Nisha paused in the doorway, looking back only for as long as it took her to reply: “And I didn’t come here to watch you leave.”
Chase spent much of the rest of the day with Bo and Rachel, his fellow prospective crew members for a mission none could have possibly seen coming even just a few hours earlier.
The three sat together once again in the otherwise empty communications office and engaged in a long discussion with Holly and Grav, battling through the ever-growing delay. Talking like this enabled them to get a better feeling of Holly’s emotions than they could via mere text.
Although Chase and Bo had never expected anything else, Rachel was pleasantly surprised to hear positive approval rather than regretful assent in Holly’s voice. Grav’s excitement over the progress was a surprise — to all three — but he stayed fairly quiet when it came to discussing technical details and plans.
While Rachel’s Craft Management team on Arkadia had been preparing at very short-notice for a launch whose importance they didn’t yet fully understand, high-ranking experts on Terradox had been briefing Holly with their concerns and suggestions. The number of people involved in such discussions was low given that the launch was not yet public knowledge, but the consensus so far was that the mission, while beyond reckless in the eyes of some, shouldn’t prove all that difficult in an operational sense.
Holly enthusiastically shared one plan which had been mooted, insisting that she firmly believed it was the sensible way to proceed. This plan involved Rachel departing Arkadia before the others in a Karrier of her own, towards where the fast-moving asteroid would be when they were scheduled to depart after recovering the probe. Holly sold this as a safeguard, just as it had been sold to her, and explained that Rachel would then be able to drop an emergency lander should anything go wrong with Chase’s initial landing that could otherwise leave he and Bo with no way off the asteroid. The new landers functioned as escape pods, but it was reasonably assumed that any landing impactful enough to ground a Karrier would also ground its landers.
The speed of the asteroid’s movement meant that taking one Karrier and having Rachel drop the others in a lander would be too risky, since her Karrier couldn’t keep up with the asteroid for any real period of time and thus attempting a hopefully unnecessary recovery would have been impossible from an ever-increasing distance.
This plan took a while to settle in their minds since they had all expected to be landing as a trio in a Karrier and taking off again mere hours later, but the safety-first logic was there. Chase asked Rachel both if she didn’t mind not landing on the asteroid and if she would be okay piloting a Karrier on her own over a significant distance. She chuckled at the first and insisted she was sure to get over the disappointment at some stage — reckless adventure didn’t drive her in quite the same way it drove Chase — and she calmly insisted that she would have no problem being out there by herself.
“So all going well, we land in the Karrier and take off again once we have the probe,” Bo said to Rachel. “And all going well, once you leave we won’t see you again until we all get back here.”
“Bingo,” Rachel said. “All going well.”
“And if we run into any problems, you’ll drop a lander and we’ll use it to escape,” Bo added. “Re-docking should be easy enough, assuming the lander makes it in one piece.”
Rachel nodded then glanced at Chase as though to indicate she would rather not discuss this worst-case scenario.
He shrugged. “One way or another, we’re getting in and we’re getting out.”
Despite his pensive words, Bo had full faith in the landers, which were after all upgraded iterations of the kind which had given he and his family a cushioned landing on Terradox after their Karrier’s unexpected collision with its then-impenetrable cloak so many years ago.
Chase spoke briefly about the landers, for his own peace of mind as well as anyone else’s, insisting that technology had come on leaps and bounds in recent years thanks to the work carried out by the Terradox colony’s research staff.
It was at this point that Rachel jumped back in to unnecessarily remind him with a smile that she had been in charge of the colony’s Craft Management division and knew all about what its staff had achieved.
“As long as we all know this is going to be a cakewalk,” Chase said, smiling back but evidently speaking out of deeply held confidence rather than bravado. “Between the crafts you guys have developed and the new rover Bo’s been telling us about, we have the very best people and the very best tech. Agencies with way fewer resources at their disposal were landing stuff on asteroids decades and decades ago, probably even a century, and probes have been recovered before. The only difference this time is that we’re actually going.”
“Just that one tiny little difference,” Rachel said.
“But we also all need to know that the priority is finding what we’re looking for,” Bo said, his tone suddenly stronger than before. “Chase, especially you. If it comes down to running out of time for an escape window that would let us dock, and choosing between that and either recovering the probe or looking further into what it found… our priority is properly documenting this discovery. It has to be.”
“Your priority is staying alive,” Rachel interjected.
Bo focused on Chase, waiting for a response.
As if knowing what Rachel was thinking and preferring to address his answer to an approving listener, Chase looked only at Bo when he spoke: “If our priority was staying alive, we’d be staying here.”
The firm nod of agreement from Bo’s side of the table contrasted greatly with the uneasy expression on Rachel’s, and for the first time she felt deeply glad that she wouldn’t be in the landing party.
Elsewhere on Arkadia at the moment, Nisha Kohli was also in deep discussions with other physicists who had already been looped in on the plan. Kayla Hawthorne was privy to the news and both she and Nisha had been tasked with triple- and quadruple-checking the trajectories and timings that could prove the difference between the success and failure of a mission whose stakes could not have been any higher.
Chase had no idea Nisha was playing any such part in the planning, and her refusal to take any of his calls or reply to any of his messages ensured that he spent the evening at home alone. Her ability to separate the personal from the professional — angry at Chase for taking the mission but willing to focus on the work that had to be done — was just one part of a well-rounded skill-set that had seen Nisha rise so quickly through the ranks in her younger years and stay there ever since.
Initially after storming out of the home she shared with Chase, Nisha had visited her parents to vent about the news. She arrived to find Robert Harrington and Peter Ospanov already there, filling Romesh and Farrah in on the news. With Nisha’s sadness and worry now understandably leaving little room for anger, the others did what they could to console her.
Most of the others, in any case.
Robert, still furious with Chase for suggesting the crazy mission, didn’t mince his words: “This is what you get with someone like him: reckless abandon.”
Peter shot Robert, his father-in-law, a look of anger tinged with disappointment. If there was a time to bad mouth Chase, this certain wasn’t it.
Romesh, effectively Chase’s father-in-law in all but name, hadn’t always seen eye to eye with him of late — particularly following the Nancy episode during their last days on Terradox. And although he could see Chase’s strength as a leader as clearly as anyone else, there had been many occasions when Romesh had quietly wished his daughter had chosen a simpler and more stable life for herself with almost anyone else.
Now, however, he took it upon himself to not criticise Chase but defend him.
“Robert,” he began, “if you could tell me one time when Chase seriously attempted something and failed, I’d be more inclined to share your perspective. But if the story you tell is the way it really went down and Chase offered to recover the probe on his own, I
have a hard time understanding where you’re getting ‘reckless abandon’ from. To me, that sounds more like courageous leadership.”
Peter nodded, approvingly rather than performatively. He had his own reservations over Chase’s plan and could certainly see the reckless side, but Romesh’s point was equally valid. More importantly, though, it was well-timed and delivered free of ego. Nisha had likely expected her father to be the last person to deliver a defence of Chase, and the words did seem to have softened her sadness already.
When it came time to leave a few minutes later, Peter shook Romesh’s hand with more warmth than normal and winked slowly in appreciation. When he entered a waiting transport capsule with Robert, Peter wasted no time in asking what the hell he’d been thinking of when he decided to criticise Chase like he had.
“My son is going to a damn asteroid because of his idiotic plan,” Robert scorned under his breath. “Don’t think I’m only angry at him, by the way, but without him Holly wouldn’t have had a decision to make!“
“Viola’s brother is going on this mission, too, in case that went over your head,” Peter said. “But do you see her going around acting like an asshole? And Nisha is upset, but do you see her shit-talking Chase to anyone else?”
“Peter…” Robert scolded in a somewhat condescending tone.
“Don’t fucking ‘Peter’ me,” Peter shot back. “If you want to be in charge around here, step up!” He turned towards Robert, seated next to him, and pushed a firm finger into his chest while inching forward, nose to nose. “Because if you won’t…”
Robert stopped the transport capsule. “Get out,” he ordered.
“I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” Peter said, settling back in his seat. “Come on, take us back to the Shipyard.”
“Get out of the fucking capsule!” Robert boomed.
Peter looked at him, dumbstruck.
“Still pretending?”
This time, Peter emotionlessly unclipped his seatbelt and opened his door. “Big mistake,” was all he said, stepping outside and tapping his wristband to call for another capsule while Robert sped away without so much as a backwards glance.
Peter kept his bust-up with Robert to himself for as long as he could, but when night fell and he found himself alone in his lounge while Viola and Katie slept upstairs, the urge to talk got the better of him.
He hadn’t mentioned it to Viola for obvious reasons — the last thing he wanted to do was dump her in the middle of a row between himself and Robert — and bringing it to Holly would inevitably come across as petty. It was Robert’s words to Nisha rather than his actions in the transport capsule that troubled Peter most, though, and with that in mind he tapped his wristband to call the only person he could think of: Chase.
Chase took the call while carefully reading through detailed mission plans drawn up by a team on Terradox, which shared a great deal with the plans drawn up entirely independently by the equivalent team on Arkadia.
“Robert’s a liability on this,” Peter lamented. “He’s angry the mission is going ahead and he’s letting that get in the way.”
Chase listened carefully to the full story, which was shorter and somewhat less explosive than he’d expected.
“And you’re telling me Romesh said that?” he asked at the end, stuck on the part where Nisha’s father had unexpectedly defended him to the extent that Robert’s preceding criticism didn’t seem to have registered at all.
“Yeah, I thought that was pretty big of him. But that’s the kind of thing Robert should have been saying. In his position, you can’t talk like he was talking. Could you see Holly doing that? Could you see one of us or Viola doing that?”
Over the next few minutes, Chase promised to talk to Robert about this before he left for the recovery mission. He also stated that while he understood Peter’s desire to keep Viola out of it, any problem between two members of the Executive Council was a matter for the whole Council.
Chase wound up the conversation as subtly as he could when a notification flashed on his wristband to alert him of an incoming video message from his father Christian. Part of him had wondered why there hadn’t been a message from either Christian or Jillian already, but Chase knew how good Holly was at running a tight ship and could understand why others had to be told before them.
But when the video message began, showing Christian’s face talking animatedly into a camera in his office within Terradox’s Botanical Gardens, Chase was surprised to hear nothing whatsoever about his imminent mission.
Holly’s ship was even tighter than he’d thought, he reflected, as Christian quite clearly still didn’t know.
Rather than the recovery of the probe on asteroid NGB-2, Christian focused instead on some “unexpected but not necessarily alarming readings” he had been alerted to by botanists on Arkadia. Chase sighed in frustration when Christian got to explaining that some plants had seemingly popped up where they shouldn’t have, an issue similar to the one Chase and Rachel had detected on their initial scouting mission a year earlier, despite safeguards that had since been put in place to ensure this wouldn’t happen.
Chase didn’t know exactly what it was the botanists feared about plants ending up in the wrong place — this had never been fully explained to him — and a large part of him thought there was probably nothing to worry about and that the scientists with the most boring jobs on Terradox and Arkadia were naturally prone to seizing excitement whenever they got the faintest sniff of it.
He nevertheless sent a quick text reply to Christian’s message to confirm that he’d do as requested and pass the message on to Robert Harrington. The botanists on Arkadia had apparently found it impossible to reach Robert all day and Christian likewise said that he’d been unable to talk to Holly and Grav, obliviously unaware of the high-level drama that these high-ranking individuals were currently so preoccupied with. Christian explained that he himself had sent a video message to Robert but that it had remained unwatched. He expected that whatever was keeping Robert so busy wouldn’t enable him to ignore a message from a Council member like Chase, and this was why he reached out to his son with such a request.
The issue regarding the plants needed careful monitoring and might soon require romotech interventions that would only be possible with clearance from the Executive Council, Christian said, and Chase promised he’d be right on it.
True to his word, he did forward the message to Robert. It was marked as opened very quickly, but no ‘viewed’ notification appeared even after more than enough time had passed. Chase was set to call Robert directly when he heard the front door opening.
He leapt to his feet, hoping he was right about the only person it could be.
“Don’t say anything,” Nisha said, pleasing him with her presence so much that the angry tone went over his head.
“Are you okay?” Chase asked.
She sighed deeply before eventually nodding and walking towards him, as though her anger had been disarmed by his opening question.
“I heard from Vic that you and Kayla were checking out the physics,” he said after they hugged. There was no gloating in his voice; if anything, it was a tone more resembling contrition.
A slight smile, almost defiant, broke out on Nisha’s face. “Well since you’re stupid enough to go out on a mission like this, someone has to be smart enough to make sure you come back…”
twenty-six
Chase awoke to some news that made him particularly glad Nisha had come home the previous evening: his asteroid-bound Karrier was set for a late-night launch, around twelve hours before he had expected to be the case. Rachel’s Karrier was leaving even earlier, in just a few hours, and suddenly everything felt almost too real.
He knew the plan and trusted that Bo would be on top of his role of navigating the surface of the barely-mapped asteroid, but the pace of the plan’s move from his germ of an idea to the final launch was enough to give anyone a feeling of nausea if they stopped to think about it.
In the few and far between quiet moments that did creep in during the day, Chase tried to quieten his wandering mind with the fact that this would be by far the shortest mission he had ever undertaken.
I left the colony for a year to live inside that damn Isolation Kompound, he reminded himself. I left Nisha for four weeks to fly here with Rachel. I flew from Terradox to the station and back — solo!
Given the impervious mask Chase Jackson wore in public, most would have been greatly surprised to think of him having any doubts about anything. If anyone had harboured any suspicion that he might have been having second thoughts over the mission, however, they would likely have expected him to deal with them just as quietly and decisively as he did.
The one factor that Nisha tried to comfort herself with was that Chase wouldn’t be travelling very far, with his outward trip taking three days at full speed. A desire to allow some breathing space lay behind the expedited launch; by leaving early, the Karrier could begin its journey below full speed and retain the ability to adapt its speed or course in case of any unforeseen complication or change of plan.
Chase, confident that the tireless work of Arkadia’s Shipyard staff would ensure everything he could possibly need would be ready in his Karrier, had no problem with the new launch time. But while Nisha would be sad to say goodbye a night earlier than originally planned, the change had in fact come partially at her suggestion. In her book, anything that increased the chance of a safe arrival and reduced the chance of Chase having to do anything stupid to land on the asteroid at the right time was worth exploring.
One night was one night — what mattered was that he came back.
Chase spent most of his morning at the Shipyard, conversing deeply with Bo and Rachel as well as a handful of core staff. Bradley Reinhart, who would be the primary communications coordinator for the mission’s duration, also sat in on the discussions.
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