IVI.
Rose had stopped going to the cafeteria for morning coffee because there was too much to do. Or that was what she said—and believed. An outsider might have said she had found work to fill that time. An outsider might have said she liked to boast of never having a minute, even for the cafeteria.
Suter stopped by sometimes. Rose found she rather liked him. She knew he was coming on to her. Many men did. So?
“At it again,” he said, leaning in her office door. “Got a minute?” He always had some excuse for visiting her. She didn’t discourage him. She learned stuff from him. And was flattered by the attention. Suter was a good-looking guy. Unlike Alan, however, he was aware of it. Vain.
“Half a minute,” she said. “I’m swamped.”
He had learned to bring his own coffee. Hers was terrible, made by some Seaman Apprentice first thing in the morning and left to cook down to its acidic worst all day. He told her some bit of detail about adjustments in the launch angle and said, “So you want to be an astronaut.”
“Sure do.” She was writing notes to herself about the launch angles.
“Ride the Vomit Comet? Join the Team of Heroes?”
“You got it.”
“I might be able to help you there.” She looked up. Her face was expressionless and did not give him the encouragement he wanted. “I know some people in the program.”
“I like to make it on my own,” she said.
“That’s not how it works.”
“That why you left the Navy?”
He had never mentioned his Navy career to her. It irritated him that she knew something like that without his having told her. “How’d you know that?” he said.
“My husband.”
Of course! That shithead Craik had told her all about him. He could picture the letters Craik had written home from the boat, full of self-pity and bitterness. He felt better. “I can imagine what he said about me,” Suter said with a smile.
“Really?” She had been writing, finished, looked up. “Actually, he didn’t say anything. I was the one who mentioned your name, and he put two and two together and guessed you were his old boss.”
“And then what’d he say about me?”
“Nothing.” She seemed surprised that he’d ask.
Well, of course he couldn’t believe that. Craik must have given her an earful. That was okay; bad press was better than no press. Maybe she found her husband just a bit of a shithead, too? “At least you mentioned my name to him,” he said with a grin.
“Valdez!” she shouted. She had a hell of a voice when she needed it; Suter resisted jumping out of his chair at her sudden bellow. Somebody had passed behind him out in the corridor. What the hell? he thought. A male voice behind him said, “Yeah,” and Rose called over and through Suter, “Show me how to acquire the Orbit Adjustment file out of White Sands, will you? I keep getting some message saying I’m committing an illegal act and I get closed down. It hurts my feelings.”
“Yeah, ma’am, I told you twice already.” He came in, a compact, dark, near-teenager in blue jeans. “Hey, how ya doin’?” he said to Suter without looking at him. He went right to Rose’s computer.
“Valdez is my resident geek,” she said. The words had a final tone to them, as if she had said something like, Oh, look how late it’s getting, meaning it was time for Suter to go. She turned away from him and toward Valdez, who was leaning over her computer.
“Uh—” Suter was annoyed. He didn’t like being dismissed. He liked even less being dismissed in favor of a Latino kid who had barely finished high school. “Maybe I’ll stick around and learn something,” he said.
She gave him a dazzling smile. “Valdez is the smartest computer jock in LantFleet. He’s got Silicon Valley after him—don’t you, Billie?”
“They jus’ want me for my body,” the kid said. His head was close to hers over the keyboard. Suter saw that he had a tiny tattoo behind his ear. Suter hated him.
Late in the day, Rose and Valdez caught a flight out of BWI to Houston. She was starting to ride herd on the thousands of details that affected the ship and the launch hardware; from Houston, they would go to Newport News to pick up the civilian ship for her week’s orientation. Go and go and go.
It was not enough for Rose to be assured by somebody else that things were going well. She had to see it for herself. She had to see the drawings, the mockups, the prototype. That first launch was not going off without her understanding everything about it. Valdez went along because he was her personal computer whiz—requested by name from her old squadron, where she had learned almost everything she knew about computers from him.
“How come you know so much, anyway?” she said as they flew over West Virginia, for once not using the flight to press her nose against the screen of her laptop. This was not a sudden desire to relax; Valdez was showing signs of unhappiness, and if her computer geek was unhappy, she knew she was going to be unhappy somewhere down the line.
“I’m a genius.” He meant it as a joke, but it was literally true, if you went by IQ scores.
“You weren’t born a computer geek, Valdez.”
“No, ma’am, I was born a spic. I was goin’ to be a criminal mastermind, but Mister Carvarlho got to me first.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll ask—who was Mister Carvarlho?”
“We called him ‘Mister Horse,’ because caballo means horse. You say ‘Carvarlho’ fast, it sounds like caballo—horse, okay? I hated him. He was PR, half black, he always wore suits, he was a born-again Christian with an attitude.”
“Not your ideal.”
Valdez laughed. “My nightmare! That guy was the opposite of everything I was gonna be. I was a gangbanger at eleven; at twelve, I was carrying a gun. No kiddin’! I had this Rossi .38 special, nickel, real shiny—I thought I was cool. I shot it once—I’m runnin’ the street at two a.m., just for the hell of it I shot it. Blam! I only had five bullets, that’s what it held—like a Chief’s Special, right, only a Rossi?—it was light, nice, but a lotta recoil for a little kid. Anyway, I carried that; I had a place I put it outside the school, I’d leave it in the morning, pick it up as soon as I got out. I was bad.”
The Navy didn’t like people who had been ba-a-a-d, she thought. He must have got awfully good awfully quick. “You never got caught?”
Valdez hesitated. He was slumped down in his seat, his left knee and calf pressed against the back of the seat in front. He was frowning. “My dad caught me. Him and me didn’t get along then. My dad—” Valdez squirmed upright. “He was workin’ two jobs, sendin’ money home, didn’t speak English—I came in drunk one night, he was comin’ home from his night job—I’m twelve years old, remember—and the gun drops out on the floor. He just looks at it, and then he starts to cry. I thought he was a jerk.
