Vessel

Sagittarius I Mission ^{DAY 937 IN ORBIT ABOVE TRAPPIST-1F}

The crew was crowded into the command module, watching as they passed over TRAPPIST-1f’s dark side. They didn’t get their first clear glimpse of their new home until they reached the terminator line that divided permanent day from night on the planet. Catherine guided them through their orbit, giving Claire Tomason, their mission specialist and resident scientist, time to do a full analysis of the surface conditions.

“Water!” Richie Almeida, their systems operator, spotted it first. “A lake. That’s a fucking lake! Are you seeing this?”

A large patch of blue winked at them from a valley, and there were other similar blue spots dotting the landscape.

“Scientists back home are going to lose their minds when they find out,” Ava said.

Tom craned his head over the communications panel he was manning, trying to spot something else new. “Doesn’t exactly look welcoming,” he muttered.

“What is your deal?” Richie nudged him in the shoulder. “It’s a new planet. You’re allowed to be excited!”

Tom pushed his hand away with a scowl.

Ever since New Year’s Day, when Catherine had crept out of his bed, Tom had been snappish with the rest of the crew.

At first, it had been awkward as hell. The ship was too small for her to avoid him completely. Two weeks after New Year’s, Tom approached her once more, trying to persuade her to come back. When she said no, he stopped talking to her altogether, unless absolutely required. He started spending most of his downtime alone in his cabin, rebuffing anyone who tried to draw him out.

She had hoped that maybe reaching their mission objective would help him come around, but it didn’t sound like it was working. Everyone else was happy, but he clearly was not.

They certainly all had reason to be happy. Finding water on the planet’s surface was exactly what they’d hoped for. Surface water greatly increased the chances that the planet could be habitable and, even more exciting, that there might already be life down there.

“That’s not all,” Israel Riley—Izzy to his friends—said, pointing out the porthole. “I’m seeing a lot of green out there.”

“Good eyes, Doc,” Claire said, nodding. “It looks like some sort of moss or lichen. It’s everywhere.” Claire was a geologist by specialty, but she’d spent time before the mission working with everyone from paleontologists to botanists to epidemiologists—even exobiologists, although that field remained mostly speculative without concrete data to study. As their only scientist, she’d needed a broader grasp of what they might encounter out here.

“Claire, what are those rock columns?” Catherine asked. Gray-blue pillars of what looked like extensions of the rocky ground stood scattered, clustered on both sides of the terminator line. It was hard to tell size from this distance, but Catherine would have guessed they were at least one and a half times as tall as she was, and the width of a large tree trunk.

“I… don’t know, actually. I’ve never seen any formations like that outside of a cave…” Claire’s excitement was palpable. “We’ll have to take a closer look!”

Sagittarius continued its orbit around the planet, passing into the dark side, where it was impossible to see what lay below.

“Catherine, ETA on landing?” Ava Gidzenko asked.

“We’ll reach the terminator line again in about twenty minutes,” Catherine said. “We’ll cross the light side one more time, then reach our landing coordinates. I’m plugged in and ready to go. We should be able to land on this pass.”

“Excellent.” Ava clapped her on the shoulder and smiled. “Okay, team. Prepare for landing. Let’s take a look at where we’re going to be living for a while.” She sat down in the commander’s seat and grinned back at the rest of the crew, who were strapping themselves in. “Then maybe we can go meet the neighbors.”

After nearly three years in space, everyone on board Sagittarius breathed a sigh of relief when Catherine touched them down on the surface of TRAPPIST-1f.

“Atmospheric analysis is almost done.” Claire looked up from her display. “It’s not far off from what we thought. Slightly higher CO₂ concentration, humidity and atmospheric pressure comparable to Earth’s. We’ll be more comfortable if we use oxygen. Temperature outside right now is a balmy thirty-one degrees Celsius, winds are holding steady at forty kilometers per hour. It’s breezy out there, folks.”

“All right, everybody,” Ava said. “Get ready to go for a walk. We’ll maintain pressure discipline and quarantine measures until we’re sure nothing here is going to kill us.”

They drew straws, and Richie got to be the first to set foot on the unfamiliar world. “Damn,” he said, “I should have thought of something clever to say.”

“You’re not on live TV. When we get back, we’ll tell everyone you were brilliant.” Catherine tried to contain some of her exuberance, but this was it—this was the thing they’d trained so long for, and now, after over two and a half years, they were here.

When it was her turn, Catherine tried to focus on just how momentous this was as she stepped down onto the planet’s surface. It crunched beneath her feet like any rocky surface back home would. The landscape looked like a desert—and the heat only added to that impression—with hills and outcroppings and canyons in the distance. It looked like parts of Arizona except the sky had a reddish cast to it, and in that sky, the shapes of the other TRAPPIST-1 planets loomed, along with the system’s sun, TRAPPIST-1 itself. TRAPPIST-1 was smaller and cooler than Earth’s sun, but its seven planets were warmer due to their closer proximities and dense atmospheres.

Catherine had never imagined such a crowded sky. From Earth, planets looked like bright stars, visible only at night. The other TRAPPIST-1 planets loomed like boulders hanging overhead, some so massive they seemed like they might fall at any moment. Just looking up into that sky made her feel claustrophobic. The light was much dimmer than she’d expected, and wouldn’t change throughout the day. All the TRAPPIST-1 planets were tidally locked like Earth’s moon, each with a permanent dark and light side. Their landing area was in the space between, in permanent twilight.

Claire had been right about the winds—they were enough to make walking difficult. But on the other hand, the gravity was just over half the strength of Earth’s gravity, which gave them the buoyancy of walking through water. Ahead of her, Richie and Izzy were laughing and jumping into the air, seeing if they could reach the top of one of the rock pillars. It was surreal to see them putting NBA stars to shame, clearing more than a meter each time with ease. Tom and Claire watched, Tom with his arms folded across his chest. Claire smiled and said something to him, but he just turned away and walked back to the ship.

“You know you’re going to have to deal with that sooner or later.” Ava’s voice came from over Catherine’s shoulder.

“Deal with what?” Catherine tried to sound perplexed, smiling as if she didn’t know what Ava was talking about, but Ava didn’t buy it.

“It’s a small ship, Catherine. Everybody knows something happened between you and Tom.”

“Shit,” Catherine said, stomach sinking. “Ava, it only happened once. We were drunk, and—”

“I don’t care when it started or when it ended; all I care about is that Tom has been at less than one hundred percent since. I kept hoping he would move past it, but he hasn’t, and now that we’re here, we need him at one hundred percent.”

“I’m not sure what to do,” Catherine said with a sigh. “It’s been over a month, and he won’t let it go.”

“You’re the only one who can try, and keep trying.”

Catherine was afraid to ask, but she had to. “How much trouble are we in for this?”

“Cath, I’m not even calling this a verbal reprimand. Call it being a worried friend. Deal with it before it blows up, and I’ll keep pretending I don’t know anything.”

“Thanks, Ava.”

“Cath… be gentle if you can. We don’t have a lot of extra space where he can blow off steam.”

Within a few days of landing, she had her first opportunity to talk to him. They were scheduled together for the first EVA on the planet’s surface, just after they finished setting up the Habitat. They reached their assigned area and started to work. Tom didn’t say anything at all, and Catherine tried to figure out how to bring it up.

“Well… we’re finally here,” she managed. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Tom didn’t look up at her; he was busily scraping some of the lichen they’d spotted earlier off the rock in front of him into a vial and sealing it up. Every bit of contact with the lichen produced small gray-green puffs of what Catherine assumed were spores.

She checked the list of EVA objectives they needed to fulfill. Acquiring the initial samples was the biggest priority, so Claire could get to work analyzing everything. “I can barely believe we’ve found actual life. I can’t wait to hear how folks are reacting back home.” Communication to Earth would take a long time. All they could do for now was send all the data they gathered and wait.

Tom’s flat voice filtered through his faceplate, and he didn’t look up at her. “Yeah.”

Catherine took a deep breath. Standing out in the middle of an uninhabited planet seemed to be about as private as things were going to get for them.

Catherine took Tom’s arm. “Tom… while we’re out here, can we talk for a minute?”

“Now?”

“I’m sorry, but… I can’t keep avoiding this. What happened on New Year’s… never should have happened.”

“Really.” His tone remained uninflected.

“Tom…”

“No, I’m serious. It was ages ago, and you’re standing here telling me it was all a big mistake. So tell me, if it was such a mistake, why’d you do it?”

“I don’t have a good answer for that. I wish I did.” Catherine fidgeted with her gloves. They were standing close to each other, even though the suit comms didn’t require it. She could see the growing anger on his face and wished she couldn’t.

“Well, I do. You were bored and maybe you were, I don’t know, pissed at David about something. And I let you. Cath… you have to know how I feel about you, how I’ve felt about you for years.”

Oh God, don’t say it, please don’t say it.

“I love you.” He said it. “And I swore to myself I wouldn’t tell you, because you’re married, but then New Year’s happened… and now you barely even talk to me.”

“I’m sorry that you’re upset, Tom—”

“You can’t tell me that night didn’t mean something! You weren’t happy with David before you left. I know you weren’t.”

“I was!” I know things were tense before I left, but I wasn’t actually unhappy… was I? “This doesn’t have anything to do with David. Ava knows. Hell, everybody knows. If you can’t get your shit together, sooner or later someone’s going to have to report that we broke the regs. You’re risking our careers with this.”

“Screw my career! We could have something here. I’m not willing to let it go because of some outdated rules.”

“Oh, outdated rules, like the fact that I’m married?” She needed to hold on to her patience, but honest to God, he was turning this into some sort of thwarted true-love scenario in his head. “Tom, we’re done. It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I have to put my family and this mission first.”

“Y-you can’t, Catherine, you can’t. Don’t do this to me.” Anger was fighting its way past the hurt in Tom’s eyes.

“I already did.” As empty a gesture as it might have been, she reached out to put her hand on his arm. “I didn’t want anybody to get hurt—”

“Don’t touch me. I don’t need your fucking pity.” He started off toward the rocky hills that edged deeper into the dark side of the planet.

“Tom, wait!”

“Leave me alone. I’ll finish the EVA. Just give me a few goddamned minutes, will you?”

She sighed. “Stay in radio contact.”

By the time they brought their samples back to the Habitat, Tom had cooled off some, but his responses to her and everyone else were monosyllabic before he headed off to shower.

Ava caught Catherine’s arm. “You talked to him?”

Catherine, pretty done with talking herself, nodded. “I don’t think it helped.”

“It had to be done.” Ava didn’t look any happier about it than Catherine, despite her words. “Oy, it’s going to be awkward around here for a bit. It’s a small enough place without somebody sulking over a breakup.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” Catherine was saying that a lot today.

Ava put a companionable arm around her shoulder and gave her a shake. “Honest truth? Mission Control expected something like this might happen. Six years away from home, someone was bound to get an itch. We dealt with it, it’s over. Come on, let’s go see what Claire makes of your samples.”

Ava could put a good face on it if she wanted to, but Catherine had seen Tom’s expression, and she doubted that it was over.