At this point the biconic would be traveling at many times the local speed of sound. Still glowing, it would streak across the Martian sky, scrawling a wake of vapor across unmarked skies, shedding great crashing waves of acoustical energy across the dead, empty landscape, a land that had lain undisturbed for half a billion years.

This sure would be a spectacular phase of the mission, she conceded. A pilot’s dream.

Maybe, York thought wistfully, the aborted Space Shuttle might have felt something like this. To fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert would have been a hell of a difference from falling into the sea ass-backwards in an Apollo. We lost a lot of beauty when we killed the Shuttle.

“Sixty-one thousand feet,” she read off.

“Rager. Reducing air brake to 65 percent. Take air data.”

“Rog.” York flicked a dummy switch. On a real biconic a series of pitot-static probes would thrust out of the craft’s surface then to confirm measurements of dynamic pressure and airspeed.

“Looking good,” Gershon said. “Coming out of the third roll.” He grinned at York. “Hey, maybe we’re going to get through this fucker.”

“Maybe. Fifty thousand feet.”

“Banking for fourth roll.”

The plaster of paris plain, unobscured by the fake plasma glow, tipped over again.

“Okay, coming out of the roll. Coming out… come on, baby… coming out of the roll… Shit.”

Here it comes, York thought. Every sim, they were out to get you somewhere. Her stomach contracted.

The attitude indicator was tumbling. Gershon worked his controls and snapped through emergency checklists. “The aerosurfaces are biting. But just not enough. Fuck. What’s going on?”

York glanced out of her window. Gershon couldn’t get out of the roll, and the landscape had tilted up through more than ninety degrees; the biconic, in the imagination of the computer, had tipped over almost completely.

“Recommend you abort,” the SimSup said calmly, breaking his radio silence.

“Screw you,” Gershon said. He kept working through his lists, checking instruments, snapping switches.

This is what pilots do, at times like this, York realized. Work through the book. Keep it logical, but move fast. Try A. If it doesn’t work, try B. If it doesn’t work, try C…

But the plaster landscape was upside-down completely, the fake craters and canyons like a crimson roof above them.

York was shocked to find that only seconds had elapsed since the first sign of the problem. That was all you were granted: seconds, to figure out the underlying cause of what could be a complex, multiple failure.

There was virtually no chance of succeeding.

If anything went wrong, you had to get out of there, more or less immediately. Or you’d die. The equation was as simple, as finely balanced, as that.

“Ralph, we have to hit abort.”

Gershon didn’t even bother to reply; he just kept working feverishly.