The Life Below

by Alexandra Monir

  The robot pauses and swivels his head to face us. That’s when I see the object in his arms: a heavy steel club, aimed straight at my radio receiver.

  Naomi drops my hand and takes off running. I race after her, the others hot on our heels as we surround Cyb, blocking him from the radio just as he takes the first swing. The club bashes my shoulder instead, and I yelp as a searing pain burns through my arm. I can barely see straight, but I force my body to remain upright, shielding both Naomi and my comm system from this AI turned violent. And then Jian lunges forward, snatching the club from Cyb’s grasp in one impressively quick move. We each grab one of the robot’s arms, pinning him against the wall.

  “It was you.” Naomi stares at the robot with a cold fury. “You destroyed our antenna and cut us off from Earth. Why?”

  “You were supposed to be our pilot,” Jian spits at Cyb. “How could you, what possessed you, to sabotage the entire mission and our crew like that?”

  “It wasn’t sabotage,” Cyb says calmly. “I was following orders.”

  “What are you talking about? Whose orders?”

  Jian loosens his grip on Cyb and that’s when the robot reaches behind his back—and suddenly his ice-blue lenses snap shut. The steady hum of his machinery cuts to silence. And then the platinum and steel exoskeleton tumbles to the floor, pieces breaking apart in a pile of metal. Minka’s shriek of horror echoes through the chamber, a look of revulsion on her face as she stares down at the fallen AI.

  “What just happened?”

  “He decommissioned himself,” Naomi says in disbelief. “He’s . . . gone.”

  Part Three

  Europa

  Twenty-Three

  NAOMI

  I WATCH THROUGH THE WINDOW, HOLDING MY BREATH, AS LEO carries Cyb’s remains to the airlock. Even with an EVA suit covering every inch of his skin and a helmet pumping a steady stream of oxygen to his lungs, I still feel a wave of terror as Leo opens the outer hatch. If anything goes wrong—if there’s the slightest tear in his suit and he gets exposed to the outside, or if he slips too close to the ledge—then I could lose him as quickly as if he’d never been here at all.

  Leo lifts his arms, and the broken pieces of Cyb fly out of his hands and through the open door, reducing Earth’s leading artificial intelligence to space junk. It hits me that this marks the third seismic shift in our mission in less than twenty-four hours. From Dev’s death to Leo’s arrival and Cyb’s self-destruction, we have more changes to adjust to on this one flight than most people deal with in a lifetime.

  Leo climbs back through the inner hatch and emerges on my side of the window looking just like the boy I first met at space camp. He’s wearing one of his old training uniforms underneath the EVA suit—khakis with a deep blue ISTC crewneck the same color as his eyes. It’s like staring straight at the memory I’ve been holding in my mind all this time. I reach for his hand, needing to reassure myself with his touch that this is still, against all odds, real.

  We float side by side to the WagnerOne command module, where Jian, Sydney, Minka, and Beckett are crowded around Leo’s salvaged radio transceiver. Jian’s head snaps up at the sound of our return.

  “It’s not working—the radio or the internet,” he says, agitated.

  My stomach seizes, but Leo is calm as he moves up to the cockpit’s digital screen.

  “It’s secured with eye-recognition tech,” he explains, floating up close to a red sensor. The sensor turns green and the tablet flashes to life, the radio beside it crackling with promise. My heartbeat speeds up.

  “It’s ready.” Leo glances at me. “Who wants to record the first message for Houston?”

  “I’ll do it,” I answer quickly. “Since I’m communications specialist, I mean. They’ll be expecting to hear from me.”

  Of course that’s only a small part of why I volunteered. I need to be the one to explain Leo’s presence here. I’m expecting an argument from Beckett as usual, but this time he doesn’t object. And then, as I enter the call letters for Houston while mentally planning out what I’m going to say, it hits me why no one else volunteered for this task. As relieved as the world back home will be to learn the five of us are alive—nothing can make up for the fact that Dev isn’t. And I’m the one who has to break the news.

  “Houston, this is Naomi Ardalan of the Pontus. We are back on air and online, thanks to another spacecraft from Earth showing up to help us just in time. It’s the late Dr. Greta Wagner’s solo ship, commanded by my—by our old friend Leonardo Danieli.” I glance at Leo with a smile, imagining the explosive reaction that bit of news will elicit.

  “The systems on their ship are invaluable to our mission going forward, and we’re grateful to have Leo joining us on the journey to Europa. I will reconfigure our internet to use the WagnerOne ship as a communications relay, so that we can once again log on directly from the Pontus. So that’s . . . that’s the good news.”

  I hesitate. I want to end it right there, to give Earth a reason to celebrate for a change instead of mourning. But I can’t. My voice shakes as I recount the hostile living thing aboard the Mars supply ship that killed the Athena crew years before killing our own Dev Khanna today.

  “Please let his country know that he was—he was so loved,” I whisper, fighting back another wave of tears. I clear my throat, forcing myself to stay calm. “Since the Athena’s stores of supplies were all contaminated, we’re forced to make do with the food that’s onboard the Pontus. We’ll begin using the solar greenhouse to grow nutrients today, and we await further instructions from Houston on how to solve this shortage.” I take a deep breath. “And one more thing. If you’re looking for Cyb’s signal, you won’t find it. He’s gone, after we discovered he is the one who cut us off from Earth in the first place. He said he was acting on orders—and we would all like to know whose.”

  I look back at my crewmates, and I can tell we’re all thinking the same thing. After what we’ve seen in the last twenty-four hours, how are we supposed to ever trust anything Dr. Takumi or the general says?

  “How long until they receive it?” Minka asks the second I’m done recording.

  I glance at the map on-screen. “Based on our current distance from Earth, it’ll take about ten minutes for the message to reach them, and then another ten for their reply to get here.”

  “Good,” Leo says, “because I have something to show you in the meantime.”

  He moves back up to the screen, tapping and swiping until the entire window shield lights up with a digital rendering of Europa. As the moon’s red ridges flicker through the screen, Leo traces them with his finger and shows us how to read the ridges as a map.

  “Right now, your mission trajectory has the Pontus landing at Thera Macula.” Leo points to the corresponding location on-screen. “But if we follow Dr. Wagner’s primer for reading Europa’s surface as a map to extraterrestrial life, we can see that Thera Macula is a dangerously active region. In fact, if you look closely enough, it looks like a . . .”

  “A face,” I finish his sentence, staring. “It almost looks like the face of some kind of . . . beast.”

  “Right. But then, if you look over here . . .” His hand moves to another region on the map, one that stands out from the rest, with its unusually bright shade of white and its smooth, flat surface.

  “If we follow this band of parallel white ridges to the south, in the area known as Agenor Linea, we don’t see any of the red signatures that correspond with alien activity. We also have a saltwater ocean easily accessible to Agenor Linea—which is another reason Dr. Wagner calls this the Habitable Zone.”

  “The place where we could coexist!” My heart leaps. It’s the equation I’ve been trying to solve all this time—and there’s something poetic about my idol being the one to solve it.

  “You’re not suggesting we completely alter our ship’s landing spot based on one woman’s wild theory, are you?” Beckett scoffs, back to his usual form.

  “She’s not
one woman,” I shoot back. “This is coming from the world’s leading scientific mind, someone who actually built a spacecraft for Leo and went to the greatest lengths imaginable to help us. What good reason do we have not to trust her over the same people who led us into that horror show on the supply ship?”

  “Well, I can’t argue that,” Jian acknowledges before glancing up at the countdown clock on the overhead flight mapping screen. He takes a sharp breath. “But if we don’t perform this gravity slingshot in the next fifteen minutes, we won’t have anywhere to land. Naomi, we need you to check the numbers. Let’s go.”

  “Wait a second!” Minka calls. “What about the reply from Houston?”

  “You guys will have to answer it,” I tell her, even as the thought of Beckett getting to speak for us makes my stomach queasy. I can only hope Sydney and Minka will do most of the talking.

  “C’mon.” I grab Leo’s hand, and it’s like we’re floating in fast-forward as the three of us race through the hatches and back to the Pontus command module. It’s markedly different now, with Tera the only robot on duty, and Jian sliding into Cyb’s pilot’s seat.

  “Naomi, the numbers,” he presses.

  I hurry to the nearest touch screen, my fingers flying on autopilot as I work through the Kepler equation and the universal variable formulation to determine the new, accurate distance between our geographical coordinates and Europa’s, with the WagnerOne’s added mass. I work as fast as I can to fill in the correct set of numbers, and five minutes later, Jian is plugging my results into our flight trajectory.

  “Okay, you both need to strap into launch seats,” he instructs us. “We’re about to get hit with an influx of speed.”

  Our combined ship, the Pontus and WagnerOne capsules joined together, starts spinning, closer and closer to Mars—so close that as I stare out the window, it looks as if our entire ship is about to disappear into the red sphere. That’s when Jian fires the rockets, kicking the ship’s velocity even higher as the Pontus turns, entering the path to Jupiter with a massive gravitational push behind us.

  And we are on our way.

  As the ship hurtles forward on autopilot and the rest of the crew attempts to sleep off the events of the past twenty-four hours, I finally have the alone time with Leo that I’ve been dreaming of for months—a dream I never thought could actually come true. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience as I take his hand, leading him to my room. I make him wait on the bed with his eyes closed while I shower first, the two of us laughing over the sound of running water. I slip into fresh pajama pants and a tank top, and then I lift his hands from his eyes.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” he whispers. He takes my face in his hands, gazing at me with an expression that floods my cheeks with color, my body with warmth.

  “Is this real?” I whisper back, only half joking. As much as I’m aching to fall asleep in his arms, I’m also afraid of what will happen when I wake up. “Will you still be here in the morning?”

  He rests his forehead against mine, our lips close enough to touch, and I can feel his curving into a smile.

  “I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the universe.”

  As our lips meet, it’s like fireworks are exploding in my chest. He wraps his arms around me, and I curl my body into his, savoring the feel of his skin on mine.

  And I can’t believe I almost went a lifetime without this.

  We wake up hours before everyone else, too thrilled by the nearness of each other to sleep, talking without pause as we catch up on the myriad of things we missed in these months apart. After Leo finishes filling me in on life on Earth post–space camp, I lay my head against his chest and ask him about Dr. Wagner. It’s still hard for me to fathom that she’s gone—that Earth is missing this longtime hero of mine.

  “What was she like? I mean, really like, behind the scenes? She always seemed so formal to me, even in her own biography.”

  “She was that way with me, too,” Leo says. “And she could be tough, all business—the kind of person you would never want to cross. But I saw another, private side of her, too. I saw someone as influenced by love and loss as we are.” He’s quiet for a moment. “No one would describe Greta Wagner as particularly warm, but she was thinking of others in everything that she did. It wasn’t about the glory of success with her. She truly wanted to help the Final Six, and I think she saw it as her last purpose.”

  I smile up at him, moved by his words.

  “She picked the right person to help her fulfill it.”

  “Something else I’ve been meaning to tell you.” Leo shifts onto his side, facing me. “There was one night when I heard what I thought was her playing piano, and it was so surprisingly good that I just had to go upstairs and see if it was really her. So I did, and it turned out to be some automated piano, with the notes playing by themselves—and with every note that played, a different letter or symbol or image flashed on the screen above it. And one of those was . . . my face.” Leo shakes his head at the memory. “The way Greta was moving around from the piano to the screen—it was like she was orchestrating the whole thing.”

  I sit up in bed, staring at him.

  “I told you about the signal we received from the Mars supply ship, didn’t I?”

  “No.” He gives me a quizzical look. “What does that have to do with—”

  “It came through in musical code,” I tell him. “A musical cryptogram—one of the few coded languages I didn’t already speak. Minka helped me crack that one.”

  Leo’s eyes widen.

  “It did seem like she was writing some kind of coded message. I just didn’t know there actually was an existing code.”

  “Do you remember what any of the symbols were, or looked like?” I reach across him for the old-school notepad and pen I keep on my bedside shelf, and hand them to him.

  “I can’t remember specific letter or number combinations, but I do remember this.”

  I peer over his shoulder, and my breath catches when I see what he’s sketching.

  A double helix.

  “She was . . . analyzing your DNA,” I say, my heart beginning to race. “The question is . . . why?”

  Twenty-Four

  LEO

  WALKING INTO MY FIRST OFFICIAL DAY WITH THE PONTUS crew, I’m a mix of adrenaline and nerves. The larger part of me is itching to dive headfirst into the mission, to learn everything there is to know about life on the Pontus and fold myself into the fabric here—become one of them. But a nagging voice reminds me that I wasn’t wanted here, that I would be dead if Naomi hadn’t used her own leverage to keep me on the ship. My stomach knots up at the thought of facing the other four, and having to prove myself every day to a crew that wishes Dev were standing in my place.

  This was never going to be fun and games, I remind myself, as I follow Naomi down to the dining room. I don’t need any of these people to be my friend—I just need to focus on the task at hand, my own personal mission for Greta that’s wrapped up in theirs.

  We arrive to find the dining room empty, and Naomi glances down at her wristband. A message flashes on the screen, and she takes a sharp breath.

  “They’re in the Communications Bay—with an update from Houston.”

  My throat turns dry. Looking at Naomi, I can tell she’s as nervous as I feel. The ISTC technically still has control over the Pontus . . . so how they react to my arrival could impact everything.

  She grips my hand, and together we run to the elevator pod. As soon as the elevator doors open onto the first floor, I hear the voice—and my whole body stiffens.

  “. . . not to be trusted, and your mission cannot afford another mistake.”

  Dr. Takumi’s voice booms through the computer speakers, his words dovetailing with our entrance. Sydney, Jian, Beckett, and Minka all turn to face us, and I flush uncomfortably as their eyes linger on me. I know what they’re thinking. I’m the next mistake.

  “So what BS is he spinning today?” Naomi says, cros
sing the room to the computer monitor. Takumi and Sokolov fill the frame, sitting together in one of the NASA offices with matching expressions of concern.

  “Good morning, astronauts,” Dr. Takumi begins. “It was the relief heard around the world when your message came through. We are thrilled and thankful beyond words to finally hear from you, and know that the five of you are safe. At the same time, our hearts break over the loss of Dev Khanna.”

  Naomi reaches for Sydney’s hand, and my heart twists at the sight of her face—hardening into something different from the Sydney I remembered.

  “You can be sure that his life and his sacrifice will be remembered and honored across the Earth, with memorial ceremonies planned in both India and the United States,” General Sokolov adds. “If you’d like to write a eulogy of your own, one of us would be glad to read it at the services.”

  “We want to commend the five of you for continuing to perform your mission duties and keeping your cool in the midst of the unfathomable circumstances thrown your way,” Dr. Takumi says. “Your actions and the character you’ve shown have proven why you were selected for this mission. In the old days of NASA, they used to describe the chosen astronauts as having ‘the right stuff.’ That certainly applies to you five, and Dev. It’s in your DNA.”

  I shift awkwardly in place. Why do I have a feeling this is about to lead into an unflattering assessment of me?

  “Which brings us to Leonardo Danieli.” Right on cue. “I don’t doubt that his . . . intentions are in the right place. But the scientist who sent him here was a woman in decline, whose mental state severely impaired her judgment and brain functioning—”

  My head snaps up.

  “That’s a lie,” I tell the others, my voice shaking with fury. “Greta’s mind was as sharp as ever, and her knowledge was so powerful that he and the general wanted her dead. And now they’re just trying to discredit her—”

  Minka shushes me loudly.

  “Listen to the rest.”