He takes these games too seriously, York thought.

At this point the biconic would be traveling at many times the local speed of sound. Still glowing, it would streak across the Martian sky, scrawling a wake of vapor across unmarked skies, shedding great crashing waves of acoustical energy across the dead, empty landscape, a land that had lain undisturbed for half a billion years.

This sure would be a spectacular phase of the mission, she conceded. A pilot’s dream.

Maybe, York thought wistfully, the aborted Space Shuttle might have felt something like this. To fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert would have been a hell of a difference from falling into the sea ass-backwards in an Apollo. We lost a lot of beauty when we killed the Shuttle.

“Sixty-one thousand feet,” she read off.

“Rager. Reducing air brake to 65 percent. Take air data.”

“Rog.” York flicked a dummy switch. On a real biconic a series of pitot-static probes would thrust out of the craft’s surface then to confirm measurements of dynamic pressure and airspeed.

“Looking good,” Gershon said. “Coming out of the third roll.” He grinned at York. “Hey, maybe we’re going to get through this fucker.”

“Maybe. Fifty thousand feet.”

“Banking for fourth roll.”

The plaster of paris plain, unobscured by the fake plasma glow, tipped over again.

“Okay, coming out of the roll. Coming out… come on, baby… coming out of the roll… Shit.”

Here it comes, York thought. Every sim, they were out to get you somewhere. Her stomach contracted.

The attitude indicator was tumbling. Gershon worked his controls and snapped through emergency checklists. “The aerosurfaces are biting. But just not enough. Fuck. What’s going on?”

York glanced out of her window. Gershon couldn’t get out of the roll, and the landscape had tilted up through more than ninety degrees; the biconic, in the imagination of the computer, had tipped over almost completely.

“Recommend you abort,” the SimSup said calmly, breaking his radio silence.

“Screw you,” Gershon said. He kept working through his lists, checking instruments, snapping switches.

This is what pilots do, at times like this, York realized. Work through the book. Keep it logical, but move fast. Try A. If it doesn’t work, try B. If it doesn’t work, try C…

But the plaster landscape was upside-down completely, the fake craters and canyons like a crimson roof above them.

York was shocked to find that only seconds had elapsed since the first sign of the problem. That was all you were granted: seconds, to figure out the underlying cause of what could be a complex, multiple failure.

There was virtually no chance of succeeding.

If anything went wrong, you had to get out of there, more or less immediately. Or you’d die. The equation was as simple, as finely balanced, as that.

“Ralph, we have to hit abort.”

Gershon didn’t even bother to reply; he just kept working feverishly.

The landscape tilted farther, visibly coming closer. The biconic was starting to go into a hypersonic spin.

“Hit abort,” she told Gershon again. “Christ, Ralph, once we go into a spin we’re through.”

The light in the cabin flickered as the fake Martian sky hurtled past the window. She had a sudden, comical image of a little TV camera on its robot arm spinning around over a plaster-of-paris floor.

If this were for real, my head would be shaking now, battering against the helmet, my inner ears coming apart from Coriolis forces. If this were for real, the craft would start to break up, maybe before I lost consciousness.

“MEM, we recommend you abort. We recommend—”

“Ralph! Jesus Christ! Ralph!”

There was a shudder, a crunch, a puff of white powder.

The landscape froze in place.

“Welcome to Mars,” the SimSup said drily. “We’re just figuring out the size of the crater you made.”

“Fuck,” Gershon said. He pulled off his helmet and threw it across the fake cabin.

The two of them clambered out of the back of the simulator. From outside it looked like the nose of a small light aircraft, a cockpit section roughly sheared off, with wires and umbilical cables dangling from the gaping rear.

The technicians were grinning at them. “Hey, Ralph, You busted our camera. Flew it right on down into the plaster of paris. How about that.”

Gershon wasn’t laughing. He confronted York. He pointed a gloved finger at her face. “Don’t you ever give me orders when we’re flying.”

She was amused rather than disquieted; she’d seen such tantrums before. Most of the time she was able to cope with Gershon, and he seemed prepared, in his rough way, to accept her as an equal in exercises like this. Even though he’d lectured to her, back when she was an ascan. Then, every so often, he would blow his stack like this.

“Orders? Me? You’re the pilot, Ralph.”

“Don’t you fucking forget it.” And he went stalking off for the wake.

Phil Stone came strolling up to her, dressed in a light blue coverall, his hands in his pockets. “Don’t take it personally.”

“I don’t.” York shrugged, and began to pull off her gloves. “Pretty soon he’ll be bawling out the techs. And then the SimSup. And then you, and… Bawling his way up the chain of command. I was just the first one to hand, the place to start. He hates to fail.”

“He didn’t fail,” Stone said. “That failure wasn’t recoverable.”

“That hypersonic spin—”

“I wrote the book about hypersonic spins,” he said, and she suspected he had a war story behind that somewhere. “I know about the spin. But even before that point, you couldn’t have gotten out of it.”

“What happened?”

“You don’t want to wait for the wake?” The wake was the long, harrowing official debrief.

“Just give me the headline.”

“Your nose RCS thrusters started firing. Just as you went into that fourth roll reversal. The aerosurface couldn’t handle the additional torque.”

She thought about that. “But that firing didn’t show up in the instruments. And besides, it’s impossible for the RCS to fire at that point. We’d dumped the fuel.”

“You thought you had.” He grinned. “Just one damn thing after another, huh?”

“Christ.” She shoved her gloves into her helmet. “Sometimes I think these guys want us to fail.”

“No. But you have to fail, a hundred times maybe, so you can succeed the one time when you need to. Besides, this is the place to do it. Nobody ever got killed in a sim. Anyhow, this was primarily a proving flight for the biconic design, not for the pilots.”

That was true, York reflected. The biconic sim was so unpopular, in fact, that only real sim hounds, people desperate to rack up some sim time, any sim time, in order to get a better seat in the crew rotation, would consider working on it.

People like Natalie York and Ralph Gershon.

Stone said, “And I don’t think this thing is ever going to fly. There’s too damn many things to go wrong. The percentage of biconic crashes we get in the sims is a joke…”

“It’s just a shame Ralph doesn’t have that perspective.”

“He may be the best we’ve got,” Stone said quietly.

She was surprised to hear Stone say that.

Stone went on, “He kept on trying. Everything he had, trying to pull her out of that spin. He came closer to saving the MEM than I thought anybody could get.

“By the way,” he said. “You did pretty well in there yourself. Calling for abort when you did was the second best option.”

“What was the best?”

“What Ralph did. Come on.” He slapped her on the back, the pressure of his hand heavy through the layers of her pressure suit. “I’ll buy you a coffee before the wake.”

They walked out of the training building.