Vessel

33

“THERE,” COMMANDER ADDY said, stepping back. “That should hold for a bit.”

“What should hold?” Cal sounded more and more agitated.

“The hive mind inside Catherine had a wall up between her and her memories,” Addy said. “My hive mind tore it down. We put the wall around them instead.” She sounded rather pleased with herself.

Catherine stood between them, stunned by all the images racing through her mind, not even sure where to begin.

“Catherine?” Cal gave her a little shake.

“I remember everything,” she said, barely recognizing the sound of her own voice.

“What?”

“All of it. All the lost time, the whole mission.”

“But how did you—” Cal started, looking at Addy.

Addy just looked back at him.

“You need to go now,” Addy said. “As long as she’s around me, her ‘friends’ will fight harder to get past that wall. They’re pissed.” Her voice was as calm as a Sunday afternoon on the front porch. To Catherine she said, “They shouldn’t control you anymore.” Her eyes narrowed. “And you shouldn’t let those bastards at NASA control you anymore, either.”

“I don’t understand,” Catherine began.

“Go.”

“Wait!” Catherine said. “Commander Addy. Iris. Come with us. We don’t understand what’s happening, and you do. We need your help. We’re trying to get NASA to bring back the crew of Sagittarius II, so this doesn’t happen to them, too.”

Addy sighed, slumping. “Catherine, NASA doesn’t want me. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want them. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to help.”

“But with both of us telling our stories, they might believe us…”

The older woman patted her cheek. “You’re still so trusting.” She looked at Cal again. “Take her and go.”

“Okay, okay, we’re going.” Cal started shepherding Catherine toward the door. “I’ve got you, come on.” He got her out to the car, having to stop and support her once or twice, strapping her in with her seat belt and pulling back onto the road.

Catherine sat limply in the passenger seat, looking out the window. She felt as if she’d run a marathon. The anger in her mind, the anger that hadn’t been coming from her, retreated, leaving her with her new memories, the faint burn of their resentment toward Catherine and Iris buried deep. Catherine knew too much now, and that was not in their plan.

What plan?

Oh, but she knew the answer to that now, too.

Neither of them said anything until they were back on the road.

“You doing okay?” Cal asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe.”

“You really remember everything?” Catherine could tell he was dying to know, but she couldn’t muster the strength to tell the whole story just yet. “Cal… I’ll tell you, I promise. I just… I can’t right now.” She looked at him. “But I saw them.”

Cal shot her a startled look.

“They’re not just… voices in my head. I saw them. On Sagittarius. And Iris Addy isn’t crazy,” Catherine continued, feeling suddenly defensive. She looked straight ahead and was quiet for a long while.

Cal didn’t push her. All he did was reach for her hand.

He had to drive around for an hour before they found a roadside motel. The sun was starting to set, and Catherine was tired enough by that point that she didn’t care. Everyone at NASA thought they wanted the truth, but it turned out they’d had part of the truth all along and had ignored it, dismissed it, and pushed Iris Addy out for telling it. They’d worked so hard to discredit Iris—would they do the same to Catherine now?

She waited in the car while Cal checked them in. He came back with two room keys and handed her one. “Looks like we’re the only ones here, so we pretty much had our pick. Not that there’s much to choose from,” he added dubiously.

Her room was decorated in timeworn colors that might have once been charitably described as “desert sunset,” but had more likely been eye-bleeding shades of pink, orange, and brown when the paint was fresh. Still, it looked mostly clean. But if she closed her eyes, she could feel the gritty dirt of TRAPPIST-1f on her hands, grimed in her knuckles.

Cal put the key card on the dresser. He handed her a bottle of water and sat down across from her.

She focused on the water bottle, not able to look at him. “I remember everything.”

“Can you tell me?” he asked gently.

“I killed Tom Wetherbee,” she blurted. “I didn’t mean to kill him. I swear I didn’t. He was infected with something and out of his mind, and all I could think was that I couldn’t bring him back like that. I had to at least quarantine him…” The words broke open long-forgotten pain, and she swayed with the force of it.

“Okay.” Cal sounded calm, as though she hadn’t just confirmed his worst suspicions of her. “Go back and start from the beginning.”

She told him the rest, about the sabotage, the comms, and finally the Event—everything that happened, everything but sleeping with Tom. That still felt too shameful. Too much like everything that followed really was her fault.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said, after describing digging Tom’s grave.

“Catherine. Look at me.”

Catherine met his gaze.

“I believe you.”

Those three words, those three simple words, untied a knot that had been growing inside her. “You do?”

“If he was anything like what I saw from you that night in Johnson, he probably would have killed you before you could get home. You did what you had to do.” Cal reached out and squeezed her hand tight, and she clutched it like a lifeline.

“The stone,” she said, then shuddered. “All that time, there were aliens all around the Habitat. They were there the whole time and we didn’t know it. Pillars of stone, moving so slowly we couldn’t see it. I still don’t know how they infected us, though.”

“They called the lichen their children, right? What if that’s the literal truth? Lichen on Earth spreads by spores, and if you were exposed, and Addy was exposed, and Tom was exposed… You know, I bet he carried the same antibody, too.”

For a moment, Catherine felt a flare of hope. If this “possession” was just some form of infection, maybe they could treat it. But… “But how did Iris get infected? She never landed.”

“No, but she did send probes out and bring them back in. What was it that it said? ‘We are everywhere,’ and it mentioned traveling through a vacuum?”

“But that’s impossible. Nothing can live in a vacuum,” Catherine protested.

“We know of at least one living creature on Earth that can—the tardigrade. And just like a lichen spore, it’s microscopic,” Cal said. “It all makes sense. Science has thought for years that our first contact with an alien life-form was going to be with a microscopic organism of some kind. We just happened to find one that’s sentient.”

“But I don’t understand why they would want to infect us,” Catherine said. “They hate us. I can feel their revulsion. We’re soft; they see us the way we see slugs. Wrong, somehow.”

“And yet, they don’t want to destroy us completely.”

“What do you mean?”

“Catherine, they could have had you do something much more destructive than just destroying a spaceship.” Cal ticked things off on his fingers. “They haven’t had you sabotage the military. They haven’t had you cause massive death and destruction. They’re not softening us up for an invasion. So if they don’t want that, what are they doing?”

Catherine’s eyes widened, the implication suddenly becoming clear. “They destroyed our settlement, and they’re doing everything they can to stop Sagittarius II. They could have killed Iris, Tom, and me, but they let two of us come back… . Cal, they’re not planning to invade us. We invaded them. They’re defending their planet from invading aliens. Us.”

“Of course!” He let go of her hand and started gesticulating as he spoke. “We show up and build a place for our people to live; of course it looks like we’re about to colonize! I mean, that’s why we went, right?” Cal laughed. “God, we’re stupid. Do you know we didn’t even talk about any contingencies in case the planet was already inhabited?”

“To be fair, all our probes showed it was empty.”

“I know, but the thing is, we’re just assuming we can go out there and find any place we want and claim it as ours.” He shook his head, incredulous. “It’s like we haven’t learned a damn thing from our own history.”

Cal was already three steps ahead of her, and that shouldn’t have been a surprise. He was brilliant, already considering the political ramifications while she was still grappling with the idea that she had come in contact with aliens.

“What do we do?” she asked.

He smiled at her, a slow-dawning expression that caught her off guard. “Listen to you. You’ve been through a hell I can’t even imagine, and nobody would blame you if you washed your hands of the whole business and tried to get back to a normal life, but not you, no. You’re ready to jump right back into the fight.”

Catherine focused on her hands, unable to meet his eyes. “Well, considering that I’m partly responsible for us being in this mess…”

He covered one of her hands with his. “But you’re not.” He gave her hand a shake. “What’s going on is not your fault. If anything, it’s NASA’s. We might have sent you to an occupied planet. Any conflicts from that are our fault. You are one of the strongest, smartest women I know. And despite everything you’ve gone through, here you are.”

Their eyes met and held. Catherine felt a rush of warmth in her chest at his words, and at the way he was looking at her right now, his eyes soft and admiring. The moment lingered, then he cleared his throat. “Anything else you remember that I should know about?”

“That’s most of it.” Catherine smiled faintly. “You know, death, destruction, alien contact.”

“When we get back, we’ll go see Lindholm. He’ll have to listen to us now. We’ll have time to call back Sagittarius before they walk into the same situation you did, blind.”

“You really do believe me.”

“I do.”

Catherine wanted to relax, to tell herself that everything would be all right now. Cal believed her. The question was, would anyone else?