Jason Frost - Badlands

"… Six, five, four…"

At T minus five seconds, Paige felt the three main engines start up with a bang. Her insides swirled as if they were being pureed by some internal blender. The hell with what anybody said: This was always exciting. It was her third flight and she was wet between her legs now just as she had been the first two times. She'd been too embarrassed to tell anyone the first time it happened, even the flight physicians who wanted to know every damn thing. But later at a luncheon for a bunch of the old-time astronauts, she'd sneaked off to a bar with a few Mercury and Gemini astronauts where two of them confessed to having climaxed during takeoff. One said he thought he'd climaxed, but it turned out he'd just pissed his pants.

"… Two, one, lift-off."

"Why don't they say 'blast-off?'" Piedmont complained. "It sounds more dramatic. Blastoff!"

The Columbia shook as the two solid-rocket boosters strapped to the big, white external tank exploded to life, lifting the craft on five columns of fire. Paige looked out the side window, watching the shuttle slide up the side of the tower like an express elevator. She hardly noticed the 160 decibels of racket outside.

"Hey," Piedmont said, "who farted?"

"We have lift-off." Weaver yipped through the speakers.

"Blast-off!" Piedmont corrected him.

The Columbia's tail was pointed south, so immediately after clearing the tower, it did its preprogrammed pitch and yaw maneuver to position itself east-northeast toward Gibraltar.

Jesus, Paige thought. Jesus, Joseph and Mary this feels so good!

"What's our altitude, Steve?" Paige asked.

"Just passed 170 thousand feet."

"Jettison solids."

"Right."

Paige pictured what was going on down on the Florida launch pad right now. The force of the blast-off would knock down several hundred feet of wire fence strung to keep the spectators back. Any grass within a mile of the launch pad would be seared. Buildings within a three-mile radius would be rocked. The thousands of people who'd gathered for this seven a.m. flight would have their heads all bent back staring up into the early morning sun as they watched the spaceship disappear behind a six-hundred-foot tail of flame.

Within two minutes and eleven seconds after lift-off they were twenty-nine nautical miles high. A bright, yellow-orange flame brushed across their windows. Six-tenths of a second later it was gone, along with the solid rockets. Eight booster separator motors had flared up and fired the solids off into the Atlantic.

Dr. Bart Piedmont was singing. "The joint is jumpin', it's really jumpin'."

"Give us a break, huh, Bart?" Steve said, annoyed.

Paige looked over her shoulder at Bart Piedmont, who was sticking his tongue out at Steve's back, panting and holding his hands up like the paws of a dog. Paige laughed again and Steve whirled angrily to look at Bart. By now Bart had on his serious scientist expression, as he intoned, "Two minutes to MECO."

"Check," Paige said. She glanced at the other two passengers, Daryl Budd and Phil La Porte. They remained silently strapped in their seats. They weren't really astronauts, merely Special Forces soldiers specially trained for this mission. Both were twenty-seven years old, with lean, hard bodies. During their special space training sessions they'd maintained serious expressions despite the usual tension-easing kidding among the astronauts. But she had to admit, they'd learned fast and never once complained. Right now they were gripping their seats with clenched fingers, grinding their teeth as if they feared the entire craft would explode at any moment.

"This is Mission Control in Houston. Press to MECO."

Paige relaxed as the MECO, main engine cut off, kicked into place. If they'd gotten that far, there was no turning back now. Columbia leveled off the trajectory and Paige could see the earth through the window. This was her third time with such a view and it never was anything less than startling. The curvature of the earth against the black velvet of space. The various shades of ocean water. The blue shimmer at the top of the atmosphere.

"Jesus," Bart Piedmont gasped. "I didn't know."

Like the two soldiers from Special Forces, it was his first flight.

Paige didn't have any more time for sightseeing. In less than four minutes they'd have to jettison the external tanks. Pieces of white insulation from the tank were drifting by the windows like chips of ice. Routine.

The ship was flying upside-down underneath the tank to make getting away from it easier. The main engines cut off and the computers activated a sixteen-second separation sequence. The umbilical propellant lines were yanked out of the tank and back into the orbiter. Explosives blew the bolts fastening them to the tank.

The Columbia was flying free.

Soon the tank would begin its downward trajectory. Whatever pieces survived the atmospheric heat would plunge into the Indian Ocean.

"Are we free?" Paige asked, but she could see the three red lights wink out as well as Steve.

He pointed to them anyway. "Guess so."

There was no feeling of motion, no sense of the explosions firing. Paige took the stick and began manually flying off to the side to make sure they didn't run into the tank as it fell. The orbiter had forty-four reaction control engines, thrusters that allowed her to maneuver the direction and attitude of the craft while in space. She veered to the side and the computer fired off one thruster on the nose and one aft. The spacecraft shook violently as if hit by a meteor. Thirty-foot spears of fire leaped from the thrusters.

Paige grabbed the rotational hand controller and pulled up the Columbia's nose. She jabbed a button and the two large OMS (orbital maneuvering system) engines, sitting above the main engines at the rear, fired. The ship was urged smoothly into orbit. About twenty minutes later the OMS engines were fired again to keep the orbit circular.

Now they were sailing 130 miles above the earth.

Paige unbuckled her belt first. Fortunately she'd taken a motion-sickness pill before takeoff, just as the others had. Some of the earlier astronauts had found themselves too spacesick in zero gravity to do any work for a couple of days. She didn't have that kind of time.

She floated to the aft deck to open the doors that cover the payload bay. The doors had to remain open during most of the time in orbit so their built-in reflectors could radiate into space all the heat that built up from the massive electronic equipment aboard.

Steve and Bart were busily entering data into the computers. Bart was moving very carefully, trying to get used to the weightlessness. He looked like someone walking barefoot on a bed of nails.

"How'd the tiles do?" Steve asked.

Paige peered at the dark patches on the pod housing the OMS engine. "Missing a few. Nothing serious."

"RTV?"

The RTV was the red compound used to bond the heat-shielding tiles to the craft. The compound itself could insulate against heat up to nine hundred degrees. "Fine. We're just fine."

Paige looked at the two soldiers, still strapped tightly into their seats. They neither spoke nor looked around. Sweat had puckered their faces like acne. She felt a little sorry for them.

"How you boys doing?" Paige asked them.

"Fine, ma'am," Daryl Budd replied, his voice a little squeaky, his eyes wide while watching Paige float in front of him.

"Just fine, ma'am," Phil La Porte managed to choke out.

"Well, fine then, I guess." Paige floated back to her chair.

Bart Piedmont drifted past, starting to enjoy the sensation. "Hey, guys, how they hanging. Whoops. I suppose in zero gravity they aren't hanging at all, huh?" He laughed to himself as he checked one of the computers.

Steve looked disgusted. "You know, Piedmont, even if this mission isn't going out on TV, everything you say is still broadcast back to Houston Control."