Anyone listening to their dialogue would never have guessed they had a catastrophe. They had assumed machine mode, their panic suppressed, every action guided by rote memory and training. onboard computers would automatically set their return course.

They were continuing downrange, still climbing to four hundred thousand feet as they dissipated fuel.

Now she felt the dizzying spin as the orbiter began its pitcharound maneuver, rolling tail over nose. The horizon, which had been upside down, suddenly righted itself as they turned back toward Kennedy, almost four hundred miles away.

“Endeavour, this is Control. Go for main engine cutoff.”

“Roger,” responded Kittredge. “MECO now.” On the instrument panel, the three engine-status indicators suddenly flashed red. He had shut off the main engines, and in seconds, the external fuel tank would drop away into the sea.

Altitude dropping fast, thought Emma. But we’re headed for home.

She gave a start. A warning buzzed, and new panel lights flashed on the console.

“Control, we’ve lost computer number three!” cried Hewitt. “We have lost a nav-state vector! Repeat, we’ve lost a nav-state vector!”

“It could be an inertial-measurement malf,” said Andy Mercer, the other mission specialist seated beside Emma. “Take it off-line.”

“No! It might be a broken data bus!” cut in Emma. “I say we engage the backup.”

“Agreed,” snapped Kittredge.

“Going to backup,” said Hewitt. She switched to computer number five.

The vector reappeared. Every one heaved a sigh of relief.

The burst of explosive charges signaled the separation of the empty fuel tank. They couldn’t see it fall away into the sea, but knew another crisis point had just passed. The orbiter was flying free now, a fat and awkward bird gliding homeward.

Hewitt barked, “Shit! We’ve lost an APU!” Emma’s chin jerked up as a new buzzer sounded. An auxiliary power unit was out. Then another alarm screamed, and her gaze flew in panic to the consoles. A multitude of amber warning lights were flashing. On the video screens, all the data had vanished.

Instead there were only ominous black and white stripes. A catastrophic computer failure. They were flying without navigation data. Without flap control.

“Andy and I are on the APU malf!” yelled Emma.

“Reengage backup!” Hewitt flicked the switch and cursed. “I’m getting no joy, guys. Nothing’s happening—”

“Do it again!”

“Still not reengaging.”

“She’s banking!” cried Emma, and felt her stomach lurch sideways.

Kittredge wrestled with the joystick, but they had already rolled too far starboard. The horizon reeled to vertical and upside down. Emma’s stomach lurched again as they spun right side up. The next rotation came faster, the horizon twisting in sickening whirl of sky and sea and sky.

A death spiral.

She heard Hewitt groan, heard Kittredge say, with flat resignation, “I’ve lost her.” Then the fatal spin accelerated, plunging to an abrupt and shocking end.

There was only silence.

An amused voice said over their comm units, “Sorry, guys. You didn’t make it that time.”

Emma yanked off her headset. “That wasn’t fair, Hazel!” Jill Hewitt chimed in with a protesting, “Hey, you meant to kill us. There was no way to save it.” Emma was the first crew member to scramble out of the shuttle flight simulator. With the others right behind her, she marched into the windowless control room, where their three instructors at the row of consoles.

Team Leader Hazel Barra, wearing a mischievous smile, swiveled around to face Commander Kittredge’s irate crew of four.

Though Hazel looked like a buxom earth mother with her gloriously frizzy brown hair, she was, in truth, a ruthless gameplayer who ran her flight crews through the most difficult of simulations and seemed to count it as a victory whenever the crew failed to survive. Hazel was well aware of the fact that every launch could end in disaster, and she wanted her astronauts equipped with the to survive. Losing one of her teams was a nightmare she hoped never to face.

“That really was below the belt, Hazel,” complained Kittredge.

“Hey, you guys keep surviving. We have to knock down your cockiness a notch.”

“Come on,” said Andy. “Two engines down on liftoff? A broken data bus? An APU out? And then you throw in a failed number five computer? How many malfs and nits is that? It’s not realistic.”

Patrick, one of the other instructors, swiveled around with a grin. “You guys didn’t even notice the other stuff we did.”

“What else was there?”

“I threw in a nit on your oxygen tank sensor. None of you saw the change in the pressure gauge, did you?”

Kittredge gave a laugh. “When did we have time? We were juggling a dozen other malfunctions.”

Hazel raised a stout arm in a call for a truce. “Okay, guys. Maybe we did overdo it. Frankly, we were surprised you got as far as you did with the RTLS abort. We wanted to throw in another wrench, to make it more interesting.”

“You threw in the whole damn toolbox,” snorted Hewitt.

“The truth is,” said Patrick, “you guys are a little cocky.”

“The word is confident,” said Emma.

“Which is good,” Hazel admitted. “It’s good to be confident. You showed great teamwork at the integrated sim last week. Even Gordon Obie said he was impressed.”

“The Sphinx said that?” Kittredge’s eyebrow lifted in surprise.

Gordon Obie was the director of Flight Crew Operations, a man so bafflingly silent and aloof that no one at JSC really knew him. He would sit through entire mission management meetings without uttering a single word, yet no one doubted he was mentally recording every detail. Among the astronauts, Obie was viewed with both awe and more than a little fear. With his power over final flight assignments, he could make or break your career. The fact that he had praised Kittredge’s team was good news indeed.

In her next breath, though, Hazel kicked the pedestal out from under them. “However,” she said, “Obie is also concerned that guys are too lighthearted about this. That it’s still a game to you.”

“What does Obie expect us to do?” said Hewitt. “Obsess over the ten thousand ways we could crash and burn?”

“Disaster is not theoretical.” Hazel’s statement, so quietly spoken, made them fall momentarily silent. Since Challenger, every member of the astronaut was fully aware that it was only a matter of time before there was another major mishap. Human beings sitting atop rockets primed to explode with five million pounds of thrust can’t afford to be sanguine about the hazards of their profession. Yet they seldom thought about dying in space, to talk about it was to admit its possibility, to acknowledge that the next Challenger might carry one’s name on the crew roster.

Hazel realized she’d thrown a damper on their high spirits. It was not a good way to end a training session, and now she backpedaled on her earlier criticism.

“I’m only saying this because you guys are already so well integrated. I have to work hard to trip you up. You’ve got three till launch, and you’re already in good shape. But I want you in even better shape.”

“In other words, guys,” said Patrick from his console. “Not so cocky.” Bob Kittredge dipped his head in mock humility. “We’ll go home now and put on the hair shirts.”

“Overconfidence is dangerous,” said Hazel. She rose from the chair and stood up to face Kittredge. A veteran of three shuttle flights, Kittredge was half a head taller, and he had the bearing of a naval pilot, which he had once been. Hazel was not intimidated by Kittredge, or by any of her astronauts. Whether were rocket scientists or military heroes, they inspired in her same maternal concern, the wish that they make it back from their missions alive.

She said, “You’re so good at command, Bob, you’ve lulled your crew into thinking it’s easy.”