“Morning,” she said brightly. The lids of his eyes were puffy, their rims red. He kept his gaze down. “Did you sleep at all?” she asked.
He seemed startled. “Hm? Oh, no, I guess not. Preoccupied.”
She looked more closely at the blueprints and saw that he had begun marking them up with notes for the spacewalks. “Who will walk? Have you decided yet?”
Harper sighed and ground the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “It has to be you,” he said slowly, letting his hands drop into his lap, “and it has to be Devi.”
Sully nodded. There was something strange in his body language, something reluctant. Did he think she wouldn’t want to walk? Or was he worried about Devi? She waited to see if he would add anything, and after a moment he did.
“I’m not sure Devi’s up for this—emotionally. But I’m also not sure Thebes will be able to improvise out there as well as she can. I’ve been going over it for hours. It has to be Devi.”
“She can handle it,” Sully said, but when she looked at the helpless expression on Harper’s face she suddenly shared his doubt. She thought of Devi’s nightmares, of her recent failings as a caretaker of the ship. She’d never seen Harper look so uncertain, and it frightened her. He was their commander, after all. “I’ll be there with her, we’ll have you and Thebes talking us through it. This will be fine, Harper. We can do it. You should get some rest, you look ragged.”
He laughed. “An understatement, I’m sure.”
Sully had an urge to reach out and smooth down the lick of hair that stood straight up from the crown of his head, as she might’ve done for Lucy, but she didn’t. “It is. I order you to sleep for a few hours. We have time, don’t burn yourself out on this.”
Harper nodded. “I know, I just—I’m worried about…” He looked at her for a long moment and then let his gaze drop. She waited, but this time he didn’t finish his sentence.
Sully reached out and squeezed his shoulder and then stuffed her hand into the pocket of her jumpsuit, as if to stop herself from touching him again. “I’m worried too, but she’s smarter than you and me put together. If she can’t do this, no one can.” She said it lightly, but Harper wasn’t smiling.
“I know,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”
TWO DAYS LATER, the replacement antenna was finished and the first walk was scheduled. Sully made her way to the comm. pod out of habit before realizing she had nothing to do there with no antenna. She ran her fingers over the knobs and buttons of the machines that lined the walls, displays dark, speakers silent. The pod seemed more like a tomb than a communication hub. The longer she stayed, the more sinister the quiet became. Eventually she drifted out of the pod and moved down the corridor, toward the command deck and the cupola.
Devi was floating in front of the cupola’s many-paned view, her hands pressed against the thick silica glass. The loose knot of hair at the nape of her neck drifted away from her head, hovering like a black cloud between her shoulder blades. She wore a dark red jumpsuit, the same as always, the legs cuffed above her ankles, an inch or two of skin visible between the bright white of her socks and the red of the suit. She wasn’t wearing shoes. Beyond the panes a great blackness hung, a darkness full of depth and movement and stillness and a hundred million pricks of light, too far away to illuminate anything, too bright to ignore.
“What do you see?” Sully asked, propelling herself headfirst into the cupola to float next to Devi.
“Everything,” Devi said, nervously toying with the zipper of her jumpsuit. She pulled it up to her neck, then back down to her sternum in rapid succession until the heather gray of her shirt caught in the plastic teeth. She didn’t bother to dislodge it. “And nothing. It’s hard to say.”
They hovered together in silence, looking out into the vast emptiness. The prospect of entering it, of inhabiting the vacuum, made home seem even farther away. Out there, there was no safety net, nothing to anchor a floating astronaut to the ship other than the thin tethers and each other. Sully started to say something about the spacewalk, then stopped, not wanting to speak out of turn, suddenly unsure if Harper had even told her yet.
“I know,” Devi said suddenly, “about the walk. He told me last night. He’s worried, yes? Because I’ve been so…disconnected. And you. He’s worried also because he’s in love with you. He doesn’t have to worry. We’ll fix it.”
Sully was stunned, silent for a long beat. She was used to Devi’s ability to see through the surface of things—most of the time she used this skill on inanimate mechanical objects, but on the rare occasions that Devi turned her mind to human affairs, she spoke alarming truths with robotic precision. It was unnerving. Sully could feel warmth creeping up her neck and she willed it to cool. Devi had said it so simply, so matter-of-factly. She didn’t question the verity of the statement, and it was a relief, in a way, to hear those words aloud. To know that her thoughts about what things might be like between her and Harper when they returned to Earth were based in something real, something quantified, qualified, and named by an outside person—by the smartest person she knew. And yet this wasn’t the time. She couldn’t think about Harper right now, not like that. It might never be the time. She pushed Devi’s words away and focused on the spacewalk instead, gazing through the cupola with a determined single-mindedness. After a moment they heard Thebes calling out for Devi. Before she left, Devi took Sully’s hand and squeezed it.
“You needn’t worry either,” Devi said.
With that she pushed off with her feet and disappeared into the corridor. Sully stayed for a long time, thinking. She considered the unfamiliar orientation of stars before her until she was quite certain she had picked Ursa Minor out of the chaos. It was from an unusual angle, but it was definitely the little bear she knew so well. She was sure of it, and it felt good to be sure of something.
SULLY AND DEVI went over the mission plan with Harper dozens of times, reciting their actions like actors reciting lines. The two women were at ease; the training in Houston had prepared them for all manner of extravehicular repair work, and the first walk would be fairly simple. Thebes was checking the suits while Tal was glued to the radar system. Ivanov kept himself busy pointing out errors in Tal’s updated computer code, poking holes in Harper’s mission plan, and offering Thebes what-if suit malfunctions with infinitesimal probabilities—a one-man red team showing them the gaps in their strategy, the flaws in their approach. For once they were glad of his criticisms.
As the preparations were checked off and the crew readied themselves for the walk, the good-natured camaraderie they had developed in Houston returned, that feeling from the bar before the launch when they had listened to the jukebox and done shots together. Tal began making jokes again and Ivanov actually smiled at one or two of them. Devi was talking nonstop, thrilling to the project at hand, engaging with the crew and the mechanical tasks before her, and Thebes seemed to breathe a sigh of relief just watching the crew converse. They all felt the momentum pulling them forward. Sully felt more hopeful than she had in months. Maybe, just maybe, the frequencies of Earth would carry more than silence once the comm.s were back online. Only Harper seemed hesitant. Even as the rest of the crew thrived on the challenge of bringing the communication system back to life, Harper oversaw the work with an air of apprehension.