The Tranquillity Alternative (6 page)

Laurell glanced back at the guards. “Gee, and he didn’t even ask if we were sisters.”

Cris smiled again. Laurell knew she was nervous; ever since they had left their house in Titusville, Laurell had been making wisecracks, singing along with the classic rock station in Orlando and talking back to the DJ, all in a futile attempt to take the edge off the moment. It hadn’t always worked, but then again Laurell had always played the irreverent cut-up next to Cris’s disciplined Air Force officer.

The sisters remark was an old standby, going back to the beginning of their relationship almost three years ago when they had met at a private gym in Titusville which catered covertly to the local gay community. There weren’t too many places in the area where two lesbian women could go during a long courtship without being accosted by straight single men, and fewer still where an obviously gay relationship would be tolerated. Thus the alibi of sisterhood; both Cris and Laurell were in their late thirties, and—until Laurell had dyed her hair—both were blondes, tall, and athletic-looking. Since they vaguely resembled each other, the pretense of being siblings made a good cover story.

But there were differences. Cris glanced again at her lover, still not quite used to Laurell’s recent change in appearance. A few weeks ago Laurell had sprung almost ten grand for cosmetic breast reduction, a surgical operation that had left her almost as flat-chested as a prepubescent teenager. Laurell insisted that she’d done so because big tits had put her on an unequal footing—no pun intended—with her male counterparts at the law firm. It was one more yuppie fad that had emerged from California, popular among female attorneys in particular, but Cris wasn’t quite certain that her companion’s newfound androgyny had nothing to do with their relationship.

“You’re such a guy,” she murmured.

Laurell looked away from the window. “Aw, c’mon, Cris … you’re not still pissed, are you?”

“Oh, no, no, I’m not pissed.” She gripped the leather steering wheel more firmly as she shook her head. “I mean, I was married to Carl for two years, wasn’t I? I should be used to a male chest by now….”

“Jesus. You’re still pissed.” Laurell closed her eyes, putting her hand to her forehead as she sighed. “Look, I’ve explained to you … it’s just something I did, all right? I always hated having boobs. I didn’t like sleeping on them, I didn’t like it when they started to sag, and I really didn’t like guys checking me out all the time….”

“I know, I know.” Cris had heard it all before. “But if you could have worked out a little more, maybe …”

“It wouldn’t have done a thing. Those mammaries were there for keeps.” Laurell smiled a little. “Hey, at least I had enough money to get it done right. If I only had five grand in the bank …”

“Then you would have been an Amazon. Right.” It was an old joke that Cris was tired of hearing.

“You’re such a bitch sometimes …”

“You got it. I’m a bitch. That’s me.” The line of traffic was creeping steadily toward the cloverleaf intersection of the east-west causeways and the Kennedy Parkway, where the highways split in four directions at the center of the island. Two hours before dawn and there was already a small gridlock within KSC. At least the rain had finally let up; with any luck, the clouds would move out to sea long before the launch window closed.

Cris found herself staring in the direction of the Atlas-C launch complex, where the
Constellation
awaited her arrival. One more mission, and she would be another ex-Air Force astronaut with the abbreviation “ret” next to her name and former rank. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. Crash landings, catastrophic launch aborts, Criticality One accidents—those risks she had willingly taken over the past fifteen years, well aware that any one of them could snuff out her life in a second.

It had never occurred to her that falling in love would be the finish of her career.

She felt Laurell’s hand on her arm. “I’m sorry,” her companion said. “I didn’t mean to get on your case like that. It’s just that I hate to see you …”

Her voice trailed off. Cris forced a smile as she grasped the back of Laurell’s hand. “It’s okay,” she said softly. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get through this. Just one more mission, then I’ll be home and we can start all over again.”

“If only you’d think about going public, getting those bastards to admit what they’ve done …”

Cris shook her head as she returned her hand to the steering wheel. She was past the cloverleaf; the sprawling headquarters area was coming up on the left, with Operations and Checkout just past the main office building. “We’ve been through this before, babe. Maybe we’d embarrass them a little, but no one would lose their jobs and we’d be eaten alive by the press. You want to hear dyke jokes about us on Letterman? That’s all that would happen.”

“But they’ll get away with it!”

Cris turned the wheel, pulled into the wide parking lot of the O&C. “They’re not getting away with anything, sweet,” she said, choosing her words carefully. If things got fucked up somehow, at least Laurell could plead innocence. “Trust me … they’re not going to get away with it.”

Laurell stared at her. For a moment, Cris was afraid she was going to ask her exactly what she meant. If she did, Cris knew that she might tell Laurell something that she shouldn’t know, if only because she hadn’t unburdened herself to anyone thus far. Beneath the cool, professional barrier she had erected, there was a white-hot ember of anger, kept alive by contempt for the intolerant assholes who had done this to her….

And a need for revenge.

But Laurell didn’t ask. “Okay,” she said, slumping back in her seat as Cris pulled into a reserved parking space in front of the building. “If that’s what you say, I’ll trust you.”

“Good girl.” Cris glanced at her watch. Ten minutes past three. She had already caught flack from the mission director for insisting on spending her last night at home, and Parnell was probably pissed off about her missing his little barbecue at the Beach House. She didn’t need any more shit about being late for the breakfast briefing.

Fuck it. What were they going to do … fire her?

She unbuckled her seat and shoulder harness, then reached into the back seat for her attaché case. “You know how to get to the commissary, right? Near the VAB. Grab a bite to eat, then get somebody to show you to the VIP viewing stands. Tell ’em …”

“Tell ’em I’m your sister?” A wan smile.

Cris hesitated. “No,” she said flatly. “Tell ’em you’re my wife.” Then she returned the smile. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

Before either of them could start crying, Cris pulled Laurell close and embraced her. People were walking past the car, NASA employees heading for their shifts; under the bright sodium glare of the parking lot lights, they could see into the car. She hesitated, but then realized that it no longer mattered very much.

She kissed Laurell farewell, not furtively as she had so many times before when they had been in a public place, but with all the passion she felt for the one true love of her life. Laurell’s arms moved around her shoulders as her soft lips responded with equal ardor.

“Ten days,” Cris whispered as she broke the kiss and gently disengaged Laurell’s arms. “Ten days and I’ll be home, and I promise I’ll never leave you again.”

Laurell reluctantly slid back into her seat. “God, I love you.”

“I love you too, sweet. Be good.” Cris found the door handle, popped open the gullwing and shoved it upward, then crawled out of the car, pulling her attaché case and its treasonous secret behind her. “I’ll bring home a present….”

Then she turned and began striding down the walkway to the entrance of Operations and Checkout, where a uniformed MP was waiting to hold the door open for her.

Captain Cristine September Ryer, USAF, NASA Astronaut Corps, reporting for her final mission.

Suit-up took only a few minutes. The blue one-piece astronaut jumpsuit over shorts and T-shirt, tucked into high-top sneakers, was preferable to the clunky old pressure suits she had worn during basic training. Cris spent several minutes stuffing her pockets with pens, notepads, penlights, food sticks, and assorted other paraphernalia—she had packed her duffel bag yesterday, and along with everyone else’s it had already been loaded aboard the ferry—then went down the corridor to the infirmary, where two doctors gave her the usual pre-launch physical which told them nothing that they didn’t already know.

When she was done, her next step was supposed to be joining the rest of the crew for the breakfast briefing. However, Cris had been careful to forget her mission notebook, making it necessary for her to walk back down the hall to the women’s locker room. The room was empty, as she had anticipated, but she looked both ways as she reinserted her magnetic keycard into the slot of her locker and opened it.

The 3.5-inch diskette concealed within her attaché case bore the handwritten word “Tetris” on its label. Indeed, if someone booted up the disk and typed that word into a keyboard, they would find a fully functional copy of the popular Russian arcade game. Yet the other program on the disk, not listed in the directory, was a game whose stakes were much higher.

For a moment Captain Ryer hesitated. She could easily walk into the bathroom, snap the diskette in half, and shove the remains into the trash can; no one would be the wiser and she would no longer be taking this terrible risk. But all she had to do was remember her anger and the reasons for it, and it was all settled. She zipped the diskette into her left thigh cargo pocket and checked to make sure that it didn’t bulge when she flexed her leg. Then she took a deep breath, pulled her notebook out of the locker, and slammed the metal door shut.

A uniformed NASA security guard checked her ID badge against his list, then saluted and held open the door of the O&C’s astronaut mess. The room was long and brightly lit by fluorescent ceiling fixtures, sterile except for dozens of mission emblems painted on the beige walls. They ran the course of American manned space exploration, some dating back to the first manned orbital flights of the early fifties: the Atlas-A, B, and C test programs, the Space Station One construction missions, the various Eagle flights of Project Luna, all the way up to Project Ares. Shortly after the completion of the Mars program, though, individual patches were no longer designed for each major mission; someone in the NASA bureaucracy, in his infinite wisdom, had decreed that this custom was a quaint holdover from the old USSF days and that space had become too routine for such trivial matters as honoring crews with their own mission insignia. And it cost too much, besides.

So the practice had declined. Not long afterward, so too had the space program.

As expected, most of her crewmates had already arrived and were seated together at a long dining table, eating the traditional pre-launch breakfast of steak and eggs. Sitting next to them were the pilot and co-pilot of the
Constellation
, two anonymous ferry drivers who barely looked up as Cris put her notebook down at an empty place on the table between them and Gene Parnell. It seemed to her that their conversation faltered a bit when she made her entrance, but that was to be expected; Parnell was an old geezer who had been dragged out of semiretirement for one last hurrah, and the two rocket apes would probably drag their knuckles all the way to the launch pad.

Damn. She missed Laurell already….

Cris excused herself and went up to the buffet table, where she passed up the high-cholesterol junk in favor of a cinnamon bagel and a fruit cocktail. There were butterflies in her stomach; her hand shook slightly as she poured a glass of tomato juice. She heard coarse laughter behind her, but didn’t care to know what it was about. She tried to tell herself that it was just another attack of launch nerves, but she could feel the diskette in her jumpsuit pocket rubbing against her leg, and she suddenly imagined that Parnell had Superman’s X-ray vision and could see right through the nylon. If that were so, the X-rays would scrub the disk’s hidden program, and that would certainly take care of things, wouldn’t it … ?

Cut it out, she told herself. Get a grip. She willed her hands to be steady and told the butterflies to get a job, and when she returned to the table she felt a little better.

“Sorry I’m late,” Cris said as she sat down. “Got stuck in the morning rush.”

One of the ferry pilots—his name badge read
CAPT. P.A. KINGSOLVER
—grunted noncommittally as he cut into his medium-rare steak. His co-pilot,
LT. COMDR. H. M. TROMBLY
, cast her a sullen look over his coffee mug. Neither of them said anything, but they didn’t have to; it wasn’t difficult to tell that they’d heard a bit about her personal life through the Cape grapevine. Although there had been no outright harassment, she knew that there were quite a few guys in the astronaut corps who didn’t much care for the idea of flying with a dyke.

Don’t worry
, she said silently as she avoided their eyes.
You won’t have to much longer
….

Parnell gave her a quick smile. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You’re not the only one running late. One of our passengers hasn’t shown up yet either.”

“Hmm? Who’s that?” Gene wasn’t bad. Perhaps he was over the hill for this kind of thing and had been assigned to this mission as a media overture, but they had worked well together during training and she reluctantly had come to like him, thinking of him in a patriarchal sort of way. If he had heard the buzz around the Cape about the Internal Affairs Office investigation, he hadn’t said anything about it to her.

“Dooley.” Parnell checked his watch. “He’s staying at a motel on Satellite Beach, I think … must have gotten tied up in traffic coming in.”

“Yeah, I hear you,” Jay Lewitt said. “Route 3 was murder.”
Conestoga
’s flight engineer pushed back his plate as he rubbed a napkin against his lean, brown face. He lived in Cocoa Beach off Route A1A, a few miles south of the space center. “Lisa floored the pedal, but she still couldn’t get us through the mess.”

“Is Elizabeth coming to the launch?” Cris asked.