‘Eliot.’ There it was again, a woman’s voice. He froze and looked around, expecting to find Fae standing behind him, but no one was in the corridor and the cabin doors of all the senior crew were closed.
‘Eliot!’ It was louder that time, with a shrill panicked edge. He looked around in alarm.
‘Who is it?’ he said to the empty corridor. But no reply came.
He climbed through the next hatch and emerged on the lower deck, where most of the lights were off and the hum and whirr of machinery was the loudest. Eliot swallowed, noticing that his forearms were quilled with goosebumps. The games room was empty. After Europa, none of them wanted to spend much time there anymore.
The sound of banging made him start. It was echoing up the long hall just as it had that day when Harry locked Jesse in the airlock. ‘Help!’ someone screamed.
It was coming from the opposite direction to the airlock, behind the door that led to the greenhouse. Eliot ran along the corridor, opened the hatch to the bridge and entered. It was dank as a cave, the sound of his footsteps echoing all around. Broken glass crunched under his feet.
Further ahead, someone was splashing in the reservoir – the deep pond where the ship’s water was stored. As he rushed there, he noticed the chemical smell of the agents they used to clean it. Someone was thrashing inside it, screaming ‘Help me!’, head surging up, then bobbing back under floes of blue ice that clinked against the sides of the pool.
Eliot whipped passed the trees and towards the water. ‘Astrid?’
Who in the Beta could not swim?
He didn’t have time to slow before he approached the reservoir, so he hit the water running. The ice on the surface was sharp against the soles of his feet, but that pain was nothing compared to the shock of the frozen water as it clamped like jaws around him.
It was only waist-deep, but the extreme cold tore through his body and his muscles seized. It was all he could do not to scream at the pain of it. Someone exploded to the surface again with a cry of horror, the water around her churned to foam from her panicked flailing.
Ara.
Her eyes were large and flashing silver with terror. He reached out his hand to grab her, buried his clumsy fingers into the folds of her vest, grabbed her waist and hauled her into his arms.
‘I’ve got you,’ he told her, pulling her close to him, pulling her head out of the water and wiping her long dark hair from her eyes. ‘I’ve got you.’
She couldn’t speak yet because she was coughing water up from her lungs.
‘You came from outside, didn’t you?’ Eliot glanced up at the vault of stars above the greenhouse. ‘I knew there was someone outside.’
What was better than the weight of her in his arms? Her fingers were thin, longer than he remembered. He had forgotten so many details. The jasmine smell of her, the baby hairs that haloed her forehead and dusted the backs of her cheekbones, the eczema on her slender wrists and around her ears. Her legs, the birthmark the shape of Peru high up on her inner thigh. He’d forgotten other things too, like how big and dark her eyes were, like singularities; they seemed to suck all the light out of the room. His panic turned, then, to elation. It was possible to save her. He had saved her.
Chapter 51
ELIOT
12.05.12
ELIOT WOULD RELIVE THAT final day so often that it took on a dreamlike quality in his mind. On the day before the launch, Ara had told him that she couldn’t go through with it. They’d been in the back of the car, driving towards the British Interplanetary Society for the tree-planting ceremony.
‘What do you mean you can’t go through with it?’ he’d asked, glancing up to the mirror to check if the driver was listening.
‘Exactly that,’ she told him in a whisper, leaning across the empty seat between them.
‘Cold feet?’
She shook her head as the driver stopped at a traffic light. London’s sunlit skyline flashed past her head, the dome of St Paul’s gleaming like a Fabergé egg, jostling up against the modern monuments that pierced the clouds.
‘Let’s climb out and run that way,’ she turned and pointed beyond the river, ‘and just keep going. You and me.’
‘What?’ Eliot was unsure whether or not to laugh. ‘Ara, we’re just here for the ceremony. And then we have to get back to the space centre.’
‘I’m not going back,’ she said, and when she turned to him her eyes were shining, the colour of iron. She took a deep breath, holding back tears, and clutched at her seatbelt. The car started up again, heading down towards Vauxhall.
‘What if we get there and there’s nothing?’
‘Then we’d still have made it,’ Eliot said. ‘Do you think the Apollo crew looked up at the moon and asked, “What if we get there and it’s just a rock?’ ”
‘Maybe not. But no one is keen to follow after them. It’s not as if they discovered America.’
‘True,’ Eliot agreed. ‘But why are you saying these things?’
‘Because I know something,’ she said. Glanced up again at the driver’s mirror. He was a quiet uniformed man who Eliot had not met before, keeping his eyes on the traffic.
‘I know that we might not get to Terra-Two,’ Ara said.
Later on, those words would toll like a bell in his nightmares, but that day he’d just shaken his head with confusion. ‘What?’
‘Do you remember anything about the Williamson Inquiry?’ Eliot squinted at her. He vaguely recalled the name. ‘The one commissioned by Save the Children to look into human rights abuses at space academies.’
‘Oh…’ He waved a hand dismissively. He’d heard talk of this on the news for a little while, and the directors of the space agency and their teachers had only ever referred to it with contempt or vague amusement. A few months after, it had been suspended.
‘My dad knows a lawyer who worked on it,’ Ara said. ‘And he told me…’ she took a deep breath, ‘that they think we have a less than twenty per cent chance of making it to Terra-Two.’
‘What…?’ Eliot’s head was spinning a little. Ara blinked back tears and continued.
‘It’s lots of things. The skeletal support from the ground, the shortcuts taken by the UK Space Agency to win the race, the fact that Igor Bovarin’s gravity-assist drive has never been tested on a manned mission. And he told me that—’
‘No.’ Eliot waved a hand to stop her. A dizzy wave of carsickness was rushing over him. ‘That can’t be true. Your dad’s not a scientist.’
‘No, but there were independent scientists and engineers and professors acting as witnesses for the inquiry. And they all said the same thing. That the mission is destined to fail.’
‘No, you said twenty per cent.’
‘Okay, it’s eighty per cent destined to fail. That’s a one in five chance of success. Not great odds.’
‘Better than rolling a dice,’ Eliot said.
‘A die. Singular. Are you even listening to me?’
‘Yes.’ Eliot looked out at the water. ‘I just don’t believe you. It would be terrible if we failed. A humiliation for the UKSA. Why would they send out a ship with little chance of surviving?’
‘Because, once we leave, it won’t be their problem anymore. We’d reach Terra-Two in twenty-three years. But once we launch the gravity-assist drive and enter interstellar space, we’ll be travelling at close to light speed. In Earth time, we won’t reach Terra-Two for decades, not even including the time it takes for them to receive any messages from us. Do you remember the Shēngmìng? The Chinese generation ship that basically went missing. It was all about the launch for them. Showing the country’s strength in the wake of the recession, and a year later they basically lost all contact with the ship.’