Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Syd nodded. “So you think the poor teacher and some of the others survived that horrendous main fuel tank explosion?”

“No, not the teacher,” said Dar, and even after all these years he felt the twinge of sadness. “She and another astronaut were on the lower deck, directly in the force of the blast. They probably died very quickly if not instantly.”

“NASA made a point of saying that they all must have died without knowing what hit them,” said Syd.

“Yeah. The whole country was in shock. That’s what we all wanted to hear. But even in the first hours after the explosion, it was apparent from video and radar of the falling debris that the main crew cabin—the upper deck, so to speak—had stayed intact through the whole two-minute-and-forty-five-second fall to the water.”

“An eternity,” muttered Syd, her eyes becoming cloudy. “And you said that you know …”

“PEAPs,” said Dar.

“Peeps?”

“Personal egress air packs. Essentially they’re tiny little oxygen bottles that the astronauts use in case of sudden depressurization. They weren’t wearing space suits, remember…The Challenger Commission made that recommendation after studying the tragedy. That’s why John Glenn and all the others who’ve flown since have gone up in space suits, just like the early astronauts…”

“But these PEAPs…?” Syd’s voice was very small and held none of the voyeuristic thrall that Dar had heard in so many people’s tone when discussing fatal accidents.

“They recovered them from what was left of the main cabin,” said Dar. “Actually, they recovered almost all of the shuttle. They rebuilt it in pieces on wood and wire frames just like we do airliners after the fact…but anyway, yes. Five of the PEAPs had been used…two minutes and forty-five seconds worth. The exact time from the explosion until impact on the ocean.”

Sydney closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she said, “Couldn’t that have been some sort of automatic thing…”

Dar shook his head. “The PEAPs had to be activated manually. In fact, the command pilot couldn’t turn his own on without help. The astronaut behind him—the other woman aboard—would have had to loosen her harness straps and lean forward to turn his on from behind. And his had been used.”

“My God,” said Sydney.

They drank coffee in silence for a minute.

“Dar…” she began.

Dar could not remember if she had used his first name before, but he suddenly noticed it now. Her tone was different.

“Dar,” said the chief investigator, “all this stuff about me coming to the cabin to protect you. All the eyebrow waggling back at Lawrence and Trudy’s. You need to know that I’m not—”

“I know you’re not,” began Dar, a bit irritated.

Syd held up her hand. “Please, let me finish. I’m telling you up front that I’m not looking for a romantic liaison and I’m certainly not looking for a roll in the hay. I like joking with you because you’ve got a sense of humor drier than the Borrego Desert, but I’m not going to play games.”

“I know—” Dar began again, but again she silenced him with a raised palm.

“I’m almost through,” Syd said very quietly. No one was at the nearby tables, and the waiter was far across the room. “Dickweed really did want to bring you up on vehicular manslaughter charges…”

“You’re shitting me,” said Dar. “Even after seeing the videotape?”

“ Because of the tape,” said the chief investigator. “It was the kind of case that even an asshole like Dickweed could win. Obvious road rage…”

“Road rage!” said Dar, angry now. “Those were Russian mafia hit men. They found their automatic weapons in the goddamn wreckage. And besides, this whole ‘road rage’ phenomenon is a load of crap, you know that, Olson. There’s not a higher percentage of traffic-related assaults today than there was two decades ago—”

Syd used both palms now to calm him. “Yes, yes…I know that. Road rage has everything to do with how the news anchors enjoy the alliteration and almost nothing to do with facts. But Dickweed might still have brought charges just because road rage is a popular topic these days and it would have got him TV coverage…”

“Road rage,” muttered Dar, sipping coffee so as not to say what he felt about the assistant district attorney and his political ambitions.

“Anyway,” continued Syd, “I sold them all on using you as…well…as bait in uncovering this larger fraud ring that the state has been after. Dickweed and his boss saw that as an even bigger media plus than a road rage trial. But it meant that you either had to be kept under constant surveillance or protective custody…”

“Or be watched by you,” said Dar.

“Yes,” said Syd. She sat in silence for a long moment. Then she said, “And I know about the Fort Collins crash.”

Dar just looked at her. Part of him was not surprised—she had access to a hell of a lot of background dossiers, and his background would be important for her to check on in her ongoing case, but another part of him curled up in pain at the mention of something he never spoke about to anyone.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Syd said, her voice even softer than before, “but it said in the report that you were actually called to the scene of the crash. How could that be? How could they have done that?”

The muscles around Dar’s mouth twitched an imitation of a smile. “They didn’t know that…that my wife and baby were on that flight when it went down. Bar…my wife had planned to come back from Washington the next day, but her mother had recovered faster than anyone expected. She just wanted to get home a day earlier.”

There was a silence, broken by loud laughter from the bar. A young couple walked by on their way out. They were holding hands.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” said Syd.

“I know,” said Dar. “And I haven’t. Even to Larry and Trudy, although they know the basic facts of it. But I’m answering your question…”

Syd nodded.

“So that’s it—my wife and the baby were supposed to arrive the next day…but they boarded this earlier flight—a 737 that went nose first into a park on the outskirts of Fort Collins.”

“And you were called,” said Syd.

“I was on the NTSB GO-team that staged out of Denver,” said Dar, his voice without emotion. “We covered any crash in a six-state region. Fort Collins is only about seventy miles from Denver.”

“But…” Syd began, and stopped. She looked down at her coffee cup.

Dar shook his head. “That was my job…looking at plane wrecks. Luckily, someone in the Denver office got a first look at the flight manifest and noticed my wife’s name. They notified my team’s supervisor only about half an hour after I got to the scene. But there wasn’t much to see anyway. The 737 went in nose-first. The crater was almost twenty feet deep and sixty feet across. There was a lot of the usual crash detritus—shoes, always many shoes, a burned teddy bear here and there, a green purse—but most of the human remains had to be retrieved by archaeologists.”

Syd looked up. “And it’s one of the few accidents that the NTSB didn’t solve…didn’t find a clear cause for.”

“One of four, counting TWA 800,” said Dar softly. “Wind shear was suspected…and the FAA recommended changing certain control connections to the rudder of the Boeing 737s after that…but nothing seemed to explain such a sudden and complete loss of control. When they came to get me, I was actually interviewing a teenaged girl who lived in the apartment building right next to the park—a hundred feet shorter and the casualty list would have been doubled—and this girl said that when she looked out her fourth-floor window, she could see the faces of the people in the plane…upside down as the 737 augered in. The faces were quite clear because it was just after dark and the people had their reading lights on…”