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Lizzy had been a fighter pilot for years. Then she’d shifted over to tactical training. First training other flight leaders, then ultimately their commanders.
But her first love had always been space. Her dreams of leaving orbit had died before she’d been born, with the demise of the Apollo program. She hadn’t even tried for the shuttle program—a female fighter pilot had enough hurdles to climb without having to live it down if she failed to make the grade. That a class of only a dozen astronauts was chosen from nearly twenty thousand applicants wouldn’t offset that worst of labels among pilots—“failure.”
Or so she’d thought at the time.
But when the chance came to jump over to the NRO satellite program, she’d leapt without a hesitation. Everything about it, tactically and technolog
