Godforsaken

Chapter 1: The Weight of Dreams

The countdown clock on the wall of the crew quarters read T-minus eleven hours, and Patricia Marshall could not sleep.

She lay in the narrow bunk at Kennedy Space Center, staring at the ceiling tiles, listening to the air conditioning hum its mechanical lullaby. Outside, beyond the reinforced concrete and the chain-link perimeters and the salt marshes of Merritt Island, the Jericho IV rocket stood bathed in floodlights on Pad 39B, venting thin clouds of liquid oxygen into the Florida night. She'd watched them roll it out three days ago from the Vehicle Assembly Building, that cathedral of engineering where Saturn Vs had once been stacked like prayers aimed at heaven. Now it was her turn.

Her turn. The words felt strange even after two years of training, simulations, medical screenings, and press conferences. Commander Patricia Marshall, United States Navy, age forty-four. Mother of one. Widow of one, though the press releases never mentioned that. First woman to command a crewed lunar landing mission since—well, since ever. Since the species had first looked up at that pale disc and wondered.

She rolled onto her side and checked her phone. Three seventeen in the morning. The alarm was set for four. She should sleep. Every flight surgeon and performance psychologist on the program had drilled it into her: sleep is a consumable, Commander. You can't make more of it in transit.

But sleep wouldn't come. Not tonight.

She thought about calling her mother in Tallahassee, but the old woman would be dead asleep at this hour, and besides, they'd said everything that needed saying at dinner two nights ago. Her mother had held her hands across the restaurant table and said, "You bring yourself home, Patty. That's all I need. You bring yourself home."

Patricia had promised.

She thought about Sophie then—couldn't help it, on a night like this. Sophie at seven years old, gap-toothed and grinning, pointing at the full moon through the kitchen window of their house in Cocoa Beach. "Mama, are you really gonna go there?" And Patricia, still a test pilot then, still years from selection, had said, "Someday, baby. Someday."

Sophie had been dead for six years now. Leukemia. The acute kind, the kind that didn't negotiate. Patricia had held her daughter's hand in a hospital room that smelled of antiseptic and wilting flowers, and she had watched the monitors flatline, and something inside her had gone quiet in a way that never fully came back.

She sat up in the bunk and pressed her palms against her eyes.

Enough. She was Commander Patricia Marshall. She had a crew depending on her, a mission to fly, and a world watching. She would not spend her last hours on Earth drowning in grief.

She pulled on her flight suit and walked down the corridor to the common area, where she found Russell Bryant sitting at the table with a mug of coffee and a dog-eared paperback.

"Can't sleep either?" she asked.

Russell looked up. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and deliberate in his movements, the kind of pilot who flew by feel as much as by numbers. Forty-one years old, Air Force, two shuttle missions under his belt before the program was retired. He had a face that looked carved from weathered wood—all planes and angles—and eyes that missed very little.

"Haven't tried," he said. "Figured I'd save myself the disappointment."

Patricia poured herself a coffee and sat across from him. "What are you reading?"

He held up the book. "Moby Dick."

"Light bedtime reading."

"Seemed appropriate. Man chases something across a vast emptiness. Doesn't end great for him, but the prose is nice."

Patricia smiled. Russell had a dry wit that had taken her months to appreciate during training. He wasn't warm exactly—not the way some pilots were, all backslaps and call signs—but he was steady. Reliable in the way that mattered when you were sitting on top of four million pounds of thrust.

"Where's Kenji?" she asked.

"Sleeping like a baby. I checked on him an hour ago. Out cold."

"Of course he is."

Kenji Moreau was their mission specialist—half Japanese, half French-Canadian, all brilliance. Thirty-six, the youngest of the crew, with two doctorates and the unshakable calm of someone who genuinely believed the universe was a puzzle designed for his amusement. He'd been recruited from the European Space Agency after his work on autonomous landing systems caught NASA's attention. He was the one who'd be running the surface experiments, operating the sampling equipment, and—if everything went to plan—planting the flag.

Patricia envied his ability to sleep. She always had.

"You nervous?" Russell asked.

She considered lying. "Yes."

"Good. Nervous people double-check things."

They sat in companionable silence for a while, drinking their coffee, listening to the building breathe around them. Somewhere outside, a mockingbird was singing in the dark, running through its repertoire of stolen songs.

"I keep thinking about the Apollo guys," Russell said after a while. "Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. Sitting in a room like this, the night before. I wonder what they talked about."

"Probably the same thing we're not talking about."

"What's that?"

"Whether we're coming back."

Russell looked at her steadily. "We're coming back, Commander."

"I know we are."

"Then stop borrowing trouble."

She raised her mug in a mock toast. "To not borrowing trouble."

"To not borrowing trouble."

The alarm went off forty-three minutes later. Kenji appeared in the doorway, bright-eyed and freshly showered, and said, "Good morning, fellow lunatics. Pun intended."

And the day of the launch began.

---

The suit-up room smelled of rubber and static. Technicians helped them into their pressure suits—the new Orion EVA models, lighter and more flexible than anything that had come before, but still bulky enough to make Patricia feel like she was being swallowed by a white chrysalis. She went through the checklist by rote: seals, pressure, comms, biometrics. Everything nominal.

They rode the elevator to the crew access arm in silence, three figures in white walking the same gantry that generations of astronauts had walked before them. The sun was coming up over the Atlantic, painting the clouds in shades of coral and gold. Patricia paused at the hatch and looked out at the ocean, the curve of the coast, the green sprawl of Florida stretching away to the west.

She thought: I'm going to miss the weight of things.

Then she climbed inside.

The Jericho capsule—officially the Vanguard command module—was compact but well-designed, a teardrop of titanium and carbon composite perched atop the service module and, below that, the massive Earth Departure Stage that would push them out of orbit and toward the moon. Patricia took the left seat, Russell the center, Kenji the right. They ran through pre-launch checks for two hours while the ground crew completed final preparations.

Mission control was in Houston, as always. Flight Director Deborah Kinsey ran the room with the precision of a conductor and the temperament of a drill sergeant. Patricia had worked with her for years and trusted her completely. Deborah was fifty-two, silver-haired, and possessed of a voice that could cut through any amount of radio static or bureaucratic noise. She'd been flight director for Jericho II and III, and she'd fought hard—harder than anyone knew—to keep the program funded through two congressional budget battles and a government shutdown.

"Jericho Four, Houston. You are go for launch on my mark. How copy?"

Patricia keyed her mic. "Houston, Jericho Four copies. We are go."

"Copy that. Good luck up there, Commander. Bring 'em home."

"That's the plan."

The countdown entered its final minutes. Patricia felt the vibration of the rocket beneath her—alive, impatient, straining against the hold-down clamps like a thoroughbred in the gate. She placed her gloved hands on the armrests and breathed.

At T-minus ten seconds, the main engines ignited. The sound was beyond sound—a physical force that pressed through the hull and into her bones. The capsule shook. Caution lights flickered and steadied.

"Three... two... one. Liftoff. Liftoff of Jericho Four."

The clamps released and the rocket rose. Patricia was pressed into her seat by three and a half G's of acceleration, her vision narrowing, her teeth clenched. The sky outside the tiny window shifted from blue to indigo to black in the space of four minutes. The solid boosters separated with a sharp bang. The first stage fell away. The second stage ignited, smooth and clean.

And then, silence. Weightlessness. The Earth hung outside the window, impossibly blue, impossibly beautiful.

"Houston, Jericho Four. We have achieved orbit. All systems nominal."

Deborah's voice came back, warm with relief she'd never admit to. "Copy, Jericho Four. Orbit confirmed. Welcome to space."

Kenji unstrapped and floated to the window. He pressed his face against the glass like a child at an aquarium.

"My God," he whispered. "It's real."

Russell caught Patricia's eye and smiled. For a moment—just a moment—everything was exactly as it should be.