by Laura Lam
Hixon had twirled a strand of limp pasta on her fork.
“Can we send them back? Or drop them off on Mars?” Hart had asked.
Valerie had shaken her head. “We’re stuck with them until Cavendish, sadly. Can’t send cryopods on the launch shuttle—and we need that for ferrying parts down to the surface once we arrive. We don’t have enough spare food to send ’em back defrosted anyway.” A pointed look at Naomi.
“I’m on it.” Naomi had put her fork down, despite her plate being half full. The chemical aftertaste turned her stomach. They had limited astronaut rations, but they wouldn’t last long.
“So looks like they’re with us until the bitter end. Worst-case, we can hold ’em hostage if Earth ends up being difficult,” Valerie had said with a too-bright smile.
“It won’t come to that,” Hart had said sharply.
“Course not. Everyone down there is all bark, no bite. Not like we’d actually hurt them. But they wouldn’t know that, now, would they? The think pieces say I want to kill all men anyway.” Valerie had waved her fork before sticking it in the silver pouch and stabbing a piece of barely warm vat-grown beef covered in thick, globular gravy. She’d been too impatient for a plate.
Lebedeva watched them all, eating her food in steady, even bites. “They are just bodies.” She had given a shrug, lips turning down.
“Easy for you to say,” Hixon had said. “You don’t know them. Not like us. And especially not like some of us.”
Naomi had kept chewing, eyes on her plate.
She’d had to come see them. Down in the Crypt, the light was dim, the main body of the ship cooler than the ring. Naomi shivered and made her way to the storage containers. She passed over the quiet robots, powered down and waiting for their moment once they arrived on Cavendish to help them build the settlement. Her mother’s inventions had provided the seed money that had turned Hawthorne into the multi-industry conglomerate it’d become. Naomi grabbed a spare LED lamp and then turned towards the cryopods.
They glowed blue in the darkness. Wrapping the cable of the lamp around her wrist, she moved closer.
Perhaps Valerie had also nixed the plans for the cryopods because she simply hadn’t wanted to admit the danger of this mission: that if one of them died, they needed someone else to replace them. It was why now the women were on board, training continued, all of them learning from the others. Naomi would take on medical training from Hart. Not long after they’d taken off, Hart had walked Naomi through all the medication in their stores. What they were, what each was for. The proper doses for local anaesthetic, morphine, antibiotics. Making sure Naomi knew how to prep syringes and find veins to take blood or IVs. She’d made Naomi take her own blood every day for a week, conducting different tests on the samples, until Naomi could stick a needle in her own vein without hesitation.
Hart was learning more about piloting from Hixon and engineering from Lebedeva, and Valerie was teaching Hixon more about robotics in return for gaps in her mathematical abilities. And so on. Just in case.
The pods were laid out like coffins paned with glass, the inhabitants within little more than murky shapes in the liquid nitrogen. The readings on the panels on the outside of their cold coffins glowed red against the blue.
Technically, the Atalanta crew were guilty of abduction in addition to their myriad other crimes. The news had leaked to Earth, Valerie said, and Cochran’s media bots were adding to the fury and fervour of reports on them just as he’d wished. They must be calling for the women’s heads. Hixon had started referring to their escape as grand theft spaceship, which had brought some half-hearted smiles.
The backup crew had been selected from a shortlisted lottery of NASA active astronauts. Naomi, Hart, or Hixon had worked with everyone chosen. Colleagues, bosses, friends, more. At least if they came with them to Cavendish and woke up, maybe it wouldn’t be as lonely.
Five men with similar skills and expertise. Unlucky enough not to be the main crew, which must have hurt their pride. What would they think if they knew that, compared to the five men stranded back on Earth, they were the lucky ones?
Lebedeva’s analogue was Devraj Chand. Naomi hadn’t worked with him directly, but he’d been at drinks after work a few times. She remembered him being very tall, polite, and quiet except for the occasional cutting remark that would make everyone blink and sit up and pay attention. Very fond of a pun.
The flight surgeon backup was Ryan Webb. He was blandly good-looking, brown hair and eyes, firm handshake. He’d looked after her health in her time at NASA. His specialism was internal medicine, like Hart, but without the same level of psychological expertise, which was another potential flaw in both the original proposed crew and the five men before her. Few had the same balance of skill as Valerie’s choices. It was why she’d picked them.
The military test pilot and mechanical engineer was Josh Hines. He was one of those men that harkened back to the early days of astronauts, those Mercury boys with their swagger and machismo, who would drag race down freeways in the desert after half a bottle of Jack just to prove they could. A man’s man, a little too familiar. He’d kept trying to flirt with Naomi and been very confused when she proved immune to his charms.
Dennis Lee was Naomi’s own double. Another botanist, one of the team that had developed the strain of algae they’d be using in the greenhouse both for food and life support. It was Lee who had figured out the best place to store water would be in the hull of the ship to provide additional cosmic radiation shielding.
Dennis was the one she knew second-best. They’d worked together for two years at NASA, side by side, developing those in-jokes borne out of close proximity and long days in a lab that smelled of pond scum and bleach. He’d done consulting work for Valerie on her company Haven, as well. She drifted closer, peering at the blur where his head must be. He had a face Naomi could only describe as mobile—always on the verge of a laugh, a smirk, a frown. She had never seen him still.
And then the last one, the backup leader of the mission. He was such a celebrity, that First Man of Mars, that Naomi was surprised they hadn’t put Cole Palmer on the main team to spearhead the mission like he had for Ares over a decade previously. His face had been familiar to her before she’d ever met him in person, his wide smile beaming at her from news segments, advertisements, the cover of his memoir in a bookstore. Even features, auburn hair, startling dark eyes. Those broad shoulders and tapered waist, his astronaut’s helmet usually propped jauntily in one arm or against a hip. If someone were to build a man to be the face of space exploration, he’d be it.
“Hello, Cole,” Naomi said, putting her hand on the cool glass, tapping it once. “You’ve looked better.”
But he and the other frozen bodies were silent, waiting to be rekindled on a new world.
When she’d taken off and left Earth, she’d thought that’d meant she’d left her ex-husband behind.
CHAPTER FIVE
2.5 Years Before Launch
Catalina Island, California
Catalina Island rose before them.
Naomi clung to the handrail of the Hawthorne yacht as they passed the sea wall. It’d been built years ago to protect the island from harsh storm waves and rising tides. The rich had complained it blocked the views of Los Angeles, but the smog usually took care of that.
They docked in Avalon Bay as morning lengthened to noon. Naomi strode down the gangway after Valerie, her legs only a little unsteady beneath her.
White sails peppered the turquoise of the water. Already it was too warm, the air hot and close. Tourists decked out in hats and shades wandered the beach, lingering beneath the squat palm trees, the scrub-dotted hills of the island rising beyond the chintzy store fronts of the promenade.
Perched at one of the edges curving into the harbour was the Catalina Casino, with its rounded walls and its Moorish-inspired columned windows and terracotta roof. In a few hours, it’d be the site of Hawthorne’s charity dinner. Ostensibly the dinner
was to support climate change refugees, but it was also a means for Valerie to crow about Project Atalanta. To wine and dine the higher-ups in government and private companies to convince them to offer more funding for completion of her vision for Cavendish. The only viable long-term solution for humanity, she was certain, even if the men in suits didn’t believe her yet.
It’d been six months since Naomi had moved back from windswept Scotland to sun-baked Los Angeles. Valerie had offered Naomi her old room, but she’d rented a studio near the office in Pasadena instead. She liked walking back home after the sun had set. The warm, muggy streets were cooler, quieter.
Back at Hawthorne, she wove together trellises of plants, a loom of lively green, or tended endless, long, skinny tubes of algae. Testing them, peering at samples beneath microscopes, seeing how to make them better and resilient enough for space and Cavendish. It meant a lot of experimenting with light and nutrient environments. She was developing a toolkit for genetic modification so that the algae could also be altered once they arrived on Cavendish. That way, they could survive with but not demolish the native algae-like cells already present in the planet’s oceans.
The project was already behind schedule and over budget. Valerie appeared unconcerned, funnelling more of her seemingly endless personal fortune into the company and convincing other rich people to reach deeper into their pockets.
Valerie had insisted on making a day of it in Catalina, but as they wandered the shops and had lunch, Naomi was too lost in her head to enjoy it properly. Her latest crop of a strain of hardy, fast-growing sweet potatoes was proving promising. She’d harvested and sliced them yesterday. Baked them into chips, sprinkled with oil, salt, and rosemary, chewing them slowly. They’d been good and grown entirely in soil that matched iron-rich soils on Cavendish.
They strolled along the beach, pausing at one of the breaks, their legs dangling above the water. Naomi’s scars were bared to the sunlight. The Casino squatted before them. Valerie passed her a tub of pistachio ice cream—her favourite, though of course it wasn’t made with anything resembling the real nut since the crops had failed. They sat in near-silence and took off their filter masks long enough to eat. The sugar and cold cream melted on Naomi’s tongue as she looked over the bay to the concrete sea wall. It did rather spoil the view.
“You nervous?” Naomi asked.
“Never,” Valerie said, sucking on her biodegradable spoon.
When they returned, hours later, the Catalina Casino was lit up from within like a jewel. Their dinner would be in the largest circular ballroom in the world. It had never been a place of gambling—the word technically meant “meeting place.” People had not even drunk alcohol on the premises until after World War II. Built in the 1920s by Wrigley, of chewing gum fame, it was all art deco opulence. Tiles over the grand, curved entranceways depicted underwater scenes. Naomi paused, staring up at the larger-than-life, stylised mermaid. Her red hair streamed upwards like the seaweed in currents. It was as if she floated in zero G. The siren held her hands out in welcome, hips hinged dramatically to one side, legs morphing mid-thigh from pale skin to blue scales. The mural was muted, pastel colours save for the bright pop of a seahorse or a trio of small fish swimming along the seabed.
Valerie swept forward, a vibrant dawn to Naomi’s more subdued midnight. Her bodice was red, segueing to orange at the waist and down to yellow and white at the hem. She wore red lipstick, her hair slicked back to a smooth cap. Her ears and neck were bare of jewels. She never saw the need to condense her wealth into hard rocks of carbon. She made rockets instead.
The ballroom was glorious, with its rose-hued walls, black and white cameos in relief above the windows lining the room beneath the scalloped ceiling and Tiffany chandeliers. They were the last to enter. Valerie loved to make an entrance.
Naomi made her way to her seat, annoyed at her dress—a sequined, dark blue affair, the tight skirt hobbling her into small, heeled steps. She’d never liked these fancy soirees. Valerie had dragged her to more than her fair share as a child. Naomi wished she was back at the lab. With a resigned sigh, she looked for her ex-husband. She’d rolled her eyes when she’d seen his name on the guest list. He never turned down an opportunity to come to these things.
Cole Palmer was seated halfway across the ballroom. His head was turned, and he leaned close to his new wife to whisper something in her ear.
Mel Palmer had the same colouring as Naomi, but aside from that they didn’t look much alike. Her dark hair was twisted into a chignon and a sapphire glittered at her throat. They must have been married a year and a half by now. No longer newlyweds. They had a newborn boy at home. Mel had taken the governmental payout, quit her job as a journalist to stay at home with the child for five years. That was the end of that; in five years, she’d be too out of the game to pick up where she’d left off. Naomi didn’t blame her—with the astronomical costs of childcare and the way women were being passed over anyway, Mel had chosen what many other women did when they birthed their first—and, because of the high subsequent children taxes, often only—child.
Naomi was meant to hate Mel, she supposed. Call her a man-stealing harpy or some other epithet. But Mel didn’t take anything that wasn’t already lost.
The Palmers made a handsome couple. She still remembered the first time she’d seen an interview of him on a screen, when she was twenty two and he thirty, fresh-faced and just returned from his mission to the nearest planet. The lines around his eyes were a little deeper now that he was nearing his late thirties, and there was a tad more silver sprinkled through his hair. He looked the same as he had the last time she saw him three years ago and she’d walked right out of his life. Cole caught her eye, not at all surprised to see her, and flashed that smile that had once worked so well on her.
Naomi dutifully curled her lips, her mind swirling with murky memories, both sweet and bitter. It’d have been easier, perhaps, to still be the one sitting next to him. Too late to wonder. Too late for regret.
Naomi twisted in her seat, the dress stiff, and introduced herself to the others at her table. She knew the Hawthorne employees, Liam and Bryony. Liam had the hangdog eyes of a beagle, and Bryony was over six feet tall and delighted in towering over others. Bryony was a doctor, working on astronaut health and immunology, and Liam was in public relations. The strangers were a hard-faced man from the Environmental Protection Agency named Bram and his much kinder-looking wife, Theresa.
Naomi spoke to Bryony primarily, as they’d at least worked together a few times. Bryony’s eyes were bright, shining. “We’re getting closer,” she said. “Can’t you feel it?” She’d always been an ardent supporter of Valerie’s.
Naomi was spared from too much small talk when Valerie tinged her fork against a glass, bringing the murmur of talk to a close. Valerie had taken her place at the head table.
“Welcome,” she said, her voice carrying easily thanks to the acoustics of the room, “to the Hawthorne charity dinner. The proceeds tonight go to vital support services for those displaced by the growing pressure of climate change.” A rough scattering of applause, a few smiles.
“I aim to help those in the here and now,” Valerie continued. “But my vision has always been to the future. Fixing a root cause rather than slapping a band-aid over the symptom.”
Some of the smiles in the audience dimmed. Naomi wondered how many people in the ballroom wearing designer suits and jewels actually gave anything resembling a crap for the refugees. People too poor to afford the subscription fees for a luxury like the internet, much less the even higher costs needed to live a comfortable life: dues to private police or firefighters or health insurance. So many lived in ramshackle housing little better than shanty towns. They didn’t count as permanent addresses, so most couldn’t register to vote. They were becoming increasingly invisible. Meanwhile, the people in this room showed up and donated pennies of their wealth to give the illusion they cared.
“We are working hard, at long last, to
try and escape the damage we’ve done to Earth. First, we looked to the moon. Decades ago, men had taken their first steps there, which are still imprinted in the grey regolith. Robots went back next, and then humans added new footprints.”
Naomi had grown up seeing photos of the base of bubbles like an unnatural growth on the pockmarked face of the moon.
“But we abandoned the moon when we’d realised how expensive it was for so little gain. So we turned our attention to Mars, inhabiting it with the descendants of Curiosity, Rover, Perseverance, Spirit.
“NASA, in conjunction with China, Russia, Europe, and Japan are doing excellent work on their terraforming of Mars. But that project will take decades, maybe even up to a century, and, frankly, we don’t have that long.”
A couple of titters and whispers, which Valerie ignored. She left the table and held her arms out once she reached the centre of the ballroom. Projections turned the pale scalloped shell of the ceiling into a map of the Milky Way. Gasps and murmurs made Naomi hide her smirk. Always one for dramatics, Valerie, but Naomi had to admit it was a good show. The people in the seats needed to be entertained enough to reach into their pockets.
The view pinpointed one star out of the thousands spackled across the ceiling. Formerly Epsilon Eridani, known colloquially as Ran, after the Norse goddess of the sea. Ten and a half light years away. The star was K2 class and eighty per cent the size of Earth’s sun. It was cooler and would glow orange in the sky rather than yellow-white. The star was young, a sprightly billion years old, but it had taken half that long for Earth to develop life. It had taken Earth four billion years for something to crawl out of the ocean and colonise forests and jungles.