“Tom? What’s going on?”
“Just a little mishap. Stay where you are. It’s not quite safe out here yet.”
“I’m seeing a lot of smoke,” Catherine said. “Where is everyone?”
“It’s fine; it’ll all be fine in a minute or two,” Tom said soothingly. Something about his voice prickled the back of Catherine’s neck and she shoved her way into the air lock, dialing in the commands that would let her out as fast as she could. Her hands were shaking as she slammed the last button and waited for the pressure to equalize so she could get out.
“Come on, come on, come on.”
The door opened into the Habitat hallway. The smoke was so thick Catherine could barely see three feet in front of her. The suit’s air tank protected her lungs, but she had to get out. Please let the others already be outside.
“Catherine, where are you going? I’m showing that you breached quarantine.”
“What are you doing, Tom?”
Tom laughed, as if that were the silliest question he’d ever heard. “I’m in the command center, doing what I’m supposed to be doing, what else?”
The door that led out of the Habitat was right in front of her. If the others weren’t outside… No, but they would be. Whatever game Tom was playing, the others would have evacuated by now.
It was twilight out on the surface, but then it was always twilight. There was no sound on TRAPPIST-1f except for the wind blowing between the pillars of rock. There was no sign of the others. The rendezvous point in the event of an evacuation was half a kilometer away, not far from where Sagittarius sat waiting for their return trip.
There was still no sign of anyone.
Then she heard a low, tearing rumble. She turned back just as the Habitat expanded outward in a slowly unfurling giant cloud of dust, rubble, and smoke, until the walls shattered from the force of the pressure. A fireball rose from within the smoke like a bright orange sun in the dim landscape.
The others.
“No!” Catherine ran toward the flames, her breath coming in harsh, sobbing pants. The debris field met her before she even got close to the Habitat’s remains, flying toward her and falling from the sky. There was no way to get closer. The air was too hot. She stumbled back, choking back her tears. As she flattened herself behind one of the stone pillars, she prayed something didn’t land on her from overhead.
When she stopped hearing debris slamming to the ground, she took a chance and looked around the pillar. The remains of the Habitat blazed brightly, the skeleton of the structure showing amid the flames. There was just enough oxygen in the atmosphere to feed the fire.
Catherine tried to get closer, but there was still nothing she could do. The fire extinguishing equipment was inside the Habitat, where it was burning as fiercely as the rest of the module.
All she could do was circle what had been her home, helpless. Hoping that someone might come out of the burning wreckage, but there was no one. Everyone was dead except her.
22
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE launch, Cal was too busy to do anything other than monitor and keep in touch with the Sagittarius II crew. Aaron had stopped glaring at him every time Cal so much as cleared his throat. He commented to him privately that he was glad to see Cal focusing on the right things.
Most of his time was spent in Mission Control, keeping an eye on his people.
The fourth morning running, Leah Morrison started ribbing him. “Hey, Morganson, don’t you have anything better to do than hover? No home to go to, nothing?”
“I’d love to go home,” he said, “but somebody’s gotta keep an eye on you and make sure you fly that thing straight.”
Commander Duffy piped up, drawling. “Houston, can somebody take a look under Morganson’s chair and see if he’s got any eggs in his nest yet?”
Laughter rippled through Mission Control, and Cal took it good-naturedly. “All my chicks have flown far, far from the nest, John,” he shot back.
“They do that,” Duffy agreed. “You gotta let ’em go, momma hen.”
“Hey, if I hadn’t, y’all wouldn’t be out there.” Cal was hovering; he knew he was. And now that the crew had called him out on it, he’d have to stop.
It turned out to be harder than he expected.
He made himself stay away from Mission Control outside of his scheduled duty hours and tried to focus on the other work waiting for him. It slowly got easier to stop worrying about his crew. That, and he could keep reminding himself that whatever problems they were going to face, they wouldn’t happen on the trip out.
There was still plenty of data coming in from Sagittarius I, and as long as Cal didn’t focus too much attention on Catherine, he was well within his job parameters. He began looking again at the telemetry from the first mission, making comparisons between the Sagittarius I benchmarks and where Sagittarius II was.
Periodically, his attention was drawn back to the data he initially uncovered. The only way the Sagittarius I data from TRAPPIST-1f made sense was if two people had been alive on the ship. But he had no other information. He was trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with no idea what the final picture would look like. And Aaron ultimately was right: the families of Sagittarius I didn’t deserve the pain of knowing that one of their loved ones had suffered terribly.
But then one of the lab techs called him. “Dr. Royer told us to call you when we had something new. We’ve got the first full set of data on Catherine Wells’s blood work. I can’t send it to you yet, but you can come down here. Trust me, you’re going to want to see this.” From the tone in the tech’s voice, he might have found something big.
On his way down to the lab, he saw David Wells in the hallway and stopped him. “Hey, I just wanted to find out how Catherine is doing.”
Catherine’s meltdown had been all anyone talked about in the days following the launch. Cal had missed the meeting where she’d supposedly been drunk, but he heard about it several times.
David gave him a somewhat surprised look. “And here I thought NASA lived on gossip,” he said. “I have no idea how she’s doing.”
“I’m sorry?”
“We split up. Before her… um, incident.”
Cal thought he saw a flicker of guilt cross David’s face. He knew about Maggie Bachman; everyone did. That was a particularly popular topic of gossip in the months after Catherine’s reappearance.
“I’m sorry,” Cal said again. “I hadn’t heard.”
“I wish I could tell you more.”
“Well, if you talk to her, let her know we’re thinking of her, all right?”
David looked grateful to be ending the conversation. “I will. Thanks.”
Huh. Cal shouldn’t be that surprised. The pressure that came with returning from a mission was enormous. And no astronaut had ever been under as much pressure as Catherine had. That had to be a contributing factor.
And some of that pressure was his fault. He wasn’t to blame for Catherine’s marriage falling apart, but…
When he got to the lab, the tech pulled him aside. “Tell me what you know about antibodies.”
“Uh… just the Biology 101 version. Part of the immune system. When your body detects bacteria or a virus or anything else that doesn’t belong there, the antibodies go after it and neutralize the threat.” He paused and looked at the tech as if to say, “Is that enough?”
“Right,” the tech said. “Each antibody is keyed to a specific antigen—the bacteria or virus. That’s often how we can diagnose a specific disease, or at least rule it out. If you have an antibody for a specific antigen, you’ve been exposed to it at some point. It’s why most people don’t get the chicken pox more than once.”