Star Dust (8 page)

The helicopter crew’s first priority was the capsule—the astronaut was expected to fend for himself, thanks to his buoyant suit.

Except his suit wasn’t keeping him up. Water was pooling in the wide collar, and he was sinking—a little slower than the capsule was, but just as surely.

He began to swim, kicking and pulling with all his might, the drag of his suit making the effort an order of magnitude harder than it should have been. But if he stopped, he would die.

The waves slapped at him, shoved frigid water down his throat, pushed him under the surface, making him splutter and gasp each time his face hit fresh air. He forced his arms and legs to keep moving, to keep crawling toward survival.

Another chopper appeared on the horizon. Rescue.

The second helicopter hovered above him, a crew member leaning from the open bay to lower a cable. Kit caught it, clutching with all his strength. As he was pulled toward safety, he slowly became less pure survival instinct and more himself again. He looked toward the capsule as he went up.

The chopper had hooked on the capsule, but wasn’t pulling it up. Instead, with each roll of the ocean, the capsule slipped further beneath the surface. The ocean pulled at the capsule like an angler reeling in a fish, only in reverse.
 

For several long moments this tug-of-war continued, the chopper lifting the capsule back to the surface in a moment of calm while the ocean pulled it back with the slap of a wave.
 

As Kit reached the second chopper, it became clear that the first chopper was losing the struggle. The ocean was going to take the capsule and the chopper along with it—unless they released the cable.

The crew member pulled him into the bay, seawater sluicing from his suit to splash across the floor. Kit sprawled for a moment, sucking in air as the chopper roared around him. His chest ached from swallowed saline and his ears throbbed from the decibel level, but he had to know what was happening. He shoved himself to his feet, his suit making him as ungainly as a walrus on land, but he managed to grab a strap to steady himself as he turned back to watch.

The first chopper was even lower now, the capsule completely submerged. The cable released then, snapping in on itself like an angry snake, and the first chopper began to gain altitude.

Beneath the water, Kit could see only a glimmer of white before the waves rose again, drowning the capsule in a smear of green-gray and pulling several million dollars’ worth of equipment to the ocean floor.

Parsons was going to be pissed.

Parsons was more than pissed—he was damn near having a stroke.

Kit had dreaded this moment the entire flight from Florida to Houston. It was turning out to be even worse than he’d expected.

The entire engineering team was assembled. Kit sat on a stool in front of them. Only the dunce cap was missing.

It was meant to be a debriefing, but Kit knew it for what it really was: a disemboweling. Of him. And why not? A very expensive test capsule had been lost on his watch, even if it wasn’t his fault.

Parsons paced the front of the room, his face beet red and his neck swelling—actually swelling, like a bullfrog’s—with the force of his anger.

“Why the hell did you prematurely blow the hatch?” he asked for the tenth time.

“I didn’t,” Kit answered for the tenth time.

“That’s impossible. The bolts wouldn’t have blown on their own.” Parsons paced back and forth, turned and paused. His left foot pawed at the ground before he started off again with goring force.

“Of course.” Kit couldn’t keep all the sarcasm from his tone. “Nothing ever goes wrong with explosives, does it?”

“Explain to me why these things always go wrong with
you
. Are you just unlucky? Or are you sloppy? This little accident lost us an entire training capsule. If we send you into space, will you have another little accident? What will you lose then? An entire rocket? Someone’s life?”

Christ. This incident—which wasn’t his fault—might cost him his only chance to go to space. He gritted his teeth and tried to think of something, anything, even remotely conciliatory to say, something that didn’t admit his guilt. But all that came were more hot words, which he kept behind his teeth.

“Um? Excuse me?” One of the younger engineers was tentatively raising his hand. A big guy, who ought to have looked like a linebacker, but the hunch of his shoulders and the shy cast to the eyes behind his glasses gave lie to that. Kit searched his memory for the man’s name—Jefferies.

“What?” barked Parsons.

Jefferies stood, somehow looking small even at his full height. “Well, if he had triggered the hatch himself, wouldn’t he have burn marks on his hands? From triggering it? Since you can’t do it with the gloves on?”

Kit held his hands up high, so that everyone could see, turning them back and forth. A silence fell across the room as everyone took note of their unblemished state.

Parsons stared at his hands, Kit holding them before him, defiance rising within him. After a moment, in which Parsons’s face went from red to black, the head engineer tossed his clipboard to the floor and slammed the door as he marched out of the room.

Later that day, Kit drove home in his T-Bird, which still sported scuff marks. He probably should have been more mollifying in the debriefing. He certainly shouldn’t have rubbed Parsons’s face in his stainless hands. But hell, he was screwed no matter how this went. Once those explosives detonated, his goose had been cooked.

He turned his car into a hard right, the rear tires squealing as they tried to keep in contact with the road. He pushed the accelerator further down, powering through the skid.

As he reached the gates of Lake Glade, he pulled his foot from the accelerator. Couldn’t go tearing through his own neighborhood.

The sight of his garage was unutterably soothing. Three days on the coast and then being called out by Parsons—he was battered, bruised. Or at least his innards felt that way.

He ought to call someone up, like Miss Delancy. He still had her number. Some female companionship would make him feel better.

Or no, not her. He didn’t even need to call someone, really—he could simply walk into a nightclub. His fame meant he’d never have to go home alone if he didn’t want to.

He slammed the car door. That was what he’d do—get a shower, change, then head right back out. Enjoy some of the benefits of this astronaut business.

Buckshot came bounding around from the backyard, looking over the moon at the sight of him. His own heart lightened at the sight of that familiar brown masked face. The Smith kids had obviously taken good care of him while he had been gone.

The Smith kids themselves came bounding after the dog.

Kit tensed. Their mother was fickle at the best of times, and he wasn’t really in the mood for a bout of hero worship from the kids—especially when he wasn’t feeling the least bit heroic.
 

“Hey, Commander Campbell!” Freddie yelled.

“How was your trip?” Lisa asked.

“Fine.” He definitely couldn’t go into specifics about the failed training run.
Please don’t ask any more questions.
But of course they would. That was what kids did.

“Look what we taught Bucky to do!” Lisa snapped her fingers at the dog, who came to attention. The girl pulled a treat from her pocket and slowly placed it on Bucky’s nose.

Bucky froze, the treat balancing on his nose.

The dog remained still as stone until Freddie said, “Okay.” Then Bucky tossed his head and caught the treat between his jaws.

“How the h—how did you teach him to do that?” Kit wouldn’t have said that Bucky was ill behaved, but he’d never dreamed the dog could do something so controlled and fancy.

“We’ll show you.” Lisa grinned, and Kit found himself grinning back. Maybe spending a little bit of time with these kids wouldn’t be so bad. At the very least, they could teach Bucky a few things.

They played with the dog for at least half an hour, trying to teach Bucky to roll over, Freddie demonstrating for the dog as Lisa twirled her wrist and said, “Roll over! Roll over!”

Bucky just barked and ran in circles around them, while Kit watched in amusement.

Perhaps the key to figuring out how to handle kids was to get a dog involved. Too bad he couldn’t take Bucky with him everywhere he went.

“Kids! Dinner!”

At their mother’s summons, the kids waved goodbye and dashed off to their own house, leaving Kit and Bucky alone in the deepening dark of evening.

The idea of going out had lost all of its appeal, so he ate a Kraft dinner at his table alone, the silence of his house nearly as heavy as the ocean waves had been.

He washed his few dishes as the sun set, not bothering to turn on the lights as darkness stole throughout the house. He changed from his suit and slacks into an undershirt and some running shorts. They were perhaps too cold for a winter’s evening, but after the suffocating press of his astronaut suit, the weight of it as it tried to drag him under the waves—

He wanted as little on his skin as possible, even if he might freeze.

He slipped out the back door, Bucky following along behind.

Sipping his beer, the bottle hard against his lips and teeth, the alcohol cold as it slipped down his throat, he studied the stars. Bucky settled at his feet, a warm weight anchoring him as he stared up at that distant expanse.

A door clicked open—the Smiths’ back door. Light spilled out, then Mrs. Smith herself followed, her arms wrapped around her as defense against the cold.
 

He held as still as he could. But Bucky barked anyway.

“Oh.” She said it so flatly and unwelcomingly, he might have been a skunk she’d stumbled across.

Okay, she was still pissed about that pass he’d made at her. Which was silly, because as far as passes went, it had been half-hearted. She should save her anger for something he’d meant more.

Maybe it was the crack he’d made about her age or the way he’d admired her ass. But in his defense, it was a lovely ass.

“Hello.” He kept his tone light. Just two neighbors meeting by chance.

“Hello.” Not an inch of give there. “I was just… looking for something. But I don’t see it out here. Goodnight.”

A clear lie—she hadn’t known he was out here, and she was avoiding him.

“Wait.” She might be angry, but he didn’t want to be alone. And she was better company than none. If he could convince her to stay.

She stopped. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t…” He choked on the rest, realizing how terrible it would sound.

“Didn’t mean it?” The disbelief in her voice was sharp. “So you just unthinkingly proposition every woman you meet?”

He didn’t want to ponder her explanation too deeply. Or why he’d unthinkingly propositioned her when he’d been resolved not to. “Like I said, I’m sorry. And it won’t happen again.”

“And the teasing?”

“I’m sorry for that too.”

She waited with her hand on the door, her shoulders hunched, her limbs tense. His apology hadn’t worked after all.

He dug deep then, went past the charm, the confidence, and into a deeper part of himself, the part that didn’t know what to do with her kids or her disdain. And he put that into this next: “I truly am sorry. About all of it. I was an ass. It won’t happen again.” He spoke that last so slow and distinct, each word could have been its own sentence.

She remained unmoving, her stance unaccepting. His heart slowed.
 

Then her chin came up. Her shoulders came back. Her hand left the doorknob.

“How was your trip?” A neighborly enough question, but her tone was stiff.

Terrible.
He released a deep sigh, his heartbeat accelerating back to where it should be. “All right.”

Surprising the hell out of him, she picked her way across the dark ground between them. She’d changed out of work clothes into a housedress—no girdle. Her bare feet peeked out from underneath her hem.

Standing only a few feet from him, she asked, “Everything okay? I guess you can’t go into detail.”

He remembered his motions as he’d prepared to escape the sinking capsule, all of it done without conscious thought, all of him focused on doing his duty.

Yet, at the very back of his brain, somewhere just above where his neck met his skull, there had been fear. Fear that the ocean would drag him down as surely as it was dragging the capsule, the both of them coming to rest forever on the bottom of the ocean floor.

“Just fine.” He flashed his
Life
smile.

She turned away. “Good for you.” Her voice was cool. She might have accepted his apology—at least, he thought that was what had happened—but they weren’t anywhere near friendly yet.

“Thanks for taking care of Bucky. I appreciate it.” Dogs and thank yous—she couldn’t be mad about those.

“It was the kids. Thank them.”

“I will,” he said, not letting his annoyance into his tone. “But I wanted to thank you too.”

She tilted her head toward him, but he couldn’t see her expression. For half a moment he was held by the tilt of her head, the considering stance of her. Would she stay? Would she go?