Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Hopefully,’ Fae said, brushing a strand of hair from her sunken eyes. But hers was not the face of a hopeful person. Poppy saw it, then. The distraction in Fae’s face, a glimmer of pain. She gritted her teeth against it. Does she have it too? Poppy wondered. And, if so, how could she help Poppy if she could not help herself?

Later, Juno posted a list of rules in the crew module. There were only a couple at first, written in her neat hand. Things like No one is exempt from chores – from now on skipping chores required finding a willing replacement amongst the crew to complete the task. Everyone attends dinner – which, she usefully expanded, was vital for crew bonding and team-building. Use the ship’s equipment maturely and responsibly (that includes the airlock!)

Juno didn’t know that it was already escaping from them, the hope they would need to survive up here.

‘You did a great job catching up,’ Juno said, breezing past Poppy with a smile as she read them. She glanced at the list she had pinned up and Poppy thought she could see Juno’s shoulders relax. As if she truly believed that, in the vacuum, the firm hand of order was all they needed to keep themselves from harm.

Chapter 30 JUNO

^25.09.12

JUPITER WAS SPECTACULAR. THE first time Juno saw it through the window on the control deck she said, ‘It almost looks like another sun from this distance.’

‘Well,’ said Eliot, ‘it’s about ten times smaller than the sun. But I see your point. It’s big. Bigger than 1,300 Earths, and it has more than sixty moons. Imagine if our planet had that many moons.’

‘The night would look like the fifth of November,’ Commander Sheppard said with a smile, his eyes reflecting the sky.

The atmosphere of Jupiter was comparable to that of the sun. It was composed of hydrogen and helium, with so many moons in orbit that it was like its own solar system. From their vantage point Juno could only just discern the vermillion belts that circled the planet. She could not yet see any hurricanes, or surging clouds of ammonia crystals. She could not even find the Great Red Spot, the storm that had swirled in the Jovian atmosphere for over 300 years, big enough to engulf Earth twice.

‘Is this really a good time for an astronomy lecture?’ Harry said through gritted teeth. He was in the pilot’s seat.

‘It’s not for him,’ Poppy said as Eliot held the camera up before his eye. ‘I can’t just show our audience Jupiter in the window. I have to teach them about it.’

‘I know,’ Commander Sheppard said. ‘Tell them that Uranus has twenty-seven moons and they are all named after characters in Shakespeare plays.’

‘Do you mind repeating that,’ Poppy asked, ‘but to the camera?’ Sheppard obliged, turning to the lens with a smile.

‘Uranus,’ he said, as if it had just occurred to him a second ago, ‘has twenty-seven moons and they’re all named after characters in Shakespeare’s plays. The largest are Titania and Oberon.’ Eliot gave him a thumbs-up and turned back to the sight in the window.

‘We’re filming this on 29 September.’ Poppy’s voice always chimed with synthetic glee whenever she spoke to her increasingly large following of schoolchildren back on Earth, all keen to be the next cohort to leave for Terra-Two. But Juno was glad to see her back doing her job after two weeks of absence. ‘A quick shout-out to all our viewers who are going back to school this month. Good luck!

‘It has taken us almost five months to travel 5.8 AU, or 540,000,000 miles from Earth.’ She gave a low whistle at the figure. ‘And this is just the start of our journey. It will still be a couple of days before we’re close enough to Europa to safely dock with the American space station Orlando. In the meantime, our ship is in the capable hands of Harrison Bellgrave, our commander-in-training.’ Harry’s eyes brightened and he smiled for the camera.

‘Switch it off,’ Igor growled from the communication deck, motioning to Harry. ‘This is a serious job. How can he concentrate with all this talk?’

‘Igor’s right.’ Commander Sheppard turned to Eliot, Poppy and Juno. ‘I think you both have tutorials to get to. And it will be a while before we’ll be able to see Europa. Longer still before we spot the American station, and you’ll get a better view of it from the observation deck.’

Juno sighed and drifted towards the door. She wanted to stay in the control room – seeing the planet in the window reminded her that they were really going somewhere, instead of suspended in the darkness of space. In a few weeks, they would meet other astronauts – she smiled at the thought – and in just over a year they would be the first humans to leave the solar system entirely.

Fae was kneeling in front of the monitor on the communications deck, cursing in German.