the two women lunged at each other. Tonya had Miss Celia by the waist and was pushing her backward into the wall. Miss Celia reached down, grabbed a chunk of Tonya’s hair and pulled.
Two more stylists rushed around the corner, and Shelly clutched her chest in relief. Finally, someone was going to break this up.
Instead, the two women stopped a safe distance away, and one said to the other, “Aw shucks, there they go again.”
Shelly had seen enough. Without looking back, she stood up and headed straight for the door. Without bothering to remove her cape, she ran across the parking lot to her car, with her wet hair dripping down her back.
Spacecraft simulator maneuvers began Monday morning, and Linc made sure he was early for the pre-training briefing. He couldn’t give Shelly yet another reason to question his commitment to the mission.
He showed up at a quarter to the hour, expecting Shelly to already be there or show up minutes later. He sat down on the table at the head of the room, near where she would likely sit. Propping his heel on the table so he could rest his arm on his knee, he was strategically situated to be the first thing she would see when she walked in.
The effect was lost when the rest of the team started filing in, and Shelly was still nowhere to be found. “Hey, Randy. Hi, Mitch,” Linc said, exchanging hand slaps first with the copilot and then with the mission specialist on the Alpha team.
“There he is, Lightning himself,” Dustin Chambers said, pausing in the doorway. “You know what they say, though, don’t you? Lightning never strikes twice.”
Linc resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the commander of the Beta team, the team that would take over flying Draco if something happened to his team. “It’s just a nickname. Like yours. After all, just because they call you Dusty doesn’t mean they think that you’re old.”
Dusty was ten years older than Linc’s thirty-six years, and Linc always felt the two of them couldn’t get along because the older man resented all that Linc had accomplished in such a short period of time.
That and the fact that if it weren’t for Linc’s space shuttle heroics eighteen months ago, Dusty would have been leading the Alpha team.
After Dusty, the rest of the Beta team–—namely, Vince and Paul—trailed in, followed by Quincy, Jason and Raj from Shelly’s engineering team.
But it wasn’t until nearly twenty minutes later that Shelly finally appeared. She flew over the threshold with two overstuffed binders in her arms.
Linc looked at his watch and clucked in disappointment. “I was starting to think that I was going to have to run this meeting myself. Ms. London, I’d hate to think you weren’t taking this mission seriously, as being late for the first day of training clearly shows.”
Some of the other guys in the room gasped or oohed under their breath.
Shelly glared at Linc, muttering, “My alarm clock never went off.” Setting her binders on the corner of the table, she pushed them until Linc was forced to slip off the edge. “I apologize for being late, team. We have a lot to cover, so let’s not waste any more time.”
Choking down her fluster, Shelly tried not to lose control of the briefing before it started. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how she’d become such a total spaz since arriving in Houston. Back in D.C. everyone had respected her. Here, no matter how hard she tried to get one step ahead, she kept falling behind. Shelly was starting to think that Houston was just bad luck.
After her disaster at the hair salon, she’d been forced to wash out the sticky conditioner the hairdresser had half applied to her hair. Since it hadn’t been applied evenly, it created two strangely different textures in her hair. Where the conditioner had been concentrated, her hair was extra wavy; the rest was tangled and matted.
It had taken two washings to get her hair halfway back to normal. But, as a result, she had to wear it in another gel-slicked bun. Because she’d been preoccupied with her hair all day Saturday, she’d been up late Sunday night, going over her training procedures.
She’d forgotten to set her alarm clock, and the rest was history. Linc had lain in wait, ready to mock her. But she couldn’t give him the satisfaction of getting in her head.
“Okay, team. We all know that we’re on a tough deadline for GRM. You all have flown on space shuttle missions in the past, and you’re here because you’re the best at what you do. Therefore, our training is going to focus only on the areas where Draco is different from the space shuttle. Unfortunately, there are many significant differences, and we’re going to have to account for them during these sessions.” Shelly looked from one astronaut to another. “Let’s talk about the most significant difference. Anybody?”
Vince Patrecchio, the Beta team copilot, nodded to her. “The air launch. Draco is going to be strapped to the bottom of a B-52 aircraft and launched from forty thousand feet.”
“That’s right,” said Shelly. “This allows us to keep this mission secret, since there won’t be a high-profile rocket launch. Since we have to cram several months of training events into the next eight weeks, training has been divided into three phases. The computer simulations for launch, docking and landing, which we’re starting today. Practice related to the maneuverability of Draco’s extension arm will take place in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, and finally, we’ll be doing flight testing at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert.”
Shelly walked to the blackboard and wrote out the launch simulator exercises for the day. “One difference between Draco and the space shuttle is the thrusters. So we’re going to practice—”
Randy snickered next to Linc. “The last thing this team needs to practice is thrusting. Lightning definitely has that down.”
Shelly gritted her teeth. Normally, she didn’t have trouble getting her peers to respect her authority. But Linc had already set a tone of disrespect, and it was only natural that his team would follow suit.
Before Shelly could figure out the best way to handle Randy’s remark, Dusty Chambers spoke up. “Give me a break, guys. You wouldn’t say things like that if Colonel Murphy was in the room, so don’t start mouthing off now. Let’s show Shelly how professional we are in the air force.”
“Thank you, Dusty,” Shelly said gratefully.
Dusty gave her a wide smile in return. And, judging by the sudden scowl on Linc’s face, he didn’t appreciate his rival coming to her rescue. She knew all about the tension between them, and a sudden burst of wisdom had told her that she could use it to her advantage.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Apparently, Dusty subscribed to that same philosophy. During the twenty-minute break between the briefing and the walk to the hangar where the flight simulations would take place, he fell into step beside her.
“Can I talk to you for a second?” he said.
Shelly stopped in the corridor and turned to face him. He was handsome, with spiky blond hair and a lined, weathered face from spending a lot of time outdoors. “Sure. What’s on your mind, Dusty?”
“I’m just curious. Did you really try to get Lightning pulled off the mission?”
Shelly
