"Thank you, Melanie," he said.

"I was just going down the hall for some coffee," she said. "Would you like some, Mr. Chisum?"

"I would, thank you, Melanie."

"Be right back, then." She smiled and closed the door gently behind her.

It might have been the first time he wished he'd gone for the director's job. It wouldn't be the last.

HOUSTON, AUGUST 2007

"Why me?" Kenai said. It was more of a demand than a question, but at least then no one could accuse her of whining. "Why not Bill, or Mike?"

"Thanks a bunch, there, Kenai," Mike said.

"He's a Muslim, Rick," Kenai said, keeping her eyes on their commander. He was the one who had to be convinced. "He's not going to like having a woman for a babysitter. Think of how it'll play back home, a woman, an inferior instructing him. They'll see it on television every night, and he'll know it. He's not going to like it."

Her voice ended on something perilously close to a plea. Rick, leaning against a desk, his arms folded, frowned at the floor and said nothing. The rest of the Carnivore Crew watched and waited. There was no effort, individually or together, to take her part. She couldn't find it in her heart to blame them. None of them wanted to be the babysitter, either.

"It's your first time on orbit, too," Joel said in a tone that brooked no argument. "You'll know what to keep him away from."

"How about we keep him away from the shuttle altogether?" Laurel said brightly.

Joel pretended he hadn't heard her. He consulted the omnipresent clipboard. "I think that's all for today. Press conference on Monday, don't forget, clean flight suits all around."

The door closed behind him. "Nice try, Nanook," Laurel said.

"But no cigar," Mike Williams said.

Kenai gave a half-hearted shrug. "Worth the effort. I thought maybe when he didn't show for the Vomit Comet training in March…" Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head.

Rick looked up. "Somebody's got to wet-nurse him, Kenai. Sorry you drew the short straw."

There was an almost imperceptible relaxation of tension around the room. That was that. "Okay," Kenai said, dismissing the sheik for more important matters, "you've all got the updates on the robot arm modifications? Good. It'll add about twenty minutes to each deployment, a small price to pay for the increase in sensitivity. She's handling like something out of Robert Heinlein now anyway."

"Unless you're the one EVA, holding on to five thousand pounds of satellite with your fingertips," Mike pointed out.

"Bitch, bitch, bitch," Bill said. "You'd kill anyone who tried to take the job away from you, Gator."

Bill had a predilection for nicknames, and he'd called Kenai Nanook from the first day he met her, since she was from Alaska and "nanook" was the local word for polar bear. Mike was from Florida and he had a long, wide, flat nose that naturally led to Bill calling him Alligator. When the secretaries over at admin got to hear of it, they were the Carnivore Crew from that day forward. After that, the deluge. Now Laurel from California was Condor, Rick from Washington State was Killer Whale, Killer for short, and Bill from Minnesota was Wolverine, partly because he was from Minnesota but mostly because he was a huge X-Men fan. It didn't hurt that he looked a little like Hugh Jackman, only black.

A week later, the sheik in question arrived for an introductory visit. He looked like Disney's Aladdin, only older and more arrogant, and from the first he proved to be labor intensive. Kenai was right, he wasn't happy with a woman as his partner, and he said so. Joel, to his credit, ignored his hints that someone of the sheik's stature in the Islamic community and his family connections and their immense wealth and political profile and blah blah blah really ought to be taken in tow by the mission's commander. The director of flight operations nipped that suggestion in the bud immediately.

Joel was probably afraid of what Rick would do to him if he did, for good reason. Rick did not suffer fools gladly, and people who inflicted fools upon him had been known to rue the day, if not resign on the spot.

The sheik had various other concerns, usually delivered to Kenai in an imperious voice as he looked down his very long nose. For one thing, he had seen photos of previous crews in space and he'd noticed that often the crew was wearing shorts. He trusted Kenai would not be orbiting the earth half-naked.

Kenai exchanged a glance with Laurel, who happened to be loitering within earshot. "I'm sorry, sir, I just assumed…"

"Assumed what?" the sheik said loftily.

"That you had been briefed." She did her best to look as if she were reluctant to be the one to bring him the bad news. "This mission…"

His brow puckered. "Yes?"

"Well, sir, this mission will be accomplished totally in the nude."

If Laurel hadn't burst out laughing he might have taken this horror straight to Joel, but as it was he didn't speak directly to Kenai for three days, which at least proved he wasn't entirely stupid.

But it was yet another unwanted distraction in the now only eleven months leading up to launch. Kenai gritted her teeth and tried to be more accessible to the royal pain in the ass. She grudged the valuable chunks of time he ate up, but it was better for her to intercept any further problems before they got to the commander.

And let's face it, Bill was right, she would have killed anyone who tried to take the job from her. There was nothing, no irritation she would not suffer to pass that magic mile marker of fifty miles up that would turn her silver astronaut pin to gold and make her a bona fide astronaut.

Flight was all she had ever wanted, from the moment she was four when her father had lifted her into his lap, put her hands on the stick of his Cessna 172, and performed a simple right bank. She'd agitated for a shot at the right seat from the time she was eight, but her father wouldn't let her try until her feet reached the pedals without assistance.

She had almost a hundred hours in dual before she had her license, which she got the day she turned sixteen, a full six months before she bothered to get her driver's license. She only got around to getting her driver's license because she got tired of waiting on rides to the airport.

She graduated from high school a year early and seven years later was out the other side of a BA in English-she'd always liked to read, and she'd noticed that the ability to write simple declarative sentences was a serious asset in the world of aviation, especially when dealing with the FAA-and an MS in electrical engineering. By the time she was a sophomore in college she was qualified to fly commercial and put herself through school flying Twin Otters and then Beechcraft 1900 for Era Aviation between Homer and Anchorage on weekends. Upon graduation she went to work for Boeing in systems design. Shortly thereafter she was test-flying jets right off the drafting table, in between times taking her doctorate, also in electrical engineering. Her doctoral thesis was an overview of the evolution of electrical systems during the design and operation of the space shuttle, and ended with the proposal of a radical new design for the next generation of manned space flight vehicles that was energy efficient without reducing power. It was well written and relatively easy even for a layman to understand. It was what got her the job offer from NASA.

The goal had always been to fly in space. With no apology and no regrets, she figured she'd read too much Heinlein at an impressionable age and never recovered. It wasn't that they didn't know better now, no Venusian dragons or three-legged Martians, but the knowledge did not quench her thirst to go see with her own eyes.