Krüger stays silent the whole way back to the station. I can tell he's fuming as he bags the pieces we collected, but he's saving his words for himself, or for later.
Liu just stares, speechless, as we lay out the wreckage on a laboratory table. Kwon picks up the bag with the biggest sample, the first twisted slice of metal that we found. She fingers the edges carefully through the plastic, then turns to the ripped wires in the bottom. She doesn't say anything either.
Krüger drums his fingers against the edge of his laptop as the photos he took of the snow formations upload. When the folder finally pops up on his drive, he opens the first file and spins the laptop to face Liu.
"Oh my god," is her first response.
She clicks slowly through the other pictures, sometimes doubling back, or flipping between pairs taken from different angles. "How big was this?" she asks, to which Krüger wordlessly points out the Isoptera leg sticking from the snow. At this scale, it's barely visible.
"I need to see it in person," says Liu, and my prediction lands true.
Krüger faces me as my expression hardens. Here it comes.
"This," he says, fingering the screen, "is dangerous. And if we want to know what the hell it is—or even what it isn't—we need to go back there and get those pieces, and we need Liu along."
I cross my arms. "It's dangerous, and that is exactly why that is not going to happen. You heard me the first time, and that order is final. It's too unsafe to send anyone back."
"That's not the point!" I so rarely hear Krüger raise his voice, it's almost a shock. I think whatever that was spooked him. "We came here because Mahaha's proven similar to Jenu in other ways. What if whatever phenomenon made this exists there, too? Or on other planets? What if it's preventable? What if it's the breakthrough of the century, and humanity should know about it to keep tens if not hundreds of thousands of people safe? You go off on us about safety, but right now the whole Pod could be in danger, if not a whole other planet, and you want us to sit here and not even try to figure out why?"
"We have been here for two months, and nothing has ever touched the Pod. The probes we keep deploying are the problem, and after we learn what we can from this one, we are not deploying any more probes."
Krüger cuts across me. "'Nothing has ever touched the Pod'—are you serious right now?" His face is a mask of furious incredulity. "The last team to come here was fucking buried. Two people died."
As if I don't think about that several times daily. He has no idea. "And that will not happen again, because I have taken steps to ensure this space stays safe this time around. The last team came unprepared."
"And Jenu?"
"Do not ask me to endanger a member of my team for the hypothetical safety of others in other, wildly different parts of the UIS. I am doing my job."
He rears up to his full height. "And we're trying to do ours! I've worked with Lingmei. You've worked with us. You know we both follow orders, and neither of us is going to be reckless on a moon like Mahaha, least of all at the site of something like this. Accompany us, stick trackers on us, tie us together, whatever you think will make the outing least risky. But for Christ's sake, we have something on our hands that can wreck a military-grade probe with hurricane-force winds and an ice wall; at least let us retrieve the pieces and let the meteorologist among us have a look!"
We stare each other down. Krüger is glaring, one hand clenched around a burette stand, glasses tipped askew in his curly hair. I keep my feet firmly planted and my arms crossed, not betraying the runaway pace of my pulse and the intense, nauseating panic that his proposition gives me. He's trying to back me into a corner with my own reasoning. The way he's phrasing it, anything I say in reply will border on outright hypocrisy. While I have no issue imposing differing standards on myself and others, I need to get my shit together before I can field this argument without crumbling.
"See what you can learn from these pieces," I say, then leave the lab before Kwon can drop her investigation to follow me. I make it to my room uninterrupted, and the urge to slam the door is so strong, I have to force myself not to. I jump up on my bed—perched atop several layers of storage drawers—then let myself fall over on the soft mattress. I pull my pillow over my head.
The Philippines. A research trip in search of plants with potential pharmaceutical properties, to rebuild the stock of medicines the world lost when antibiotic resistance and new diseases annihilated the medical sector, and then half the population jumped ship. Seventeen researchers from fields as varied as medicine and molecular biology. Nine interns. Two tech staff. And then our Aventureros team, Yahvi, and me.
We took so many precautions. The wrecked forest crawled with invasive and native diseases, toxic plants growing in old clearcuts, and island upon island of dead trees that couldn't take the changing weather patterns, and died where they stood. The storms were unpredictable, the terrain unforgiving. But we kept our people alive.
Until two weeks in, I made a stupid mistake. The interns found a river flowing near the base of a steep slope, and wanted to go swimming. Their leaders said yes. Yahvi said yes. And when the final say in our consensus decision-making came down to me, I ignored my trepidation and said yes. I went with them. Just me. I was cocky enough to think that would be enough.
We weren't expecting an earthquake. We weren't expecting the slope to liquify and come crashing down on the river. And with only me there, I could only save three of the kids before the rest drowned beneath the mud.
Everyone called it an accident: unpredictable, unpreventable. Even Yahvi said she thought the same. We fought. I couldn't look at her. Hear from her. We got the rest of the team out alive and coordinated a helicopter to come pick up the bodies, then flew home and parted ways at the Santiago International Airport.
The next day, I got on a shuttle to the skyport over Santiago. I boarded the first F-300 liner making the three-month trip straight to Mu Chaons, the farthest of the solar systems in the UIS. And I never came back.
I drop my hands and stare at them for a long time. It's been nine years. Eight since I finished retraining and took a seat in the cockpit of an interplanetary C-60 shuttle, the entry level for UIS pilots. Seven since Yahvi switched careers, too, going into research first on earth, then abroad. Six since she sent me a letter asking me to join her.
Five since I graduated to an F-300 liner, the fastest pilot to reach that level in the last twenty years of the training network's history. Four since Yahvi's research group made the Özdemir List as one of the most promising and influential in the UIS. They ranked just two spots behind the Dara Research Institute, which was turning heads at the time. Three years since I gave up even the apartment I'd had on Keelut and joined the small contingent of Captains who lived on the F-300s full-time. I talked with some of them. About half were in it for the thrill: the exploration, the novelty of interstellar travel at faster-than-light speed. The rest were running away.
Three years ago was the last time any of Yahvi's letters found me.
Two years, and I had settled into a comfortable, numbing rhythm of flight on the liners and respite in cities where nobody knew me. That lasted until one year ago yesterday, when my name hit the news like a bombshell, and I got a call from the head scientist of the Dara Research Institute. Yahvi and I weren't the only ones to leave our old lives after the Philippines. Zuri Ramadhani, once a biochemist on that fateful trip, mother of one of the interns I couldn't save, remembered my name and wanted me on a mission.
A research trip to investigate one of the UIS's most hostile planets. To succeed where other teams had failed. And to undercut her greatest rival, my former best friend. Zuri didn't need to tell me about Mahaha; I'd spent months in Qualupalik's sector in my early years of flying in the UIS. I knew the moon, the sector, and the Hub's opinion of both. I knew all about the Mahaha Rescue. Heck, I knew the pilot who had flown the shaken and half-frozen survivors back to habitable territory. I heard their stories second-hand.
I panicked and shut Zuri out. She tracked me down again. I said no. She pushed back. I said no again. She began to flood me with emails, calls, and messages; filled my voicemail and found me on obscure sites. Guilt wouldn't let me block her, and two weeks in, I cracked just enough to expose my greatest weakness. That was my worst mistake.
She knew I blamed myself. And she knew I knew nobody else was qualified.
From there, her tactics changed.
She dug up old news clippings touting mine and Yahvi's expertise. She made charts that proved no other candidate had all the skills to keep her team alive. She got hold of my travel record from my Aventureros days and found out that Yahvi and I spent two years working in Antarctica. She sent me pictures of Mahaha's surface. I deleted them before they could make me miss earth's wilderness. I deleted everything she sent me. Sometimes before I read it, only for the guilt to make me dig it up again. It was eating me up inside. I went on sick leave from my job, reached the hotel room, and threw up in the sink, my anxiety was so bad. I remember shaking whenever I picked up my phone.
Zuri had me cornered, and she knew it.
Then, after a long break in communication that I hoped meant she'd given up, she wrote up profiles for the two young scientists I'd be leading, and sent those to me, with pictures. Formatted just the way her daughter's once was.
That broke me.
I don't know what possessed me when Zuri next called. Maybe the guilt. Maybe some desperate hope that keeping these two safe on such an appallingly hostile moon would pay back my moral debt in some grand, cosmic scheme of things. Or maybe because I just wanted her to stop calling and hounding and praising me, and leave me alone.
I said yes. And then I took a year's leave from piloting and took the whole mission into my own hands. I used the weight of my name as leverage when I needed to, calling contacts, haggling with the Hub over supply lists, and fighting to get the most talented engineer I knew onto my team. Kwon came without a second's hesitation when she got clearance from her boss.
I met Krüger and Liu at the Dara Research Institute, and interviewed them both personally. Liu had frighteningly little field experience, but she was lethally smart, and well-versed in everything from planetary science to meteorology. I wanted someone like that on the team. Someone with that kind of mind. She and Krüger got along, too, and if we were going to be stuck in a cramped moon base for seven months, I needed a team that could work together.
Liu picked up on my worries, and wavered until I promised I'd coach her. Starting with physical competency tests, and continuing onto Mahaha. I felt good at the time. I'd done exactly that for sixteen years before, with interns and Aventureros trainees. A stupid parallel, for all that had changed since then.
And then there was paperwork, an initial site visit, plans for salvaging the Pod, and engineering designs for how to make it habitable. There were supply list revisions as weight limits got tightened, mental and physical screenings, and reams and reams of competency tests. Focus, direction, and productivity worked its magic: I passed my mental health exam with little hint of what was coming for me once we actually arrived.
And then it was time. We boarded the landing shuttle, and twelve hours later, we were making ourselves at home in the Pod with the closest human beings on their way back out of orbit, half a million kilometers away. That's when it hit me. The danger, the fear, the realization that the team's lives rested on me and me alone. And more, and worse. I locked myself in my room as the worst panic attack in years rolled over me like a mudslide, dropping me to the floor, suffocating me, asking me what the hell went so wrong that I ended up here. Back in exactly the same position I abandoned my whole home planet to leave behind.
It lasted an hour. When I got up again, I pulled myself together, locked those feelings away, and vowed never to lose another person under my watch again.