The Life Below

by Alexandra Monir

  “I would be alone on Earth, too,” I remind her. “With my family gone, and now Naomi . . . What difference does it make whether I’m alone down here or up there?”

  “There is one key difference,” she says. “By sending you to space without government approval, you’ll be committing a crime—both of us will. In the long run, after you help the Final Six survive, as I know you—we—can, you’ll be seen as a hero. But in the short term, the people you leave behind on Earth will view you and me both as reckless criminals. Maybe even saboteurs.” She hesitates. “You might not find such a welcoming reception from the Final Six when you first arrive, either.”

  The thought stops me cold—traveling all that way through space, only to find that she never wanted me there in the first place.

  “And while I will do everything in my power to keep you safe up there,” she continues, “I can’t promise that Dr. Takumi and General Sokolov won’t try retaliating through their own resources in space.”

  I swallow hard, my throat like sandpaper. I can’t deny that she’s managed to shake me.

  “It feels like you’re trying to talk me out of this. Why?”

  “No. I’m making sure of my choice,” she says, eyeing me carefully. “It’s my responsibility to discuss these worst-case scenarios with you, since we both have to know: How far are you willing to go for the Final Six? For the future of humankind?”

  I look back at the screen, where the six are floating out of another hatch and into the Habitation Module, an artificial-gravity zone containing their sleeping cabins and common areas. One minute they’re skimming the ceiling, and the next, their feet hit the ground. Yet another wonder of the Pontus.

  “Before I answer that, there’s something I need to know too.” I lock eyes with Greta. “What did you mean when you said that only you and I can provide the help the Final Six needs? What is your plan for Europa?”

  I can almost see the wheels turning in Greta’s mind as she mulls over what to tell me. And then—

  “I’ll show you.”

  MESSAGE ORIGIN: EARTH—UNITED STATES—SOUTHWEST TEXAS

  MESSAGE RECIPIENT: PONTUS SPACECRAFT—EARTH ORBIT

  ATTN: ARDALAN, NAOMI

  [MESSAGE STATUS: RECEIVED—ENCRYPTED]

  Hey, Sis.

  I’ve tried writing this email three times already, and I can’t seem to land on the right words. I thought I’d start with some jokes to make you smile, but let’s face it, I don’t exactly kill when it comes to comedy. So I scrapped that and told you what it was really like to leave the launchpad after we all said good-bye. That email was about as uplifting as classic Russian literature, so I hit Delete again. Now here I am just trying to be normal, when our lives have diverged so far from that.

  I thought a lot of things might happen to us—I thought I might not live long enough to see them—but I never predicted this. Losing my sister. And I know, I know, I’m not really losing you. Not completely. But when it’s just me and our parents, and when we go back home and your room stays empty—well, it sure feels that way.

  Anyway. The truth is, hard as this is, I am so proud of you. We all are. Mom keeps burning esfand in our hotel room to ward off the evil eye, since everywhere we go, people are raving about you. How your bravery and smarts could make the mission a real success, and save the rest of us from dying out on this hostile Earth. (No pressure or anything!)

  Tomorrow the ISTC jet flies us home to LA, where we’ve been told things should be a little different. As some sort of compensation for your “services to the global cause,” the US government and the United Nations are covering some of our expenses, like my cardiologist bills and heart medications, which I knew you’d be relieved to hear about—and a monthly delivery of unrationed groceries! They even offered to move us to a flood-safe house to live rent-free, but Mom and Dad refused that on the spot. None of us want to leave the last place you lived. So they negotiated a deal where the government covers three-quarters of the rent, which should make a huge difference. They won’t have to pull so many hours at work, and I won’t feel like such an expensive burden. You’ve helped us already, Sis.

  So now it’s my turn to help you. I’ve gotten pretty good at Python since you’ve been away, and I coded a site where we can transmit encrypted data back and forth. If you can send the data you found on Europa over to the domain address linked here, then I can put in the research time that I’m guessing you can’t, under all that supervision. And then, hopefully, I can fill in some of the gaps.

  For extra security, the site knows only one language: Farsi. (Wish I could tell Mom and Dad! Remember how they had to literally drag us to Farsi school?) And I coded the landing page to redirect to a wormhole-theory blog, so anyone at NASA tracking your online habits will just think you’ve got another nerdy obsession. ;)

  All right, someone’s at the door—I think it’s time for the farewell dinner they’re hosting for the families of the Final Six. Which reminds me: yesterday I asked some ISTC staff how I could get in touch with your friend Leo, and they gave me nothing. But later, Dr. Takumi said to come by his office before I leave, so maybe he is planning to share Leo’s contact info then. I’ll keep you posted.

  Stay safe up there. We love you.

  S

  Two

  NAOMI

  THE VIEW IS WHAT MAKES IT REAL. I COULD ALMOST PRETEND, during liftoff, that I was simply on the most terrifying roller-coaster ride of my life, squeezing my eyes shut and freezing my emotions cold for those eight and a half minutes. But now we’re here, well above the stratosphere—and with the sounds of celebration bursting through my earpiece, I have no choice but to look.

  I unlatch my safety strap, and my body begins to rise. The feeling of weightlessness is a heady rush, like swimming with no water. I float toward the cockpit’s cupola window, bumping and jostling against my crewmates along the way, as the six of us fumble through the first minutes of zero gravity. It doesn’t matter that we practiced this half a dozen times in the Vomit Comet at space camp—everything becomes trickier once it’s real.

  I gaze out the window, and the sight sends goose bumps crawling across my skin. It’s like I’ve woken up inside one of the posters that used to hang on my wall as a kid, with the all-encompassing darkness, the silver specks of stars peeking through the black. And then, just below our ship, I see the massive curve of blue and white, shielded by nothing but the thin, glowing ring of the atmosphere. Earth looks so fragile, so defenseless from up here. And suddenly, everything I’ve bottled inside rises to the surface. A sob lodges in my throat, a wave of grief so intense that for a second, I can’t breathe. Until a familiar voice shakes me out of my thoughts.

  “Well done, crew! Congratulations on a successful launch.”

  It’s General Sokolov, our commander on the ground, speaking to us from Houston’s Mission Control.

  “Your loved ones and the public back home are all thrilled to see you achieve this critical first step in our mission,” she continues, sounding uncharacteristically delighted. “Once you reached 330,000 feet, the Pontus Habitation Module attached to our booster inflated automatically to its full size. Your home in space is now open, and accessible through the airlock. Aside from Jian Soo and, of course, Cyb, the rest of you won’t be seeing this flight capsule again until Mars.”

  I glance across the capsule at each of my crewmates, wondering if any of them feels the way I do—this growing sense of panic as we cut our ties to Earth—or if they’re all just thrilled to be getting away, escaping our dying planet before it kills us too. It’s impossible to guess what the others are thinking, when I barely know all but one of them . . . the same person I wish I’d never met.

  Beckett Wolfe hovers near me, steadying himself on a handrail, and I inch away from him, gripping the back of one of the launch seats to keep my body from drifting. I know what he’s capable of, how he wouldn’t flinch before sabotaging any one of us—just like he did to Leo. And as I glance at him now, my nausea retur
ns. His face just rests in a smug expression, like someone whose daily life consists of getting his way. I guess that’s the perk of being rich and power-adjacent, the privileged nephew of Mr. President.

  “You may now leave your space suits to charge in the airlock, and then go straight to the Communications Bay, where you will find another message from me and Dr. Takumi,” the general instructs us. “Copy?”

  “Roger that,” Dev, our lieutenant commander, answers. He motions us forward and we follow him to the airlock, with only Cyb staying behind to man the cockpit. Before disappearing through the metal door, I turn to give the capsule one more look—the last place where I got to feel Earth beneath me.

  The six of us each step into the space suit charging pods lining the airlock, which use mechanical claws to peel the heavy fabric off of us. I can hear the charging pods gurgling and humming behind us as we crawl out of the airlock through the hatch door, into the body of the ship.

  We float through the tunnel-like hatch until we reach the Habitation Module, where our feet land with a thunk on the white-painted floor. It’s the moment that gives me my first real smile in space. The design is genius: an artificial-gravity environment created by turning the module into an ever-rotating centrifuge. It’s the work of my hero, Dr. Greta Wagner, and for the umpteenth time, I wonder what could have happened to get such a crucial figure fired from our mission.

  We pass more tech wizardry on our way to the main crew quarters, from a triple-sealed solar storm shelter to an artificial greenhouse, where lettuce leaves and would-be plants grow like preemies in an incubator. And then, we arrive at the Astronauts’ Residence.

  My mouth falls open as we step onto the first floor, looking up at a soaring atrium surrounded by six wraparound levels of living space. At the center of the atrium is a transparent, silver-glowing pod, to zip us up and down each floor, while a ceiling window gives us a constant view of the stars.

  “Whoa,” Sydney murmurs, echoing my thoughts.

  “This definitely beats the mock-ups from space camp,” Jian says.

  Looking around, it’s clear we’re standing in the Communications Bay. Three blinking touch-screen desks are bolted to the floor along with matching white swivel chairs, while a 5K-HD screen covering nearly an entire wall displays a slideshow of well-wishers from around the world, cheering us on. Moments after we enter, a red light flickers overhead, followed by an audible click. I glance up and find a camera burrowed into the wall a few inches above my head, its lens pointed straight at me.

  “We’re being watched already,” I say with the familiar twinge of discomfort that I know well from space camp. There is something so . . . so borderline creepy about being on camera twenty-four/seven. It’s the reality show I never meant to sign up for, broadcast to all of Earth.

  “They don’t have these in our bed-and-baths, do they?” Minka Palladin, our crewmate from Ukraine, asks. She folds her arms over her chest, giving the camera a suspicious look.

  “Certainly not.”

  We all jump as a familiar face fills the screen. Magnified in close-up, his features look almost exaggerated: fierce dark eyes under thick black brows, deep crevices in the skin where age has left its mark. Dr. Takumi is a jarring transition from the slideshow that was playing just moments ago. He fixes his piercing gaze on us through the screen, and then breaks into a smile. It makes him look like someone else—someone who might still have a heart. But I know better.

  “Welcome, our chosen six, to space!” Dr. Takumi draws out the words for grand effect. “Tell me, how does it feel?”

  We answer with a smattering of mumbles—“amazing,” “weird,” “exciting,” “trippy”—while Beckett yells out, “Effing fan-tas-tic!” I roll my eyes at him, brownnosing the boss even from up here.

  “Good.” Dr. Takumi nods and the camera pans out to reveal him at his throne-like desk on ISTC campus, with General Sokolov standing at his shoulder. They are dressed in their respective uniforms, the black and red colors I’ve come to associate with them: black for Dr. Takumi’s suit with an ISTC logo glowing at the chest, and red for the general’s Roscosmos flight jacket and army pants.

  “Now, you have a fair amount of time before your first stop in Mars orbit and the final destination of Europa, but these months en route will be far from idle,” Dr. Takumi continues. “You have a spacecraft to protect, an artificial crop source to grow, and further training to complete for your new life on a new moon. And of course, the first leg of your trip will require the utmost precision and focus, with course corrections along the way as we monitor the fuel leak on the Mars supply ship.”

  My stomach sinks at the reminder of this wrench in the plan. The only way we’ll have enough food and support systems for a lifetime on Europa is by collecting those materials from the supply ship that’s currently on a never-ending loop around Mars, where it’s been stuck in purgatory since the failed Athena mission five years ago. But when SatCon discovered the fuel leak, right before we all touched down at Space Training Camp, we learned that this cache of supplies we’d been counting on to survive is in jeopardy—because each day of dripping fuel sends the vessel ever so slightly out of alignment. If it slips outside of the Pontus’s trajectory, we could miss it altogether, and if it falls out of orbit before we get there . . . well, both scenarios would leave us starving to death. So, everything is riding on us making it in time for the Mars rendezvous and docking with the supply ship before it’s lost to us forever. Not exactly a light task.

  “Dr. Takumi and I will be actively involved every step of the way, watching and monitoring your progress and conducting your training from the ground,” General Sokolov chimes in. “So if you’ve had any fears about the six of you being alone up there, with all that’s at stake, just remember that we will continue to serve as your leaders every day through this process.”

  I hear Minka exhale and I catch Dev grinning at the screen in relief, but unlike my crewmates, the last thing I want is for the ISTC heads to remain omnipresent. Watching them hold sway over our team from behind the camera reminds me that we are at the mercy of this secretive, powerful pair.

  “But,” the general adds, “our involvement can only extend up to a point.”

  I stop short as her tone changes.

  “Because the farther you travel from Earth, the longer the time delay in our communication. As you approach Mars, you can expect a four- to ten-minute gap each way between sending and receiving messages from the Pontus to Earth, and vice versa. The closer you get to Jupiter, the delay increases to roughly forty minutes each way.”

  I nod impatiently; they’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. The time delay was always one of my chief reservations about this mission. I mean, how helpful was an SOS signal when you had to wait as long as eighty minutes for a reply? We could all be dead in half the time it took to get a response. That’s supposedly why the ISTC included two robots on our mission, superior AIs programmed to trouble-shoot almost any crisis. And then, in a flash, I remember my conversation on Air Force One, the words I couldn’t stand to hear. Is the general’s announcement about . . . that?

  “Since quite a lot can happen in such a time frame, especially with the aforementioned Mars maneuver, one of you will assume the leadership role in our place, whenever Dr. Takumi and I are unreachable,” she reveals. “During those hours, however long they last, five of you will follow the commands of your de facto leader—a person we are entrusting to make the right decisions by all of you.”

  Here it comes. I brace myself for the inevitable.

  “Wait a sec,” Sydney interjects. “Isn’t that Cyb’s job, to be proxy commander?”

  “From a piloting and navigational standpoint, yes. But when it comes to the six of you, with any human decisions that need to be made, the final word rests with . . .”

  I swallow hard, glaring at the floor.

  “Beckett Wolfe.”

  “What?” Dev and Sydney both blurt out in unison, while Jian’s e
xpression turns thunderstruck. Beckett’s eyes flit across each of us, a smile playing on his face. It’s all I can do to not lunge at him, and wipe that smile off.

  “Excuse me,” Dev says with a cough. “I’m just wondering if that—I mean, that’s a mistake, right? Because you and Dr. Takumi named me lieutenant commander before we left, and that outranks Beckett as underwater specialist—”

  “As does copilot,” Jian jumps in, hands balling into fists at his sides. Now that we’re a world away, it seems no one is afraid to stand up to our leaders anymore.

  The general frowns her disapproval at the two of them.

  “I certainly shouldn’t need to explain this. The copilot is chiefly concerned with assisting Cyb on the flight deck, while lieutenant commander means serving as the right hand to whomever we choose to lead,” she says crisply. “In our absence, that will mean Beckett.”

  Dev looks repulsed, and I’m slightly gratified to see that I’m not the only one who feels this way about my fellow American. The thought of him having any power over me makes me ill, and more than that, it makes no sense. What sway does he hold over Takumi and Sokolov, and why?

  “Why do we even need one person among us calling the shots, anyway?” I speak up. “Can’t we just agree on things as a group, give everyone an equal voice?”

  “That’s the kind of thinking that’ll get us stuck playing rock-paper-scissors when a crisis hits,” Beckett scoffs. “You ever tried settling a vote with an even number of people?”

  “Yeah, well it’s a lot more appealing than you playing dictator—”

  I break off midsentence as a black sheet of darkness falls over the room, eclipsing everything but Dr. Takumi’s flashing eyes on-screen. And then I hear the deafening sound of scraping metal as walls that I didn’t know existed slide in and around us. Our “home” is closing in on itself, shutting out all hatch openings—trapping us into this one module.

  A scream echoes, and footsteps clatter as we stumble through the darkness. My heart is clanging in my chest as I feel my way around the walls, searching for another light source. And then—