He felt as if he’d spent half his life in front of these displays. Maybe he had, he thought. He felt at home here, in this busy, competent, glowing little cockpit.

Just a day at the office.

Lamb didn’t want to throw his life away. On the other hand, if Columbia was lost, that was the end of the space program, for sure.

Maybe it was time to rewrite the rule books, one last time.

He thought his way ahead, through the uncertainties of the next few minutes. He would have to manage his energy. He actually had to accelerate, to get to the ground with enough airspeed; by the time he got down to ten thousand feet he needed to have picked up to two hundred and ninety knots, plus or minus a few percent.

He pitched Columbia’s nose down. His airspeed rose sharply.

“Flight, Surgeon. I got six bail-outs. We lost one.”

“…Six? Capcom—”

White said, “Columbia, Houston. What’s going on? You’re dropping out of fifteen thousand. Tom, you asshole, are you still on the flight deck?”

Fahy climbed away from her workstation and crossed to the capcom’s station. She plugged her headset into White’s loop. “Tom, this is Fahy. Get your ass out of there.”

“You’re breaking up, Barbara. Anyway, since when has a Flight Director spoken direct on air-to-ground?”

There was a stir among the controllers.

A picture of the orbiter had come up on the big screen at the front of the FCR. It was hazy with distance and magnification. White contrails looped back from the wings’ trailing edges. And black smoke poured from the OMS engine pods.

Thirteen thousand feet.

Lamb looked down at the baked desert surface. It was flat, semi-infinite, like one huge runway. It was why Edwards had been sited out here in the first place.

Columbia flew over the straight black line of U.S. 58.

This would make a hell of a tale to tell the boys over a couple of Baltics at Juanita’s, like the old days.

Fahy was still talking.

Patiently, he said, “If you’re going to be the capcom, give me my heading.”

“Tom—”

“Give me a heading, damn it.”

“Uh, surface wind two zero zero. Seven knots. Set one zero niner niner. Tom—”

Now he was down to ten thousand feet, and that dip had earned him around three hundred knots extra velocity. Not so bad; he ought to be able to land within six or seven miles if he worked at it…

He got another master alarm. Main bus undervolt. That last power unit was giving out on him. But it wasn’t dead yet.

He punched the red button to kill the clamor.

There was no sound at the press stand, save the barking crackle of the PA’s air-to-ground loop.

The recovery convoy was racing off across the desert surface, towards the orbiter’s projected touchdown position, miles from the runway. They raised a dust cloud a thousand feet tall.

The orbiter was huge as it came in, impossibly ungainly. It was gliding down a steep entry path, as smooth as if it were mounted on invisible rails.

You could tell the bird was sick. Even Hadamard could see that, at a glance. There was some kind of black smoke billowing out of the fat engine pods at the orbiter’s tail. The pods themselves were badly charred and buckled. And there were yellow flames, actual flames, licking along the leading edge of that big tail fin. The public affairs officer said that was hydrazine, leaking out of ruptured power units over the orbiter’s hot surfaces.

But it wasn’t a disaster yet. In the distance Hadamard could see five billowing white parachutes, like thistledown, drifting down through the air.

Hadamard tried to think ahead. He was going to have trouble with that arrogant old asshole Tom Lamb, when he emerged from this, covered in fresh glory. He’d have to be kicked upstairs to somewhere he and his old Apollo-era buddies could be kept quiet, once the first PR burst was over…

Arrogant old asshole.Suddenly he pictured Tom Lamb sitting on the flight deck of that battered old orbiter, alone, struggling to bring his spacecraft home.

His calculation receded. Hadamard found he was holding his breath.

To increase his rate of descent, he pushed forward on his stick. The back end of the bird came up a little, and the attitude change increased his sink rate.

It was a steep descent: at seventeen degrees, five times as steep as the normal airliner approach, dropping three feet in every fifteen flown. He was pretty much hanging in the straps now, falling fast. He tried to keep his speed constant, by opening and closing the speed-brake with the throttle lever. He could feel the brake take hold, dragging at the air.

Way to his right, he could see where the runway had been painted on the bare desert surface, remote, useless. Beyond it was a group of drab, dun buildings: it was the Wherry housing area, where he’d once lived, when he’d flown F-104 chasers for the X-15s. But that had been in the middle of a different century, a hundred lifetimes ago.

Two thousand feet.

“Beginning preflare.” Using his hand controller and his speed brake, he started to shallow his glideslope to two degrees.

Columbia responded, sluggishly, to the maneuver. But his speed was about right.

It was still possible. Even if the landing gear collapsed, even if the orbiter slid across half the Mojave on its belly. As long as he held her steady, through this final couple of thousand feet.

The baked desert surface fled beneath the prow of the orbiter already shimmering with heat haze.

At a hundred and thirty-five feet, the orbiter bottomed out of it’s dip. He lifted the cover of the landing gear arming switch, and pressed it. At ninety feet, he pushed the switch.

He heard a clump beneath him, as the heavy gear dropped and locked into place.

“Columbia,Houston. Gear down. We can see it, Tom.”

“Gear down, rog. I’m going to take this damn thing right into the hangar, Marcus.”

“Maybe we’ll dust it off a little first.”

Just a few more feet. Damn it, he could jump down from here and walk into Eddy.

“Coming in a little steep, Tom.”

“Yeah. Could do with a little prop wash right here.”

“Hell,” said White, “stop complaining. You never had to nurse a sick jet home to a carrier, in pitch darkness, in the middle of forty foot Atlantic swells. Even a black-shoe surface Navy guy like you can handle this…”

Now for the final maneuver, a nose-up flare, to shed a little more velocity.

But now the master alarm sounded again. He didn’t have time to kill it.

According to the warning array, the last power unit had failed.

He jammed on the speed-brake, and shoved at his stick. If he could pitch her forward, get her nose flat — maybe there would be just a little hydraulic pressure left—

But the stick was loose in his hand, the throttle lever unresponsive.

The orbiter tipped back.

He heard an immense bang from the rear of the craft, as the tail section struck Earth.

Columbia was still travelling at more than two hundred knots.

The orbiter bounced forwards, tipping down as its aerosurfaces fluttered. He could feel the bounce, the longitudinal shudder of the airframe. And then came the stall. The orbiter had lost too much of its airspeed in that tail-end scrape to sustain lift.

The nose pointed to the ground.

Now — with the master alarm still crying in his ear, and the caution/warning array a constellation of red lights — the Mojave came up to meet him, exploding in unwelcome detail, more hostile than the surface of the Moon.

Barbara Fahy watched every freeze-framed step in the destruction of STS-143.

The second impact broke the orbiter’s spine. The big delta wings crumpled, sending thermal protection tiles spinning into the air. The crew compartment, the nose of the craft, emerged from the impact apparently undamaged, trailing umbilical wires torn from the payload bay. Then it toppled over and drove itself nose-first into the desert. It broke apart, into shapeless, unrecognizable fragments. The tail section cracked open — perhaps that was the rupture of the helium pressurization tanks — and Fahy could see the hulks of the three big main engines come bouncing out of the expanding cloud of debris, still attached to their load-bearing structures and trailing feed pipes and cables.