Rescue Mode - eARC Read Free

rocks, but Benson refused to discuss his private life with the news media.
    “T MINUS FIFTEEN SECONDS . . . FOURTEEN . . . THIRTEEN . . .”
    The crowd seemed to hold its breath. Treadway felt their excitement. He had covered dozens of rocket launches over his years of reporting, yet the final moments of a countdown always clutched at his guts. It was if his pulse rate synchronized itself to the ticking of the countdown clock.
    “FIVE . . . FOUR . . . THREE . . .”
    Despite himself, Treadway held his own breath. And felt foolish for it. He reminded himself that they’d launched this kind of rocket a hundred times. It was the most reliable booster on Earth. Still, he held his breath.
    A burst of flame flashed from the base of the rocket, almost immediately blotted out by billows of steam from the launch platform’s cooling water system. Standing tall in the midst of the clouds, the booster seemed unmoving, immovable.
    Come on, Treadway urged silently. Get your ass in gear.
    Slowly, slowly, the tall slender booster lifted out of the billowing steam, bright orange flame streaming from its base.
    “Go, baby,” someone shouted.
    Then the noise hit them, the dragon’s roar of the rocket engines, pulsing, throbbing, washing over them even through the thick, shatterproof windows. Treadway’s innards went hollow; he felt as if he wanted to weep.
    Up, up the booster rose. Slowly at first but then faster and faster, accelerating into the bright turquoise sky until it was no more than a bright star hurtling across the heavens.
    Treadway turned to the huge screens that covered the visitor’s center’s rear wall. One showed a telescope’s view of the booster soaring up into the sky. Another relayed the view from a camera on the booster’s outer skin, showing the Earth falling away, the launch pad and spaceport buildings dwindling to dots on the desert floor.
    Faster and faster the booster rose. The flash that separated the spent first stage brought a gasp from the crowd, but the gasp quickly turned into a cheer as the second stage’s engines lit off and pushed the bird higher and higher until it was too distant to be seen by unaided eyes.
    “THE ARROW SPACECRAFT HAS ACHIEVED ORBIT,” the overhead speakers confirmed. “ORBITAL PARAMETERS ARE NOMINAL. THE LAUNCH IS A SUCCESS.”
    The crowd sighed, then cheered, and then rushed to the bar. Treadway looked past them, toward Connover and his little family, still standing by themselves off on the other side of the room.
    Connover’s eyes were fixed on Benson as the Canadian was pushed to the bar by the press of news media people and celebrities.
    But Treadway saw the expression on Connover’s grim face. Silently, the American astronaut was saying to Benson, You shouldn’t be the mission commander. They should have picked me. I’m the better man for the job and we both know it.

March 30, 2033
    Earth Departure Minus Twenty-five Months
    14:55 Universal Time
    Earth Orbit

    “Steven Treadway reporting from four hundred miles above Earth’s surface, thanks to the wonders of virtual reality.”
    He seemed to be standing in empty space, solidly three-dimensional, real . Behind him curved the massive bulk of Earth, heartachingly blue flecked with purest white clouds. To his right on the television screen hovered an ungainly-looking spacecraft, bulbous and bristling with piping, antennas, and a single cone-shaped thruster at one end.
    “Today,” Treadway intoned, “the centuries-old dream of using the energy of the atom to propel a ship into deep space will become a reality when the nuclear thermal rocket engine of spacecraft Fermi comes to life.”
    Treadway was actually standing in a TV studio in New York, in front of a blank green screen, reading his script from a teleprompter. He felt an urge to cross his fingers when he said so assuredly that the nuclear rocket would work, but realized that the viewing audience would see him do it.
    “Within seconds,” he continued, “