“He fired his engine!” Mikhail says.

“You think?” Sergei says, staring into the same void with a death grip on the control stick. “The phrase they use in Houston is: No shit, Sherlock!”

Kip doesn’t have a spare second to be confused.

No time to wonder about what flashed past the forward windscreen less than a minute after ignition. Maybe a satellite. Maybe nothing. Whatever it was, it seemed so incredibly close, yet, it whooshed past without a sound, like an illusion—some computer-generated sequence projected on the windscreen. He still has the mental image of what the thing looked like somewhere in his memory, and it’s a familiar shape somehow, but his attention is too focused on the forward panel to think it through.

Kip’s right hand is working the sidestick controller constantly with small, intense movements, and there’s a tiny flash of pride that he’s already learned not to overcontrol. Three g’s of thrust are pressing at his back and pulling at his face, but it’s all as handleable as the ascent was four days ago.

The physical impact of the light off was nothing compared to the psychological shock that the engine really fired. His mind is still trying to work through how that happened. At the same time, he’s trying to make sure he doesn’t do anything else terribly wrong, like face the rocket engine the wrong way and boost himself on a one-way trip to outer space. He’s already figured out that, with enough fuel left to subtract seventeen thousand miles an hour of momentum, this spacecraft, if turned in the opposite direction, could easily reach the escape velocity of twenty-three thousand miles per hour and soar away from Earth’s gravity forever.

He double-checks that he’s aimed Intrepid’s nozzles in the right direction, and holds the ship steady with a massive force of will, playing a video game with life-or-death consequences in keeping the tiny dot in the “V” on the attitude indicator screen. The nose slowly comes up, changing the rocket engine’s thrust vector from all horizontal deceleration to a mix of both vertical and horizontal, keeping gravity from yanking Intrepidtoo rapidly back toward Earth.

The engine should cut out, the checklist says, when he’s at eighty degrees nose up, still flying backward, at an altitude of ninety miles and dropping at less than three hundred miles per hour, with almost no forward speed. Intrepid,he knows, uses fuel and thrust to slow down instead of trading speed for heat—using the type of red-hot thermal braking through the atmosphere that incinerated the shuttle Columbiayears ago. He’ll have less than a minute, when the fuel runs out and Intrepidbegins to freefall, to use the reaction thrusters to raise the tail and turn the space plane completely around. Then he’ll be falling like some sort of man-made leaf into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, belly first, never going fast enough through the thickening air to melt the structure with frictional heating.

It’s a hard concept to grasp, this frictional heating and airspeed. He knows, because he tried to explain it to Julie for a school science report one night as Sharon rolled her eyes and left for bed. He reruns the memory, every word of it ringing clear in his head, even as he works the control stick and watches the forward panel.

“Honey, below four hundred thousand feet above the planet Earth—eighty miles high—the atmosphere begins with just an occasional molecule of air. On a space shuttle reentry, every molecule gets hit at nearly orbital speed as the spacecraft descends lower and lower into more and more air, and with each tiny collision, there is a transformation of the massive speed of the collision into heat. At four hundred thousand feet it doesn’t amount to much, but hitting two hundred thousand feet, where the still-thin air molecules are much more closely packed together means a lot more of those tiny heat-producing collisions are happening, and the heat begins to raise the temperature of the spacecraft itself thousands of degrees, each collision stripping away electrons from the molecules and creating a super-heated plasma that can be seen from the ground as a long trail of fire. It was at two hundred and seven thousand feet over Texas,” he told her, “that the Shuttle Columbiabegan to break up, killing the crew.”

Julie had seen Sharon’s response, and it had limited her attention span. He never had the chance to talk about airspeed, and why a spacecraft flashing through those edge-of-space altitudes at thousands of miles per hour could show an indicatedairspeed of less than a hundred miles per hour, something that always fascinated him.

A calculation he needs to make in his head snaps him away from the memory. He was four minutes late firing the engine, and so the result will be a landing somewhere in eastern Arizona. He needs to know soon where he is, what state he’s over. Unlike the shuttle, which starts down around the California coast in order to land in Florida, he remembers from his indoctrination that with Intrepid,he’s just dropping into whatever state he’s over.

There’s a button to be pushed on the HSI—the horizontal situation indicator—when he turns the ship around nose down, and the screen is supposed to show the airfields he can reach, but he’s getting ahead of himself with the engine still firing, and right now all he can do is play the video game and hang on, battling the feeling that he’s not really here.

The three minutes elapse, feeling like ten. The nose-up angle is nearly thirty degrees now as he slowly arcs backward toward the planet. The numbers on the screen indicating forward velocity are down below eight thousand miles per hour, the stars still visible outside the window.

The chilling thought that keeps running through his head is that with or without the help of the map computer, he’ll have only one shot at finding a place for Intrepidto land—let alone figure out how to fly her there.

But so far his control movements are steady, competent, even professional, and he can’t figure why. He doesn’t know nearly enough to do this. Yet here is his right hand, moving the stick with calm competence, as if he’s channeling a realastronaut—a golden connection, a reserve of assurance and intellect from somewhere beyond himself.

Suddenly the noise and thrust and shaking and moving numbers that are the cacophonous reality of this descent back to Earth begin to recede, as if a sound engineer somewhere was moving the master volume down slowly. He feels an unexpected tranquillity descending over him like a warm blanket—reassuring, comforting, validating that his hands really do have it under control and his mind is free to float so he can turn and watch himself. He’s being enfolded by a peace he’s never felt, and along with it there seems to be a rising, gentle chorus of voices against the sound of a thousand strings, like the most magnificent space movie on the most amazing screen he could ever dream up, the orchestral and choral harmony all around him now, as if the unity and connectedness of uncounted souls are trying to put his fear in a perspective he’s never imagined.

It’s a crystalline moment of aching, indescribable beauty, and, as has happened several times in this odyssey, tears come unbidden to his eyes.

They are, he realizes, tears of appreciation for just being,and for the first time in his life he finds himself overflowing with a love of the moment and of life as it is akin to nothing he’s ever experienced—a love so deep, so complete, that even if it all ends within seconds, the contentment will have too much force not to live on. It’s a place he’s never been, a moment he never wants to leave, and one he’s quite sure he was never supposed to glimpse.