Lisa Nichols: Vessel

As they rounded the corner, Catherine could see them standing on the other side of the glass doors. David was pacing the waiting area, his arms folded across his narrow chest. Aimee was chewing on her thumbnail.

She was the one who spotted Catherine first, looking up with a bright smile and waving enthusiastically. Aaron touched Catherine’s shoulder and smiled. “Go on. Get out of here.”

Catherine started out walking down the long corridor but wound up running. Her eyes stung and her throat ached long before she got to the door. Finally. Finally. Her heart beat that one word over and over as she stepped through. David and Aimee rushed to embrace her, and she wrapped her arms around both of them fiercely, burying her face in Aimee’s hair and letting the tears fall.

“WHAT THE HELL was that about?” Aaron Llewellyn waited until he and Cal were well away from the conference room, on the way back to Aaron’s office.

“Come on, Aaron. It doesn’t add up. It’s too neat. How are all the personal logs gone? Even if Wells’s amnesia were fishy—which it is—she couldn’t have wiped those records.” Something wasn’t right here. It didn’t piece together. His instincts were yelling it loud and clear, and his instincts rarely steered him wrong.

Maybe he shouldn’t have pushed it so hard in the debrief, though.

“If she couldn’t have wiped the records, then why did you go after her so hard? You think… what? That the crew survived and Catherine abandoned them?” Aaron shook his head.

“No, but…” Cal paused. He’d considered that, but there was no evidence. And as good as Aaron was about listening to some of Cal’s more out-there ideas, floating sinister theories about Wells was a bad idea right now. Everyone on the team was protective of her. Cal got that. Whatever the truth was, she’d been through hell, and no doubt was still going through it. “There’s just something she’s not telling us. I can feel it.”

Aaron stopped walking and turned to face Cal. His expression was flat and the way he crossed his arms over his chest didn’t bode well for Cal. “Listen, kid. I’m letting you step up on this mission. You don’t have to start shit to try to make yourself look good. Don’t make me, or anyone else, regret this.”

“I’m not starting shit—”

Aaron gave him a look.

“ This time. I’m not. I swear.”

Cal never meant to start shit. He saw things that other people overlooked. Worse than that, he was terrible about just going with the flow. He couldn’t let things slide, especially not for the sake of a feel-good story for the history books. NASA ran on myths and legends as much as it ran on funding and science. And Cal just couldn’t buy into it.

“Well, just… lay off for a bit, would you?” Aaron started walking again and Cal hurried to keep up. Aaron might as well have asked him to fly, as far as Cal was concerned, but he’d try. “She’s a hero around here. After what happened with Sagittarius I, NASA needs all the heroes it can get. And right now, Sagittarius II depends on what she’s able to tell us.”

But she’s not telling us everything. Cal sighed. “Yeah, all right. I’ll lay off.” It was just intuition right now, something about the way Wells told her story. Nothing concrete. The problem was, the more people defended Wells, the more people talked about her like she was a hero, the more Cal wanted to puncture that bubble, find out what she might be hiding. The higher the stakes got, the more important it was that he find the truth.

His promise to lay off didn’t even make it to lunchtime. He was just checking on something, that was all. For his own peace of mind. He pulled up the transcripts of Wells’s initial debrief right after she landed.

WELLS: 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.

That sounded familiar—too familiar. Her second debrief was with the psychiatrist present and was filmed. Cal watched the video briefly, then fast-forwarded to the same question.

Catherine, who had been interacting normally, paused and looked straight ahead. Cal hit Play.

“—ahead of schedule. That was sometime around Mission Day 865, because Commander Gidzenko commented on it in the ship’s log.”

Then his recording from earlier today: the exact same story, word for word. Memory didn’t work that way. When people talked about a traumatic event, it was rarely the same story twice—they misremembered, they forgot, they revealed things out of order, and they found new memories between one telling and the next. That was one reason NASA did so many of these damned reviews: to coax out as many details as possible, a few at a time. He and Aaron had hoped that in a slightly more relaxed setting with just the three of them, focused specifically on what happened to the others, that maybe a few more details would emerge.

But Wells was telling the exact same story every single time. As though she’d memorized it. As though it had been prerecorded, so to speak. On its own, it wasn’t enough to take back to Aaron, not while everyone wanted to keep Wells on her pedestal, but it was enough to raise Cal’s hackles. He just had to—

“I knew it. I knew you forgot me, man.” Dr. Nate Royer leaned against Cal’s office doorframe. “You stood me up. I sat there in the cafeteria all by myself.”

“Nate! Oh shit, I’m sorry.” Cal closed his laptop guiltily. He got out from behind his desk and greeted Nate with a clap on the shoulder. “I had that Wells debrief this morning and it threw off my whole day.”

“It wasn’t a total loss. I looked so pitiful, one of those cute new engineers must’ve felt sorry for me. Came over to say hello.”

Cal grinned, motioning Nate into his office and shutting the door behind him. “I bet you milked it for all it was worth, too, didn’t you. You dog.”

Nate shrugged eloquently, his teeth flashing bright in a quick grin. “We talked about the fickleness of straight boys. Especially the cute ones like you.”

Cal rolled his eyes at the long-standing joke. “Did you at least get his phone number?”

“What kind of a man do you think I am, Morganson? Of course I got his phone number.”

“See, wouldn’t’ve happened if I hadn’t zoned out.” Cal sprawled in his chair again while Nate took his usual seat on the other side of the desk.

“So… Catherine Wells, huh? How’d that go?”

“If you’re asking if we nailed down everything that happened on TRAPPIST-1f, then the answer is no. We’re not much closer than we were before.” He pawed through the papers on his desk for his tablet and the notes he’d taken during the debriefing. Nate was slated as the crew doctor for Sagittarius II. Even if they hadn’t been close friends, Cal would be doing everything he could to make sure Nate and the others got the answers they needed before they risked their lives.

“Damn,” Nate said. “She doesn’t know anything ? I mean, if you’re going to send me up there, it’d be nice to know my chances of coming back were getting better.”

“We’re still working on the assumption that something catastrophic happened to the Habitat…” Cal trailed off. He really wanted to be able to give Nate the party line. Nothing to see here. Move along.

“Uh-oh. I know that look. There’s a ‘but’ coming.”

“No, not really, just—” Cal pushed his tablet aside. “Never mind, man. I shouldn’t be talking to you about it.”