5
Washington, DC
Cheever had grown accustomed to keeping punishingly long hours; it was part of the package when one rose to the level of an agency administrator. Equivalent to a corporate CEO, she took satisfaction in the knowledge that her work was devoted to a higher purpose. Not being encumbered with a family made it that much easier to endure the hours.
Still, she was finding her limits being stretched by her agency’s participation in this new UN space initiative. She believed deeply in the Cooperative’s mission, and in fact had been an early advocate for it. In a world with diminishing capital, it only made sense for the few active spacefaring nations to coordinate their efforts toward a unified goal. Let the private ventures continue throwing everything they had at their own questionable priorities; she was convinced it would eventually bankrupt them.
This bright new future was taking its toll, however. While she was used to long hours, UNSEC’s operations being managed out of Beijing meant that most of her cohorts were working on the opposite side of the clock. While her peers at other agencies were beginning to wrap up their workdays to throw themselves on the mercy of Washington’s perpetually gridlocked roads, the second half of Jacqueline Cheever’s day was just beginning. She rationalized that getting actual work done was better than being mired in traffic with her personal driver.
Her video phone rang as the sun began to set, bypassing the receptionist outside: It was Li Fang, director-general of UNSEC. She stabbed at the receiver, and a wizened man with a shock of white hair appeared on screen.
“Good morning, Dr. Li,” she said cordially, a tone she reserved for a select few. “How are you today?” Inside, she grated at the Eastern tendency to start every conversation with pleasantries and small talk. They could accomplish so much more in the same amount of time if they’d just get down to business.
“I am well, thank you. And may I say it is most fortunate that your missing astronaut has been found, though I am surprised that there has been no public announcement.”
“We’ve been waiting for an opportune time,” she said, deflecting his query. “There will be a considerable amount of public interest and we have to correctly handle the messaging.”
“I see.” He paused. “You will excuse my abruptness, but my day began quite early given this news. I spent the predawn hours striving to understand the rest of your information.”
That was a welcome change. Li was getting right to it, so he must have been as surprised as she was. Hearing from Templeton after all this time was perhaps the least startling development. “I thought you’d find it intriguing. We’re still trying to understand it here, as you could imagine.”
“As are we. Who else is aware of this development?”
“My assistant at first. He’s my personal liaison to the contractor team monitoring the spacecraft.”
“I take it he has your complete trust, otherwise I assume he would not be in such a position. You said ‘at first.’ May I presume others are now involved?”
“You are correct, Dr. Li. I’ve also briefed in our chief scientist, Dr. Trumbull. As you know, my professional work has been in astrobiology and these discoveries demand someone with a stronger background in astrophysics.”
“A considerably stronger background,” Li agreed. “I am familiar with Dr. Trumbull. He is no doubt up to the task, but can he be trusted to remain discreet as well?”
Cheever caught herself before rolling her eyes in annoyance. She had to be careful on video calls like this. A tight smile crossed her lips. “Rest assured I would not have briefed him in otherwise.”
Li nodded sagely. “That is most encouraging to hear, Dr. Cheever. This discovery is unexpected, to say the least. It must be treated with the utmost sensitivity.”
“Of course. Have you shared this with the other UNSEC agency heads?”
“No,” he said, more tersely than she thought necessary. “I have the leader of our science division evaluating this. I would rather have some understanding of the situation before sharing it.”
Knowledge is power. Her brow furrowed faintly. “That is your prerogative, of course. But may I suggest that Roscosmos still has a capable science division of its own. Dr. Komarov could be particularly helpful.”
“All in good time,” Li assured her. He clearly didn’t trust the gregarious Russian to keep this to himself for long, though Yevgeny Komarov might have been the best man on the planet for this job. “I would like to know more about your mission management staff.”
She knew he was more interested in their trustworthiness rather than their abilities, and Cheever had to admit this crew might be difficult to control. “They’re contractors, as you know. Not direct employees of NASA.”
“I am aware,” Li said, the disapproval evident in his eyes. “That is unfortunate, given the present circumstances. How many of them have direct involvement in the program?”
“Twelve. That includes the program director, Owen Harriman. He was the original Magellan mission manager and most of the team used to work for him. They have been duly reminded of the legal and financial consequences of violating their nondisclosure agreements.”
“Monetary incentives are often more powerful than other, less pleasant methods.” Li’s tone implied those other methods should also be on the table.
At that moment, Owen Harriman was studying the lengthy directives he and his team had been presented with. Written in the customary impenetrable legalese, it was a reminder of why he’d chosen engineering over law school. He’d take pages of differential equations and technical specs any day over paragraphs-long expositions on simple words like and or shall.
It had been days since he’d informed Cheever’s personal liaison, and there’d not been a word about Jack Templeton in the news. Wouldn’t they have wanted to trumpet his reappearance to the press? It was fantastic news, and from her perspective a surefire way to secure the kind of funding the space agency always craved. He knew it had grated on her that Congress had forced her hand to turn over control of their exploration-class ships to private entities; at the time it was the only way to avoid shutting it all down completely. If anything, he’d expected her to use this to take back direct control. Instead, everyone in HOPE was being ordered to keep their mouths shut.
Discovering Magellan after so many years of presuming it lost had obviously ignited a firestorm within NASA, apparently even higher up than that. So what was her game? She was notoriously against a human presence, which had to be playing into this. And he didn’t see this new UN “cooperative” as much more than another layer of bureaucracy guaranteed to add time and expense to whatever it touched, with the side benefit of not accomplishing very much.
Was that it? Had they decided to keep all this under wraps and just hope it went away? Abandoning Jack to whatever fate this “anomaly” held for him?
Another mission was a tall order, definitely beyond NASA’s current abilities. Not impossible, but there were severe time constraints, and it wasn’t as if no one had been thinking through the scenarios either here or back at the space agency.
Owen glared at the as yet unsigned reminder from the agency’s legal counsel. His acknowledgment would have to be signed and notarized, with a date and time. In his estimation, he wasn’t yet bound by it. Good for him, and too damned bad for Cheever. The personal consequences of violating his NDA were nothing compared to those of leaving Jack Templeton’s fate up to the lawyers.
That’s what he told himself as he picked up his phone and thumbed through the contacts until he landed on Roy Hoover’s personal number. The old astronaut picked up after the first ring.
“We found Magellan. Jack’s alive.”
Johnson Space Center
Houston, Texas
Traci strode briskly across the courtyard, at once in a hurry to escape the simmering heat while not wanting to expend any more energy than necessary just to avoid more sweat. One would think she’d have become acclimated after years of working here, but her body refused to cooperate.
As she approached Building One she caught a glimpse of herself, too obviously studying her reflection in the glass doors. To her, the streak of white in her otherwise dark brown mane of hair stood out more than normal. She thought it made her look like a skunk, while Roy liked to say it gave her some personality. “Mission souvenir,” he’d pointed out after she’d come out of sedation aboard Magellan. The docs had attributed it to the shock from a traumatic brain injury and months in therapeutic hibernation. Whatever the cause, it was a constant reminder of what kept her off flight status, not that she was in a hurry to go out there again. Almost two years in the Big Nothing had been more than enough. And yet the unfinished business left behind still pulled at her.
A curtain of cold air descended on her as she stepped inside. The sudden shock of leaving the sweltering heat made her head swim, like stepping into an ice box. The goosebumps on her skin were a reminder of her first day here, when they had been from sheer excitement. Once the bustling hub of America’s manned space program, Building One now felt empty as space itself.
When they’d returned to Earth, the country had just begun clawing its way out from under the currency collapse that had happened during their long journey to Pluto. Already considered a luxury by many, the human spaceflight program had been eviscerated, though the token presence they maintained here stood as proof that once begun, a government program could never truly be eliminated. She and Roy had been among the few placeholder astronauts kept on the payroll in the hopes that someday there would once again be spacecraft to fly and missions to run.
While their positions had a lot to do with politics, she was also convinced they’d been awarded out of sympathy for their ordeal in deep space. Roy had always maintained his stoic equilibrium—if we’re ever going back, they’ll need people who’ve been there—but she couldn’t shake the feeling that public relations had as much to do with it. NASA couldn’t very well turn its most experienced crew members loose into a nonexistent job market. The conniving harpy who’d maneuvered her way into the administrator’s office would’ve happily ended human spaceflight altogether, but she wasn’t completely blind to the optics. Fortunately, Roy’s wife and crewmate Noelle Hoover had been able to return to her university research, which left only two redundant components Cheever had to keep on the payroll.
Which brought her back to the nagging question of the third “redundant component.” Every day, she and Roy had received updates from the industry consortium that had taken over support of the stripped-down Magellan spacecraft as it flew deeper into the solar system. And every day the results had remained largely the same, save for changes in position and velocity. With Jack in hibernation, Magellan had essentially become autonomous, and with the radio signal delays stretching into most of a day there was precious little anyone on Earth could do for him. Traci had become just another spectator.
That observer status mirrored the rest of her work in the Future Applications branch—and “work” was a term she used only in the nominal sense that they were paying her and she was expected to show up on time. Whatever she actually accomplished seemed not to matter. Future applications of what, exactly? The pulsed-fusion drive they’d used on Magellan had promised to open up the solar system. All sorts of grand ideas languished on virtual drawing boards: fleets of fast-movers to take more humans to the outer planets, more efficient iterations of fusion rockets that could be sized for specific missions, and some intriguing proposals for AI-driven interstellar probes that were no longer confined to fiction.
The sad reality was construction of Magellan’s sister ship, Columbus, had been well underway when they’d had the rug pulled out from under them. Now it sat in a parking orbit, waiting for politicians on Earth to decide its fate. In its place, the new administrator had thrown NASA’s remaining discretionary resources at some tech billionaire’s crackpot idea to cool the planet. Future Applications felt like just as much of a dead end, a place to mark time and stay employed until the rest of the world stopped looking for handouts.
She dropped her purse and coffee—which she took religiously despite the heat—on her desk. When she reached for the desktop keyboard, she found a handwritten note from Roy behind it:
MY OFFICE. ASAP.