“You know you’re going to have to deal with that sooner or later.” Ava’s voice came from over Catherine’s shoulder.
“Deal with what?” Catherine tried to sound perplexed, smiling as if she didn’t know what Ava was talking about, but Ava didn’t buy it.
“It’s a small ship, Catherine. Everybody knows something happened between you and Tom.”
“Shit,” Catherine said, stomach sinking. “Ava, it only happened once. We were drunk, and—”
“I don’t care when it started or when it ended; all I care about is that Tom has been at less than one hundred percent since. I kept hoping he would move past it, but he hasn’t, and now that we’re here, we need him at one hundred percent.”
“I’m not sure what to do,” Catherine said with a sigh. “It’s been over a month, and he won’t let it go.”
“You’re the only one who can try, and keep trying.”
Catherine was afraid to ask, but she had to. “How much trouble are we in for this?”
“Cath, I’m not even calling this a verbal reprimand. Call it being a worried friend. Deal with it before it blows up, and I’ll keep pretending I don’t know anything.”
“Thanks, Ava.”
“Cath… be gentle if you can. We don’t have a lot of extra space where he can blow off steam.”
Within a few days of landing, she had her first opportunity to talk to him. They were scheduled together for the first EVA on the planet’s surface, just after they finished setting up the Habitat. They reached their assigned area and started to work. Tom didn’t say anything at all, and Catherine tried to figure out how to bring it up.
“Well… we’re finally here,” she managed. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Tom didn’t look up at her; he was busily scraping some of the lichen they’d spotted earlier off the rock in front of him into a vial and sealing it up. Every bit of contact with the lichen produced small gray-green puffs of what Catherine assumed were spores.
She checked the list of EVA objectives they needed to fulfill. Acquiring the initial samples was the biggest priority, so Claire could get to work analyzing everything. “I can barely believe we’ve found actual life. I can’t wait to hear how folks are reacting back home.” Communication to Earth would take a long time. All they could do for now was send all the data they gathered and wait.
Tom’s flat voice filtered through his faceplate, and he didn’t look up at her. “Yeah.”
Catherine took a deep breath. Standing out in the middle of an uninhabited planet seemed to be about as private as things were going to get for them.
Catherine took Tom’s arm. “Tom… while we’re out here, can we talk for a minute?”
“Now?”
“I’m sorry, but… I can’t keep avoiding this. What happened on New Year’s… never should have happened.”
“Really.” His tone remained uninflected.
“Tom…”
“No, I’m serious. It was ages ago, and you’re standing here telling me it was all a big mistake. So tell me, if it was such a mistake, why’d you do it?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that. I wish I did.” Catherine fidgeted with her gloves. They were standing close to each other, even though the suit comms didn’t require it. She could see the growing anger on his face and wished she couldn’t.
“Well, I do. You were bored and maybe you were, I don’t know, pissed at David about something. And I let you. Cath… you have to know how I feel about you, how I’ve felt about you for years.”
Oh God, don’t say it, please don’t say it.
“I love you.” He said it. “And I swore to myself I wouldn’t tell you, because you’re married, but then New Year’s happened… and now you barely even talk to me.”
“I’m sorry that you’re upset, Tom—”
“You can’t tell me that night didn’t mean something! You weren’t happy with David before you left. I know you weren’t.”
“I was!” I know things were tense before I left, but I wasn’t actually unhappy… was I? “This doesn’t have anything to do with David. Ava knows. Hell, everybody knows. If you can’t get your shit together, sooner or later someone’s going to have to report that we broke the regs. You’re risking our careers with this.”
“Screw my career! We could have something here. I’m not willing to let it go because of some outdated rules.”
“Oh, outdated rules, like the fact that I’m married?” She needed to hold on to her patience, but honest to God, he was turning this into some sort of thwarted true-love scenario in his head. “Tom, we’re done. It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I have to put my family and this mission first.”
“Y-you can’t, Catherine, you can’t. Don’t do this to me.” Anger was fighting its way past the hurt in Tom’s eyes.
“I already did.” As empty a gesture as it might have been, she reached out to put her hand on his arm. “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt—”
“Don’t touch me. I don’t need your fucking pity.” He started off toward the rocky hills that edged deeper into the dark side of the planet.
“Tom, wait!”
“Leave me alone. I’ll finish the EVA. Just give me a few goddamned minutes, will you?”
She sighed. “Stay in radio contact.”
By the time they brought their samples back to the Habitat, Tom had cooled off some, but his responses to her and everyone else were monosyllabic before he headed off to shower.
Ava caught Catherine’s arm. “You talked to him?”
Catherine, pretty done with talking herself, nodded. “I don’t think it helped.”
“It had to be done.” Ava didn’t look any happier about it than Catherine, despite her words. “Oy, it’s going to be awkward around here for a bit. It’s a small enough place without somebody sulking over a breakup.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” Catherine was saying that a lot today.
Ava put a companionable arm around her shoulder and gave her a shake. “Honest truth? Mission Control expected something like this might happen. Six years away from home, someone was bound to get an itch. We dealt with it, it’s over. Come on, let’s go see what Claire makes of your samples.”
Ava could put a good face on it if she wanted to, but Catherine had seen Tom’s expression, and she doubted that it was over.
8
“YOU’D THINK BY this point we’d have managed to do every sort of low-gravity experiment known to man,” Zach Navarro complained.
The crew of Sagittarius II was crowded into Cal’s office, perched on a couple of borrowed chairs, Cal’s desk, the windowsill.
“That’s the point,” Kevin Park was saying. “Experiments are supposed to be repeatable. So, we repeat them.”
“Again and again and again,” Navarro said.
“Trust me, you’ll be glad to have something to do.” Cal was in his office chair, his feet up on the desk. “You’re going to be stuck in that ship for over two years on the trip out. Plus, you’re going to be on TRAPPIST-1f for less time than Sagittarius I was, so we’ve got to fit in as much prep work as possible on the trip there.”
“Did we ever find out why Colonel Wells took so much longer to get home?” Kevin asked.
“Initial analysis of the ship’s trajectory suggests she was just… wandering for a while before she reentered the wormhole,” Cal said. “She may have had navigation problems on her own. We won’t know unless she remembers. But you”—he changed his tone to something more upbeat—“won’t have to worry about that. Because we hired Duffy for his excellent sense of direction.”