Vessel

30

CATHERINE WOKE IN her own bed, confused at first, thinking that she’d had a strange nightmare.

The sound of someone moving around in her living room brought it all back. It had been real. Cal had driven her home in her car, made her tea, put her to bed, and—from the sounds of it—slept on her couch.

Details were fuzzy, but she remembered what she’d gone to NASA to do. I almost killed them. I almost killed everyone on Sagittarius. The thought stuck in her head, echoing and rebounding. She crawled out of bed and pulled on her robe.

Cal was in the kitchen making coffee. “Hey,” he said. “I heard you get up. How are you doing?”

Catherine’s voice came out in a rusty croak, as if she had a cold, or had been shouting. “I tried to kill six of my friends last night—seven, counting you—but otherwise, I’m doing okay. You?” There were bruises on his face, but the cut on his cheek didn’t look as bad this morning. Her aches weren’t physical, but her soul felt bruised. How could she live with what she’d done? And what if she tried to do it again?

“Yeah, okay, so maybe that was a dumb question.” He changed the subject, holding up the coffee can from her cabinet. “Seriously? You seriously drink this? You know dirt would be cheaper, right? And probably taste better.”

Despite her misery, she smiled. “It gets the job done. Some of us don’t care about hand-roasted, carefully ground artisanal beans from some obscure corner of the world. It’s caffeine.”

“My God. I see I have a lot of educating to do here.” He shook his head. Still, he started the coffee machine and came to sit next to her on the couch. “Were you able to sleep?”

“Surprisingly, yes.” She lowered her face to her hands and rubbed with her palms. “Who knew attempted murder was so exhausting.”

“You weren’t in control—”

“That doesn’t actually make it any better.” She looked up at him, needing to voice her fears aloud to another person. “What if I try again? What if I already did kill someone, and just don’t know it?”

“Now we know what the plan is,” Cal countered. “That makes it easier to stop. And maybe it will give us a clue about what’s going on here.”

“But whose plan? Cal, there is someone in my head. Maybe more than one. I felt them!” Catherine sighed, slumping against the back of the sofa. “God. This is such a nightmare.”

“I have a theory about that.” Cal turned, sitting sideways to face her. “The Longbow Protocol was supposed to prevent any sort of alien life-form from coming to Earth without our knowledge, right? The thing is, it already failed. We failed. There was one outcome we didn’t predict: that someone would bring something back with them, something we wouldn’t be able to detect until it was too late.”

“What do you mean?” Catherine pulled her knees to her chest.

“You’re carrying an antibody that has never been seen on Earth before. It means you were exposed to something during the mission—bacteria, a virus, a fungus—something that got into your body and caused a reaction in your immune system. And only one other human on record has ever had that particular antigen,” Cal said. “Iris Addy. The one other person who’s experienced similar memory loss and violent impulses after going through the wormhole.”

“You’re saying we all were exposed to something out there?” A nightmare scenario grew in Catherine’s mind, all six of them falling into those fits. Oh God, had they all destroyed one another? Was that what happened?

“It’s possible. I don’t know.” Cal watched her carefully as if he saw the tension spike in her. “Cath, don’t start jumping to conclusions. Stick to what we know. You and Commander Addy. That’s all we know.”

Catherine took a deep breath to steady herself, then let it out. “Okay. Say you’re right. How could an infection make us do things and not remember them? How could it… control us?”

“Have you ever heard of zombie ants? In Brazil?”

“Zombie ants…” As bad as things were, that was just ridiculous enough to make her smile. “No. Please tell me you aren’t saying I’m a zombie.”

“No! No, not at all. Okay. So there’s a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It infects certain species of ants and takes control of their bodies. It’s not sentient; it just makes the ants go to a specific place that’s most favorable for the fungus to spread.”

“Something tells me that doesn’t end well for the ants.”

“Well, no; they die and sprout fungi,” Cal said quickly, “but that’s not what I’m thinking about here. What if the original antigen represents some sort of similar method of control?”

“But…” Catherine paused.

“There’s no sign that it’s fatal,” Cal reassured her. “Iris Addy has been living with it for years.”

“You said the fungus isn’t sentient,” Catherine said. She could remember the distinct feeling of another entity, an intelligent mind, directing her movements. “But there was a… a personality there. A mind.”

“Yeah, it’s not a direct parallel. I’m just saying I think the antibodies are related—” Cal stopped. “Catherine. Do you realize what this means? An alien life-form made contact with you out there.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions—”

“It’s a small jump—a hop. First contact. Catherine, that’s huge.”

“We could have it all wrong.” Catherine wanted to backpedal. He believed her almost too completely. She hadn’t counted on that. “What if I’m just crazy?”

“I don’t think you’re crazy—at least, not delusional.” Cal got up to get their coffee, black for both of them. He brought it back to the living room and Catherine wrapped her hands around the mug, hunched over it.

“Even if I’m not, and I have met aliens—or they’ve communicated with me somehow—they’re not exactly saying ‘we come in peace,’ Cal. They may have already had a hand in killing some of us, and… and if…” She couldn’t make herself say it.

Cal leaned forward and touched her hand carefully, and she didn’t pull away. “Come on. Spit it out.”

“If they see us the way that I saw people…” Catherine shivered. “They want us dead. All of us.” A worse thought occurred. “What if they made me kill them all? My crew? If we were all infected, what if we killed one another?”

“Let’s verify that they exist first, before we start worrying about that.” Cal squeezed her hand and let it go. The warmth lingered on Catherine’s skin, more soothing than she wanted to admit.

“ ‘We,’ ” Catherine said suddenly.

“Huh?”

“You keep saying ‘we.’ ‘Before we start worrying.’ ”

“Well… yeah.” Cal gave her a puzzled look. If he tilted his head, he’d look like a baffled golden retriever, and Catherine had to fight a smile. “We’re the only ones who know about this. The first thing we need is more information,” Cal said.

“Where do we start?”

Cal rubbed his eyes before answering. “Some of it might come from you, if you start remembering things. There might be some reports hidden away that describe anomalies from your mission, or Iris Addy’s. I haven’t seen them, but I can look.”

“They didn’t tell me about any, if there are.”

“Yeah… that doesn’t mean much. Something like that would be classified ‘need to know’ immediately. And of course,” he added, “mere astronauts don’t need to know that.”

“You know people would say we’re both crazy.”

“Feh,” he said cheerfully. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s said that to me. Besides, they told Galileo he was crazy, right? And probably Einstein. Sometimes you gotta be crazy to make any progress.”

“NASA doesn’t like crazy these days.” Catherine felt a wry smile tugging at her mouth. “Crazy isn’t politically expedient.”

“Again, I say feh.” He really was on her side. He’d been against her only when he thought she was trying to hide the truth. Which… she supposed, she had been. She’d been afraid of the truth. She still was, but now she wasn’t afraid alone. And that made more of a difference than she could have imagined.

“The way I see it—God, that’s awful,” he said, grimacing after taking a sip of coffee, “once we have proof of their existence, the two biggest questions we have to answer are how and why. How are they controlling you? And why do they want to destroy Sagittarius II?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’ve felt—I’m not sure how to describe it. When I’ve had those violent, repulsive thoughts, it’s like I got pushed out of the driver’s seat. And… last night, when we were fighting, I pushed my way back.”

“Lucky for me,” he said.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not another word. You didn’t do it.” Cal leaned back, thinking.

“I don’t understand,” Catherine said. “We sent probes to TRAPPIST years before Sagittarius I. And you saw the data we managed to send back. Nothing showed any signs of intelligent life.”

Cal lowered his mug. “ ’What if this species, whatever it is, has evolved into a form that we can’t track or recognize?”

“Like what?”

“Any number of things,” Cal said. He looked for all the world like a graduate student having a theoretical discussion with some classmates. “They might be microscopic. Hell, they might not be made up of anything we recognize as living, organic material.”

“How the hell do we find something like that?”

Cal grinned. “I have no idea. But we’ll figure it out with some more data.”

“Oh God,” Catherine said suddenly. “We’ve got to let the crew know what they’re heading into.”

“I have a better idea,” Cal said, his expression turning more thoughtful. “How about we bring them back?”

“How are we going to do that? If no one wants to know the truth because of bad publicity, they’re sure not going to let us do that.”

“I don’t know yet.” Cal leaned back into her sofa. “We’ve got just over three weeks to find evidence that letting Sagittarius II land on TRAPPIST-1f would be worse optics than calling them back and scrapping the mission.” He glanced over. “You up for the challenge?”

“I am if you are.”

“It’s got to be good. We’ve got to find something they can’t argue with. Some sort of proof, hard proof, that these life-forms exist,” Cal grumbled, thumping his head against the cushion. “I guess if we fail we can make some good money on the basic cable circuit, right?”

“They’d probably give you your own show.” She joked, but he was right. They had to convince people who stubbornly didn’t want to believe.

Cal let out a frustrated breath. “If only we had someone who could substantiate your story. Someone else who came back from the mission.”

“One more reason being a sole survivor sucks.”

Cal laughed, startled. “I bet that’s a long list.”

She hadn’t meant it as a joke, but she laughed with him. “Yeah. Yeah, it really is.”

“Right, so no one to back up your story. Too bad.”

“Yeah, no one’s exactly been in my shoes before—” Wait. Catherine stopped herself. You don’t want to end up like Commander Addy. I don’t want to see that happen to you, Dr. Darzi warned her. What had Addy seen on her own trip through ERB Prime? What had she heard? “Cal… what about Commander Addy?”

“Addy… she didn’t go to TRAPPIST, though—” His eyes lit up. “But she did go through the wormhole.”

“And every time I started pushing for the truth, my therapist used her as a cautionary tale.”

“Yeah, but that’s because when she came back, she returned with some pretty wild stories, apparently.” Cal broke into a smile and planted a loud, sudden kiss on Catherine’s cheek. “And the same strange antibodies you have! Colonel Wells, you are a certified mad genius. If we could track her down, you two could compare stories.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“I have some ideas. Worst case, we find her and go see her. You up for a possible road trip?” Cal was the one who looked like a mad genius now, a wild grin on his face.

“Let’s find our missing commander,” she said.