Good Morning, Midnight

EIGHT

“WHAT THE HELL have you done?” Ivanov shouted at Tal. Tal was brandishing his radar tablet like a weapon. Their voices boomed around the centrifuge, drawing everyone toward them.

“I haven’t bloody done anything,” Tal shouted back, his face beet red. “I’ve been looking at this screen all morning and there’s been nothing—no debris, no asteroids, nothing within fifty fucking miles.”

“Well, something’s collided with the antenna, no? Perhaps as we’re in the main asteroid belt it was a fucking asteroid, no? Or do you think the dish just fell off?”

“Enough!” Harper shouted. “That’s enough.”

Tal threw the tablet onto his bunk and walked over to the cooking range, turning his back to the group while he collected himself. The veins in Ivanov’s neck still bulged, but he folded his arms across his chest and kept his mouth shut for the time being.

Harper stood up straighter, as if to physically invoke the power of his command in front of the assembled crew. “I want to be talking about how to fix our communication capabilities, and at this moment I don’t give a damn how it happened unless it’s relevant to that goal. At this point the retrieval of the antenna is probably impossible. Other options.”

The crewmembers were silent, staring at the floor. Tal kept his back turned. Sully could hear the quiet, shrill squeak of Ivanov’s teeth grinding together. Thebes cracked his knuckles one at a time. Devi drew a circle on the floor with the toe of her shoe.

“Other options,” Harper repeated, and this time there was a warning in his voice. “Now.”

“We can make a new antenna,” Sully suggested. “I think I have all the main components, especially if we take the paraboloid from the landing module. The gain won’t be as high, but it should work.”

Thebes laced his fingers together and began to nod. “A replacement antenna is plausible, I agree,” he said. “But the installation will require a great deal of EVA work—probably two space walks, one to assess the damage and prep the site, another to actually install it. The risk is unavoidable. I think we have to go ahead and do it, but we needn’t rush—Earth wasn’t saying much anyway.”

“That’s a good point,” Sully said. “The scheduled uplinks from the probes are lost as long as the receivers are dark, but they’re not high on our list of priorities right now. I’m not even sure the new system would be strong enough to pick up those signals, and in the meantime Earth has been silent this whole time—no noise pollution, no satellite activity, nothing. I’ve been checking. It’s all been spooky quiet. So might as well take our time and do it right.”

Tal finally turned back to the group. “If I have a few days I can try and up the radar sensitivity. I don’t know if it will work, but it might. If we’re sending warm bodies out there I’d like to have a handle on the micrometeoroid population.”

Ivanov’s teeth squeaked again and Sully cringed at the sound. Devi still hadn’t said anything. Harper sighed and ran his hands through his hair, making an unconscious tsk tsk sound with his tongue against the back of his teeth while he considered. He crossed, then uncrossed his arms. Finally he spoke.

“So we’ll assess the damage as best we can from inside and get to work on the antenna replacement. Sullivan, Devi, Thebes—I’d like the three of you to work on this together. Sully, let’s not worry about the Jovian probes. If we can pick up their signals, great; if not, Earth is the focus. Tal, I want you to work on the radar system, see what took a bite out of us and what we can do to prevent or at least anticipate a repeat. Ivanov, you and I will take stock of the damage from the EV cams. Thanks, everyone—take your time, do it right, but let’s get moving.”

Devi hadn’t said anything since the meeting began, and Sully wasn’t sure she had been paying attention. But as they left the centrifuge to go look at the equipment in the lunar module, Devi turned to Sully and started chattering. She was brimming with ideas for the replacement they were about to cobble together. Beneath Devi’s nonstop stream of consciousness, Sully let out a soft sigh of relief. If there was anyone who could make this plan work, it was Devi.

THERE WAS FINALLY work to do again. Important work. Aether was abuzz for the first time since leaving Jovian space, four months ago. Sully, Devi, and Thebes began by raiding the rest of the ship for the components that could be spared. They appropriated the dish from the lunar landing module, and the comm. pod was full of redundancies they could pilfer. The replacement was well under way by the time Harper and Ivanov reported back on what little they could glean from the installment site. Sully and the engineers used the table in Little Earth as a staging area so that their tools wouldn’t keep floating away.

They were still at it when the main LED lights on Little Earth automatically dimmed, signaling the end of the day. Each of the individual bunk lamps was illuminated, giving the centrifuge a soft, candlelit glow. It was midnight by their watches, but the constraints of time no longer seemed relevant. They were tired, but also invigorated. The problem had woken them up, snapped them into the moment. They finally had something to do, a reason to pay attention. Even Ivanov rose to the occasion, acting more amiable than he had in months.

Sully and Devi were doing most of the construction, while Thebes handed them tools and prepared the components they needed.

“Drill,” Devi said, and Thebes put it into her hand before she had a chance to look up.

“Wire cutters,” Sully said, and Thebes was already at her elbow.

The construction of the new dish was moving along faster than anything had since they’d worked on the logistics of the Jovian moon landings. After Thebes and Devi left, Sully stayed at the table for another hour, making a few more adjustments but mostly thinking. After tidying up the area, Sully walked back toward the sleeping compartments. Tal was on the couch studying a notebook full of dense calculations while he fiddled with the tablet on his lap. Harper and Ivanov were conferring quietly near the lavatory. Harper said something she couldn’t quite hear, and a genuine smile appeared on Ivanov’s lips. Ivanov laid his hand on the commander’s shoulder for a brief second, then disappeared into the lavatory while Harper continued on to his own compartment. Sully noticed that Ivanov had left his curtain open. Looking in, she saw a panorama of photos showing rosy faces and white-blond heads—his family, every one of them smiling—on every surface. Ivanov returned sooner than expected and caught her staring. She blushed, ready to be scolded, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“It is a bit much, no?” he asked.

Sully shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. “I think it’s perfect. I wish I’d brought more things from home, but I didn’t…well, I didn’t anticipate wanting them so much.”

“You have one daughter,” he said, not a question but a statement. “And your husband—he didn’t understand?”

She was surprised, first at his boldness and then at his accuracy. Ivanov understood her, in some essential way, and she was surprised. He hadn’t spoken to her in weeks, but suddenly he saw her more fully than she could see herself. She remembered watching him have dinner with his family in Houston at the outdoor café, the tender way that he cut his daughter’s food into little pieces, the rapt attention he paid to his wife as she told a funny story, the love visible on all their faces.

“No, he didn’t,” Sully said.

“My wife also did not understand, but she tried to, and I believe this makes me lucky.” Ivanov patted her arm. “Not everyone has a calling,” he said, and shrugged. “It is difficult for them to comprehend, I think. Good night.” He climbed into his bunk and closed the curtain.

The lone photograph of Lucy seemed so small where it was pinned to the wall, the empty space around it like an ocean. Sully reached out and touched her daughter’s face, already smudged with fingerprints. She turned out the light and lay back in the darkness, but even when she closed her eyes, the negative image of the photograph burned on the inside of her eyelids. She didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, she was so energized by the renewal of their work. But eventually she did, and dreamed of fireflies dressed as little girls.

THE STRENGTHENING DAWN light beyond her curtain pulled her out of her dreams, but it had been only a few hours since she’d gone to bed. She closed her eyes, ignoring her alarm, and when she opened them again it was almost 1100. As she wriggled into her jumpsuit and braided her hair she’d already begun thinking, planning a mount for the replacement antenna. Harper was sitting at the long table with a set of Aether’s blueprints laid out in front of him and a cup of instant coffee. He didn’t look up as she slid onto the bench beside him.

“Morning,” she said brightly. The lids of his eyes were puffy, their rims red. He kept his gaze down. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.

He seemed startled. “Hm? Oh, no, I guess not. Preoccupied.”

She looked more closely at the blueprints and saw that he had begun marking them up with notes for the spacewalks. “Who will walk? Have you decided yet?”

Harper sighed and ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “It has to be you,” he said slowly, letting his hands drop into his lap, “and it has to be Devi.”

Sully nodded. There was something strange in his body language, something reluctant. Did he think she wouldn’t want to walk? Or was he worried about Devi? She waited to see if he would add anything, and after a moment he did.

“I’m not sure Devi’s up for this—emotionally. But I’m also not sure Thebes will be able to improvise out there as well as she can. I’ve been going over it for hours. It has to be Devi.”

“She can handle it,” Sully said, but when she looked at the helpless expression on Harper’s face she suddenly shared his doubt. She thought of Devi’s nightmares, of her recent failings as a caretaker of the ship. She’d never seen Harper look so uncertain, and it frightened her. He was their commander, after all. “I’ll be there with her, we’ll have you and Thebes talking us through it. This will be fine, Harper. We can do it. You should get some rest, you look ragged.”

He laughed. “An understatement, I’m sure.”

Sully had an urge to reach out and smooth down the lick of hair that stood straight up from the crown of his head, as she might’ve done for Lucy, but she didn’t. “It is. I order you to sleep for a few hours. We have time, don’t burn yourself out on this.”

Harper nodded. “I know, I just—I’m worried about…” He looked at her for a long moment and then let his gaze drop. She waited, but this time he didn’t finish his sentence.

Sully reached out and squeezed his shoulder and then stuffed her hand into the pocket of her jumpsuit, as if to stop herself from touching him again. “I’m worried too, but she’s smarter than you and me put together. If she can’t do this, no one can.” She said it lightly, but Harper wasn’t smiling.

“I know,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”

TWO DAYS LATER, the replacement antenna was finished and the first walk was scheduled. Sully made her way to the comm. pod out of habit before realizing she had nothing to do there with no antenna. She ran her fingers over the knobs and buttons of the machines that lined the walls, displays dark, speakers silent. The pod seemed more like a tomb than a communication hub. The longer she stayed, the more sinister the quiet became. Eventually she drifted out of the pod and moved down the corridor, toward the command deck and the cupola.

Devi was floating in front of the cupola’s many-paned view, her hands pressed against the thick silica glass. The loose knot of hair at the nape of her neck drifted away from her head, hovering like a black cloud between her shoulder blades. She wore a dark red jumpsuit, the same as always, the legs cuffed above her ankles, an inch or two of skin visible between the bright white of her socks and the red of the suit. She wasn’t wearing shoes. Beyond the panes a great blackness hung, a darkness full of depth and movement and stillness and a hundred million pricks of light, too far away to illuminate anything, too bright to ignore.

“What do you see?” Sully asked, propelling herself headfirst into the cupola to float next to Devi.

“Everything,” Devi said, nervously toying with the zipper of her jumpsuit. She pulled it up to her neck, then back down to her sternum in rapid succession until the heather gray of her shirt caught in the plastic teeth. She didn’t bother to dislodge it. “And nothing. It’s hard to say.”

They hovered together in silence, looking out into the vast emptiness. The prospect of entering it, of inhabiting the vacuum, made home seem even farther away. Out there, there was no safety net, nothing to anchor a floating astronaut to the ship other than the thin tethers and each other. Sully started to say something about the spacewalk, then stopped, not wanting to speak out of turn, suddenly unsure if Harper had even told her yet.

“I know,” Devi said suddenly, “about the walk. He told me last night. He’s worried, yes? Because I’ve been so…disconnected. And you. He’s worried also because he’s in love with you. He doesn’t have to worry. We’ll fix it.”

Sully was stunned, silent for a long beat. She was used to Devi’s ability to see through the surface of things—most of the time she used this skill on inanimate mechanical objects, but on the rare occasions that Devi turned her mind to human affairs, she spoke alarming truths with robotic precision. It was unnerving. Sully could feel warmth creeping up her neck and she willed it to cool. Devi had said it so simply, so matter-of-factly. She didn’t question the verity of the statement, and it was a relief, in a way, to hear those words aloud. To know that her thoughts about what things might be like between her and Harper when they returned to Earth were based in something real, something quantified, qualified, and named by an outside person—by the smartest person she knew. And yet this wasn’t the time. She couldn’t think about Harper right now, not like that. It might never be the time. She pushed Devi’s words away and focused on the spacewalk instead, gazing through the cupola with a determined single-mindedness. After a moment they heard Thebes calling out for Devi. Before she left, Devi took Sully’s hand and squeezed it.

“You needn’t worry either,” Devi said.

With that she pushed off with her feet and disappeared into the corridor. Sully stayed for a long time, thinking. She considered the unfamiliar orientation of stars before her until she was quite certain she had picked Ursa Minor out of the chaos. It was from an unusual angle, but it was definitely the little bear she knew so well. She was sure of it, and it felt good to be sure of something.

SULLY AND DEVI went over the mission plan with Harper dozens of times, reciting their actions like actors reciting lines. The two women were at ease; the training in Houston had prepared them for all manner of extravehicular repair work, and the first walk would be fairly simple. Thebes was checking the suits while Tal was glued to the radar system. Ivanov kept himself busy pointing out errors in Tal’s updated computer code, poking holes in Harper’s mission plan, and offering Thebes what-if suit malfunctions with infinitesimal probabilities—a one-man red team showing them the gaps in their strategy, the flaws in their approach. For once they were glad of his criticisms.

As the preparations were checked off and the crew readied themselves for the walk, the good-natured camaraderie they had developed in Houston returned, that feeling from the bar before the launch when they had listened to the jukebox and done shots together. Tal began making jokes again and Ivanov actually smiled at one or two of them. Devi was talking nonstop, thrilling to the project at hand, engaging with the crew and the mechanical tasks before her, and Thebes seemed to breathe a sigh of relief just watching the crew converse. They all felt the momentum pulling them forward. Sully felt more hopeful than she had in months. Maybe, just maybe, the frequencies of Earth would carry more than silence once the comm.s were back online. Only Harper seemed hesitant. Even as the rest of the crew thrived on the challenge of bringing the communication system back to life, Harper oversaw the work with an air of apprehension.

The eve before the walk, Harper pulled Sully aside on the command deck. As he spoke to her, the bright blackness of the cupola’s view behind him transfixed her. It was intoxicating. Knowing she was hours away from stepping out of the airlock and into the vacuum, she struggled to focus on his face, to move her gaze away from the subtle movements of swirling atoms just outside the glass and to meet his eyes, which were boring into her.

“Sully,” he said. “Sully.” She had no idea how many times he’d already said it.

“Yes, sorry, I’m listening.”

“I want you to promise me that if something seems off, if anything goes even the slightest bit awry, you’ll abort and come straight back to the airlock. I know how it feels once you’re out there, but please. Not having the comm.s online won’t kill anyone. We can always try again. We can always wait to dock with the ISS. We can always—I don’t know, but there are other options, okay? I know we’ve been friendly these past few months, you and I—shit, Sully, there’s little enough fun to be had—but I need to know you’re going to follow my orders when you’re out there. Tell me you understand.”

“I understand, Commander.”

“All right, then. Get some rest. We open the airlock at 0900 tomorrow, let’s be ready.”

Harper turned and floated back toward Little Earth, leaving Sully alone on the command deck. She watched him go and then let her gaze drift back toward the cupola. She reflected on Devi’s words, wondering what it would feel like to love him back—wondering if she already did. Unsure, she tried to reject the possibility, and instead let the black glow of space fill her imagination with its emptiness.