Yes, in her mind, in her heart, she was right there in the spacecraft with them, right there, experiencing what they went through at every stage.

It was T minus five minutes and counting.

Annie listened to the voices in her phones.

"--Control, Orion here. APUs juicing up," Jim was saying. "It's HI green for one and two, starting three, over."

"Roger, proceed, over," the controller replied.

"Okay, we're three for three. Humming away."

"Roger, Orion. Beautiful."

Annie felt her eagerness building. What she'd heard indicated that the hydrazine-fed auxiliary power units that would gimbal the space shuttle's main engines--or SSMEs--during ascent were on and functioning normally.

They were down to the wire.

She continued listening in as the shuttle went to independent power and its external tank pressured up. Beside her, Gordian stared out the heavy windows facing the pad with rapt fascination. Only the controllers were speaking now; this close to liftoff, firing room protocols required absolute silence from everyone but those in the launch communications loop. The rules were strictly observed, although Annie guessed the overwhelming exhilaration of the moment would have rendered her speechless even if they hadn't been.

At T minus two minutes the controller declared they were okay for launch, and Annie felt the expectant tingling that had started in her fingers rush through her entire body.

She would remember checking the countdown clock on her console at T minus six seconds--when Orion's three SSMEs were to have ignited exactly a half second apart in a sequence controlled by the shuttle's onboard computers.

Instead, it was when things went wrong.

Terribly, unforgettably wrong.

From the time Annie picked up the first sign of trouble over her audio link to the disaster's tragic final moments, everything seemed to worsen with dreadful rapidity, giving rise to a stunned, dreamlike sense of unbelief that, in a way, would almost prove a blessing, numbing her to the full impact of the horror, allowing her to cope with what might otherwise have been overwhelming.

"Control ... I'm seeing a red light for SSME Number Three." The urgent voice belonged to Jim. An instant later Annie heard something else in the background, the piercingly shrill sound of the master alarm. "We've got a hot engine ... LH2 pressure's dropping ... smoke detectors activated ... there's smoke in the cabin...."

Shock bolted through the control room. Her eyes going to the video monitor, Annie reflexively clenched her hands into fists. As she'd glanced at the screen, an inexplicable streak of brightness had shot from Orion above its main engine nozzles.

The controller was struggling to remain calm. "We're aborting at once, copy? Evacuate Orbiter."

"Read you ..." Jim coughed. "I--we ... hard to see... "

"Jim, white room's back in position, get the hell out of there!"

Annie swallowed hard. She had performed the emergency evac drill many times during her flying years, and knew it as well as anyone. The "white room," a small environmental chamber, was at the end of the crew-access arm, which reached from the service tower to Orion's entry hatch. Having automatically retracted soon after the ten-minute hold was completed, it now had been moved back into place. According to established abort procedure, the crew was to exit the hatch, then quickly pass through the access arm to a platform on the opposite side of the tower, where five high-tension slide-wires ran down to an underground bunker 1200 feet away. Each wire supported a steel basket that was large enough for two or three astronauts, and would deliver them to a nylon catch net at the opposite end.