Kip Dawson’s mind returns to the reality of Intrepid’s cabin, the sounds rising in volume around him but altered now and somehow incapable of threatening him, even as his adrenaline flows like a flood-stage river.

He shakes his head against the steady g-forces. There’s a strange comfort, he thinks, in the force of this rocket-propelled deceleration pressing him down in the seat—an affirmation that Newton’s laws are still relevant. Back in the Mojave ground school he’d thought the math beyond him and was astounded to discover how straightforward the equations are for the dynamics that are shaking him now. So many thousands of pounds of thrust out of the engine nozzles for so many seconds in the absence of air raises or lowers speed predictably, and he’s filled with awe that, in essence, Intrepidis merely coming to a stop before dropping back into the atmosphere. No screaming trail of charged, burning plasma across the sky. No three-thousand-degree temperatures to be absorbed and deflected. Just a small, private ship dropping back in like a badminton birdie.

The countdown to engine cutoff is on the screen and less than forty seconds away, the nose-up angle approaching sixty degrees. Forward speed is coming under a thousand five hundred miles per hour, and still he’s hanging on and holding the dot in the V.

He wonders if any radar facility will pick him up, or if anyone at Mojave even has a clue he’s not still in his stable orbit. If he can’t find an airport and ends up hurt or dead in the back country of Arizona, he figures they won’t find him for days or weeks.

Or maybe even years.

Poor old Kip,he thinks with a smile, the boy just disappeared while on orbit and no one ever knew why.

And still he can feel the serenity growing within. It doesn’t matter. Everything is as it should be.

Ten seconds to cutoff.He almost doesn’t want the thrust to stop, but the noise has been deafening and he looks forward to quiet.

Engine shutdown catches him by surprise, kicking him forward. Again he’s in zero gravity and it seems wrong. Shouldn’t he feelthe downward pull of Earth—the increase of thirty-two feet per second in speed every second?

Technically he’s still in space, just nowhere near high enough or fast enough to stay there any longer.

Kip checks the descent speed. Two hundred sixty feet per second. He sees the target dot on the ADI, attitude deviation indicator, blinking red as it starts moving down. He moves the sidestick controller to follow, startled when the Earth swims back into view. Intrepid’s nose changes pitch from near vertical through the horizontal and continues downward to twenty degrees below the horizon. He wants to look at the surface below and try to figure out where he is, but his eyes have to stay riveted on the ADI until he feels the ship stabilize. Funny how suddenly it seems so easy, and just a few days ago he’d been spinning out of control like a crazed gyro.

The steadiness of the ship now that the engine is quiet is almost unnerving, and he remembers to consult the checklist Velcroed to his knee before reconfiguring the space plane and raising the tail structure to keep down the speed of reentry. Instead of his finger shaking like before as he points it at the next section of the reentry checklist, his hand is now steady, and his index finger tracks the next few steps as he reads through the verbiage, and triggers a small hydraulic pump.

A tiny whine akin to an energetic mosquito begins complaining from somewhere aft, confirming its operation. Lights illuminate on the forward panel and a series of lighted pushbuttons that control the process of feathering the ship light up as well. He pushes them in sequence, checking and rechecking each step and feeling the change in the tail structure as the twin-boomed empennage begins to rise to a nearly eighty-degree upward deflection.

Kip recalls the explanation almost verbatim: “As the air molecules begin to flash past, the tail will align vertically, leaving the body almost horizontal into the relative wind, the tremendous drag keeping the speed from building too high. Like a shuttlecock,” the instructor had added, sending Kip to the dictionary only to discover that “shuttlecock” essentially meant the same thing as “badminton birdie.”

Four hundred thousand feet… eighty miles,Kip thinks, the upper beginning of the atmosphere.

His gaze takes in the horizon once again as he uses the sidestick to bring the nose up, stopping at ten degrees down.

Speed is what? Okay, five hundred twenty knots and accelerating.

In less than five minutes, Intrepid’s heat-coated belly will peak at a temperature of just over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit—as long as he holds the right attitude. He thinks he can feel the molecules of air beginning to impact the fuselage, even though Intrepid’s relative, indicatedairspeed is still not even registering. But the true speed through the near vacuum around him is now just under twelve hundred miles per hour.

The curvature of the Earth is still pronounced, the darkness of space beyond still stark and amazing, and he realizes he’s seeing the same view as those who ride suborbitally to the same height.

Three hundred fifty-one thousand!

The ship seems to be moving ever so slightly now, not unlike an airplane in stable flight, but he knows the motion will increase along with the sound of the high-speed air impacting his fuselage.

Where am I?The question now becomes urgent. He cranes his neck to see better through the forward windscreen, looking for anything identifiable. The map display should be showing what he’s over, but for some reason it’s switched to some diagnostic screen and Kip punches first one, then another of the buttons around the perimeter to get the map back.

Oh my God, the seat!

He’s almost forgotten to reposition it, rotating the bottom upward and leaning it back in accordance with the checklist and tightening his seat and shoulder harness against the five-g peak deceleration to come.

The thought of Bill Campbell’s lightly restrained body behind him suddenly flashes in his consciousness. Only small Velcro straps are holding the plastic bag to the back bulkhead, and up to now all the deceleration has been backward. But when the real atmospheric braking starts, the body will tumble forward, and he wonders how to secure it.

He could strap it into his passenger seat close behind, but it’s too late to get out of the harnesses. The thought of the body crashing forward and into his hand on the control stick worries him, but he’ll deal with it when, and if.

Three hundred five thousand, velocity twenty-four hundred feet per second… sixteen hundred miles per hour straight down!

He can see a line of snow-covered mountains far below, and as he looks north, one of them resembles Pikes Peak and he wonders if he’s coming down in the middle of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo range.

But when he looks more closely, he realizes Colorado is apparently much farther north.

He could twist the sidestick controller around and yaw left or right to see better, but he’s afraid of disobeying the V on the ADI in front of him and he stifles the need. He’ll wait until Intrepidis an aircraft again with the tail aligned before looking for airfields.

A hint of slipstream noise is becoming more pronounced, a clear rising protest of assaulted atoms of nitrogen and oxygen shoved aside by a bow wave, a supersonic bow wave, as he descends below three hundred thousand feet, no longer in space but clearly still in the far upper reaches of the atmosphere. The speed is fairly steady now, just under Mach 3, and the indicated airspeed has begun to move upward in single digits.

A red symbol has begun blinking urgently on the forward display and Kip leans forward to read it.