Insofar as Annie could continue tracing its genesis, the next permutation of the story occurred when one of the early evening network news broadcasts blended an analysis of the day's speculation into its overall coverage, creating an ambiguous muddle of fact and fiction that was later used as source material by yet another national news program. It had all culminated with the rootin'-tootin' McCauley Stokes asking Annie how NASA meant to stop UpLink's pullout as if it were an actuality rather than something that had sprung from Gary HoneyVanilla's imagination.

Hence, the story had incredibly gone through seven distinct stages over the course of a single news cycle, and Annie had needed to spend most of her air time with Stokes addressing the compounded inaccuracies rather than getting out the information she'd wanted to present. And despite her repeated clarifications, dismissals, and denials, it was now almost certain that tomorrow would kick off with a swarm of Stokes-derived headlines about the UpLink retreat--adding more quick-to-solidify layers of nonsense to the story, while increasing the self-perpetuating momentum that had allowed it to snowball over the last twenty-four hours.

And it's going to keep rolling over me unless I start being a lot more careful choosing my words, Annie told herself. This isn't like anything I've dealt with before, and I need to get real about the sort of media glare I'm under.

Perhaps subconsciously, then, another reason she'd come here was to let the reality of the task confronting her fully sink in. Perhaps her initial awkwardness--and occasional defensiveness--in publicly dealing with the aftermath of Orion stemmed from a reluctance to entirely acknowledge what had happened in her own mind. She had assumed a responsibility that would not permit her the shock or denial that were the normal early stages of grief, and had compelled her to take a wrenching shortcut to acceptance. No sense condemning herself for that, but her future effectiveness demanded that she understand and confront her mistakes.

She walked slowly around the room, working her way between the mutilated fragments of what once had been Orion. On this side of her were some cracked thermal tiles, on that side a skeletal mound of aluminum ribs and spars from its airframe, over there an almost unrecognizable chunk of the pilot's console with a thatch of fused cables dangling from its blown-out rear panel. At her feet, she could see an elevon that must have become detached from the edge of a wing in one of the explosions that had rocked the firing room where she had been a hapless witness to the disaster.