The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  Jansen understood what he meant by that. Julia had something to lose. This was going to be a dangerous mission, maybe the most dangerous NASA mission since the moon landings eighty years earlier. If Jansen died up there—who would miss her? Chuy and Esmee?

  “You have the qualifications I need. You know this job inside and out. I don’t have anyone else who fits that bill. Sally—we thought we were done. We thought we weren’t going to get any more crewed missions. Now this happens. We need you. I need you.”

  Blood surged through her head, making her cheeks burn. She felt as if her skull were tightening, crushing her brain.

  “I’m offering you a second chance. How many people get those, in life?”

  She let go of the breath trapped in her chest.

  She couldn’t say what she wanted to say. I killed Blaine Wilson. Those words wouldn’t come out of her mouth. She knew how Roy would respond anyway. He would say that she had saved three other lives in the process. That had always been his line. So instead she voiced the second-biggest objection she had to his proposal.

  “Roy. I’m fifty-six years old.”

  “And in better shape than any of them,” he said, gesturing at the files in front of her. “Plus there’s the fact that no one knows Orion better than you.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t… Look, it was bad enough last time. You picked me to be mission commander of Orion 6. A woman. The media had a field day with that. Even before we launched, my social media was just one big hate fest. After we scrubbed the mission, I had to delete every online account I had.”

  “I remember. I saw some of the posts about woman drivers,” McAllister said tightly.

  “Did you see the death threats?” she responded.

  Which hadn’t even been the worst of it. She didn’t want to tell him, even now, about the trolls who had told her in loving detail what they planned on doing to her. What they claimed she deserved.

  McAllister looked shocked, but he just shook his head. “I don’t care about those ignorant fools. And I don’t care if you’re a woman or a man, black or white—I don’t care how old you are. You’re still the best astronaut I ever trained.”

  Jansen rubbed at her face. “Roy! Roy, what the hell are you doing? What are you asking from me?”

  “I’m asking if you still have it, Sally. If you’re still the astronaut I picked to be the first human being to land on Mars. I think you are, but you know. If you say to me right now that you’re the wrong person for the job, well, OK. I’ll find someone else. Somewhere. Or you can say yes. You can say yes, and you can go back to space.”

  Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t control them.

  A second chance. A chance to redeem herself, to show she really was the astronaut he believed she was. Or a chance to screw up again and prove to everyone exactly what she was.

  “What’s your answer, Sally? I need it right now.”

  CLOSE APPROACH

  ROY MCALLISTER: Orion 7 launched on a beautifully clear day in September, atop an SLS Block 2 rocket out of pad SLC-6 at Vandenberg Air Force Base. For this launch I personally served as FC, flight controller, and CAPCOM, the only voice that the astronauts would hear from the ground. The launch was textbook. First- and second-stage separations went smoothly, and there were no problems with orbital insertion. We needed this one to be perfect. NASA had never had so much riding on a mission. No. Not just NASA. The human race.

  Watching the Earth from space was better than any VR stream Parminder Rao had ever experienced. There was always something changing: Cloud shadows drifting with perfect slowness over the Alps. Rivers and lakes catching the sun in sudden, blinding flashes of light. The glowing spiderwebs of cities on the night side.

  She was hovering in the cupola module, a little dome of polycarbonate windows mounted in a metal frame at the front of Orion 7. For the moment, while it was still pointed back at home, she was taking in one last view. She caught her breath as a meteor streaked by over Australia, an arrow-straight line of light that flared into nothingness as she watched.

  Beautiful, she thought.

  Then the view glitched, big blocks of pixels cascading across the surface of the planet, ruining it. Reminding her this wasn’t real.

  She reached up and touched the twin devices mounted on her cheekbones—two little circles of plastic. She’d been looking at an AR view of Earth, a telescopic view. When she shut down the overlay, she saw Earth as it really looked now. Just a bright-blue dot far, far behind them, the only thing breaking up a panorama of black. She couldn’t even see the stars. Thirty-three days since they’d launched. She’d thought she would get used to the emptiness, the endless stretch of nothing. She never had. Instead she had kept her eyes locked on that blue dot, the sole point of reference in the universe.

  Except—it wasn’t the only thing she could see. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized for the first time she could see another dot out there. Tiny, and very dim, a dull red that disappeared if she tried to focus on it.

  2I. Their destination.

  The aliens.

  She could see them with her naked eye. Excitement percolated through her as if her bloodstream had just been carbonated. She should tell the others. She turned around and pushed open the vinyl flap that separated the cupola from the HabLab, the main module of the spacecraft. The others would come running, she knew. While they’d made plenty of telescopic observations over the last month, this was a special moment, an important—

  Music burst over her as she stuck her head into the HabLab, the pounding rhythm of Chinese ultrapop, a whirling vortex of guitars and drum machines.

  BOOM BOOM BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA. BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA.

  “EVERYONE MUST DANCE NOW.”

  “Orion, this is Pasadena,” Roy McAllister called. “We’re hearing something over your acoustic telemetry feed. Everything OK up there?”

  It would take fifty-two seconds to get a reply. McAllister stood up from his seat and paced back and forth in front of his console. He had the big chair, but there were a dozen other people in the control room with him, all of them watching a massive bank of screens at the far end of the room. The biggest of those screens showed Orion 7’s question mark–shaped trajectory, its path to 2I following a broad curve that would let it match velocities with 2I as it plunged toward Earth. The ship was well into the descending node of the hook, now—only a week or so before it would arrive.

  He hadn’t been sleeping, the last few nights. He knew he wouldn’t be able to relax until they actually got to the alien starship. Of course, he was fooling himself if he thought he would be able to sleep then.

  There was so much riding on this mission. Whether Orion found friendly aliens up there or a weapon hell-bent on destruction, nothing was ever going to be the same.

  “DANCE DANCE DANCE.”

  “Pasadena, this is Orion,” Jansen said, making him flinch. He’d almost forgotten that he’d called for a status check. “Everything up here is A-OK. Stevens is just blowing off some steam.”

  BOOM BOOM BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA. BOOM BOOM.

  The entire HabLab was shaking to the beat.

  The largest module of Orion 7 was essentially a big balloon with two walls made of thick, reinforced vinyl. They were basically living inside a bouncy castle. The minimal furniture inside the HabLab—their sleepsacs, the little table where they took their meals, their screens and storage lockers and equipment—all of it was bolted to the soft walls in such a way that when they played music or screened a movie, everything vibrated with a droning hum.

  BOOM BOOM BOOM.

  Hawkins was on the treadmill, jogging to the beat. He scowled when he saw Rao enter the module, then rolled his eyes to indicate he wasn’t mad at her. He grasped the hand bar of the treadmill and squeezed until his knuckles turned white. His hands always scared her a bit. They were rough, gnarled, the knuckles twisted. Rao had been a doctor long enough to know what that meant. Hawkins must have spent his formative years bouncing from one fist
fight to another. From the way his nose was slightly off center she knew it must have been broken enough times that it wouldn’t set properly anymore. He’d never been anything but immaculately polite to her since she’d met him, but she never felt quite comfortable around him, either.

  She touched her devices and saw that he still had thirty-nine minutes left in his scheduled stretch on the machine. “Keep it up,” she called, shouting over the thud of the music. As the mission’s flight surgeon, she had to make sure they all got two hours a day on the torture device. Living in microgravity for a month could turn your bones to mush if you weren’t careful. “Pick up your pace and you might set a new record!” To encourage them all to stick to their exercise schedule, she’d created a log of how much virtual distance each of them covered during their daily run, then challenged them each to beat the others’ scores.

  The idea had been met with mixed degrees of enthusiasm.

  Hawkins just rolled his eyes again and frowned at the back of the module, the walled-off area where they slept and bathed. Sunny—she was supposed to call him Stevens, they were all going by their last names now—must be back there, she thought.

  “EVERYONE IS REQUIRED TO DANCE.”

  “Towel, Major?”

  Hawkins flinched as ARCS—their autonomous robotic crew support—approached him on tiny puffs of air. Rao knew he had never liked the robot, and she had to admit it creeped her out sometimes, too. It was made of nothing but plastic arms, three of them connected at a mutual shoulder. Each arm ended in a white hand that was entirely too human for good taste. The hands were modified versions of the prosthetics given to wounded soldiers, which explained why they had simulated fingernails and slightly raised ridges on the knuckles to resemble hair. It used one of its hands to grab and hold on to one of the upright supports of the treadmill. Another held out a white microfiber towel.

  Hawkins grabbed the towel and smeared it around his face and neck, soaking up his sweat before it could get loose and float around the module. “Do you happen to know,” he asked Rao—she could barely understand him over the music—“how loud music has to be before it damages the human ear?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” she asked. She actually did know—eighty-five decibels with prolonged exposure, or a hundred for even a short duration—but she assumed this was one of those times people asked a question so they could tell you the answer.

  “I’d say this qualifies,” he muttered.

  “If it keeps him sane,” Commander Jansen said from over their heads, “I’m all for it. Hawkins, nobody complains when it’s your pick for movie night and you only want to watch documentaries about World War II.”

  Rao glanced up and saw Jansen drifting along the ceiling of the cylindrical module like a fish bobbing along the roof of a tunnel. The mission commander was dismantling one of their oxygen generators, taking it apart piece by piece. As she removed and secured each component, she would stab the air with her index finger, probably making notations on a virtual clipboard Rao couldn’t see.

  If there had been a competition for who was the most fastidious and disciplined on board, Rao knew that Jansen would win every time. The woman never stopped working.

  Rao admired this and found it terrifying, in roughly even measures.

  BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA. EEK. EEK.

  Rao kicked off one yielding wall and grabbed the flap that partitioned off the dormitory section of the HabLab. Normally she would have cleared her throat or coughed to indicate she was coming in, but there was no way Stevens would hear her over the music, so she just shouldered her way through the flap and into the dim chamber beyond.

  This was Stevens’s scheduled sleep shift, but he was out of his sleepsac, floating in the middle of the tiny chamber. He was thrusting his arms back and forth and shaking his hips.

  At least he was getting some exercise.

  She started to reach out, to tap him on the shoulder. Then she jerked her hand away, not wanting to be presumptuous. He must have felt the air moving as she reached for him, though, because he spun around and gave her an incredibly serious look. For a moment he just hung there, slowly floating away from her. His eyes met hers and he raised one eyebrow.

  “YOU MUST DANCE.” EEK. EEK.

  Rao felt her cheeks grow hot. Stevens was still looking at her.

  “You heard the man,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Stevens grabbed her hand and spun her around in the air. She shrieked in surprise, then tried to cover the noise she’d made with a laugh. He put a hand on her hip and they were dancing. Rao looked back over her shoulder, making sure neither Hawkins nor Jansen could see them.

  EEK. EEK.

  “What the hell is that?” she heard Hawkins shout. Maybe he was trying to be heard over the music, but that was unnecessary—Jansen had switched off the sound system, and the only thing they could hear was the repetitive screech.

  EEK. EEK. EEK.

  “It’s the proximity alarm,” Jansen replied.

  “What the hell are they thinking?” McAllister demanded, pounding his console with one fist.

  No one in the control room bothered to answer him.

  Up on the big screen, Orion’s trajectory was identified as a blue curve. A second, orange curve had been projected up there as well. A curve that crossed the blue, which had triggered the alarm.

  It was KSpace. McAllister had known that the commercial spaceflight group had launched its own mission to 2I. He’d been following its progress closely—often with gritted teeth. It had been a close thing, but he had managed to get Orion off the ground a full week before the KSpace rocket. He had assumed, in his planning sessions, that NASA would have a week alone with 2I before the competition arrived.

  As he watched the orange curve intersect with the blue, he realized that wasn’t going to happen. “They’re going like a bat out of hell,” he said. He called out for his FDO, his flight dynamics officer. The woman looked up at him with wide eyes. He tried to remember her name, but he was too stressed out. “How are they moving that fast?”

  “It looks like they’ve got some kind of compressed plasma engine, low specific impulse, but they’ve been running it nonstop since they launched, building up velocity.” The FDO shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense—it’s an incredibly wasteful flight profile. They’ll need to burn even harder to brake when they arrive at 2I, to match velocities.”

  “Fonseca,” McAllister said, suddenly remembering her name. At his age you celebrated the small victories. “It makes perfect sense. It means they get there first.”

  “It’s like a shot across our bows,” Hawkins said.

  The four of them were inside a virtual reality environment, floating in empty space. The trajectories of the two ships swooped around them as Jansen zoomed in on the display.

  It was all over before she could even get the display up and running, of course. At the speeds the two ships were traveling, the KSpace ship had passed across their trajectory and was already well on its way back into deep space. “NASA says they were tracking them this whole time, but didn’t expect them to come within a thousand kilometers of our position,” she said. “They didn’t know what was happening until it was too late to give us a warning.”

  “How close did they get to us?” Rao asked.

  “About sixteen kilometers.” Jansen shook her head. They’d all had some training in orbital mechanics. At their current velocity, that kind of separation between spacecraft was dangerously close.

  “So they intentionally changed their course to buzz us.” Hawkins nodded significantly, as if the commercial spaceflight group had just declared war on him personally.

  “It’s part of the corporate culture over there,” Stevens pointed out. “KSpace never settles for second place.” He reached out and manipulated the display, extending it forward in time. The digits of a clock spooled upward as he extrapolated KSpace’s course. “Looks like they’ll arrive at least a day ahead of us.”

&
nbsp; Rao knew what that meant. It meant that the honor of true first contact—the first meeting between humans and an extraterrestrial species—was going to go to a private company. Not to America or the UN. Not to NASA.

  “Well, shit,” she said.

  PARMINDER RAO: I’d spent my whole adult career studying potential aliens, hypothetical aliens. I’d done experiments to see whether life was possible in the methane lakes of Titan, or in caves deep under the surface of Mars. None of it mattered anymore. I was going to meet real extraterrestrials, see them with my own eyes. The fact that KSpace was going to get there first was something we had to accept, but I’ll admit—it hurt our morale. We would just have to settle for being the second group of people ever to meet the aliens.*

  STAY/NO STAY

  LADELLE NOONAN, FLIGHT ACTIVITIES OFFICER: Much sooner than anyone would like, 2I was on target to reach Earth orbit. It had still failed to respond to any signal we could think to throw at it. We were concerned about having competition from KSpace—of course—but it didn’t change anything. Orion had a mission itinerary to stick to, a flight profile that couldn’t be changed. The work had to go on.

  “Everybody hold on. We’re going to have gravity again—just a little of it,” Jansen said, “and just for a second.” She grabbed a handrail mounted on the wall of the cupola.

  ARCS grasped the handrail right next to her with one of its robotic hands. “I am ready for acceleration, Commander Jansen,” it said.

  “Thrilled to hear it,” she said, and then she opened a screen to display Orion’s engine controls.

  Another week had passed—a week of bad freeze-dried food and minimal contact with Earth. No one was complaining now, however. They had finally arrived.

  The cupola was just big enough for the four of them to squeeze into at the same time. The air in the module got very thick and humid, but the polycarbonate windows were designed to resist condensation, so at least they didn’t fog it up with their breath.