in the other. The same guard was at the door and repeated the same security checks in exactly the same order as she had yesterday. No one looked up when she entered, and she slowly made her way around the room. She stopped at each station, spending a few minutes reviewing the data displayed and listening to any conversation. These steps gave her a feel for the overall status of that area. Admittedly at some stops she didn’t understand anything, but at others she was able to get the general gist of what was going on. All of the information was critical to her understanding of the entire situation.

  Kenner had an uncanny ability to see the big picture of a situation and then drill down to the exact cause, issue, or problem and find the solution. The downside was that she couldn’t just focus on the problem area. Her mind grasped for reasoning and context and how all things fit together.

  Growing up, her thought process had frustrated her parents and just about every teacher she’d had. She was an inquisitive child, and growing up in the small town of Carltown, Arkansas she had been quickly labeled a disruptive student. Carltown, population thirty-eight thousand, four hundred and twelve, was located in the southeast corner of the state, abutting Louisiana and Mississippi. When her teachers were trying to focus on teaching the fundamentals, Kenner was struggling to understand how they all fit together. When the rest of the class was learning the proper sound of the letters A, B, and C, Kenner was lost because she couldn’t figure out what that had to do with words, or anything, for that matter. Once she saw how each letter and sound fit into a word, which then fit into a sentence, she excelled in reading. That was just how her brain worked. Unfortunately, the public school system in Carltown wasn’t equipped for a student like her, and Kenner suffered because of their inadequacy.

  She was brilliant, and living in rural Arkansas and kids being the cruel little shits they can be, they teased and tormented her for being a nerd and a brainiac. She graduated from college at nineteen, finished her master’s degree in mathematics at twenty, and her doctorate two years later. As a result she was always the odd-man out, so to speak. The awkwardness wasn’t quite as intense in college and as she’d worked on her PhD, but years of being under the microscope both for good and bad reasons had shaped who she was today. Her carefree attitude was more than a front to ward off insensitive, hurtful, jealous comments. It was how she lived her life. She took her work very seriously, having finally found a place to fit in at Quantum, but other than that she was just what she appeared to be. She didn’t care what people thought of her, but she agonized over her work at times to a state of complete exhaustion. She drove fast, played hard, and liked her women the same.

  A movement of color passed across her peripheral vision, and Kenner turned her head to find it. The royal blue in Andrea’s shirt was the first thing she’d noticed this morning when she turned around to see Andrea standing in her living room, staring at her. The second was the way the color made Andrea’s eyes stand out, and the third was the way her pulse started racing faster through her body.

  Andrea was dressed in a simple black suit, the crease in her pants pressed like a razor, the cuffs draping perfectly over her shoes. She wore a thin black belt around her waist, and had tucked her shirt in perfectly. She seemed to have stopped midway putting her jacket on, one arm in one out, as she stared at Kenner.

  “What?” Kenner had asked. But what she had really thought was what now?

  Andrea had recovered and finished putting on her jacket, her eyes looking everyplace other than at Kenner. “Nothing. Ready? We can grab something for breakfast on the way.”

  “I didn’t see anything in the fridge,” Kenner said without thinking. The look on Andrea’s face was one she recognized, and she quickly said, in a joking tone, “Yeah, I know. You’ve been a little busy lately.” Andrea had scowled, obviously not finding the humor in her words, and now when she looked at Kenner across the control room she still wasn’t smiling.

  “Boss wake up on the wrong side of the bed?” Kenner asked the man sitting next to her in the conference room she’d been in yesterday. They’d gathered for the post-shift meeting, and Andrea was again at the head of the table practically barking orders and
questioning every status report that was given. The man stifled a laugh, but not well enough.

  “Maxwell? Kenner? Is there something you want to share with the team?” Andrea asked expectantly.

  Andrea was more than a little cute when she frowned, but Kenner kept her opinion to herself.

  “No,” the man beside her answered, not looking at Kenner. Andrea’s eyes moved to Kenner. She raised her eyebrows as if to say “well”?

  “No, ma’am,” Kenner replied, the fire in Andrea’s eyes telling her she didn’t like her answer. “I was just asking Max what the telemetry readings were overnight.”

  Kenner kept her expression neutral as Andrea searched her face for any sign of deceit.

  “And what were they?” she asked, obviously hoping to catch them in a lie.

  “Twelve point eight,” Kenner answered.

  Max let out a sigh of relief.

  Andrea stared at her a few seconds more before turning her attention and next question to a small Hispanic woman Kenner hadn’t met.

  Ten minutes later Kenner couldn’t wait to get out of the meeting. She hated meetings and would rather be out solving the problem than talking about it. She put her hands on her thighs to stop her legs from fidgeting, but her feet took up the cadence instead. Finally after what felt like forever, Andrea dismissed them. All except her.

  “Kenner?”

  Shit, what did she want now? Was it to scold her to dress more professionally? Not to talk in class? Maybe it was that her services were no longer needed. She couldn’t care less about the first, would defend herself against the second, and, by the status reports, knew the third wasn’t true. She held her ground, braced for God knew what.

  “My boss, Barry Haven, wants to see you this morning.”

  Kenner couldn’t help but show her surprise. “Your boss?”

  “Yes. His office is this way,” Andrea replied, holding her hand out in the direction of one of the doors.