‘Good. I need to get into the escape shuttle.’
‘Right now?’ Eliot put down the helmet he was holding.
‘This can’t have been the plan, can it?’ Astrid asked. She looked more like Juno in the half-light. Her eyes were wet, her lashes pearly and sticking together. ‘For us to fail like this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Eliot said.
‘I feel like nothing good can ever happen to me if I let this dream go,’ Astrid said. ‘I don’t want to die like Tessa Dalton, just looking and looking at the stars. I dream about Terra-Two so vividly that this ship sometimes feels like the dream. I can feel the rain, on my face.’ She closed her eyes and Eliot thought he could see it too, the salty drops from Terran clouds rolling down her cheeks. ‘I’d rather die than let go.’
Eliot felt an inkling of it too. But for him it was about the machines. Inside Eliot, there were robots longing to be built, and the only thing more tragic than never using them was never building them. He thought about Igor’s machines, about the most spectacular one of alclass="underline" the gravity-assist drive. Igor had sacrificed his life for his work, and if they left now it would amount to nothing. Eliot wanted to see how it felt to slingshot around the resplendent rings of Saturn, to soar through interstellar space.
‘My whole life has been about this mission.’ Astrid’s voice was low.
‘Mine too,’ he said.
‘So,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘will you help me to save it? I need to get into the escape shuttle, but Igor has locked me out. I need an engineer-authorized ID badge to get in. And you’re the only one who can help me.’ With his help, the plan could work. They didn’t have to leave Igor, Cai, Sheppard and Fae to die on the Damocles.
‘Don’t you want to see what it’s like?’ she asked. ‘If it was all worth it?’
Eliot said yes because, even after all that had happened, even after watching the crew on Orlando disappear, even after losing the girl he loved, this remained. He needed to know.
Chapter 45
JESSE
4 P.M.
BEFORE THE LIGHTS CAME back on, Jesse gathered with the rest of the Beta in the crew module to say goodbye to the seniors. Poppy was sobbing quietly, wiping tears away with the sleeve of the old Dalton leavers’ hoodie that she wore on top of her flight suit. It said ‘Class of ’12’ on the back, with the names of the school’s ‘Final Fifty’ printed inside the numbers. She and Juno were searching under cushions and chairs in the crew module as Juno ticked items off an inventory. As they’d had so little time to pack, the room looked as if it had been in the path of a hurricane, blankets slipping off sofas, wires hanging from open equipment panels and trailing out of drawers. Chess pieces toppled, three knights rolled under the spine of a book, Harry Potter in Korean, a rook mired in a puddle of baked beans.
Fae emerged from the infirmary still wearing what she had been yesterday, hair falling loose of her bun. When Jesse asked how their commander was doing she simply shook her head sadly.
Cai and Igor were helping Harry gather the equipment needed for their flight, piling it up near the hatch. Juno looked up from her clipboard and said, ‘Astrid should be here by now.’
‘I haven’t seen Astrid,’ Poppy said, her arms full of books. ‘Not for the past few hours. Or Eliot, for that matter.’
Fae hissed, and glanced at her watch. ‘Now is not the time for them to be wandering around.’
‘I’ll look for them in the engine room,’ Igor said, heading back in that direction.
‘And I’ll do a quick sweep of the greenhouse,’ Cai said.
They stood in silence for a moment. Everyone absorbed by their own thoughts of the trip ahead. The small cabin in which they would live for six months was nothing compared to the spacious beauty of the Damocles. It broke Jesse’s heart to say goodbye, but as the hours approached a shameful, secret excitement began to dawn inside him as he contemplated Earth, his sister and his parents. Returning a kind of hero.
Fae broke the silence. ‘So, as there are no members of the senior crew on this last mission home, Harrison Bellgrave is now acting commander.’
Harry looked up, his watery eyes strangely vacant. ‘Me…’ He fingered the badge on his lapel, the bronze pin that he’d fought for years to wear. Then he glanced up at Jesse. ‘You know what, Jesse Solloway? I don’t know how or where you learned to fly like that but… it was the greatest thing I’ve seen in all my years of Command School. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.’ Tearing off his badge, he turned to the others and said, ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Commander Sheppard… and Jesse.’
Then he did something Jesse had never imagined he would: he handed over the badge. It glinted in the low light, cold to the touch. ‘I know it’s not worth much, now that we’re going back to Earth, but…’
Jesse didn’t know what to say.
‘You did save us,’ Poppy said, and she flung her arm over his shoulder and kissed his cheek with a loud smack of her lips.
‘I’m proud of you,’ Fae said, putting her hand on Jesse’s shoulder.
‘And glad you came with us,’ Juno said, her eyes warm. She embraced him too, and Jesse’s chest swelled with gladness.
‘All of us are,’ Harry said.
It was all he’d ever wanted. Their acceptance, their warm embrace, and it had come too late.
As Fae reached for Jesse the main lights came on. For a moment they appeared so bright they bleached his vision.
‘What’s happening?’ Harry rubbed his eyes as if he’d just woken up.
‘I don’t know,’ Poppy said with a gasp. In the same moment, the vents along the sides of the room activated, and air whooshed out like smoke. ‘Maybe everything is fixed?’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Fae said, running over to examine a booting-up monitor on one of the walls.
Juno clenched her fists. She already knew the answer.
‘It’s Astrid.’
Chapter 46
POPPY
4.30 P.M.
POPPY HAD ALWAYS HATED arguments in her own house. One morning at breakfast her mother had told her boyfriend at the time that she would be home late, words that – from their facial expressions – clearly sent shockwaves down through some unseen well of domestic resentment. He’d reached across the table and slapped her mother with such a hard whack that blood sprang from her nose, and she looked around, her eyes whirling in surprise. Poppy had stared between the adults in horror and, even afterwards, when they were making tea for each other and kissing, something of that fear remained. Buried deep in Poppy and transformed into a sticky dread of conflict, a need to please, to plan the parties, to keep everyone smiling.
Which was why she would have said anything to quell the argument that ensued when Astrid and Eliot emerged from the lower deck. Igor had found them in the shuttle. They’d disabled it and, against orders, enacted their plan. Taking its life support apart and attaching it to the Damocles.
The entire crew were swept into a flurry of action after they realized what had happened. Poppy ran up to the communications deck, checking different channels to see if anyone had replied to their distress signal. Over the headset she could hear nothing but a vicious hiss of static, although a data file with a Russian title was loading on one of the monitor screens. Hope flushed through her. Was rescue coming?
As she reach over to grab the mouse, Harry burst into the room and shouted at Astrid, who was seated on the control deck opposite, transcribing figures from one of the screens.