Lisa Nichols - Vessel

“You know I’m going to see the full debriefings eventually, right?” Nate beckoned, like Bring it on .

Cal glanced at the closed door. “It’s nothing concrete. Something’s not adding up yet. Just a feeling.”

“Oh lord, not one of your feelings.” Nate groaned and ran a hand over his face dramatically.

“Listen. How often have I been wrong?”

“It’s not how often , Cal; it’s that when you are wrong, it turns into a colossal clusterfuck.” Nate would know; he’d helped mop Cal off the floor enough times.

But once again, Cal wasn’t going down without a fight. “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad. Name one clusterfuck.”

Nate raised his eyebrows. “You really wanna play this? All right. Let’s go. You spent a month convinced that TRAPPIST-1f was actually a volcanic hell planet.”

“The science was there! With the other planets in the system so close, volcanic activity should have been—”

“It was speculation! You were guessing , Cal.”

“I was a kid. Come on, we were still in college. Besides, it got me the job offer with NASA, didn’t it?”

Nate was unimpressed. “You nearly got the whole program scrapped.”

“Considering what actually happened, would that have been so terrible?”

“They weren’t killed by volcanoes, were they?” Nate stabbed a finger at him. “No moving the goalposts. You were wrong.”

“We don’t know they weren’t killed by volcanoes…”

“Cal, we’ve got the crew’s surveys from orbit right before they landed. ‘Volcano’ is probably one of the few causes we have ruled out.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay,” Cal admitted grudgingly. “Fine. I was wrong once.”

“Once.” Nate snorted. “What about that time you were working on Sentinel and you thought—”

This game wasn’t fun if Nate was going to show off his flawless recall of “every time Cal Morganson was an idiot.”

“All right, all right. Maybe more than once.” Cal leaned forward, pointing at him. “But how many times have I been right ?”

Nate leaned back in his chair, grin on his face. “Not enough times for me to stop giving you shit every time you say you have a feeling.”

“I’m wounded, Nate. I’m deeply wounded.” Cal pressed a hand to his chest.

“You’ll survive. Your ego has made it through worse.” Nate gave him a shrewd look. “You know, we’re not all really keeping score on how often you’re wrong here. You’re the only one counting, man.”

“Can’t tell if you’re winning if nobody’s keeping score.” He focused on Nate again, growing serious. “I can’t shake the feeling that something’s off. It could be something big.” Cal didn’t care if Nate laughed at him; he probably deserved it a little , and Nate was allowed even if Cal wouldn’t put up with it from anyone else. “I just don’t want a repeat of whatever happened. Not with you guys. You’re my team.”

“I know. I get it. And we appreciate it, Cal, we really do.” Nate grew more serious as well. “Six years is a long time. It would be easy to treat Sagittarius I like ancient history. We all had a chance to get over it and move on. Now that Wells is back, it’s stirring up a lot of old stuff for us. Everybody’s feeling it.”

“How’s the crew doing?”

Nate shrugged. “Better, actually. Nobody talked about it, but it was kinda rough, being the crew to follow a mission where everyone died.”

“I worried about that, how you guys would handle it.” Cal had been tracking the crew’s psych evals. Every one of them was understandably anxious. Anxiety was normal, but it led to errors, errors Cal didn’t want to risk.

“But now that it turns out there was a survivor, in a weird way it makes it better. Maybe if we can find out exactly what happened, we’ll avoid making the same mistakes. If there were mistakes.”

“That’s what we’re working on.”

“Yeah, I know. I trust you, Cal,” Nate said easily. “As long as I keep believing you guys are gonna get us up there and back, I’m fine. I think everyone else feels the same way.”

And that, right there, was exactly why Cal needed to get to the truth of Catherine Wells’s story. He owed it to his crew, to Nate, to make sure they were as safe as possible. It might make people hate him; it might get him demoted even, but he couldn’t risk Nate and the others for the sake of the narrative that made Wells a hero and left his team vulnerable.

NONE OF THEM spoke at first. They clung to one another. Catherine was sobbing and so was Aimee, her slender body shaking with the force of it while Catherine held on to her and David held on to both of them. I’m home, I’m home, I’m home . She couldn’t stop thinking it, unable to believe it was finally happening. Our families will be so happy to see us; we’ll be able to make everything work out. Ava had been right.

David leaned in to kiss her carefully, their first kiss in nearly a decade. It was sweeter than she remembered. Catherine closed her eyes and they were twenty-three again, leaning toward each other on a boardwalk bench still warm from the setting sun. She’d been laughing, daring him to kiss her, their mouths sticky with cotton candy like children’s. He still smelled the same twenty years later, still wearing the same cologne.

David drew back and brushed a hand over her hair. “Come on. We’re taking you home.”

Walking out into the sunlight—Earth’s light, not artificial light, not starlight—was like walking out under a spotlight. Everything was so harsh, overexposed, bright. She was walking into a nuclear blast and half expected to see her shadow burned into the concrete behind her. The shapes were all wrong. While she was in quarantine she’d noticed the obsession of Earth architecture and design with having everything squared off. After the curves and contours of Sagittarius , that blocky squareness felt wrong. It felt dangerous. There were too many sharp corners to cut herself on.

What didn’t feel wrong were the two people with her. Squinting despite the sunglasses, she kept David on one side of her, Aimee on the other, her arms around their waists as they headed for the car.

A car . She laughed at the sight of it sitting there, delightfully ordinary. David wasn’t driving the exact car he’d had nine years ago, but it was the same in all the ways that mattered: midsize sedan, comfortable, safe, and a little dull. She used to tease him relentlessly about it: “You drive the slowest, most boring car of any future astronaut I know.” The rest of their training cohort were notorious speed junkies, an impressive collection of sports cars and classic muscle cars among them. Then David had washed out of the program, and the jokes stopped.

Catherine settled into the passenger seat and found herself savoring the overheated air from the late spring sun.

“Are you hungry?” David asked. “Do you want to stop and get anything before we get home?”

“I just want to go home .” Catherine couldn’t stop looking at both of them, cataloguing changes. David’s auburn hair was a little thinner at the temples, and there were wire-framed glasses covering his gray eyes that hadn’t been there before. But really, he looked the way he’d always looked. From the cologne to the car to everything else, David never changed. He was her rock, steady and unmoving and always there .

Except he did change, didn’t he? Your rock moved on. To Maggie. Ava’s voice. Catherine willed the thought away. She just wanted to enjoy this.

Aimee was a wonder. For years, Catherine had carried the image of the nine-year-old tomboy in her head, and she scarcely knew how to credit this ethereally beautiful seventeen-year-old sitting behind her. She’d always had David’s friendly features and Catherine’s pale skin, but there was no trace of the tomboy in her now. Her dark-brown hair was pulled back in a loose braid, and she was wearing a perfectly tailored gray dress. It was the kind of thing Catherine would never have had the fashion sense to pick.