“Go up,” Reza said urgently. He was working imaginary controls, pulling back on them. “Forget the one-shot reentry. Go higher, take another shot later.”
Radio silence was two-way. There was no chance that Zoe Nash could hear him. Frictional heating surrounded the racing orbiter with a blaze of ionized gases.
“Black body equivalent temperature of Lewis’s hull, six thousand degrees.” Jenny’s voice was a dead whisper. Then, with urgency, “Cool down. You can’t take that for long.”
She was right. As she spoke, the blazing arrow tip vanished. It was replaced by a puff of white, round and delicate as a cotton ball.
Celine did not cry out. She leaned forward and covered her face with her hands. That innocuous cottony cloud was an incandescent rage of flaming gas. In its heart were Zoe Nash, Ludwig Holter, and Alta Mclntosh-Mohammad, reduced to their component atoms in Lewis’s fiery explosion.
They would be carried away by the pendent winds, blown and dispersed by the restless violence of the atmosphere. If the three crew reached a single final landing place, no one would ever know it.
The control room was silent except for Reza’s harsh breathing. Celine rocked backward and forward, unable to weep or to make any sound. All she could think was that Zoe, supercapable and superconfident Zoe, had been wrong.
Zoe would not be down on Earth in two days. Zoe would not be there ever.
15
The snow had ended. The wind was dropping away to nothing, and with the loss of cloud cover the night had become bitterly and unnaturally cold.
The ancient frigate chugged south at a leisurely eight knots, while at the bow Saul Steinmetz stood hatted, gloved, and swaddled in winter clothes. His brain was buzzing after a two-hour whirlwind of snap executive judgments that everyone else in government seemed too scared to make. One side effect of Supernova Alpha was Saul’s own apparent apotheosis. No one questioned his authority to do anything.
The buck stops here. Good old Harry Truman, he said it better than anybody. But it would be nice to think you were making right decisions.
Saul was alone, but not, he was sure, unobserved. Even if the frigate crew could conquer their natural curiosity at having the President on board, his security staff were still on duty.
One week ago, heavy rains had pushed the river far above flood stage. The level was lower now, but when the snow melted the waters would rise again, farther than ever. The only evidence for wild conditions upstream lay in the large amount of carried sediment. At night, the heavy suspension of reddish mud did not show. The water lay thick and black as oil, parting smoothly before the old warship’s advance.
Saul stared downstream. A light was blinking there, alien in its slow staccato. A warning? No, a message, that was much more reasonable. A message intended for this ship?
Peering at the point of light and wondering about its meaning, Saul allowed his mind to wander away to more personal questions. Was he going to learn something, as he believed, or was he running away? A thousand things needed doing back in his White House second-floor office. Auden Travis was the most diplomatic of aides, but his face had made his views clear when Saul said where he was going. There had been some kind of fight between Auden and Yasmin Silvers. Maybe tonight Saul would learn the cause.
And what was it between Saul and Tricia? Why had she called, out of the blue, after a two-year silence?
It was certainly not for lunch and a casual how-are-you. Tricia’s whole history showed that she did nothing casually.
She had been born Patricia Stennis, poor in Toledo. At age eighteen she had gone to work for the country’s biggest software company, where the next year at a Detroit trade show she had caught the eye of the aging majority shareholder. Six months later they married and she moved to California. She became Patricia Stennis Leighton, and soon after that, Patsy Leighton. She had been totally devoted and loyal to her husband for four years — until, suddenly and surprisingly, they had divorced.
One year after that Patsy was in Houston, the wife of an oil baron whose ranch sprawled across three hundred square miles and embodied an excess of all forms of bad taste. Trish Beacon, as she was now, enjoyed — or endured, though she would never admit it — two and a half years of Lone Star lifestyle, until finally she and Bobby Beacon divorced.
The next fall Trish married into some of the oldest money in the country. She moved readily, maybe even eagerly, from west Texas to Delaware. Again, she was unswervingly loyal to and admiring of her husband. Saul first met her at a reception in Wilmington when she was two years into her third marriage. She was now Tricia Chartrain. He found her breathtakingly attractive. She seemed to take little notice of him, then or at other dinners and social functions where their paths crossed. Always, she talked admiringly of her husband, Willis Chartrain.
A year later, she called Saul at his Atlanta office. She and dear Willis had divorced — she would prefer not to talk about it. She was in town for a few days, and without an escort for a dinner party. She remembered that Saul’s headquarters were in Atlanta. Would he, as a great favor, consider being her dinner companion?
Would he? He had ended a long go-nowhere affair two months earlier, soon after the primaries made it clear that he had a good shot at the party nomination. But Saul was Saul. He set the machinery to work, and had a detailed report on Tricia in less than a week. Patricia Stennis/Patsy Leighton/Trish Beacon/Tricia Chartrain had played around some in Toledo and elsewhere when she was very young, but in her marriages she had been either faithful to her husband or infinitely discreet. An association with Tricia was unlikely to ruin Saul on the campaign trail.
In fact, the report came too late. Saul and Tricia had become lovers on the night of the dinner party. They remained that way, passionate and committed and inseparable, for the next six months. She had a way of devoting herself, totally and unreservedly, to Saul and his interests. It was intoxicating, something he had never known before. He knew that he would give her anything, or give up anything for her.
Anything, until the day his political advisers came to meet him on the campaign trail in Oregon. Tricia was away, spending a day or two with old friends from the Patsy Leighton software days in San Francisco. The message delivered to Saul was quite clear. They had the poll results and the analysis. Married to Tricia, Saul would lose his bid to be President.
He refused to believe it. He argued, he pleaded. She’s beautiful, she’s wealthy, she’s kind and generous, she has an unblemished past.
“Yes, yes. We’re not arguing with any of that. She may be a saint for all we know. But it’s not relevant. Gotta be hard-nosed about this, Saul. Look at the data, look at the numbers. You marry her, you’re dead in the water. She’s been around the block too often, that last marriage was one too many.”
Saul looked at the numbers. They were a disaster.
“Has anybody else seen these?”
“Only Crossley and Himmelfarb, the Palo Alto pollsters who did the analysis. They have instructions to keep everything confidential.”
“God, I should hope so. Look, suppose I don’t get married. What are the chances of making it to the White House as a bachelor?”
“We tested that, too.” Out came more charts and displays. “It looks good. Seventy-nine percent, with a standard deviation of less than three points.”