Not all the surprises were pleasant ones.
She tried to push aside thoughts of Maggie, someone Catherine had known and loved as a friend. Maggie, who’d been in their wedding, who’d been one of the first to show up at the hospital after Aimee was born. Who’d sat at Catherine’s dining table for countless dinners.
Maggie, who had always been prettier than Catherine, more poised.
Maggie, who was now stepping aside but who somehow still felt so present.
It was no one’s fault in the same way that a hurricane was no one’s fault: even without anyone to blame, the damage was immense. So now there was nothing to do but try to rebuild what was broken, put the pieces back together.
There was a knock at her door. Aaron Llewellyn was a tall, tanned cowboy of a man. As flight director of Sagittarius II, he was her new boss by default. He was a good man, but she desperately missed Michael Ozawa, Sagittarius I’s flight director. He’d been a friend, and he hadn’t deserved to die thinking he was a failure.
Catherine took a deep breath to clear her thoughts. Her flight commander Ava Gidzenko’s voice in her head was a steadying presence. Keep your shit together, Cath. Tell them what you know, one last time, and then you can go home.
“You ready?” Llewellyn asked. “I know you’ve got to be sick of telling your story, but thank you for humoring us. Cal and I just want to dig into a few more details that might relate to Sagittarius II.”
Cal Morganson. There was another unexpected—unpleasant—surprise. From the gruff voice, the barely there Texas accent, she would have expected someone who looked more like Aaron Llewellyn, NASA’s version of the Marlboro Man, not the tall, wiry young guy who’d introduced himself on her first day back. She’d since learned he was a NASA prodigy of sorts, a fixer. In several briefings, she’d caught him watching her with cold, blue, wolfish eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses (oh God, were those trendy again?), studying her as if she were a problem that needed fixing. If it weren’t for those eyes, for that expression, she would’ve said he was cute.
“I’m not sick of it,” Catherine said truthfully. “I keep hoping that if I talk about it enough, I might start to actually remember more of it.” She was the only person alive who had set foot on a planet outside Earth’s solar system, and she couldn’t remember any of it. What sort of massive cosmic joke was that? Even the parts of the mission she did remember felt like something that had happened to someone else. Dr. Darzi, her psychiatrist, kept saying this was normal.
Normal. She was already sick of the word. It didn’t feel normal. Nothing about this felt normal. She was forty-three years old, and a huge chunk of her life was just… gone. From shortly after Sagittarius and her crew entered the wormhole until six months after Catherine left TRAPPIST-1f alone, there was nothing but a blank spot on the recording in her mind. She was forty-three, but she’d never been thirty-seven.
Of course Claire Tomason and Richie Almeida would never see thirty-seven either, but for a different reason. After nearly six years alone in space, Catherine thought she was through the worst of the grief for her crew. Coming home had reawakened everything. It was like losing them all over again.
She hadn’t expected that so much about coming home would hurt this much. The pain of understanding the scope of her memory loss. The pain of learning about Maggie. The pain of returning without her crew. And the pain of just being. Even stepping out of her quarters into the hallway hurt.
The lights of the hallway stabbed into her eyes, and she reached for the sunglasses she now carried everywhere. The lights on Sagittarius had been designed to acclimatize the crew to the perpetual twilight of TRAPPIST-1f. No doubt there’d been a similar acclimatization program planned for their trip home, but Catherine had never found it. Since her return, she’d been wearing progressively lighter sunglasses. The lights in her quarters had started out dim, slowly brightening, although they were still low. The lights in the hallway were not.
Llewellyn noticed her squinting. “I’ve had them turn the lights down in the conference room. It shouldn’t be so bad there.”
“Thanks.” The lighting wasn’t the only physical difficulty. The gravity on TRAPPIST-1f was weaker than that on Earth, and Catherine hadn’t kept up with her exercise program on the way home. She’d been badly deconditioned when she’d landed. Walking across a room had left her winded and tired. Even now, despite extensive physical therapy, her body still didn’t feel like her own. She’d felt the same way after giving birth to Aimee—that her body was forever altered in ways she would keep discovering for years.
“Here we are.” Llewellyn looked down at her and gave her a reassuring smile as they reached the door of the conference room. “You ready to get this over with?”
“Hell yes,” Catherine breathed. After this, she could go home, go back to work, and resume her interrupted life.
The conference room was taken up by a long table, a little ridiculous with its single occupant down at one end with water glasses and a pitcher. Cal didn’t look up from his tablet as they came in. Only when she and Aaron took their seats near him did he glance at her. “Good morning, Colonel Wells.”
“Good morning.” Catherine poured herself a glass of water. She took off her sunglasses, then folded her hands on the table, clasping them tightly to suppress the urge to fidget.
Cal fiddled with his tablet and started the recording. “This is Cal Morganson, here with Aaron Llewellyn and Lieutenant Colonel Catherine Wells.” He stated the date and time, then pushed the tablet forward, between the three of them.
Aaron started. “You’ve said in prior briefings that you have no memory at all of the time between roughly Mission Day 865 and Mission Day 1349, a gap of four-hundred eighty-four days. There’s still absolutely nothing you recall from that period?”
“No,” Catherine answered, wishing she could say otherwise. It was as if she’d talked to Ava right after they entered the wormhole, and then a moment later she was alone on the ship, with all the evidence telling her she’d left the TRAPPIST-1 system six months earlier. “All of it is still a complete blank. Dr. Darzi says that some memory loss is to be expected. I understand the last astronaut who went through ERB Prime also had some memory issues.”
“Iris Addy didn’t forget sixteen months,” Morganson commented, looking through his notes.
Everyone around NASA knew about Commander Iris Addy. She’d been the first to go through the wormhole, nearly ten years before the launch of Sagittarius. Just a quick trip through and back. Except Catherine heard the rumors that she’d come back wrong. Hearing voices. Claiming to have no memory of parts of the trip. All Catherine knew for certain was that Addy had gotten violent with another astronaut and washed out. No one had seen or heard from her since. No one talked about her officially anymore. It was as if she’d never existed.
Llewellyn stepped in before Catherine could respond. “Commander Addy’s trip was much shorter. And we know now there may have been a few… additional factors related to her problems after returning home. I think we can agree that Colonel Wells’s experience is unique. There’s no way to compare it to anyone else’s.” He turned to Catherine and gave her a reassuring smile. It was a smile that said I’m on your side. You can trust me. Which automatically made Catherine suspicious.