by Laura Lam
Naomi’s face softened. She’d spent as much time in the observation room as she could get away with for the same reason. Spots of stars. Dark and endless. She’d fallen asleep curled up in the window ledge a few times. Woken up with a start.
“Dinner’s in ten,” Hart added.
“Can’t wait,” Naomi said without enthusiasm. The menu tonight was vat corned beef out of a packet, though they would be able to have a tiny salad of hydroponic lettuce to help freshen it up. Dessert was a strawberry nutriblock.
Naomi was isolating herself. Valerie or Hart would call her out on it soon. Space had been the goal, but she felt as though she moved through mud, her mind never clearing of fog. She kept thinking of Earth, wondering what she’d be doing now, almost as if she was mourning the life she’d elected to leave behind. If anyone else was doing the same, they knew better than to speak of it.
Naomi still felt nauseous, especially if she had to go down into the main body of the ship and lose her tenuous hold on gravity. As much as she’d loved floating weightless, the fear of retching up her breakfast in micogravity took the fun out of it. At night, strapped to her bed, all seemed steady enough, but her stomach still knew the ring rotated several times per minute, spiralling through the abyss towards their destination.
Naomi took a last look through her crops, running her fingers along their delicate stems and flat leaves. Promises she’d coaxed from seeds with light, water, warmth, air, and soil. She frowned, staring beyond the crops to the bioreactors against the far wall. A cluster of four cylinders began blinking, on and off, like a steady heartbeat. A sign that something within had gone wrong with the batch—too hot, too cold, a leak, or a contamination. As she watched, another two started flashing.
Naomi activated the comms panel. “Valerie?”
She’d anticipated problems from the crops, if anywhere. A plant infected with witches’ broom, or fungus or aphids somehow getting through the contamination protocols. Algae was much easier to grow—especially the strand they’d engineered for space travel.
A crackle. “Lovelace.” The use of her last name was a rebuke. A reminder to keep to the command structure. No obvious favouritism that could lead to fractures in their group.
“Dr. Black,” Naomi said, the slightest edge in her voice as another cylinder started flashing. “Houston, we have a problem.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
42 Days After Launch
84 Days to Mars
207 Days to Cavendish
The batches of algae were leeching colour. In normal light they would have changed from a deep, verdant green to opaque and milky, announcing the algae was dead. It was happening quickly. Naomi would go to bed and return to the lab the next morning to find that viruses had exploded the cells within.
She’d flushed the first batch in case of infection—sending it out of the airlock instead of recycling it into fertiliser—sterilised the bioreactors, and grown a new batch from a fresh sample. It was holding, but its levels were still lower than she’d like. One of her older batches wasn’t looking good either, and yet another showed normal growth and then sudden crashes. Lebedeva had double-checked the equipment, and all was functioning as it should. Temperatures were normal, nutrient feeds were good, and still batches were crashing in a matter of hours. So if it wasn’t their environment, it was likely a virus. And that was not as easy to fix.
If it’d been the crops failing, it’d be a problem, but it’d mean all of their food would come from nutriblocks. If algae productivity dipped too low, it’d affect the bulk of their food and, of course, their life support.
Naomi was working until exhaustion, often falling asleep on the table. Her lab was no longer her quiet corner of the ship. Valerie would come in and narrow her eyes at the darkened cylinders full of cellular debris, as if she could bring them back to life with the sheer power of her glare.
Naomi put more of their healthy algae into the harvester. Out came more nutriblocks. They had enough food for an extra few weeks. They weren’t at panic mode, not yet—Naomi had isolates of spirulina as well as a few types of chlorella in the vault that hadn’t come into contact with the other strains—but she wanted to know what exactly was going wrong before she dug into her stores. If those isolates became infected, that was that. Endgame.
Naomi, with Lebedeva’s help, centrifuged the cellular debris out of the dead culture and DNA-sequenced the remaining supernatant, which consisted mostly of the virus. So she had the virus isolated, at least.
Despite the stress, everyone else’s space illness had passed. Naomi envied the others’ easier shift from gravity to zero G if they went down to the bridge or the Crypt. Though they were all tense, they had found their rhythm. Hixon and Lebedeva checked the ship from top to bottom, working their way through systems diagnostics over the course of a few days only to start over again once they reached the end. Naomi would see them, heads together over some problem. Hixon would gesticulate wildly and Lebedeva would hunch her shoulders and focus.
Hixon and Valerie were working together to ensure they were on course as well as rechecking the Alcubierre theories, running simulation after simulation in the VR rec room. Hart helped Naomi with the crops while she battled the algae, kept tabs on everyone’s health, and ran regular full physicals.
Valerie locked herself in the observation room, her de facto office, for hours at a time, working on urban planning for the landing site on Cavendish, building digital blueprint after blueprint. Catherine Lovelace had designed the robots and tech that led to many aspects of the spaceship thirty years on, but Valerie Black’s first love had always been seeing how technology fitted into the larger whole. She loved designing buildings, cities, expanding Hawthorne into one of the few mega-companies with fingers in many industries. Tech, medicine, agriculture, distribution: so many tools that coalesced to help design a new base on another planet.
When she emerged, Valerie would flit through the spaceship, keeping an eye on everything. She sent word back to Evan every few days and asked for news updates and disseminated short reports to the crew.
Naomi was never sure if Valerie told them everything or filtered out the worst bits. The U.S. had tried to deny any responsibility, but the rest of the world wasn’t looking too kindly on them. Under the Outer Space Treaty and subsequent amendments to it, NASA and Lockwood were responsible for the Atalanta by law even before they put it into orbit. The PR machine was in full spin; the women on board had made America look incompetent. Spaceship thieves, body snatchers. Scandalous enough to bolster sinking news-site hits.
“That’s because they were inept!” Valerie had said, before snorting at an article. Conspiracy theories abounded. That the Atalanta was a distraction, so people would look up at the night sky rather than notice disappearing public money. Naomi had to admit, that one might hold water. Another theory she was less fond of, one that postulated that the U.S. had “allowed” the women to go because they didn’t think it was actually safe enough yet for men. Writing the five of them off as bodies to be offered up on the altar of science.
“Horseshit,” Valerie had added for good measure. “Then why did they put five men in the backup crew?”
Yet the article had reminded Naomi of something one of the Mercury 7 said in a press conference, when asked back in the sixties if there was room in the astronaut program for women. He’d cheesed it up and said they could have used a woman on the second orbital Mercury Atlas they had flown in 1961. In case they didn’t get the joke, he went on to explain: “We could have put a woman up, the same type of woman, and flown her instead of the chimpanzee.” The reporters had laughed.
“We’ll send them a postcard from Cavendish,” Hixon had drawled, but her eyes had flashed. Hart had taken her wife’s hand, and Naomi had felt a pang at their intertwined fingers. Not jealousy, not quite, but a yearning for something as simple as touch, or falling asleep next to someone and letting the cadence of their breath lull her to sleep. She knew little of their relationship, ot
her than Hart and Hixon had met in astronaut training—the last group to have gender parity in their ranks. They both applied to be on the Ares mission. When Hixon had gotten it and left Hart behind, it’d nearly been the end of them. Was it strange for Hart, to have Hixon outrank her as second in command?
Hixon rarely mentioned the Mars mission. If she did, it was only the relevant information to whatever task at hand they needed aboard the Atalanta. She never mentioned Cole, and Naomi never asked.
“There have been some protests and marches in support of us,” Valerie had said, for a spot of good news. “They call us the Atalanta Five.”
That had given them all a thrill. They all knew of the Mercury 13. In the mid-twentieth century, at the same time as the Mercury 7 had all the fame for being space flight pioneers, thirteen women had tested just as well if not better than the men on the aptitude tests. But they’d never reached space, even after bringing their case all the way to a congressional hearing. Eleven were still alive when Sally Ride was the first American woman in space in 1983. When Eileen Collins was the first woman to pilot the space shuttle in 1995, seven of them attended the launch, and ten attended her first command mission in 1999. Women had clawed their way into NASA only to be edged back out by the governmental policies that saw women as threats.
As Naomi wrapped up the nutriblocks—they had the unfortunate side effect of collecting any speck of dust in a five-foot radius—Valerie watched her work, leaning against the only spot of wall bare of bioreactors. Naomi could feel her stare as she watered the crops, which were thankfully doing all right. The Cavendish crops were peakier than the Earth ones, which was something to worry about once the problem of the algae was solved.
“Do you know what’s wrong with our pond scum?” Valerie asked.
“Yep.” Naomi grimaced. “It’s a cyanophage.”
“A virus?” Valerie asked, intrigued.
“Take a look.” Naomi gestured to the microscope on the lab table. Valerie pushed her back, peering through the eyepiece.
“It’s subtle, but it’s there. It shouldn’t have gotten past the checks.” Teeny little cyanophages, with icosahedral heads and a little tail that had landed on the cell surface and pumped their DNA into the cell.
“I think we can probably bioengineer a fix. There’s a good amount of stuff on cyanophages here on the drive, but not as much about genetically engineering algal resistance to this one specifically, and I need to double-check some data.” She took a breath. “I also need to talk to Evan directly. His work in immunology means he might be able to help as well.”
Valerie’s eyebrows rose. “Volunteering to speak to Evan? Has hell frozen over? God, you used to be at each other’s throats every goddamn holiday.”
Naomi rolled her eyes. “We weren’t that bad.”
Valerie scoffed. “Sure. Came a time I thought one of you would end up killing the other one. Though I guess you ended up playing nice enough in college before you decided you hated each other again. Then I gave up.”
“I see you trying to pry and I’m not falling for it, Dr. Black,” Naomi said. “I’ll send him some questions tonight, if that’s all right.”
Valerie’s soft laugh was just shy of mocking. “Sure. After dinner. Ask him for anything you think might be useful. We’ll only be able to talk to him until Mars, after all.”
As Valerie turned the doorknob to leave, Naomi thrust out the bag of freshly-pressed nutriblocks. “These could hitch a ride to the kitchen with you.”
Valerie wrinkled her nose, but she took one out of the bag and popped it in her mouth, grimacing and chewing. “So gross.”
After the door slammed, Naomi’s plastered smile fell.
“I have to talk to Evan,” she said to the little zinnia flowers. “Fuck.”
Naomi shifted on her chair in the VR rec room—the large console doubled as the main comms point. She hadn’t spent much time in here, even as Valerie kept reminding her that yes, downtime was essential, algae emergency or not.
They could watch films or play a few games. They could also exercise in here instead of the gym, running in place and pretending they were jogging through forested trails or along the beach, the pixellated landscapes a pale stand-in for the real thing, even if the floors, walls, and ceiling were made with a flexible, programmable material that could raise false rock croppings or nearly whatever they desired.
Naomi put her fingers on the keypad.
Atalanta: Evan, it’s Naomi. I’m going to send you the DNA sequence of the phage that I’ve isolated. First, can you search GenBank to figure out what phage this is by matching the genetic sequence to the ones on file? Then I’ll need you to blast it against the database and tell me which receptor and which part of the receptor the phage targeted. At that point, I can use gene editing to change the shape of the offending receptor. Voila. No more virus.
She added a few specific databases and authors that would be good starting points. There would be a small delay before Evan got her message. He should be at the comms hub—it was ten at night in California—but he might not respond immediately.
The further away the ship flew from Earth, the longer the delays would be. The position of the planets would also have an effect. It could take anywhere from three to twenty-two minutes for a signal from Earth to reach Mars. With current positions, it’d be about four minutes, so a minimum of eight minutes between messages. Once they jumped through the ring, it’d take months. Communications would have to be sent through the rings via probes, like messages in bottles. Twenty minutes later, she had her first reply.
Earth: Hello from Earth, Atalanta. V told me about the algae trouble. I’ll look through those and send you anything else I find on what these phases are targeting on your spirulina. Any other search parameters?
Naomi focused on the task at hand. She sent him everything she needed, terse and factual. She didn’t let herself imagine him hunched in the tiny underground comms base, his dark eyes staring at blue screens, lips pursed. Despite spending his days in a lab, he always struck Naomi as uncomfortable indoors—he was active, his half-Chinese skin tanned from hours outdoors on long hikes or runs.
No one knew the base’s location save Evan and Valerie, not even Naomi, though she’d seen the pictures and schematics. Satellites sprouting from the roof, screens surrounding the interior. A desk. A bed. A bathroom and kitchen. It was a little bigger than Naomi’s cabin on the Atalanta. He had to be careful coming and going. If people found the bunker and suspected he was in contact with the ship, they’d take him in. Valerie had been repeatedly ignoring any official message from Earth.
It was strange for Evan to agree to do this in the first place and put himself at risk. If there was one thing Naomi knew about Evan, it was that he was a little mercenary in his approach to life. That didn’t mean he was selfish to the point he wouldn’t do the right thing, but he was always angling to make sure his actions directly benefitted himself in some way. Or he’d take action for the opportunity to learn something interesting rather than because it was moral. Why offer to help? Or had Valerie not given him a choice?
He’d delighted in frustrating Valerie’s plans for him. He’d been the rebellious one and Naomi the one who did what she was told.
Once, Evan had been dropped off at Valerie’s mansion in a cop car. Evan had sauntered up to the front door, unbothered by his mother’s fury. He’d broken into a nearby lab just to prove he could. He didn’t steal anything, just peered at all the different medicines, the animals in their cages, taking it all in. They’d been experimenting on the vaccine for Seventh Disease, or erythema varicella. It was a new childhood disease, a mutation of the same virus that caused chickenpox and shingles, that affected children intensely but barely touched adults. It had only taken a few years to engineer a new vaccine.
The lab didn’t bring charges against him, in no small part due to who his mother was. They were impressed, despite themselves, that he’d been able to get in so easily. They ended up hiring
him to help with their security, then given him an internship that eventually led to him studying immunology. It’d stopped him going down the road of seeing what he could steal for the pure thrill of it, at least. Naomi had no doubt he still unpicked a lock that struck his interest from time to time, to prove to himself he still could.
How did it feel, to know that Naomi and his mother had gone and stolen something far bigger than he ever could?
It took ages to send the information back and forth. While she waited for his responses, Naomi had scrolled through the existing information on the remote drive. Once she found the fix, she could stamp out the virus and continue with her crop experiments. Perhaps she was overthinking it, and there was a simpler way to fix the cyanophage. After all, even with cases as virulent as Seventh Disease, there were always a few children who were naturally immune and unaffected.
The astronaut mantra snaked its sneaky way through her head: expect the best but prepare for the worst.
Naomi rose and stretched, heading to the canteen for a cup of coffee before heading back to the comms centre. Black and bitter. She’d be sad when it ran out. They’d have to start adding caffeine pills to mint tea or something, but it wouldn’t be the same. She’d try to grow coffee on Cavendish.
When she returned, another message from Evan waited for her.
Earth: How is it up there? Never sure if V is telling me everything. I mean, why start now?
Naomi paused, her fingers hovering over the keypad. So much on this ship was automated. Records of how long everyone spent in each room, their locations easily drawn up on a map. Useful if anyone wanted to know where one of the other crew members were. Not as useful if you wanted privacy. The logs would be automatically saved—any of the others would be able to access this if they desired. Naomi was almost certain Valerie had read her childhood diaries, especially during her silent years.