Space as an environment for humans wasn't the most comfortable, Lewis was all too conscious of that. Cucooned within her A1C derived pressure suit-NASA didn't officially call them Spacesuits-she was constantly exposed to how deadly Space was. Hollywood, to insure the Hero always triumphed, fudged the truth about how long a person could survive without an atmosphere. Death would win faster than any human could blink. Stress would kill almost as quickly, Cardinal understood. Hooray for Pink and Purples! Her MESA, Agency slang for Mental and Emotional Support Administrator, had shoved an amber colored plastic vial of them at her during their first meeting.

   Being with the Agency for nearly two years had revealed quite a lot of little realities the public and the media were not supposed to know. NASA had its share of surrepticious soiled laundry. Like every other Federal agency, they had to compete for funding. That meant elected pricks in Washington D.C. could pretty much treat them as they wished. An unexpected tickle of perspiration triggered an involuntary wriggle from her. Wearing her gleaming white suit, helmet and attendant 02 hoses along with a writhing Comm cable made her appear sanguinely lachrymose. Her kittenishly elfin look-as one magizine had described her made the White House even more certain she was the one to command the Juno mission to Mars. And being barely twenty-five with her coquetteish coed looks made her all that much more popular with the Twerp in the Oval office.

   NASA had gone ga-ga over her from the start. Being a Commercial Pilot with nearly double their required two-thousand hours of jet time, had allowed them to employ her even sooner as their leading cheerleader for the project. From the earliest days, Cardinal had zipped about promoting STEM to primarilly college coeds. The suit clad knuckle dragger in the Rose Garden posing before the media hardly remembered what those letters stood for. SCIENCE. TECHNOLOGY. ENGEERING. MATHEMATICS. He knew his way around a humidor of cigars, decanters filled with cheap scotches...and that's about it. Knowing her image along with that of her mission partner, Henry-SpaceApe-Clark were being viewed on the big screen in Mission Control made her even more self-conscious. Space was not only dangerous, it was also silent. Their Juno Command Module operated almost without any sound.

   There were various lights, all meaning something, glowing from the grey instrument panel just inches in front of them. Sound was hardly part of the environment. There was the Master Caution alarm. Cardinal knew if that was heard she and Her partner probably had seconds to live-at best. The only continuous sound heard was her own respiration, thunderously dry. She despised how it overpowered the Comm channel reminding her how precarious their status was. From outside the Juno CM a sudden wave of glowing light demanded her attention triggering an abrupt gasp from her. Their Juno CM-Command Module-was orbiting their Home planet every ninety minutes. From outside of the atmosphere, various hues of green, blue, brown accented with whisps of cloud white were stunning in their clarity.