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6




Traci flopped into the shabby government-issue chair behind her desk, not remembering the long walk back from Roy’s office and oblivious to the two people she’d nearly stumbled into along the way. Her head was swimming as she processed the news she’d long hoped for, but never expected.

Jack was still alive.

Alive, against both the odds and everything she knew about their old spacecraft. Long after having resigned herself to the reality that he was beyond reach, he was back. Not only that, his go-to-hell temperament apparently hadn’t been tamed by his years in stasis. The man had spent more time in hibernation than any human still alive, and apparently without any harm to his cognitive functions. The cases of emergency torpor she was familiar with—including her own—often resulted in adverse long-term effects, with cognitive impairment and anemia being most common.

She’d experienced all of those to some extent, another reason why she now flew a desk instead of a spaceship. Not that there was much of the latter happening within NASA these days.

Any sense of loss she felt in that regard didn’t spring from a lack of opportunity. She’d had a good run. Multiple trips into Earth orbit, a stint at the Lunar Gateway, then the audacious Magellan mission to the outer planets. The irony had not been lost on her that the notoriously risk-averse space agency had only been prodded into action after the discovery of a derelict Russian spacecraft orbiting Pluto.

Finally breaking free of chemical rockets to embrace nuclear propulsion had enabled more real exploration in the last decade than in the half-dozen preceding it. Fission power had taken humans to Mars and the asteroid belt, while fusion engines had taken them to Jupiter and beyond. That should have been more than enough to scratch any self-respecting astronaut’s itch.

In her case it certainly should have been. Returning from the Kuiper Belt, traveling faster than any humans before them, ought to have been a career pinnacle yet she had never allowed herself to see it that way. She’d been an invalid, a vegetable tended to by Noelle as they raced home.

And if Jack hadn’t stayed behind in her place, she wouldn’t even have been that. Her notation in history would have been the first corpse NASA returned to Earth. By charging back into deep space, he had reserved that dubious honor for himself.

Yet improbably, there he was, alive and kicking.

How was she supposed to process that? How would anyone?

The news had kept Roy up since the wee hours of the morning, not that he ever showed fatigue. How long before then had it crossed Owen’s desk? For that matter, who else knew? The fact that Owen had encrypted and sent it “eyes-only” to Roy’s private account suggested a precious few. This was a momentous development and the bosses—not to mention the public—would want to know. Owen had to realize that. Why keep it under wraps?

When she logged onto her desktop, a scarlet-bordered notification window offered a likely answer:


GOOD MORNING TRACI KEENE. YOUR CURRENT SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE IS 78.7%. CONSIDER YOUR CHOICES TODAY AND STRIVE FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT.


An exasperated growl slipped out through clenched teeth. This right here. That’s why.

She’d known they would be coming back to a different world, but the effects of the currency collapse had been more far-reaching than any of them expected. Elevating the yuan and euro to equal the dollar as the global standard had been a terrible idea, except for all the other ones. Their credit guarantees may not have been the only way to climb out of the pit the US had dug for itself, but it had been the most expedient. There were not nearly enough bureaucrats, elected or otherwise, with either the fortitude or imagination to offer a workable alternative. And predictably, it had come with many strings attached.

The long-resisted imposition of social credit scoring was one of those strings. It would’ve perhaps been easier to ignore but for the fact that her employment was now conditioned on her public engagement in an “acceptable” manner.

No wonder Owen had jumped on the HOPE bandwagon when it set itself up as an offshore concern. Art Hammond and Max Jiang had seen the writing on the wall and rushed to move as much as they could outside of the government’s sphere of influence. And she had to admit the Caymans didn’t sound like a bad place to live.

She wasted the next half hour scrolling through her social media feeds, something she’d have never dreamed of doing at work before, if only to feign interest in some anodyne stories that painted the establishment in a good light which she didn’t find personally offensive. One was about the agency’s first all-female class of astronaut candidates, another was about the ongoing revelations from the ice-penetrating probes they’d released at Europa years earlier.

She wasted another half hour searching in vain for any public news about their other discoveries from the Magellan mission, the stuff that the administrator would have preferred they’d left undisturbed at Pluto. They’d returned with a small freezer full of organic matter, chiral molecules and RNA precursors preserved in naturally formed ice spheres, as if they’d been vials carefully placed in deep freeze.

The scientist in her understood it would take time to process it all, and she personally knew Noelle was deeply involved in that effort with her university.

Yet there was not one syllable of it to be found in the news feeds. No matter which search engine she used, even the officially discouraged “Free Thinker” sites, not a word could be found about the Miracle Marbles of Pluto. She scowled at the monitor—whatever credit points she’d amassed for sharing the feel-good babble had just been nullified by visiting disapproved sites. She could watch porn on a government network and suffer fewer repercussions.

Screw ’em. Her social credit score was going to permanently be a C minus. She’d hear about it in her performance review.

Their discovery had looked for all the world as though it might hold the key to life’s origins. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by that? All of the necessary precursors, once thought to be found only on Earth, were apparently scattered out there among the frozen worlds of the Kuiper Belt. Maybe as far as the Oort cloud, given how orbits migrated over the eons. It was evidence of lifegiving molecules arriving on Earth via the same comets that water was thought to have come from—which made perfect sense in a simplistic way. So far, naturally occurring water had always contained at least the seedlings of life.

Juxtapose that against the current state of world affairs, where precious little seemed to be naturally occurring. Some nameless, faceless entity was always offering unsolicited suggestions, poking and prodding her into the “right” direction. Encouraging, never admonishing, but still relentless. The social credit bots had more of an overt presence on the clunky government network, but switching to her private device wasn’t much better. The commercial user interfaces just did a better job of camouflaging them. Silicon Valley still had some incentive to give their customers the illusion of privacy; what might it become if that incentive was eventually removed?

It would resemble the garbage appearing on her screen now, with the agency’s official motivational phrase of the day superimposed over the vacant smile of Administrator Jacqueline Cheever. The startup sequence dutifully scrolled her through similar headshots of the chain of command. Yet instead of ending with the President, it went to the UN Undersecretary for Space Development. NASA was now just one member of a multinational coalition. Nothing happened without UNSEC’s ultimate approval, and they had shown themselves to be adept at endless debate while deftly avoiding actual decisions.

“Yes, we all know who we work for,” Traci muttered to herself. Why did they feel the need to keep reminding everyone?

It was the same reason Owen had kept the news of Jack’s return on the down-low, she knew. The Cooperative needed to make sure everyone knew they were in charge, and this news might threaten that arrangement. Cheever and company were fine with keeping tabs on Magellan via the HOPE consortium, but that was only for as long as he was presumed dead or inevitably headed for that condition after ignoring every order from on high.

The comfortable narrative within the executive ranks was that no one expected him to come back from his suicidal race to an undiscovered planet. Doing so would make an awful lot of self-important people look bad, the unforgivable sin in politics during a time when politics had infested everything. For him to be alive—no longer in hibernation, but actively communicating with them—was about to upset an awful lot of closely held assumptions in Washington. If word got out, the public would be clamoring for them to do something.

The certainty of a need for action gave her the first glimmer of hope in a long time as she pored over the data from Roy’s tablet. At serious personal risk, Owen had offered her a conduit to a man she’d come to care for a great deal.

What to say? She began scribbling on a tablet, the old-fashioned “dumb” paper kind that didn’t record her pen strokes.

Sup, bro?

No. Too casual. Much too dated. Nobody talked like that anymore.

Warmest greetings from the glorious People’s Republic of America.

Gross. We weren’t that far gone. Not yet.

Come on, she chided herself. She’d been thinking about what to say to him for years now, imagining this day would come. Expecting it. The suits upstairs might have written him off, but she and Roy knew better. Between the two of them, Jack and Daisy had enough brains and ingenuity to keep Magellan running on little more than duct tape and safety wire. The limiting factor was calories for the human.

So what are you going to say, hotshot?

She twirled the pen in her hand, recalling all the imagined conversations that had run through her mind since waking up inside that EMS pod on the way home. She’d always imagined talking to him in person, and video messages ate up a lot of bandwidth. Not impossible, but text was much more efficient over such distances.

This called for an exception, she decided. Owen would make it happen for her, of that she was certain. Traci flipped on a video recorder, mindful to keep it off network, and saw her image appear on screen. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the thin scar along her hairline, a reminder of the surgery she’d undergone almost as soon as they pulled her out of the reentry capsule in the Gulf of Mexico. She self-consciously fluffed her hair, hiding the blemish beneath her chestnut locks.

Would he notice that? She studied her face in the video and decided it didn’t matter. This was not the time for personal vanity. After thinking through what she would say, she began recording.

“Hello, Jack. It’s been a while.” She paused, smiling for him. It made it easier to imagine she was talking to him directly instead of a camera lens. “Believe it or not, I’m glad to know you’re alive,” she joked feebly. “We’ve got some catching up to do.” It didn’t feel like much, but it was a start. “Things here are . . . different. Not much happening at the agency, but they’ve managed to keep me and Roy around. I’m working in Future Applications, which means I spend my days thinking through missions that’ll probably never happen.”

It wasn’t the approved party line, but it was the truth. She tried not to think about a closely related issue, that being the prospects for bringing him home. “The scientists back here are still trying to make sense of the stuff we brought back from Pluto, and everyone will be anxious to see what else you find out there.” If anyone ever finds out about it, she didn’t say. They could talk about that later. This was a personal message which she didn’t need to contaminate with more depressing shoptalk. “I’m doing okay,” she continued after a pause. “It was kind of sketchy there for a while, but I’ve been a good girl and done what the therapists have asked. Managed to get my civilian flight medical back, but I don’t know if NASA will ever let me go up again. I hope your time in hibernation went better for you than it did for me. I’d say your advantage is not having a head injury,” she said with a cheeky grin, “but then again I don’t know how anyone could tell the difference.”

There. Just the right tone for that inveterate wiseass.

The desktop dinged at her as she finished recording. IT IS GOOD TO SEE YOU SMILE, TRACI KEENE. CONTINUE ENJOYING YOUR DAY!

Her burning need to spout colorful language was about to clash with her Kentucky church upbringing yet again. That usually didn’t happen until much later in the day.

Her desktop dinged again: YOU APPEAR DISTRAUGHT, TRACI KEENE. PLEASE REVIEW THESE MINDFULNESS TECHNIQUES TO START YOUR DAY RIGHT.

Traci slapped a piece of tape over the lens atop her screen, undoubtedly generating another hit to the credit score she no longer cared about, and rationalized that she could make it another year without a raise.



Human Outer Planets Exploration Consortium

Grand Cayman


Owen Harriman mopped the sweat from his brow with a bandana as he navigated the labyrinth of shipping containers and air-conditioned prefabs that had recently surrounded the small HOPE headquarters like a besieging army. Before their arrival, the compact campus of low-slung stucco buildings would have effortlessly blended into the local architecture had it not been for the forest of antennas behind them. The hulking satellite dish that towered above the swaying palms was a particularly stark reminder that HOPE was not typical of the many offshored businesses calling the Caymans home.

While less stifling than Houston had felt, Owen had quickly learned that hot was hot. In this Caribbean getaway, the ocean breezes ultimately couldn’t mask the stinging heat of high summer in the tropics. Owen wrung out his bandana and wrapped it around his neck in a vain attempt to keep the collar of his white linen shirt from becoming completely soaked.

He was dressed more formally than usual, as was everyone else at HOPE today. Only the essential control center team remained inside their air-conditioned headquarters building. He almost envied them.

Of all the staff here, he’d been the only one to meet their founder and prime benefactor face-to-face. In a meeting arranged years earlier by the previous NASA administrator, Owen had been introduced to the man who’d saved Magellan from being abandoned in orbit. While famously acerbic, Arthur Hammond had managed to become more iconoclastic in his old age. He’d also remained zealously engaged in the projects he’d dedicated his life to, long ago forgoing retirement. Owen had learned that soon after being offered the job as HOPE’s director, when he’d pointedly asked his new boss about his own plans. “Retirement?” Hammond had scoffed. “Hell, even I can’t afford that anymore! I’m staying just to make sure my people can keep their jobs!”

Owen had been tempted to share that personal vignette with his team many times, but had thought better of it. Men could change their minds, particularly when circumstances evolved beyond their control. Best to keep those remarks to himself, if for no other reason than it helped him project the confidence his people needed.

In that regard, the small village of CONEX boxes that had sprung up around the consortium’s secluded home in the past few weeks had been a welcome boost to the group’s morale. Learning their small contingent would soon host the operational headquarters of Hammond Aerospace had sparked fresh enthusiasm, an expectation of prosperous times ahead.

He watched the staff, both giddy and nervous with anticipation, gathered under the afternoon sun by the facility’s private runway as the boss’s personal Gulfstream 900 taxied onto the ramp. Engines whined as the transonic business jet came to a gentle stop. Owen discerned the silhouettes of passengers moving behind the jet’s big oval windows before the airstairs had finished folding open.

One of the pilots stood by the door as a stocky figure emerged from the cabin. His boxer’s frame stooped noticeably by age, Art Hammond still carried himself with the confidence of a man who had carved out a storied career in a notoriously unforgiving industry.

As he watched the beaming faces around him, Owen smiled inwardly as he anticipated what was coming next. Hammond paused at the top of the stairs and silently regarded the crowd. He arched his brow and placed his hands on his hips, preparing to address them.

“What the hell are all you people doing out here in this heat?” he bellowed. “For the love of God, get back inside!” And with that, he waved them away and let himself down one step at a time. He was shadowed by a conspicuously fit middle-aged man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut who surveyed the scene around them as a younger, redheaded woman followed close behind. As Hammond reached the last step, crew cut handed him a walking cane.

Owen stifled a laugh as he turned to face the crowd. “He’s not kidding, y’all. Mr. Hammond will have time to address everyone later. Let’s all get back to work.” As he waited for them to disperse, the boss and his small entourage quickly made their way to a nearby pop-up shelter.

Hammond ran a hand across his forehead, glistening with perspiration. “You might be used to this, Harriman, but damned if I am.”

Owen offered him a bottle of ice water from a nearby cooler. “You’re not reconsidering your move, are you?”

“Not entirely up to me,” Hammond said as he took a sip. “My wife’s already hired decorators. She’s looking forward to us spending the rest of our days on the beach.”

Owen watched his companions trade knowing glances, neither of them believing for a minute that Art Hammond would allow himself to slow down that much. “Mr. and Mrs. Quinn, I presume?”

“Marcus Quinn, security manager,” crew cut man said, extending a sinewy hand. His loose-fitting clothes concealed a tightly muscled physique and what was almost certainly a firearm holstered behind his waist. He turned to the woman beside him, green-eyed with auburn hair tied into a ponytail. “I don’t believe you two have met, either.”

“Only by conference calls. Not in person,” she said. “Audrey Quinn.”

“A pleasure,” Owen said, happy to finally meet the husband-and-wife team in person. Though their responsibilities were on opposite sides of the spectrum, they had a reputation for being nearly inseparable. She’d tread much of the same ground he had at NASA years before, and now they’d both ended up at the same place.

Hammond ran the ice-cold bottle across his brow and studied the scene before them. “You’ve got a real mess on your hands, Harriman.”

“Yes, sir, you could say that. Your facility manager’s doing a fine job bringing order to the chaos, but we can’t seem to stay out of his way.” Too many systems were interconnected and couldn’t be taken offline while new systems were built from scratch around them. “The generator farm’s been getting a workout.”

“Good thing they don’t have a beef with modular nuke plants down here,” Hammond said. “When this is done we’ll have enough surplus power to light up the whole island.”

“And then some,” Owen agreed. He noticed their tenor change as Marcus Quinn signaled that they were now safely isolated. Audrey made a coughing sound under her breath.

“I know,” Hammond said to her. “Don’t worry, Aud, I haven’t forgotten.” He eyed Harriman. “What’s the status of our wayward spacecraft?”

“Telemetry has been continuous since we reestablished contact two days ago. We have a good picture of the vehicle’s health now.”

“What about Templeton?”

“Just the one message,” Owen said. “He’s been quiet ever since.”

“That’s concerning,” Hammond said. “He had a reputation for being rather chatty, didn’t he? I’d think he’d have more to say after five years in the cooler.”

“There was never any guessing at what might be on Jack Templeton’s mind,” Owen conceded. “He was always happy to let us know. I can’t explain why he’s been radio silent. Maybe it’s hibernation hangover.”

“Could be,” Hammond agreed. “The docs tell me it leaves you feeling drained and foggy, like coming out from under anesthesia. Any chance he just decided to get some actual sleep, instead of the induced kind?”

“We can’t tell, Art. His biomonitors were disconnected a long time ago, when we first lost contact with the spacecraft. They never came back online. Like I said, we’ve got a good view of the machine—the human, not so much.”

“What’s Daisy have to say?”

“Templeton had her disconnect the feeds after she woke him up, before they resumed telemetry.” It was an annoyance to the flight surgeons, but Owen had encouraged them to have empathy for the man’s mental state. A lone individual that far removed from the rest of humanity had earned the right to a little privacy if he wanted it.

“Or maybe he’s just waiting for a response from Keene, since he addressed her directly,” Audrey interjected. All eyes turned to her. “Just speaking as a woman here.”

Hammond turned back to Owen. “Those two have a thing between them?”

“We paired the long-duration crews based on compatibility assessments,” Owen explained. “Relationships were officially discouraged, but the reality is we had to allow for the possibility on an expedition of that length. As far as I know it was never, well . . . consummated.”

“Would she have told you if something had been consummated?” Audrey wondered. “She might not be comfortable talking about it.”

“Traci’s pretty straight-laced, so you could be right. I wasn’t there for the post-mission debriefs; I was working for you guys by then,” Owen said. “It would be helpful if I could talk to her and Roy more.”

Now it was Marcus’s turn. “Understood, but that can’t happen yet. We have to be careful. They’re the only two you’ve shared this with besides the administrator?” He knew the answer, but needed to drive the point home about secrecy. If NASA knew about it that meant UNSEC did too, and it would only be a matter of time before both Magellan and Columbus were taken away from them.

“They’re it,” Owen said.

Hammond nodded. “It won’t stay that way for long. Once this goes public, there’ll be a clamor for the agency to take over.” He took one last look around the ongoing construction before making his way up to the operations building. “The sooner we’re at full capability, the better position we’ll be in to prevent that.”


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