The Day the War Struck Home

By Leigh Kimmel

Astronaut Peter Caudell comes home to find his daughter struggling with a school assignment. She's to write an essay for Memorial Day, and her teacher has suggeted astronauts -- but she wants to write about combat heroes, nto REMF's. So Peter suggests the NASA Massacre, and relates his own experiences.

 

It's the summer of 1994 and the Energy Wars are raging in the Middle East. On the home front, it's the Summer of Fear, a season of continual terrorist attacks. All eyes are upon Kennedy Space Center,w here a space Shuttle is launching for a critical on-orbit repair of a spy satellite. When it goes up without a hitch, everyone breathes a sigh of relief.

 

However, the intelligence proves incomplete -- the actual target is Johnson Space Center. Suddenly Peter is in the fight of his life, as the presence of multiple police agencies further complicates matters.

 

It's a story of courage, patriotism, and self-sacrifice that proves a much greater lesson than the teacher imagined.

 

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

 

Oiriginally published in Liberty Island Magazine as an Honorable Mention for the Memorial Day contest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: May 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201477264

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. All names of persons, places and organizations are fictitious or used fictitiously.

COVER CREDITS:

Image credits:

Johnson Space Center: NASA

Flight Control Room: NASA

Space Shuttle: NASA:

Crosshairs: donations welcome from Pixabay

Font: Elementary Gothic Bookhand

Published by Starship Cat Press, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

http://www.starshipcatpress.com/

The walk from Flight Ops to the residential wing of the Roosa Barracks always felt too long, and doubly so after a mission had taken him away from home. Peter Caudell reminded himself that this place had gone through a lot of changes since the first time he'd been here, back in the days when this part of Grissom City was still the moonbase, when Slayton Field was just a few landing pads.

Not to mention that one simply did not fail to visit the Wall of Honor upon returning home after a mission. Even if it took you out of your way to get from the debriefing rooms to your destination, you paid your respects to the fallen heroes of spaceflight, from the Gemini VIII disaster to the present.

At least Environmental Systems had finally gotten rid of the odor of old gym shoes that always lingered in his memories of his first tour of duty up here. On his walk through the residential wing, past the apartments of his colleagues and neighbors, one after another savory odor tickled his nose: real cooking, from the products of the vast greenhouse farms out on the Sea of Tranquillity.

Back in the old days, NASA had run things like a warship at sea or an antarctic research station. You might eat in the dining commons with your colleagues or take your packaged astronaut meal to eat while you worked on a project, but food was still something your employer provided, along with the other necessities of life up here. These days Grissom City had a regular civilian economy, and when you were at home you bought food like you would in family housing on an Earthside military base.

The odor wafting from under his own front door smelled at once foreign and familiar. Martha had texted that the biology labs had done a major cull of the mouse colony and Emily had brought home enough for all three of them to have a Roman feast. Of course the fish sauce would be nuoc mam from the Vietnamese grocery rather than actual garum, but was it that different from using lab mice instead of actual dormice?

A quick swipe of his key card and he was in. His wife and daughter were at the table, going over something on a tablet computer. The moonglass table might not look like the battered wooden one Peter remembered from his childhood, but it served the same purpose as hub of family activity.

Peter sat down beside his daughter. I hear you're having some trouble with your homework.

He'd expected it