The Last Second (A Brit in the FBI #6)(3)
Holloway shook her head. “Sorry, Franklin, but there’s no way I’m clearing her for flight. I suppose she did show some skill during the incident. It appears she kept her head about her, managed to get reattached to the ISS against all odds. But she shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place. In my professional opinion, the stress of the incident has manifested into something bigger and deeper. The delusions she’s having about these aliens—it’s entirely possible she’s had a psychotic break and is going to present with a severe mental illness after more testing. She’s sick, Franklin, and I’m grounding her.”
He sighed. “All right, I’ll tell her. Can we at least keep her attached to the next mission, for publicity’s sake?”
“I don’t think you’d be doing her any favors. Think this through, Franklin. What it looks like is she tried to commit suicide. She unhooked her tether—”
“A mischaracterization, you saw the tapes. Her tether got tangled with her fellow astronaut Gary Verlander and they were trying to get themselves straight.”
“That’s what you think you saw, what she claims too, but what I saw, what others saw as well, was an astronaut unhook herself and kick off into space, Franklin. It was a miracle she was able to turn around and reattach. Now she’s back on Earth talking about meeting aliens. I know you believe in her, always have, but I don’t. Not now. She’s not stable. I can try some new therapies and reassess in six months, but I can’t guarantee you she won’t be worse. Psychopathy like this, she could very well be more embedded in her delusions.”
Dr. Holloway left the room, the door closing behind her. The click rang of finality. Norgate stared at the closed door. Holloway hadn’t ever liked Dr. Nevaeh Patel, he’d known it immediately. Jealousy? Had Nevaeh known the extent of Dr. Holloway’s dislike? He doubted it. Before this fiasco, Nevaeh had been totally focused on being an astronaut, readying herself to go to the space station. She probably hadn’t even noticed Holloway. But, of course, her entire future had been decided by one person. Not that it mattered now. Rebecca Holloway’s word was final and he’d lost his best astronaut.
Now he had to break it to Nevaeh that she was grounded.
In the hall, Nevaeh stood erect, hands behind her back, legs shoulder-width apart. She looked—resigned. When she met his eyes, he shook his head slightly, and she bit her lip.
Norgate said, “It’s only six months.”
Nevaeh gave an ugly laugh. “We both know I’m finished here. What I don’t understand, Franklin, is this: I’ve given you the information NASA’s been searching for since its inception, and instead of doing everything you can to confirm what I’m saying, you’re kicking me out.”
“It’s just six months, Nevaeh—”
It was Rebecca Holloway, she knew it. “I quit.”
And with that, she walked away, shoulders back, heart breaking in two. And the Numen, silent until now, said in a soft, sibilant, and single voice, It will be all right, Nevaeh. We chose you. You will find us again. We will help you.
CHAPTER ONE
PRESENT DAY
TIME TO LAUNCH: T-MINUS 00:03:01:23
The Guiana Space Centre (CSG) is a French and European spaceport to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana. Operational since 1968, it is particularly suitable as a location for a spaceport as it is near the equator, so that less energy is required to maneuver a spacecraft into an equatorial, geostationary orbit, and it has open sea to the east, so that lower stages of rockets and debris from launch failures cannot fall on human habitations.
—Wikipedia
Launch of the Galactus 5 Rocket
Galactus Spaceport
French Guiana
July 14, 2018
Dr. Nevaeh Patel was always nervous at a countdown, but this wasn’t an ordinary launch. She’d taken great care to ensure no one on the ground had any idea how very important this payload was to her. All they saw was the same calm, cool, collected CEO and president they always saw, an omnipresent figure during launches, a well-liked, hands-on manager, intelligent—a woman to admire. After all, she’d spent almost six months aboard the International Space Station, one of the few female astronauts to achieve the honor in the new millennium, and was spoken of with awe by many of the aerospace experts who spent their days and nights sending rockets to space. Many. Not all.
She tapped a pencil against the computer station, listening to her launch commander run through the countdown checklist. She looked from screen to screen, focused, assessing. The forty-foot wall was broken into five massive squares—the large center screen showing the Galactus 5 rocket on the launch pad, flanked by two more screens on either side. Top left, the launch sequence; bottom left, the orbital planes surrounding Earth; top right, the elliptical they selected for the satellite insertion; bottom right, the interior specs of the rocket itself, laid out in a 3-D rendering from engines to fairing, running systems checks of each component. Above was a smaller horizontal screen running the computer programming codes now taking over from human flight control.
She watched every screen with the intensity of a hawk. Nothing was left to chance. Nothing. Even the smallest anomaly would scrub the launch. And she prayed.
Her launch commander spoke in her ear: “This is Flight. Everything looks good. We are all go for launch. Repeat, all go for launch. T-minus two minutes.”