Vessel

2

“WHAT THE HELL was that about?” Aaron Llewellyn waited until he and Cal were well away from the conference room, on the way back to Aaron’s office.

“Come on, Aaron. It doesn’t add up. It’s too neat. How are all the personal logs gone? Even if Wells’s amnesia were fishy—which it is—she couldn’t have wiped those records.” Something wasn’t right here. It didn’t piece together. His instincts were yelling it loud and clear, and his instincts rarely steered him wrong.

Maybe he shouldn’t have pushed it so hard in the debrief, though.

“If she couldn’t have wiped the records, then why did you go after her so hard? You think… what? That the crew survived and Catherine abandoned them?” Aaron shook his head.

“No, but…” Cal paused. He’d considered that, but there was no evidence. And as good as Aaron was about listening to some of Cal’s more out-there ideas, floating sinister theories about Wells was a bad idea right now. Everyone on the team was protective of her. Cal got that. Whatever the truth was, she’d been through hell, and no doubt was still going through it. “There’s just something she’s not telling us. I can feel it.”

Aaron stopped walking and turned to face Cal. His expression was flat and the way he crossed his arms over his chest didn’t bode well for Cal. “Listen, kid. I’m letting you step up on this mission. You don’t have to start shit to try to make yourself look good. Don’t make me, or anyone else, regret this.”

“I’m not starting shit—”

Aaron gave him a look.

“This time. I’m not. I swear.”

Cal never meant to start shit. He saw things that other people overlooked. Worse than that, he was terrible about just going with the flow. He couldn’t let things slide, especially not for the sake of a feel-good story for the history books. NASA ran on myths and legends as much as it ran on funding and science. And Cal just couldn’t buy into it.

“Well, just… lay off for a bit, would you?” Aaron started walking again and Cal hurried to keep up. Aaron might as well have asked him to fly, as far as Cal was concerned, but he’d try. “She’s a hero around here. After what happened with Sagittarius I, NASA needs all the heroes it can get. And right now, Sagittarius II depends on what she’s able to tell us.”

But she’s not telling us everything. Cal sighed. “Yeah, all right. I’ll lay off.” It was just intuition right now, something about the way Wells told her story. Nothing concrete. The problem was, the more people defended Wells, the more people talked about her like she was a hero, the more Cal wanted to puncture that bubble, find out what she might be hiding. The higher the stakes got, the more important it was that he find the truth.

His promise to lay off didn’t even make it to lunchtime. He was just checking on something, that was all. For his own peace of mind. He pulled up the transcripts of Wells’s initial debrief right after she landed.

That sounded familiar—too familiar. Her second debrief was with the psychiatrist present and was filmed. Cal watched the video briefly, then fast-forwarded to the same question.

Catherine, who had been interacting normally, paused and looked straight ahead. Cal hit Play.

“—ahead of schedule. That was sometime around Mission Day 865, because Commander Gidzenko commented on it in the ship’s log.”

Then his recording from earlier today: the exact same story, word for word. Memory didn’t work that way. When people talked about a traumatic event, it was rarely the same story twice—they misremembered, they forgot, they revealed things out of order, and they found new memories between one telling and the next. That was one reason NASA did so many of these damned reviews: to coax out as many details as possible, a few at a time. He and Aaron had hoped that in a slightly more relaxed setting with just the three of them, focused specifically on what happened to the others, that maybe a few more details would emerge.

But Wells was telling the exact same story every single time. As though she’d memorized it. As though it had been prerecorded, so to speak. On its own, it wasn’t enough to take back to Aaron, not while everyone wanted to keep Wells on her pedestal, but it was enough to raise Cal’s hackles. He just had to—

“I knew it. I knew you forgot me, man.” Dr. Nate Royer leaned against Cal’s office doorframe. “You stood me up. I sat there in the cafeteria all by myself.”

“Nate! Oh shit, I’m sorry.” Cal closed his laptop guiltily. He got out from behind his desk and greeted Nate with a clap on the shoulder. “I had that Wells debrief this morning and it threw off my whole day.”

“It wasn’t a total loss. I looked so pitiful, one of those cute new engineers must’ve felt sorry for me. Came over to say hello.”

Cal grinned, motioning Nate into his office and shutting the door behind him. “I bet you milked it for all it was worth, too, didn’t you. You dog.”

Nate shrugged eloquently, his teeth flashing bright in a quick grin. “We talked about the fickleness of straight boys. Especially the cute ones like you.”

Cal rolled his eyes at the long-standing joke. “Did you at least get his phone number?”

“What kind of a man do you think I am, Morganson? Of course I got his phone number.”

“See, wouldn’t’ve happened if I hadn’t zoned out.” Cal sprawled in his chair again while Nate took his usual seat on the other side of the desk.

“So… Catherine Wells, huh? How’d that go?”

“If you’re asking if we nailed down everything that happened on TRAPPIST-1f, then the answer is no. We’re not much closer than we were before.” He pawed through the papers on his desk for his tablet and the notes he’d taken during the debriefing. Nate was slated as the crew doctor for Sagittarius II. Even if they hadn’t been close friends, Cal would be doing everything he could to make sure Nate and the others got the answers they needed before they risked their lives.

“Damn,” Nate said. “She doesn’t know anything? I mean, if you’re going to send me up there, it’d be nice to know my chances of coming back were getting better.”

“We’re still working on the assumption that something catastrophic happened to the Habitat…” Cal trailed off. He really wanted to be able to give Nate the party line. Nothing to see here. Move along.

“Uh-oh. I know that look. There’s a ‘but’ coming.”

“No, not really, just—” Cal pushed his tablet aside. “Never mind, man. I shouldn’t be talking to you about it.”

“You know I’m going to see the full debriefings eventually, right?” Nate beckoned, like Bring it on.

Cal glanced at the closed door. “It’s nothing concrete. Something’s not adding up yet. Just a feeling.”

“Oh lord, not one of your feelings.” Nate groaned and ran a hand over his face dramatically.

“Listen. How often have I been wrong?”

“It’s not how often, Cal; it’s that when you are wrong, it turns into a colossal clusterfuck.” Nate would know; he’d helped mop Cal off the floor enough times.

But once again, Cal wasn’t going down without a fight. “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad. Name one clusterfuck.”

Nate raised his eyebrows. “You really wanna play this? All right. Let’s go. You spent a month convinced that TRAPPIST-1f was actually a volcanic hell planet.”

“The science was there! With the other planets in the system so close, volcanic activity should have been—”

“It was speculation! You were guessing, Cal.”

“I was a kid. Come on, we were still in college. Besides, it got me the job offer with NASA, didn’t it?”

Nate was unimpressed. “You nearly got the whole program scrapped.”

“Considering what actually happened, would that have been so terrible?”

“They weren’t killed by volcanoes, were they?” Nate stabbed a finger at him. “No moving the goalposts. You were wrong.”

“We don’t know they weren’t killed by volcanoes…”

“Cal, we’ve got the crew’s surveys from orbit right before they landed. ‘Volcano’ is probably one of the few causes we have ruled out.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay,” Cal admitted grudgingly. “Fine. I was wrong once.”

“Once.” Nate snorted. “What about that time you were working on Sentinel and you thought—”

This game wasn’t fun if Nate was going to show off his flawless recall of “every time Cal Morganson was an idiot.”

“All right, all right. Maybe more than once.” Cal leaned forward, pointing at him. “But how many times have I been right?”

Nate leaned back in his chair, grin on his face. “Not enough times for me to stop giving you shit every time you say you have a feeling.”

“I’m wounded, Nate. I’m deeply wounded.” Cal pressed a hand to his chest.

“You’ll survive. Your ego has made it through worse.” Nate gave him a shrewd look. “You know, we’re not all really keeping score on how often you’re wrong here. You’re the only one counting, man.”

“Can’t tell if you’re winning if nobody’s keeping score.” He focused on Nate again, growing serious. “I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off. It could be something big.” Cal didn’t care if Nate laughed at him; he probably deserved it a little, and Nate was allowed even if Cal wouldn’t put up with it from anyone else. “I just don’t want a repeat of whatever happened. Not with you guys. You’re my team.”

“I know. I get it. And we appreciate it, Cal, we really do.” Nate grew more serious as well. “Six years is a long time. It would be easy to treat Sagittarius I like ancient history. We all had a chance to get over it and move on. Now that Wells is back, it’s stirring up a lot of old stuff for us. Everybody’s feeling it.”

“How’s the crew doing?”

Nate shrugged. “Better, actually. Nobody talked about it, but it was kinda rough, being the crew to follow a mission where everyone died.”

“I worried about that, how you guys would handle it.” Cal had been tracking the crew’s psych evals. Every one of them was understandably anxious. Anxiety was normal, but it led to errors, errors Cal didn’t want to risk.

“But now that it turns out there was a survivor, in a weird way it makes it better. Maybe if we can find out exactly what happened, we’ll avoid making the same mistakes. If there were mistakes.”

“That’s what we’re working on.”

“Yeah, I know. I trust you, Cal,” Nate said easily. “As long as I keep believing you guys are gonna get us up there and back, I’m fine. I think everyone else feels the same way.”

And that, right there, was exactly why Cal needed to get to the truth of Catherine Wells’s story. He owed it to his crew, to Nate, to make sure they were as safe as possible. It might make people hate him; it might get him demoted even, but he couldn’t risk Nate and the others for the sake of the narrative that made Wells a hero and left his team vulnerable.