The next morning, marathon-cramming sessions began. I never do well with those. You need a certain amount of fear as motivation and I just didn’t have it. I procrastinated briefly by clearing a path to the computer screen and submitting RJ’s clearances and team assignment. From there the battle began to group the pile of musty-smelling notebooks and printouts into four meaningful stacks, a half-hearted effort that helped me fool myself into thinking I was doing something. It worked for a while, until wanderlust kicked in and my alter ego began asking questions about the flight simulator in the high-bay just outside the hanger window. Curtains will need to be installed at some point.
Along with the ungodly stacks of ringed notebooks, they had provided three linked tablets, which offered a certain modest amusement. When you called up info on one, the other two automatically displayed supporting data. I ended up tilted back in my chair studying the Griffin’s flight deck until a mercifully distracting knock came at the door and it swung open to reveal someone new.
She wore tan cargo pants tight enough that they almost made me laugh. She had high brown leather boots that would have complimented a riding crop nicely. The sky blue blouse had a faint image of a milky-white swirl leading up over the shoulder. Her red exchange badge was clipped to the open V near the neck. Her hair was dark-brown short, her makeup reserved and precisely applied. She had a pert little upturned nose, and green eyes behind an appraising stare. There was no hint of a smile from the small cherry red lips. I guessed her to be mid-thirties. Her self-assured demeanor made the shields kick in.
“Yes?”
“Danica Donoro, Commander. I report under Porre. I wanted to check in and let you know I’m on board.”
“I’m sorry. Things are happening so fast they did not send me a file or let me know you were coming. If you’ll forgive an awkward question, you’re here to fill what position?”
“I’m a pilot, Commander. Really, that’s probably the first thing we should clear the air on.”
“Come in, Danica. Have a seat. What kind of air-clearing would you like?”
“Female test pilots. Enough women have come back shot up these days that they pretty much don’t question us as fighter pilots anymore, but there’s still a big matzo ball hanging out there that women aren’t cut out for the experimental stuff. I’m hoping you and I are not going to go round and round about that.”
She sat back in the seat almost in a slouch, lowered her chin in anticipation, and stared. Many people after having the courage to deliver an ultimatum to their new boss tend to cower a bit immediately afterward, having used up their courage in the delivery. This woman was having none of that. Her intense gaze told me she was locked and loaded. I did my best to hide the fact that I was impressed.
“Have you seen the sim out there?”
“First place I stopped.”
“You must know that by the time we finish crashing that thing a few hundred times, everyone is going to know who can fly and who can’t. We’re going to burn up, break up, and do the lawn dart trick until we know what we can get away with and what we can’t. And each time somebody screws up, the simulator playbacks are going to tell on them. It wouldn’t matter if you were Chewbacca, ET, or Flash Gordon, those flight profiles are gonna scream to the whole world what kind of pilot you are. There’ll be no guesswork involved. As for me, am I prejudiced against women left-seaters? If you’re worried about that, you may have come to the right place. My father let me start flying when I was twelve. He took me out to the smallest airport he could find and said if I mastered the short strips, the big ones would be a breeze. The FBO was a tiny wooden shack about the size of a tollbooth. I told them who I was and went and sat on a bench outside to wait. A few minutes later, this old German lady comes out. Had to be in her seventies, at least. She looks at me, says my name, looks at her clipboard and says, “You want to learn to fly, eh?” I nodded my head and to my surprise she says, “Okay, let’s go.”
“She had an antique Pitts Special. She buckled me in the front and off we went. She made that thing do every aerobatic maneuver known to man until she was sure I was about to puke into the wind, which would not have been good for her in the back seat. On the ground, while I was still choking it back, she said, “Okay Mr. Tarn, if you’re here tomorrow at this same time, I’ll know you really want to fly.” The next day, I was there early expecting the same torture. Out comes one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, in a see-through blouse, and she says, “My name is Mary Mackly. I’ll be your instructor for the next few weeks. So, Danica, do you think I have any insecurity about women pilots?”
“How about vendettas?”
“You’ve got to know, I can’t afford to cut anybody any slack on this tour. You could say it’s a long reach. You’ll know I’m not prejudice the first time I have to come down on you for screwing up. Equality works both ways. Something I would like to know, though; what got you into the business of flying?”
“It was all I ever wanted. When I was a kid, I used to hope the aircraft going overhead would crash on our property so maybe they’d let me keep the wreckage and I could pretend in it. Then, I stole my father’s Jetstream when I was ten.”
“You must be kidding. You soloed a PAV when you were ten?”
“We were camping in the mountains, fortunately. There was no municipal air traffic anywhere. I was so sure I could handle it I thought if I could show my parents they’d let me fly.”
“And?”
“I got lost real fast and had to put down in the middle of nowhere. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Scared the shit out of myself. When they finally tracked me down, I was grounded for good, in more ways than one. There were no citations because there was nobody around. After the rage settled, my father started taking me to simulator classes and at least I got that out of it. I was the only ten-year-old girl in a class full of older boys. I was arrogant and overconfident, and I thought I could do anything. I ended up beating the pants off all those guys. Made them feel like they’d lost their man-cards. Never gave it a second thought. Flying was never an option. It was always compulsory.”
“Why did Porre pick you? No profiling intended.”
“I was an assistant to the assistant test engineer on the original Griffin design. Nobody knows more about the Griffin than I do. I can’t wait to see her again.”
“My report says it’s in the Flight Processing Facility near the VAB, being configured for a twelve-month excursion, but we’ll have a test flight before actual departure. Do you really know what you’re signing on to?”
“Actually, I pulled some strings to get here. I have always kept track of the Griffin, hoping someday it would be pulled out of mothballs. You know how it got its name?”
“Not a clue.”
“It’s the wings. The Griffin was a mythological creature with the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle. That ship has all the power of a spacecraft, but the wings of an aircraft as well. So they called it the Griffin. I had a friend on the inside and when the Griffin was sent out for refitting, he let me know. It took a lot of calls but I finally locked in on Porre’s office. I was lucky, too. He had someone else lined up for the job, and he didn’t want to replace him. If I hadn’t called in favors from executives above his office, I wouldn’t be here right now. And, yeah, by that time I knew enough about the mission to know it was aggressive, but that’s the way I like it.”
“And you know there have been some significant changes to the Griffin?”
“Just that it has a whole lot of range and a whole lot of P-factor and not the kind you get from a propeller, either. When can we fly the sim?”
“According to our resident director, in a couple days, but it will take a lot longer than that to go through these spec and cert books. I suggest you get started right away. Tell me, since I know nothing about you: are you married?”
“Nope. No self-important stud is going to tell me what to do.”
“Wow! Which one of us is the chauvinist??
??
“No, no. I’m just saying. A lot of people think they can take over your life if they get too comfortable, if you know what I mean.”
“Any kids?”
“Hell no. They can take over your life.”
“I’ll go through your file when I get it. There’s actually just one concern I have. How obligated did you make yourself to Mr. Bernard Porre?”
“I owe him periodic progress reports.”
“Has he tried to insert himself into the command structure through you?”
“I see where you’re going with this. He’s manipulative, but I never promised him anything.”
“The deal is, when our butts are hanging out a few hundred light years from here, and he’s sitting at home in his den having tea and crumpets, his orders don’t mean jack-shit. And before we strap in for the long haul, I’m going to need to know you believe that.”
“Fair enough.”
“On this ride there is not going to be a standard command structure. There’s going to be seven bosses with one boss over them: me. If I begin to sense that anyone is developing a superiority complex over anyone else, it will immediately qualify them for permanent galley and latrine duty and that’s just for starters.”
She smiled and leaned back in her seat. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Commander. I did a lot of asking around when your name came up. It seems you’re as mysterious as the Griffin. I know you were on the last Electra mission, but try to get anyone to talk about that. There’s some stories floating around; stuff has leaked out. People say that ship was too damaged to get back. There are rumors about a battle with aliens. There’s one particularly interesting rumor maybe even you haven’t heard about. It reminded me of a very old story I once heard in flight school. There was an incident way back in the 1980s. A new passenger airliner had just been put into service. It was sitting on the ramp ready to go with passengers onboard waiting. The thing was so new the fuel indicators weren’t working yet, so the ground crew had to climb up and measure the tanks manually. They used a metric fuel stick. The problem was, the system wasn’t set up in metric. They told the Captain he was good to go when he actually had half of the fuel he needed. He got halfway to the destination at thirty-thousand feet when fuel pump alarms start popping up. A few minutes later engines begin shutting down. By the time the last engine died, they finally had to accept there was no fuel and they were going down. Even back then it was a glass cockpit, so all their readouts went dark. The APU was not running off course, so they had to crank open a little door on the underside to get a wind turbine turning to get some electrical power back. They called Air Traffic Control and were told the only thing in range was a short, abandoned airstrip and it was at the very edge of their envelope or even beyond it a bit. The Captain went for it. A mile out they see a car show or something taking place on the abandoned runway, people everywhere, and they’re silent cause there’s no engines running. Finally, a kid on a bike sees this big heavy airplane coming in and starts screaming bloody murder and the car show turns into a mad panic to get out of the way. Although the runway was supposedly a bit out of range, somehow the Captain made it there with a little extra. He’s high. He and the copilot stand on the rudder and slip a heavy jumbo jet down and land safely on that overgrown field. At first the flight crew is in a panic to get through the post crash procedures to prevent fire, until the Captain realizes there’s not gonna be any fire, cause there isn’t any fuel. Anyway, in the following weeks, the airline company programs the same failure into its main simulator system. A bunch of pilots go in there to duplicate what happened, and not one of them gets the plane safely down to that runway. I tell you this story, because the rumors I hear say it’s kind of the same thing with the Electra. In the Washington training facility, they set up the same circumstances the Electra had with the same spacecraft systems out of commission. Flight and engineering crews went in repeatedly and tried to get the Electra simulation back to Earth. Nobody’s made it yet. I thought you’d like to know that, and I’d sure like to hear that story.”
“Where are you staying, Danica?”
“They put me up in an apartment on Merritt Island. The view is fantastic but I don’t think I’ll be spending much time there.”
“Have you started working the spec sheets?”
“A bunch of it downloaded this morning.”
“You need to check in with Terry Costerley, our test director. He’ll set you up with an office and a schedule.”
She pushed herself up to leave, and paused at the door. “Commander, do any kick boxing?”
“Only when I’m forced to, Danica.”
She nodded. “It’s a hobby. I need to find a sparring partner.”
It made me notice how well conditioned she was. “You may be in luck. There might be someone coming on board I think will give you a challenge at that. By the way, do you have any idea who else Porre is sending?”
“I know it’s a propulsion engineer, but that’s all. He was pretty pissed off about having to appoint me, so I wasn’t on the in with him, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, welcome aboard. I look forward to having you up front.”
“You’d better stay sharp Commander, or I’ll have your man-card!” She laughed, and shut the door too hard.
Chapter 6