Second Chance (8 page)

Too bad we didn’t have any way of landing there. Adding a lander to the mission, never mind the gene banks and other colonization equipment some had insisted should be included, would have raised the weight of each module above what the boost lasers could push to Tau Ceti. But we could drop one of the atmospheric drones. The nearest satellite with drone capability was orbiting Balzac and could be in position in a couple of weeks. We told it to make all deliberate speed.

While we were waiting for that data, the question remained open: where was the oxygen coming from?

The problem drew Mari and I together. We built on each other’s ideas, shot theories back and forth, argued over the meaning of the data. But though we had probably exchanged more words in a matter of hours than we had in the whole rest of the time we’d been at Tau Ceti, we were still uncomfortable with each other—emotionally reserved, overly sensitive to each other’s personal space, shying away from any kind of physical contact. And when we realized just how long we’d been working without sleep, we went to our rooms with only a very formal good-night. Still, it was a start.

-o0o-

Over the next few days, between sessions with Mari on the anomalous composition of Bianchon’s atmosphere, I continued to tackle the lack of communication from Earth. But all the dead ends I’d run into before were still dead. I tried a couple of techniques to resynchronize the satellites’ clocks, or compensate for the lack of synchronization, but no matter what I did the result was the same: nothing.

Finally, after much introspection and prayer, I asked Bobb for help. He was in Gamma systems bay, cleaning the air filters—a messy chore he happily abandoned to help me.

“Have you tried a Fourier analysis on the data from one satellite?” he asked.

“Uh...”

Talking with Bobb was much harder than I’d expected it to be... harder even than with Mari. Maybe it was because he was so much bigger than me. Some part of my brain kept wondering what I would do if he tried to jump me. I kept reminding myself that this fear was ridiculous, but it was deeply ingrained. Love thy neighbor, I reminded myself.

“I don’t think there’s enough signal there for that to be worthwhile,” I said at last.

“Maybe not. But it’s still worth a try.” He wiped his grimy hands on a towel and headed down to the work bay.

Once we set up the Fourier transform, it took only a few minutes to run. The result, as I’d feared, was inconclusive—natural radio noise from the Sun was the dominant factor in the signal, and any artificial signal from Earth was drowned out even after processing. We really needed to combine the signals from several satellites to augment the resolving power of their little radio dishes, but without a solid timestamp on the data that wasn’t possible.

Bobb’s face grew thoughtful. “What about a natural timestamp?”

I understood immediately. “I don’t know if there are any pulsars in the data.” But if there was one, we might be able to use its regular radio pulses as a natural clock to line up the signals from the different satellites.

“Only one way to tell...”

We signed up for the big dish on
Cassiopeia
—although I considered the whole system suspect, it had the potential to give us a quick positive—and pointed it toward Earth, then set up routines to troll the data for a faint regular pulse in the appropriate frequency range.

In some ways, doing the work with Bobb was more comfortable than working with Mari. We had similar skill sets, so it was more cooperative than mutually instructive. But the fact that I’d seen Bobb and Matt together was like a constant background noise.

Every time I found myself wondering where those hands, that mouth, had been, I reminded myself that it was wrong to think of him as “a homosexual.” He was more than what he did in bed. He was a whole human being—and a fine human being, far more tolerant of me than I’d been of him. As we worked, he displayed no discomfort or awkwardness from my earlier self’s mistreatment of him.

I felt like a heel.

Bobb’s brow furrowed, then his eyebrows shot up. “Hey! Got one!”

“Let me see.”

He swiveled his monitor so we could both see it. “There.” The graph showed a nice periodic pulse at 260 MHz, not very powerful but extremely crisp and regular.

Extremely
crisp. I’d never seen a natural signal with such a constrained pulse width. “Wait a minute. What’s the period?”

“A little under a second.” He tapped with his stylus on the controls. “Point eight two seconds, to be precise.”

“Wait, wait...” A memory nagged at me. Each of
Cassie
’s five modules broadcast a module beacon—a powerful omnidirectional ping at 215 MHz, which they used to locate each other on arrival at Tau Ceti. “If it’s 215 megahertz, blueshifted to 260...” I turned the monitor toward myself and popped up a calculator window, which told me that the source was approaching at nineteen percent of lightspeed. A very familiar number. And subtracting the same blueshift from the signal’s 0.82-second period yielded an original period of... exactly one second. “Look at this. One second period. 215 megahertz. Nineteen percent of lightspeed. Does that mean anything to you?”

Bobb’s eyes widened and his mouth broke into a huge grin that echoed my own. “The module beacon.”

We looked at each other. “It’s
Alpha
!” I shouted.

Bobb and I grabbed each other in an enormous hug, laughing and pounding each other on the back. The return of the lost module meant more metals... more instruments... more living space! We scooted off in opposite directions to share the happy news with the rest of the crew.

I didn’t realize until I was talking with Matt that I’d embraced Bobb without fear. I smiled to myself at that.

-o0o-

The grainy image on the big monitor showed why Alpha was so late. One of the four sails that was supposed to catch the light from the boost lasers, then drop off for coast phase, was still attached—bent and twisted into a crumpled C shape. The sail had probably jammed on initial deployment, and had cut the module’s thrust during boost phase by twenty percent or more. There was some concern that the jammed sail could cause problems during the first aerobraking maneuver, as Alpha slammed into Molière’s atmosphere at interstellar speed. But simulations showed that it would most likely come off as the module’s aerobraking ballute inflated, and if it didn’t do that it would probably simply burn away early in the maneuver.

Everyone chattered excitedly over the personal possessions the module held. My own two hundred and seventy grams was mostly devoted to a pocket Bible that had been my grandfather’s—I remembered thinking of alpha and omega as I placed it in the bin labeled ALPHA. But then my breath caught in my throat as I remembered something else that was on board the wayward module—a full set of crew tissue samples and memory scans. Left to its own devices, Alpha was fully capable of reconstituting the entire crew by itself.

Of course, that wouldn’t happen. We had already transmitted the rendezvous code, and when Alpha joined us after two years of deceleration it would be unoccupied. But if the situation had been reversed, if it had been Alpha that had arrived on time and the other modules delayed, it would have been Alpha’s cells and scans that would have created... me. Or someone like me.

Would that person have had as tough a time of it as I had? Probably he would not have been vived at all. I still didn’t know why
I
had been.

Which made me realize that Alpha carried one other thing of interest.

A full set of data from boost and coast phase. And possibly the answer to the missing signal from Earth.

-o0o-

Nuru’s eyes flicked back and forth between two monitors filled with figures. “Yes?” she said without looking up.

“You’ve locked me out of the big dish.”

She glanced up at me, then returned her gaze to the monitors. “I have.”

I waited for an explanation. When I didn’t get one, I said “I need it to retrieve Alpha’s coast-phase data.”

Nuru paused, then closed her eyes and steepled her long brown fingers in front of her nose. “That’s exactly why I placed that hold.”

“Oh?”

Now she did look at me. Her dark, liquid eyes held mine with firm intensity. “Chaz, you’ve been spending far too much time on this side project. We are here for science, not engineering.”

“What good is science if we can’t send our results back?”

“Transmission’s working fine. You’ve said so yourself. And as far as our
basic
scientific
mission
goes”—she emphasized the words with an index finger driven hard into the palm of her other hand—“we won’t need to receive anything from Earth for almost twenty-four years. Plenty of time to fix the receiver. Assuming we live that long.”

I was momentarily taken aback, but then I recovered: “If there have been any relevant advances in basic science since we launched, they’ll be beaming them in our direction right now. We don’t want to be spending our precious time out here reinventing the wheel.”

She didn’t blink. “Zac zac. This environment is dangerous—we have no idea how much time we have. So I want you to focus your attention
on
the
mission
. Do I make myself clear?”

I felt my heart beating in my throat as Nuru and I stared at each other for a long moment. “Perfectly clear,” I said.

She returned her gaze to her screens, dismissing me.

-o0o-

I swallowed and licked my lips before speaking. Bobb and I were alone in his quarters, which made me nervous for many reasons. But what I had to say could not be overheard. “Something very peculiar is going on.”

Bobb just looked at me, questioning.

I swallowed again. “Look... I know you guys voted not to vive me.”

He dropped his eyes from mine. “Yeah. I... I thought you might find out eventually. I’m sorry.” He looked up. “They did it for my sake. And Mari’s. I... I wasn’t happy about it, but it would have seemed... ungrateful not to go along.”

“I’m sorry, too. For the way I treated you. The first me.”

Bobb’s lips pursed. Contemplative or angry, maybe a little of both. Then he sighed and shook his head. “Water under the bridge, Chaz. You would have gotten over it eventually, if... if you hadn’t died.”

“Well, I’m back now. And I’m trying. To get over it.”

“I can tell.”

We floated there for a while, each with our own thoughts. “But that’s not the only thing,” I said eventually. “Nuru’s put a lock on my access to the big dish. She says I’m spending too much time trying to re-establish communication with Earth, and she wants me working on science.”

“Well, it’s our main mission.”

“But there’s an... undercurrent. I think she wants to keep me from getting ahold of Alpha’s data.”

“Why?” His expression reflected my own bafflement. We were all scientists, and free access to information was fundamental to scientific progress.

“I don’t know. But that only makes me more determined to get it.”

“So you want me to get it for you.”

“Yes. But be subtle about it.”

He looked to one side, considering. “I could relay the communication through several satellites. Bury it in other data streams.”

“Exactly. I mean, zac zac.”

Bobb grinned. “Now you’re getting it.”

-o0o-

I focused my visible attentions on science, specifically the composition of Bianchon’s atmosphere. I swapped my primary work station with Kyra so that Mari and I could work more closely together, with Mari looking into the chemical activity while I focused on a high-level planetological survey of the moon. We hadn’t originally planned to go into such detail on the gas giants’ moons until later in the mission, but the presence of oxygen made Bianchon a lot more interesting. As Mari and I spent more and more time together, I realized I was starting to look on her differently. Not as a woman, exactly, but as a human being rather than some kind of aberration.

I also started taking dinner with the crew again. At first I ate quietly at the back of the group—in the team but not of it—but as the days went on I began to offer my opinions, then to engage in discussion and debate. After a week and a half the interactions started to feel natural, and I found that I could even disagree with people without feeling as though I was balancing on a razor’s edge.

One day, while Mari and I were waiting for a complex data analysis to complete, I even got up the nerve to ask her a question that had been bothering me for some time. “Back on Earth,” I said, forcing the words past the tightness in my throat, “when we first... got together...” I swallowed. “What in the world did you see in me?”

For a long moment she just stared at me, and I was sure I’d overstepped what little trust we’d built up. But then she snorted and shook her head. “You were actually kind of hot as an old guy,” she said with a sad little smile. “I’ve always been partial to bald men. And, well, we were spending so much time together...” She sighed, shrugged. “We all make mistakes.”

“Yeah,” I acknowledged. “I guess we do.”

But just for a moment I wondered if it had to have been a mistake. If I hadn’t been such a shit back then...

Then the monitor pinged, announcing the completion of the analysis, and we got back to work.

-o0o-

During what was supposed to be my sleep period, I analyzed the data that was trickling in from Alpha. The wayward module was so far away, and moving so fast, that the bandwidth the satellites could achieve with their little dish antennas was pathetic. I was frustrated as the puzzle built up, slowly, piece by piece, but I knew Bobb was doing the best he could to move the data quickly without attracting attention. I was tremendously impressed with his feats of digital legerdemain, and I told him so.

One night, as I was peering with gritty eyes at a graph comparing the growing set of Alpha’s coast-phase data with the merged data from
Cassie
, I was startled by a tap at my door. “Chaz, are you awake?” came a low voice. “It’s Nuru.”

Heart pounding, I powered the screen down and opened the door. “I’m awake,” I said, blinking in the light from the habitation bay outside. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”