18
Unable to sleep, Traci wandered down to the beach behind Polaris’s transient crew dorms and plopped down onto the white sand, drawing her knees up to her chin and pondering the starry sky above. Ahead, the ocean glowed silver beneath a gibbous moon. She closed her eyes and let the salty breeze wash over her, losing herself in the susurrating hiss of the surf. This being her last night on Earth for the next few years, she desperately needed to remove herself from life’s distractions.
To call the previous few months a whirlwind didn’t feel dramatic enough. It had been a class-five hurricane of urgent needs and competing demands run through with political maneuvering that was distasteful at best and infuriating at worst. She had a feeling that wasn’t about to get any better. At least she’d be off-planet for those repercussions, safely removed in orbit and growing more distant by the day. Much as she dreaded voluntarily going under for so long a time, it would relieve her of the stultifying world her home planet had become.
She pondered the sky above, its fixed stars occasionally crisscrossed by steadily moving points of light: satellites, tracing their paths around Earth. Soon, Columbus itself would rise behind her to pass overhead along its orbit.
She looked toward where she knew Neptune to be, where she herself would be in another year. It was imperceptible to her unaided eyes; even with a good telescope it would be nothing more than an aquamarine mote in the dark, barely distinguishable from the background stars. And beyond that . . .
What, exactly? Beyond had never held such portentous implications. The universe was at once spectacular and deeply weird in ways that defied words, and now they find that deep weirdness parked at the edge of their unassuming little stellar neighborhood, like an exotic foreigner moving in down the street.
No, that wasn’t right. It had been there for a very long time. Judging by the orbits of the trans-Neptunian objects it had drawn in its direction, it had been there since before humans had first looked up at the heavens and sought meaning in its movement.
That the Anomaly had a gravity field in the first place implied it was stable; all that dark matter may have influenced the evolution of the solar system. Had it helped keep the outer planets in their distant orbits, shepherding the inner system’s planets and shielding them from eons of cometary bombardment?
Not that it had been perfect; they’d found evidence themselves for the theory that water and the seeds of life on Earth had come from out there. Had it all been by accident, or was it part of a grand design? The question had dogged her since childhood. Despite all they’d learned—or perhaps because of it—she felt no closer to an answer now than before.
She’d have felt better about all this if Jack had found the hypothetical Planet Nine. That would’ve made for a nice, neat way to wrap up the solar system’s missing links. She’d hoped for a world teeming with frozen organics, carried by the tides of orbital mechanics to primordial Earth, in the center of the Goldilocks zone where the Sun’s warmth could give them a chance to take root and grow. Instead they’d found a cosmic exit ramp into a tunnel through space-time. And if it could be traversed . . .
She shuddered at the implications. She’d always comforted herself with the belief that humanity had never detected other intelligent life because we were the first: God’s chosen creation, placed above all others as the dominant species with the commission to go forth and multiply.
Jack, half-jokingly, had proposed the opposite: What if we hadn’t heard from anyone else because we were in a bad neighborhood and it was better to be quiet and keep our heads down? By that logic, flying through the wormhole might give away our presence to a horde of extraterrestrial marauders.
She laid her head against her knees, angry with herself for letting her imagination run wild again. This called for cold practicality, not unbridled flights of fancy.
“Mind if I join you?”
She looked up to find Penny standing beside her in the darkness, cradling a bottle of wine in one arm. How long had she been there? “We can’t drink within twenty-four hours of a launch.” It sounded weak as she said it.
Penny eased down into the sand beside her, crossed her legs, and passed her a plastic cup. “That’s an agency rule, dear. Spaceline rules are twelve hours bottle to throttle.” She leaned over to fill the empty cup. “But that’s for the crew. We’re passengers.”
Traci nodded in surrender and took a sip. “I keep forgetting that.” She studied the cup appreciatively. “Not bad. Pinot?”
“I didn’t read the label, just grabbed the first bottle of white I could find in the stockroom fridge. We keep rotating the labels every month.”
“We?”
Penny smiled. “I used to work here, remember? When you put that much of yourself into something it’s hard to think of it in the third person.”
Like letting go of NASA, she realized. She indulged the distraction from her troubled thoughts. “Demanding, was it?”
Penny rolled her eyes. “Like you wouldn’t believe. Every day there were new fires to put out. Planes break in ways you can’t imagine, crews get out of position, Feds are always snooping around looking for nitpicky violations . . . and all that while keeping the ‘high net worth’ passengers happy.” She filled her glass and lifted it in a toast. “But they do have good taste in booze. Here’s to success.”
Traci returned the gesture. “To success,” she muttered, and drained her glass.
“It’s supposed to be sipped, you know.”
She worked her toes into the sand and shrugged. “Guess I’m not feeling particularly refined right now.”
“Doesn’t look like you’re feeling very sleepy, either. What’s on your mind?”
What wasn’t on her mind would be easier to answer. She blew out a sigh and laid back against the sand. “Everything and nothing. What are we doing here, ma’am?”
Penny cocked an eyebrow. “Didn’t I tell you to stop calling me that? I’m not your boss anymore. And you know precisely what we’re doing.”
She waved a hand at the stars above. Columbus had just come into view, a bright light passing to the south. “We’re hanging our tails out in the breeze when a UN ship is already on the way. As much as I detest Cheever, she has a point about risk.”
Penny frowned. “And we both know that she neglects the risk of subjecting Jack to another bout of extended hibernation. The devil will use ninety-nine facts to float one falsehood past you, dear.”
She sat up on her elbows, not expecting such a bold assertion. “So you know where I’m coming from?”
Penny leaned over to refill the now empty glass. “Maybe better than you think. The world makes it tough to keep yourself centered. To keep your faith.” She followed Traci’s eyes to the stars overhead. “There’s so much out there that overwhelms the senses, makes you realize how big God is and how puny we are. In our line of work there’s always a platoon of pointy-headed academics carping from the sidelines, trying to convince us it’s all from random chance.” She took another sip. “It almost worked on me for a long time.”
“So you still believe?”
“More than ever. Had my own struggles, mind you. I’ve seen people at their best and at their worst. All it does is convince me we don’t have all the answers.”
Traci kneaded her forehead. “I’d just like to get to the point where I have fewer questions.”
“The older I get, the more I learn, which just shows me how much less I understand. Life’s kind of humbling that way.” Penny studied her for several moments. “You’re not conflicted about the mission. You’re conflicted about the objective. Or rather, how you feel about it.”
The lady did have a reputation for getting to the point. “You know about Jack, then.”
“I had to sign off on the crew selection, dear. And I did have a few off-the-record conversations with the psych team.”
She sat up straight. “So you know I’m—”
Penny cut her off gently. “I know you’re conflicted, and that’s why you choose to remain celibate.” She placed a hand on her arm. “That’s a big mark in your favor in my book. That shows a dedication to your beliefs that not enough people appreciate anymore. Strength of conviction can be off-putting.”
“Better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all.” It sounded hopelessly trite even as she said it.
“Don’t be too sure about that. I’ve lost two husbands,” Penny countered, “and a best friend. That guy meant almost as much to me as the men I married, just in a different way. It didn’t hurt any less.”
She sat up. “I didn’t know—about the others, I mean.” Everyone in the space agency had known about her first husband’s death in a launch accident. “How do you keep going after something like that?”
Penny shrugged. “Same way you did after we gave Jack up for dead. Life has to go on.” She stared off into the distance. “Dan was doing his job. It could’ve easily been me up there. Joe was a few years older than me and had a family history of heart disease. I should’ve seen that coming. Tom’s was . . . should have been . . . avoidable.”
“That was the Clipper accident, wasn’t it? The one that was stranded in orbit?”
Penny’s eyes darkened. “Like I said, avoidable. A victim of industrial espionage that spun out of control. He saved his crew and passengers, and probably saved the company.”
Traci was beginning to understand. “Is that why Hammond is so determined to go ahead with our mission?” With an UNSEC vessel en route, it would have been easy for him to stand down and save himself considerable expense.
“Art believes people are more important than machinery. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a huge tech nerd but he’s old enough to distrust AI even more than Roy does.” That drew a knowing chuckle from Traci. “He doesn’t want to leave this operation up to bots. Especially UN-sanctioned Chinese bots.”
“Not a big believer in the international order, is he?”
“Not in its current form.” Penny stood, brushing sand from her backside as she looked up to the night sky once more. “This could be the single most important discovery since finding the New World. Nobody knows what’s on the other side of the Anomaly, but humans need to be there to find out. This is way more than just a recovery op.”
“I know,” she sighed. “It’s just easier to focus on the immediate problem.”
“Careful that you don’t get target-locked, then.” Penny looked down at her. “Otherwise you’ll end up painting yourself into a corner. For every action you take, have a plan for what to do if everything turns to crap. Because it eventually will.”