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lieutenant. She had been very specific—more than once—in pointing out how any numbskull high school dropout could do my job better. The name on her uniform read Pembry. She touched the kid on his back and guided him to the seats, but if she recognized me, she said nothing.
    â€œTake a seat anywhere,” I told them. “I’m Tech Sergeant Davis. We’ll be wheels up in less than a half an hour so make yourself comfortable.”
    The kid stopped short. “You didn’t tell me,” he said to the nurse.
    The hold of a StarLifter is most like the inside of a boiler room, with all the heat, cooling, and pressure ducts exposed rather than hidden away like on an airliner. The coffins formed two rows down the length of the hold, leaving a center aisle clear. Stacked four high, there were one hundred and sixty of them. Yellow cargo nets held them in place. Looking past them, we watched the sunlight disappear as the cargo hatch closed, leaving us in an awkward semidarkness.
    â€œIt’s the fastest way to get you home,” she said to him, her voice neutral. “You want to go home, don’t you?”
    His voice dripped with fearful outrage. “I don’t want to see them. I want a forward facing seat.”
    If the kid would have looked around, he could have seen that there were no forward facing seats.
    â€œIt’s okay,” she said, tugging on his arm again. “They’re going home, too.”
    â€œI don’t want to look at them,” he said as she pushed him to a seat near est one of the small windows. When he didn’t move to strap himself in, Pembry bent and did it for him. He gripped the handrails like the oh-shit bar on a roller coaster. “I don’t want to think about them.”
    â€œI got it.” I went forward and shut down the cabin lights. Now only the twin red jump lights illuminated the long metal containers. When I returned, I brought him a pillow.
    The ID label on the kid’s loose jacket read “Hernandez.” He said, “Thank you,” but did not let go of the armrests.
    Pembry strapped herself in next to him. I stowed their gear and went through my final checklist.
    Once in the air, I brewed coffee on the electric stove in the comfort pallet. Nurse Pembry declined, but Hernandez took some. The plastic cup shook in his hands.
    â€œAfraid of flying?” I asked. It wasn’t so unusual for the Air Force. “I have some Dramamine...”
    â€œI’m not afraid of flying,” he said through clenched teeth. All the while he looked past me, to the boxes lining the hold.
    Next the crew. No one bird was assigned the same crew, like in the old days. The MAC took great pride in having men be so interchangeable that a flight crew who had never met before could assemble at a flight line and fly any StarLifter to the ends of the Earth. Each man knew my job, like I knew theirs, inside and out.
    I went to the cockpit and found everyone on stations. The second engineer sat closest to the cockpit door, hunched over instrumentation. “Four is evening out now, keep the throttle low,” he said. I recognized his hangdog face and his Arkansas drawl, but I could not tell from where. I figured after seven years of flying StarLifters, I had flown with just about everybody at one time or another. He thanked me as I set the black coffee on his table. His flight suit named him Hadley.
    The first engineer sat in the bitchseat, the one usually reserved for a “Black Hatter”—mission inspectors were the bane of all MAC aircrews. He asked for two lumps and then stood and looked out the navigator’s dome at the blue rushing past.
    â€œThrottle low on four, got it,” replied the pilot. He was the designated Aircraft Commander, but both he and the co-pilot were such typical flight jocks that they could have been the same person. They took their coffee with two creams each. “We’re trying to outfly