Astrid smiled as if Cai had asked the exact right question. ‘So our engine and all the electrical systems we keep running mean that we are making excess heat from electrical energy all the time, and the job of the thermal controls are to get rid of the heat, to cool us and all the equipment down—’
‘Only when all systems are nominal,’ Cai said. ‘Right now, the thermal controls are overcompensating, so we’re losing more heat than we’re making.’
‘After we follow my plan we might even have enough oxygen to schedule a second EVA and fix that manually,’ Astrid said. ‘Thermal control is pretty basic engineering, at least on the hardware side. Eliot could do it. If we just take off some of the radiators that are absorbing the heat from the ship and pouring it out into space.’
‘That sounds risky,’ said Poppy. ‘What if rescue doesn’t come, or comes too late?’
‘We’ll be in the exact same situation we are now,’ said Jesse. ‘Only without a lifeboat.’
‘Exactly!’ Igor’s voice was startling. ‘I would rather half of you made it home safely than—’
‘Take a chance to make it to Terra-Two?’ Astrid interrupted. ‘Who’s to say that, after us, there will be another mission anytime soon? What if this is our only chance for the next couple of generations? If we come back, will people want to sign up for the Off-World Colonization Programme? What if governments decide it was not worth the money – everything that was sacrificed to get us just this far. There was talk that the Orlando mission might be discontinued entirely even before we left.’
‘Astrid!’ Igor slammed his hand down on the table and Astrid dropped her pen in surprise. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of this. The decision has been made.’ Tears sprang to Astrid’s eyes but she fought to stay strong. She had been trained to listen to the captain’s orders and yet Jesse could see her entire body was shaking with anger.
‘You’re just giving up,’ she said. ‘The shuttle can leave without me. I’m staying here.’ She knocked the papers off the table so they scattered on the floor and stormed out of the room. In the silence that followed, Jesse heard the heavy sound of her boots as she climbed down the hatch.
For a moment, Jesse allowed himself to imagine Astrid’s plan. If they were rescued, then this time next year they could be in interstellar space. But, during training, Jesse had been taught that there was no disaster worse than mutiny. That the crew in a spacecraft needed to operate like one body, with the commander as the head. Jesse had not truly believed it until he and Harry had steered the shuttle out of danger. The two of them had abandoned their disagreements and navigated the shuttle together in a ballet of technical skill, Harry taking the lead and Jesse anticipating his movements. So he swallowed his objections and kept quiet.
After the meeting, he headed down to the crew module. It was baffling to him that the ship was already a hive of activity. Eliot was on the lower deck, packing up their spacesuits for the flight home. Poppy was helping Fae to pick out the rations they required for the coming months. Harry was helping Juno download files from the ship’s computer. Jesse watched her for the seconds it took her to notice him. If he had not been chosen for the mission he would not have been given the chance to love her – and for a moment fate seemed kind. But then she spotted him, and Jesse remembered that yesterday they’d had more than twenty years together and now they had only a few months. The loss was devastating.
‘It seems crazy to me,’ he said, rubbing his eyes, as if he still believed that perhaps this afternoon was a terrible dream, ‘that we’re just leaving like this. Without them.’
‘I know.’ Juno twisted a cable around in her hands and bundled it into a storage box. The whole ship was like a music festival an hour after the headline act, grim industrious stage hands working to take the whole show down and pack it up, no time for sentiment.
‘What will happen?’ he asked her.
‘We’ll board in two hours,’ she said.
‘I mean, when we get back?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, and they gazed at each other in silence.
Jesse had already pictured an alternate life for them. Imagined Juno switching from biochemistry to politics, trekking the globe to negotiate treaties, conversing in six different tongues, penning laws that were like her Damocles Document writ large. Jesse imagined himself kneading the land, working with long-haired men and women on permaculture, building compost heaps and saving rainforests. They were different people, he realized with a sinking in his chest, going different places.
He left without saying anything.
In their cabin, Jesse found that Eliot had already stripped his bed of its sheets and peeled his posters off the walls, and even Harry had taken down a few of his things. The room pulsed with the same aching vacancy as their dormitories in Dalton at the end of term. Belongings packed up, the light glaring off naked walls stripped clumsily of posters and notices. A sorry sight, the nicked metal bedframes, the plastic mattress covers, the suddenly silent halls.
Jesse looked at his untidy bed, at the draped pashminas he had used instead of curtains, the glittering dream catchers, the bamboo wind chimes that only ever sang in the morning when he leapt to his feet or when someone slammed the door. He decided, then, that if he was going to leave, he would take nothing with him.
Chapter 44
ELIOT
2 P.M.
AFTER COMMANDER BOVARIN DISMISSED them from the kitchen, Eliot headed down to the lower deck to pack up the spacesuits the Beta would take with them on the shuttle back to Earth. Their spacewalk that morning seemed like a terribly long time ago, now.
Taking apart his spacesuit, Eliot considered, as he often did, what a marvel of engineering it was; eleven layers of material, ortho-fabric, aluminized mylar, neoprene and stainless steel. If Eliot alone possessed all the skills and equipment, it would take him around two and a half years to build himself one, and would cost him about £9 million.
The ripped and bloodied shell of Commander Sheppard’s old suit was slumped in the corridor outside, and it hurt Eliot to see it.
In the same way, during the spacewalk that morning, he had seen the damage that the service module had sustained with his own eyes. It had been torn like a limb, shot right through the middle by some speeding object, wires and severed piping spilling out like organs, condensation frozen in uneven bubbles of ice all over the blackened metal. The sight of it almost induced a sympathetic ache inside Eliot, and he guessed that Igor had felt the same way too.
The Damocles wasn’t just a machine; it was a work of art. When Eliot looked at diagrams of its engine he saw years of love, the dedication of dozens of minds, the loyal work of a thousand hands.
Igor had told them that they would have to return home, but as soon as Astrid had suggested his plan to the crew – dismantling the service module on the escape shuttle and rewiring it to the Damocles – Eliot was imagining it. How it could be done, which valves to switch, which wires to reroute.
It came as no surprise to him when, almost thirty minutes into his work, he heard someone coming down the hatch, stepping carefully. It was Astrid, still dressed in her flight suit, holding two of Igor’s manuals and a box of tools. When she spotted him she looked up and down the corridor just to make sure they were alone.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘I need your help.’ She glanced over her shoulder again and then looked at the work that Eliot was doing. ‘Is Igor helping you with that?’
‘I don’t need his help,’ Eliot said. ‘He’s on the control deck.’