Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

BY SUNDAY, JUNO WAS convinced she had not seen Poppy leave their cabin all week. Poppy had tried to convince the senior astronauts that she was too ill to attend lessons or group mealtimes. And, as the days went by, the senior crew were getting more and more concerned. Every time Fae or Commander Sheppard attempted to talk to her about it, Poppy would burst into tears. Sheppard had suggested that they give her ‘some space,’ that perhaps she needed more time to adjust to their new environment, but by mid-July Juno was sure that they should try another form of intervention.

She woke up early that morning and went for a run. Once she’d showered she headed up to the comms deck, where Poppy was supposed to be running software updates. Instead, she found Eliot and Astrid hunched over the keyboard, both their ears covered with headphones.

‘What are you doing?’ Juno asked, looking down at her watch. Astrid and Eliot stared unflinchingly at the display, her face cast in pale light, his eyes far away.

When Juno tapped her sister on the shoulder, she jolted, then looked up with a startled intake of breath.

‘I can’t hear you,’ she shouted, even as she pulled her headphones off her ears.

‘Where’s Poppy?’ Juno asked.

‘Where she always is,’ Astrid said with a shrug, ‘our bedroom.’ She touched her headphones, already threatening to put them back on, then she turned to her sister with a frown. ‘What were you doing?’

‘I just went for a run.’

Astrid stared at her. ‘It’s not your day,’ she said, her voice spiked with suspicion. ‘You don’t do cardio on Sundays.’

‘You don’t do comms ever,’ Juno said, gesturing towards the monitors.

Astrid’s eyes brightened with excitement. ‘Eliot’s showing me how to use the new communications software. Want to have a look?’ She gestured toward a little navigation display. ‘See, that’s us.’ She pointed to a little blip just under the amber disc of Mars. Jupiter was cut off in the corner of the screen, so Juno could only see the pale arc of its edge in the schematic. In the dotted path of their ship’s trajectory was an ivory bubble, which represented Europa. ‘That’s the Orlando.’ Astrid pointed to a tiny flashing light on the moon’s perimeter. ‘Though you can’t really see it, and we won’t be able to until we get a bit closer. But we’re getting near enough to tune in to them. In a week we’ll be able to have a conversation in real time.’

The thought filled Juno with excitement. The rendezvous with the American space station had been added relatively late to their itinerary, so soon before the launch that Juno had all but forgotten about it. She and her crewmates had been about ten years old when the first expedition launched, so young that Juno had grown up with the distant sense that there had always been people orbiting Jupiter’s icy moon.

The first astronauts to go had been Captain Omar Briggs and Dr Sie Yan, a married couple who specialized in xenobiology. It made Juno’s mind reel when she realized that for over a decade the two of them had been staring down the lens of a microscope, working to genetically engineer a crop of plants capable of thriving in the ocean that was hidden under the frozen surface of Europa. ‘A decade alone in a box is enough to test any marriage,’ Commander Sheppard often said with a laugh. He’d been the best man at their wedding, and he and Briggs had shared a tent for seven months when they scaled Olympus Mons.

The second expedition to the Orlando had launched years later. The astronauts involved were young recruits who’d emerged from the USA’s space academy system: Kennedy, James and Cal, the smiling, suntanned forerunners of the Beta. Juno couldn’t wait to meet them.

‘Can you talk to anyone on that?’ she asked, nodding at the computer.

‘Sure. If they’re within range,’ Eliot said, then he rolled his eyes up in thought. ‘We can always send messages. But, obviously, the further out we go the further the signal has to travel. And the longer we have to wait for a response. By the time we reach Saturn it will take about eighty minutes for Earth to get our messages, and the same amount of time for us to hear a response. So, you know, no kind of real-time conversation will really be possible. But, we don’t have to think about that for a while…’

‘And the Orlando is the furthest human outpost,’ Astrid finished. ‘The furthest humans have travelled in our solar system.’

‘Except for the Shēngmìng,’ Juno said.

‘Well, not really.’ Eliot took his hands off the control deck. ‘No one knows where that ship is. Or if it’s even still out there.’