The black smoke billowing from the tail section was suddenly brightened by reddish-orange flames, as the residual RCS fuel there burned.

The orbiter’s drag chute billowed out of its container in the tail. Briefly it flared to its full expanse, a half-globe of red, white and blue; then it crumpled, and fell to the dust, irrelevant.

White thought of Tom Lamb. It was like a vision, blinding him.

…Tom came loping out of a shallow crater, towards White. Tom looked like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white against the black sky, bouncing happily over the sandy surface of the Moon, Tom had one glove up over his chest, obscuring the tubes which connected his backpack to his oxygen and water inlets. His white oversuit was covered in dust splashes. His gold sun visor was up, and inside his white helmet. White could see Tom’s face, with its four-day growth of beard…

Damn, damn. It was as if it was yesterday. That was how he was going to remember his friend, he knew; as he was during those three sun-drenched days they’d had together on the Moon both of them feeling light as feathers: the most vivid moment of his life, three days that had shaped his whole damn existence.

He turned away from the FCR screens.

The morning California sunlight was bright. It illuminated the expanding cloud of dust and smoke, turning it into a kind of three-dimensional, kinetic sculpture of light, set against the remote hills surrounding the dry lake beds.

Hadamard, beyond calculation, knew he would spend the rest of his life with this brief sequence of images, watching them over and again.

Jiang gazed at the glistening curvature of Earth: the wrinkled oceans, the shadow-casting clouds stacked tall over the equator. Outside the cabin, all the way to infinity, there was no air; just silence. She felt small, fragile, barely protected by the thin skin of the xiaohao.

Where she passed, she relayed revolutionary messages, reading from a book she had carried in a pocket of her pressure suit. “Warm greetings from space,” she said. “Everything that is good in me I owe to our Communist Party and the Helmsman of the Country. This date is one on which mankind’s most cherished dreams come true, and also marks the triumph of Chinese science and technology…”

The words were so familiar to her, homilies from classes in politics, as to be almost meaningless. And yet, here, alone in the blackness of space, with the blue light of Earth illuminating the pages of the book, she felt filled with a deep, unfocused nostalgia. She felt growing within her an abiding attachment for her huge country, for the billion-strong horde of her countrymen: the brash entrepreneurial class in the bustling coastal cities, the peasants still scratching at their fields as they had done for five millennia. She was of them, and so of the Party which, after seven decades, still ruled; she would, she knew, never be anything more or less than that.

But now the ground controllers were telling her, in clipped sentences, of some disaster involving the American Space Shuttle. They sounded jubilant, she thought. They had her intone words of sympathy, of fellowship, broadcast from orbit.

The truth was she felt little concern, for whatever might have befallen the American astronauts. This was her moment; nothing could diminish that.

Though she knew she would be under pressure to become an ambassador for the space program, for the Party, and for China, Jiang intended to battle to stay within the unfolding program itself. The Helmsman had stated that a Chinese astronaut would walk on the surface of the Moon before 2019: the seventieth anniversary of Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic. Jiang felt her grin tighten as she thought about that. It would be a remarkable achievement, an affirmation that China would, after all, awake from her centuries-long slumber and become the dominant world power in the new millennium.

And it was only fifteen years away.

Jiang would still be less than fifty. Americans and Russians had flown at much greater ages than that…

And so she read the simple words of soldier and Party leaders, as she sailed over the skin of Earth.

Paula Benacerraf, suspended, could hear sounds, drifting up to her from the huge, empty ground below. Her own breathing was loud in her ears.

This was the end of the U.S. space program, and the end of her own career.

Earth was claiming her. For the rest of her life.

She could see her future, mapped out. Her destiny was no more than to be a survivor of Columbia, and somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, for the rest of her life.

She’d never get back to space again. She’d never again drift in all that light, never see the lights of her spacecraft as it drifted in its own orbit beneath her.

Like hell, she thought. There has to be an option.

She tucked up her legs, keeping away from the Earth as long as she could. But the impact in the dirt, when it came, was hard.

BOOK TWO

Low Earth Orbit

A.D. 2004 — A.D. 2008

“What did you think you were doing, Rosenberg?”

Marcia Delbruck, Rosenberg’s project boss, was pacing around her office, formidable in her Berkeley sweatshirt and frizzed-up hair: she had a copy of Jackie Benacerraf’s life-on-Titan article loaded on her big wall-mounted softscreen. “You’ve made a joke of us all, of the whole project.”

“That’s ridiculous, Marcia.”

“You let this woman Jackie Benacerraf get to you. You just can’t handle women, can you, Rosenberg?”

Actually, he thought, no. But he wasn’t going to sit here and take this. “All I did was speculate a little.”

“About life on Titan? Jesus Christ. Do you know how much damage that kind of crap can do?”

“No. No, I don’t really see what damage that kind of crap can do. I know it’s bad science to go shooting my mouth off about tentative hypotheses before—”

“It’s not the science. It’s the PR. Don’t you understand any of this?” She sat down behind her desk. “Isaac, you have to look at the situation we’re in. Think back to the past. Look at 1964, when the first Mariner reached Mars. It was run out of JPL, right here—”

“What has some forty-year-old probe got to do with anything?”

“Lessons of history, Rosenberg. Back then, NASA was already thinking about how to follow on from Apollo. Mars would have been the next logical step, right? Move onward and outward, human expansion into the Solar System.

“But Mariner found craters, like the Moon’s. They’d directed the craft over an area where they were expecting canals, for God’s sake.

“All of a sudden, there was no point going to Mars after all, because there was nothing there except another sterile, irradiated ball of rock. You could say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. If Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound down.”

“I know about the disappointment,” he said icily. “I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.”

“NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.” She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. “Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite…”

“Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm—”

“It’s not the point, Rosenberg,” she snapped. “You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.”

“All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.”