All Fixed Up

 

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This book is dedicated to my brilliant, creative, and generally adorable children, Annalisa and Sean. All that morning sickness really paid off.

 

Chapter 1

Weightlessness, I decided, was overrated. My stomach concurred.

I took deep and steady breaths, willing the breakfast I now regretted eating to stay where I'd put it. Really, I should have known better. But in my defense, I wasn't supposed to be here. I thought I'd be sitting at a news conference, dropping a bombshell on a NASA-friendly press corps, doing my patriotic part to keep the nation's interest in our space program amped up enough to ensure future funding.

Of course, the press conference was still ahead of me. Only now it would be a tad more challenging to keep a smile on my face—and, you know, breakfast in my stomach—while the cameras were rolling.

The plane providing our zero-G experience by alternately climbing, then diving, at a steep pitch—a fricking airborne roller coaster was what it was, and I didn't even like the earthbound versions—neared the bottom of its arc. Gravity was restored with a vengeance, pressing down with a force that made me feel like I weighed three hundred pounds, pinning me just long enough for anticipation to build to another crescendo in my solar plexus. I lay quietly on the floor of the cabin, holding myself still, as per the instructor's orders. It was supposed to prevent, in most cases, the nausea a flight on the aptly nicknamed “Vomit Comet” was famous for, but I feared I wasn't a “most case.”

This on top of the preflight physical I'd been subjected to that morning. With shots. (God only knew what they were inoculating me against. Airborne cooties?)
Not
a good day for an admitted needle-phobe who had only recently started to get over her fear of flying. But I was coping. I counted that as a victory.

I opened my eyes long enough to check out the ASCANs around me. ASCAN is short for Astronaut Candidate, and it's pronounced exactly like you'd expect it to be. Ass can. (Yes, I giggled like a middle-schooler when I first heard it. What can I say? God blessed me with a juvenile sense of humor.) All the ASCANs looked significantly less green than I felt. Huh.
They
probably actually used the antinausea medication issued to them. Me? Yeah, well, when you're dealing with a nickname like “Iron Gut,” it's tough to justify the sudden necessity.

“Behind your ear,” the photographer assigned to document my return to the space program said in his adorable Australian accent, speaking loudly enough to be heard over the engines.

I turned my head to see that he'd landed right next to me. Alec, his name was, Alec Loughlin. In his mid-forties, he was the rugged, distilled-by-life kind of middle-aged, not the soft, no-reason-to-even-try-anymore kind. Too old for me, but hey, nothing wrong with appreciating what gifts the future might hold. After a second or three of appreciating the finer points of keeping in shape as you age, it occurred to me that if stray lascivious thoughts were entering my headspace, then maybe my airsickness wasn't going to be as bad as I thought. Was random (and, okay, inappropriate) lust a possible cure for motion sickness?

He reached up and stroked a spot that happened to be one of my most sensitive erogenous zones. I felt my eyes widen, and mentally apologized to my boyfriend, Billy Doyle. Not that Billy had a problem with lust inspired by outside sources—which he claimed was merely a sign of a healthy libido, and therefore a good thing—as long as I came to him to act on it. But after a recent lapse in judgment on my part, I was still a little sensitive about it myself.

“Right here,” Alec said. “It's an antinausea patch. New, faster-acting stuff. You'll be fine.”

I lifted my hand to check, bumping his hand out of the way. Sure enough, there was a smooth patch I hadn't noticed before. “But I didn't—”

He shrugged, floating upward as gravity released its grip on us once more. “I had a spare. Slipped it on you when I was adjusting your collar before our preflight camera check. ‘Iron Gut' or not”—this accompanied by a sardonic lift of brow—“I don't like my footage spoiled by random puking. Should be kicking in by now.”

Of all the nerve!
I rose next to him, trying my best to control my limbs. Pro tip: Air is not water. Swimming motions are useless for moving around in zero-G. Though apparently highly amusing to others who have more experience with the situation. I gave him a dirty look.

“You had no right,” I said, indignation propelling me into an unintentional cockeyed somersault.

He shrugged again (an attractive mannerism on him) and reached out to steady me. “How's your stomach?”

I stilled, considering. No longer felt impending barfage. “Fine,” I admitted. Grudgingly. “Doesn't mean—hey, wait a second…” I eyed him suspiciously. “Are you who I think you are?”

Billy. It had to be. He had a habit of showing up on my jobs under the pretext of helping me, but really he just likes to annoy me. It's a holdover from growing up together, raised as cousins, even though we're
not.
Our mothers were sorority sisters, which makes our cousin status strictly honorary, and therefore not in the least perverted. But that doesn't keep Billy from zinging me with a teasing conversational “cuz” at every opportunity. He claims it's habit, but I suspect he just likes getting a rise out of me.

Mr. Too-Old-But-Still-Gorgeous shrugged again, giving me a decidedly odd look. Suspicious, one might say. “Depends on who you think I am, I suppose.”

“
You
know. But I thought you were, um, otherwise occupied.” Billy was supposedly busy with one of his vast and varied moneymaking schemes—something terribly clandestine, and probably not legal in the slightest. He'd never hurt an average Joe, but had no such compunction about those he deemed to be the rich assholes of the world.

Alec looked at me blankly. “This is my assignment. Where else would I be? Look, we only have a limited time up here. How about you introduce yourself to the camera? Try to look all gung ho NASA, and tell us why you're back with the program. And if you're going to puke, don't get it on my equipment.”

Okay, maybe he really was the photographer.

“Your precious equipment is safe. So, will this be shown at the beginning or the end of the press conference? Wouldn't want to spoil the big announcement.”

“The beginning. Do it right, and this will
be
the big announcement.”

All right, then. I pasted a suitably patriotic expression on my face and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Hello! I'm Philippa Carson, NASA astronaut and lab geek, soon to be the first woman to conceive a baby in space.”

The ASCANs tried to mill closer without spoiling the shot. They'd heard the wild rumors, of course, watercooler gossip being what it was, but it appeared confirmation was still a shock. The women looked incredulous, the men speculative. I quickly went on to explain my field of research was conception in off-earth environments, and that thus far all experimentation with animals had been limited to the tiny variety.

“If all goes according to plan, I'll be the first mammal bigger than a rat to conceive in a microgravity environment,” I said, squeezing it in right before the floor came up and hit me again.

I lay back, making sure my pose was as far from “porn star” as humanly possible. After an announcement like that, the last thing you need to do is add any visual innuendo. Of course, if the PR guys at NASA hadn't come up with the bright idea that a zero-G ride would make great “optics” for the mission reveal, I wouldn't have to worry about it at all.

Alec kept shooting, aiming the camera down at me from his kneeling position. (Not generally recommended for those trying to retain their stomach contents. Apparently not a concern for the intrepid photographer.) I tried not to look like I was gripping the padded flooring beneath me with my fingernails, and hoped to hell my oh-God-I'm-being-plastered-to-the-floor-again face didn't in any way resemble an O-face.

“Since my husband and I were planning to start our family soon anyway, and I already have the astronaut training, I figured I'd be the perfect candidate. When I presented the plan to my bosses, backed up with comprehensive research to show the risk to me and my future offspring is minimal, they agreed. Can't wait to get up to the ISS!”

“ISS?” Alec asked on behalf of the future audience.

“International Space Station,” I clarified. “I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to my first visit.”

Ugh.
Not
. Thank God it would be the real Philippa Carson going and not me.

Because, yeah, I wasn't Philippa Carson. I was a rather impressive copy of her, though. An exact replica, appearance-wise at least. Even the exceedingly thorough NASA doctors couldn't tell us apart. Well, as long as they didn't decide to run a random DNA profile, which was unlikely.

Thanks to my extensive dossier on the woman, I also had her personality down pat. The one face-to-face meeting I'd had with her—long enough to grab her energy and chat about life in general—had been enough to pick up her mannerisms. I have a knack for people-reading. Which is a good thing, considering my job. What good is looking like people if you can't pull off the subtleties of their behavior?

My job? Ciel Halligan, Facilitator, at your service. I fix other people's problems for a living. Got a situation you, and only you, can take care of? Move over. I can handle it for you.
As
you. And probably better than you, seeing as how I'm not bogged down by whatever baggage is keeping you from handling it yourself.

How is it possible? Easy, if you happen to be an aura adaptor. Because of a genetic anomaly—a mutation that originated quite a few generations back—aura adaptors can alter the energy they project to take on the appearance of another person. There's a complicated explanation for how and why it works (my brother James, the scientist—who, ironically, didn't inherit the adaptor gene from our parents—can explain it better than I can), but I find it's easiest to think of our kind as human chameleons and leave it at that. I mean, I don't know every detail of how my cell phone works either, but I don't lose any sleep over it.