“You can tell her, but she’s not going to believe me,” Tom said dully. “And I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t believe me either.”
“We’re going to get to the bottom of this, I swear,” she said. “I’ll come back when I can, okay?”
When she got to the mess, the others were already gathered.
“I’m just saying we can’t keep him in there forever,” Claire was saying.
Catherine leaned against the counter, and the other crew members looked at her with varying expressions: Ava looked troubled, Izzy and Richie looked skeptical, poor Claire just looked shaken.
“It’s too dangerous,” Richie argued. “How many times might he have tried to kill us already? And he nearly succeeded killing one of us this last time. You wanna give him another chance to try again?”
“Did he say anything, Catherine?” Ava asked.
“He’s still saying he didn’t do anything.”
“How the hell does he expect us to believe that?” Izzy asked. “We’ve all seen the footage.”
“I know.” Catherine leaned her head back against one of the cabinets and closed her eyes. She sighed. “He says he doesn’t remember doing any of it. And that he’s… well, that he’s lost time. Waking up in his bed and not remembering how he got there. That sort of thing.”
“So which is it? Is he saying he didn’t do anything, or that he doesn’t remember doing anything?” Claire asked.
“He’s saying both,” Catherine said.
“Convenient amnesia.” Izzy folded his arms. “I’ve been doing medical workups on all of you regularly, and I haven’t found a single thing wrong with any of you.”
“Would some sort of trauma-based amnesia show up on an exam, though?” Ava asked. “Are there any tests you can give him?”
“We don’t exactly have the facilities for a full diagnostic battery of tests,” Izzy said. “I mean, I can test him for a few things, but… the thing about amnesia and fugue states—which are what he’s describing—is that they’re really fucking easy to fake. How am I supposed to say, ‘Yes you do so remember what happened’?”
“Ava,” Claire said quietly, “don’t you think it’s time we stopped trying to deal with this ourselves and got NASA involved?”
“I tried.” Ava ran her fingers through her cropped hair. “The comms are now completely down. I couldn’t send a message of any sort.”
“The comms are down? What, did Tom sabotage them, too?” Richie said.
“Shit.” Izzy looked around the table. “What if he’s been doing that all along? What if NASA’s been sending us messages and he’s just… not sharing them?”
The five of them fell silent.
“We don’t know for sure that he did anything to them,” Catherine protested. “What he’s done is worrisome, yeah, but… maybe we shouldn’t start blaming him for everything.” Not yet.
“Oh, of course. Of course you’re going to stick up for him,” Izzy said with an eye roll.
“What do you mean?” Catherine had a sinking feeling she knew exactly what he meant.
“Sagittarius is a small ship, Catherine. You think we didn’t know the two of you were sleeping together on the trip out?”
“Look,” Catherine said, then paused, realizing she was about to defend the indefensible. “Yeah, okay. We did. Once! It was New Year’s Eve and I was drunk. Then I told him it couldn’t happen again. I know it was a mistake, and it never should have happened.”
“Wait a minute,” Richie interrupted. “That’s when he started acting distant and grouchy. And it got worse when we landed. Are you saying that all of this happened because you screwed him?”
“No!” That couldn’t be it. Catherine refused to believe that. “The thing is, no matter what he did, and no matter what happened between the two of us, if we’re going to get a message to NASA, we’re going to have to let him out at some point. We need him.”
“Maybe you need him,” Izzy sneered.
“Doc, come on,” Claire tried to interject.
“No, I mean it.” He turned to Catherine. “Your boyfriend might be trying to kill us because you felt guilty and now you’re feeling guilty about that, so you’re trying to believe he’s innocent. And you expect us to just trust you. To trust him.”
“It’s not like that!” Catherine’s temper was quickly fraying. “If you had talked to him, you would have seen how rattled he is by this. I don’t believe he’s lying.”
“And I’m supposed to just trust my ass with him because he gave you a big sad puppy-dog look?”
“Enough.” Ava cut them both off. “Catherine isn’t wrong. We don’t know for sure that he’s deliberately and consciously done anything to hurt us. But more important, he’s the only one who can get us back in touch with NASA. As long as the comms are down, we can’t tell them anything.”
Richie spoke up. “And if he’s the one who sabotaged the comms in the first place?”
“Well, if he was,” Ava said, “then he’ll know better than anybody else how to fix them. It’s in his interest, too. He agrees to fix the comms, we let him out—for a little while at least.” She looked around at all of them. “Look, we need to get in touch. This is the sort of thing NASA ends missions over. But it’s too big for me to make the call alone. I’m not calling an abort until I’ve heard from Mission Control. Are we clear?”
The four of them nodded, the men grudgingly.
“All right,” Ava said. “Richie, Catherine, come with me. We’re gonna see if Tom is in the mood to bargain.”
“You’re gonna fucking get us all killed,” Izzy muttered. “Just watch.”
17
CATHERINE YAWNED AND rubbed her eyes, squinting at her office computer. Last night, she’d tossed and turned, unable to get comfortable in the hotel bed that was hers for the foreseeable future; there was no time between now and the launch to find an apartment.
Her phone beeped and she saw a text from Aimee: there’s a new apt complex not far from house. U looked there yet?
Catherine smiled. Aimee seemed to be taking things in stride so far, eager to help Catherine find a place to settle. Aimee was so perceptive that Catherine wouldn’t have been surprised at all if she had seen this coming. God knew Catherine should have.
No, I didn’t know about it, she replied. Text me the address?
Aimee loved to give her shit about how she texted in complete sentences with proper punctuation, but Catherine had never gotten the hang of abbreviating everything.
She took a sip of her lukewarm coffee and turned her attention back to her computer. She was going to be one of the flight controllers on launch day, a first for her. Tradition said the CAPCOM desk—short for Capsule Communicator, although there hadn’t been a “capsule” launched in decades—should be staffed by an astronaut, and as the only surviving member of Sagittarius I, Catherine wasn’t just the logical choice, she was the only real choice. When John Duffy radioed the call sign “Houston” on launch day, Catherine would be the one who answered him.
The role was an extremely visible one, one that she’d never have been given if anyone at NASA knew about her blank periods. To distract herself from the fear that she might have one of those spells on launch day, she threw herself into memorizing all the protocols.
An hour later, she picked up her mug and walked to the kitchen area down the hall, smiling at Aaron on autopilot as she passed him.