“WHAT? WHAT PROBLEM on reentry? Out with it, Matsuri!”
“Hoi hoi, Yukari, I will, it’s just I’m not totally sure what the problem is myself yet. Hang on a second. I’ll put Kinoshita on.”
“I need you both to stay calm and listen up,” Kinoshita told them as soon as he was on the mic. “Sorry to put this on you now, but if we allow you to proceed on your planned course, there’s a chance you could disintegrate on reentry.”
“What?” Akane yelped.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!”
“Curse me all you want, but save it for later. We made a mistake, basically, but there’s a way out of this. We’re going to have you adjust your attitude on reentry to avoid overheating.”
“Adjust during reentry? Uh, is that even possible?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to do it yourself, manually. Time to flex those arm muscles, Yukari.”
“Flex my…what? You want me to pilot this thing at 8 G?”
“Preferably you’ll be finished with your maneuvers before the Gs get that bad. Around 5 or 6 G.”
“That’s still asking a lot of a dainty little girl, Kinoshita.”
“All we have up there is dainty little girls, if I’m not mistaken. So one of you has to do this.”
“You have a point. So what do I do, exactly?”
“You’ll be bringing the nose of the orbiter up and down three times. The trick is in the timing and the angle. You’ll need to maintain the right angle for the right amount of time and know when to switch. NASA’s just sent us the numbers. There are twenty-four time/angle checkpoints for you to keep track of.”
“You’re going to read them off to me, right? There’s no way I can remember that many.”
“No, actually. Remember we can’t talk on the radio during reentry. You’ll have to write it down and stick it on your instrument panel.”
“Okay. Let me get some paper.” Yukari opened the procedure manual to the blank pages at the end. “Hey, Akane, can I borrow a pen? I gave mine to Luis.”
“What, you too?”
“No way. He got your pen?”
“Yeah…he said it would be a good souvenir.”
“Does that guy have a souvenir obsession or what? Tell me we have an extra pen somewhere.”
Akane shook her head. “You think they’d stow extras of anything in an SSA orbiter?”
“So what do we do? Carve it in something with a knife?”
“You’d never be able to read it with all the turbulence. It’s hard enough to see the instruments.”
“We could cut our fingers and write it in blood?”
“The numbers’d be too big. We don’t have enough paper. And we don’t have time for that anyway.”
“Kinoshita?” Yukari said. “You’re not going to believe this, but we have nothing to write with up here. Any ideas?”
“Well,” Akane cut in, “I could memorize them and read them off to you.”
“What, all those numbers?”
“It’s forty-eight numbers in all, right? That shouldn’t be a problem. I’m pretty good at remembering things.”
“You sure you can do that, Akane?”
“Just read them off to me slowly. I’ll do my best.”
“Right, here goes.” Kinoshita began reading off the list.
Akane closed her eyes and tapped her forehead with a finger once for every number. When he was finished, Akane read them back.
“Perfect! That’s incredible!” Kinoshita was practically cheering.
“Way to go, grade-A student!”
“Okay, now that that’s taken care of, proceed with your scheduled course—just be careful not to waste a drop of fuel. You’ve got twenty-one minutes left till reentry.”