January 28, 1986. The date flashed across the screen of the time machine hub, alerting the weary travelers to yet another anomaly. Manfred stared at the screen with bleary eyes, wondering why it didn't say what the event was on that date. The hub always told them which events were supposed to occur around that time, but this time, there was nothing.

The reason for this was two-fold. First, the machine was unable to determine what event had thrown this particular time-line off. Second, the machine had rightly ascertained that the information available in this time-line would be vital to its own existence. It ran a few more calculations while Manfred and the others were looking at the screen and then beeped, scrolling another message across the screen. Send two teams. Recommended course of action: put machine on autopilot.

Manfred crossed his arms, frowning down at the screen. The hub, he thought, had never made recommendations in the past. "Lucia? What's it doing?"

Lucia peered over his shoulder. "I'm not sure. Usually the machines only make suggestions when the situation is dire. I'd follow the recommendation it's making."

Manfred chewed on his lower lip. "There's not that many of us left."

They all looked at each other as they crowded around the hub. Manfred, Lucia, Aetius, and Nefertiti were the only ones who remained from their initial team. Others had already been sent out to do other missions in various time periods. They were, unfortunately, all that remained.

"This is going to be dangerous." Aetius scratched the back of his neck. "More dangerous than in the past, anyway."

Lucia stared at the floor, scuffing a shoe along the seamless metal. Aetius was right, she thought, and no one knew what they'd face out there. Just that the machine thought it was bad enough to recommend a splitting of the group and autopilot. If the hub went down, they'd be stranded with no way to call the machine back.

Manfred cleared his throat. "Is there a way to get more information on how the teams should be split?"

The machine, which had been running more simulations and looking for more data, emitted a high-pitched squeal. Teams should be split as follows: team one with three people and team two with one.

Lucia frowned, wondering how the second team could really be a team with only one individual. She shrugged it off. "There's your answer."

Manfred sucked in a breath. If the second team had only one person, there was a reason, and he was willing to wager it was the most dangerous part of this mission. "You three will go together with one of the tablets to transmit back to the machine. I'll go after you three and will take the last tablet so I can also transmit whatever I find back to the machine."

Aetius crossed his arms. "You can't."

"I beg your pardon?" Manfred raised a brow at Aetius, thinking that the soldier was acting strangely to defy him this way. "That wasn't a request. It was an order."

Aetius shook his head. "I can't let you go someplace unknown by yourself. If something happens, you'll have no—"

"I know." Manfred turned away from them, swallowing the lump in his throat. "And I will not put any of you in that situation. I've lived a long, troubled life. If it ends trying to ensure the security of the world as we know, I can think of no better use."

Bowing his head, Aetius backed off. "Very well. Lucia, Nefertiti. With me." Turning, he strode to the time machine.

Nefertiti followed without comment, but Lucia hung back, thinking about what they might face. "Manfred, if you do this, you may not return."

Manfred didn't answer, thinking that it was a high possibility he wouldn't. This was a decent assumption to make since many of them hadn't returned, and that had been with backup. He was heading into a situation with no information and no backup. It was suicide, he thought, and because of that, he couldn't allow anyone else to do it.

Lucia bit her lip. "Come back alive, okay?"

He turned to her with a half-smile on his lips. "I've made it this far. Don't worry about me. Now go on! We've got a time table to keep."

She spun on her heel, snapping a jaunty salute back at him before marching for the time machine. Over her shoulder, she called out, "We've nothing but time, it seems. Time to fix things." She lowered her voice to a murmur that only she could hear. "And plenty of time to screw things up."

***

Manfred hunched in his seat at the hub, spinning to take in the room filled with wires, gears, and whirring instrument panels. The voices of comrades no longer filled the space, and the squeak of the sticking joint in his chair's seat squealed in the cavernous space. He shoved away from the panel he'd been working at and rose, popping his back and raising his arms above his head to stretch his sore muscles. Everything ached, and his hand went to his chest where the dull throb never faded. His head pulsated with a pulse all its own, but he shoved the distraction away and meandered to the second panel of instruments.

His finger hovered over the blinking red button that would sign away control of the machine to the hub. He gnawed on his lower lip. It was not that he feared death, nor was it that he feared the pain of dying. No, it was that Manfred von Richthofen feared that he and his comrades might not return and, in doing so, might doom the world. This thought wasn't a recent one, though he hadn't given it room to flourish. Still, even with limited time to grow, it had dug into every cranny and crevice of his mind, burrowing deep and refusing to be rooted out like the weeds that had grown in his mother's garden.

He shook his head.

It didn't matter, he thought, if they all died. At least if they all died now, they'd die knowing they'd tried. And if they didn't try, they'd all perish anyway, he thought.

His finger trembled for an instant then steadied.

He pressed the button, a numb tranquility washing over him. If he died today, it would be for a good purpose. Striding to the time machine, which had by now returned from carrying the others off to America in 1986, Manfred climbed aboard for what would be the last time.

He buckled himself in for the ride, feeling more at peace with the strap fastened over his waist. The measure was, he admitted, a useless one, but it was one that brought comfort nonetheless. Settling back with the tablet in his lap, he dropped his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. The machine jerked and bucked for a moment and then transitioned to the smooth sailing of previous trips.

The ride through the vortex was passed in indomitable silence. Manfred reclined in his chair at the machine's control panel, lost in his own nostalgia. The machine hurtled through the space-time continuum in an equally silent fashion, recognizing in its own way the brevity of the situation.

The oddity of a machine that could understand such things had been lost long ago, but now the machine traveled with a greater speed and urgency because its very existence was threatened by the recent turn of events. The knowledge that the three it had left in 1986 were working on it was of some relief to the sentient being of wires, bolts, screws, and metal scraps. It soon left off thinking about it, deciding that if the outcome wasn't desirable, nothing could be done anyway. Fretting was a human emotion it wasn't capable of at its current upgrade status, so the machine sent its computing power to other more sensible things as machines were wont to do.

In this strangely lulling manner, the machine continued on its way with Manfred tucked cosily inside. It paused as it approached the time line and scanned through the space in time where it needed to be. Finding the hole to that location, it popped through with a merry whistle and deposited Manfred in the back of the crew cabin of the Challenger. The year was 1986 and the day was January 28. Satisfied, the machine opened the door, picked up the sleeping Manfred with a clawed arm, and deposited him on the floor, safely ensconced behind a pile of supplies and blankets, which had been bolted down. A suit and helmet followed Manfred, flopping onto the floor beside him. It dropped the tablet in his lap and vaulted back through the hole in space and time just as the crew of the Challenger arrived.

Manfred, having woken up just in time to see his time machine blip out of existence, almost gave himself away by sitting up. Fortunately, he realized people were boarding the capsule where he'd been left, and he laid back down before he was seen. Where had he ended up, he asked himself. And if this was 1986, what disaster awaited him here? These were all very good questions, though they were, in this case, all the wrong questions.

Had Manfred known what would transpire, he might've gotten up and made a scene simply to delay the impending disaster. But, Manfred didn't know what was to occur here, so he kept his mouth shut and stayed still, listening to the crew of the Challenger as they boarded.

"I heard that there was some tele-conference with NASA and Thiokol. You think something's wrong, Smith?"

Smith, who was to pilot this fateful mission, shrugged. "If there were, I'm sure they would've told us. Don't you worry about a thing, McAuliffe."

The teacher bit her lip and nodded. "Of course. I'm sure they wouldn't launch this if they didn't think it was safe."

Scobee, the commander of the Challenger, clapped Smith on the back. "We're all cleared for launch. You set to go, folks?"

The crew crowded into the crew compartment with broad smiles.

"Yes, sir!" Ronald McNair and Ellison Onizuka saluted him with matching grins.

"Hasn't been a day I wasn't ready to go, sir." Judith Resnik, the flight's third mission specialist, clambered into her seat with a smirk.

Gregory Jarvis buckled in beside her with a snicker. "True enough, Jud."

Judith raised a brow at their Payload Specialist. "Is that sarcasm I hear? None of that now. We're to take the first teacher into space today. No time for your cheek."

Gregory grinned back at her.

Christa buckled into the seat across from theirs. "You two bicker like an old married couple."

Ronald McNair roared with laughter, his pearl teeth shining against his ebony skin. "Darn right they do. Better be careful though, Resnik. That husband of yours might not like you getting on so well with Jarvis here." He buckled into the seat behind Jarvis.

Resnik thought about the statement for a moment, her cheeks reddening. This was a highly likely possibility, but her husband understood the need for camaraderie amongst team members for missions like this. "He wouldn't say a thing, and you know it."

Smith and Scobee exchanged glances, smiling at their teammates' antics. They strapped in at the seats in front of the pilot and co-pilot flight panels.

"Alright, you lot!" Scobee tugged his helmet on. "Find your helmets under the seats and put them on. We're scheduled to launch in less than two minutes."

In his spot behind the supplies, Manfred scrambled about as quietly as possible, looking for anything that resembled a helmet. He might not fear death, but that didn't mean he wanted to die. Especially not now when he'd gathered no solid information on the situation here.

His arm knocked against the helmet and the suit. The helmet was the first thing he struggled into. The rest wasn't going to go on quietly. Fortunately for him, the crew was busy chattering away over the headset links in the helmets. His had been turned on so he could hear what was going on, but the blinking light by the speaker indicated that he couldn't communicate.

Well, he thought, at least he wouldn't alert them to his presence by accident. He maneuvered into the suit and zipped it up as quietly as possible. Ellison Onizuka, another of the mission specialists, shifted in his seat, and Manfred froze, thinking that it was all over now. Then the man settled back in his seat. Manfred bit his lip, realizing that they were preparing for take off, and he wasn't buckled in.

Was it possible to survive a takeoff in this sort of machine without being buckled in? One seat sat empty beside Onizuka, but he had no way to reach it without being caught.

The universe has a funny way of dealing with anomalies, and in Manfred's case, the universe dealt with his situation at just the right moment. He could feel the roar of the engines beneath him, and the entire crew cabin shuddered as the Challenger prepared for takeoff. At just that moment, he shifted, and the tablet slid off him, clinking against the back of Onizuka's chair.

Onizuka glanced back and spotted him. The astronaut said nothing for a moment, and the two of them stared at each other in silence. A frown worked its way onto Onizuka's brow. There wasn't supposed to be an eighth passenger, he thought. He cleared his throat. "Hey, Scob, were we supposed to have an eighth passenger?"

Scobee peered back at Onizuka, wondering if the man had lost it. That, he pondered, would be a bad thing indeed because they needed all of the crew functioning at full mental capacity. "What're you going on about back there? An eighth?"

"Yeah, an eighth." Onizuka shook his head, blinking and wondering if he was seeing things. Manfred was still there when he reopened his eyes, so he decided that if he was seeing things, the vision was persistent. "We got an eighth geared up back here."

By now, the others had all turned to look at Onizuka too. From the flight deck of the crew cabin, the pilot and commander couldn't see Manfred, but the others could, and low murmurs broke out amongst the crew.

Mission control came crackling over the intercom at that moment, cutting the chatter. "Take-off in 3. 2. 1."

Onizuka was the first to snap into action. "I don't know who you are, but you'd better get locked in before the launch gets too much speed under it. You're along for the ride now. No way off this thing until we land."

Manfred nodded, snatching his tablet from the floor and following instructions. Scobee could see him in the rearview now, and he swore, thinking that it shouldn't be possible to gain an eighth. Launch security had been too tight, but here the newcomer was. "Well, I'll be."

Smith glanced in the mirror too, shaking his head. "How'd we pick up a straggler, sir?"

"No idea."

While the captain and commander observed the newcomer with bated breaths, Onizuka and the others began the interrogation. This interrogation felt more like an inquisition to Manfred, but he endured it, hoping he'd be able to figure out what the time machine wanted him to upload before anything bad happened.

"So, where are you from?" Resnik's voice came over his headset with a cheerful lilt. "I'm Judith Resnik, by the way. Mission specialist and second woman in space." She said this with a measure of pride and a wide smile on her face. "This is my second mission, and boy, we're going to make history!"

Manfred chewed on his lower lip. "I'm from lots of places, I guess. I roam around a lot."

"Then how'd you end up onboard the Challenger?" Onizuka leaned closer. "'Cause we weren't expecting an eighth."

"Yes, well... That's top secret." Manfred knew it was a poor excuse, but he couldn't think of a better one, so it would have to do.

"Really?"

"Yes, really." His mind whirred over the problem, searching for a better response, and when he found it, he cheerfully tacked in on. "In truth though, I'm here to examine the launch to bring back a detailed report."

"Ah, I see." McNair tugged at the neck of his suit. "What's that thing for?"

Manfred glanced down at the holo and tucked it into his pocket. "It's for transmitting information. Newest model. It's—"

"Let me guess," Jarvis drawled. "Top secret?"

Manfred's lips curved up in a sheepish smile. "Ah— Yes, you've nailed it, I believe."

The volley of questions continued on, and Manfred clicked on the recorder of his tablet, hoping he'd find information the time machine could use.

***

While Manfred was aboard the Challenger, the other three found themselves in a small closet, listening to a meeting going on in the room beyond. The three of them were squashed together in the tiny space, the air quickly becoming stuffy and sweaty. Lucia bit back a groan as Nefertiti's elbow bit into the small of her back, driving her closer to Aetius. As if there were any room to get closer, she thought. Aetius's breath tickled against her neck, stirring the baby hairs escaping her bun.

Aetius's lips brushed her ear lobe, and he murmured, "How much longer do you think we'll be stuck in here?"

Lucia shrugged, wrapping her arms around his neck to minimize the space they had to take up. Her feet tangled between his, and Nefertiti's elbow stopped digging into her back as she arched her back and pressed into Aetius. "Just be quiet and let the recorder listen in to whatever they're talking about out there." She tapped the device stuck to the inside of the closet door. It lit up with a soft green glow, indicating its recording function had been activated.

The voices in the room beyond filtered through the thin skin of the door.

"You can't launch the Challenger!" The voice in the next room that rose over the others was that of engineer Bob Ebeling, who had worked on the O-rings that would cause the Challenger's woes. The other engineers on the team in Utah nodded in agreement as he continued on. "You can't seriously be asking to launch it at this temperature. We're only qualified to forty degrees fahrenheit. What business does anyone even have thinking about eighteen? We're in no-man's land."

Lucia's eyes widened in the gloaming of the closet. "Aetius, they're saying not to launch this thing."

He laid his finger over her lips, his calloused skin brushing there and lingering. She pursed her lips against his finger, and he raised a brow at her. She shrugged and returned to listening to the conversation coming through the door.

"I am appalled. I am appalled by your recommendation." Hardy—the deputy for science and engineering at Marshall Space Flight Center—berated the Thiokol team over the speaker on conference call.

"Thiokol, when do you want me to launch—next April?" This came from shuttle program manager Lawrence Mulloy.

In Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, Ebeling's boss, McDonald clenched his fingers into fists, blood rushing to his face as he stood in his office listening to the call. "Lives are at stake! I don't care if you have to wait two years to launch that shuttle. Don't launch it now. For heaven's sake, man, there's ice on the launch pad."

"So?" Mulloy—located on the KSC conference line—was becoming irate over the direction proceedings were taking. "I won't accept such a weak argument. You have no proof this won't work. Besides, if the primary O-ring fails to seal, the second one is there as backup."

Ebeling glanced at his fellow engineer, Roger Boisjoly, and then turned his attention to addressing Mulloy, thinking that if he didn't do something, they were going to be at fault for the loss of seven good lives. "With all due respect, Mulloy, those O-rings won't seal that SRB joint properly. If there's any joint rotation, the second one won't seal, and that's assuming any of them seal. They show clear failures in weather below fifty-four degrees fahrenheit. You launch that shuttle in a few hours, and it'll blow up."

Mulloy's face purpled as he listened to the words crackling through his line. "No one has shown me any data to prove it! I want another conference call in two hours, and this time, I want the management over there to get their lazy rears in here and defend this ridiculous claim."

Bob Lund, the vice president of engineering glanced at him and motioned for him to move back and let management take over. "Gentlemen, this conversation has been going on for long enough, and I think we've shown enough evidence that launching isn't safe. I support the engineers' suggestions. Launch at this time is unsafe." He cleared his throat, glancing down at his paper pad. "Until temperatures are fifty-three degrees, I don't want to fly."

"Your data isn't conclusive enough. We'll reconvene about this in another two or three hours to discuss further." Hardy's voice came over the speaker in sharp, clipped tones between waves of static.

Lund sighed, thinking that he'd never dealt with a more hard-headed bunch. "Fine. Three hours, and we'll reconvene to discuss the situation."

Ebeling shook his head and pursed his lips. He backed closer to the closet door where his fellow engineer, Roger Boisjoly, was watching with rising levels of despair. They'd provided NASA with the safe temperature they'd requested, Ebeling thought, and they had no business going ahead with this anyway. Beyond that, he thought, those O-rings were a Criticality 1 component. They couldn't depend on backup with a Crit 1 component, so they shouldn't be launching this flight on that basis alone.

"They can't seriously go through with this." Boisjoly leaned against the wall, a frown etched into his brow. "Rockwell International told them the large amount of ice present on the launch pad was a constraint for launching. We're telling them those O-rings will fail in weather this cold." He sucked a breath between his teeth. "What are they thinking? Seven lives are going to be lost if they do this!"

Ebeling gritted his teeth, thinking that he'd very much like to strangle someone. "I know. I know that. But what am I supposed to do? They're setting up for launch. Let's hope management convinces those fools at NASA to wait before they lose seven good American citizens."

In the closet, Lucia pressed her forehead against Aetius's chest, listening as everyone trickled out of the conference room outside their hiding place. Whatever was going on, it sounded horrific, and her stomach flipped. Nefertiti shifted behind her, and the sharp elbow was digging into her back again. Somehow, it didn't bother her as much in light of what they'd just heard.

When the conference room finally emptied, the three tumbled out of the closet. Lucia sucked in great gasps of air, sagging against Aetius. "What do we do?"

Aetius wrapped an arm around her, wondering what the best answer to that was. After all, this technology was out of his grasp and that of most of them. "I don't know. Do you know what they're talking about?"

Lucia dropped into the chair at the head of the gleaming oak conference table. She buried her face in her arms and nodded. "I think so. Kiereth—" She swallowed, his name bringing back memories she didn't want to think about. "He brought me to a time shortly after this. I remember he explained to me what happened here with the Challenger while we watched another shuttle—the Columbia—blow up while trying to re-enter Earth's atmosphere in 2003."

"Re-enter Earth's atmosphere?" Nefertiti flopped into a chair beside Lucia.

"They're sending giant transportation devices out into space." Lucia chewed on her lip. "They send them way up into the sky until they touch the stars. Sort of."

Nefertiti scratched the back of her neck. "Really?"

Aetius leaned on the table beside her, withdrawing the tablet from his pocket and sliding it onto the table in front of Lucia. "So what happened here, anyway?"

"Well, the O-rings were sealing devices made of rubber." She grabbed some of the clear plastic cups littering the table and began stacking them. "The SRB's you heard about? Those are the solid rocket boosters. Imagine these long cylinders with a point at the end." She pointed to her cups. "They're split into segments and then stacked onto each other like these cups. That creates a joint at each place a segment joins."

Aetius slipped into a chair nearby and rested his elbows on the table. "So what did the O-rings have to do with this?"

"Okay, so those rubber rings were supposed to seal stuff inside the joints off so that the pressurized gas from the tanks wouldn't leak through those joints but would instead travel to the exhaust funnel." She pointed out the places where the cups were joined and then to where the end of the stack would be. "Problem is, the rubber becomes brittle under cold weather conditions. In previous control groups they ran, the heated gas ended up causing the metal keeping the O-rings in place to bend away from the ring, letting the gas around the rings. This led to severe erosion of the rings."

"So?" Nefertiti frowned, rubbing her nose. "What does that mean?"

"In lay terms, it means that the rocket booster ends up releasing hot gases from the segment joints of the booster, and the places it escapes to are close to the hydrogen tank. Hydrogen is an unstable gas, and so getting hot gases near it can cause an explosion."

"Where'd you learn all this?"

Lucia wrinkled her nose. "Like I said, Kiereth explained. He's a bit of a science nerd."

"So, does the tablet have all this information?" Aetius pursed his lips, staring at the device and wondering if this was why they were sent here.

Lucia pulled up the information on the tablet and shook her head. "Nothing here. Maybe that's what we need to document?" She clicked through a few more documents. "Actually, there's no record of most of the tech that made NASA possible." She chewed on her lip, thinking that if there was no sign of the tech that led to NASA in the future, that might mean the time machine would cease to exist.

Aetius, who was thinking along the same lines, straightened in his chair. "Luc, if the stuff from this time doesn't exist for us in the future, then the time machine might not either."

She nodded. "Exactly. We need to start getting the info on this shuttle uploaded."

"Do you know anything else about this case?" Nefertiti squinted at the tablet. "We stick out here, and I'd rather not go roaming about if we don't have to."

Lucia's shoulders slumped. "Sorry. I don't."

"Well... The engineers seemed to know a lot about it. Do you know who the guys protesting this were?"

Lucia glanced up at him. "Actually, yes. Bob Ebeling, Roger Boisjoly, and their boss McDonald along with two other engineers from Thiokol warned NASA about this. Ebeling was the one who told them they had no business thinking about a launch in current weather conditions."

"So, we find Ebeling, ask questions, and figure out what goes down when the Challenger blows up."

Lucia frowned at him. "This isn't funny."

He cocked his head to the side, blinking. He hadn't intended to be amusing, he thought. "I wasn't saying it was."

"What goes down when the Challenger blows up is a whole lot of debris and seven people who die when that crew compartment hits the Atlantic Ocean at 200 miles per hour. And in case you don't know, 200 miles per hour is far beyond the speed of those cars whipping by outside the window."

Aetius glanced out the window she'd mentioned and watched the metal objects blur past. His stomach churned, and he swallowed back a lump in his throat. His comment no longer seemed appropriate, and he slouched in his seat. "Jesu help them."

"Indeed." Lucia returned to typing things into the tablet, thinking that they had very little time to figure this out if her suspicions were correct. They needed to find Ebeling and fast.

***

Ebeling, as it happened, was in his office with his fellow engineers at the moment that Lucia and the others realized they needed to find him. The men in the room slouched in the chairs with slumped shoulders and dejected frowns.

"You think they'll delay the launch?" Ebeling's daughter, Leslie, who worked with NASA at the time and had carpooled with him that morning, fidgeted with her blouse's collar. She knew as well as the rest of them in the room that NASA wouldn't, but someone had to ask the question.

Ebeling shook his head. "You saw how they responded. They won't delay it."

Leslie nibbled on her lower lip. "If they launch, what are the odds of the crew's survival?"

Ebeling rubbed his temples. "At these temperatures, the rings won't seal and the metal holding them in place will probably peel away from the ring like it did in the tests." He dropped his head into his hands, asking God why he had to be a part of this. "I told them that. I told everyone that."

She sighed and stood, walking to him and placing a hand on his back. "We know, dad."

He shook his head, scrubbing a palm over his face. "We'd better pray to God that management doesn't cave to NASA and agree to launch."

At that moment, one of the lower engineers poked his head around the corner, perusing the scene and thinking that the looks on their faces summed up exactly how he felt at this moment. "They've gone to the private meeting room, and they're discussing it now. Lund wants to see you all in there."

"Half an hour wait? That's all they needed to discuss a decision that may cost seven lives?" Boisjoly clenched his fingers around the slick metal of his chair's armrests.

"Figured as much." Boisjoly stood and began pacing the length of the room, running his hands through his hair. "We'd better get in there and make sure they don't do anything stupid. It's almost the three hour mark."

Ebeling sighed and got to his feet, his shoulders slumping and his head drooping.

His daughter patted him on the back, thinking that she'd never seen her father look so dejected. "Good luck."

Ebeling didn't respond. He just plodded to the door, leading the rest of the engineers to their other conference room with a world-weary sigh. He shoved the door to the conference room open, fighting back the urge to hit something or cry in despair.

The faces staring back at him were blank, no longer the warm, inviting ones that welcomed him at work each day. The men sitting around the table now were not friends. They were not on his side. They were the enemy, the ones he had to plead with if he was to save the Challenger and her crew. He shoved his hands in his pockets and marched to the table.

"Gentlemen." Lund ducked his head. "Hardy brought up a good point in the conference earlier. We'd like to discuss that with you."

Hardy, Ebeling thought with a bitter sneer, had brought up nothing of any use to anyone. He'd only badgered and bullied. Since when had they been forced to prove the lack of safety in a launch anyway, he wondered. Before, the burden had been to prove the safety of the matter. He dropped into a seat nearby and dragged an unclaimed pad of paper toward him, pulling a pencil from his pocket with the other hand. "Well, what was it?"

"Well—" Lund glanced at the other managers. "Hardy mentioned that if the primary o-ring failed, the secondary one should still seal."

Thompson, who was the head of the project here in Utah, resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands. Instead, he began sketching out the diagrams of the SRB and the joint under discussion. "Look here. Here's the concern." He gesticulated to the sketch, stabbing the point of his pencil into the paper where he'd drawn the joint. At the same moment, he made eye contact with Mason and Cal Wiggins, the vice president and the general manager of the space division. They were the ones he had to convince. It was now or never, he thought. Either they understood and stuck with the decision to postpone the launch, or they'd launch it, and everyone on-board would die. "We've got cases where that didn't happen. And this is why it matters."

Boisjoly watched from across the room with the other engineers, eyeing the faces of his former friends and fellow employees. They remained impassive, and he knew then that Thompson wasn't getting through to them. When Thompson sat back with pursed lips, Boisjoly took a shot at it too. Tears welled in his eyes as he drew frantic sketches and showed the managers pictures, explaining in every way he knew how the danger they were putting the crew in. "Here's the crux," he snapped. "The colder the weather, the greater the chance of joint failure."

Thompson slouches down in his chair, refusing to meet Boisjoly's frantic glance and silent plea for backup. No one would listen, he thought. Beside him, Ebeling did the same. By now, both men could see that the forcefulness of Hardy and those in NASA was too great. Thiokol wouldn't back them in their recommendation. The Challenger was doomed.

Boisjoly returned to his seat, swallowing the lump in his throat.

"We need to make a management decision now." Mason tapped his fingers against the lacquered surface of the table, thinking that they didn't have time for this with NASA breathing down their necks. "Your concerns will be taken into account."

Lund cleared his throat. "We—"

Mason shot him a hard look. "Take off your engineering hat, and put on your management hat, Lund."

Lund dropped his gaze to the table and remained quiet.

Vice President Joe Kilminster, who had until then remained mostly quiet and had simply listened, rose to his feet. "We're going to take the poll now."

Thompson and Ebeling both straightened and looked at him, wondering if he'd look to them for advice or ask the engineers for any input on the poll. But Kilminster refused to make eye contact with them, and they slumped back into their chairs. Kilminster proceeded forward, asking only management for the poll decision.

And when it came, the decision was overwhelming. The Challenger had the green light from Thiokol to proceed with the launch as scheduled.

***

Meanwhile, aboard the Challenger, Manfred was sitting and observing the proceedings in the crew compartment. His fingers flew across the screen of his tablet, logging information and uploading it to the time machine. As he was doing this, commands from NASA were crackling over the speaker. They were at ten seconds and counting.

While he was busy recording things about the Challenger and its crew, the crowds watched the launch with bated breath below. An excited hum thrummed through the crowd as excited school children watched from stands near the launch site, waiting to see their teacher become the first teacher in space. This, sadly, wasn't what was about to occur, but for the moment, the crowd was rife with anticipation.

In mission control, deep within the Kennedy Space Center, Mulloy preceded over the commands being issued to Commander Scobee and Captain Smith. No one there had reason to suspect anything would go wrong, least of all that Mulloy and the other managers at NASA would be the ones who'd send everyone on the Challenger to their deaths.

In the Challenger's right solid rocket booster, the disaster was brewing. When the shuttle had launched, the O-rings in the booster's joint nearest the hydrogen tank had failed to seal due to the low temperatures. This, under normal circumstances, would be a disaster in their own right, but the direction the gases burned was what sealed the Challenger's fate when the end came.

Initially, the aluminum oxides from the rocket fuel had sealed the area around the failed rings, but aluminum wasn't capable of holding up against the heat of the gases barreling down the booster's length. Later, when the footage was examined, the first dark smoke spelling trouble would be seen through the camera's lens, but for the time being, no one was aware of the impending doom facing the Challenger and its crew.

The shuttle continued blasting up through the sky, trailing exhaust behind it.

***

A few hours before the Challenger met its demise, Lucia and the rest were busy breaking into Ebeling's office. Breaking in actually wasn't difficult since the man hadn't locked his office. In his distraction and despair, he'd left the charts, graphs, and pictures they'd used in the meeting lying in scattered piles around his desk. He'd even left some schematics from the Challenger and the drawings they'd done in their meetings.

Lucia grabbed it all, thrusting handfuls toward Aetius and Nefertiti. "Start taking pictures."

She took a handful of the notes herself and flopped onto the floor with her tablet in her lap. Since she was the only one who could read the scrawling words on the paper, she took anything with text on it and began typing it all into the tablet.

Her eyes were burning and scratching from the lack of sleep since she'd returned to the museum. Her mind wandered to the reason for that, and she shook her head, rubbing her eyes. Aetius looked up in time to catch her pained expression, and he scooted over to where she was resting her back against the desk. "You okay?"

She nodded, thinking that she was anything but fine.

Aetius wrapped an arm around her waist. "You haven't slept a full night since we got back from Lincoln's time. You want to talk about it?"

She stared down at the tablet, the words blurring over as her eyes filled with tears. "Now? We've got work to do."

"Look, we have the rest of the night to do this. It's only eleven pm, and I figure we can take some time for this."

She rested her head on his shoulder.

Nefertiti glanced at them and cleared her throat. "I will take my work to the hallway now that no one is in the building."

Aetius shot her an appreciative smile, thinking that she was really a kind sort for all her posturing.

When Nefertiti had slipped out and shut the door with a soft snick, he turned his attention back to Lucia. He toyed with her long locks, running the satin strands through his fingers. She closed her eyes, hot tears slipping down her cheeks and splashing onto the surface of her tablet. The screen cast an ethereal glow over her porcelain skin and illuminated the teardrops on her alabaster cheeks.

"You want to tell me what's wrong?" He crooned the words to her like a parent singing a lullaby to fretful child.

"I keep thinking about everything that happened with Kiereth."

This was progress, Aetius thought. Especially considering she hadn't spoken a word about what Kiereth had done since they'd returned. "Yeah?"

She fiddled with the tablet, smearing her tears over the surface. "Does missing what we had make me a bad person?" She sucked in a breath, thinking that it must because she shouldn't miss such things when she had the man of her dreams right next to her.

Aetius rested his chin on top of her head. "No. We all miss things that were and now aren't. And more than that, we often miss the good times that ended in the worst ways."

She sniffled. "He didn't hurt me. Not really. I did most of the damage to myself. All he did was restrain me—" She paused, considering whether or not to tell him the rest. Honesty was the best policy though, wasn't it? "And kiss me."

Aetius remained silent, mulling over that information.

"Does that make me an awful person? For letting him, I mean." She pulled away from him, thinking that he likely didn't want her near him now.

He tugged her back to him, wrapping his arms around her with a sigh. "No, it doesn't. I'm glad he didn't hurt you though."

They sat there, huddled on the floor as her sniffles subsided. He rocked her back and forth, continuing to thread his fingers through her hair and to hold her close. He wouldn't lie and say that he wasn't bothered by the prospect that Kiereth had touched her at all, but he knew she was already broken up enough. She didn't need to deal with his jealousy too. Dropping a kiss on the top of her head, he sighed. "Anything else on your mind?"

She shrugged. "The Challenger. We need to get back to documenting the tech we've seen here. I don't know what the machine sent us here to find, but I have a feeling it sent us here for this. Maybe the space travel equipment is a necessary part of technology that led to the time machine?" She squirmed out of his grip and wiped the surface of her tablet clean with the edge of her shirt.

Aetius returned to his own work. "Maybe. Let's just focus on this and get out to see the launch, okay?"

Lucia nodded. She sent a quick text through to Nefertiti's tablet to let her know she could return. Soon after, the Egyptian monarch crept back into the room and settled down to continue her own work. The three of them sat there, working through the night to upload everything to the database.

***

January 28, 1986. 11:38 AM EST.

The entire crew cabin thrummed as the solid rocket boosters ignited.

"And we're away!" McNair pumped a fist in the air with a whoop.

Onizuka and Resnik cheered too, and McAuliffe just laughed, thinking that she'd been more nervous than she'd thought. Jarvis observed them all with a smile, and Manfred sat in his seat without response. He knew what none of them did: if he was here, something was going to go wrong. He didn't know what, but he knew something had to.

That was what terrified him the most. The fact that something had to go wrong but there was no way off this thing—according to the crew—and he had no way to know what they'd face. For the first time in his life, Manfred felt helpless in the air. The air had always been his domain, but now, as they hurtled skyward, his gut roiled and his shoulders tensed. That seventh sense that warned of danger flickered to life, washing down his neck with a series of sharp prickles.

He shifted in his seat and glanced at his watch.

Onizuka noticed and smiled. "We're at T+0.678. Going strong. There's nothing to worry about."

Manfred bit his lip and stared down at his lap. Of course, he thought, they would think that. They'd been reassured by those in control that everything was on schedule and safe, or so they'd told him earlier.

In the right solid rocket booster of the Challenger, the beginnings of the disaster were now manifesting.

Strong puffs of dark gray smoke emitted from the right-hand solid rocket booster near the aft strut attaching the booster to the external tank. The smoke was coming from the opening and closing of the aft field joint on the booster. Under the severe stress of ignition, the booster's casing had ballooned and caused the metal parts of the casing to bend away from each other.

Through the gap this created, gases above five-thousand degrees fahrenheit rushed, unfettered by the primary O-ring, which should've shifted from its groove to form a seal like it had in past launches. This was not, in fact, how the solid rocket booster was designed to function, but once again, when the process appeared to work well enough, Thiokol had left it be and accommodated extrusion.

The cold temperatures of the launch that morning worked its brutal machinations upon the O-rings within the rocket booster, hardening them and lengthening the time of extrusion.

More gases leaked through the gap.

T+3.375.

From the ground, everyone watched in anticipation, waiting for the rockets to begin disengaging as the Challenger made its final thrust toward space.

The O-rings never sealed.

With no barrier to the gases in place, the O-rings were vaporized.

Aluminum oxides from the burned solid propellant sealed the damaged joint, temporarily replacing the seals before flame passed through the joint, and the Challenger flew on.

It cleared the tower with its main engines operating at 104% of their rated maximum thrust.

T+35.379. The main engines throttled back to the planned 65%.

Five seconds later, Challenger passed through Mach 1 at 19,000 feet per procedure. It continued on its flight trajectory with the inhabitants blissfully unaware of the fate that awaited them. Manfred alone suspected all was not well, and he sat in his seat, gripping the armrests of his chair with white-knuckled force as the others around him listened to the orders coming from headquarters back at the Kennedy Space Center.

T+58.788 seconds.

The clock was ticking down.

Had anyone known to look, they would've seen the beginnings of the plume near the right solid rocket booster's aft attach strut. At this point, however, spotting the plume would've done no good. The damage was done.

Hot gas began to leak through the growing hole in the damaged joint.

Had it not been for the wind shear that kicked up at about T+37, the Challenger might have made the flight safely with the aluminum oxide seal holding out until the launch was done. Instead, the force of the wind shattered the oxide seal.

With no barrier to stop it, flame blasted through the joint.

One second. The plume was well defined and intense.

Internal pressure began dropping as the hole in the failed joint rapidly enlarged.

T+60.238. The flame was readily apparent as it burned through the joint and began infringing upon the external tank next to it.

This was the final straw that would end this fated mission.

T+64.660.

The liquid hydrogen tank located in the aft of the external tank began to leak, and the plume quickly changed shape to indicate the newest problem. At first, this went unnoticed as the main engines' nozzles pivoted to adjust the unbalanced thrust the booster burn-through was producing.

T+66.764.

The effect of the leak was now felt on the external LH2 tank as the pressure there also began to drop.

At this point, no one board and none of the flight controllers thought anything was wrong. Even had they considered the possibility of this grave error, there would've been no recourse to fix it.

NASA management had made the decision to remove the ejector seats and safety functions from the crew compartment after the previous mission, claiming the features were unnecessary since the design of the shuttle and boosters was safe enough and wouldn't fail. This negligence toward proper safety was what would, in the end, cost the lives of the crew.

The flight time was now at T+68.

CAPCOM Richard O. Covey came over the shuttle intercom. "Go at throttle up."

Commander Scobee nodded and replied, "Roger, go at throttle up."

Unknown to himself and everyone aboard, these were the last words that would be heard from the Challenger on the air-to-ground loop.

T+72.284.

The aft strut failed with a snap. The right solid rocket booster jerked away from the failed strut, coming unattached from the external tank.

T+72.525.

The crew's laughter and joking about ended abruptly as the shuttle bucked and accelerated laterally to the right.

Smith frowned, looking at the instruments around him. Blinking lights that had been green turned red. Main engine performance was down, and the external fuel tank's pressure was far below what it should've been. His eyes widened. "Uh-oh."

Those were the last words that the crew cabin's recorder ever captured.

T+73.124.

The flight controllers now knew something was wrong. They scrambled to reestablish contact and determine the cause of the issue, but nothing could be done.

At that same moment, as they scrambled to fix whatever they could, the aft dome of the liquid hydrogen tank failed. The force propelled the hydrogen tank into the LOX tank in the forward part of the external tank with a loud clang. The situation worsened as the right solid rocket booster, which had all but come off, rotated about the forward attach strut. It struck the intertank structure.

T+73.162 seconds.

At 48,000 feet off the ground, the external tank suffered a complete structural failure.

On the ground, the watching crowd heard a grumbling boom. Then the steady trail of exhaust and smoke from the rocket flew in every direction as the LH2 and LOX tanks ruptured, mixed, and ignited. The resulting fireball enveloped the entire stack.

A baby's frightened wail rang over the silent crowd, and the rest of the onlookers watched in breathless anticipation, waiting for the Challenger to emerge on the other side.

Inside the cloud, the external tank continued disintegrating, and the semi-detached rocket boost kept contributing its thrust to the shuttle, though it now sent the Challenger spinning off its correct location in the local airflow. The resulting aerodynamic forces then rent the Challenger in pieces.

The solid rocket boosters careened through the sky in no particular pattern, looking much like a drunken man does while staggering down a sidewalk. The debris from the engine dropped out of the cloud, raining down eighteen miles from the launch site.

T+75.237.

Everyone on the ground watched with wide eyes and open mouths. A few cries erupted from the crowd, and then a scream lashed out over them as a woman sank to her knees, sobbing. The onlookers saw the crew cabin exit the cloud of gases at that moment, continuing a ballistic trajectory.

It hit the peak of its trajectory at 65,000 feet off the ground and plummeted. Wiring trailed along behind it like the guts of some alien creature torn from their proper place. It was the wiring that stabilized the cabin through its descent.

In Utah, Ebeling and his fellow engineers sat at a conference room table, watching.

Boisjoly stopped cheering for the safe launch and stared in stunned silence.

Ebeling also stared, the words of his prayer of thanks to Almighty God dying on his lips. His daughter, who sat beside him, looked on with wide eyes. Others around them who had also been watching the launch stared.

For a moment, no one in the room moved.

Lucia, Aetius, and Nefertiti looked away from the screen, unable to watch what they'd already known would happen. Knowing hadn't prepared them for what they were seeing.

Serna's gaze flew to her father as the reality of what had happened sunk in. Ebeling slumped against her, his entire frame shuddering. Then he buried his face in his hands and released a guttural wail, tears spilling hot and fast down his weathered cheeks. Next to him, Boisjoly also began to weep.

Lucia's gaze went back to the broadcast where the orange fireball lingered in the sky as the last of the fuel burned up and trails of smoke billowed off in the directions of various parts of the Challenger. She bit her lip, remembering that no one on the Challenger had made it. How could they? she asked herself. The crew cabin would hit the Atlantic Ocean at two-hundred miles per hour with estimated deceleration at impact of well over two-hundred g's.

On the ground at the launch site, Reader's digest writer Malcolm McConnell and several other reporters started running for the emergency landing strip, thinking the shuttle might return now that they'd seen it exiting the cloud of gases.

They stood there, craning their necks upward and staring at the sky, waiting for any sign. Waiting for any hope.

Confused shouts echoed across the empty expanse from the crowd behind. Loud swearing and a short scream followed.

"Where are they?" One of the reporters shifted in place, biting his lip.

McConnell sat down on an empty bleacher bench with a shake of his head. "Dead." He stared up at the blue sky. "We've lost 'em, God bless 'em."

Back in mission control, the flight controllers stared at their consoles, seeing the large S's on the readouts. Mulloy and Kingsbury watched the screens displaying the live footage of the launch, waiting with bated breath as they tried to determine what had occurred. When the rockets veered across the blue sky, Mulloy thought with relief that it couldn't have been the rockets, and beside him Kingsbury was thinking the same.

Then it hits.

The crew.

The crew had no way off.

Kingsbury uttered an oath and shook his head. "No. No, this wasn't supposed to happen," he murmured.

The public announcer glances at them and then gets back on the speaker. "Obviously a major malfunction—" He swallowed hard, thinking that was an understatement. "We have no downlink. Reports from the flight dynamics officer say the vehicle has exploded."

Silence descended back over the mission control room.

Onboard the Challenger, the crew was scrambling to stay alive. The cabin was slowly depressurizing, and the crew fumbled about to grab their oxygen masks. Anything to remain awake and have a hope of piloting the shuttle to a safe landing.

The pilot and commandeer couldn't reach theirs. They gasped for breath, their eyes flicking open and closed as they faded.

Then one of the crew members shoved a mask over Smith's face, and he sucked in a lungful of air. There was no time for Scobee's mask. Only three of the crew members were still conscious.

Manfred huddled in the corner by the windows, which miraculously had withstood the blast. His helmet had an oxygen line equipped. Onizuka had secured it for him when he'd seen that the eighth passenger didn't have a clue how to use it. The man who'd done his best to keep Manfred conscious and alive now lay slumped in the adjacent seat, passed out cold. In the long run, it was better this way. The four of them that were awake would now remain conscious for the rest of the trip to the end where the crew cabin would slam into the Atlantic and crumple, killing them all on impact.

Manfred wasn't aware of this, but he did know that something was terribly wrong and that no one seemed capable of fixing their current situation. He watched as Smith flipped switches and tried to wrestle the crew cabin into submission. He gritted his teeth and looked down at the tablet. This was it.

He typed out one last message to let his team know what had become of him.

Trapped aboard the Challenger. If I don't see you again, I went down with the ship.

~MvR

He pressed send.

The ship hit the water with a cacophonous boom.

Blinding light was followed by utter darkness.

***

The time machine came for them minutes after they'd stumbled from the meeting room. They boarded in a daze, still unable to process what they'd seen. Staggering to seats, they strapped in and let the machine do its job, grateful that it was on autopilot because it meant they didn't have to think, didn't have to let their minds work over what they'd just seen. Didn't have to function.

The trip back to the museum passed in a blur. None of them registered how much time had gone by, and for a few moments, they didn't recognize that the ship had come to a stop. The hydraulic lock on the door hissed and released, and the time machine's door swung open to reveal the familiar sterile steel of the hub room.

Lucia was the first to move.

She stood and flitted to the door, not allowing her mind to reengage consciously.

The other two followed her out, standing next to the machine on shaking legs. Lucia made her way through the empty room to the hub, thinking for a moment that it was odd to be here without Manfred. That kickstarted her sluggish, shocked mind. Manfred. Where was Manfred, she wondered.

An icon on the hub blinked, indicating one new message was waiting. She bit her lip, wondering who it was from. Reaching out, she tapped on it to pull up the details.

The screen read: sent from Manfred von Richthofen at 11:39 AM on January 28, 1986.

Her eyes widened, and she swallowed hard. Sweat broke out on her upper lip, and her legs trembled. She grabbed the edge of the hub to keep herself upright. It couldn't be, she thought. He had to be stranded somewhere and observing some other bit of technology. That was it, she decided.

Her finger shook as she reached out and opened the message.

Trapped aboard the Challenger. If I don't see you again, I went down with the ship.

~MvR

Lucia clapped her hands over her mouth and sank to the floor. A high, keening wail echoed off the bare walls, and she wondered where it might be coming from. Warm, solid arms wrapped around her, and Aetius's voice murmured from somewhere very far away. She closed her eyes.

Her entire body felt cold. So very, very cold.

He was gone, she thought. Manfred von Richthofen—the Red Baron, the man who had brought them this far—was gone. A scream rent itself from her chest and clawed its way up her throat to explode out of her mouth. And this time? This time, she thought, she knew it was her. It was she who screamed to mourn the loss of a friend and of seven other good lives who didn't have to be lost. It was she who screamed because time travel kept taking and taking and taking. Did it ever end? she asked herself.

Another scream hollowed out her insides.

The machine still existed, she thought. But oh, how she hated that blasted machine. That machine that had taken so many to their deaths. That machine that had caused these problems in the first place.

What a horror it was, she thought to herself as she wept. What an utterly horrific piece of machinery.

Because she knew. She knew it had left Manfred there to die in order to bring them back.

T+238. Just two minutes and forty-five seconds after the breakup of the Challenger.

They lost Manfred.

And so she released the volley of agonized, angered screams, giving the dead a dirge unlike any funeral wake. His life was mourned even as the cacophony died off to a gentler weeping past a raw throat and sandpaper lids. Because he was gone, she thought. He was gone, and it was their fault. Her fault. Because they had let him go.

He was gone. And he would never come back.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author's note:

The majority of the people and places in this narrative are true to life. This incident and the details surrounding it came from actual research and investigation done before and after the Challenger's fatal flight. I will post a full list of the facts and details a little later on once I have it compiled. For now, it's very late where I live, so I'll leave it with this note and will upload the complete list of facts sometime tomorrow or Monday.

Sincerely,

Ariel