After nearly three years in space, everyone on board Sagittarius breathed a sigh of relief when Catherine touched them down on the surface of TRAPPIST-1f.
“Atmospheric analysis is almost done.” Claire looked up from her display. “It’s not far off from what we thought. Slightly higher CO2 concentration, humidity and atmospheric pressure comparable to Earth’s. We’ll be more comfortable if we use oxygen. Temperature outside right now is a balmy thirty-one degrees Celsius, winds are holding steady at forty kilometers per hour. It’s breezy out there, folks.”
“All right, everybody,” Ava said. “Get ready to go for a walk. We’ll maintain pressure discipline and quarantine measures until we’re sure nothing here is going to kill us.”
They drew straws, and Richie got to be the first to set foot on the unfamiliar world. “Damn,” he said, “I should have thought of something clever to say.”
“You’re not on live TV. When we get back, we’ll tell everyone you were brilliant.” Catherine tried to contain some of her exuberance, but this was it—this was the thing they’d trained so long for, and now, after over two and a half years, they were here.
When it was her turn, Catherine tried to focus on just how momentous this was as she stepped down onto the planet’s surface. It crunched beneath her feet like any rocky surface back home would. The landscape looked like a desert—and the heat only added to that impression—with hills and outcroppings and canyons in the distance. It looked like parts of Arizona except the sky had a reddish cast to it, and in that sky, the shapes of the other TRAPPIST-1 planets loomed, along with the system’s sun, TRAPPIST-1 itself. TRAPPIST-1 was smaller and cooler than Earth’s sun, but its seven planets were warmer due to their closer proximities and dense atmospheres.
Catherine had never imagined such a crowded sky. From Earth, planets looked like bright stars, visible only at night. The other TRAPPIST-1 planets loomed like boulders hanging overhead, some so massive they seemed like they might fall at any moment. Just looking up into that sky made her feel claustrophobic. The light was much dimmer than she’d expected, and wouldn’t change throughout the day. All the TRAPPIST-1 planets were tidally locked like Earth’s moon, each with a permanent dark and light side. Their landing area was in the space between, in permanent twilight.
Claire had been right about the winds—they were enough to make walking difficult. But on the other hand, the gravity was just over half the strength of Earth’s gravity, which gave them the buoyancy of walking through water. Ahead of her, Richie and Izzy were laughing and jumping into the air, seeing if they could reach the top of one of the rock pillars. It was surreal to see them putting NBA stars to shame, clearing more than a meter each time with ease. Tom and Claire watched, Tom with his arms folded across his chest. Claire smiled and said something to him, but he just turned away and walked back to the ship.
“You know you’re going to have to deal with that sooner or later.” Ava’s voice came from over Catherine’s shoulder.
“Deal with what?” Catherine tried to sound perplexed, smiling as if she didn’t know what Ava was talking about, but Ava didn’t buy it.
“It’s a small ship, Catherine. Everybody knows something happened between you and Tom.”
“Shit,” Catherine said, stomach sinking. “Ava, it only happened once. We were drunk, and—”
“I don’t care when it started or when it ended; all I care about is that Tom has been at less than one hundred percent since. I kept hoping he would move past it, but he hasn’t, and now that we’re here, we need him at one hundred percent.”
“I’m not sure what to do,” Catherine said with a sigh. “It’s been over a month, and he won’t let it go.”
“You’re the only one who can try, and keep trying.”
Catherine was afraid to ask, but she had to. “How much trouble are we in for this?”
“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.”
“Thanks, Ava.”
“Cath . . . be gentle if you can. We don’t have a lot of extra space where he can blow off steam.”
* * *
Within a few days of landing, she had her first opportunity to talk to him. They were scheduled together for the first EVA on the planet’s surface, just after they finished setting up the Habitat. They reached their assigned area and started to work. Tom didn’t say anything at all, and Catherine tried to figure out how to bring it up.
“Well . . . we’re finally here,” she managed. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Tom didn’t look up at her; he was busily scraping some of the lichen they’d spotted earlier off the rock in front of him into a vial and sealing it up. Every bit of contact with the lichen produced small gray-green puffs of what Catherine assumed were spores.
She checked the list of EVA objectives they needed to fulfill. Acquiring the initial samples was the biggest priority, so Claire could get to work analyzing everything. “I can barely believe we’ve found actual life. I can’t wait to hear how folks are reacting back home.” Communication to Earth would take a long time. All they could do for now was send all the data they gathered and wait.
Tom’s flat voice filtered through his faceplate, and he didn’t look up at her. “Yeah.”
Catherine took a deep breath. Standing out in the middle of an uninhabited planet seemed to be about as private as things were going to get for them.
Catherine took Tom’s arm. “Tom . . . while we’re out here, can we talk for a minute?”
“Now?”
“I’m sorry, but . . . I can’t keep avoiding this. What happened on New Year’s . . . never should have happened.”
“Really.” His tone remained uninflected.
“Tom . . .”
“No, I’m serious. It was ages ago, and you’re standing here telling me it was all a big mistake. So tell me, if it was such a mistake, why’d you do it?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that. I wish I did.” Catherine fidgeted with her gloves. They were standing close to each other, even though the suit comms didn’t require it. She could see the growing anger on his face and wished she couldn’t.
“Well, I do. You were bored and maybe you were, I don’t know, pissed at David about something. And I let you. Cath . . . you have to know how I feel about you, how I’ve felt about you for years.”
Oh God, don’t say it, please don’t say it.
“I love you.” He said it. “And I swore to myself I wouldn’t tell you, because you’re married, but then New Year’s happened . . . and now you barely even talk to me.”
“I’m sorry that you’re upset, Tom—”
“You can’t tell me that night didn’t mean something! You weren’t happy with David before you left. I know you weren’t.”
“I was!” I know things were tense before I left, but I wasn’t actually unhappy . . . was I? “This doesn’t have anything to do with David. Ava knows. Hell, everybody knows. If you can’t get your shit together, sooner or later someone’s going to have to report that we broke the regs. You’re risking our careers with this.”
“Screw my career! We could have something here. I’m not willing to let it go because of some outdated rules.”
“Oh, outdated rules, like the fact that I’m married?” She needed to hold on to her patience, but honest to God, he was turning this into some sort of thwarted true-love scenario in his head. “Tom, we’re done. It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I have to put my family and this mission first.”
“Y-you can’t, Catherine, you can’t. Don’t do this to me.” Anger was fighting its way past the hurt in Tom’s eyes.
“I already did.” As empty a gesture as it might have been, she reached out to put her hand on his arm. “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt—”
“Don’t touch me. I don’t need your fucking pity.” He started off toward the rocky hills that edged deeper
into the dark side of the planet.
“Tom, wait!”
“Leave me alone. I’ll finish the EVA. Just give me a few goddamned minutes, will you?”
She sighed. “Stay in radio contact.”
By the time they brought their samples back to the Habitat, Tom had cooled off some, but his responses to her and everyone else were monosyllabic before he headed off to shower.
Ava caught Catherine’s arm. “You talked to him?”
Catherine, pretty done with talking herself, nodded. “I don’t think it helped.”
“It had to be done.” Ava didn’t look any happier about it than Catherine, despite her words. “Oy, it’s going to be awkward around here for a bit. It’s a small enough place without somebody sulking over a breakup.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Catherine was saying that a lot today.
Ava put a companionable arm around her shoulder and gave her a shake. “Honest truth? Mission Control expected something like this might happen. Six years away from home, someone was bound to get an itch. We dealt with it, it’s over. Come on, let’s go see what Claire makes of your samples.”
Ava could put a good face on it if she wanted to, but Catherine had seen Tom’s expression, and she doubted that it was over.
8
“YOU’D THINK BY this point we’d have managed to do every sort of low-gravity experiment known to man,” Zach Navarro complained.
The crew of Sagittarius II was crowded into Cal’s office, perched on a couple of borrowed chairs, Cal’s desk, the windowsill.
“That’s the point,” Kevin Park was saying. “Experiments are supposed to be repeatable. So, we repeat them.”
“Again and again and again,” Navarro said.
“Trust me, you’ll be glad to have something to do.” Cal was in his office chair, his feet up on the desk. “You’re going to be stuck in that ship for over two years on the trip out. Plus, you’re going to be on TRAPPIST-1f for less time than Sagittarius I was, so we’ve got to fit in as much prep work as possible on the trip there.”
“Did we ever find out why Colonel Wells took so much longer to get home?” Kevin asked.
“Initial analysis of the ship’s trajectory suggests she was just . . . wandering for a while before she reentered the wormhole,” Cal said. “She may have had navigation problems on her own. We won’t know unless she remembers. But you”—he changed his tone to something more upbeat—“won’t have to worry about that. Because we hired Duffy for his excellent sense of direction.”
The tension broke with a chuckle that went around the room, and they went back to studying Cal’s planned itinerary. Cal kept his expression light, but the mention of Catherine sent him into what was now a familiar thought spiral. He kept thinking about finding her in the archives, about the odd look on her face, confusion mixed with fear mixed with a strong sense of guilt. Guilt about what?
“Why does Nate get a pass on some of the experiments?” Kowalski looked up from the initial version of the schedule Cal had put together. She didn’t sound put out, just genuinely curious. “I don’t see him listed as often as the rest of us.”
“Perks of being the FAO’s best friend.” Nate grinned and nudged Cal with his foot.
“Come on, seriously?” Navarro still wasn’t good at recognizing a joke.
Commander Duffy spoke up from his seat on the windowsill. “No, not seriously, Zach. I’m guessing Dr. Royer here is going to be doing all sorts of experiments on us.”
“Extended artificial gravity followed by a year in a low-gravity setting; the physiological possibilities are a dream,” Nate agreed.
“Wait a minute,” Leah Morrison said. “Y’all aren’t planning to use any of us as some kind of control to see who winds up all weak and messed up when we land, are you?”
“Nah, it’d compromise mission efficiency,” Nate said, straight-faced.
He got the response he was looking for. “ ‘Mission efficiency!’ What the hell, man?” Morrison looked appalled.
Nate waved a hand. “Plus, there’s that whole ethics issue around human experimentation.”
Duffy cracked first and snickered.
“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Morrison muttered, folding her arms.
“But I will be collecting data and doing analyses on how y’all are doing,” Nate said, dropping the act. “And if need be, altering the physical conditioning routines you’re each going to be following if it turns out we underestimated the performance drop. There’s no point in doing all the training now if you’re going to lose it on the trip there.”
“In a very real sense, maintaining your health and well-being is the central purpose of the entire mission,” Cal said. “We need to know if TRAPPIST-1f can support human life adequately. And for all our theorizing and testing and probing, the only way to confirm that is to send humans there and see. You’ve got one sort of bonus—you’re not the first. Whatever happened to Sagittarius I, it doesn’t seem like it was a direct result of the planet’s environment.
“I need you guys to understand something. If I think anything is going to endanger you—aside from normal mission risks—I will do everything in my power to fix it or stop the mission. You know me. I don’t back down when I know I’m right.”
Nate grinned. “You don’t back down when you’re wrong either, man.”
The rest of them laughed, and even Cal had to grin. “Then you know you’re in good hands.”
The meeting broke up shortly after that, but Nate hung back.
“You mean it?” Nate asked him once the office held just the two of them. “You really think everything’s kosher for us?”
Hating himself a little, Cal lied to his best friend. “I haven’t seen anything that proves otherwise. And believe me, I’m looking out for it.” He paused. “But . . . I’m glad you stayed behind. I need to pick your brain.”
“My brain is yours,” Nate said with a smile, and settled back onto the couch in Cal’s office, a battered old thing that had seen Cal through far too many late nights.
“I’m chasing something. It might be nothing.”
Nate rolled his eyes and folded his arms. “Oh brother, here we go again.”
“Nate. Humor me, okay? The doctors are assuming that Catherine Wells’s amnesia is the result of psychological trauma. What if it isn’t? What if it has a biological component? What sorts of things could cause that?”
Nate frowned. “No one’s considered this yet?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“Well, there are a lot of possibilities. Brain damage is the most likely,” Nate said first thing. “Lack of oxygen, dementia, a brain tumor . . .” He paused. “Doesn’t her mother have Alzheimer’s? I thought I heard that in the gossip mill.”
“Yeah, early-onset, too,” Cal said, “but Catherine’s not showing any other signs, and memory loss with Alzheimer’s doesn’t act this way. She’s had every scan imaginable, so we can rule out a brain tumor. Any other sorts of diseases?”
“Anything that causes inflammation in the brain. Any sort of encephalitis. We’re seeing fungal infections more often these days . . .”
“So it’s possible.”
“What are the guys analyzing the data saying?”
Cal had the grace to look sheepish. “I haven’t really talked to them. Aaron gave me a pretty stern warning to stay away from Wells, at least as far as investigating her goes.”
“And yet here you are.”
“Nate . . . she’s lying about something. I can feel it. Her story has holes in some places, but is too ironclad in others. I have to find out what it is.” He leaned across his desk, needing to make Nate, of all people, understand. “If it turns out that something she’s keeping from us is the very thing that can keep you guys alive . . .”
“I get it.” Nate didn’t seem like he was about to start making jokes about Cal and his paranoia. “I’ll tell you what. I’m not under orders to stay away from Wells and her info. I have every reason, as the crew’
s doctor, to want to see the medical records from the previous mission. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.”
Cal hesitated, despite the urge to jump on the offer. “Don’t get yourself in hot water over something that might be me seeing volcanoes again.”
“I’m a big boy. And you know I’ll tell you if you’re going off the deep end.”
“Thanks. I just . . . want you guys to be okay.”
Nate stood up. “Yeah, I know. That’s your job. And we’re counting on your sorry ass.” He grinned and headed out the door. “Climbing gym tonight?”
“Yeah. Seven sound good?”
“You bet.”
After Nate left, Cal debated with himself for a long time whether he should talk to Aaron. With Catherine’s visit to the archives . . . his instincts were screaming. Sure it was possible she had access and Cal didn’t know about it, but she was acting much too guilty.
He headed for Aaron’s office.
“How’d it go with the crew?” Aaron said by way of greeting.
“We’re good, I think. Morale’s been high lately. They’re getting excited.” Cal shut the door behind him and sat down in front of Aaron’s desk.
“Of course. With Catherine back safe and sound, everybody is relieved.”
“That’s . . . what I wanted to talk to you about.” Cal figured Aaron opened that door, so he was going to march right through it.
“Cal.” That tone didn’t bode well. “Please tell me you’re not coming in here with more conspiracy theories about Catherine Wells.”
“I am absolutely not coming in here with more conspiracy theories about Catherine Wells,” Cal answered. “I have nothing but what I’ve seen and heard myself.”
Aaron leaned back in his chair, rubbing his face with his hands.
“Aaron, I’m not trying to start shit. I swear.”
“All right. Let’s talk this through. Suppose whatever it is you have is something worth worrying about.” Aaron sat forward, his elbows landing on his desk. He pointed at Cal. “You come up with something. We postpone or even cancel Sagittarius II. What happens then?”
Vessel Page 8
