by Laura Lam
UN Climate Change Conference
Orange County Convention Center, Florida
Naomi stood in the middle of Cavendish.
Well, not quite.
She’d created two biomes. The larger one was in her lab at the Hawthorne headquarters in LA. Once a week, at least, Valerie threatened to move it into the lobby. She wanted everyone who passed through the doors of her company to walk through the tunnel, gazing at the alien plants like people stared at sharks gliding over the walkways through aquariums.
“I’m not going to do my work with a bunch of people gawping at me,” Naomi had said, and she’d compromised by creating this smaller one that usually stayed in the lobby but was portable enough to bring anywhere.
Valerie insisted on taking it to the UN Climate Change Conference that year, in the convention centre not far from the Kennedy Space Center, and that meant Naomi had to tag along, looking after her biome.
Naomi’s smaller creation was the size of a large living room. A six-foot-tall tunnel led to a round centre big enough for five or six people to stand comfortably under the dome of Perspex. They couldn’t touch any of the plants, walled off as they were, but they could stare at them through the glass for ten minutes, taking in the tiny echo of the new world. There had been a waitlist all day.
Hawthorne had shut down the biome for the evening, and most people had already left the main floor, streaming to the large auditorium for the keynote speech. Crowds of people had eddied around the various stalls, peering at what was on offer, networking, and pretending there was still enough time to stop what they all knew was coming. They walked around with easy smiles, as if the Florida coastline wasn’t barricaded by high sea walls. As if the hurricanes that descended on the state yearly didn’t grow stronger every year. The Kennedy Space Center was thinking of packing up and relocating to an area where the high winds didn’t cancel launches more often than not.
The crush of the people hadn’t overwhelmed Naomi, but as someone used to the relative silence of her lab, the constant noise and having to shoulder her way through the throng—who would stop like pebbles in a stream—was exhausting.
Naomi let her hands fall open in her lap as she tilted her head up, breathing deeply, emptying her mind.
She and Valerie had spent the day introducing the public to Cavendish. Naomi had been on a couple of panels that day, knowing her face was being recorded, her words quoted and dissected from every angle. Sent out in out-of-context or paraphrased bytes on social media. Her face hurt from holding a polite smile.
Some of the panellists had been more diplomatic than others, but Valerie had, without fail, gone into one of her impassioned speeches, any attempt the others made at candy-coating the future washed away by Valerie’s acid.
The artificial sunlight in the biome was as orange as Ran’s would be. Naomi had grown four types of vascular plants that were similar to Devonian-era flora on Earth, like ferns and lycopods, in her larger biome from seeds brought back through the probes. For ease of transport, her portable biome only grew one.
The ferns weren’t radically different at first glance. The fanned, striated leaves were still green, though tinged closer to teal. Instead of fiddleheads, the ends spiralled sinuously in a way Earthen ones never did. The ground was a rich, loamy soil, softened with a blueish moss. Between the orange sunlight and the odd shade of the greenery, Cavendish would likely look like a world on the edge of perpetual sunset.
Naomi had spent the last year studying the reports from the Cavendish probes until her eyes crossed. When the first bit of blue-green had emerged from Earth soil treated to be like Cavendish’s, she had felt a fierce satisfaction.
That little sprout would be her ticket to NASA.
Naomi was late—she should already be in the green room. Valerie’s keynote speech would begin soon, but it almost hadn’t happened. Protests. Petitions. Valerie Black would not represent what the UN stood for in this conference, they said. She was too loud. Too radical.
Too female.
She was branded a bitter feminist who couldn’t accept how the world had changed. Even that early, the murmurings were there, if Naomi had bothered listening. Women were being gently urged towards retirement, passed over for promotions. Cochran was on the horizon for the presidential run even then, building on his work in the Senate to limit abortion and introduce the additional child tax. He was whispering poison about his running mates, especially the women.
Global temperatures were already at projections for 2060—decades too soon—up two degrees Celsius. Carbon emissions, and Brazil deciding to sell off the lungs of the Amazon—what hadn’t burned—one tree at a time, was worth the money. The deforestation was coupled with a massive release of methane during the rapid tundra melt of the 2020s, which caused a larger positive feedback in warming than any of the pre-2025 models had accounted for.
In the green room, Valerie would already be sipping lemon- and mint-infused water. To anyone else, she’d look perfectly calm and in control. But Naomi would see the way her long fingers would smooth non-existent wrinkles on the trousers of her dark purple suit. The way she’d blink just a little too long, as if centring herself for the extra half a second.
“Naomi?” came a voice from outside.
Naomi’s lips thinned. Evan. She hadn’t seen him since Christmas and hadn’t spoken to him alone since the night after her master’s graduation. She stood, leaving the orange light and locking the entrance to the tunnel.
The crowds had thinned, but people lingered near the stalls, the dark-clad security guards slowly ushering them towards the doors.
“Valerie was asking for you,” Evan said, keeping his distance. His features were as hard for her to read as ever. They’d gone to a graduation party and he’d told her about his new job at NASA in astronaut health at the Kennedy Space Center. The job was junior as he’d just started his PhD, but NASA were even helping a bit with funding while he worked. By all accounts, despite working and studying he’d end up finishing his terminal degree in record time.
She’d drunk just enough that she hadn’t been able to temper her response. She’d been an asshole, but hadn’t known how to apologise, and the time between had lengthened into an awkwardness that couldn’t be breached. Even now, seeing him with that NASA badge emblazoned on the chest of his polo shirt was still a reminder that, though she loved her job, she still wasn’t where she wanted to be.
“Thanks,” she said, annoyed at her own curtness.
Evan made to leave. Froze. Naomi saw it a second after he did.
A crowd had gathered on the other side of the biome. Murmurs and whispers grew louder, like the buzzing of bees. People raised phones cupped in the palms of their hands, snapping photos by blinking their eyes.
Evan and Naomi pushed their way to the front. A few edged away from Naomi when they recognised her as Valerie Black’s shadow. She felt their eyes on her as she took in the ugly, red graffiti scrawled across the biome’s smooth exterior.
VAL BLACK = FRIGID CLIMATE CUNT
In another context, she would have laughed. Naomi stared at it, unblinking. The intent of this was malice, belittlement. She wanted to jerk back from the force of it. Reducing Valerie and her education, her company, her work, into a four-letter word. The rudest insult they could come up with. The condescending use of the nickname. That equal sign, as if this was a logical equation. A foregone conclusion.
Naomi’s eyes darted around the hall at the crowd. How many pictures had already been taken? It must have happened while she was in the biome collecting herself. The idea of someone looking in and spray-painting this while staring at the back of her head through Cavendish ferns unsettled her. Was the person who did it one of the crowd?
“Did you see who did this?” Naomi asked them. A few scattered, embarrassed to be caught gawking. Others shook their heads. Still more were already craned over their phones, uploading their snaps, pithy captions at the ready. Stone-faced security guards broke up the crowd.
Naomi put her finger out to touch the last T of the graffiti. The paint was still tacky. Her gaze flicked up to the cameras. Their positions meant it’d be hard to get a clear shot of whoever did this, and they’d doubtless have worn a hat or a filter mask. Part of her wanted to demand the footage, but a far larger part of her wanted these words gone and off her work. Right now.
Naomi grabbed one of the large, standing Hawthorne posters, dragging it in front of the lettering to hide it from the last of the onlookers. She rummaged in the depths of the stall and found the cleaning solution she’d used first thing that morning to make the biome shine. After hours of curious hands, it was smeared with fingerprints.
Evan disappeared, returning with extra tissues liberated from the bathroom.
Naomi sprayed the letters, gritting her teeth so hard her jaw ached. The red dripped pink rivulets over the glass of the dome. Evan started scrubbing. The paint was oily, smearing into a mess.
Naomi snuck a glance at Evan as they worked side by side. His hair was longer, falling into his eyes, still that shining black. He’d just turned twenty-eight and had settled into his features. For most of her undergrad degree, they’d formed an alliance. They’d studied together, alternating who brought the snacks. Evan had taken her to her first college party and held her hair back the first time she’d drunk too much. They’d been friends, for a time. And she’d let that go.
They scrubbed harder, dousing the glass with more cleaning solution.
“I never apologised,” Naomi said. “For what I said that night.”
“That’s not why we really stopped talking. You know that.”
“Ah.” It was what had happened not a half hour before her outburst. She kept wiping, even though that section of the glass was already clean. “Nothing to apologise for there, right? It was just a kiss.”
The party the night of graduation. She’d tied her tassel to her wrist, watched it flutter each time she moved. He’d tasted of Sprite—he had stopped drinking by that point. Said he didn’t like the crutch it’d become, or who he became when he drank. They’d broken away, both shocked and not at the same time. He’d changed the subject, told her about the job, and she’d lashed out. She ached with embarrassment as Evan kept scrubbing with more vigour than necessary. The red was gone, the surface of the biome clear. As if it’d never happened.
They gathered up the stained, crumpled napkins. They said nothing else as they put them in the trash, moved the screen back to its original place, and made their way to the auditorium. She’d kept Valerie waiting.
Evan parted before she could say goodbye, making his way to an empty seat in the crowd. Naomi went behind stage to watch. Bryony was there, the doctor from Hawthorne, giving a presentation on astronaut radiation protection the next day, her eyes panicked.
“Had she heard about it?” Naomi asked her, head tilting up at Bryony.
“Haven’t been brave enough to ask. Is it still there?”
“No. Me and Evan cleaned it off.”
Bryony let out a breath, bobbed her head in a nod. “Good.” She flitted away, head already bowing over her phone.
Naomi opened her own phone, holding her breath as she searched the platforms. Already the news was cascading. Photo after photo, the ugly red stark against the soft orange of her created, miniature world. Whenever Naomi gave a talk or showed her biome to the masses again, those words would be branded across people’s memories.
Valerie came to stand next to Naomi, surveying the audience. Her lipstick was freshly applied, her hair its usual dark corona.
“Valerie—” Naomi began.
“I know already,” Valerie cut her off.
Before Naomi could say another word, Valerie stepped on to the stage, head held high.
Valerie began; her speech easy, appearing unrehearsed. She’d been up half the night practising; not a word uttered by accident. She spoke as if she didn’t give a damn what people out there were saying, sharing. That she didn’t know those red words would be thrown back at her face time and time again. That her inbox and platforms wouldn’t be inundated with even more hate mail than before. That she wouldn’t have to strengthen her security detail against the inevitable death threats.
Naomi turned off her phone.
Projections of the probes and the schematics of the Alcubierre warp drive that would become so familiar to Naomi swirled above Valerie’s head.
Naomi searched for Evan in the crowd. She found him, his elbows on his knees, staring up at the screen. It had been the first time he’d really been confronted with what Valerie and Naomi were trying to do. And it’d been the first time he must have realised just how much they had up against them.
Naomi wanted to go to NASA so that she wasn’t only Valerie’s ward and the daughter of Catherine Lovelace, working away in the company that her mother and adopted mother started. She needed to prove herself on the government side, make herself invaluable to both, so that when the time came to pick a crew to go to Cavendish, she’d be one of the first names they listed.
Valerie paced slowly on her black pumps, her voice taking on a deeper timbre, an almost hypnotising cadence and rhythm as she one by one lured them all closer to Cavendish.
CHAPTER TWELVE
71 Days After Launch
55 Days to Mars
178 Days to Cavendish
It started with the lights blaring too bright, then flickering, then darkening. Naomi woke up from a deep sleep, disorientated, before everything snapped into focus.
Alarm lights blinked as violet as the grow lights of her labs—red, it had been decided, would inspire too much panic. Dread still lurked within Naomi as she stepped into her coveralls.
Years of training took over. On the way to the bridge, she checked on the greenhouse. The alarm lights were yellow there, the other end of the spectrum from purple. The backup lights for the spirulina were on—they ran on a separate generator with a double backup in case something like this happened. The air was cooler than she’d like, but it shouldn’t affect the crops short-term. It was puzzling, though. The alarms were going off, they were on backup, but none of the trackers had registered anything odd. There weren’t any detectable radiation spikes on the monitors.
She climbed along the long spoke to the centre of the ship. Her hair had grown out enough that she could feel it rising from her skull like a bristle. Hixon and Lebedeva were there, alert and working on the main controls. Valerie and Hart floated in just as the lights stabilised again.
“Radiation spike is my guess,” Hixon said. “Leaked through the shields enough to mess with the systems.”
“Not in my lab,” Naomi said.
“Somewhere else, perhaps. See to it,” Valerie said, voice tight.
There had been little else Naomi could do, so she’d floated back up to solid ground and spent a few hours in her lab before catching a handful of hours of fitful sleep.
By the time she’d woken up again, Lebedeva and Hixon had run full diagnostics. All looked fine.
Yet over the next two days, alarms dinged through the ship. Oxygen levels started to dip, slowly and inexorably. Naomi, Hart, and Valerie helped Lebedeva and Hixon with the checks. They’d checked the ship again from top to bottom but couldn’t find a fix. The filters were fine, as was the shield. No one was panicking yet, but it was similar to when Naomi’s algae was infected—if a solution wasn’t found soon, they were scuppered, to use one of Naomi’s father’s favourite sayings. No one spoke much. The full wattage of the team was focused on solving the problem.
Lebedeva found the issue on the morning of the third day—a subsystem in the main body of the ship was leeching power, affecting both the life system and fuel efficiency. Hixon was isolating each subsystem to find out more detail.
Valerie had delegated communication with Earth back to Naomi as she helped Lebedeva and Hixon. Evan had sent through what additional information he could, but there wasn’t much that wasn’t already in the repair manuals and detailed di
agnostics on board. He kept saying he wished he could do more. She’d dryly responded that she wished the ship would stop trying to kill them.
The lower oxygen left the crew sleepy and sluggish, with heavy limbs and constant headaches. Those on the ISS or the Gateway had suffered lower levels and been fine, but Naomi went to the medical lab and gave herself another scan in the autodoc, alone, just in case.
At twelve weeks, it was a foetus rather than an embryo, her body easing from the first trimester to the second. The thing inside her was now the size of a peach, forming into something more concrete—bones and cartilage and buds of teeth.
She’d avoided looking at herself too closely for the last few weeks, but in the lab, she unbuttoned her coveralls, peeling the top half back. She ran her hand over her stomach. There was a slight roundness to her lower abdomen, but no different than if she was bloated with cramps. Veins of blue criss-crossed against her pale skin, always visible but now thicker, rising above her sports bra and down her abdomen like tree branches. Subtle changes. She wouldn’t have long.
Hart came in as Naomi was buttoning up her coveralls.
“I was going to make you come in for a scan today,” the doctor said. “You beat me to it.”
“Sorry not to ask first. I just needed to know.”
“It’s fine. I get it.” She drew up the scan, peering at it.
“Still healthy, right?” Naomi asked.
“Perfectly. No abnormalities. If the oxygen dips much lower, you’ll have to go on supplemental oxygen.”
Naomi grimaced. “How would I explain that?”
Hart gave her a pointed look. “I know this is not the best time to ask, but have you made up your mind?”
“What, abort or let it suffocate?” Naomi said, wrapping her hands around her stomach.
“It wouldn’t come to that.” Hart put a hand on Naomi’s shoulder. “This is a stubborn ship, but it’s full of even more stubborn women.”
Naomi gave a weak laugh. “That’s true enough.” A hitched breath. “Do you think it’s ridiculous, to even entertain keeping it?”