Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

The morning of the mission, piano music skittered into his dreams, and Jesse ascended into consciousness picturing David Bowie’s mismatched eyes. ‘You know how it goes,’ Eliot said with a smile, turning the volume dial up on his speakers. “ ‘Is there life on Maaaaaaars?’ ” he shouted as the cellos began to play. Jesse laughed, rolling out of bed and rubbing his eyes. Eliot was already dressed in his flight suit, although a dried crust of toothpaste flaked around the left side of his mouth.

‘You must know the song?’ he said as the strings reached their first buzzy crescendo.

‘Of course I know the song,’ Jesse said, getting to his feet. And they caught the chorus again; this time they shouted it.

‘Happy birthday, man.’ Harry said, clapping Jesse on the shoulder. ‘Old man.’

‘Thanks,’ Jesse couldn’t help but remember waking up in his bedroom one year ago. It had been a miserable day, overcast and threatening snow. He’d just returned from months of training for the backup crew and abandoned all hope that he would ever set foot on this ship.

They all sang the chorus again, one final time, at the top of their lungs. Jesse was so happy to be alive, to be on the Damocles, with these people that he almost cried.

‘Do you feel any older?’ Eliot asked as the string arrangement began its glissando slide into the song’s finale.

‘I feel years older,’ he said. And then there was silence.

‘Hey,’ Harry said, and raised his eyes to the window, ‘look.’

Europa loomed large in their view. Jesse had seen the moon so many times in the piloting simulation that the sight of it gave him an odd sense of homecoming. He had sacrificed two weeks of nights to level eight on the simulator, trying to lock a new module onto a docking port. A Sisyphean task that required the most delicate manoeuvres he had ever mastered, shifting the module an inch a minute, only to crash at the final moment when the muscles in his wrist seized with cramp.

In the window, that morning, Europa’s surface looked brittle and delicate as the edge of an egg, shining with so much reflected light.

Suddenly, Jesse gleaned something of the enormity of the Orlando mission. The American crew were hoping to make the moon habitable. It had an oxygen atmosphere, and an ocean roiled metres beneath the frozen crust of the planet, two ingredients necessary for life. But it was still far from hospitable. It was around -160°C at the equator, a temperature at which cell membranes crystallize and fracture. It was pelted daily by radiation and nothing could grow. The Orlando’s crew had nevertheless progressed in leaps and bounds, engineering single-celled organisms that were now able to multiply in sub-zero temperatures. Their hope was to eventually terraform the planet. Atom by atom, they planned to bend it into submission. To cover the crust with mutant lichen and moss, to one day fill the sea with alien plants. It would be decades before Europa was terraformed, if ever. Long before that happened, Jesse and his crew would be on Terra-Two, breathing the temperate air and leaping into lagoons.

When he was dressed, Jesse stepped into the crew module to a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ from the crew. Commander Solomon told him that as a reward for gaining such a high score on the simulator – and because Eliot’s injured hand had still not healed – Jesse would be joining them in the shuttle. Jesse was so overjoyed to hear it that he shouted and punched the air.

The crew on Orlando had also recorded a message.

‘Happy birthday!’ yelled Dr Sie Yan.

‘We’re wishing Jesse Solloway of the Damocles a very happy birthday,’ said her husband, Captain Omar Briggs, by her side. ‘We’re looking forward to seeing you folks soon, and eating dinner with you on the Damocles.’

In five hours, Poppy, Harry and Jesse would accompany Sheppard as he docked their shuttle onto the Orlando and met this couple who’d lived in Jupiter’s orbit for a decade. And in just over twenty-four hours, they would ferry them and the rest of the Orlando’s crew to the Damocles for dinner.