One Giant Leap Read online

  Dedication

  To my parents, John and Rebecca,

  who made everything possible

  Epigraph

  Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.

  —INSCRIPTION OF THE LUNAR PLAQUE, LEFT ON THE MOON DURING THE APOLLO 11 MISSION

  Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

  —JOHN F. KENNEDY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Heather Kaczynski

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  I OPENED MY eyes to the interior of a spaceship and couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there.

  Focus. Breathe. Where are you?

  Four stainless steel pods stood around me like a futuristic Stonehenge. The space was circular, confined. The lights were too bright, sending spots and flares dancing before my vision.

  Memories slowly trickled back to me—flashes of blueprints and schematics I’d studied and memorized a long time ago. But they were disjointed, like pieces to a puzzle I’d forgotten how to put together.

  I was sprawled on the floor, the door to my empty pod hanging open. The metal grate of the floor had left an aching imprint on my cheek.

  My helmet was lying on its side nearby. I had no memory of taking it off.

  The habitation module. That’s where we were. And those pods held my crewmates in hibernation.

  The general idea of the why and how of my situation was still there in my mind. It was the details and the most recent memories that were gone.

  Cautiously, I sat up, tensing my abdominals to force blood into my head so that I wouldn’t lose consciousness again. A short wave of dizziness passed, and I felt moderately normal.

  How long had I been unconscious? I touched my cheek gingerly; the feeling in my fingertips was blunted from the skintight suit I wore.

  The module was silent but for the air circulation system. At least life-support systems seemed intact.

  No engines burned. I couldn’t detect any motion. No windows here to give me a clue as to where we were.

  I couldn’t have been here long. My crewmates were sleeping inside their pods, their vital-sign monitors still flashing the steady rhythms of heartbeats.

  I’d been supposed to wake up first. First into the hibernation pod, first out. The theory had been that I would respond best out of anyone else in the crew to the hibernation, being the youngest and most physically fit.

  That, at least, I could remember.

  The most worrisome thing wasn’t that I couldn’t remember how I’d woken up on the floor. It was that I was on the floor. Which meant some kind of gravity was in effect.

  When I’d gone under, we’d been floating in zero-g. There shouldn’t be gravity now. Unless.

  Had we . . . arrived?

  Facts trickled back into my reality. I was on board the first faster-than-light-capable ship built by human hands. I’d competed for the honor of being included in this crew. We were here to . . . I couldn’t remember. Something important. Something massive. The enormity was still there, circling the edge of my consciousness, lost in the fog.

  For a terrifying second, my own name eluded me. Then my lips formed the familiar sounds, muscle memory more than anything else.

  “My name is Cassandra Gupta,” I whispered out loud.

  “Hello, Cassandra,” said a pleasant disembodied voice.

  I would’ve jumped, if my body were currently responding to my brain’s commands. I’d never heard the voice aloud before, but I’d had it in my head long enough to recognize it.

  “Sunny,” I choked out, and a strange sort of relief flooded me. Sunny may have been little more than a very intelligent computer program, in charge of our vital signs and ship trajectory while the human crew was asleep, but at least I wasn’t alone on this ship, stranded who-knows-where in the universe.

  My voice, when I tried to speak above a whisper, was like something that had been dragged down a gravel driveway until it was an unrecognizable carcass. “Sunny—water?”

  A panel retracted on the wall nearby, and I dragged my lower body to it, my legs feeling as though they’d been asleep longer than I had. I reached up with one arm, hand scrabbling up the wall with some difficulty, to retrieve the pouch of post-hibernation fluids.

  I unscrewed the top and let the liquid trickle slowly into my mouth, unsure that my muscles would remember how to swallow. Chilled and slightly salty orange-flavored liquid coated my throat. A few coughs and gags, and I started to feel a little more human. “Sunny,” I said, this time a little clearer. “Status report?”

  “Please clarify request.”

  “Uh, crew status report. Please,” I added sheepishly.

  “Activation sequences have automatically commenced. Pod release of Dr. Harper Copeland in one minute, forty-five seconds. Please stand by.”

  I should’ve realized—the pods of the other crew members were triggered to activate not long after mine. Just then, the pod nearest me began to beep, a red light flashing on the display. I swore, climbing to my feet and immediately crashing to my knees in my haste. Somehow I made it to the pod, using its edges to help me pull myself up.

  Through the small window cut into the steel, the sleeping face of Dr. Harper Copeland was an eerie pale blue. The tube began to hum beneath my hands. I took a shaky step backward as the gel inside the tube was drained away, giving Dr. Copeland’s face back some of its natural deep brown color.

  Waking sequence complete, the pod door unlatched, and Dr. Copeland’s limp body fell against it. I opened the door and just barely caught her before she hit the deck.

  My arms couldn’t hold her weight long. I ended up kneeling on the deck, supporting her helmeted head while her eyelids fluttered. Before she completely regained consciousness, I unlatched her helmet and pulled it off.

  Her eyes opened. She blinked a few times, then focused on my face with the laser intensity that I had grown accustomed to after weeks of being her student. Her mouth opened, nothing but a hoarse, voiceless rasp escaping.

  I was ready with the electrolyte solution. She was like an infant, learning how to coordinate breathing and swallowing for the first time.

  “Cassie,” she said after she’d finished the pouch. There was a question in her eyes, a furrow in her brow. Maybe she was wondering the same thing I’d wondered: Why is there gravity? Where a
re we? But instead of asking her questions, she gestured weakly to the pod beside hers that held flight engineer Logan Shaw. “The others.”

  His pod was beeping.

  One after another, the hibernation modules released my crewmates, and they tumbled into my arms. I laid them each in turn on the steel deck, removing their helmets and repeating assurances to each that they were not, in fact, dying.

  The physical effects of the cryogenic hibernation had worn off relatively quickly for me. The pouch of electrolytes, water, and glucose had jump-started my system. Which was good, because the hibernation pods of Odysseus weren’t meant to open under normal gravity conditions. We were supposed to be able to float out of them in zero gravity. We weren’t meant to wake with the full pressure of gravity bearing down on our weakened bodies.

  Instead, the four veteran astronauts of Odysseus—men and women who had taught me, who had spent their lives working to further human spaceflight, who had once been the pinnacle of human health—now lay limp and gasping at my feet like so many beached fish.

  They were all upward of forty-five. They’d basically been in a coma, living off liquid nutrition and floating in goo, and they were wrecked. I mean, so was I, but compared to them I was an Olympic athlete.

  Dr. Copeland recovered enough by the time Shaw’s pod opened to sit up, leaning against the wall for support. Her eyes a little sunken, but still sharp, still calculating. She helped advise me on how to take care of them best she could. Her instructions came in between short, breathy gasps. Sunny filled in the gaps in Dr. Copeland’s memory for me.

  The rest of the crew members gagged on their pouches of electrolyte solution, hardly able to hold them in their hands. Our muscles had atrophied. Not as much as they would have without the electric stimulation nodes and pressure of the suits regulating our bodies during hibernation, but still enough that it would take time for us to fully recover.

  By the time everyone else could stand on their own, my lungs felt heavy, my muscles overtaxed. The cushy, padded interior of my empty hibernation module was beginning to look really inviting.

  Dominic Bolshakov spoke a command to Sunny, and the pods retracted behind wall panels and were replaced with molded plastic, high-backed chairs. There was now slightly more breathing room in the cramped hibernation module.

  We each crawled into one, conserving our strength. None of us had any kind of endurance.

  Nervousness fluttered in my stomach as I searched each crew member’s face. They all appeared just as I’d last seen them, sealing me in my HHM in orbit around Earth. Bolshakov’s gray buzz cut had grown out somewhat, and his skin was ashen. Logan Shaw, with his friendly smile and skin pale white beneath his freckles, had a strange absence in his affect like a sleepwalker, and it took him seconds to respond when spoken to. Michele Jeong kept blinking her eyes slowly, squeezing them shut and then opening them wide as though she was having trouble with her vision.

  The men had stubble where they’d once been clean-shaven—the cryogenic sleep had slowed, but not stopped, our metabolisms. I was pretty sure my braid hadn’t been quite this long when I’d gone under.

  We were all a little too thin. Wasted from living on nothing but liquid nutrients.

  I closed my eyes. Unbidden, the face of a boy I used to know rose to my mind’s eye, older and sadder than I’d remembered. I shook off the apparition. He was nothing more than a dream I’d had while in hibernation. A dream that kept chasing me into reality. He wasn’t important right now.

  “Why . . . is there . . . gravity?” Shaw was looking at his hands, then at his feet, as though he’d expected them to be floating.

  “We shouldn’t have landed yet,” said Jeong, her face still slack with sleep. She shook herself a little, then placed a hand on the bulkhead. “No vibrations. We’re not even moving.”

  “Computer, report,” Commander Bolshakov said. His voice was almost back to full strength but hadn’t lost the hoarseness we all suffered from. “What is our location?”

  The cool, computerized voice of Sunny came from the wall speaker. “Undesignated terrestrial satellite of exoplanet designated Kepler-186f.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “What did she just say?” Shaw asked.

  Sunny helpfully repeated herself.

  Kepler-186f. That was it. That had been our original destination. More details kept trickling in, heralded by tidbits of familiar data. My brain was waking fully, like a slow computer churning back to life.

  NASA and SEE would not have sent us hurtling through space toward a moon that we had not even discovered, much less named.

  “Is anyone else . . . having trouble with their memory?” Shaw asked. “We were supposed to land on 186f, weren’t we? Not its moon.”

  Jeong and I nodded.

  “The computer was programmed to take the best possible course of action for our trajectory while we were unconscious,” Bolshakov reminded us. “There must have been some problem that diverted us to this moon. She is designed to make some decisions autonomously for the best interest of the crew; this isn’t that unusual. Sunny, pull up the projected map of the Kepler-186 system.”

  A hologram of circling spheres appeared in the middle of the room. In the center was Kepler-186 itself, the red dwarf star of this system. Then the four planets we knew about, circling too close to their sun to be livable. The fifth, designated Kepler-186f, had been the first Earth-sized exoplanet discovered within the habitable zone of its star, way back in 2014.

  “This is the map of the system as we knew it when we left,” Bolshakov explained slowly. “Sunny, now display the adjusted solar map, accounting for any new data the scanners detected upon arrival.” A handful of small celestial bodies, all undiscovered until now, clustered around Kepler-186f, circling in multiple orbits. “Sunny, highlight our current location.”

  The smallest circling orb—one of the moons of Kepler-186f—glowed a soft blue.

  “Just to remind everyone, seeing as we’re all a bit fuzzy, Kepler-186f was highlighted for its potential to harbor life. But that isn’t the reason we came. We came because we were invited.”

  A cold sensation pooled in my stomach at Bolshakov’s words. I did recall that now. We’d come here on good faith, following instructions sent to us across light-years, in a ship of alien design.

  But there was something else. Something still prowling around the outer edges of my knowledge, like a predator in the dark. Something crucial I had forgotten and needed desperately to remember.

  I felt like I should say something. But I had nothing to say, and we had so much else to do. This eerie feeling might only be a side effect of hibernation, a lingering sense of a nightmare that hadn’t yet burned away like the morning mist.

  “Is that why our landing was diverted?” Jeong asked in a whisper.

  Silence fell over the five of us.

  “I don’t know what’s going on here,” Dr. Copeland admitted. “But we’re five hundred light-years from home. We need to stick to the plan, as much as we’re able.”

  Astronauts—with the exception of me, who’d only had a few months’ worth of preparation for this mission—trained over and over again for every possibility. The plan was everything. There were backup plans upon backup plans. Every eventuality had been discussed, dissected, and diagrammed.

  None of our plans had included landing on this moon.

  “All right, then. Since we seem to have some missing spots in our memories, we’ll have to rely on Sunny to keep us straight. Sunny, what’s next on our protocol?” Bolshakov said.

  “Wait. Shouldn’t we run Sunny through a diagnostic check first, to make sure she wasn’t damaged during flight?” Jeong asked.

  Bolshakov asked Sunny to run a diagnostic on Odysseus. Everything was functioning optimally. That seemed to rule out a system malfunction being the reason for the diverted landing. Then, with a heavy sigh, he asked what we all wanted to know. “Sunny, what is the Mission Elapsed Time?”

  Sunn
y’s computerized voice was calm and unaffected. “MET is five months, twenty-five days, fourteen hours, and seventeen minutes.”

  We looked at each other in confusion. “That isn’t right,” Shaw said, furrowing his brow. “It can’t be. It’s not possible.”

  Kepler-186 was five hundred light-years from Earth.

  The computer sat silent.

  When Shaw spoke, his voice was so tightly controlled it was clear to me he was trying to rein in some deeper panic. “Sunny, please explain how we were able to land on a planet five hundred light-years away in only five Earth months.”

  “Odysseus is equipped with an Alcubierre drive capable of faster-than-light travel.” That was all she said. Like it was that simple.

  Odysseus was equipped with Alcubierre engines, which had only been hypothetical until this flight. These allowed us to distort the fabric of space-time in a small bubble around ourselves, moving through space-time without violating the laws of physics, and hopefully without a time-distortion effect that would see us return to Earth to find that hundreds of years had passed without us.

  The engineers and scientists behind Project Adastra had run tests on these engines, of course. Computer models. But in reality, we didn’t know the full capabilities of these engines until we turned them on. They were not of our own design. They’d been a gift from whomever it was that had wanted us to come here.

  I was itching to move on. We were on an alien planet. We needed to focus on that. “The ship is in good condition and we’re all safe. I think it’s more important for us to focus not on the discrepancies in the plan but on accomplishing our mission now that we’re here.”

  A corner of Bolshakov’s mouth ticked upward, and a pleasant glow warmed my chest. “I agree, Gupta. Let us follow procedure.”

  The others took their cues from him. Only Shaw’s face still looked a little pinched.

  Bolshakov said, “Sunny, is this moon habitable?”

  Sunny’s dispassionate voice cut through the room. “The surface temperature and radiation levels are lethal to humans. There is no detectable amount of liquid water on the surface. No signs of carbon-based life, and no artificial structures seen by Odysseus’s exterior cameras on approach.”