Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Only when all systems are nominal,’ Cai said. ‘Right now, the thermal controls are overcompensating, so we’re losing more heat than we’re making.’

‘After we follow my plan we might even have enough oxygen to schedule a second EVA and fix that manually,’ Astrid said. ‘Thermal control is pretty basic engineering, at least on the hardware side. Eliot could do it. If we just take off some of the radiators that are absorbing the heat from the ship and pouring it out into space.’

‘That sounds risky,’ said Poppy. ‘What if rescue doesn’t come, or comes too late?’

‘We’ll be in the exact same situation we are now,’ said Jesse. ‘Only without a lifeboat.’

‘Exactly!’ Igor’s voice was startling. ‘I would rather half of you made it home safely than—’

‘Take a chance to make it to Terra-Two?’ Astrid interrupted. ‘Who’s to say that, after us, there will be another mission anytime soon? What if this is our only chance for the next couple of generations? If we come back, will people want to sign up for the Off-World Colonization Programme? What if governments decide it was not worth the money – everything that was sacrificed to get us just this far. There was talk that the Orlando mission might be discontinued entirely even before we left.’

‘Astrid!’ Igor slammed his hand down on the table and Astrid dropped her pen in surprise. ‘I don’t want to hear any more of this. The decision has been made.’ Tears sprang to Astrid’s eyes but she fought to stay strong. She had been trained to listen to the captain’s orders and yet Jesse could see her entire body was shaking with anger.

‘You’re just giving up,’ she said. ‘The shuttle can leave without me. I’m staying here.’ She knocked the papers off the table so they scattered on the floor and stormed out of the room. In the silence that followed, Jesse heard the heavy sound of her boots as she climbed down the hatch.

For a moment, Jesse allowed himself to imagine Astrid’s plan. If they were rescued, then this time next year they could be in interstellar space. But, during training, Jesse had been taught that there was no disaster worse than mutiny. That the crew in a spacecraft needed to operate like one body, with the commander as the head. Jesse had not truly believed it until he and Harry had steered the shuttle out of danger. The two of them had abandoned their disagreements and navigated the shuttle together in a ballet of technical skill, Harry taking the lead and Jesse anticipating his movements. So he swallowed his objections and kept quiet.

After the meeting, he headed down to the crew module. It was baffling to him that the ship was already a hive of activity. Eliot was on the lower deck, packing up their spacesuits for the flight home. Poppy was helping Fae to pick out the rations they required for the coming months. Harry was helping Juno download files from the ship’s computer. Jesse watched her for the seconds it took her to notice him. If he had not been chosen for the mission he would not have been given the chance to love her – and for a moment fate seemed kind. But then she spotted him, and Jesse remembered that yesterday they’d had more than twenty years together and now they had only a few months. The loss was devastating.

‘It seems crazy to me,’ he said, rubbing his eyes, as if he still believed that perhaps this afternoon was a terrible dream, ‘that we’re just leaving like this. Without them.’

‘I know.’ Juno twisted a cable around in her hands and bundled it into a storage box. The whole ship was like a music festival an hour after the headline act, grim industrious stage hands working to take the whole show down and pack it up, no time for sentiment.

‘What will happen?’ he asked her.

‘We’ll board in two hours,’ she said.

‘I mean, when we get back?’

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, and they gazed at each other in silence.

Jesse had already pictured an alternate life for them. Imagined Juno switching from biochemistry to politics, trekking the globe to negotiate treaties, conversing in six different tongues, penning laws that were like her Damocles Document writ large. Jesse imagined himself kneading the land, working with long-haired men and women on permaculture, building compost heaps and saving rainforests. They were different people, he realized with a sinking in his chest, going different places.

He left without saying anything.

In their cabin, Jesse found that Eliot had already stripped his bed of its sheets and peeled his posters off the walls, and even Harry had taken down a few of his things. The room pulsed with the same aching vacancy as their dormitories in Dalton at the end of term. Belongings packed up, the light glaring off naked walls stripped clumsily of posters and notices. A sorry sight, the nicked metal bedframes, the plastic mattress covers, the suddenly silent halls.