The newly redesigned Wanderer-NX is the most advanced spacecraft in the KSpace fleet. It is partially reusable and meets all industry standards for safety and pilot comfort. Depending on its mission, the Wanderer can be launched atop a variety of boosters, including existing American, Russian, and European rockets.
“Confirmed, Pasadena,” Jansen said. She reached up and touched her devices, then turned around to look at the rest of the crew. For a long time she didn’t speak.
“Come on, Sally J,” Stevens said, drumming on the wall of the HabLab with one hand. He realized he was doing it and stopped. “McAllister said something. You were talking for a long time.”
“They went into 2I. They were supposed to come out more than twelve hours ago, but they never did,” Jansen said.
“It’s not normal to be that late on an EVA, is it?” Hawkins asked.
“No,” she replied.
“But it’s not—I mean, it’s not long enough that we can assume they’re dead, either,” Hawkins said.
“No.”
Stevens launched himself across the HabLab. Headed toward Jansen. “Just because they’re KSpace doesn’t mean they’re bad people,” he said, trying to look her in the eye. He was certain he knew what McAllister had said, and he couldn’t bear it. “Foster I don’t know. Taryn Holmes, I used to call him Terry, he and me worked on a SETI survey a couple years ago, we didn’t find anything, but he taught me how to surf. And Sandra—”
He stopped himself.
The portraits of the three KSpace crew members were up on one of the HabLab’s screens. Smiling, wearing orange KSpace hoodies. Looking excited to explore the universe. There had been a picture of Stevens in the same pose, in the same sweatshirt, hanging on the wall of an office in the Hive. Before he quit his job and ran away to join NASA.
“Sandra,” he said. In the picture she had cut her hair short. She had a mole on her left earlobe. So she’d never had that removed. She used to talk about it…
“What is it, Sunny?” Rao asked, putting a hand on his shoulder.
He glanced back at her, not wanting to say it. “She worked in market development, not my area, but we met at a party and for a little while we, you know. Dated. We—” He shook his head. “We’re still good friends.”
He expected Rao to pull her hand away, and maybe say, “Oh,” and look away from him, but she didn’t. She squeezed his shoulder and moved until she was floating right behind him. Close.
“We need to go after them,” he said. Stevens felt as if a boiler in his head were building up steam. He felt as if his eyes were bugging out of his head. “Jansen—if you don’t want to go over there, I will. I’ll go right now.”
“Hold on,” Jansen told him, calm as always. “McAllister had his own thoughts on this. Our original mission didn’t include us boarding 2I, at least not this early on. He was very clear about that.”
“God damn it! We have to save them!”
Jansen’s eyes snapped into focus, as if she’d just come out of virtual reality. She looked straight at him.
He flinched, a little. But he was certain he was in the right. “You can’t let them die. You can’t just—”
“Stop,” she said.
Stevens pushed off the side of the treadmill and moved away from her, getting as far from her as he could. He realized he’d been about to grab her. To shake her, he thought. Which would have been an idiot move.
“Just shut up a second,” she told him.
Jansen reached over and touched the nearest screen. Stevens could see what she was doing—she didn’t hide it. She had just switched off their radio. No one on Earth would hear what they said next.
“Yes,” she said. “Yeah. We’re going.”
SALLY JANSEN: I know what they’re going to say. I lost an astronaut once. He died on my watch. I had some kind of deep-seated need for redemption. I wasn’t thinking that at the time. All I knew was, the second I saw Wanderer, I felt something was wrong. I had to do something. Say I was compensating if you want. Say I was being paranoid, I don’t give a damn.
Stevens whooped and punched the inflatable wall hard enough it rippled. “Yes! Yes!”
“Wait,” Hawkins said. “Just—just wait!”
Jansen ignored him. She moved over to the nearest screen and started the warm-up sequence for the EVA suits.
She was the commander of this mission. She wasn’t interested in hearing his opinion of what she’d chosen to do. Apparently that didn’t sit well with him. He kicked his way across the HabLab and grabbed her arm.
“Are you insane?” he asked. “You can’t risk our lives just because—”
“Let go of me,” she told him.
He pulled back, lifting both hands as if in surrender. She could see from his face, though, that he hadn’t accepted anything.
Rao was still on the far side of the module, touching Stevens’s back. Now she moved away from him, just a little. She gave Stevens a complicated look before she spoke, but clearly she intended to be heard, too. “We have our orders,” she said. “NASA was pretty clear on this—we’re not supposed to touch 2I. We’re not supposed to get any closer to it than we are right now. Back on Earth they said that could be taken as aggression, and—”
“We’re not on Earth now,” Jansen said. “McAllister didn’t foresee this. He didn’t make any plans for astronauts going missing.”
Hawkins glared at him. “Am I the only one who’s going to say it? Seriously?” He let out a bitter laugh. “They’re dead!”
Stevens bristled. “Hey!”
Hawkins didn’t look at him. He was too busy trying to stare Jansen down. “They’re dead. They broke into an alien spaceship and the aliens killed them. How can you not see that?”
Jansen tried to ignore him, but he wasn’t done.
“It’s the only explanation that makes sense. But… this isn’t about Wanderer’s crew. Is it?” She tried to turn away, but he followed, getting right in her face. “It’s about you. You want to be a hero. You want to make up for past mistakes.”
Maybe, she thought. Maybe.
But it was still the right thing to do.
Jansen stared him down. “I’m the commander of this mission,” she said. Intending for that to be the last word. “Stevens,” she called.
“I won’t be a part of this,” Hawkins told her. “I refuse to help you get yourself, and maybe all of us, killed.”
“Fine,” she told him. “Then stay here while I go over. Stevens. Sunny!”
Stevens looked up with a start, as if he’d been lost in thought. “Yeah?”
“I’m going right now. You coming?”
Instead of answering her directly, he looked over at Rao. She was chewing on her lip, clearly agitated. Clearly scared. Her eyes searched Stevens’s for a moment. Then they cut away. Rao hugged herself and looked at nobody.
“Yeah,” Stevens said. “I’m in.”
YSABEL MELENDEZ, EXTRAVEHICULAR ACTIVITY OFFICER: So we had a brief loss of communications, which was bad enough. Then I noticed on my board that two of the EVA suits had been undocked from Orion. Which meant two of our people were out on an unscheduled EVA. That’s… that’s pretty much my worst nightmare, that my astronauts would just go out for a walk and not even tell me. I called Administrator McAllister, of course, but he was still on his way back from Atlanta. He told me to sit tight. I had no fucking clue what was going on. Sorry for the profanity.
The second he got back from Atlanta, Roy McAllister raced to retake his chair in the control room. All the screens in front of him displayed the same view—a camera feed from Orion’s exterior hull. It showed the backs of two space suits, slowly receding from view. The top half of every screen was just a blur of dark red, the north pole of 2I out of focus as the camera tracked the astronauts.
“Commander Jansen,” McAllister said, “this is Pasadena. Come in, Commander Jansen. Copy, please.”
Every eye in the control room was watching McAllister. The ground crew was hol
ding its collective breath. They all wanted to see what he was going to do next.
He was going to wait nearly a minute to get an answer. That was what he was going to do.
He knew what Sally was doing. Up to this point no one had specifically told her not to do it. Just like last time, when she’d gone off tether to investigate Wanderer. He’d allowed that to happen. A sin of omission. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
“Copy, Pasadena,” Jansen eventually said.
“Commander, your current EVA was not scheduled. You’re giving us all a good fright down here. I want you to turn around.” He decided not to wait for her reply before he said more. “We discussed this, Sally. We talked about you going over there, and I told you I thought it was a bad idea.”
He tried to keep his breathing calm and level as he waited for her reply.
“You didn’t specifically order me not to go,” she said.
McAllister sat down and rubbed at his forehead, trying to ward off the headache he knew was coming. “Well, I am now. Turn around, Sally. KSpace made it very clear they don’t want your help. You’re endangering Dr. Stevens by taking him out of the ship.”
That last was a bit of dirty pool, McAllister thought. He knew Jansen had been traumatized by Blaine Wilson’s death. That she would do anything to protect her people, and that he was being manipulative. Still, she had started this by defying him. He couldn’t let that stand.
Thirty seconds ticked by. Sixty. Still there was no response.
“Commander Jansen—” he started, but then she interrupted him.
“Those people in there could still be alive,” she said.
McAllister gritted his teeth. “Commander—”
“Sir,” someone said. McAllister looked up, ready to bite their head off.
It was the CATO, the communications and tracking officer, who was in charge of all radio communications with Orion.
“Sir,” CATO said. “Commander Jansen has switched off ground communications. She can’t hear you.”
Melendez, the EVA officer, was standing up, leaning over her own screen. “I’m still getting telemetry and biodata from both suits,” she said. “What do we do?”
McAllister scrubbed at his face with his hands. “Do? There’s nothing we can do.” Technically that wasn’t true. They could remotely switch off power and life support to Jansen’s suit. They could let her suffocate in the hope she would take the hint and turn back. Though she was smart enough to figure out how to override their remote commands, he imagined.
They could call Orion and speak with Major Hawkins and have him relieve Jansen of command. That might not be enough, either.
Realistically? They could do nothing.
McAllister took his hands away from his face and looked at the sea of expectant faces all around him. “We sit tight and wait for her to come to her senses.”
EXCURSION (1)
AMY TARBELIAN, FLIGHT PSYCHOLOGIST: All four Orion astronauts had been screened thoroughly before launch. We wanted to make sure they were up, mentally, for the stresses ahead of them. We knew that Sally Jansen had suffered a traumatic experience in her past, but she was tough as nails—resilient, I guess, is the better clinical term. If anything, we believed the tragic loss of life during her aborted Mars mission would make her more determined to keep her people safe and alive. It didn’t surprise us that she would extend that quasimaternal impulse to the Wanderer’s crew. We didn’t expect, though, that she would defy a direct order.
“Oh shit. Oh shit, oh shit. Oh motherfucking shit.”
Jansen didn’t bother looking back to see what was happening behind her.
“Keep it together, Stevens,” she said. “Come on—tell me what’s wrong.”
“I’m, uh, tumbling a little,” he said.
“We covered this in training. How do you fix a tumble?”
“Jets. Suit jets. Right. Just a touch of… OK, that made it worse. Jansen—Jansen, I’m upside down!”
She touched the keypad on her glove and spun around. Used a little propellant to get closer to him. He was slowly spinning, his legs coming up over his head.
“Remember the first rule,” she told him.
“There is no up, there is no down,” he said.
“Right. Just because I look upside down to you right now…” She reached him and grabbed hold of his arms. Got him stabilized. “OK. There.”
“Thanks,” he said. She could hear him gasping for breath over the radio.
She needed to distract him. “So,” she said. “You and Rao, huh?”
It worked—she heard him gasp, and, though it was hard to tell when he was in a space suit, she thought he turned bright red, too. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said, in an exaggeratedly serious voice.
Jansen laughed. “You do realize that there are cameras all over Orion, right? And that Mission Control listens to every word we say?” She knew how easy it was to forget that. “And—I’m not going to name names or anything, but believe me, you wouldn’t be the first. Why her, though? If you don’t mind me asking, and since we’re out here with something approaching privacy.”
He touched his jets until they were facing each other directly. Which meant he was flying backward and couldn’t see 2I. Probably for the best—she could catch him long before he ran into anything. “You mean other than she’s the only woman on the ship who’s… age appropriate?”
Jansen laughed. “Son, I would break you in two.”
“We’re scientists. Parm and me, we speak the same language. I guess it started there. But hell, you don’t pick the people you like, do you? Sally J, are you going to tell me you never fell for somebody at the wrong time?”
“That’s pretty much the story of my love life, actually,” she admitted.
“Oh yeah?”
Jansen sighed. “Back when I was picked for Orion 6, well, I was in the news streams a lot. I was with a very nice, very tough guy. Baxter, an air force pilot, but he couldn’t handle the fact I was suddenly more famous than him. Yeah. Bad timing. Then after I came back… there was this woman, and that was good. Having somebody to talk to. Maybe, if I’d waited a little longer, it could have worked. I was pretty broken. Mary did her best, but in the end she was more interested in psychoanalyzing me than getting me into bed. And when somebody tries to fix you when you’re not ready—” She realized that maybe she was oversharing. “Listen, just—if the two of you make a mess on my spacecraft, just clean it up.”
“Wh-what?”
“There are some things nobody wants to clean out of an air filter.”
He was looking her right in the eyes. She glanced away—and then he erupted in a howl of laughter.
“Now,” she said. “Isn’t an EVA easier when you’re not hyperventilating?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that helped, talking. Just—there’s got to be a name for it. They’ve got names for all those phobias. Ailurophobia is the irrational fear of cats. Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number thirteen. Right?”
“Sure.”
“What do you call the fear that you’re going to go flying off into space, forever?”
“Sanity,” she told him.
ROY MCALLISTER: I could have been more forceful with Jansen. I could have threatened her with criminal charges when she refused to return to Orion. God help me, I think I agreed with her, though. That we had a duty to rescue the KSpace astronauts. I made the appropriate protests, followed the rules. Then I let her go. Of course, I reserved the right to have her clapped in irons as soon as she was back on the ground.
As they approached the alien ship, Stevens used his jets to turn himself around, to get his first close-up look at the surface of 2I. Almost immediately he wished he hadn’t. The tall spires loomed over them in every direction. Giant, furry pyramids that rose away on every side. Though he knew better, he couldn’t help but think they were the buildings of some ancient, cyclopean city. Which would make the giant dome some kind of temple dedicated to elder god
s.
Stevens could hardly imagine trespassing on that solemn place, but without so much as a word Jansen passed through the weirdly shaped aperture and was gone, and for a moment he was alone, floating weightless over the brooding landscape. As terrified as he was of what they might find inside 2I, he liked even less the idea of being on his own outside. He touched the keypad on the back of his glove to activate his jets and followed after her, into the shadows.
The darkness inside the airlock was absolute. Jansen’s suit lights provided the only illumination. She played them across the inner wall of the airlock, and Stevens saw just how big it was. You could have parked Orion and Wanderer side by side in there, easy. The interior was smooth and featureless and round, nothing more than a spherical shell, with no visible controls or sensors or—
Something moved through the light, and he yelped in panic. It was just an empty foil packet, though, crimped along one edge. He caught it and saw the hexagon logo of KSpace printed on one side. “Glow sticks,” he said. “It’s a package of glow sticks.” It was empty.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“We wait,” Jansen said. They had both watched the video of Wanderer’s crew entering this airlock, but they still had very little idea of how it operated. “McAllister thinks it’s set to cycle automatically once anybody’s inside. How it knows we’re here is anybody’s guess. I don’t see any sensors.”
“You don’t like this,” he said. He could tell from the way her light moved, jumping from one spot on the featureless inside of the airlock to another, never staying still. Sally Jansen, the old, experienced astronaut, was nervous.
It didn’t help him manage his own fear.
“Once we trigger this thing,” she said, “2I will know we’re here. I don’t know. Maybe it’s been watching us the whole time, maybe it scanned us the second we arrived, but before it felt like we were invisible. Beneath notice. Now we’re scuffing our shoes on the welcome mat. We don’t know what we’re going to find inside, and—”
She stopped and swung around, her light disappearing as it stabbed out through the aperture behind them. His own lights lit up nothing but her suit.
The Last Astronaut Page 10