Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  Jesse looked at his untidy bed, at the draped pashminas he had used instead of curtains, the glittering dream catchers, the bamboo wind chimes that only ever sang in the morning when he leapt to his feet or when someone slammed the door. He decided, then, that if he was going to leave, he would take nothing with him.

  ELIOT

  2 P.M.

  AFTER COMMANDER BOVARIN DISMISSED them from the kitchen, Eliot headed down to the lower deck to pack up the spacesuits the Beta would take with them on the shuttle back to Earth. Their spacewalk that morning seemed like a terribly long time ago, now.

  Taking apart his spacesuit, Eliot considered, as he often did, what a marvel of engineering it was; eleven layers of material, ortho-fabric, aluminized mylar, neoprene and stainless steel. If Eliot alone possessed all the skills and equipment, it would take him around two and a half years to build himself one, and would cost him about £9 million.

  The ripped and bloodied shell of Commander Sheppard’s old suit was slumped in the corridor outside, and it hurt Eliot to see it.

  In the same way, during the spacewalk that morning, he had seen the damage that the service module had sustained with his own eyes. It had been torn like a limb, shot right through the middle by some speeding object, wires and severed piping spilling out like organs, condensation frozen in uneven bubbles of ice all over the blackened metal. The sight of it almost induced a sympathetic ache inside Eliot, and he guessed that Igor had felt the same way too.

  The Damocles wasn’t just a machine; it was a work of art. When Eliot looked at diagrams of its engine he saw years of love, the dedication of dozens of minds, the loyal work of a thousand hands.

  Igor had told them that they would have to return home, but as soon as Astrid had suggested his plan to the crew – dismantling the service module on the escape shuttle and rewiring it to the Damocles – Eliot was imagining it. How it could be done, which valves to switch, which wires to reroute.

  It came as no surprise to him when, almost thirty minutes into his work, he heard someone coming down the hatch, stepping carefully. It was Astrid, still dressed in her flight suit, holding two of Igor’s manuals and a box of tools. When she spotted him she looked up and down the corridor just to make sure they were alone.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’ She glanced over her shoulder again and then looked at the work that Eliot was doing. ‘Is Igor helping you with that?’

  ‘I don’t need his help,’ Eliot said. ‘He’s on the control deck.’

  ‘Good. I need to get into the escape shuttle.’

  ‘Right now?’ Eliot put down the helmet he was holding.

  ‘This can’t have been the plan, can it?’ Astrid asked. She looked more like Juno in the half-light. Her eyes were wet, her lashes pearly and sticking together. ‘For us to fail like this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eliot said.

  ‘I feel like nothing good can ever happen to me if I let this dream go,’ Astrid said. ‘I don’t want to die like Tessa Dalton, just looking and looking at the stars. I dream about Terra-Two so vividly that this ship sometimes feels like the dream. I can feel the rain, on my face.’ She closed her eyes and Eliot thought he could see it too, the salty drops from Terran clouds rolling down her cheeks. ‘I’d rather die than let go.’

  Eliot felt an inkling of it too. But for him it was about the machines. Inside Eliot, there were robots longing to be built, and the only thing more tragic than never using them was never building them. He thought about Igor’s machines, about the most spectacular one of all: the gravity-assist drive. Igor had sacrificed his life for his work, and if they left now it would amount to nothing. Eliot wanted to see how it felt to slingshot around the resplendent rings of Saturn, to soar through interstellar space.

  ‘My whole life has been about this mission.’ Astrid’s voice was low.

  ‘Mine too,’ he said.

  ‘So,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘will you help me to save it? I need to get into the escape shuttle, but Igor has locked me out. I need an engineer-authorized ID badge to get in. And you’re the only one who can help me.’ With his help, the plan could work. They didn’t have to leave Igor, Cai, Sheppard and Fae to die on the Damocles.

  ‘Don’t you want to see what it’s like?’ she asked. ‘If it was all worth it?’

  Eliot said yes because, even after all that had happened, even after watching the crew on Orlando disappear, even after losing the girl he loved, this remained. He needed to know.

  JESSE

  4 P.M.

  BEFORE THE LIGHTS CAME back on, Jesse gathered with the rest of the Beta in the crew module to say goodbye to the seniors. Poppy was sobbing quietly, wiping tears away with the sleeve of the old Dalton leavers’ hoodie that she wore on top of her flight suit. It said ‘Class of ’12’ on the back, with the names of the school’s ‘Final Fifty’ printed inside the numbers. She and Juno were searching under cushions and chairs in the crew module as Juno ticked items off an inventory. As they’d had so little time to pack, the room looked as if it had been in the path of a hurricane, blankets slipping off sofas, wires hanging from open equipment panels and trailing out of drawers. Chess pieces toppled, three knights rolled under the spine of a book, Harry Potter in Korean, a rook mired in a puddle of baked beans.

  Fae emerged from the infirmary still wearing what she had been yesterday, hair falling loose of her bun. When Jesse asked how their commander was doing she simply shook her head sadly.

  Cai and Igor were helping Harry gather the equipment needed for their flight, piling it up near the hatch. Juno looked up from her clipboard and said, ‘Astrid should be here by now.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Astrid,’ Poppy said, her arms full of books. ‘Not for the past few hours. Or Eliot, for that matter.’

  Fae hissed, and glanced at her watch. ‘Now is not the time for them to be wandering around.’

  ‘I’ll look for them in the engine room,’ Igor said, heading back in that direction.

  ‘And I’ll do a quick sweep of the greenhouse,’ Cai said.

  They stood in silence for a moment. Everyone absorbed by their own thoughts of the trip ahead. The small cabin in which they would live for six months was nothing compared to the spacious beauty of the Damocles. It broke Jesse’s heart to say goodbye, but as the hours approached a shameful, secret excitement began to dawn inside him as he contemplated Earth, his sister and his parents. Returning a kind of hero.

  Fae broke the silence. ‘So, as there are no members of the senior crew on this last mission home, Harrison Bellgrave is now acting commander.’

  Harry looked up, his watery eyes strangely vacant. ‘Me . . .’ He fingered the badge on his lapel, the bronze pin that he’d fought for years to wear. Then he glanced up at Jesse. ‘You know what, Jesse Solloway? I don’t know how or where you learned to fly like that but . . . it was the greatest thing I’ve seen in all my years of Command School. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.’ Tearing off his badge, he turned to the others and said, ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Commander Sheppard . . . and Jesse.’

  Then he did something Jesse had never imagined he would: he handed over the badge. It glinted in the low light, cold to the touch. ‘I know it’s not worth much, now that we’re going back to Earth, but . . .’

  Jesse didn’t know what to say.

  ‘You did save us,’ Poppy said, and she flung her arm over his shoulder and kissed his cheek with a loud smack of her lips.

  ‘I’m proud of you,’ Fae said, putting her hand on Jesse’s shoulder.

  ‘And glad you came with us,’ Juno said, her eyes warm. She embraced him too, and Jesse’s chest swelled with gladness.

  ‘All of us are,’ Harry said.

  It was all he’d ever wanted. Their acceptance, their warm embrace, and it had come too late.

  As Fae reached for Jesse the main lights came on. For a moment they appeared so bright they bleached his vision.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Harry rubbe
d his eyes as if he’d just woken up.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Poppy said with a gasp. In the same moment, the vents along the sides of the room activated, and air whooshed out like smoke. ‘Maybe everything is fixed?’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Fae said, running over to examine a booting-up monitor on one of the walls.

  Juno clenched her fists. She already knew the answer.

  ‘It’s Astrid.’

  POPPY

  4.30 P.M.

  POPPY HAD ALWAYS HATED arguments in her own house. One morning at breakfast her mother had told her boyfriend at the time that she would be home late, words that – from their facial expressions – clearly sent shockwaves down through some unseen well of domestic resentment. He’d reached across the table and slapped her mother with such a hard whack that blood sprang from her nose, and she looked around, her eyes whirling in surprise. Poppy had stared between the adults in horror and, even afterwards, when they were making tea for each other and kissing, something of that fear remained. Buried deep in Poppy and transformed into a sticky dread of conflict, a need to please, to plan the parties, to keep everyone smiling.

  Which was why she would have said anything to quell the argument that ensued when Astrid and Eliot emerged from the lower deck. Igor had found them in the shuttle. They’d disabled it and, against orders, enacted their plan. Taking its life support apart and attaching it to the Damocles.

  The entire crew were swept into a flurry of action after they realized what had happened. Poppy ran up to the communications deck, checking different channels to see if anyone had replied to their distress signal. Over the headset she could hear nothing but a vicious hiss of static, although a data file with a Russian title was loading on one of the monitor screens. Hope flushed through her. Was rescue coming?

  As she reach over to grab the mouse, Harry burst into the room and shouted at Astrid, who was seated on the control deck opposite, transcribing figures from one of the screens.

  Jesse ran in behind him, his face red, and grabbed Harry’s wrist as if to hold him back. Harry twisted free. ‘You realize,’ he shouted, ‘that it’s an offence to disobey direct orders from your acting commander.’ Igor and Eliot entered the room behind him. ‘Igor said that you weren’t to touch the service module. We were ordered to leave. To return home.’

  ‘I know—’ Eliot stepped between Harry and Astrid, his hands up as if to defend her. ‘But we just couldn’t.’

  ‘Couldn’t obey orders,’ Fae said, her face pale. ‘Back on Earth, this would be considered mutiny.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Harry. ‘You’d be court-martialled.’

  Astrid stood up. Poppy could tell that she was stunned by their reaction. It was the exact opposite of the one she had been expecting. ‘But we saved you all.’

  ‘Saved us?’ Juno’s voice was simmering with rage. They had all entered the room now, everyone but Commander Sheppard, who was still unconscious in the infirmary. It felt strange to gather like this without him.

  ‘Do you realize what was about to happen?’ Astrid asked. ‘Do you realize what we were about to do? Leave this ship. Leave Igor – I mean, Commander Bovarin – and Fae and Cai and Sheppard to die. Go home. Only it’s not home anymore. If we stepped out now, do you think we’d have a chance to go to Terra-Two ever again? Do you think they’d choose us? All those years of work, everything we did would be wasted. Our whole lives . . .’

  ‘It will be wasted when we die here!’ Harry shouted.

  ‘Astrid was just doing what she thought was right,’ Jesse said.

  ‘No.’ Juno slammed her fist against a desk. ‘Astrid was just doing what she wanted. Being selfish and reckless.’

  Astrid let out a cry of indignation, and stepped closer to her sister. ‘Do you even want to be here, Juno?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘On this ship. On this mission. Did you ever really want to go to Terra-Two or did you just want to go because I wanted to go? Because you’ve never been able to stand being alone. You slept in my bed until you were twelve.’ The expression of betrayal on Juno’s face made Poppy ache. ‘Maybe this is what this is about,’ Astrid continued. ‘You went to Dalton because you need me. Not because you have a higher purpose.’

  ‘Oh, and you do?’

  ‘There’s a whole planet waiting for us, Juno. This is our only chance to go there. And you’re all too cowardly to fight for it.’

  ‘Die for it, you mean,’ said Juno. ‘Do you realize what you’ve chosen for us, now? The Russian expedition still haven’t responded to our message. We only have a few weeks of oxygen left. They might not come in time. Or at all.’

  ‘They will.’

  ‘You better hope so. Because if you’re wrong, it’ll be your fault. You’ll have all of our deaths on your hands.’

  ‘We have three months of oxygen,’ Eliot reminded them.

  ‘No, we don’t have three months,’ Fae said. She sank down in the chair next to Poppy and put her fingers between her eyebrows as if she was nursing a headache. ‘The volume of this ship is larger than the volume of the shuttle. So the partial pressure of oxygen will already be a lot lower. We have half that time or less, because once the oxygen is lower than 50 per cent of normal levels, we’ll start to die.’ Her words made dread and bile creep up in Poppy’s throat.

  ‘Remember what we learned in Sunday school about the Israelites?’ Astrid said to her sister in a low voice, taking her face in her hands, willing her to recall it. ‘Who trekked for generations in the desert, or the Mayflower pilgrims who crossed an ocean in the winter to found a new country. History will remember us. This is the day our descendants will sing about and rejoice.’

  ‘The Mayflower pilgrims were religious nuts, and half of them died of scurvy, pneumonia or tuberculosis,’ Juno listed on her fingers. ‘And that land that they found—’

  ‘What happened to your faith, Juno? Did you think this would be easy?’

  ‘Can I be the first one to say,’ Harry interrupted, ‘that I have no plans to die here, or for this mission. Not now, or ever. And going back to Earth – going back home – would it really be so bad?’

  ‘This isn’t a holiday, Harry,’ Astrid said, letting go of Juno and narrowing her eyes in disgust. ‘It’s not some ski trip you can return from when the going gets tough.’

  ‘You made damned sure of that, didn’t you,’ Harry said, his voice low and deadly.

  ‘Please stop,’ Poppy pleaded and they all fell silent, bristling in the glacial light of Europa. Poppy’s head spun with confusion. She didn’t want to go back to Earth either, and the thought of leaving half of the crew to die on the ship had broken her heart.

  ‘I’m glad they did it,’ Jesse finally said. ‘I feel like an idiot for not helping. I can’t believe I thought I could leave Igor and Fae and Cai and Commander Sheppard to die here. Could you?’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Poppy said quietly. ‘Sitting on that shuttle a week from now knowing that our crewmates were suffocating to death.’ Fae put her head in her hands, and Cai looked as if the thought made him ill.

  ‘We’re the senior crew,’ Igor said. His voice was raspy, and he stopped a moment to cough into a handkerchief. ‘This—’ He coughed again. ‘T-this is a choice that we made to give you the best chance.’ Poppy noticed little petals of blood blooming on the cotton fabric in his fist.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Jesse said, turning to him. ‘But it wasn’t our choice.’

  ‘It wasn’t yours to make,’ Igor said, his teeth gritted with fury.

  ‘They’ve given up enough,’ Eliot said. ‘Igor gave up the rest of his life for this mission. Sheppard left his wife and baby behind. Fae clearly never wanted to be here in the first place.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Astrid said, her eyes pleading for understanding. She looked at Igor and then Fae and Cai. ‘Please understand, Commander Bovarin. I know we’re supposed to listen to orders. And I almost always do, but this time . . .’ she took a shaky breath.
‘This time there was too much to lose.’

  ‘I’ve heard enough of this. I say we punish her,’ Harry said, crossing his arms.

  ‘How?’ asked Jesse, looking to Igor, then back to Harry, whose fists were still clenched. ‘Throw her overboard like pirates?’

  ‘On Mars, the punishment for a serious offence, up to and including mutiny, is confinement,’ Juno said.

  Jesse snorted in disbelief. ‘You mean lock her up?’

  ‘That’s exactly what she means,’ Harry said, stabbing a finger at Eliot and Astrid. ‘Both of them.’

  ‘She’s your sister, and this isn’t a prison,’ Jesse said, then turned to Juno. ‘What happened to doing things differently?’

  Juno folded her arms. ‘We have to maintain the rule of law amongst ourselves. Otherwise, anything goes. She might be my sister, but we’re all brothers and sisters here and Astrid betrayed us.’

  ‘The rule of law.’ Jesse snorted. ‘Oh, this is about your plan to build a utopia by getting us all to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules you invented. Like that’s never happened in human history before.’

  ‘We have a chance to do it right this time,’ Juno said, although she looked a little wounded. ‘And I thought you believed in the Damocles Document. In making a better world?’

  ‘I believe in you. But, don’t you even realize what utopia means? It means – here’s a fun fact – it means “no place”. Somewhere that doesn’t exist. There is no place where humans stop being humans. We’re going to fight wherever we go, we’re going to argue. In the future, we’ll fuck our children up, and drill holes into the ground and spill oil in the sea. We’ll make mistakes.’