Station Breaker

1 Space Gun

T-minus 4 hours:

I think my Commander is insane.

Not the kind of insanity natural to anybody willing to sit on top of a million gallons of explosive fuel — but the workplace shooting kind of nuts.

I tell myself I'm the crazy one. This is Commander Halston Bennet we're talking about. I've known him for years. Yet, a second ago I saw him in the prep room mirror slipping a gun into the side pocket of his spacesuit when he didn't think anyone was looking.

At first I don't think anything of it. Bennet, after all, is the manliest man you'll ever meet; a former Navy pilot, SEAL instructor, and a NASA astronaut before coming to work for iCosmos. Of course a guy like him would carry a gun into space. Military pilots are taught hand-to-hand combat in case they come down in hostile territory. Russians keep pistols on their Soyuz craft in case they land somewhere with wolves — which is just about everywhere there. Maybe Bennet is just planning for any contingency?

Hell, maybe he wants to shoot Martians.

I try to put it out of my mind, but I can't. I should say something.

Maybe it's just a standard operating procedure I don't know about? In that case, telling Renata, our launch manager, that he has a gun won't be a big deal.

But what if it's Bennet's little secret? Maybe he's not supposed to do this, but the piece is his good luck charm?

If I rat him out, he could be out of the company and I'll probably catch shit for being the one that finked on an American hero.

An American hero.

Halston Bennet is the kind of man that made me want to become an astronaut. He's the man I want to be when I grow up. He's also the one that trained me to go into space.

Space.

Holy shit.

Of course this would happen on my first mission.

Hell, I didn't even know I was going until twelve hours ago. I was an alternate for Robbie Carlyle. I got a phone call at 3 AM telling me I needed to get my ass to Canaveral in the next hour.

The official story is Carlyle suffered a sprain while working out.

The real story is that he slipped in the shower getting busy with some girl other than his regular girlfriend.

I've been listed as an alternate six times. After the fifth time the astronaut I was alternating for defiantly refused to show up with the flu, a broken leg or visible cold sores, I kind of gave up and decided I'd be going into space after about the 10,000th rich jerk-off tourist flew out of Mojave in one of those suborbital tin cans they call a spaceship.

Then I got the call.

I'd been waiting for that call ever since I decided I wanted to be an astronaut.

Not because I wanted to set foot on Mars or perform earth-shattering experiments in micro-gravity. But because I wanted to fly things. The faster the better.

My heroes have always been pilots. From Chuck Yeager to Han Solo, I wanted to be the guy at the controls — a guy like Bennet.

Bennet. Damn it. In some alternate universe I was going to be a military guy turned NASA astronaut like him.

Imagine my disappointment when I was seventeen years old and walked into an Air Force recruitment center wearing my Coke-bottle glasses and was told in no uncertain terms the only way I'd see the inside of a fighter cockpit was if there were paper towels and a bottle of Windex in my hand so I could clean it for the guys with perfect eyesight.

Pissed, I worked two jobs that summer; getting up hours before dawn to fold newspapers and deliver them. I can still smell the wet ink and feel the warm newsprint in my hands as it sucked all the moisture from my fingers. After that, I worked at Burger King during the day, getting laughed at by my friends as they came into the place imagining new and ridiculous ways to "Have it their way." Har har, guys.

I used the money I earned to buy myself laser surgery for my eyes. Which was something my parents couldn't afford — trying to raise three kids on one teacher's salary as my mother finished up her master's degree.

With beyond perfect 20/10 vision, I walked into the Navy recruiter's office and was told, sorry kid, LASIK was an automatic disqualifier.

They changed the rule later, but it was too late for me. Uncle Sam wanted no part in making my dream a reality. I'd never be a guy like Bennet, a Real American Hero™.

Dejected and rejected, I decided I'd find other ways to take to the sky. I studied engineering and aeronautics in college and found that as a student you could get cheap pilot training.

I learned how to fly fixed wing, rotary, single engine, multi-engine and even no-engine in gliders and a hot air balloon. One summer, a couple of my flight school pals and I even took a trip to Russia and got to take control of MiGs. I did a crash course in Russian, afraid I'd try to change the air conditioner and end up ejecting myself over Siberia.

To pay for it all, I spent my spare time volunteering for medical studies where they poked me with different chemicals as I sat around playing flight simulators.

When it came time to graduate, my friends all went into commercial aviation. I didn't. Flying a jumbo jet wasn't the same as going to the stars. So I took a job as a science teacher in my mom's school district.

The same week classes started, iCosmos, the private space company with its own fleet of rockets, announced they were accepting applications for astronauts.

I pissed my mom off when I turned in my school resignation after iCosmos hired me. Although, it wasn't as an astronaut at first. They had plenty of former NASA people, like Bennet, who'd gone through their program to choose from.

When the recruiter read the part on my resume about working for various pharmaceutical companies, you should have seen the fiendish look in her eyes when I explained I'd basically been a medical guinea pig.

"Oh, we need those too," she replied.

"Will it help me be an astronaut?" I asked.

"Sure, why not?" she answered in that Northern Californian, non-response.

It didn't matter. Being a test monkey stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool for ten hours in a leaking spacesuit, or finding out what happens when your cockpit chair snaps loose as the capsule goes rolling sideways down a hill, was a lot closer to being an astronaut than flying complaining tourists and neurotic flight attendants on the same route over and over.

The day they finally accepted me into the iCosmos astronaut program, after nearly killing me on Earth nine ways from Sunday, was the second happiest day of my life.

The happiest was today, when I got the call. That all came to a fiery reentry when I saw Bennet, the man who taught The Most Interesting Man in the World how to be interesting, stick a gun into his pocket.

Man up, David. Go talk to him.

Worst case scenario and he actually is crazy?

He'll just shoot me here on Earth instead of 200 miles up.