Vessel

38

EVERY TIME CAL closed his eyes he saw the despair on Catherine’s face as security took her away. He wasn’t sleeping much.

Not that it mattered; with only seven days—at most—to go before Sagittarius II lost radio contact, he had no time to sleep. And it wasn’t like he had anywhere else he had to be. Aaron hadn’t fired him outright, not yet, but he was on an indefinite leave of absence. That might have been a bonus, except that meant he had no way to contact the crew directly. And there was no one at NASA he trusted enough to go around the chain of command and send them a message. So he had far too much time to think. To plan. To look for any pieces he and Catherine might have missed, something so irrefutable that NASA would have to listen.

At least three times a day, Cal picked up his phone. One of the science writers at the New York Times always came to Cal when she needed information on anything aerospace related. She’d be delighted if Cal handed her the scoop of the century, proof not only of alien life but also that NASA was hiding it.

God, he was tempted. With all the information he and Catherine had collected, there was enough to warrant an investigation, enough to put pressure on NASA and get Catherine released.

Would he be viewed as a whistle-blower or disgruntled employee? If this story broke, how badly could it hurt NASA? Paul Lindholm liked to think of this as NASA’s first real golden age since the Mercury and Apollo days, but how fast would the funding dry up if the truth came out? Would NASA ever recover? More to the point, Cal couldn’t help wondering if it deserved to.

He wasn’t ready to give up on NASA just yet. They could still fix this. He just needed more proof of first contact, and he needed it yesterday.

So he kept his coffeepot filled and spent his waking hours in his home office, going over every bit of information he’d gathered on every single aspect of the Sagittarius I mission. There was something here. He just wasn’t seeing it.

A knock sounded at his door. That was the last thing he needed interrupting his thought process.

He ignored it, but after the third flurry of knocks, he muttered and went to answer.

At first, he didn’t recognize the girl standing on his doorstep. She was vaguely familiar; he’d seen her somewhere before, but without any context…

“You’re Cal Morganson, right?” She tilted her head, and Cal realized where he’d seen her. “I’m Aimee Wells. You work with my mom.”

“Yeah, I did—I do.” Cal could only blink at first, and then he broke through his fog. “Is your mom okay?”

“She’s fine—well, as fine as you’d imagine.” She glanced around as if making sure there were no observers. “She sent me.”

Stranger and stranger. Cal swung the door open farther. “Come in.”

She followed him inside and he tried to make sense of it all. Once again, he found himself sitting in his living room with a Wells, and he was baffled. “So you’ve seen her? How is she? I can’t get anybody at NASA to tell me anything. I tried your dad, but he won’t return my calls.”

Aimee grimaced. “I think that’s one reason Mom asked me to come. Dad was ordered not to talk to you.”

That was ominous, but it explained why no one else was returning his calls either. If he was persona non grata with the NASA staff, then his career was over. “But your mom is okay? Is anyone helping her?”

“Dad is. Well, sort of. I don’t think he believes her story, but he’s getting a lawyer for her. She’s doing okay, though, really,” Aimee said. “They’re keeping her in quarantine.” A roll of her eyes showed what she thought of that. Cal was inclined to agree with her assessment. “She was worried about you, though.”

“About me?” He gestured around himself. “Aside from being currently unwelcome at NASA, I’m okay. Tell her that I’m still working on what we were talking about. Tell her I’m doing everything I can to get her out of there.”

Aimee perked up. “What are you working on? Can I help?”

It was sweet of her, sweet enough to make him smile. “I don’t think so. I’m trying to find more proof about what happened to your mom. It’s pretty dull stuff, and it involves rather advanced science—”

“I’m going to be an aerospace engineering major at MIT,” Aimee interrupted, looking unimpressed. “For my senior science project I did an analysis of how the life-support systems on Sagittarius might have functioned differently with only one person on board and how that affected my mother’s trip home.”

Cal blinked. “I stand corrected.” He should have known better than to underestimate any daughter of Catherine’s. “If you’re already familiar with the life-support systems, then I think I have something for you to do.”

Aimee’s initial assessment, after three hours going over some of Cal’s printouts, was filled with outrage. “How the hell is NASA ignoring this? Like, okay sure, they want to use the evidence that Tom Wetherbee survived the explosion to keep Mom locked up, but look at this. Right here, before the explosion. Look at those heat readings in the air lock. It’s just like Mom said. Doesn’t that seem high enough to suggest two living things were in there?” Cal could sympathize with her frustration.

“I know. It seems like a strong indicator, but it’s too easy for them to dismiss as a malfunction.” Cal sighed. “I’ve got to find something completely incontrovertible. Something a layperson could look at and instantly understand.”

“You need a picture of a little green man,” Aimee grumbled.

“Pretty much, yes.”

“So let’s find one.”

“I wish it were that simple.” Cal pushed back from his computer. “I’ve been over the video footage we have—and there’s not much of it. The video feed from when your mom did actually see them is long gone. There’s nothing else there.” He looked up to see Aimee texting. Inevitable, as she was still a teenager, he supposed. Smart or not, she couldn’t be expected to stay focused forever.

Or so he thought.

“Sorry,” she said, “I had to cancel some plans. I’m going to get my computer and bring it back. We’ll save time if we’re both going through the electronic records.” Then she paused. “If that’s okay?”

“Uh. Sure, why not?” A new set of eyes couldn’t hurt. And maybe, just maybe, Aimee’s inexperience would be an asset here—fewer preconceived notions.

Two heads, it turned out, weren’t necessarily better than one. Three days later, they were comfortable enough with each other to be frustrated and irritable. At least Aimee had been able to keep Catherine updated on their progress and was able to reassure her that Cal was fine.

“Are you sure we can’t get our hands on more data? Anything?” Aimee asked for what Cal thought might have been the hundredth time today.

“I had to go digging to get what we’ve got now.” Cal was deliberately not thinking about the penalties for revealing classified information to a teenage girl. If this all went south, he’d be revealing it to a much larger audience. The Times reporter was still an option.

“Why is so much of it missing?”

“Ask your mother,” Cal snapped, then immediately regretted it. They didn’t know for certain that Catherine had deleted any of the data. It could have just as easily been Tom.

“I would, but I don’t know when your bosses will let me see her again.” Aimee didn’t seem angry so much as tired. They both were. They’d been beating their heads against this for days and weren’t getting anywhere.

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.” He hadn’t been able to contact Catherine in over a week, and he was startled at how much he missed her. He kept seeing the fear in her eyes as NASA security led her away. And always, always, the clock was running in the back of his head, counting down the minutes until his crew was out of his reach and beyond his help.

Aimee interrupted his thoughts. “Okay. So, if we can’t get more data, then we just have to find new ways to look at what we do have.”

Cal raked his hand through his hair. “I dunno, Aimee. Maybe there’s just nothing here. We don’t know what these things are, or what we’re looking for. Maybe we don’t have the technology to even prove they exist.”

“We do. We have to.” Aimee hummed to herself thoughtfully, tapping at her keyboard. “Maybe we literally need a new way of looking at what we have. What was it Mom said they told her? The adults needed protection from daylight, and they took it off so she could see them? She said it was like a shield. I’m guessing technological, some sort of cloaking device, or… I don’t know what. But it blocks the visible light spectrum—so cameras are no good. But… they were still giving off heat. We’ve got those measurements.” She looked away from the monitor. “There was a spectroscopic camera in the Habitat, right?”

“Yes, but…” Cal paused. “I didn’t think to—” He grasped what she was getting at. “You’re saying to check other spectrums visually.”

Aimee nodded, already typing furiously. “What were the time stamps for the increased heat signatures in the Habitat air lock when Mom and Richie were working on it?”

Cal checked his notes and gave her the numbers while she called up the imaging program. “Okay,” she said. “Here we go…” Cal came around to stand over her shoulder, looking at the monitor.

Aimee sighed. “No, there’s nothing—” As she spoke, there was movement in the frame. “What is that? That’s not Richie, is it?”

Whatever it was, it radiated heat, but more to the point, as they looked through the infrared spectrum, it was visible. The shape was humanoid in the loosest sense—there was what appeared to be four limbs, and something that might be a head.

“That’s not Richie,” Aimee repeated, more certain.

“It’s not anybody from the crew. Wetherbee was the tallest crew member at five foot eleven; your mom’s five eight. That thing… it’s at least seven, maybe eight feet.” Cal couldn’t stop staring, his heart thumping painfully in his chest. “Got you,” he murmured. “Got you, you bastard.”

“That’s—that’s an alien. That’s a real alien.”

Cal put his hand on Aimee’s shoulder. She sounded about as stunned as he felt. “And you found it, Aimee.”

“Mom found it.”

“Either way, I have to get to Johnson.”

Aimee turned and looked up at him, the fright in her eyes reminding him of her mother. “What will you do if they don’t believe you? What if they lock you up, too?”

“Listen.” Cal crouched to Aimee’s eye level. “If I haven’t called you in… say, two hours, call this number.” He texted her the contact information. “That’s a direct line for a science writer at the New York Times. Give her my name. Tell her what we’ve found.”

“I’m a kid; she won’t believe me,” Aimee protested.

“You show her that video. She’ll believe you.” He stood. “Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

His fate rested in the hands of the bureaucracy at NASA and an eighteen-year-old girl. Right now, he trusted Aimee more.