It was the first day of the new term. Kimberly had been advanced one whole grade, she was so bright. But some of the older girls did not like their new dark-skinned arrival.
“Five of them,” Kimberly repeated. “They threw mud at me. They said I was too dark to be with them.”
By the time Mama led her downstairs again Kimberly was almost calm. But she could feel the anger burning inside her.
Her father was waiting at the foot of the stairs. “Come with me, Kimberly,” he said, leading her into his office.
Dr. Harold Hadid was a third-generation Saudi Englishman who had emigrated to the United States to pursue a career in neurosurgery. Tall and reserved, he’d had to face the inborn, unconscious intolerance of the British class system and decided to move to America. There he had met his California-born, Japanese American wife, excelled in school at Johns Hopkins, and settled in the Washington, D.C., area.
He sat Kimberly in the big leather armchair that was usually reserved for guests and listened patiently to her story about the other girls’ bullying.
“I hate her!” Kimberly concluded. “Marla Kingston. I hate her!”
Sitting on the rocker next to her, Papa raised a slim finger.
“Hate is a vicious emotion,” he said softly. “It can lead you to do things you’ll regret later on.”
“But she—”
With one of his rare smiles, Papa said, “Let me give a word of advice, Kimberly. An American politician, a U.S. senator, in fact, once said, ‘Don’t get mad, get even.’ Think about that.”
Kimberly did think about it. When she returned to school later that day, she went straight to the principal’s office to explain that she had gone home to change her dress, which had somehow gotten begrimed with mud.
She kept to herself, avoiding most of the other girls in her class, and everyone forgot about Kimberly’s muddied dress.…
A few months later, she won the top score in the class’s state exams. And somehow Marla Kingston’s paper disappeared and she had to retake the test after regular class hours. Even then, her paper was rejected by the computer scoring device because of illegible handwritten sections.
And years later, when Kimberly and Marla Kingston were seniors at Johns Hopkins University, Marla’s cell phones, laptops, and other digital devices malfunctioned so often that Ms. Kingston was reduced to tears.
Don’t get mad, get even.
JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, ISS CONTROL CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS
Although he was on the ground and not in space, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Robinson took the initiative, as he’d been trained. Shocked and incredulous, he was sitting in front of the new, organic LED panel with the CAPCOM sign atop it, his earphones dangling around his neck.
Four years of astronaut training, three six-month tours aboard the ISS, five years flying the F-22, two years of pilot and fighter training, and four years at the Blue Zoo made him react without thinking—the one thing he’d mastered after years of preparation for this one instant in time that would affect nearly every one of the seven-plus billion people on Earth.
For the first time in history, he killed a live video feed to the public being beamed from space, immediately after Vasilev was murdered. No way in hell was he going to give these terrorists any publicity by showing ISS personnel being slaughtered.
Broadcasting over NASA TV, Roscosmos, the Space Channel, and other channels picked up by every major network in the world, the public feed of the live coverage from the International Space Station suddenly went dead. Channel screens went dark and nothing, not even a sign apologizing for the inconvenience, appeared on the networks.
But the feed was still being broadcast over NASA’s closed channel, and he knew that every person in the U.S. government would instantly start working to help any way they could.
And the media went apeshit. Especially after just seeing Zel’dovich’s dead body and witnessing the brutal slaying of an ISS crew member.
Scott didn’t ponder the public relations crisis that might erupt from NASA’s press dweebs, and he didn’t wring his hands over the possible—and now, certainly probable—exponential drop in funding the space program would see from irate congressmen. He couldn’t care less; it was the last thing on his mind, as it should be. He was one of the last, true astronaut fighter pilots NASA still employed in the dwindling astronaut corps, and like the rest of the astronauts, he had been trained not to react but to anticipate, to stop the problem, fix it, and ensure that it didn’t happen again before it erupted into anything big.
Every person in the room manning the communications consoles that oversaw space station operations, their sensors and data feeds, was among the most highly qualified people in the world. They just didn’t get better than this. Even after years of neglect, the space program still attracted the world’s top talent.
And Scott wouldn’t want anyone less qualified in the communications center, either with him here on the ground or if it was him up on the ISS, undergoing what the American and Russian crew was experiencing … as Kimberly Hassid-Robinson was now.
And that escalated the stakes even higher, because he and the people in this room weren’t only trying to assist the ISS crew to survive whatever-the-hell the whole world had just seen; now it was personal, as far as Scott was concerned.
But as good as everyone on the floor was, he was still the only person who’d recently been to space. That gave him the creds to pull off what he’d just done—and they still had comm with the station through their closed link.
But seconds later, the remaining NASA-only comm channels with the ISS blinked off, as if someone on the ISS had killed the emergency visual and voice links streaming from the station.
The noise level in the room was approaching that of a jet taking off on afterburners. Everyone was standing, yelling into their throat mikes as they stretched the wires from their headphones as far as they could reach, gesticulating to unseen listeners, turning to their neighbors and trying to yell over the escalating noise.
For some reason Flight, the ISS Flight Director, wasn’t taking control and trying to focus everyone back on helping the astronauts and cosmonauts on board. Scott realized this was Flight’s first solo and the poor kid was badly rattled. So as today’s senior astronaut liaison serving as CAPCOM, Scott needed to take the bull by the balls.
He yanked off his headphones, kicked the black, government-issue swivel chair out of his way, and climbed up onto the console. He started clapping his hands and yelling as loudly as he could, “Hold it! Stop! Quiet down!”
He kept clapping, now and then pointing to a person to silence her neighbor so they could all focus their attention on him. Someone bolted from the control center, leaving their post. Within seconds the noise in the room dopplered down considerably, although a few people still gabbled on excitedly. The chamber was quiet enough for Scott to speak, not in a shriek but in a strong, measured tone designed to let people know he was in charge and get them to listen to him.
Now that the command center was quiet, Scott held his hands over his head and said firmly, “Listen up! Everyone in here knows Zel’dovich and Vasilev are dead, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Now that the ISS’s comm links have been cut, we need to be trying everything we can think of to contact our people on the station. Everything.