Chapter Text
They try to make it a proper holiday, for the boy’s sake.
The weather’s less than cooperative, muggy and hot as a summer swamp one day and then rainy and chilly the next. Every afternoon the skies open in a downpour. It’s hard to reconcile the Christmas lights with the steam rising from the tops of sun-warmed palm trees. But there’s every reason to celebrate. It’s the second week in December and the space agency’s brand new launch facilities to the south are operational at long last.
It’s a sight to see, even for a jaded space veteran like Benny. The gantries above the launch pads sparkle in the sunlight, and the Visitors’ Center gleams like a fresh penny. Even deep within the private crew and control areas of the complex the luxury continues unabated. The astronauts’ quarters are slicker than any hotel Benny’s ever seen. Mission Control looks like a set from a science fiction film, all flashing touch screens and fancy modernist Scandinavian furniture. Nothing like the ancient MI back home at the Space Center outside of Bricksburg, desktops discolored with the scorches of ten thousand cigarettes, fossilized gobs of gum cobblestoning the undersides of every surface.
Hour by hour, visitors from across the world pour in to the new Center. There’s the music of hundreds of languages in the gathering crowd. Television crews slowly set up their cameras beside the bleachers at the launch viewing areas, shroud them in plastic against the inevitable rain. The AP and Reuters have sent armies of reporters. They strut round the Center like kings, flashing their laminated press passes. Excitement and anticipation are thick in the air.
Vega is headed back into space at last.
And Benny with her.
Quarantine begins in five days. Benny ticks the hours off obsessively, runs a countdown in his head. B doesn’t mention it, but Benny knows he’s doing it too. He watches B’s eyes flick down to the clock on his phone five, six times an hour. Time trickles away like water, unrelenting, unstoppable. This should get easier, but it never does.
They’re holed up in a cheap hotel to the west of the Space Center, all three of them: Benny, B, Neil. It’s a tight squeeze in the small room with a busy young boy, so they spend little time there. From the hotel it’s a quick walk down the street to the ocean where they can look out across the cape towards the Center’s looming Vehicle Assembly Building and beyond, to the three launch pads. One is occupied.
If Benny squints, he can see Vega already perched atop the bright orange boosters of the Delta IV Heavy. She’s configured now for a low earth orbit flight to the space station, though he engineered her for deep space travel as well. Someday she’ll take a crew to Mars. She’s beautiful in the hazy sunlight, white as a dove. She’d been his life, and nearly his death. She’s the culmination of all of his skills as an engineer, a mechanic, a pilot, an astronaut. He loves her fiercely. Once he would have even called her his greatest work, his magnum opus.
Once.
Before there was Neil.