19. Final Countdown
NINETEEN
FINAL COUNTDOWN
Flynn
My sister hums while rifling through my kitchen pantry. Not at all like she’s just been arrested and almost jailed.
“I can’t believe this wasn’t the first time you’ve been arrested for beating up Beth,” I say to Rose. “Do I even want to know when that happened?”
Rose pokes her head out of the pantry, looking me in the eye.
“You know when.” She disappears again for a moment, coming out with a bag of cookies.
“That’s why I have my own lawyers.” She tosses the bag on the counter.
“And why I paid Beth off the first time and made her sign papers saying she could never sue me. I knew she wasn’t done causing trouble.
” She yanks open the fridge door, mumbling, “I’m not stupid. ”
“That’s yet to be proven,” I say, but laugh softly, remembering the look on Holt’s face at the police station.
“I thought Holt was going to have a conniption.” For an hour, Holt sequestered himself with Rose’s lawyer after he’d discovered Rose’s previous run-ins with Beth.
Holt had been even more pissed when Rose’s lawyer wouldn’t tell him anything due to client confidentiality.
Rose retrieves the gallon of milk and clears her throat. “Speaking of Holt, you two seem to be getting along better.” Her voice is hopeful.
After our manly little heart-to-heart after dealing with Beth, my brother and I have gotten along better.
Or at least a lot of the tension and resentment has lifted.
Holt still moseyed back to the ranch after the police station.
I think we’re both going to take this new reunion of sorts one day at a time.
I amble over to her, pushing her out of the way.
“Yeah.” I grin, then grab myself a soda from the fridge.
I realized today how much my anger had been controlling me.
I’d been so consumed by it, I’d let it blind me to what’s important—family.
And now, Jackie. So I’m letting the anger go.
It’s easier than I thought it’d be. My brother is an idiot, but at least he was trying to help.
“That’s good.” She pours a large glass of milk and takes a healthy swig. “I was getting tired of playing go-between for you two asshats.”
“Nice mustache, dude,” I say, ruffling her hair.
“Hey! Watch it,” Rose ducks her head and wipes her milk mustache off with the back of her hand. “I still have that just-been-arrested look. It’s hard to fake. Gotta make the most out of the real thing.” She smirks before ripping open the bag of cookies.
“Whatever, Rose,” I say, rolling my eyes.
“Don’t forget to call Jackie,” she says, mouth full of cookie. “We had a near miss earlier.”
“What do you mean? When Beth and Jackie talked at the bar?” I take a sip of soda. “Beth told me what they talked about.” I shrug. “Or at least Beth’s version of it.”
“Uh, yeah. I wouldn’t go believing anything that bitch says.” She shakes her head. “I was talking about when Jackie came back after the cops arrived.”
I set the can carefully on the island. “She came back?”
“Yeah. She was all set to go look for you but I knew you were with Beth, so I steered her back out to her car.” She shoves another cookie in her mouth.
“Good thing I got her out of there. The last thing Jackie needed was to see you and your crazy-ass ex huddled together inside at the bar. Beth may be batshit crazy and the devil besides, but she’s hot.
No girl wants to think their man hit that. ”
I stand very still. “We weren’t at the bar, Rose.”
“What are you talking about?” Rose mumbles around the cookie. “That’s where you went when the cops came.”
“Until the manager asked us to take it outside because Beth was being too loud. We were in the parking lot.”
We stare at each other. Rose gulps.
“Jackie would’ve said something if she saw you. Right?” Rose asks, eyes watering as she chokes down the cookie. She picks up her glass of milk, trying to wash it down.
I replay that part of the day, back to caging Beth against the wall just to keep her from running her mouth off to the cops. From the parking lot that would not have looked good. I check my phone. “She hasn’t answered my text or calls from earlier.”
“She’s at work. Big NASA emergency, remember?” Rose’s voice sounds unsure, which is when I know I’m in trouble.
Again, I mentally run through my interaction with Beth. No one called out my name, I didn’t so much as glimpse wild blond hair walking up the porch steps from where I’d been standing. But then it hits me. My mind stalls on the one thing that had distracted me from isolating Beth.
That silver car.
“Wait, how did she even get to the bar? Her car is in my garage,” I say, praying I’m wrong.
“Ian’s Tesla.”
“Fuck.”
I’ve never been so glad for my astronomic cable bill.
I have to pay for a huge number of channels to get all the specialty channels that deal with vintage restorations and racing.
But along with that expensive bundle is NASA TV.
There was no way I could get on site with all the security and no badge.
I’m pretty sure making a scene at the gate would not endear me to Jackie.
But Jackie had mentioned NASA TV once, so I flip through until I find it.
Apparently, NASA TV provides live coverage of launches, spacewalks and other mission events, as well as the latest news briefings and video files.
What I’m interested in at the moment is the live footage from Mission Control.
The channel shows a bunch of desks with multiple computers stacked on top.
Each long desk is manned by two or three people.
Then there are the people standing in the center of the room.
There are three of them. One of them is Jackie.
Beside her are two men, one in a suit and one in khakis and a polo. For some reason, Jackie is in an oversized T-shirt and gym shorts. She also has a headset on and is gesturing to one of the men. There isn’t much sound. A bunch of murmurs, and typing sounds, but that’s it.
It feels really weird being able to see her, what she is doing, and her not know I’m watching.
Rose perches on the edge of my couch with her laptop on her knees, following the current news feeds as well as NASA TV. Turns out while I was busy having a white trash family brawl, Jackie had been trying to save the International Space Station and its crew. Talk about perspective.
I don’t think she has her phone on her, but I pull mine out and text her good luck anyway. Just in case.
I’m surprised when I see Jackie’s head swivel to one of the desks.
She picks up a cell phone, looking at the screen.
A frown mars her face before she slaps the phone back on the table, screen side down.
Her expression clears when Ian waves her over to another desk.
She walks over to him, leaving her phone and my text behind.
Not good.
Jackie
I focus on the schematics projected on the screen in front of me. Sitting at a table, along with most of the higher-ups at NASA, I’m surprised I’m not nervous. I don’t even adjust my glasses. Instead, I take charge.
“You can see the damaged wires in the shots Astronaut Starr took of EXT-1 after it was hit. What we need to check on are the wires that continue running under the exterior panel.” I look at the electrical engineering team assembled to one side of the room. “What do the plans tell you?”
“According to the electrical drawing, the wires continue under the panel, and even coil for slack. You should have enough give to cut and reconnect,” one of them answers. “If that fails, we can banana clip around the damaged section.”
I address the EVA division. “What’s our timeline? How fast can Jules and Bodie be out the door?”
Astronauts always go on spacewalks in twos—the classic buddy system. Though Jules will run the show, Bodie will be her backup.
“They’re suited up. They just need to connect their helmets and get to the airlock.”
I pace back and forth in what feel like clown shoes on my feet.
Anyone going on a spacewalk needs to depressurize to avoid decompression sickness, or ‘the bends,’ which happens when someone is exposed to a rapid drop in external pressure and expanding nitrogen gas bubbles in the bloodstream escape too quickly.
To prevent this, an hour before the spacewalk an astronaut dons the full space suit and breathes pure oxygen inside the sealed airlock while the pressure gradually decreases.
Once the area reaches the appropriate pressure, the astronaut pulls himself through the airlock hatch and into space.
“They’ll have both the tether and the SAFER jetpack, since we don’t know how long this could take,” an EVA engineer continues.
EVAs usually take weeks to plan. Not hours. There’s a detailed list of procedures, which are followed to the letter. In comparison, what I have planned is like giving a toddler paints and a brush and expecting a Rembrandt.
All those movies about astronauts jumping into their suits and then diving into space to save the day? Yeah, not so much. Even this hastily put together spacewalk is bending protocol almost to the breaking point.
“Okay. Make sure Jules has her tool belt fully stocked with clippers, cables—the lot. We don’t want a failure simply because she forgot to properly pack her purse,” Sean says.
Ian barks out a laugh. “Jesus, Sean. You should be glad this is an emergency. Otherwise you’d have your ass handed to you by Human Resources for that remark.”
Sean dismisses him with a wave and an eye roll, mumbling something about millennial safe zone bullshit. Everyone pretends they can’t hear, but the chuckles continue.
I move to the door, my nervousness flaring up with a stiff smile. “Let’s go get the EXTs back online.”