He folded up his softscreen and put it in his breast pocket.

They arrived at the center of the base, the Dryden Flight Research Center. The parking lot was maybe half full, and there was a mass of network trucks and relay equipment outside the cafeteria.

He shivered when he got out of the car; the November sun still hadn’t driven off the chill of the desert night. The dry lake beds stretched off into the distance, and he could see sage brush and Joshua trees peppered over the dirt, diminishing to the eroded mountains at the horizon. Hadamard looked for his reception.

Barbara Fahy settled into her position in the FCR — pronounced “Ficker,” for Flight Control Room. She was the lead Flight Director with overall responsibility for STS-143, and the Flight Director of the team of controllers for the upcoming entry phase.

Right now, Columbia was still half a planet away from the Edwards Air Force Base landing site at California; the primary landing site, at Kennedy, had waved off because of a storm there. Now Fahy checked weather conditions at Edwards. The data came in from a meteorology group here at JSC. Cloud cover under ten thou was less than five percent. Visibility was eight miles.

Crosswinds were under ten knots. There were no thunderstorms or rain showers for forty miles. It was all well within the mission rules for landing.

Everything, right now, looked nominal.

She glanced around the FCR. There was an air of quiet expectancy as her crew took over their stations and settled in, preparing for this mission’s final, crucial — and dangerous — phase.

This FCR was the newest of the three control rooms here in JSC’s Building 30; the oldest, on the third floor, dated back to the days of Gemini and Apollo, and had been flash-frozen as a monument to those brave old days. Fahy still preferred the older rooms, with their blocky rows of benches, the workstations with bolted-in terminals and crude CRTs and keyboards, all hard-wired, so limited the controllers would bring in fold-up softscreens to do the heavy number-crunching. Damn it, she’d liked the old Gemini mission patches on the walls, and the framed retirement plaques, and the big old U.S. flag at front right, beside the plot screens; she even liked the ceiling tiles and the dingy yellow gloom, and the comforting litter of yellow stickies and styrofoam coffee cups and the ring binders full of mission rules…

But this room was more modern. The controllers’ DEC Alpha workstations were huge, black and sleek, with UNIX-controlled touch screens. The display/control system, the big projection screens at the front of the FCR, showed a mix of plots, timing data and images of an empty runway at Edwards. The decor was already dated — very nineties, done out in blue and grey, with a row of absurd potted-plants at the back of the room, which everyone ritually tried to poison with coffee dregs and soda. It was soulless. Nothing heroic had happened here. Of course, Fahy hoped nothing would, today.

Fahy began to monitor the flow of operations, through her console and the quiet voices of her controllers on their loops: Helium isolation switches closed, all four. Tank isolation switches open, all eight. Crossfeed switches closed. Checking aft RCS. Helium press switches open…

Fahy went around the horn, checking readiness for the deorbit burn.

“Got the comms locked in there, Inco?”

“Nice strong signal, Flight.”

“How about you, Fido?”

“Coming down the center of the runway, Flight, no problem.”

“Guidance, you happy?”

“Go, Flight.”

“DPS?”

“All four general purpose computers and the backup are up, Flight; all four GPCs loaded with OPS 3 and linked as redundant set. OMS data checked out.”

“Surgeon?”

“Everyone’s healthy, Flight.”

“Prop?”

“OMS and RCS consumables nominal, Flight.”

“GNC?”

“Guidance and control systems all nominal.”

“MMACS?”

“Thrust vector control gimbals are go. Vent door closed.”

“EGIL?”

“EGIL” was responsible for electrical systems, including the fuel cells. “Rog, Flight. Single APU start…”

And so it went. Mission Control was jargon-ridden, seemingly complex and full of acronyms, but the processes at its heart were simple enough. The three key functions were TT C: telemetry, tracking and command. Telemetry flowed down from the spacecraft into Fahy’s control center, for analysis, decision-making and control, and commands and ranging information were uploaded back to the craft.

It was simple. Fahy knew her job thoroughly, and was in control. She felt a thrill of adrenaline pumping through her veins, and she laid her hands on the cool surface of her workstation.

She’d come a long way to get to this position.

She’d started as a USAF officer, working as a launch crew commander on a Minuteman ICBM, and as a launch director for operational test launches out on the Air Force’s western test range. She’d come here to JSC to work on a couple of DoD Shuttle missions. After that she had resigned from the USAF to continue with NASA as a Flight Director.

As a kid, she’d longed to be an astronaut: more than that, a pilot, of a Shuttle. But as soon as she spent some time in Mission Control she realized that Shuttle was a ground show. Shuttle could fly itself to orbit and back to a smooth landing without any humans aboard at all. But it wouldn’t get off the ground without its Mission Controllers. This was the true bridge of what was still the world’s most advanced spacecraft.

She’d been involved with this mission, STS-143, for more than a year now, all the way back to the cargo integration review. In the endless integrated sims she’d pulled the crew and her team — called Black Gold Flight, after the Dallas oil-fields close to her home — into a tight unit.

And she’d been down to KSC several times before the launch, just so she could sit in OV-102 — Columbia — and crawl around every inch of space she could get to. As far as she was concerned the orbiter was her machine, five million pounds of living, breathing aluminum, kapton and wires. She liked to know the orbiter as well as she knew the mission commander, and every one of the four orbiters had its own personality, like custom cars.

Columbia,especially, was like a dear old friend, the first spacegoing orbiter to be built, a spacecraft which had travelled as far as from Earth to the sun.

And now Barbara Fahy was going to bring Columbia home.

“Capcom, tell the crew we have a go for deorbit burn.”

Lamb acknowledged the capcom. “Rog. Go for deorbit.”

The capcom said, “We want to report Columbia is in super shape. Almost no write-ups. We want her back in the hangar.”

“Okay, Joe. We know it. This old lady’s flying like a champ.”

“We’re watching,” the capcom, Joe Shaw, said. “Tom, you can start to maneuver to burn attitude whenever convenient.”

“You got it.”

Lamb and Angel started throwing switches in a tight choreography, working their way down their spiral-bound checklists. Benacerraf shadowed them. She watched the backs of their heads as they worked. The two military-shaved necks moved in synchronization, like components of some greater machine.

Lamb grasped his flight controller, a big chunky joystick, in his right hand. “Hold onto your lunch, Paula.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Lamb blipped the reaction control jets.

Columbia’s nose began to pitch up. Benacerraf watched through the flight deck’s airliner-cockpit windows as Earth wheeled. The huge, wrinkled-blue belly of the Indian Ocean dominated the planet, with the spiral of a big swirling anticyclone painted across it.

Now Columbia flew tail-first and upside down.

“Houston, Columbia. Maneuver to burn attitude complete.”