Vandenberg

Aliases: Vandenberg Air Force Base Status: Supporting

Vandenberg Air Force Base hosts the Night School field trip: a class tour, a rocket launch, and Uncle Rob’s covert side operation. Its people include Lieutenant Mitchell, Mission Control staff, security, a janitor, and Agent Darren.

Description

A working launch facility: Mission Control with its operators and the man in charge, a server room, a satellite observation booth holding rows of basketball-sized micro-satellites, a spacesuit room with pristine astronaut suits, a commissary, and a launch pad sending up a privately manufactured rocket system.

Role in Volume 01

In Night School, Lieutenant Mitchell gives Uncle Rob’s class the tour: Mission Control, the satellite booth (first micro-satellites bound for orbit), the spacesuit room. While the class watches, Rob deploys devices from his Uncle Rob’s Surveillance Equipment kit: self-guiding black pills, one through the server room door (“One down, two to go”), a handful into the satellite chamber’s air vents (“That’s two”), two more into astronaut helmets (“That’s three”). Chino and Homeboy vape Rob’s Jedi Mind Trick in the latrine, pair off with Cindy and Olivia, Jedi-mind-trick a spacesuit-room engineer (“We do belong here”), and get strapped into the rocket as accidental astronauts. Security pulls Rob out of Mission Control during the launch; Agent Darren interrogates him and is ordered to release him. As the rocket goes up, every Mission Control monitor scrambles into static and goes dark.

Relationships

• Lieutenant Mitchell: the base’s face to the class; runs the tour.
• Cindy and Olivia: Airmen met on the tour.
• Agent Darren: federal authority operating out of the base.
• Uncle Rob: uses the field trip as cover for his pill operation.
• Karen: the classmate who snitches to both Rob and Mitchell about the duo’s wandering.

Notes

• The base never learns what Rob planted, or that two of its “astronauts” were stoned civilians. The static on the monitors is the last thing the volume shows of it — the text never confirms the pills caused the blackout, so don’t read the causation as established.
• This page was formerly filed under Characters (as a group entry); it is reclassified here as a place, with the old URL redirecting.