Dana Stabenow - Prepared For Rage

Back on board that evening, Cal thought about the XO's tragic marriage. One of a kind, he'd called his wife.

Cal liked his life. He saw no reason to change how he lived it, in spite of his parents' infrequent pleas. If anything, his father's wishes in the matter moved Cal in the opposite direction. He supposed it was juvenile of him, but there it was. At least he knew what motivated him, and right at the top of the list was a disinclination to serve as a working trophy for his father.

One of a kind. Kenai was one of a kind.

They'd been seeing a lot of each other over the past eighteen months, or as much as either of their jobs would permit. So far they'd managed to keep it quiet, from their families as well as from the media. Cal harbored no illusions about his own intrinsic worth to what Harlan Ellison had so aptly named the glass teat, but the press was always on the lookout for a juicy astronaut story, and if and when his father found out about them he'd want to use Kenai on campaign tours.

His mother, on the other hand, would be terrified that marriage and- horrors!-grandchildren might be in the offing. So long as Cal didn't reproduce, Vera Beauchamp Schuyler could go on pretending she was on the right side of forty.

He wondered about Kenai's parents, what they were like. She had spoken warmly of both of them, although her father seemed to predominate over any such conversation. An ex-Alaskan Bush pilot, he sounded like a hell of a guy.

Now it was no longer a matter of when he would meet them, or if. They would be watching the launch from the Munro.

He'd shied away from meeting the families of any of his other girlfriends. It had been more than once the rock upon which the relationship had foundered, and frequently in such instances he was accused of being afraid of commitment. In vain did he protest that it was a simple matter of him liking his life as it was and that he saw no need to change it. He didn't convince any of them, but then he didn't try that hard.

The truth was he hadn't cared enough to put in the extra effort. That made him an asshole of the first water, no doubt, but it also made him a free asshole, and in the years following his escape from the mansion on Louisburg Square his freedom had been his most precious possession, the one thing he was determined never to yield, no matter how many broad hints his father gave about founding the greatest political dynasty in Massachusetts since the Kennedys.

So far, Kenai had not offered to introduce him to her parents, nor had she asked to meet his. It worried him sometimes, how easy their relationship had been so far. After a year and a half he remained interested in her, too, which also worried him. He had made an effort, met with varying degrees of success, not to think about what any of that might mean.

He called her that night in Houston. "How's the Arabian Knight?"

"Status quo," she said. "It's his friggin' satellite that's giving us fits now."

"What's wrong?"

"One of the gyroscopes keeps throwing off weird readings during testing."

"A vital piece of the package?"

"Not once it gets into the correct orbit, no. It's supposed to help get it into that orbit, though."

"I thought you just opened the payload bay doors and released it."

"Mostly, yeah, but this is, in fact, rocket science we're talking about here."

He grinned at her mock sarcasm. "I stand corrected."

"Anyway, we fixed it." She yawned. "Man, I'm beat."

"I'll let you go," he said, "but one question."

"What?"

"Do I get to see you before you depart this sphere?" The Munros were coming aboard early and sailing up the coast of Florida with them. When she got back from orbit, Kenai would make a flying trip to Miami to have a Munro family photo taken on the foredeck of Munro, the Medal of Honor banner on the lookout station in the background. Two genuine American heroes, one past, one present, one standing on the deck of a ship named for the one who died in duty above and beyond the call, and a Coastie, no less. It was hard to tell who was closer to orgasm over this PR opportunity, NASA or the U.S. Coast Guard. It was going to be hard to get around the ship without tripping over an admiral in any direction. He said, very casually, "How are we handling that, by the way?"

When she answered, she was no less casual. "We could pretend to be just acquaintances, I suppose."

"I suppose," he said without enthusiasm. "So, any chance for some alone time before this circus puts up its big top?"

"I might be able to sneak off for a couple of hours. Maybe. Possibly. If you can get up to the Cape before we go into crew quarters."

"What are crew quarters?"

"A bunch of trailers. We move in a week before launch date. It's essentially medical quarantine, so the crew doesn't catch anything from a family member or a friend and get sick during the flight. The only people we can see after that is someone checked out by the NASA flight surgeon."

"Oh." Getting checked out by the flight surgeon increased their chances of getting found out by the press.

She yawned again. "Anyway, I'm going to hit the rack." He heard the smile in her voice. "Exercise that paranormal Schuyler ability to find a really nice hotel as close as possible to KSC."

"Aye aye, ma'am," he said, and hung up with a reluctance that would have frightened the living hell out of him, if he'd noticed.

HOUSTON

Kenai had noticed, but she refused to be distracted by it. The Arabian Knight had, among many innate talents ready-made to annoy the astronaut corps, the ability to generate news coverage. A lot of this was driven by the administration, determined to make a show of hands across the sea in spite of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani dead and further in spite of the current saber rattle toward Iran. When asked, given the less than congenial state of affairs that existed between the United States and the world's Muslim nations, if he had any qualms about sending a Qatari national into space, director Milton "Alfred E." Neuman raised surprised eyebrows and said blandly, "Why, no. Should I have?"

The astronauts had some, not least of which was the Arabian Knight's propensity for the spotlight. He was a media magnet. According to the next morning's newspapers, while they were frantically working to recover the ARABSAT-8A's gyro, he was cruising Houston 's hot spots with one of the Disney blondes on his arm. "I can live with a jetsetting playboy," Rick told Kenai. "What I won't live with is someone who won't do their homework. I'm not taking anyone into orbit who doesn't know how to flush the fucking toilet."

Rick Robertson rarely swore, in public or in private. "Yes, sir," Kenai said, and departed at speed. She hunted down the Arabian Knight, who was chatting on his cell phone. She removed it from his hand, ended his call, and tossed it in a nearby trash can, where it landed with a promising thud.

The Arabian Knight erupted, in Arabic.

"Shut up," Kenai said.

He kept talking.

Kenai stepped up and got right into his face. "Shut up," she said, and this time he did. "I'm going to show you how to flush the toilet on the shuttle," she said, "and this time you're going to have the procedure down before you leave, I don't care if we're here all night."

She towed him behind her like a mother towing a recalcitrant child. His face was congested with fury and he spit what sounded like serious insults at her all the way there. They passed many NASA employees who had never seen quite that expression on Kenai's face before but were quick in clearing a path for it, especially when they saw who she had in tow. The Arabian Knight was no longer a shared joke, he was a potential hazard to the successful completion of the mission. In two years they would be retiring the shuttle, they'd already lost two, and no one wanted to lose a third between now and then, especially not due to some arrogant little prick of a part-timer who had been granted a ride-along because his daddy would sign the check to launch the satellite in the cargo bay.