Free SpaceCorp by Ejner Fulsang

sky was clear and the evening breeze wafting up from the valley floor was unusually balmy.
    “Have a good time today?”
    “Yeah, my butt’s sore though.”
    “You mean from—”
    “The saddle!” she said, elbowing him in the ribs.
    He smiled. “They seem quite taken with you.”
    “Mutual. I wonder what turn my life would have taken had I grown up here instead of in some picker’s shack on a vineyard.”
    “What kind of turn?”
    “A better education for starters. You went to a nice school where everyone had been told what a phenom you were before you walked in the door.”
    “You’re no dummy. Surely they spotted that straight away.”
    “So you’d think. But where your teachers were told in advance you were brilliant and to stay out of your way, my teachers thought I was just a mouthy little bitch. You know how you started university when you were twelve? Well, I dropped out of grammar school when I was twelve, and then I ran away.”
    “Ran away? You never told me that.”
    “A girl has to preserve some mystery about herself. Anyway, it was that or juvee. So I moved in with my aunt over in Napa. I matured early so I was able to get a job picking. Then I moved into the lab to do quality control. Started as a lab assistant. Ran the place by the time I was sixteen which was good because I made enough money to get a place of my own which was even better because my aunt’s boyfriend may have been dumber than dirt but not so dumb that he failed to notice I had matured early.”
    “How’d you deal with him?”
    “Book.”
    “What, you hit him with it?”
    “No, I read it. Muay Thai: Breaks, Locks, and Submissions . Single girl’s best friend! First punch I ever threw in anger—broke his nose. Paramedics said he almost died—something about skull fragments getting into this frontal cortex. You really have to be careful with that stuff!
    “Anyway, there were also a bunch of books on enology—winemaking. Lot of chemistry which was easy but boring. There was a bunch of stuff on organic chemistry which was also easy but more interesting. I used to sneak the book files home and study them at night on my reader. Then I got into molecular biology—my scientific passion to this day. Then I got… skip that. Let’s just say it was time to leave. I picked my way down to V-berg. Heard about the bio lab and the work they were doing on algae and nanocellulose. So I put on some clean clothes and some lipstick and started talking about gene splicing. They thought I had a PhD. Started calling me Dr. Carvalho. I didn’t tell them I hadn’t even finished grammar school. Early maturation finally did me some good for once!” She giggled at the recollection. “And then the astronaut recruiter dropped by one day.”
    “Good thing we don’t have much of an HR department at SpaceCorp. Back East they’d have wrung you dry with background checks. Here, most people learn what they learn through shadowing. So, how’d you deal with astronaut training? Don’t they have classrooms?”
    “Very little of that is in the classroom. And the parts that were I found were pretty short and to the point. Instructors fancied themselves more as trainers than teachers. I liked that. And I was ballsy—try anything, bust my ass to get it right. Instructors liked that.”
    Mack stretched and got up and walked over to the railing and pointed toward Vandenberg. “The big Eagle Vs used to rise up over that mountain. They’d go streaming up, up, up and then they’d stop. Main engine cutoff—I learned later on. Then a bit higher up the second stage would kick in and they’d go up, up, up again till I couldn’t see them anymore. I used to wonder where they were going, what they’d see.”
    She walked over to the rail beside him. “And now you know.”
    “Well, I thought I did. Until you told me what I’d been missing. Next time I go up, I want to try again. See if I can do the ballsy thing and keep my eyes open.”
    She held his