Survival was the best thing she could manage right now. She wanted to make a plan to get home, but was there even any point? How was she going to fly back all by herself?
The comm screen beeped loudly and Catherine gave a small scream, jumping out of her chair. She was just about to write it off as her imagination, but then it beeped again, and she thumbed the receiver.
The screen flashed just two words: SURRENDER, CATHERINE.
Her makeshift dinner threatened to come back up her throat, stopped only by the fear that constricted it. She leaned in to the mic. “Who the hell is this? Tom? Is that you?” Her heart pounded so hard that it only increased the sick feeling in her belly, and she swallowed the rush of saliva in her mouth.
The screen flashed again. GIVE UP. GIVE IN. SURRENDER.
Fuck that. “Fuck you.” She enunciated clearly into the mic. “Whoever you are, if you want me, you’ll have to come and get me.”
She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand, staring at the comms, waiting to see if there was an answer. It was Tom. It had to be Tom. But how could he have gotten out of the Habitat?
Maybe he’d lied when he’d said he was messaging her from inside. If nothing else, it was clear that he’d wanted her to stay inside so she’d die with the others. But if he was outside in a suit, why didn’t she see him when she came out?
The others were dead; she was sure of it. Once the fire had burned itself out, she’d explored the ruined Habitat. She’d found at least three bodies, but otherwise there hadn’t been much to identify; the fire had burned hot and fast in the Habitat’s oxygen-rich atmosphere. When no one else turned up, she made the logical assumption that she was the sole survivor.
I have to go home. I have to tell the others what happened, if nothing else.
Except… what could she tell them?
She stared at the comm screen while she thought. At one point she checked the message log and confirmed that yes, those messages had actually come in.
Okay. If she was going to go home, leaving was going to take some preparation. The ship itself wasn’t stocked with enough supplies for the long trip back. There was a supply shed on the far side of the landing area, on the other side of the Habitat—far enough to have been untouched by the blast. She’d have to raid and transport things one rover-load at a time. Thank God the second rover hadn’t been close enough to the Habitat to be destroyed, too.
After the first round of messages, the comms had pinged throughout the night, destroying any chance Catherine had of restful sleep. No matter how hard she tried to convince herself that she’d imagined the whole thing, the string of messages telling her to surrender was real. She’d deleted them in a fit of fear and bad judgment. It wasn’t supposed to be possible to delete any of the comm records, but Tom had shown her how to bypass those protocols, showing off for her with a cheeky grin.
Tom. He was still out there, and he expected her to surrender.
There was a tiny cache of weapons on Sagittarius, intended for protection against any unfriendly fauna on TRAPPIST-1f. When there had been no fauna to be found, those weapons—modified roughly from standard handguns to fire in different atmospheres—had been locked up shipboard. Ava had confessed to Catherine one night that NASA had also meant for those weapons to serve as a last-ditch solution for the crew, should the worst happen. One usage NASA probably hadn’t anticipated for those guns was for the crew to protect themselves against one of their own. But the guns were locked up, and she had no real way to get to them. Ava had been the only one with the passcodes.
“Okay. Okay. No guns, then. Fine.” Ah, well, the ability to improvise solutions in a crisis was one reason NASA had chosen them all, wasn’t it?
No weapons at all, and she still needed to start getting things together. She grabbed the tool kit from the ship’s storage area and slid a heavy wrench into a pocket of her jumpsuit. It might be useless as a weapon, but the weight of it made her feel better.
She drove the rover across the landing zone to the storage shed and started gathering some of the supplies. The entire time she worked, hauling crates onto the rover’s storage rack, the back of her neck prickled. Was Tom out there, watching her?
While she was in the shed, she heard a thunderous crash outside, and ran out to see all her carefully stacked crates spilled to the ground.
It was Tom.
He was coming at her from around the rover. His expression was utterly blank, slack-jawed. One side of his face had livid burn marks on the cheek. There was no light in his eyes at all, almost as if he weren’t even looking at her.
“Tom. Come on, it’s me. It’s Catherine.”
He stopped, and his eyes focused, fixing on her, still dead and cold.
“We have to work together to get home.”
“Surrender.” His voice was flat, unemotional.
He started toward her again, at a steady, relentless walk. She pulled the wrench from her pocket. “Stop. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Tom didn’t stop. But Catherine couldn’t make herself swing the wrench at his head. At the last second she spun and tried to flee, but he caught her by the shoulder, reaching for her throat. His fingers burned hot through the material of her suit as they closed around her neck.
Catherine fell back on her training. She fought hard and dirty, slamming a foot into Tom’s, clawing at his hands. Finally she hit backward with the wrench, connecting with his skull through his hood. Tom grunted and his hands loosened from her neck. She fled, leaving the rover behind for now. She looked back to see Tom still on his feet, blood on his head and his hand. He began to chase her.
Once she was in the shadow of the rocks, she ducked and wove through them, hiding behind one to listen for his footsteps.
He was easy to hear, trampling over the ground without any attempt at stealth.
She waited for what felt like hours, until the footsteps receded and all she heard was silence. She had no way of knowing where he was, if he was searching for her in the distance or lying in wait. All she knew was that she couldn’t stay here. Slowly, quietly, she pushed herself upright, the wrench clamped tight in her fist.
Silence.
She didn’t see Tom. Couldn’t hear him. This was her chance.
She sprinted back for the rover, her heart thudding in her chest. Everything was just as she’d left it. The metal crates were still intact. She shoved them up onto the rover, less careful about stacking than before, no longer interested in loading as much as she could in one trip. The entire time, her skin crawled, waiting, listening for the sound of Tom. Despite everything, she didn’t know if she could kill him.
She climbed into the rover and started it up, pushing the little motor as fast as it would go back to the ship. Even if he pursued her, the ship was far enough away, and she had enough of a head start, to give her time to unload the rover before he could reach her.
By the time she finished loading the crates on board Sagittarius, Catherine was exhausted and sweaty. Not to mention starving. She sealed up the ship, finally able to relax a bit knowing that Tom couldn’t reach her in here. Whatever had happened to him, he seemed too far gone for her to get him back.
The question was, did that mean she was going to leave him behind when she left?
After she cleaned up, luxuriating in the feel of clean clothes, she started pulling together dinner. She was so hungry that waiting for everything to heat up felt like an eternity. She was just about to sit down in the galley when the comms started pinging again.
Catherine froze, halfway between sitting and standing, her appetite vanishing. With her stomach twisting in knots, she went to the cockpit, expecting to see the demand to surrender flash on the screen again. Instead, she got Tom’s voice.