One of the managers at Johnson in Houston answers.

“Yes, sir. They’ve lost all their communications.”

“Telemetry, too?” Geoff asks.

“We can’t pick it up if anything’s coming down. All their comm links went dark as soon as they arrived on orbit.”

“Have we visually looked at them?”

Heads nod and there’s a sudden switch to a videotape of the spacecraft in flight, a fuzzy, indistinct image shot with an incredibly long lens from a ground station in western Australia.

“So what am I seeing?” Geoff asks, leaning forward.

“The craft appears intact, and we’re reading livable heat on the other side of the windows. That could be just the window heaters we’re detecting, but most likely she’s still pressurized and survivable. We don’t see any visible damage, but… there’s this.”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Ed Rogers from Houston.”

The picture changes to a composite of black and white imagery and what appears to be a digital radar display.

“What am I looking at?” Shear demands.

The same voice responds.

“This is from NORAD’s array, just as ASA’s ship reached orbit. This is about a minute and a half after engine cutout. I’m going to go frame by frame here, because we have just two radar hits on what appears to be a very small object approaching very, very rapidly from in front of the craft, then one single radar hit of it on the backside, in a slightly different trajectory. At the same point, on the visual image, there’s a small burst of light that might indicate ejected debris aft of the capsule corresponding with the backside trajectory.”

“And in English, Dr. Rogers?”

“We think they got nailed by something NORAD wasn’t tracking.”

“And that’s where the radios went?”

“Sir, it apparently passed through the equipment bay of their ship, and God knows what damage it did, but knocking out virtually all their communications and their propulsion, control, and, eventually, even life support would not be an outlandish expectation.”

“Jesus!”

“Geoff, John Kent in Houston.” The voice of NASA’s chief astronaut, a former Air Force colonel, is not a welcome intrusion.

“Yeah, John.”

“We have Atlantisin the vehicle assembly building at the Cape and I can work up an emergency mission plan within an hour if you’d like.”

“Why, John?”

Silence fills the room and the circuits, a silence Geoff knows Colonel Kent will be unable to keep.

“If someone’s alive up there, we can’t just sit on our hands, can we?”

Geoff gets to his feet, his well-honed ability to put subordinates in their place virtually second nature.

“Thanks, everyone,” he says on the way out of the room, answering the question by default. He knows the effect on his staff, and he should thank Kent for the opportunity to once again demonstrate how an iron-ass leader wields his power. Those who press beyond the limits of what Geoff Shear wants to hear will be ignored and embarrassed.

Besides, he thinks darkly, Kent knows damn well what the policy is on rescuing privateers in space.

So Sharon was right after all.

Kip thinks of little else. The hope that he might somehow remember how to blast himself back out of orbit and find a way to land seems beyond overwhelming. He looks at the pile of checklists in his lap, having read over several trying to get a mental image of the long litany of technical duties that he’ll have to perform at the right moment in the right way to direct the rocket motor in precisely the right direction to lose all that speed they gained.

He sighs, shaking his head at the image of himself getting tangled up in what switch to hit next. Even if, somehow, he gets it all right and everything works, he’ll then pop out in the lower troposphere and have an on-the-job learning experience trying to dead-stick an engineless spacecraft down to a runway somewhere without colliding with something hard and unforgiving.

No, Sharon is going to be right, he decides. But there is still the slightest glimmer in his mind that he could escape. A shred of hope, like believing your football team can somehow use the last five seconds of the game to Hail Mary their way through ninety yards of determined defenders to the winning touchdown.

Possible, yes. Probable, no.

Okay, most likely I’m going to die.

And the hell of it is, he can’t even call Sharon to apologize.

He looks at his watch, then at the Earthscape passing below. He’s in darkness now somewhere over the Pacific, wondering why he has to wait for three more orbits before trying to leave. Maybe he should plan to try the retrofire sequence at the end of the second orbit, instead of waiting for the third? Or would that bring him down in the wrong place? To fire it right now, for instance, would probably mean a very wet and fatal landing a thousand miles east of Hawaii.

Wait a minute, dammit!he thinks, responding to a small wave of anger that punches at him, causing him to clench his jaw in self disgust. What am I doing? Giving up without a fight?

This defeatist attitude, he’s grappled with it before. The “Eeyore Syndrome,” he’s labeled it, a determination to find the worst in every situation. Hasn’t he warned the girls against it? Jerrod, too, until Jerrod literally rolled his eyes at him one day.

And here I sit programming myself to fail and die. Bullshit!

He takes a deep, if ragged, breath and forces himself to sit up, to comply with this newfound determination, but not really believing it. His mouth is cotton dry and he reaches for the water bottle by his seat, drinks deeply, then recaps it and slips it back in one of Bill Campbell’s seat pockets.

Okay, so what do we do first?

He pulls the checklists back to his lap, ignoring his shaking hands, and starts through the lists of steps again, determined this time to figure out and practice exactly what needs to be done.

I’ve got five hours before planned reentry. That’s an eternity. So what if it’s hard? I have to try.

The reward is survival. Possible survival.

After all,he reasons, they wouldn’t have taught this stuff in ground school back in Mojave if they didn’t think a passenger could handle it. So all the keys have to be right here!

The first sequence will be to turn the ship around, pointing the engine nozzles in the direction he’s traveling. There may be an automatic system to do just that, he figures, since it’s referenced in the verbiage of the checklist. But then how to initiate the maneuver on the panel? He imagines he may also have to use the control stick, the fighter-pilot-style, video-game type hand-control mounted on the right edge of the armrest.

Once more there’s a low whooshing noise in his ear, and he realizes he’s been hearing it periodically. Whenever it happens, he feels Intrepidmove slightly.

The reaction jets!

That’s what it has to be. And there has to be an automatic system making them fire, keeping the ship pointed straight ahead. It’s floating in a three-axis, three-dimensional environment, with yaw, pitch, and roll. Without air outside to operate against flight controls, the only way to move the ship around those three axes is firing tiny jets of whatever propellant Intrepiduses. He remembers the briefing clearly.

But there’s only so much propellant aboard, and he’ll need to make sure he doesn’t use too much. Without those little jets, there will be no way to position the ship for reentry or even slow down.

He stares harder at the forward panel, determined to find the appropriate switches and learn how to use them, and slowly, very slowly, some of the nomenclature begins to make sense. Just not enough.