Chapter Text
Then:
Vel opened her eyes, let them take their time focusing, gazed up at the ceiling fan slowly turning above her, slowly churning the stale air.
A sparsely-furnished motel room. Curtains pulled shut against the dawn light. A single pale beam dancing with dust motes, illuminating the dingy interior. A bottle of tequila half-empty on the nightstand, and a body, warm and smooth, soft and hard in equal measure, pressed close against her own.
Cinta murmured something beside her, her cheek brushing Vel’s naked shoulder, skin on skin. Vel turned her head to bury her face in Cinta’s dark curls, breathing in her smell as she slightly tightened her arm around her, gently squeezing her curves.
“Good morning,” Cinta repeated, her lips tickling Vel’s collarbone.
“Morning,” Vel said, and kissed Cinta’s hair.
Then, unceremoniously, Cinta began gently disentangling herself from the encircling arm, starting to sit up. The sudden emptiness along Vel’s flank was devastating; only air and motel sheets caressing her skin instead of another warm, living body.
“We don’t have to get up yet,” she weakly protested. Cinta already had her underwear on, was hunting around the room for the other clothes she had discarded in a hurry last night.
“Yes we do,” Cinta replied, pulling up her uniform trousers. “I have to be on the flight line in an hour. If I smash the speed limit, I’ll just about have time for coffee and a shower.”
“Why, what time is it?” Vel wondered, watching the fan turn. She rolled over and reached for her Rolex, where she had left it next to the tequila bottle. She squinted blearily at its face. Shit.
She put the watch back on and lay there for a moment, watching Cinta dress. She was beautiful, she thought, definitely not for the first time. Her hair, her skin, her lips; her dark, dark eyes…
“You know,” Vel said, a little nervously. “It was good. Last night, it was good. Wasn’t it?” She felt stupid, self-conscious. There was so much more she wanted to say, but the words deserted her.
Cinta did not look up from buckling her belt. “It was.”
“We haven’t done that in a while, have we? I mean, with work and everything…”
“No, we’ve both been busy.” Cinta finished buttoning her shirt and started putting on her blue tunic, Captain’s bars flashing on its shoulder straps.
“We should…” Vel shrugged awkwardly, or would have if she was not currently horizontal and naked. “We should make time, we should… I’ve got some leave coming up. I was thinking of driving down to the border, and… I mean, we could…” She could feel her tongue stumbling over the words, and it wasn’t just the alcohol she had consumed last night. Why was it always so hard, talking to Cinta? Why did everything feel so important, so intense, when she was with her?
She knew what Cinta’s answer was going to be, just from the pause before she spoke. Vel knew she was thinking about how she couldn’t afford any time off, with the test series ramping up, with the deadlines Project Archangel had set for their experiments to be completed. So much was riding on these test results; the whole world, for one thing. Everything else had to come after that. Vel knew that all too, and felt like the most selfish, shallow person in the world for wanting something else while they were waiting for the axe to fall. For wanting more than this; more than the odd stolen hour in shitty motel rooms, followed by rushed goodbyes.
“Maybe,” Cinta said in the end, meaning no chance. “We’ll have to see. Maybe in a month or two.”
“Yeah.” Vel sank back against the pillow. She felt hollow inside. Cold. She took a deep, shuddering breath. “Yeah, we’ll have to see.”
Cinta gave her a backward glance, and a smile, as she put her hand on the doorhandle. That smile, so rare and yet… Vel felt her heart swell, the cold feeling melting as Cinta’s sunlight fell across her.
“See you up there,” Cinta said, and was gone.
“I love you,” Vel whispered to the closed door.
Two hours later, she was cruising at five hundred miles per hour and forty thousand feet, high enough to see the curve of the horizon and the blue sky starting to fade and darken. The High Desert was laid out below her, a shining mosaic of yellows, creams and pinks, broken up by dry brown mountains.
The F-104 Starfighter trembled and thundered around her, the smallest possible amount of shining silver aircraft wrapped around the largest possible jet engine. Five hundred mph represented little more than a third of its titanic power. She sat strapped snugly into the narrow cockpit, her hands on the stick and throttle, peering up through the domed plexiglass canopy as she breathed through her mask. Her head and vision were both clear and sharp, now; sucking pure oxygen for a few minutes was the best hangover cure she knew.
High overhead, she could see the huge swept wings of the B-52 mothership. Eight muddy exhaust trails stretched across the sky behind it, like tyre tracks in snow, as it hauled ass, already nearing its ceiling and fighting for every extra foot of altitude. And slung beneath one of those vast wings, the slim black missile-shape of the X-15. And strapped into the X-15’s own snug cockpit…
Cinta’s voice crackled over the radio channel: “Engine reset, hydraulic pressure are both about…” Static blotted out her voice for a moment. “Controls and flaps coming down.” Down below, Vel could see the control surfaces on the missile-shape moving as Cinta tested them.
“Roger,” ground control responded. “Chase One, have you got that?”
Vel keyed her mic and responded with her visual confirmation: “Affirmative, control. All set. Flaps coming down.”
Cinta spoke again: “Coming back up. Coming up. Flaps up. Circuit breakers are in.”
“Very good,” control responded. “Keep going, Cinta.”
“Mixing chamber temperatures are minus four-zero on number one and number two,” Cinta reported. “Alpha is still reading good, and beta is about one needle head off to the left.”
“Roger. Chase One, is your fuel okay for this?”
“Yes,” Vel replied, checking the gauge. “I have three thousand pounds.”
“Roger.”
The B-52 pilot’s voice now came popping and hissing over the channel: “Starting turn.”
“Roger.”
The giant bomber gently banked into the turn, still gaining height, and Vel shifted her stick and rudder to follow, the dartlike Starfighter easily keeping pace.
“One minute now, Cinta,” the bomber pilot advised. “One minute.”
“Roger.” Cinta sounded as cool as ever, almost bored, as if she was not about to hurtle at Mach 5 plus to more than two hundred and sixty thousand feet, the very edge of space. Vel, by contrast, could feel her hands sweating inside her gloves, struggled to keep her breathing calm and steady. “Experiment, camera. Give me a forty-five second call.”
The B-52 pilot came back immediately: “Forty-five seconds now.”
“Roger.” Vel could picture Cinta in her cockpit, bulky in her silver pressure suit, helmeted head moving as her eyes and hands darted over instruments and controls. “Prime, igniter ready. Precool igniter and tape. Give me fifteen seconds.”
There was a brief pause. Vel listened to her own breathing, waiting, dreading. Her heart pounded beneath her flight suit. Then the mothership pilot spoke again: “Fifteen seconds.”
“Prime good,” Cinta said. “Igniter…”
“Five seconds.”
“Looks good here, Cinta,” ground control chimed in.
“Roger,” Cinta acknowledged. And then: “Three…two…one. Launch.”
Vel’s heart jumped in her chest. The slim black shape dropped away from the bomber’s wing; falling, falling for a breathless eternity that, in reality, lasted less than a second. A great billow of vapour shot from its rear as it began to accelerate away. This trail was pure white, unlike the B-52’s dirty exhausts.
“Good light,” Vel informed control, trying to keep her voice even, trying not to let them hear her relief. “Looks good. Everything looks good, Cinta.”
“Roger,” control replied. “Cinta, check your altitude and heading. Right on track, Cinta. You're coming up on profile. Standby for theta.”
Vel lit the F-104’s afterburner, pushed the throttle to maximum as she hauled on the stick, standing the Starfighter almost on its tail. The gees steadily built up, pushing her back into the ejection seat, squashing her against the parachute pack she was sitting on. She saw the mach gauge climbing in front of her, barely felt it as she crashed through the sound barrier and kept accelerating. But even flying the hottest fighter in the Air Force’s inventory, she had no hope of catching the X-15.
“How do you read, Cinta?” control was asking. “Check your boost guidance null. We have you right on the track, on the profile.”
The white vapour trail stretched across the sky in a smooth, shining arc. Cinta was somewhere near its glinting tip, the X-15 already too small to see with the naked eye as it kept on climbing and accelerating.
Control was still talking, a constant patter of slightly crackling commentary: “Okay. Standby for eight-three thousand, Cinta.”
The sky around Vel was nearly black now, the Earth’s curve growing ever more pronounced as it fell away from her, and she in turn fell away from Cinta. The slim rocketship was somewhere above and ahead, black on black, outrunning even its own contrail; disappearing into the distance, into the heavens.
Leaving her behind.
Now:
Vel opened her eyes, let them take their time focusing, gazed up at the ceiling fan slowly turning above her, slowly churning the stale air.
Four white walls with cracked plaster; a wardrobe; a chair strewn with discarded clothes. Golden light spilling through the slats of the blind, painting the room in stripes of bright and dark. Beyond the blinds, a glimpse of the sapphire ocean, glittering waves breaking on pale golden sands. All around her, the emptiness of a bed built for two.
She reached out and stopped the alarm clock’s metallic trilling, picked up her Rolex from the nightstand and blinked at it, confirming it was time to get moving. She had been dreaming about the desert again, she realised as she sat up with a tiny, unconscious groan. Her mouth was dry and sour-tasting, her head thumping from the margaritas she had been sinking alone on the back porch last night. She had been dreaming about the X-15. Dreaming about…
She stood under the scalding shower long enough to clear the fumes and wake herself up, brushed her teeth, got dressed while the coffee was brewing; tan khaki uniform slacks, a matching short-sleeved shirt over a plain white t-shirt, her Major’s oakleaves pinned to the collar. She brushed her auburn hair into a tight regulation bun.
She looked out through the gaps in the blind while she was drinking her coffee, looking at the waves. The tiny bungalow was barely more than a shack, despite the exorbitant rent. She thought the adjoining stretch of beach and the view were worth the price.
She tore down the coastal highway in her fire-truck-red Ford Mustang convertible, the Rolling Stones blaring on the radio. Twinkly, trippy sitar chords over an apocalyptic drumbeat:
I see a red door and I want it painted black…
The car roared throatily, like a P-51 trying to take off, as she pressed her foot down and watched the needle steadily circle the speedometer. She took the bends recklessly, barely slowing down.
No colours anymore I want them to turn black…
Luckily, there was little traffic at this early hour. Up ahead, further along the coast, she could see the vast sprawl of the Finis Valorum Space Center, a maze of buildings and hangars and, standing well away from the rest for safety, the tall orange gantries of the launch pads.
Only one was currently occupied, right out at the far end of the headland; Launch Complex 34. That snow-white spire, flashing in the Florida sun, was the Saturn C-2 launch vehicle mated to the Archangel 1 spacecraft. Due for launch four weeks from now but already undergoing preflight preparations; the first step towards literally saving the world.
When she saw it, the enormity of what they were all doing here struck her like a glass of iced water to the face. All her personal worries and problems seemed pathetic, ranged against that.
The usual straggle of protestors loitered on the access road to the base, bearing placards accusing the whole project of being “Against God’s Will,” and similar horseshit. Some of them even shouted at the car as she sped past. There were fewer of them all the time, and none of those who still turned out seemed, to Vel, like anybody to take seriously.
Five years ago, it had been a crowd out here, barely held back by riot police and armed soldiers. That first intense wave of global panic, political and economic collapse, millenarian culture shock, had passed by then, but there had still been regular mass unrest around the world.
Nowadays, things seemed generally calmer in some ways, less stable in others. Television pundits on the late-night discussion shows Vel watched when she could not sleep pontificated about the lawlessness and moral laxity they perceived sweeping the nation. By this, they seemed mainly to mean young people engaging in sex and drugs and rock and roll. Both church attendance and violent crime statistics had been breaking records, year on year, since the start of the decade, whatever that might indicate.
In the meantime, the general public were being propagandised almost twenty-four hours a day by TV, newspapers, radio, government information films; continuously reassuring them Archangel was guaranteed to save them all. Some, maybe many, probably believed it, if only for something to cling onto, an excuse to continue more or less normal life while they could.
Vel was sure there were others, though, who had either convinced themselves Doomsday was never really going to happen, or that they were not going to think about it and live as well as they could while there was still time left. It was hard to maintain that level of panic from the early days, she supposed, for a decade or more.
That might change, though, as the deadline drew ever closer.
The Marines on the front gate checked her pass and waved her through the barrier. She parked in her reserved space behind the Astronaut Office building and turned off the engine, killing the music. She removed her steel-rimmed aviators and hung them from the breast pocket of her shirt.
She walked the short distance to the main administration building, briefcase in hand, people bustling around her. They wore a variety of different uniforms, spoke in an even wider range of accents and languages. Archangel truly was an international effort, something that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, during the Cold War of the 1950s. That was its main strength, and also the thing the project’s enemies, and it had more serious enemies than those sad sacks with the placards, seemed most bothered about.
“Hey, Major Sartha!”
She turned at the sound of a familiar voice, seeing a dark-haired, black-moustached man striding towards her from the direction of the Astronaut Office. His olive uniform had blue stripes on its shoulder boards and pilot’s wings pinned to its breast.
“Morning, Captain Andor.” She gave him a nod. Saluting and “yes ma’am-ing” were not the culture around here, much to the bemusement of most new military arrivals.
Cassian Andor. Joined the Mexican Air Force, 1953. Court-martialled for insubordination, 1957. Broke out of a military prison, 1958, and deserted to lend his skills to Gerrera’s revolutionaries in Cuba. Trained as a test pilot in the USSR, applied and was accepted for cosmonaut training. Got that shiny medal he was wearing for pulling a fellow officer out of a burning MiG-21 just before it exploded. Part of the first class of international astronauts recruited for Archangel in 1962, although like the other recruits from communist nations, he still insisted on referring to himself as a cosmonaut. They thought it sounded better, for some reason. His wife Bix was a rocket engine designer, currently working on the NERVA subproject in Nevada, and even more highly regarded in her field than he was.
Cassian always gave Vel the impression of a man slightly surprised to find himself where he was, after a life of trying and completely failing not to get into perilous situations.
“Are Gorn, Nemik and Taramyn in the office yet?” she asked him. “I want to speak to them before they go out to the pad for the plugs-out test.”
“You just missed them,” he answered. “Meteorology say there’s a storm due this afternoon, so they moved the test up to ten-hundred hours.”
Vel nodded. “I’ll talk to them later, then.”
The plugs-out test was yet another launch rehearsal. The prime crew were sick of them by now, impatient for the real thing. At least this one was aboard the actual spacecraft, atop the actual rocket, rather than in the simulator. They would be testing the command module could run on its own power once the umbilicals to the launch tower were disconnected. A formality, really, assuming the contractors had delivered the spacecraft in working order.
She could see the way Cassian was looking at her, impatiently but slightly sheepishly. She knew what he wanted to discuss with her. He was wondering whether or not it was a good idea.
“So is it true?” he asked eventually, slightly circumspectly. “About Skeen?”
“He’s canned,” she replied, with a shrug. “They decided Saturday morning.”
Cassian’s eyebrows shot up. “He only got arrested Friday night.”
Vel shrugged. “It wasn’t a hard decision, in the circumstances. He’s already packed up and shipped off to the stockade. It’s going to be announced officially later today.”
“Well, I never liked him,” Cassian commented. “You know that. But I’ve been training with him and Jyn for five months now.”
“I know.”
“Stabbing a civilian in a bar fight…” He shook his head at the senselessness of it all. “So what does this mean? We’re a crewmember short now, with twelve weeks to go. Are you going to give it to the backup crew instead?” He looked displeased by this, as well he might. No pilot liked giving up their seat, especially if they had done nothing wrong themselves.
“That’s why I’m on my way to meet with Dr Marki,” Vel said. “To sort all that out. Believe me, as soon as I know more, you will too.”
“Dr Marki?” Cassian nodded slowly. “She scares me.”
Vel forced a thin smile. “You’re not the only one, Captain.”
“I would have thought this was something Director Lear would decide personally. He has the final word on all crew assignments, right?”
Vel gave Cassian a wry look. “You mean you might try and appeal to him if you don’t like what Dr Marki and I decide?”
Cassian shrugged. “I’m not sure I’ll get the chance.” Again, he spoke with a slight caginess, visibly searching her face for clues as to what she was not telling him: “He used to drop by the office all the time, him and Lonni, but I don’t remember the last…”
“Director Lear’s busy,” she replied, as neutrally as she could. “Now we’re into flight testing, he’s got a lot on his plate. Public relations, congressional committees, a lot of other stuff that’s way above our paygrade. He’s delegating more than he used to.”
“To Dr Marki.”
“That’s right. It’s probably a good thing; no-one likes a micromanager.”
Cassian nodded along amiably enough, even as his eyes called her a liar.
The foyer of the administration building was somewhere between a dentist’s waiting room and a science museum. Slightly shabby easy chairs were ranged around coffee tables strewn with magazines. A scale model of the Archangel Command and Service Module hung from the ceiling, with a placeholder for the still under-development Nuclear Thermal Mining and Propulsion Module docked to its blunt nosecone. A date was painted in big black lettering across the white-painted wall behind the reception desk:
JULY 24, 1981.
A reminder to everyone who walked in here of the hard deadline to which they were all working.
“Major Sartha from the Astronaut Office,” she told the friendly secretary behind the desk. “I have an appointment with Dr Marki.”
“Please take a seat, Major. I’ll just let her know you’re here.”
Vel did not take a seat. Instead, as the receptionist picked up her phone, she wandered restlessly around the room, looking at the pictures and displays ranged around its walls, as if she had not seen them a thousand times before.
There was a big, framed copy of the famous photograph taken at the United Nations General Assembly in 1961. President Organa and Soviet General Secretary Dodonna shaking hands after signing the Space Cooperation Treaty. Lear could be seen lurking on the edge of the frame, grinning as though his team had just won the World Series. Which it had. Everything they had managed to build here had flowed from that moment, with a lot of help from Director Lear himself and his incredible, ruthless energy and focus.
When she saw him in that picture, as he had been six years ago, tall and strong with flamboyantly coiffed grey hair… When she compared that to the gaunt, grey-faced man she had last seen leaning on a cane a month or more ago…
She felt that fear again, the fear she had felt in her dream. She saw the X-15 falling from the bomber, that long pause before its engine ignited…
The next board showed a spectacular photograph of the Moscow skyline; the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral overhung and partly backlit by a huge, misty white smear in the night sky, bright enough to blot out any other stars, hanging in a clear black void.
Comet Erso-Lemelisk. The Doomsday Comet, some called it. Vel had once heard it referred to as the Death Star.
One whole wall of the room was covered in blowups of fuzzy negative images, black on white, like some sort of avant-garde art installation. They were photographic plates taken through a telescope, the initial observations of the comet made following its discovery in 1945 by observatories in both Britain and the United States. The theory was that a brush with Jupiter had altered its orbit, resulting in its first spectacular close approach to Earth just as the Second World War was ending amid an ocean of blood and a flash of atomic fire. Some people had taken that as a sign, an omen. They had not been far wrong.
Even back then, some of the astronomers who had used those observations to calculate the comet’s new orbit had been alarmed. Some predicted it would strike the Earth shortly after its next perihelion in 1957, International Geophysical Year, the year of Sputnik. They had been wrong, but only just. That was when the Moscow photograph had been taken, as the comet passed by, briefly coming closer than Earth’s own moon.
The observations conducted during that second passage a decade ago had left almost no doubt, at least not for about ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of the scientific community. There were still a few contrarians and doubters; there always were. For everyone apart from them, the prognosis was stark.
July 24, 1981; fourteen and a half years from now, but still far too soon.
Doomsday.
On that date, it had been determined, Comet Erso-Lemelisk, on its return journey after grazing the sun once again, would impact the planet Earth somewhere in the North Pacific, about a thousand miles north of Midway Atoll. There was a globe on a stand near one of the coffee tables, with the estimated target area marked by a large red circle. Ninety percent of life on Earth would be extinguished, according to one conservative estimate, as the impact tore apart the planet’s ecosystem. Civilisation would be snuffed out, across the globe, in the space of a day. There could be no bunker or bomb shelter deep enough or well-stocked enough to ride out such a cataclysm. The planet would recover, in ten million years or so, as would life upon it, but it would be forever changed. Humans, almost assuredly, would go the way of the dinosaurs.
Or maybe not. Not if Project Archangel and Director Lear, the mad genius at its centre, had anything to do with it.
In the summer of 1969, Erso-Lemelisk would swing around the sun once again on its monotonous twelve-year cycle. It would make another hair-raising close approach to Earth, even closer than in 1957, a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse.
And when that happened, if they could be ready in time, the astronauts of Project Archangel would have their one shot at saving the world and everybody in it.
They could not afford to miss.
She heard the secretary’s voice behind her. “Dr Marki is ready for you now. Please go right on through.”
The sign on the office door said DR. KLEYA MARKI, EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT TO THE DIRECTOR, PROJECT ARCHANGEL. Vel knocked once.
“It’s open.” The voice was low, clipped, vaguely disdainful.
The Executive Assistant herself was standing with her back to the door as Vel entered, gazing out of her office window in the direction of the launch pads, immaculate as ever in a tailored dark blue suit, her dark brown hair piled high on her head. Vel could just imagine her leaping out of her seat to assume this enigmatic pose in the time it had taken her to walk through from reception.
Dr Marki turned around, giving Vel a wide, but breathtakingly fake smile as she indicated the chair in front of the desk. Vel sank into it, and Marki sat down opposite her, still smiling, even as she eyed Vel as if she had grown her in a petri dish. There were certificates hanging on the walls of the large, very modernly furnished office, speaking of undergraduate and graduate degrees awarded by half a dozen prestigious schools in Europe and North America. Only the recently used ashtray next to the blotter and the smell of stale cigarette smoke in the air detracted from the carefully cultivated impression of slick, stark brilliance, indicating that the office’s occupant was human after all.
“Good morning, Major.” Marki managed to make the greeting sound like an insult. Her accent was soft and unplaceable, sounding vaguely English most of the time, with occasional hints of something else. “I have a full diary today, so let’s try and make this brief.”
“Of course, Dr Marki.” Vel tried her best to echo the other woman’s outward civility. She concentrated on unpacking her briefcase, sliding a sheaf of papers across the desk to Marki. “Is Director Lear not joining us?” she added, as offhandedly as she could manage.
“Director Lear is busy,” Marki replied, stonily, as she put on her large, black-framed reading glasses and looked down at Vel’s report.
“He’s always sat in on meetings about crew selection…”
“He’s busy,” Marki curtly reiterated, without looking up from her reading.
“How is he, these days?” Vel asked, cautiously, thinking of the grey skin, the sunken cheeks, the dull eyes, the cane. “Last time I saw him…”
“That’s none of your business,” Marki bluntly responded, finally looking at her again. The smile returned, even more unconvincing than before. Vel thought she might have angered her.
“Well, relay my best wishes to him,” she continued anyway. Marki stared at her in what she could only interpret as disbelieving fury.
“I shall,” she told Vel, with dangerous courtesy. “Of course, I’ll probably have to remind him who you are first.”
Vel felt herself bristle at this remark, even though she knew she should ignore it. It was schoolyard pettiness, she told herself, not worth a response, but she could not stop herself: “He knows who I am.”
“He knows who your cousin is, certainly.” Marki’s smile was openly insolent now. “I suppose that’s practically the same thing.”
“What about Lonni?” Vel asked, changing tack. “Doesn’t he want to…?”
“Associate Director Jung is in Washington, testifying before the Air and Space Committee,” Marki replied. “Director Lear has delegated this matter to me.” She paused, taking off the glasses and regarded Vel with hard brown eyes, even if the smile remained fixed in place. “Is that a problem, Major Sartha?”
“No,” Vel mumbled. “Of course not, Dr Marki.”
“Oh, I’m so pleased to hear you approve.” Marki tapped the report with a perfectly manicured fingernail. “This Skeen business. It doesn’t reflect well on the project or the Astronaut Office, does it?”
“No, Dr Marki.”
“How on Earth did he get selected in the first place?”
“He did very well in training,” Vel replied. “He was very highly qualified. We had no reason to believe…”
“He stabbed this man thirteen times,” Marki pointed out. “He’s lucky he’s only looking at an attempted murder charge. Was there no indication at all he was the sort of person who was capable of something like that?”
“He passed all the psychological assessments,” Vel said. “I can’t really tell you more than that.”
“I’m an engineer,” Marki said, “amongst other things. I understand that; numbers, test results, tolerances. Your flyboys, on the other hand… They surprise me, constantly. I don’t like surprises.”
“They also put their lives on the line for you, for everyone, every time they go up there,” Vel told her, trying to hold back her anger. “And they do it because they want to, because it doesn’t even occur to them to say “no.””
Marki looked at her for a few moments, as if trying to decide how she should respond to this outburst. “Their lives are not the only ones on the line,” she reminded Vel. She let out an irritated sigh. “Well, I suppose all that is for the legal system and our press department to deal with. Although it’s not good, not when Senator Palpatine and General Krennic are trying to get the ball rolling on Stardust again.”
“Are they still flogging that dead horse?” Vel wondered.
“And they will continue to flog it until we can demonstrate Archangel is going to work.” Vel saw Marki’s hand move reflexively towards the ashtray, towards the cigarettes and lighter she had probably stashed in the desk drawer before Vel came in, then move back onto the papers again. “We have two and a half years until our one chance to prevent Doomsday, and a full testing program between now and then. We can’t afford any slip-ups. And now we’re left with a practical problem regarding crew assignments.”
Vel nodded. “The prime crew for Archangel 2 is now one person short. They were due to launch three months from now, two months after Archangel 1, to practice docking with a mock-up of the nuclear module.”
Marki gave her a pained look. “I’m aware.”
“But that’s why we have a backup crew,” Vel continued. “Rook, Melshi and Îmwe are fully trained on the mission profile, We could sub them in and still make the launch date, but…”
“But?”
“It completely messes up the testing schedule. We’d have to do a lot of rejigging.”
“We have a second class of astronauts training in Houston,” Marki observed. “Could any of them be substituted for Skeen?”
Vel shook her head. “None of them will be ready until next year. They’re training for the translunar endurance missions in the Archangel Block II spacecraft, and live testing the NERVA rig in space, neither of which will be ready until then either. And even if any of the next class were ready now, I doubt we could integrate an outsider into the Archangel 2 crew in the time we have left. And if we delay…”
“The comet isn’t going to delay,” Marki cut in. “We can’t either.”
“Exactly,” Vel said. “The thing is, the Archangel 2 backup crew are slated to be the prime crew on Archangel 3 later this year, and then to fly again on the asteroid rendezvous mission eighteen months from now, which is a dress rehearsal of the whole Archangel concept from end to end. They won’t…”
“They won’t be back on Earth in time to prepare for the actual comet intercept in ’69.” Marki wearily pinched the bridge of her nose. “That’s the Archangel 2 prime crew’s job.”
“Right,” said Vel, “and they’ll need a full year to train for that. That’s the point of this whole thing, the mission everything else is working up to. That’s why Andor and Erso were initially selected for it.”
Marki gave a little nod. “Because Director Lear wanted someone from the Soviet cosmonaut program on the main mission, to encourage their buy-in, and the British practically forced Erso on us. Her father was one of the astronomers who discovered the thing, after all.”
“Well, it worked out,” Vel said. “He’s one of the greatest pilots I’ve ever seen, and she’s a brilliant engineer. They were top of their class, fair and square; the best people we’ve got.”
“And what about Skeen?” Marki asked, acidly. “Was he one of the best people we’ve got?”
“Someone had to get the third seat. Unfortunately, as it turns out, it was him.”
Marki leaned back in her leather-upholstered chair, looking exasperated for a moment before the calm, poised mask slipped back into place. “So… To allow the project to proceed according to the planned schedule, you need someone who has all the qualifications to be an astronaut, but who is also already intimately familiar with the planned Archangel 2 mission profile, to the extent they would be able to fill that third seat with the minimum of additional training?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Vel replied. “But the fact is, nobody like that exists.”
Marki stared at her again as if she had just said something unbelievably stupid. She often stared at people like that, in Vel’s experience. “Well, nobody apart from you, Major Sartha.”
Vel stared back. She felt herself go cold inside. She saw the desert again; yellows, creams and pinks. She saw the shining white trail stretching across the darkening sky. “Me?”
“You’d make the perfect third wheel, in fact. The communist hero, the British genius, and the cousin of the prospective next president of these United States.”
“I’m not an astronaut,” Vel protested. “I’m a trainer, an administrator. That’s what I’m good at.”
“Who said you were good at it?” Marki asked, contemptuously.
Vel tried her best to swallow the anger that came welling up from inside her, but still her voice sounded choked and rough to her: “Director Lear told me I was good.”
“Well, yes, he’s always been a people pleaser.” What was that bitterness she heard in Marki’s voice, she wondered? It seemed more raw, more real, then her characteristic meanness. Was it...jealousy? “But let’s be honest, if your cousin wasn’t your cousin, I doubt we would have hired you. What with your baggage, I mean.”
Vel blinked, breathing hard, trying to hold down her anger, trying to resist the urge to do something that would land her in the cell next to Skeen’s. “My baggage?”
“Everyone knows you went to pieces after, well…Cinta went to pieces.”
Vel was stunned. That was the lowest of blows. She bowed her head, forcing herself to take deep breaths, trying to stay composed, trying not to let Marki see how badly she had wounded her.
“You’re a qualified test pilot and flight instructor,” Marki went on, “but for the past four years you’ve barely flown. Just the minimum hours to maintain your qualification. Why is that?”
“You know why,” Vel said, quietly. “I was ill for a while.” That was the truth. “I got better.” That was a lie. “But even allowing for that, I think I’ve contributed as much to this project as anyone.” And then, because she was not going to take such verbal slaps without slapping back: “As much as you have, anyway.”
Marki raised her eyebrows, the smile creeping across her face again. She was outraged, Vel hoped. “You have no idea what I do, Major Sartha. The Astronaut Office is but one of many plates I am tasked with keeping spinning, although I will admit it is one of the more annoying ones.” She let out another sigh. “Look, I don’t like it any more than you do, but in spite of all the misgivings I’ve outlined, you’re the obvious choice. You trained the astronauts. You know the test schedule and the mission architecture inside out.”
“I can’t do it,” Vel said. The dry brown mountains; the black missile-shape falling, falling…
“Are you a coward, Major Sartha, is that it?”
“No,” Vel said, very firmly, meeting Marki’s piercing gaze with one of her own.
“What do you think Cinta would say if I asked her to do this?” Marki asked, very calmly. The casual cruelty in her voice and eyes was astonishing. “Do you think she’d make excuses?”
“No, she wouldn’t,” Vel said, bitterly, but certainly. “She’d do anything you asked of her. You wouldn’t even have to ask. You might not understand pilots, but I think you understand that much.”
Marki did not deign to address this last observation. “And what would she think of you putting your disgusting self-pity ahead of the survival of humanity? Would she think maybe you were only ever playing at this aviation business, posing, trying to scandalise those old-money parents you hate?”
“I’m a good pilot,” Vel insisted, and it sounded ridiculous in her own ears, the mewling of a petulant child. She could feel the tears trying to escape and fought them as hard as she could. She was not giving Marki that satisfaction. “Maybe not as good as Cinta. And maybe I’m not as strong a person as Cinta, maybe I can’t just sacrifice everything else for the project, but I’m not a coward, and I’m not a poser.”
“In that case, you’ll do what’s required of you,” Marki told her, frostily. “However hard it might be for you.” It was a statement, not a question.
The phone on the desk buzzed suddenly, making Vel jump. Marki gave her a withering glance as she picked it up: “Marki speaking.”
There was a pause as she listened, while Vel sniffed and gathered up her papers and tried to hold on to what was left of her dignity.
And then she saw Dr Marki’s face freeze.
“I see,” she said to the person on the other end of the phone, and all of the poise and attitude melted away. She actually looked shocked for a second. “I’ll be right over,” she said, and put the receiver down.
The abrupt change in the other woman’s manner was enough to shock Vel too, out of her anger and misery. She felt her heart patter and her face tingle as the blood drained out of it. “What’s happened?”
“There’s been an accident,” Dr Marki said, softly, almost sounding dazed. “Out at Launch Complex 34. A fire.”
Continued…