Catherine couldn’t believe it. “Richie, you sure?”
“I’m sure.” His voice was unrecognizable, low and dark. “I saw the damage.”
“But why would somebody do that?”
“I can think of several reasons, all worse than the one before,” Ava said, folding her arms. “And it’s more than that. I had Richie dig deeper into the problems we’ve been having with the oxygenator. It looks as if it’s being tampered with, too.”
“What? That— I mean, anyone who’s messing with that has to know they’re putting themselves in danger, too!” Catherine’s head spun. The oxygenator filtered the air and made sure the inside of the Habitat was as close to Earth’s atmosphere as possible. Anything that needed oxygen to survive needed the oxygenator. “What are we going to do?”
Ava leaned closer to the mic. “You and I are going to go over the security footage and see what we find.”
Catherine had never wanted so badly to be wrong, but only one person kept coming to mind, one person who had been quieter than usual, more withdrawn. God, she thought, hoping she was wrong.
What about the shadow in the air lock?
No way. That she pushed firmly out of her mind.
Richie went to double-check the rest of their essential equipment while Catherine and Ava divided up the security footage for the twenty-four hours before Catherine and Claire took the rover out. The two of them painstakingly made their way through it, Catherine on her side of the observation glass, Ava on hers. Hours later, Catherine found the smoking gun. Early that morning, long before anyone else was up and about, the cameras showed Tom Wetherbee sneaking into the rover bay and opening a panel on the side. Catherine told Ava the video time stamp, almost too shocked to speak, and they watched as he did something they couldn’t quite make out, then closed the panel.
“Go back to Day 1033,” Ava said. “Check the footage around the equipment room.”
“You didn’t do this before?”
“No. I didn’t think it was sabotage.”
The two women scrolled through the footage and Catherine drew a quiet breath when—again, in the middle of the Habitat’s night cycle—Tom showed up. He went straight to the oxygenator.
It had failed for the first time the following day.
“What are we going to do?” Catherine asked.
“We’ll have to question him. Confine him to quarters while we try to figure this out. At least to start.” Ava’s brow creased. “I don’t know. I want to get a message to NASA. They may not be able to reply, but they at least should know what we’ve found.” She shook her head.
“I take it they didn’t give you any contingencies in the case of a crew member trying to kill everybody?” Catherine meant for it to sound dry and sardonic, but the truth of the statement, once spoken, was unavoidable. Tom tried to kill us. Or at least hurt us.
“Not… quite like this.” Ava rubbed her forehead. Catherine didn’t envy the position she was in. “Cath, I’m going to bring him in here to talk to him. Maybe he’ll say something in front of you that he wouldn’t in front of just me.”
“And here I thought I was going to get bored in quarantine,” Catherine said.
When Tom came in to the observation area, he rushed to the window. “I heard what happened. Are you all right?” Worry was written all over his face. It looked real to Catherine. “I’m fine for now.” She glanced over his shoulder at Ava, who looked equally nonplussed. “We’ll see if I come down with anything.”
“What’s going on?” he asked, and now he looked between her and Ava. “Is there something I can do to help?”
“Tom, sit down.” Ava gestured to a seat and took one herself. She’s calmer than I would be in her shoes, Catherine thought.
“What’s wrong?” He looked worried about more than just Catherine now.
“Were you in the garage at all last night?” Ava asked.
“Last night?” Tom shook his head. “No. I haven’t been out there since… well, whenever my last EVA was.”
He was lying. He had to be lying, but damned if Catherine could read any sign of it on his face.
“All right.” Ava nodded. “What did you do last night, then?”
“Nothing unusual…” Tom looked to Catherine and she thought she saw a trace of fear in his eyes. “What’s going on? Why do you think I was in the garage?”
Catherine glanced at Ava through the glass and she gave a faint nod, so Catherine drew a breath. “Tom, there’s security footage of you. We both saw it. You went into the garage and did something to the rover. The one Claire and I were in.”
“No, there’s some sort of mistake!” His hands gripped the edges of the table, his knuckles going white. “I didn’t do that. Cath, I know we’ve had a rough time, but I would never hurt you; you have to know that.”
She would have thought so once, but after seeing that video she wasn’t sure anymore. Rather than answering, Catherine called the footage up on her tablet and turned it to the glass for Tom to see.
Tom watched and started shaking his head as soon as he saw himself head for the rover. “No. I didn’t do that. It’s a fake.” He looked between them like a trapped animal. “Richie. He’s got access to all the security systems, and he’s been pissed at me for ages. He could have changed the footage, edited it somehow.”
He couldn’t expect them to believe that. Catherine sat back and looked at him, folding her arms.
“I swear it wasn’t me!”
Ava tensed, and Catherine worried that there was no one else in the room with her for backup if Tom got violent. “Tom,” Ava said quietly, “I promise you, I’ll look into that possibility, but in the meantime, I have to restrict you to your quarters. You understand that, don’t you?”
“I do, but…” Tom didn’t look violent. He looked lost. If Catherine weren’t literally looking at the video footage, she would have believed him.
“All right. We’re going to do that now, okay? And if you didn’t do it, we’ll figure out who did.” Ava spoke to him as if she were talking him down off a ledge. “You’ve got to trust me, Tom. All I want is to make sure we’re all safe. You want that, too, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course I do.”
Ava took Tom by the arm and he didn’t resist. As she led him out, Catherine slumped against her seat. Two crew members out of commission. How the hell were the other four going to keep everything going? And if Tom really was a danger to them, what could they do, so far from home and on their own?
13
“FOR NEARLY SIX years, we mourned the loss of Sagittarius and her crew.” Paul Lindholm’s voice came through Cal’s car radio as he drove in. He was giving a report to Congress, which the local news reported in loving detail, but it sounded more like he was giving a sermon. “But then early this year, we received the radio transmission that rewrote NASA history when Colonel Catherine Wells returned to our solar system, alive and well.
“Thanks to her bravery and determination, we have a much clearer understanding of the tragedy that befell the Sagittarius I mission, and knowing what happened on TRAPPIST-1f, we can move forward, wiser and more prepared for the next mission.”
Cal snorted. Catherine hadn’t given them a clearer understanding of anything. How could she have? All they had was the information on board Sagittarius, and so far that had yielded little.
“And we will move forward! If NASA excels at anything, it is moving forward, and moving our great nation forward.”
Cal snapped off the radio. NASA was doubling down on its mythology-building. Once Cal had thought it was just PR, but it wasn’t. It was a belief that was religious in its fervor, with astronauts as NASA’s demigods and goddesses. From the very start, the moment Catherine had reappeared, Lindholm had written a specific narrative for the Sagittarius I mission, and he was not going to let anything stray from that narrative.