“Yes. Like it’s been in a war,” Libet said.

“So it has.”

“Software in mode 104,” Angel said.

“Endeavour,Houston. You are go for the OMS-one burn.”

“Copy that, go for OMS-one,” Angel said.

Libet worked switches. “Attitude indicator to inertial.”

Angel began to punch the relevant navigation software into the computer, using the keypad to his right. Benacerraf, still following her checklist, monitored his keystrokes: ITEM 27 EXEC.

The small orbital maneuvering system lit up with a crisp jolt, a dull roar.

“We’re going to come out of this low,” Libet said.

She got no reply. There was silence, on the ground, on the flight deck.

The burn seemed, to Benacerraf, to go on and on.

White called from the ground, “Coming up on OMS cut-off. On my mark. Three, two, one. Mark.”

The gentle thrust died.

In the FCR there was a burst of clapping.

Endeavour was in orbit.

Barbara Fahy thumped her clenched fist against the surface of her workstation. She felt a surge of savage, exultant joy. She had acted; her decision had been correct, and had maybe saved the mission.

She wished she could get her hands on whoever had shot at her orbiter. She felt she could destroy them herself, with her bare hands, unleashing primitive, savage energy.

She tried to calm herself down. She started to talk on the voice loops, calling her controllers to order. There was still a hell of a lot of work to do, not least the planning of the next big burn, the revised OMS-two burn.

But, even as she forced her mind to work analytically once more, she clung to the memory of that wild moment of exultation.

Jackie stayed in the press stand, listening to the fragmentary, incomplete announcements from the NASA PAO. It was as if she was somehow connected to Endeavour, that huge pile of metal to which she’d been so close, just three miles from it, before its explosive launch into space — as if she had to stay here until the crew were safe, as though if she moved away she would somehow break the spell that was somehow preserving the crew, her mother’s life.

In the distance she could hear cars, the squeal of brakes and tires. The car park around the VAB was filling up, and there was a lot of activity in front of the TV networks’ big glass-fronted studios. More press were hurrying here, and presumably to the other NASA centers around the country, now that the launch had turned into some kind of genuine news story.

They finally did it,she thought. She’d understood, technically, only a fraction of what she’d witnessed today; but the meaning was clear.

At last, the military-industrial complex of the United States — the sprawling, interconnected mass of semi-covert interests and alliances out of which the space program had been spawned in the first place — had turned in on itself, and was consuming its own children.

The column of smoke and vapor from the launch still towered into the sky, dwarfing everything, dwarfing even the VAB itself. It broadened and twisted as the off-shore winds pulled slowly at it.

I always knew this was a dumb idea, Mother.

“Seventy thousand feet.”

“Okay, all out.”

“Keep on coming downhill, looks real good. The strip is off to your ten o’clock, do you have it in sight?”

“Yep.”

“Coming through Mach two now, real nice. Keep your brakes out. Okay, you can bring the brakes in now, have you about ten miles out. One point five Mach. What’s your attitude, Linebacker?”

“Coming through forty-five now.”

“You’re about six miles out of high key here, Linebacker.”

“Rog.”

“Velocity one point two Mach. Watch that angle of attack;”

“Rog.”

Deeke was flying an unpowered aircraft now. He was facing perhaps the toughest moment of the flight, an unpowered deadstick landing. And this wasn’t Edwards, on the tabletop of the Mojave, with its hundreds of miles of surrounding glass-smooth dry lake beds. He would get just one chance at this.

But he had always been a pretty good stick and rudder pilot. He wasn’t really concerned.

In fact, he’d rather the flight never ended.

At thirty-five thousand feet he reached the high-key position. He was now directly over his landing site, and he would go through a three hundred and sixty degree spiral, to line himself up for the runway.

He rolled into a broad left turn, using a thirty-five degree bank. Now, from his side window, he could see Merritt Island set out below him, like a flat, brown map overlaid with the long straight lines of highways and the Canaveral AFB, surrounded by flat, shining water. And there was his runway, fat as a goose, right under him where it ought to be.

He glanced up. He caught a glimpse of a vapor plume to the north, still lingering around Launch Complex 39-A.

He descended smoothly and steeply, hanging on his speed brakes. The X-15 seemed to drop like a brick; he decided he’d done too much flying in commercial aircraft, with their baby-gentle descent profiles.

At some point the ground metamorphosed from a flat landscape far beneath him, into a complex three-dimensional world. The runway stretched off before him, converging, comfortingly infinite.

He pulled the X-15 out of its dive, coming level at about a hundred feet above the ground. He extended the landing flaps, and brought up the plane’s blunt nose, scorched and blistered from the reentry.

Just feet above the runway, still moving at more than two hundred miles per hour, he pulled a T-handle to the lower left side of his instrument panel. He heard a solid bang under his feet: the landing gear dropping into place.

“Flaps down,” he said.

“Rog, flaps look good, gear looks good. Fifty feet, ten, five.”

The rear skids hit the ground first, sending a cloud of dust up into the cold January air. The initial touchdown was smooth, and the nose wheel held aloft for a few seconds. Then the nose thumped down, hard enough to give Deeke an eight-G jolt. For a moment he thought the nose gear must have failed; he’d forgotten how close the cockpit was to the ground in the landing attitude. The X-15 was a low-slung aircraft; his head was no more than five feet above the ground.

“That’s a beauty, Linebacker.”

He pulled back on the stick. It was an old trick: hauling back on the control stick increased the friction with the ground, and slowed his slide more quickly.

A mile from the touchdown point, the X-15 dragged to a halt.

“How about that,” he said.

“Yeah. Real nice show, Linebacker.”

He checked his timer. The whole flight, from his launch from the B-52, had lasted just five hundred and eight seconds. Less than nine minutes. It was hard to believe; it felt much, much longer.

Recovery vehicles converged on him, a dozen of them, like, he thought, vultures after a corpse. A recovery helicopter flapped overhead, thirty feet up, seeking fires or propellant leaks. Then it landed, and dropped off two technicians in protective suits. They came running towards the cockpit.

He sat in his warm cabin, breathing hard. When he lifted his arms, he found them shaking, as if the muscles were depleted, and he felt sweat pooling at his collar. He was definitely getting too old for this.

He remembered landing at Edwards after his first familiarization flight. Most of the project’s staff, and PR people and a few family, had been out there on the lakebed. Later, Deeke figured he had shaken over a hundred hands, out there in the dry sunlight of the high desert, while the chase planes did salute rolls overhead. And then they had all returned to Rosamond to sink a few Baltics. It had been one hell of a day, the height of his sunlit youth.

He wondered if anyone would shake his hand today.