The landscape tilted farther, visibly coming closer. The biconic was starting to go into a hypersonic spin.

“Hit abort,” she told Gershon again. “Christ, Ralph, once we go into a spin we’re through.”

The light in the cabin flickered as the fake Martian sky hurtled past the window. She had a sudden, comical image of a little TV camera on its robot arm spinning around over a plaster-of-paris floor.

If this were for real, my head would be shaking now, battering against the helmet, my inner ears coming apart from Coriolis forces. If this were for real, the craft would start to break up, maybe before I lost consciousness.

“MEM, we recommend you abort. We recommend—”

“Ralph! Jesus Christ! Ralph!”

There was a shudder, a crunch, a puff of white powder.

The landscape froze in place.

“Welcome to Mars,” the SimSup said drily. “We’re just figuring out the size of the crater you made.”

“Fuck,” Gershon said. He pulled off his helmet and threw it across the fake cabin.

The two of them clambered out of the back of the simulator. From outside it looked like the nose of a small light aircraft, a cockpit section roughly sheared off, with wires and umbilical cables dangling from the gaping rear.

The technicians were grinning at them. “Hey, Ralph, You busted our camera. Flew it right on down into the plaster of paris. How about that.”

Gershon wasn’t laughing. He confronted York. He pointed a gloved finger at her face. “Don’t you ever give me orders when we’re flying.”

She was amused rather than disquieted; she’d seen such tantrums before. Most of the time she was able to cope with Gershon, and he seemed prepared, in his rough way, to accept her as an equal in exercises like this. Even though he’d lectured to her, back when she was an ascan. Then, every so often, he would blow his stack like this.

“Orders? Me? You’re the pilot, Ralph.”

“Don’t you fucking forget it.” And he went stalking off for the wake.

Phil Stone came strolling up to her, dressed in a light blue coverall, his hands in his pockets. “Don’t take it personally.”

“I don’t.” York shrugged, and began to pull off her gloves. “Pretty soon he’ll be bawling out the techs. And then the SimSup. And then you, and… Bawling his way up the chain of command. I was just the first one to hand, the place to start. He hates to fail.”

“He didn’t fail,” Stone said. “That failure wasn’t recoverable.”

“That hypersonic spin—”

“I wrote the book about hypersonic spins,” he said, and she suspected he had a war story behind that somewhere. “I know about the spin. But even before that point, you couldn’t have gotten out of it.”

“What happened?”

“You don’t want to wait for the wake?” The wake was the long, harrowing official debrief.

“Just give me the headline.”