The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

“They’ve been silent so far,” Stevens pointed out, but she didn’t care.

  She wanted to press her face into the crook of his shoulder and cry. Happy tears.

  But then the door of the classroom opened again and two more people came out, and Rao had to step back, out of the hug. McAllister and Jansen walked past, not even looking at them. Sally Jansen wasn’t looking at anything—she seemed lost in thought.

  When they were out of earshot, Stevens leaned in close. “What’s she doing here?” he asked. “You know who that was, right? The woman who almost went to Mars.”

  Rao looked up at him in surprise. “That’s a little cold.”

  “She killed Blaine Wilson,” Hawkins said.

  Rao’s eyes narrowed. “And saved two other astronauts,” she pointed out.

  Stevens shook his head, and then his big smile was back. “Ancient history, guys. Listen. McAllister wants us to meet him this afternoon for another briefing. I’m not sure why, but I assume that we—all three of us,” he said, nodding at the space force guy, “are going to be working together. Should we go get lunch? We can talk some more about 2I.”

  “We shouldn’t discuss anything in public,” Hawkins said. “We should order in. Ms. Rao, do you have an office here, in the building?”

  She didn’t bother correcting him—she was Dr. Rao, but at the moment she didn’t care what people called her. She was going to talk to aliens…

  Hawkins cleared his throat.

  She looked down and saw that she still had one hand on Stevens’s arm, and that she was gently stroking it. Stevens didn’t seem to mind.

  Just the excitement, she thought. They were all so excited. “Sure,” she said. “Um, down this way,” and she started walking toward her office. She spun around as she walked and looked back at the two men.

  “Aliens!” she whispered.

  She wanted to run up to the roof and shout it at the sky.

  McAllister took Jansen deep into the heart of JPL, to a room she’d never actually seen before, though she knew it by reputation.

  Together they watched a small army of technicians move a very large packing crate from the JPL loading bays to the antechamber of the Twenty-Five-Foot Space Simulator. Men and women dressed in paper from head to foot, with special nonconductive, lint-repelling shoes, walked the container with excruciating slowness toward the big doors. Careful not to bump or jostle the crate in any way.

  The Twenty-Five-Foot Space Simulator—which, in classic government fashion, was actually twenty-seven feet across—was one of NASA’s most famous assets. It was a National Historic Landmark, and for good reason. It had been used to test space probes from Ranger to Voyager and a dozen more since. It was a stainless steel cylinder eighty-five feet high, with doors as thick as a bank vault’s. Once a piece of space hardware was put inside and the doors were sealed, the interior of the cylinder could be turned into all kinds of hell. The temperature could be raised to hundreds of degrees, or lowered to well below zero. All the air could be pumped out of the cylinder until it formed a hard vacuum. The contents of the cylinder could be bathed in ionizing radiation for hours or even days. All to prove the hardware in question was safe to take to space.

  The technicians moved the big crate right up to the Simulator’s doors, then got to work cracking it open.

  “Who knows about this?” Jansen asked.

  McAllister had told her how top secret his project was. How important it was that the general public not find out about 2I until NASA had some actual information to give them. He still hadn’t explained why she’d been brought into the loop.

  “For the moment we’re limiting exposure. Only a handful of people in Pasadena know. Congress and the president. Of course, KSpace knows, because Stevens was working for them when he found it. The Russians have been informed. So far they’re happy to let us take all the risk. The Chinese are getting ready to launch a vehicle as well,” McAllister said. “Though they’re being tight-lipped as to its specifications. We’re not sure if they’re sending taikonauts, or simply a probe. Or a nuclear missile.”

  She turned and gave him a questioning look.

  McAllister shrugged. “Is paranoia such an unreasonable response? This thing could be coming to kill us all. Our space force is getting their own weapons ready for launch, too. If 2I is hostile, we won’t have a lot of time to take countermeasures. Better to have weapons up there, ready to fire, than find out too late that we need them.”

  “This is first contact, Roy,” she said.

  And suddenly—it hit her. What that meant.

  Sally Jansen had been to space. She’d looked back at Earth and seen how fragile it was, and how alone. She’d looked out across empty light-years and felt the incredible distance between stars. She’d never believed in UFOs, never thought humanity would ever detect so much as a radio signal from another world. Yet here they were.

  How could you deal with that? How could anyone come to grips with the size of this? How did you not just shut down, give in to the shock?

  She used to be an astronaut, damn it. She knew the answer. You fell back on your training. You considered the problem through the lens of what you knew, what you were sure of. Roy McAllister was thinking of it as a series of problems. A national security problem. An engineering problem. Problems he needed to solve.

  She tried to do the same. How did this affect her, personally? What was it going to mean to her? She struggled with even that. She felt dizzy with the size of what they were talking about.

  “This could be the biggest event in history. Human history.”

  “I’m aware,” he told her. “That’s why, when I went to Congress, I told them we needed a crewed mission of our own. We need to send American astronauts up there, to meet this thing face-to-face.”

  Jansen stared at him. “A… crewed mission. A NASA crew. On a mission.”

  “Yes,” he said. He was taking her through this slowly, she could tell. Trying to let her fully understand each new revelation. By the way he kept popping his knuckles, though, she could also tell he needed her to catch on fast.

  “Congress has been nickel-and-diming NASA for decades. They’re the reason we don’t have any astronauts anymore, for God’s sake. How’d they take this?” Jansen asked.

  “They gave me a check. Not as big a check as I asked for. But maybe enough.”

  Her mouth actually fell open. That—that never happened. NASA had been begging and fighting for scraps of money since the last Apollo mission flew. The aborted mission to Mars had taken decades of saving and scrimping on a shoestring budget, and years of meetings and proposals and meetings about writing proposals. Every time a new president or a new Congress got elected, NASA had to start over from scratch. Now—Roy had gone to Washington, given one presentation, and walked away with all the money he needed?

  Apparently this was the mission that the money people had been waiting for.

  “Of course, all the cash in the world can’t make a mission just magically appear,” McAllister told her. “We’ll need to scrap a bunch of our robotic exploration programs and divert funds, people, and equipment into this thing. We don’t have Canaveral or Houston anymore, so we’ll need to borrow one of the space force’s launch pads and run control from right here at JPL. We’re not set up for training astronauts—we’ll need to rebuild a bunch of resources we’ve lost, write code for new training simulators, hire back people we laid off a decade ago, reuse rockets and space suits that have been sitting in warehouses for decades. It’s going to take every asset I’ve got to pull this off in the given time frame. Assets like this one.”

  Down below them, on the floor of the Simulator, they had finally gotten the crate open. The spacecraft inside had been sealed away for twenty-one years, but a lot of effort had gone into keeping it in good shape. It had been packed with excruciating care into the big steel container, which had then been welded shut to make it airtight. Then it was pumped full of nonreactive helium to protect the contents against rust o
r corrosion. For decades it had been housed in a high-security warehouse, guarded night and day by armed soldiers.

  Technicians with pry bars and power wrenches moved in to take down the walls of the crate while its top was lifted away very carefully by a crane. When it was done, the spacecraft lay revealed, as shiny and new as the last time she’d seen it.

  Down to the paint job. Down to the name ORION 7 lovingly stenciled just below the American flag. She didn’t say anything, because she knew if she opened her mouth her voice might break. This wasn’t Orion 6, it wasn’t her ship. But it was so close.

  The conical command module was covered in square black protective tiles. The HabLab module was deflated, perched on top of the command module like a big saggy silver doughnut, secured by yellow nylon straps to keep it from flopping around. There was no Martian lander attached to this spacecraft—that was the big difference between this ship and the one she had almost flown to Mars.

  “We had three of these—7, 9, and 15—in storage, so if there’s a problem with this one we have two spares we can cannibalize for parts.” He took a step forward until he was right by her shoulder. He reached out and touched her arm, but she didn’t move. “There’s no time to design and build a new spacecraft. We needed to go with what we had in dead stock.”

  Jansen wasn’t surprised. NASA never threw anything away—one of its operating principles was that it never wanted to reinvent the wheel. The Orions were directly based on technology from the old Apollo missions that had put men on the moon almost a hundred years earlier. Proven technology.

  They were also the last crewed spacecraft NASA had built. Twenty-one years and it still didn’t have any other way to get people into space.

  “Honestly,” McAllister said, “it’s in better shape than I expected. We’ll need to replace the batteries and the reaction wheels. Update the star trackers, install new carbon scrubbers… but for the most part, it’s ready to go, right out of the box.”

  She understood how important that was. McAllister’s mission was on a deadline and there were realities to face, constraints to work within. She got it.

  As the technicians started moving 7 into the big cylinder, she turned around so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

  She used to be an astronaut. They had given her Orion 6—it had been her ship. And then everything had gone wrong. Her whole life had fallen apart. Why was he showing her this? Why tell her about 2I when it was being kept secret from the rest of the world? What the hell did he want from her?

  McAllister wasn’t a cruel man. He took one look at her face and led her out of the observation room and down a hall to an unused conference room, where they could talk.

  ROY MCALLISTER: Sally Jansen knew that ship better than anyone alive. She’d piloted it halfway to Mars and back. I trusted my staff, my scientists, and my engineers, but I needed her eyes on this. A lot of people pushed back against involving her, but I was certain: this couldn’t work without her. I still believe that, after everything that happened.

  “I wanted to talk to you about my crew,” he told her. He touched the device hanging from his ear and an AR window opened in front of her, displaying a series of personnel dossiers.

  She reached up and touched the one on top. Photographs and service records blossomed all around her. HAWKINS, WINDSOR. MAJOR, USSF, THIRTIETH OPERATIONS WING, she read.

  “A military man,” Jansen said, a faint smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “So if the aliens come swarming out of 2I, ray guns blazing, you have somebody to fight them for you.”

  McAllister grinned. “Hardly. Orion’s mission is to make contact, not start a war. There are no weapons on the spacecraft—that might send the wrong message. Though if it turns out the aliens do mean us harm, we’ll be ready with a response. Hawkins’s job is to serve as a military analyst. If you look here, you’ll see his credentials are exemplary. He was handpicked by the Pentagon.”

  “You didn’t choose him yourself?” Jansen asked, surprised.

  “One of the conditions Congress attached to my budget was that I had to work directly with the military. Paranoia runs deep. I approve of their choice, though. Hawkins has over a thousand hours working in space, flying an X-37d.”

  Jansen shot him a look. “You mean that drone spaceplane of theirs?” She knew a little about it. A robot spaceship that looked like a miniature space shuttle with no windows. Supposedly they used it to kill enemy satellites. She didn’t know for sure—all its missions were classified. “He flies that thing? It’s a lot different flying a spaceship when you’re in it, not sitting in a bunker in Nevada playing with a joystick.”

  “Utah, actually, and it’s all done with haptic response VR these days. Don’t look at me like that. He’s supposed to be an extraordinarily competent man.”

  “Sure,” Jansen said dryly. She swiped Hawkins’s file away and went to the next one. RAO, PARMINDER, MD, PhD, she read. The picture showed a smiling young woman with short black hair. “Doctorates in medicine and astrobiology. She must like to keep busy. Looks like she’s about eighteen.”

  “Everyone under forty looks like that these days,” McAllister said. “Better medicine, better nutrition… Meanwhile, those of us who grew up in the twentieth century all look like desiccated mummies.” He smiled to show he was making a joke. He made them so rarely you needed a signal to know it was happening. “Rao works here at JPL, with me. I’ve known her for years, and she has my complete confidence.”

  Jansen swiped the file away—then stopped in surprise when she saw who was next.

  STEVENS, SUNNY, PhD

  “You met him today,” McAllister pointed out. “What did you think?”

  Jansen had spent half her life training to be an astronaut. She knew the kind of person who was right for the job, and who would wash out early. She’d seen it happen again and again. Stevens wasn’t the type to make it.

  She gave McAllister a dubious look.

  Roy shrugged. “He’s brilliant. No, really. No one else even thought to look at 2I, back when it was just one more bright dot in the sky. We might have missed this thing—right up until it parked itself on our doorstep. And he’s studied it for more than a year now.”

  She supposed that counted for something. Still.

  McAllister shrugged. “When Stevens came to me originally, bringing his data from KSpace, he had conditions. He wanted a job. Specifically, he wanted to be an astronaut. He said he’s wanted to be one since he was five.”

  “Like every other kid in America,” Jansen pointed out. Except that wasn’t true anymore, was it? Now they all wanted to be stream celebrities. “Wait. You’re saying—he bargained for a seat on this ship?” That wasn’t how this was done. Jansen had spent years of her life qualifying for a shot at a mission. She had worked her ass off. This guy came in and just demanded it, and it was handed to him?

  “Without his data, there would be no mission.”

  “He’s blackmailing you. No, it’s extortion—or something,” Jansen said, irritated.

  “I’ve chosen to see it a different way. I get a world-class astrophysicist and the closest thing we have to an expert on alien spacecraft.” McAllister shrugged. “Sometimes you don’t get to choose your battles in this life. Sometimes you take what’s handed to you.”

  “I think I understand now,” she said, “why you brought me here. You’ve got a crew with no real experience. For all their degrees and qualifications, not one of them can be trusted with a spacecraft.”

  “We chose the best people in America for the job,” McAllister said. “Sadly, these days—we didn’t have a class of astronauts to pick from.”

  “So you want me to train these people, right? Teach them how to be astronauts? We don’t have much time.”

  “Four months.”

  Jansen shook her head. Astronaut training, back in her day, took two or three years—and that was just for the basics. After that you might spend another year learning about your specific mission. She’d spe
nt eighteen months simply learning how to walk on Mars. To get people ready to work and survive in deep space? Four months was ludicrous. They might as well go untrained. “I’ll do what I can, but… Wow. This is a recipe for disaster, and you know it, Roy. You need a team to go talk to aliens—and this is all you could come up with?”

  McAllister sighed. She saw, suddenly, what a strain he was under. How hard he’d worked on this. “There are things I just don’t have. I don’t have time for more training. I don’t have the ability to spend months looking for the right people—I need to go with people I have in front of me right now. And I don’t have astronauts, not anymore. Which brings me to this. I need someone on Orion 7 who can actually fly it. I don’t want you as a trainer, Sally. I want you in the fourth seat. As mission commander.”

  Her whole body turned to stone. There was no other way to describe it. She couldn’t move. Her lungs seized up and she couldn’t breathe.

  For twenty-one years she’d lived with what happened to Orion 6. With the fact that she had personally, with her own hands, killed Blaine Wilson. It didn’t matter why she’d done it. It had never mattered why. It had meant the end of her time as an astronaut. It had meant she would never go to Mars. It had meant she would never go to space again—the thing she had loved more than anything in her life.

  And now. Just like that. He wanted her back.

  What he was asking of her—

  How could he ask this of her?

  Dear God, she wanted to punch him in the jaw. She wanted to grab him and pull him close and sob into the lapels of his jacket. Damn it, this wasn’t fair.

  It wasn’t fair at all.

  “I know it’s a big ask.”

  She snorted in surprise. Talk about understatement.

  “If there was anyone else…”

  “Julia Obrador. Or Ali Dinwari,” she suggested. “They were on Orion 6. They have the skills you need, and the training.”

  “Neither of them ever served as MC on a mission. Besides which—Ali died about four years ago. He was run down by an autonomous car in San Francisco. As for Julia, she’s living in Mexico, making high-end pottery. She has three kids and a husband.”