This was not going quite the way Cal had planned. “I know the history,” he started.
“I lived the history, Cal.” Aaron stood up, pacing to his window. “Without Paul Lindholm schmoozing his ass off on Capitol Hill, neither of us would have a job right now. The days after we lost that signal were some pretty fucking dark days. There was so much outrage, there was worry that NASA would lose most of its funding for its projects. Paul saved us all.”
Paul Lindholm was a rarity: a former astronaut who’d made it into the NASA administrator’s chair. He exuded an air of hail-fellow-well-met with bright-blue eyes and graying blond hair, and smiled too much for Cal’s liking. On Capitol Hill, though, he inspired confidence and had won funding for NASA even in some of the bleakest situations. Cal trusted him about as much as he trusted any politician: not much.
“But how much worse will it be if we wind up losing a second mission, and it comes out later that we had the information to prevent that?”
Aaron sighed and folded his arms. “All right. No promises, but what have you got?”
“Does Wells have access to the archives on B2?”
“She hasn’t asked for access, so no. Why would she need it? None of her records are down there, as far as I know.”
“I found her down there yesterday. The day she joined us on the TRAPPIST simulation.”
“Well, she might’ve—” Aaron stopped. There was nothing else down on that level, and certainly nothing Catherine might need. Cal knew—he had checked already. “What did she say?”
“That she’d been in the archives doing research,” Cal said. “But she hesitated and her cheeks were flushed, like she was lying.”
“Maybe she got lost, and just felt embarrassed about it.”
“How could she be lost? She was at NASA for years before she left.”
“I know, but with the memory loss she’s experienced, it could happen. And that would certainly make for an embarrassing situation.”
“She didn’t look embarrassed,” Cal insisted. “She looked guilty.”
“Guilty or not, this isn’t the sort of thing that warrants postponing an entire mission. Any longer than two weeks and we’ll miss the launch window. The next one might not be for months.” NASA’s engineers had carefully calculated the Earth’s rotation and position around the sun to come up with the optimum launch window. Anything outside that window ran the risk of Sagittarius running low on fuel too soon. They were already cutting it close. Finding another window could take months, possibly years.
“I’m not saying postpone. Not yet.” Cal debated telling him about the automatic way she told part of her story, and how false that felt to him. Feelings, though, weren’t going to get through to Aaron.
Aaron fell silent for a time, going back to his desk and sitting down. He was thinking it through, and that was a hell of a lot further than Cal had expected to get today. “This program is Paul Lindholm’s baby. It was his initial idea; he’s set all our benchmarks. He’s not going to sit by and let us play with timelines and mission schedules because you’ve got a feeling.”
“If it turns out that I’m right, it’s not gonna be just a feeling.” He took a quick, discreet look at his notes. “Look. Catherine’s memory loss is worse than Commander Addy’s was. Say it was caused by something out there, something we don’t know about. Commander Addy may be our best-case scenario instead of the worst, and I know nobody wants that.”
“Cal, if Sagittarius II goes down, it doesn’t mean just your career, or my career.” He pinned Cal to his seat with a dark-eyed look. “As hard as Lindholm fought to keep our funding after Sagittarius I, and the promises he made to Congress about the program’s potential, if we go down, we might drag the rest of NASA down with us.”
Paul Lindholm, Cal thought, was either a fool or the single most optimistic man on the planet.
“All the more reason to make sure we’re not sending our crew into a bad situation,” Cal insisted. “We can’t put them at risk.”
Aaron laughed harshly. “I’m sorry, did you just say that we shouldn’t put the people who signed up to let us strap explosives to their asses and launch them trillions of miles from home at risk? Risk is what they signed up for, Cal. We minimize what we can, but the Sagittarius program is about more than just individual people; it’s about the greater good. The crew of Sagittarius I paid the price for that, but they knew they might.”
“I know what the normal operational risks are; you know I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the risks that the crew didn’t sign up for. The ones they don’t know about.”
“Oh, come on,” Aaron said. “You know there’re plenty of risks they never know about. If they knew everything, they’d never have signed up. We talked about the Longbow Protocol, remember? You didn’t argue against it. And you, in fact, argued that we should keep the information from everyone on board Sagittarius except for the commander.”
“That’s different.” Longbow was a thing Cal didn’t let himself think about too often. “We designed Longbow in case Sagittarius’s return put the entire planet at risk. Longbow is about protecting the planet from alien infection or radiation. If—God forbid—we ever trigger it, we’ll be sacrificing six people in order to save billions. You won’t balk at that, but you’re hesitating at stopping and taking a second look?”
“So what are you suggesting we do?”
“I don’t know. Stop the mission clock until we’ve got this figured out. Look, we’re talking about sending six people into an unknown situation, one where things have already been spectacularly fucked up, on the off chance that it won’t happen again, so that maybe we’ll find a planet to colonize.” Common sense was taking a close look at the storm brewing on Aaron’s face and telling him to shut up, but Cal and common sense didn’t always see eye to eye. He pushed on. “Sending Sagittarius II without more information could mean sacrificing six people so you can cover your ass with Lindholm.”
Sometimes the only way Cal could see the line was when he looked behind him to see if he’d crossed it. Judging by the look on Aaron’s face, he’d cleared it by several feet.
“Let it go. I’m not postponing an entire mission because you think a traumatized woman is acting weird. If I’d gone through what she has, I’d be acting weird, too.”
“But—”
“We’re done. Humanity has to find another home. Now, before there’s an emergency threatening Earth. Sagittarius is moving forward. Let this go.”
“Yes sir.” Cal managed to keep any trace of sullenness out of his voice as he rose from the chair, dismissed.
He thought of Nate and the rest of the crew, how they’d all looked to him. He had no intention of letting anything go.
9
THE SATURDAY OF Aimee’s graduation party, the weather was glorious: warm, but not too warm as the day slowly turned into evening. Catherine checked the ice in the coolers and refilled one of the canapé trays spread across a long table against the far wall. The house was overflowing with a mix of Aimee’s friends, David and Catherine’s friends and colleagues, and a few family members from both sides, including Julie, who’d arrived last night. They spilled through the kitchen and into the yard, filling every seat on the patio.
In the middle of it all, Aimee moved from group to group with utter ease, a gracious host. As Catherine watched, Aimee charmed Aaron Llewellyn, one of the few members of the Sagittarius II staff to make it—understandable, since launch preparations were getting more intense by the day. Catherine was lucky she was able to be here.