Lisa Nichols: Vessel

You can do this . Would this be the time she remembered something new? “The mission was going as planned. We were on schedule traveling through ERB Prime, and the planned experiments were going well. The last clear memory I have is of a conversation with Commander Ava Gidzenko about adjusting our ETA, since we seemed to be ahead of schedule. That was sometime around Mission Day 865, because Commander Gidzenko commented on it in the ship’s log.” The logs were the only reason she knew for certain that they’d even reached the TRAPPIST-1 system, but the entries stopped shortly before they landed.

Cal spoke. “Commander Gidzenko’s private logs mention some tension among the crew around that time, but she didn’t go into specifics.”

That was new information. Had Ava been referring to— She hadn’t written that down, had she? She’d promised. Cath, I’m not even calling this a verbal reprimand. Call it being a worried friend. Deal with it before it blows up, and I’ll keep pretending I don’t know anything.

A sudden paranoia grabbed Catherine by the throat and shook her. Each of the crew had written private log entries. She had reviewed the public entries, but she couldn’t access the private ones. Her own personal log entries had been wiped sometime during her blank period, leaving nothing before Mission Day 865. She had no idea when or why they’d been deleted. It wasn’t as if she’d written anything incriminating…

But what had the others written? What had they seen? How much did NASA know? Breathe. If they knew everything, you’d know by now.

“Colonel Wells?”

“Sorry, sir.” She clenched her jaw. It galled her to call him “sir.” “That’s news to me. Commander Gidzenko didn’t talk to me about any problems among the rest of the crew.” That was the absolute truth.

“And the first thing after the gap?”

Catherine shook her head. “It was like waking up from a dream. There are snatches of memory, doing some of the planned experiments, making a meal… Day 1349 was the first day it really came to me that I was alone, and that I shouldn’t be. I thought the ship’s mission clock had to be wrong at first, but there was so much evidence on board that we’d landed—the Habitat module wreckage, the depletion of the supplies, the missing rover… That’s when I first realized things were terribly wrong.”

She could still feel that panic clawing in her mind even six years later, and remembered how she’d run blindly from one crew quarters to another, praying she’d find her missing colleagues there.

At times it felt as if she might drown beneath a massive tsunami of delayed grief. Every time she sat down to retell her story in yet another debrief, there were ghosts behind her, pushing at her, needing her to tell their stories as well. But how could she tell their stories when she couldn’t even remember her own?

The questions came from both men now, fast and hard.

“And so nothing out of the ordinary was going on before Sagittarius left the wormhole, nothing that was kept out of the logs?”

“No sir.” Another technical truth.

“You have no memory of Mission Day 1137, or of any of the circumstances around it? Nothing about what happened to the rest of the Sagittarius I crew?”

“No, sir. I wish I did.” God, I wish I did. How can I ever face Ava’s kids and tell them I don’t know what happened to their mom?

“What about the Habitat debris on board Sagittarius ? Do you remember anything about that?”

“No, sir. All I know is what I’ve been told since coming home. On Mission Day 1137, all contact between Earth and TRAPPIST-1f ended abruptly, and all life-support signals from the crew ceased, including mine.” She survived; what if the others had as well? Had she just abandoned them? No, she wouldn’t have. She couldn’t have. “I’ve thought about it, and all I can figure is that if the Habitat was destroyed, I would have tried to bring the debris back with me, for analysis, to figure out what happened.”

“Colonel Wells.” Morganson spoke up again, and he lifted his head to look at her. She was struck again by how attractive he might have been, with his messy brown hair and boyish features, if there’d been any hint of warmth to him. “What do you think happened on Mission Day 1137? Surely in six years, you’ve formulated a theory.”

“I—” Catherine looked at Aaron, but he seemed interested in her answer as well. “I’ve asked myself that question every single day.” It was more than that. The question tormented her. Over the six years that she was alone with nothing to do but think, she’d come up with a thousand possible scenarios, some more improbable than others, most of them—at least to some degree—her fault. Coming home, she’d hoped that maybe, finally, someone at NASA might be able to help her find the answers. She took a breath and gave them her least improbable possibilities. “There might have been a problem with the Habitat, or an accident of some sort. I know now that we did find signs of microorganisms in the water there, so there could have been an illness that hit us, but given how suddenly everything stopped, and that the Habitat debris shows signs of fire, my best guess is that something catastrophic happened to our life-support systems in the Habitat.”

“And the others?” Morganson asked.

Catherine couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead she focused on her hands. “The logical assumption is that whatever happened on Mission Day 1137, I was the sole survivor.” She hated that answer. That for some unexplainable reason, she survived and the others didn’t. “I can’t think of any other reason why I would have come back alone.”

“Oh, I can think of a few,” Morganson said.

“Cal,” Llewellyn said sharply. “You’re out of line.”

“I’m sorry, Aaron, but no one else around here seems willing to say it,” Morganson said. “It’s incredibly convenient that Colonel Wells ‘doesn’t remember’ anything, and that all information from the Habitat, including public logs and telemetry, stops abruptly three days prior to the Event, not to mention that all of the crew’s personal logs after Day 865 are gone. All we have are Colonel Wells’s personal logs after Day 1349.”

The Event. NASA had always been fond of euphemisms for tragedy. The fear and anger and frustration that had been simmering in her for years bubbled over. “Well, it’s pretty damned inconvenient for me . Especially since you seem to be implying that I’m lying.”

“No one thinks you’re lying,” Aaron said, looking pointedly at Cal. “No one. We’re in awe of you. You went through an unimaginable experience out there and the fact that you came back is a miracle, yes, but it’s also a testament to your strength and resilience. No one has ever survived alone in space for as long as you did. You’re a goddamned hero.”

The word rankled her. She’d spent years training for a mission she couldn’t even remember. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow whatever happened up there was her fault. How else was she the only one to return?

“I think that’s all we have for now.” Aaron stood up. “Come on. Your family must be waiting for you. Let’s get you to them.”

“Thank you.” Catherine stood as well, reaching for her sunglasses.

Aaron accompanied her from the room and down the seemingly endless corridors that lead from the depths of the building to the waiting area. Escaping the room felt like escaping prison, and now for the first time in nine years, she was going to find out what it was like to be free again. Her heart thudded painfully in her chest, and her mind raced with the thought of seeing Aimee and David for real, without any barriers between them.