Annie looked around the vast floor of the room, her brows drawn into a contemplative M above her eyes, deep grooves bracketing the comers of her mouth. If the explosion had occurred even seconds after Orion began its ascent, the debris would have been scattered across the bottom of the Atlantic, which would have made its reclamation a prolonged and arduous task requiring a flotilla of recovery ships and scores of divers. But because the fire had taken place prior to liftoff, almost every part of the craft--from the smallest, still-unidentified scraps of scorched metal, to the gigantic bolts that had held the stack together, to large sections of the Orbiter's delta wings and fuselage--had been salvaged from the launchpad area, then brought here to be tagged and audited like bodily remains awaiting a coroner's exam. What word could she use to describe her feelings about that? Encouraged? Thankful? It seemed obscene to use either in a context of such utter grimness and heartache.

The segments of the craft and equipment numbered in the hundreds, a few of them relatively unscathed, most damaged by flames and smoke. Tomorrow she would run herd over the first group of forensic specialists to inspect these parts that could never again add up to a whole ... no, not even if every last screw and inch of wiring had been recovered. There would be a fresh round of interviews with newspeople, mountains of paperwork, a long list of phone calls--including Roger Gordian's promised briefing on the Brazilian incident. She needed some rest. A shower, a peek in at the kids, then bed.

So why on earth hadn't she gone directly home instead of coming to view this terrible, oppressive scene after everyone but the uniformed men in the gatehouse had left for the night?

Annie frowned, trying to think of an answer to her own question--and then suddenly realized that her need to do some thinking might very well be the answer. Or most of it anyway.

If she'd been asked to grade her own first-day-on-the-job media performance, Annie believed she might at best find herself deserving of a C minus. The coverage had veered in a direction she had not meant for it to take ... and worse yet, had been torn from her grasp by the newshounds and begun to feed off their intentional and unintentional distortions. What had originated with Gary HoneyVanilla's offhand question about the possibility of Roger Gordian withdrawing from Brazil had led several media outlets to assert there were "rumors"--plural-- of an UpLink pullout by midday, a word that hardened into "reports" at her afternoon press conference--thank you, Allen Murdock--giving the story a false legitimacy, and inciting fervid debate about its ramifications for ISS on Crossfire and kindred early evening shout fests some hours later.