Running a mission like this — making it up as they went along — was alien to a NASA culture that went back half a lifetime. Culture shock for us all, he thought, with a certain relish.

Geena was still talking. “Your suitability training will be performed here, in the US. Your crew training will take place in Star City. The generic training will be at a mixture of locations; we’re agreeing the objectives with the Russians now, and—”

“Woah. Star City? Isn’t that Moscow?”

Turtle said, “Our launch manifest is full, in the window we have. You’ll be taken to orbit in a Russian Soyuz.” He smiled, weakly. “The Russians are working with us. Planet in peril. Hands across the sea. All that stuff.”

“Oh.” Oh, shit.

Geena grinned, with relish of her own. She said sweetly, “Didn’t anyone tell you? And by the way.”

“What?”

“I’m running your training.”

He was to be flown to Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, to report to the School of Aerospace Medicine there. And Geena was going to take him there, in a T-38, flying from Ellington Air Force Base close to JSC.

The T-38s were supersonic jet trainers which the astronauts used to maintain their flying proficiency, and they used them as personal taxi cabs, taking themselves and their colleagues back and forth between NASA sites at Houston and the Cape and Alabama and elsewhere. The pilots had been flying the little planes since the 1960s, and they were a familiar sight in the skies over Houston.

But Henry had never flown one before. And certainly not one piloted by his ex-wife.

It took him an hour just to get suited up, in a flight suit, helmet, boots, parachute, survival kit. The tech had to walk him from the personal gear room to the runway, because Geena was already in the cockpit.

Close to, the T-38 was, he conceded, an elegant piece of engineering, a sleek white cylinder with a vanishingly small wingspan, barely wide enough to accommodate two adult human beings under tiny blister canopies.

Geena didn’t acknowledge him as he walked up. The tech helped him climb into the cockpit, and he closed his canopy, and found himself staring at the back of Geena’s helmeted head.

As soon as he was aboard she taxied the jet to the end of the runway. Dials and sticks moved back and forth in his cockpit, a baffling choreography. The jet roar was too loud for him to hear anything through the intercom, if anybody troubled to speak to him, and in his helmet he was sweltering in the cockpit, trapped in a bubble of Houston heat.

When he breathed through his oxygen mask he could smell burned rubber.