breath shaky.
“I had an indication, but thought reassurance the best response.”
“Thank you. I do appreciate it. Sleep now.”
Vanhi had never expected to encounter Dr. Chappell or her team, but she’d known the woman was angry, even from afar. How could she not be? If Chappell had sacrificed her ethics to get a once-in-a-lifetime job, and not only had that opportunity been ripped away from her, but all others as well, there would be no measured response. She’d feel guilty, and furious, and lost.
But that wasn’t quite right, was it? Someone who would purposefully skew their data—waste hundreds of thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars on a lie—wouldn’t be mad like that. They wouldn’t be mad about the things Vanhi would be mad about. They’d be mad someone had the nerve to question them. They’d be angry they didn’t get their way.
They might get violent.
They might be the type to get drunk on a Moon base and go after the weak link in their exposure. They’d threaten. They’d deny.
But they wouldn’t, of all things, ask “Why?”
Inside her, the leafy sprout shot up, budding—the flower of realization threatening to unfurl.
She shuffled over to the composite desk, tripping over the edge of the bed and her half-unpacked suitcase to get there. She let the folder fall to the table with a plop, and it scattered open like a wilting rose. The holoflex-sheets were creased—rainbow colors bowing away from the damage to show where the plasma nanocircuits were, in effect, “bleeding”—and everything was out of order. A few paper sheets were tucked in the mix.
Most of the pages were dated or belonged to a dated set. She fanned them out, attempting to reconstitute their timeline.
On the right she set Dr. Chappell’s “original” data; on the left she laid out the “undoctored” versions.
She was no biologist, but the results seemed clear: on one hand she had evidence that at least two of the planets in TRAPPIST-One likely had multicellular life. On the other, she had what looked like a correction to the original study, with a variable not originally taken into account added into the mix. That wouldn’t make Dr. Chappell’s results fabricated so much as uncorrected. It looked like she’d submitted the first results and suppressed the second.
It wasn’t uncommon to create an experiment and get fantastic results only to realize you’d constructed your experiment wrong. That was part of the scientific process. You learn, you correct, you learn again.
Perhaps Chappell had wanted so badly for there to be life in this system that she’d convinced herself the second set of data had to be wrong. Maybe she’d gone so far as to fool herself.
The flower in Vanhi’s gut grew thorns and poked. Because …
This doesn’t feel right.
There were grad students who’d stood up for Dr. Chappell when she was exposed, but there had been others who insisted the data she’d issued to the consortium wasn’t complete. They’d sworn she’d tampered with the results.
Vanhi stared at the pages, eyes not fully focused, as though the longer her gaze hovered over the pages the more likely she was to learn the truth.
Something clicked in the back of her mind, and she jumped for her purse. “C, wake up.”
“Yes?”
“You know that backdoor connection to Jamal he insisted on installing?”
“Of course.”
“The one I told you never to use?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to use it now.”
“All right.” Thank the heavens for small favors. “What kind of information should I remit?”
“I’m going to upload some holoflex files. I probably shouldn’t have these, and he definitely shouldn’t have these, so make sure he knows they’re classified, but, like classified classified.”
“I’m not sure that’s a recognized—”
“Just do it. He’ll know what I mean. Ask him to dig in and look for the dates the files were created. The real dates. He’s going to have to go deep—there’s no way it’s in the typical metadata.” She rubbed her chin and mumbled, “He’s too smart for that.”
“Who is?”
Vanhi gritted her teeth. “Kaufman.”
The setup for the press conference took advantage of Earthrise in the conservatorium. Vanhi would give her speech and answer questions under the glass dome—its decahedron panes glittering in the full sunlight. With the Earth swelling slowly behind her in all its blue glory, her monologue would hit emotional beat after emotional beat, and at its climax, the Littlest Convoy’s three ships would clear the horizon. It would make for fantastic schoolroom viewing.
Because of the libration cycle, Earthrise was a slow event, nothing as dramatic as a sunrise or even moonrise, but it would have the desired effect on those who loved space.
Concealed beneath the stage in the conservatorium was the greenroom. Here Vanhi sat, chewing her thumbnail, arms crossed, legs crossed; a knot outside and inside. She hadn’t slept a wink.
As soon as the door opened and Kaufman entered from the anteroom, Vanhi was on her feet. “You lied to me.”
“About what?” he asked—not as though he were tired of her accusations, but as though she could be referring to a number of lies.
She held up one holoflex sheet, its corner dog-eared. “Doctor Chappell didn’t fabricate results, you did.”
C had gotten through to Jamal straightaway. The programmer treated a sudden ping from one of his surviving C series like the emergency it was. And he’d confirmed her worst fears.
The contradictory data in those files was first created a full month after Kaufman had fed her the story back in Dubai.
Kaufman took up a chair—the kind that passed for plush on a moon base, with hard armrests and a deep bucket seat—and shrugged. Shrugged! “I’d hoped you wouldn’t have to find out.”
“I can’t believe you. I can’t—why? Why would you do that?”
“Look at where you are, then ask me again.”
She wasn’t going to take that. She was done playing. Two strides brought her before him. She leaned down, grabbing the armrests, caging him in. “No. I never asked for this. This was never even a twinkle in my eye until you came to me. Why?”
His expression remained stoic, unimpressed. “You and I both know this mission needed to be born. It had to be. Had to.”
“No. That’s another lie.”
“You
