“Your nose RCS thrusters started firing. Just as you went into that fourth roll reversal. The aerosurface couldn’t handle the additional torque.”

She thought about that. “But that firing didn’t show up in the instruments. And besides, it’s impossible for the RCS to fire at that point. We’d dumped the fuel.”

“You thought you had.” He grinned. “Just one damn thing after another, huh?”

“Christ.” She shoved her gloves into her helmet. “Sometimes I think these guys want us to fail.”

“No. But you have to fail, a hundred times maybe, so you can succeed the one time when you need to. Besides, this is the place to do it. Nobody ever got killed in a sim. Anyhow, this was primarily a proving flight for the biconic design, not for the pilots.”

That was true, York reflected. The biconic sim was so unpopular, in fact, that only real sim hounds, people desperate to rack up some sim time, any sim time, in order to get a better seat in the crew rotation, would consider working on it.

People like Natalie York and Ralph Gershon.

Stone said, “And I don’t think this thing is ever going to fly. There’s too damn many things to go wrong. The percentage of biconic crashes we get in the sims is a joke…”

“It’s just a shame Ralph doesn’t have that perspective.”

“He may be the best we’ve got,” Stone said quietly.

She was surprised to hear Stone say that.

Stone went on, “He kept on trying. Everything he had, trying to pull her out of that spin. He came closer to saving the MEM than I thought anybody could get.

“By the way,” he said. “You did pretty well in there yourself. Calling for abort when you did was the second best option.”

“What was the best?”

“What Ralph did. Come on.” He slapped her on the back, the pressure of his hand heavy through the layers of her pressure suit. “I’ll buy you a coffee before the wake.”

They walked out of the training building.

Wednesday, August 12, 1981

HEADQUARTERS, COLUMBIA AVIATION, NEWPORT BEACH

They flew into Newport News the night before the presentations: Lee and Morgan and Xu and Rowen and Lye and all the others — even Art Cane, who had decided to open and close Lee’s presentation himself, to show that the corporation was committed to the bid.

They checked into the Chamberlain Hotel at Old Point Comfort, near Langley, where the presentations were to be held. Morgan beat a path to the bar, where he started drinking rum: Lemon Hart, 150 proof.

But Lee went to his room with his boxes of slides.

He’d had a final run-through in front of Cane the day before and he was horrified to find that he still overran, by nearly twenty minutes. So he opened the boxes and began sorting the slides, trying to find something he could cut.