Vessel

5

“BREATHE, WILL YOU?” David reached across the front seat to take her hand as they drove in together the first morning.

Catherine released her two-handed death grip on her travel mug and took David’s hand. “I’m breathing, I’m breathing.” She glanced over with a smile. “Hey, I haven’t had to go to the office in over nine years, so cut me some slack for being nervous.”

David brought her hand to his lips, keeping one eye on the traffic as he drove. “That’s my girl. Strap her to a rocket and she’s cool as a cucumber, tell her she’s got to face rush-hour traffic every day and she’s worried.”

It wasn’t that, and David knew as much, but Catherine was grateful to him for making light of it. “Yeah, well. NASA produces better pilots than Houston does drivers.” They shared a grin and some of the tension drained from her. “It’ll be good to be back, part of things again.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “One more step back to normal life, right?”

And, despite the nervousness, she was eager to get back. Llewellyn had offered to give her more time off, but with Aimee finishing up her senior year and David working, there didn’t seem to be any point in Catherine’s staying home. They’d taken Aimee out of school for a week or so, and there’d be ongoing family counseling to resolve any adjustment issues. Besides, with only a month and a half to go before the Sagittarius II launch, she knew Llewellyn could probably use every pair of hands he could get. She was looking forward to meeting the new crew and helping them however she could. It was the least she could do.

“I saw John Duffy is the flight commander for Sag II,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. Don’t tell me he’s grown up and gotten all responsible.”

“Listen, I still can’t believe he made it through training,” David said with a snort, giving her the crooked grin that had first stolen her heart. “He was so busy playing pranks and chasing tail I didn’t think he was actually learning anything.”

“Oh come on, he wasn’t that bad.”

“You only think so because you were one of the tails he was chasing the hardest, ‘Catherine the Great,’ ” David teased.

Too late, Catherine realized that despite David’s grin, she’d stumbled onto a sore spot. Duffy had been in their training cohort, and despite his antics and David’s quiet, intense dedication to learning everything he could, Duffy went on to finish the program and David hadn’t. The two men were nearly diametric opposites, and given Duffy’s tendency to flirt as easily as he breathed, the tension between them was unavoidable.

“Ugh, I forgot he used to call me that.” She tried to find a way to recover. “I guess I’ll find out today if he’s changed or not. I’m meeting with him and the rest of the crew this afternoon for the simulation test.”

“Yikes, that’s today?” David looked at her closely. “Are you ready for that? What time?”

“May as well jump in with both feet,” Catherine said, trying to smile for him. “It’s early this afternoon, after that planning meeting.”

“Which planning meeting?”

“The one at eleven, with Aaron Llewellyn. It’s not on your calendar?”

David’s smile was still firmly in place, but even after more than nine years apart, Catherine could see the strain beneath it. “Nope, that’s the weekly meeting for department heads and up. You’re in that one?”

“Yeah… it’s probably a one-time thing, to talk about my mission.”

When David let go of her hand to put both hands back on the steering wheel, she tried to tell herself it was because freeway traffic was getting heavier, and she wrapped her fingers around the stainless steel of her cup, staring straight ahead.

“Maybe not,” David said, a little too casually. “You’re a superstar now, kiddo. I’m just a grunt in the trenches.”

She was right back in the moment they’d learned that David had washed out of the program. He’d had that same casual, too-faint smile on his face then. If she asked him, he would say he was fine, and that he was excited for her. It was probably true. But it wasn’t the whole truth.

“Yeah, well, you’re my grunt, and I love you.”

“Love you, too, Cath. I’m proud of you.” Now when he looked over at her, the smile looked a little more real. “Always have been.”

JSC was one of those places that never changed, even while in a constant state of flux. The displays were different, the faces were different, but even if she’d been dropped in the middle of a hallway, Catherine would have known where she was. She found her office without difficulty, a small, blank space with a desk, a computer, and a decent-sized window. Tomorrow she’d bring in a few personal things.

The planning meeting was something new, a glimpse behind the scenes she’d never had before. The only crewman there was John Duffy, and he gave Catherine a quick wave as they sat down.

She knew, of course, that immensely detailed logistics went into every NASA mission, but listening to the others go over the minutiae of weight limits, fuel calculations, supply needs, etc., it seemed a miracle they’d ever gone into space to begin with.

When the meeting ended, Duffy made his way over to her before she could leave the conference room. He came forward with an outstretched hand and, when she took it, he pulled her into a hug. “Here’s our hero,” he said with a grin.

“Oh God, no,” Catherine said, grimacing. “Don’t start that.”

“I damn near did a dance in my living room when I heard you’d come back,” he said, finally letting her go. “Bad enough to lose Ava and the others, but not Catherine the Great.” Duffy eyed her closely. “How is it? Being home?”

“It’s… weird, but good.”

“Come on. We’ve got time for a cup of coffee before we have to meet the rest of the crew.”

Over coffee he filled her in on some of the agency gossip she’d missed out on: who was jockeying for a promotion, who was probably sleeping with whom, all the things the briefings left out.

“We did learn a few things from Sagittarius I before the Event,” Duffy said. “Mike Ozawa figured out pretty quick that we were receiving the data but you weren’t getting our return messages, so he got the engineers working on it. They think they’ve got it resolved. Guess we’ll find out in a couple of years.”

“Road testing new equipment is always exciting.”

“Tell me about it. That’s the problem with what we do, Cath. There’s only so much they can do to re-create actual conditions on the ground.”

“You know, it’s nice talking to another astronaut again,” Catherine admitted. “Someone who gets it.”

“Catherine, I don’t know if any of us can really get what you went through,” Duffy said, playing with the stirrer in his coffee.

“You’ve been out there, though. You get that. Being alone.” Catherine had expected that the feeling of aloneness would stop once she was home, but it lingered like a bad smell. Even though she was home, sometimes it felt as though David and Aimee weren’t really seeing her when they looked at her. Maybe that was because she still didn’t quite know who she was now. Here at NASA, she’d been part of a unit, her crew, for so long. It felt weird to make a decision without running it by Ava, or to get through a day without Richie’s saying something to make her laugh. It was like missing limbs.

“Yeah,” Duffy said quietly. “I do get that. I’m sorry.”

Catherine smiled at him with a tight expression, fighting to keep her eyes dry. “Yeah. I am, too.” She changed the subject. “How is it being flight commander? How’s your crew?”

Now it was Duffy’s turn to grimace. “Oh God they’re young. They’re so young. I hate them.” She laughed, then listened as he went on to give her some background on each of them. By the time they walked toward another, smaller conference room together, she felt as if they were already familiar to her.

Her first thought on entering the conference room was Oh, they are young. Had she ever been that fresh-faced? Llewellyn wasn’t there, and she and Duffy alone didn’t do much to raise the average age of the room.

Some of the faces she’d seen around JSC. Duffy, she knew, of course, and Cal Morganson, in his role as flight activities director. That ought to be fun, Catherine thought dourly.

John squeezed her shoulder and brought her in to face the rest of the room. “Y’all know Catherine, I’m sure. Catherine, this is my crew.” He indicated a woman with a close-cropped Afro and a flyboy smirk. “Leah Morrison’s our pilot.” Catherine recognized a kindred spirit right away. She would bet money that Morrison had been a test pilot once, too.

“I was there the day you took the B-87 prototype for its test run,” Morrison said, standing and offering her hand. “I’m glad it was you flying that day and not me. I was barely out of Basic at the time.”

Catherine laughed and shook Morrison’s hand. “Yeah, they had to go back to the drawing board with that one. I’m just glad both engines didn’t go out.”

Next down the line was a man with wide brown eyes who looked like a teenager. “This is Zach Navarro, our flight engineer. He’s the baby of the bunch,” Duffy said.

“Hey!” Navarro protested.

“Not my fault you’re a child prodigy, kid.” Duffy ruffled his hair while Navarro made a face, but smiled at Catherine.

“Kevin Park is our mission specialist,” Duffy went on, pointing to a man with pale white skin and a shock of dark hair. “He’s an exobiologist. After what you found up there, he’s hopeful.”

“I’m glad they’re sending you,” Catherine said. “Claire Tomason was a hell of a scientist, but she was a geologist.” Claire had been the baby of their crew, and they’d all been mildly protective of her.

“I can’t wait to see it all for myself,” Park said. “Who knows what we’ll be able to find.”

But there’s nothing else there to find, she thought, although there was no way she could know that. She pushed the thought away and turned her attention to the systems operator, a bubbly blonde named Grace Kowalski. “It’s an honor to meet you, Colonel Wells,” she said. “I was so glad you didn’t die—I mean, I was glad you came back safe.” She pushed up her glasses, flustered. “You know what I mean.”

“I do,” Catherine said. “No worries.”

“Last but not least is the man who’s going to be there to save our asses, Dr. Nate Royer, our physician.”

Nate was attractive, with warm brown skin and an easy smile. And Catherine didn’t miss that he was sitting next to Cal; the two of them looked close, as much friends as colleagues.

“And of course, you’ve already met Cal, our resident cat herder.”

“Colonel Wells.” Cal nodded briefly, and Catherine would’ve sworn the temperature dropped in the room.

John’s phone beeped and he checked it. “Okay, the techs tell me they almost have the simulator ready for us. Hang tight for a bit; soon we’ll be able to take a look at what our new home is going to be like.”

The TRAPPIST-1f simulation was equal parts virtual reality and real-world environmental changes, like temperature, gravitational pull, winds. At first Catherine hadn’t seen the point of her joining in. It wasn’t as if she could verify how accurate they were. The science team was working off the little bit of information that had come back from Sagittarius I, not anything useful from her.

They settled in to wait for the techs to give them the go-ahead, and Morrison scooted over to sit next to Catherine. “Hey, I’ve been dying to ask. Is there anything about flying in ERB Prime that I should know? What’s the handling like?”

Catherine was thrilled to have a question she could actually answer. “Well, you’re hopefully not going to do that much flying in it. At least not in terms of controlling the ship. There’s only one way to go, and that’s forward.” She reached down for her water bottle. “It’s… like being on a track. All you control is the speed, not the direction.”

“What do you think happens if you go off the track?”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

Morrison grinned. “But you tried it, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

Catherine laughed. “Busted. That was part of our mission, to learn as much as we could about the makeup and properties of the wormhole. I did try to steer the ship off course.”

“What happened?”

“Not a damn thing. The ship twitched a little, but that was it. A tunnel. That’s a more accurate description. It’s like flying through a tunnel.” She paused. “Except you can’t hit the wall.”

Morrison looked as if she wished she were taking notes. “How close are the flight simulators to actually flying Sagittarius?”

Catherine had mentored new pilots before, when she was in the air force, but this was something different. She was the first to fly the Sagittarius model ship, and so far, the only. That added a little pressure to get the information right—there was no one else around who could correct her if she got it wrong. “They’re pretty close. As close as sims can get to the real thing, anyway. I think we pulled more Gs on liftoff than the simulators said we would. It was one hell of a push to get us going. Other than that… yeah, pretty close.”

There was a knock at the door and one of the techs stuck her head in. “We’re ready for you in the planetary simulation now.”

The six of them—Catherine plus the Sagittarius II crew, except for Commander Duffy, who was observing with Cal—suited up in the same space suits used on the first mission. The only difference was the VR headsets implanted in the helmets.

They started going through the planned “mission” for the session, gathering “samples” from the environment. The room was hot and humid, close to surface conditions on TRAPPIST-1f. The light dimmed and brought relief to Catherine’s strained eyes.

“You know, this is going to take away all the wonder from actually getting there,” Navarro complained. “It’s gonna feel like standing in a room in Houston.”

Before Catherine could say anything, a strange feeling came over her. She was hot enough to start sweating—that wasn’t so surprising—but it was harder to breathe. They had oxygen on. Even if the atmosphere in the room was a match to the planet’s, the oxygen would counter it.

It wasn’t a memory, exactly. More a feeling of uneasy familiarity. Her skin was crawling and she couldn’t explain why.

“Yeah, except it’s hotter in here than in the other sims we’ve done,” Park said. “And the commute’s a hell of a lot longer. I dunno, this is pretty exciting to me. We get to see another planet without the long trip.”

“Park, are you the kind of guy who spends his vacation touring the world through VR?” asked Morrison. When he didn’t answer, she laughed. “Oh my God, you are. Would you seriously rather spend most of the week exploring Venice via a headset rather than actually going there?”

“It’s not that, it’s just… easier that way,” Park said defensively.

Sweat beaded along Catherine’s temple. Through the VR goggles, she could see the projected landscape of TRAPPIST-1f. It might have been a desert anywhere in the Southwest: rocky ground, hot. The sky was a dull red, and was crowded with the other TRAPPIST planets, close enough to be clearly visible. They’ve got it wrong. Everything’s wrong. Something’s missing. It was a feeling, a deep, unsettling feeling, but it didn’t come with any memory of what the landscape had really been like. A shadow fell, and something glimmered in the corner of her eye. She turned sharply to the left. Nothing was there, but the feeling persisted. I’m being watched.

“All right, enough with the chatter,” Duffy interjected. “Wells, your vitals are going wonky. Heart and blood pressure rates up. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.” There was a bitter, coppery taste in the back of her throat, adrenaline flooding her body. She laughed shakily. “You guys must have gotten this sim close to the real thing. I’m having déjà vu.” Of course you’re being watched. Half of NASA is observing you.

“Catherine, are you remembering anything?” That was Cal’s voice.

“No, it’s just… weird. This feels familiar.” Familiar but wrong. It was as if her vision were doubled, one image superimposed on the other, but the image in the background was too blurry for her to see it.

“Catherine, your blood pressure is shooting up, and I’m not liking your heart rate. If your vitals don’t stabilize, I’m going to pull you out,” Duffy warned.

“It’s okay. I’ll be fine,” Catherine insisted, even as dark spots clouded her vision.

The stones are missing. It was her last thought before she fell to her knees and everything went black.