Andrew Morgan: Vessel

‘But that’s ridiculous!’ Lev shouted, snapping from his distant state. ‘He’s the best cosmonaut we have, a veteran of many successful missions on Earth and in space!’

‘I’ve also seen in his file that he has a history of depression.’

‘When he was a teenager for goodness’ sake!’

‘Depressive behaviour is not something that can be ignored, and as this case shows, cannot be indefinitely cured. Major Romanenko’s mental instability should have had him filtered out during the selection process and he should have never been allowed to wear a space suit. He is a discredit to the RFSA, a discredit to the partners of the ISS and a discredit to space exploration.’

Bales shot a look at Aleks. ‘I’m disappointed you couldn’t tell me about this. I wanted you to be honest with me, even gave you the opportunity to speak your mind, and you held information back — important information. In light of this situation, my conclusion — and the conclusion I shall be reporting to my superiors — is that Major Romanenko is a threat to our mission, the crew, and potentially to the future of mankind. We will retrieve your crew as soon as possible and replace them with our own so we can be certain that the future of this mission is not jeopardised any more than it already has been.’

‘This is insane…’ Lev said, shaking his head in disbelief.

‘Furthermore, Mr Ryumin,’ Bales said, standing up and pushing his chair under the table, ‘you have been granted three month’s leave so you can take some time to rest and recover from this ordeal. It hasn’t been easy for you, I’m sure.’

‘But — but I’m fine,’ Lev said, getting to his feet so fast that his chair snapped back against the wall.

‘It wasn’t a suggestion.’

The door swung open and a young man rushed in. He was red faced and panting.

‘Sorry to disturb you,’ he said between gasps, ‘but you’re needed in Mission Control right away.’

Bales squeezed past and set off down the corridor at a run, and Aleks, with Lev in tow, scrambled out after him. Foregoing the elevator, they clattered down a flight of stairs, crashing one by one through the swinging double doors and into the corridor. When they got to Mission Control, security swept them in, and Aleks entered, hands on hips, chest rising and falling.

‘What’s the situation?’ asked Bales, his apparent fitness allowing him to speak in his usual composed way. The junior flight controller led them to the comms desk as he spoke.

‘We had another window — a brief one — and we had enough time to catch a message from the ISS.’

He nodded to the operator sat at Aleks’ desk, who, waiting for the command, thumbed the playback button on the recorder.

‘It isn’t much,’ the junior flight controller said, the whites of his eyes bold and bright, ‘but I think you need to hear it.’

The speakers erupted with a distorted chatter, swelling and throbbing with guttural hisses and stabs of noise that sounded like tearing paper. An underlying current of speech also seemed to be threading its way through the static, but it sounded distant and muffled, and not quite defined enough to form any recognisable words. The operator turned the gain up, and the hiss rose, becoming almost too loud to bear.

Then, clearly, through the mist of distortion flushing from the speakers, a word — and then another — pressed against the eardrums of everyone in the room, the voice made unrecognisable through the strain of distress:

‘Help… me…’ it said.

An orange flame of dawn light pierced through the small window, straight into Sally Fisher’s eyes. She pulled the blind down and repositioned herself so her head was resting up against the small jet’s leather-trimmed fuselage.

Sally had received the call from NASA the evening before, around ten thirty at night. A call from NASA wasn’t unusual, because they sponsored her SETI work in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, but the timing was. Although she had still been working — as she always seemed to be, and that’s how she liked it — it was way past what she considered to be an appropriate time for a business call.

Her annoyances were soon forgotten when the voice on the other end of the phone relayed its message. She had been summoned, not to the NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. or to the Kennedy Space Centre like she had been on a few previous occasions, but to Moscow. Her work was her life; there was no spouse, partner, or even cat to consult with, and so her response had been an immediate, resounding, and what she hoped didn’t sound too much like an over-excited schoolgirl, yes .

Not six hours later, she had met her NASA liaison at the Moffett Federal Airfield, a short drive from the Carl Sagan Centre where she conducted most of her research. She had been ushered onto a small, unexpectedly luxurious private jet. The jet’s turbines where already whining at idle as she boarded, and within minutes of buckling up her seatbelt, they were airborne. No one had even asked to see her passport.

The soft, creamy leather should have been comfortable, yet Sally struggled to sit still on its velvety folds. Her brain was a muddle of exhilaration, anticipation, nervousness; a mixed bag of pure ecstasy and unadulterated fear.

They had told her on the phone that she was needed right away in Moscow, but little more than that. The NASA escort at the airport hadn’t uttered a word beyond polite pleasantries and the odd instruction. She surmised that whatever it was they wanted from her, it could only be one of two things: firstly, Sally was a communications expert. That didn’t mean she was good with radios — although she was — more that her research led the way in the field of deep space transmission. Her first MIT doctorate thesis, completed when she was just twenty-three, helped NASA extend its field of view into the cosmos to make sense of the fine detail received by its space telescopes like Hubble and ROSAT. Her second thesis helped NASA and CalTech push space telescope technology to the next generation, enabling NuSTAR to be launched. Despite her extraordinary technical ability and almost god-like understanding of light in all its wavelengths, Sally had chosen to reject a position at NASA and had joined the SETI Institute instead, driven by an insatiable urge to find life outside the reaches of Earth. This association was the basis of her second assumption for NASA’s motives.

Of course, NASA wouldn’t let such talent as hers go to waste, and so in exchange for their support of her search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, both through financial investment and access to their facilities, equipment and man-power, Sally would undertake research and assist in the development of technology for NASA and its partners. Her complete lack of ability to put less than her all into what she did meant that she effectively had two full time jobs — one she worked during the day, and the other she worked at night. It would be a strange day — even hour — when Sally Fisher wasn’t poring over a computer screen or a printout.

Although it wasn’t unusual for NASA to request something vague at short notice, the likelihood of them flying her all the way to Moscow for SETI purposes seemed monumentally slim. She couldn’t overlook the obvious fact that her encyclopaedic knowledge of communications could easily be imparted over the phone, by email or through Skype, so to send her to Russia for a mere technical query seemed just as unlikely. Her brain spun, tying itself in tighter and tighter knots as she sat alone in the leather-clad flying cigar tube. She considered turning on the polished wood-framed television, but she knew nothing on that could possibly distract her overactive mind.