Vessel

by Lisa A. Nichols

  “But he’s still not fixing the comms.”

  “Says he can’t. He says there’s nothing wrong with them, just that the signal can’t reach Earth from here.”

  “But we were sending data before . . .”

  “And we never got a response,” Claire said. “We have no way of knowing if anything got through then, and now we can’t even try.”

  Catherine studied her plate. “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t know what to believe. I mean, we were having communication problems before, but maybe that was him, too . . . And why would he want to help us, when all Ava is going to do is rat him out to NASA first thing?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.” She couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this was her fault, that somehow what happened with Tom had . . . unbalanced him.

  Claire stiffened suddenly, then lifted her head, sniffing the air. “Is that smoke?”

  “I don’t smell it.” But Catherine wouldn’t. The air she was breathing was recirculating through her room without ever touching the air outside the quarantine cell. Still, just the mention of smoke was enough to send a chill through her. Despite all the precautions, despite all the safety lessons learned at the expense of other astronauts’ lives, fire in an enclosed area was still one of everyone’s greatest fears.

  Claire stood up. “I’m going to go try to track it down.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will. Wait here. I’ll sound the alarm if you need to get out. Might want to suit up, just in case.” Claire hurried off.

  It might be nothing. It was probably nothing. But Catherine started the arduous process of climbing into her decontamination suit anyway.

  She was grateful that she glanced at the clock before Claire left, because five minutes felt like twenty. And it was starting to look hazy outside her window.

  Six minutes. Hazier still.

  Catherine thumbed the comm on her suit and set the channel to broadcast over the entire Habitat. “Guys? What’s going on?”

  Six and a half minutes. Nothing.

  “Ava? Claire? Somebody?”

  The corridor was actually smoky now. She was heading for the air lock leading out of quarantine when a voice sounded in her ear over the comm.

  “It’s all right, Catherine. Everything’s fine.” Tom sounded totally calm. The only way he could speak to her directly through her helmet rather than over the overhead speaker was if he was in the command center still, where he’d been working all morning.

  “Tom? What’s going on?”

  “Just a little mishap. Stay where you are. It’s not quite safe out here yet.”

  “I’m seeing a lot of smoke,” Catherine said. “Where is everyone?”

  “It’s fine; it’ll all be fine in a minute or two,” Tom said soothingly. Something about his voice prickled the back of Catherine’s neck and she shoved her way into the air lock, dialing in the commands that would let her out as fast as she could. Her hands were shaking as she slammed the last button and waited for the pressure to equalize so she could get out.

  “Come on, come on, come on.”

  The door opened into the Habitat hallway. The smoke was so thick Catherine could barely see three feet in front of her. The suit’s air tank protected her lungs, but she had to get out. Please let the others already be outside.

  “Catherine, where are you going? I’m showing that you breached quarantine.”

  “What are you doing, Tom?”

  Tom laughed, as if that were the silliest question he’d ever heard. “I’m in the command center, doing what I’m supposed to be doing, what else?”

  The door that led out of the Habitat was right in front of her. If the others weren’t outside . . . No, but they would be. Whatever game Tom was playing, the others would have evacuated by now.

  It was twilight out on the surface, but then it was always twilight. There was no sound on TRAPPIST-1f except for the wind blowing between the pillars of rock. There was no sign of the others. The rendezvous point in the event of an evacuation was half a kilometer away, not far from where Sagittarius sat waiting for their return trip.

  There was still no sign of anyone.

  Then she heard a low, tearing rumble. She turned back just as the Habitat expanded outward in a slowly unfurling giant cloud of dust, rubble, and smoke, until the walls shattered from the force of the pressure. A fireball rose from within the smoke like a bright orange sun in the dim landscape.

  The others.

  “No!” Catherine ran toward the flames, her breath coming in harsh, sobbing pants. The debris field met her before she even got close to the Habitat’s remains, flying toward her and falling from the sky. There was no way to get closer. The air was too hot. She stumbled back, choking back her tears. As she flattened herself behind one of the stone pillars, she prayed something didn’t land on her from overhead.

  When she stopped hearing debris slamming to the ground, she took a chance and looked around the pillar. The remains of the Habitat blazed brightly, the skeleton of the structure showing amid the flames. There was just enough oxygen in the atmosphere to feed the fire.

  Catherine tried to get closer, but there was still nothing she could do. The fire extinguishing equipment was inside the Habitat, where it was burning as fiercely as the rest of the module.

  All she could do was circle what had been her home, helpless. Hoping that someone might come out of the burning wreckage, but there was no one. Everyone was dead except her.

  22

  IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE launch, Cal was too busy to do anything other than monitor and keep in touch with the Sagittarius II crew. Aaron had stopped glaring at him every time Cal so much as cleared his throat. He commented to him privately that he was glad to see Cal focusing on the right things.

  Most of his time was spent in Mission Control, keeping an eye on his people.

  The fourth morning running, Leah Morrison started ribbing him. “Hey, Morganson, don’t you have anything better to do than hover? No home to go to, nothing?”

  “I’d love to go home,” he said, “but somebody’s gotta keep an eye on you and make sure you fly that thing straight.”

  Commander Duffy piped up, drawling. “Houston, can somebody take a look under Morganson’s chair and see if he’s got any eggs in his nest yet?”

  Laughter rippled through Mission Control, and Cal took it good-naturedly. “All my chicks have flown far, far from the nest, John,” he shot back.

  “They do that,” Duffy agreed. “You gotta let ’em go, momma hen.”

  “Hey, if I hadn’t, y’all wouldn’t be out there.” Cal was hovering; he knew he was. And now that the crew had called him out on it, he’d have to stop.

  It turned out to be harder than he expected.

  He made himself stay away from Mission Control outside of his scheduled duty hours and tried to focus on the other work waiting for him. It slowly got easier to stop worrying about his crew. That, and he could keep reminding himself that whatever problems they were going to face, they wouldn’t happen on the trip out.

  There was still plenty of data coming in from Sagittarius I, and as long as Cal didn’t focus too much attention on Catherine, he was well within his job parameters. He began looking again at the telemetry from the first mission, making comparisons between the Sagittarius I benchmarks and where Sagittarius II was.

  Periodically, his attention was drawn back to the data he initially uncovered. The only way the Sagittarius I data from TRAPPIST-1f made sense was if two people had been alive on the ship. But he had no other information. He was trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with no idea what the final picture would look like. And Aaron ultimately was right: the families of Sagittarius I didn’t deserve the pain of knowing that one of their loved ones had suffered terribly.

  But then one of the lab techs called him. “Dr. Royer told us to call you when we had something new. We’ve got the first full set of data on Catherine Wells’s blood work. I can’t send it to you
yet, but you can come down here. Trust me, you’re going to want to see this.” From the tone in the tech’s voice, he might have found something big.

  On his way down to the lab, he saw David Wells in the hallway and stopped him. “Hey, I just wanted to find out how Catherine is doing.”

  Catherine’s meltdown had been all anyone talked about in the days following the launch. Cal had missed the meeting where she’d supposedly been drunk, but he heard about it several times.

  David gave him a somewhat surprised look. “And here I thought NASA lived on gossip,” he said. “I have no idea how she’s doing.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We split up. Before her . . . um, incident.”

  Cal thought he saw a flicker of guilt cross David’s face. He knew about Maggie Bachman; everyone did. That was a particularly popular topic of gossip in the months after Catherine’s reappearance.

  “I’m sorry,” Cal said again. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “I wish I could tell you more.”

  “Well, if you talk to her, let her know we’re thinking of her, all right?”

  David looked grateful to be ending the conversation. “I will. Thanks.”

  Huh. Cal shouldn’t be that surprised. The pressure that came with returning from a mission was enormous. And no astronaut had ever been under as much pressure as Catherine had. That had to be a contributing factor.

  And some of that pressure was his fault. He wasn’t to blame for Catherine’s marriage falling apart, but . . .

  When he got to the lab, the tech pulled him aside. “Tell me what you know about antibodies.”

  “Uh . . . just the Biology 101 version. Part of the immune system. When your body detects bacteria or a virus or anything else that doesn’t belong there, the antibodies go after it and neutralize the threat.” He paused and looked at the tech as if to say, “Is that enough?”

  “Right,” the tech said. “Each antibody is keyed to a specific antigen—the bacteria or virus. That’s often how we can diagnose a specific disease, or at least rule it out. If you have an antibody for a specific antigen, you’ve been exposed to it at some point. It’s why most people don’t get the chicken pox more than once.”

  “Okay . . . so what did you find?”

  “It’s buried in the prelim report. Probably no one will care much about it, but . . . Colonel Wells came back from TRAPPIST-1f with an antibody that matches no known antigen on Earth.”

  Cal shook his head. “Sure, but we expected that. She was living on another planet; she was bound to come in contact with something if there was anything to come in contact with.”

  “Except I’ve found one other person who carries that same antibody. Iris Addy.”

  “You’re saying they were both exposed to the same antigen?” A sense of excitement, like he was on the brink of something big, was growing in Cal’s gut. “But . . . Addy didn’t go to TRAPPIST-1f. She never even left the ship.”

  The tech shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I found.”

  Cal’s thoughts were whirling. “When can you send me the full report?”

  “We should have it written up in the next day or two.”

  “Thank you, this could be a huge help.”

  He headed to Aaron’s office for their regular meeting.

  As soon as he settled in, Aaron said, “I wanted to congratulate you, first off. I’m glad to see you took my words to heart. You’re back on track, where I expect you to be, and the mission’s success so far reflects that.”

  Cal pasted on a smile, still thinking about the new data. He had to tell Aaron, and just hope that Aaron wouldn’t get angry. “I owe it to my crew to give them my best,” he said. That wasn’t a lie, at least.

  “Nobody could fault you for the job you’re doing,” Aaron said.

  “Listen. I really did stop looking into Catherine, but the medical team gave me some data today that I think could be important. It might be a clue to the amnesia that Catherine and Iris Addy both developed.”

  Aaron lifted his eyebrows, his gaze telling Cal the ice beneath him was getting thinner. “Cal, Addy’s medical workup has been gone over with a fine-toothed comb, and we can’t have that much information back on Catherine yet.”

  “Addy’s records have been, yes, and it’ll be months before we’ve gotten final results on all of Wells’s tests, but today I got some of the initial results.” Cal wished he had the written report, but he had to make do with what he had. “We may have found something.”

  Aaron gave him a small nod, a cautious one, and Cal felt a surge of relief. He was going to listen.

  “The folks in the lab found an unrecognized antibody in Catherine’s system,” he began.

  “Not a surprise; we already knew there was all sorts of life on TRAPPIST-1f.”

  “Yes, but . . . Commander Addy has that same antibody. And as far as the lab can tell, it doesn’t match any known antigen on Earth. She never landed on TRAPPIST-1f.” Cal could see the skepticism growing in Aaron’s eyes, so he rushed ahead to his conclusion. “They both had to be exposed to the same thing out there. What if the amnesia and the erratic behavior have a biological component?”

  “You may be onto something,” Aaron was forced to admit. “Whatever it is, it’s unlikely that it’s infectious, or we’d have had a problem before now.”

  Cal nearly slumped in relief. Finally, Aaron was listening.

  “That being said, you need to think about spending some time away from here.” He raised his hand to forestall Cal’s protest. “Now’s the best time. We can follow up on the antibody angle without you. Things should be quiet for a bit, and we’ve got a couple of months before the ship gets to the wormhole.”

  “Shouldn’t I wait until they’re in before I take time off?” Cal countered. “They’ll be unreachable then so there won’t be anything we can do with them at all.”

  “You’ll be taking time away then, too,” Aaron said. “We’ve got too many staff overstressed right now, but you and Wells are the ones I’m most worried about.”

  Cal was fine. What was there to worry about? Catherine, though . . . “I heard about her and her husband. It’s a shame.”

  “I’m not surprised, honestly.” Aaron could afford to be philosophical, as he had two failed marriages behind him himself. “It’s more than that, though. Have you talked to her at all lately?”

  Cal shook his head, allowing himself a wry grin. “You told me to stay away from her.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m worried about her.”

  “So you’re sending us both into time-out?”

  Aaron shook his head, chuckling. “You know, most people don’t consider a few days off punishment. But yeah. Go to your room, Cal. Come back on Monday.”

  “Yes, sir,” Cal sighed.

  “I mean it. Pack up and clear out, starting right now. I don’t want to see your goofy-ass face until Monday.”

  * * *

  Cal didn’t do well with an excess of free time. The good thing was, he knew that about himself, and was planning ways to keep from going stir-crazy. It was too last minute for him to go on a trip, and he wouldn’t want to be too far away from Johnson anyway, in case something did go wrong. The only option that left him was going home to his folks, and he sure as hell didn’t want to do that.

  And despite what Aaron said, he had every intention of looking into the first mission from home.

  The second morning, though, he needed to get out of the house. And he needed to move.

  The climbing gym that he and Nate favored was mostly empty on weekday mornings. The only people around were people off work for the day, like him, and folks who worked the night shift. Still, there were a few familiar faces, and it wasn’t hard to find a partner to climb with.

  Climbing with Nate was better, Cal decided, when he was halfway up the wall. It wasn’t just that they knew each other’s habits, it was also that he was more fun. Get it together, he chided himself. It hadn’t even been two weeks since the laun
ch. If he started missing Nate now, he’d never make it. Still, it was one thing to logically know his best friend would be out of touch for several years, but now the reality of it was starting to kick in.

  It took until his second attempted climb for Cal to clear his mind. Things were so clean here, so simple: find the next handhold, keep moving. The steady rhythm of his heart and the sweat trickling down his face left his mind clear and empty.

  Aaron had told him to take a break, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the strange Sagittarius readings. Which crew member had made it back onto the ship with Catherine? What had happened to that person?

  Maybe following up on the new medical info might provide a way to unlock Catherine’s memories. But if Cal was honest with himself, it wasn’t just that. Before her discharge from NASA, Commander Addy wasn’t only erratic but had also had more than one violent outburst. It hadn’t happened with Catherine yet . . . but what if it did? What if it already happened, out there?

  And what if that same antigen—virus, bacterium, whatever it was—infected the Sagittarius II crew?

  It was a lot to think about. Something else to look into. Maybe it was the missing piece of the puzzle, or maybe it was the one maddening piece that wouldn’t seem to fit anywhere until the whole picture was almost complete.

  Either way, having a new direction to go in lifted a weight off his shoulders. Cal took a deep breath and swung into action, reaching for the next handhold.

  23

  WHEN HER PHONE rang Catherine almost let the call go to voice mail, but after Julie’s visit, she’d promised to pick up the phone when people called. Besides, she was starting to feel a little lonely.

  “Hi, Julie.”

  “How are things going?”

  “I’m doing better.” Catherine paced the length of her living room, before spinning in the other direction. She sounded normal. Then again, she was completely sober, for the moment.

  Julie paused, and Catherine could hear office sounds in the background, before they muted with a thud. She must have closed her office door. “Cath, are you still drinking?”