Vessel

by Lisa A. Nichols

  Normal. She was already sick of the word. It didn’t feel normal. Nothing about this felt normal. She was forty-three years old, and a huge chunk of her life was just . . . gone. From shortly after Sagittarius and her crew entered the wormhole until six months after Catherine left TRAPPIST-1f alone, there was nothing but a blank spot on the recording in her mind. She was forty-three, but she’d never been thirty-seven.

  Of course Claire Tomason and Richie Almeida would never see thirty-seven either, but for a different reason. After nearly six years alone in space, Catherine thought she was through the worst of the grief for her crew. Coming home had reawakened everything. It was like losing them all over again.

  She hadn’t expected that so much about coming home would hurt this much. The pain of understanding the scope of her memory loss. The pain of learning about Maggie. The pain of returning without her crew. And the pain of just being. Even stepping out of her quarters into the hallway hurt.

  The lights of the hallway stabbed into her eyes, and she reached for the sunglasses she now carried everywhere. The lights on Sagittarius had been designed to acclimatize the crew to the perpetual twilight of TRAPPIST-1f. No doubt there’d been a similar acclimatization program planned for their trip home, but Catherine had never found it. Since her return, she’d been wearing progressively lighter sunglasses. The lights in her quarters had started out dim, slowly brightening, although they were still low. The lights in the hallway were not.

  Llewellyn noticed her squinting. “I’ve had them turn the lights down in the conference room. It shouldn’t be so bad there.”

  “Thanks.” The lighting wasn’t the only physical difficulty. The gravity on TRAPPIST-1f was weaker than that on Earth, and Catherine hadn’t kept up with her exercise program on the way home. She’d been badly deconditioned when she’d landed. Walking across a room had left her winded and tired. Even now, despite extensive physical therapy, her body still didn’t feel like her own. She’d felt the same way after giving birth to Aimee—that her body was forever altered in ways she would keep discovering for years.

  “Here we are.” Llewellyn looked down at her and gave her a reassuring smile as they reached the door of the conference room. “You ready to get this over with?”

  “Hell yes,” Catherine breathed. After this, she could go home, go back to work, and resume her interrupted life.

  The conference room was taken up by a long table, a little ridiculous with its single occupant down at one end with water glasses and a pitcher. Cal didn’t look up from his tablet as they came in. Only when she and Aaron took their seats near him did he glance at her. “Good morning, Colonel Wells.”

  “Good morning.” Catherine poured herself a glass of water. She took off her sunglasses, then folded her hands on the table, clasping them tightly to suppress the urge to fidget.

  Cal fiddled with his tablet and started the recording. “This is Cal Morganson, here with Aaron Llewellyn and Lieutenant Colonel Catherine Wells.” He stated the date and time, then pushed the tablet forward, between the three of them.

  Aaron started. “You’ve said in prior briefings that you have no memory at all of the time between roughly Mission Day 865 and Mission Day 1349, a gap of four-hundred eighty-four days. There’s still absolutely nothing you recall from that period?”

  “No,” Catherine answered, wishing she could say otherwise. It was as if she’d talked to Ava right after they entered the wormhole, and then a moment later she was alone on the ship, with all the evidence telling her she’d left the TRAPPIST-1 system six months earlier. “All of it is still a complete blank. Dr. Darzi says that some memory loss is to be expected. I understand the last astronaut who went through ERB Prime also had some memory issues.”

  “Iris Addy didn’t forget sixteen months,” Morganson commented, looking through his notes.

  Everyone around NASA knew about Commander Iris Addy. She’d been the first to go through the wormhole, nearly ten years before the launch of Sagittarius. Just a quick trip through and back. Except Catherine heard the rumors that she’d come back wrong. Hearing voices. Claiming to have no memory of parts of the trip. All Catherine knew for certain was that Addy had gotten violent with another astronaut and washed out. No one had seen or heard from her since. No one talked about her officially anymore. It was as if she’d never existed.

  Llewellyn stepped in before Catherine could respond. “Commander Addy’s trip was much shorter. And we know now there may have been a few . . . additional factors related to her problems after returning home. I think we can agree that Colonel Wells’s experience is unique. There’s no way to compare it to anyone else’s.” He turned to Catherine and gave her a reassuring smile. It was a smile that said I’m on your side. You can trust me. Which automatically made Catherine suspicious.

  “Tell us the last thing you remember before the gap, and the first thing after,” Llewellyn said.

  You can do this. Would this be the time she remembered something new? “The mission was going as planned. We were on schedule traveling through ERB Prime, and the planned experiments were going well. The last clear memory I have is of a conversation with Commander Ava Gidzenko about adjusting our ETA, since we seemed to be ahead of schedule. That was sometime around Mission Day 865, because Commander Gidzenko commented on it in the ship’s log.” The logs were the only reason she knew for certain that they’d even reached the TRAPPIST-1 system, but the entries stopped shortly before they landed.

  Cal spoke. “Commander Gidzenko’s private logs mention some tension among the crew around that time, but she didn’t go into specifics.”

  That was new information. Had Ava been referring to— She hadn’t written that down, had she? She’d promised. Cath, I’m not even calling this a verbal reprimand. Call it being a worried friend. Deal with it before it blows up, and I’ll keep pretending I don’t know anything.

  A sudden paranoia grabbed Catherine by the throat and shook her. Each of the crew had written private log entries. She had reviewed the public entries, but she couldn’t access the private ones. Her own personal log entries had been wiped sometime during her blank period, leaving nothing before Mission Day 865. She had no idea when or why they’d been deleted. It wasn’t as if she’d written anything incriminating . . .

  But what had the others written? What had they seen? How much did NASA know? Breathe. If they knew everything, you’d know by now.

  “Colonel Wells?”

  “Sorry, sir.” She clenched her jaw. It galled her to call him “sir.” “That’s news to me. Commander Gidzenko didn’t talk to me about any problems among the rest of the crew.” That was the absolute truth.

  “And the first thing after the gap?”

  Catherine shook her head. “It was like waking up from a dream. There are snatches of memory, doing some of the planned experiments, making a meal . . . Day 1349 was the first day it really came to me that I was alone, and that I shouldn’t be. I thought the ship’s mission clock had to be wrong at first, but there was so much evidence on board that we’d landed—the Habitat module wreckage, the depletion of the supplies, the missing rover . . . That’s when I first realized things were terribly wrong.”

  She could still feel that panic clawing in her mind even six years later, and remembered how she’d run blindly from one crew quarters to another, praying she’d find her missing colleagues there.

  At times it felt as if she might drown beneath a massive tsunami of delayed grief. Every time she sat down to retell her story in yet another debrief, there were ghosts behind her, pushing at her, needing her to tell their stories as well. But how could she tell their stories when she couldn’t even remember her own?

  The questions came from both men now, fast and hard.

  “And so nothing out of the ordinary was going on before Sagittarius left the wormhole, nothing that was kept out of the logs?”

  “No sir.” Another technical truth.

  “You have no memory of Mission Day 1137, or of any of the ci
rcumstances around it? Nothing about what happened to the rest of the Sagittarius I crew?”

  “No, sir. I wish I did.” God, I wish I did. How can I ever face Ava’s kids and tell them I don’t know what happened to their mom?

  “What about the Habitat debris on board Sagittarius? Do you remember anything about that?”

  “No, sir. All I know is what I’ve been told since coming home. On Mission Day 1137, all contact between Earth and TRAPPIST-1f ended abruptly, and all life-support signals from the crew ceased, including mine.” She survived; what if the others had as well? Had she just abandoned them? No, she wouldn’t have. She couldn’t have. “I’ve thought about it, and all I can figure is that if the Habitat was destroyed, I would have tried to bring the debris back with me, for analysis, to figure out what happened.”

  “Colonel Wells.” Morganson spoke up again, and he lifted his head to look at her. She was struck again by how attractive he might have been, with his messy brown hair and boyish features, if there’d been any hint of warmth to him. “What do you think happened on Mission Day 1137? Surely in six years, you’ve formulated a theory.”

  “I—” Catherine looked at Aaron, but he seemed interested in her answer as well. “I’ve asked myself that question every single day.” It was more than that. The question tormented her. Over the six years that she was alone with nothing to do but think, she’d come up with a thousand possible scenarios, some more improbable than others, most of them—at least to some degree—her fault. Coming home, she’d hoped that maybe, finally, someone at NASA might be able to help her find the answers. She took a breath and gave them her least improbable possibilities. “There might have been a problem with the Habitat, or an accident of some sort. I know now that we did find signs of microorganisms in the water there, so there could have been an illness that hit us, but given how suddenly everything stopped, and that the Habitat debris shows signs of fire, my best guess is that something catastrophic happened to our life-support systems in the Habitat.”

  “And the others?” Morganson asked.

  Catherine couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead she focused on her hands. “The logical assumption is that whatever happened on Mission Day 1137, I was the sole survivor.” She hated that answer. That for some unexplainable reason, she survived and the others didn’t. “I can’t think of any other reason why I would have come back alone.”

  “Oh, I can think of a few,” Morganson said.

  “Cal,” Llewellyn said sharply. “You’re out of line.”

  “I’m sorry, Aaron, but no one else around here seems willing to say it,” Morganson said. “It’s incredibly convenient that Colonel Wells ‘doesn’t remember’ anything, and that all information from the Habitat, including public logs and telemetry, stops abruptly three days prior to the Event, not to mention that all of the crew’s personal logs after Day 865 are gone. All we have are Colonel Wells’s personal logs after Day 1349.”

  The Event. NASA had always been fond of euphemisms for tragedy. The fear and anger and frustration that had been simmering in her for years bubbled over. “Well, it’s pretty damned inconvenient for me. Especially since you seem to be implying that I’m lying.”

  “No one thinks you’re lying,” Aaron said, looking pointedly at Cal. “No one. We’re in awe of you. You went through an unimaginable experience out there and the fact that you came back is a miracle, yes, but it’s also a testament to your strength and resilience. No one has ever survived alone in space for as long as you did. You’re a goddamned hero.”

  The word rankled her. She’d spent years training for a mission she couldn’t even remember. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow whatever happened up there was her fault. How else was she the only one to return?

  “I think that’s all we have for now.” Aaron stood up. “Come on. Your family must be waiting for you. Let’s get you to them.”

  “Thank you.” Catherine stood as well, reaching for her sunglasses.

  Aaron accompanied her from the room and down the seemingly endless corridors that lead from the depths of the building to the waiting area. Escaping the room felt like escaping prison, and now for the first time in nine years, she was going to find out what it was like to be free again. Her heart thudded painfully in her chest, and her mind raced with the thought of seeing Aimee and David for real, without any barriers between them.

  As they rounded the corner, Catherine could see them standing on the other side of the glass doors. David was pacing the waiting area, his arms folded across his narrow chest. Aimee was chewing on her thumbnail.

  She was the one who spotted Catherine first, looking up with a bright smile and waving enthusiastically. Aaron touched Catherine’s shoulder and smiled. “Go on. Get out of here.”

  Catherine started out walking down the long corridor but wound up running. Her eyes stung and her throat ached long before she got to the door. Finally. Finally. Her heart beat that one word over and over as she stepped through. David and Aimee rushed to embrace her, and she wrapped her arms around both of them fiercely, burying her face in Aimee’s hair and letting the tears fall.

  2

  “WHAT THE HELL was that about?” Aaron Llewellyn waited until he and Cal were well away from the conference room, on the way back to Aaron’s office.

  “Come on, Aaron. It doesn’t add up. It’s too neat. How are all the personal logs gone? Even if Wells’s amnesia were fishy—which it is—she couldn’t have wiped those records.” Something wasn’t right here. It didn’t piece together. His instincts were yelling it loud and clear, and his instincts rarely steered him wrong.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have pushed it so hard in the debrief, though.

  “If she couldn’t have wiped the records, then why did you go after her so hard? You think . . . what? That the crew survived and Catherine abandoned them?” Aaron shook his head.

  “No, but . . .” Cal paused. He’d considered that, but there was no evidence. And as good as Aaron was about listening to some of Cal’s more out-there ideas, floating sinister theories about Wells was a bad idea right now. Everyone on the team was protective of her. Cal got that. Whatever the truth was, she’d been through hell, and no doubt was still going through it. “There’s just something she’s not telling us. I can feel it.”

  Aaron stopped walking and turned to face Cal. His expression was flat and the way he crossed his arms over his chest didn’t bode well for Cal. “Listen, kid. I’m letting you step up on this mission. You don’t have to start shit to try to make yourself look good. Don’t make me, or anyone else, regret this.”

  “I’m not starting shit—”

  Aaron gave him a look.

  “This time. I’m not. I swear.”

  Cal never meant to start shit. He saw things that other people overlooked. Worse than that, he was terrible about just going with the flow. He couldn’t let things slide, especially not for the sake of a feel-good story for the history books. NASA ran on myths and legends as much as it ran on funding and science. And Cal just couldn’t buy into it.

  “Well, just . . . lay off for a bit, would you?” Aaron started walking again and Cal hurried to keep up. Aaron might as well have asked him to fly, as far as Cal was concerned, but he’d try. “She’s a hero around here. After what happened with Sagittarius I, NASA needs all the heroes it can get. And right now, Sagittarius II depends on what she’s able to tell us.”

  But she’s not telling us everything. Cal sighed. “Yeah, all right. I’ll lay off.” It was just intuition right now, something about the way Wells told her story. Nothing concrete. The problem was, the more people defended Wells, the more people talked about her like she was a hero, the more Cal wanted to puncture that bubble, find out what she might be hiding. The higher the stakes got, the more important it was that he find the truth.

  His promise to lay off didn’t even make it to lunchtime. He was just checking on something, that was all. For his own peace of mind. He pulled up the transcripts of Wells’s initial
debrief right after she landed.

  WELLS: The mission was going as planned. We were on schedule traveling through ERB Prime, and the planned experiments were going well. The last clear memory I have is of a conversation with Commander Ava Gidzenko about adjusting our ETA, since we seemed to be ahead of schedule. That was sometime around Mission Day 865, because Commander Gidzenko commented on it in the ship’s log.

  That sounded familiar—too familiar. Her second debrief was with the psychiatrist present and was filmed. Cal watched the video briefly, then fast-forwarded to the same question.

  Catherine, who had been interacting normally, paused and looked straight ahead. Cal hit Play.

  “—ahead of schedule. That was sometime around Mission Day 865, because Commander Gidzenko commented on it in the ship’s log.”

  Then his recording from earlier today: the exact same story, word for word. Memory didn’t work that way. When people talked about a traumatic event, it was rarely the same story twice—they misremembered, they forgot, they revealed things out of order, and they found new memories between one telling and the next. That was one reason NASA did so many of these damned reviews: to coax out as many details as possible, a few at a time. He and Aaron had hoped that in a slightly more relaxed setting with just the three of them, focused specifically on what happened to the others, that maybe a few more details would emerge.

  But Wells was telling the exact same story every single time. As though she’d memorized it. As though it had been prerecorded, so to speak. On its own, it wasn’t enough to take back to Aaron, not while everyone wanted to keep Wells on her pedestal, but it was enough to raise Cal’s hackles. He just had to—