by Laura Lam
Hart considered it. “It’d be a challenge. Someone else would have to take over your duties when you’re nearly at term or have an infant. But you’d have access to a full medical lab and a damn good doctor, if I do say so myself.” She fluttered her eyelids. “If we were in microgravity, it’d be more dangerous, but the ring solves a lot of potential problems and complications. I don’t know. I support you either way. It’d be a hell of a thing, though, wouldn’t it? The first baby in space?”
“It would. I’ll let you know in a few weeks. If I haven’t—or if we haven’t—” She hated stumbling over her words.
“Sure,” Hart said, gentle.
Hart gave Naomi some easy tasks to do in the med bay to take her mind off things. They’d just settled into a rhythm when Valerie’s clipped voice came over the comms.
“Crew. To the bridge.”
Hart and Naomi exchanged a look.
“That doesn’t sound like good news,” Hart admitted.
As they walked down the dimmed hallway, Naomi wondered if they were about to be told this was it. The end. No way to recalibrate the systems. They could fill the emergency shuttle with as much nutriblocks and water as it could carry and speed back to Earth and hope they made it in time. With a clench, Naomi realised that would mean leaving the backup crew behind.
But they might be too far gone for that to be an option. Valerie could be summoning them to ask if they wanted to die quickly or slowly.
Naomi kept one foot moving in front of the other. If they did have to take a shuttle, Naomi would have to take Hart up on her offer. A miscarriage or other complications on the Atalanta would be dangerous enough—on a tiny shuttle they’d be deadly. The choice would be taken away.
She took the rungs of the spokes one at a time until her feet floated and she gently rappelled towards the main craft of the ship.
To sacrifice this much to get this close and have to turn around… to never see Cavendish.
Valerie’s face was grim. She floated above the captain’s chair, reminding Naomi of the mermaid in the mural over the Catalina Casino. Naomi’s breath stayed even as she prepared herself. Lebedeva held on to one of the handholds near the window, staring out. Hixon had strapped herself into the pilot’s seat, staring intently at the plotted course to Mars on one screen, then swivelling to the readouts of the ship on the next. Hart and Naomi both found handholds. Naomi crossed her ankles.
“I’ll start with the good news. We found a solution,” Valerie said.
“And the bad?” Naomi asked.
Valerie tapped her teeth together three times—one of her few anxiety tells.
“The cryopods are leeching power,” Hixon began. Her pale fingers were fully smudged with blue. “Lockwood made an error in the calculations. Underestimated power requirements by the tiniest fraction of a per cent, but that’s enough.”
Naomi let that sink in. “Lockwood cut corners. First the cyanophage got through the contamination procedures, now this.” They were on a defective ship. Who knew how many other problems could crop up between now and Cavendish?
Naomi remembered a quote from Mercury 7 astronaut John Glenn, the first American man to orbit the Earth, when asked how he felt listening to the countdown for lift-off: “I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts—all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”
Valerie nodded, simmering with rage.
“The chambers are becoming progressively less efficient,” Lebedeva said, her accent clipping the words. “Incremental, but we already see the effects.”
“So that means…” Naomi let the words trail off, unwilling to finish voicing what she already suspected.
“If we don’t pull the plug, we won’t make it to Mars,” Valerie finished. Her jaw jutted forward. Her features were sharp in the dim light of the bridge, as if they’d been sketched with charcoal.
“Are you sure?” Hart asked.
“I’ve run the numbers so many times,” Hixon said. “I can’t find another way. Even if we divert the chambers to the lowest setting, we’d go dark before Mars. And—” she squeezed her eyes shut—“the original glitch was a surge of power directly to the cryopods. I don’t know how to say it, but—”
“—they partially defrosted,” Hart finished.
Naomi kept her face very still.
“Yes,” Hixon said, wincing. “The inhabitants are almost certainly damaged. Irene, will you check them over?”
The inhabitants. Did Hixon realise she was already using distancing language?
Hart nodded. “Of course I will. But if the cells have crystallised… you can’t undo that.”
Naomi tried to order her thoughts into something like logic. Cole was in the storage bay. Either still asleep or already dead.
Like her, he’d sacrificed to be on this ship. He’d left behind his new wife, his son, knowing he wouldn’t see them for half a decade or more. He knew what he risked. That space was as unforgiving as the ocean.
And it wasn’t only him. She’d known every man in those chambers. Lee’s face, reverent, as he showed her the half-grown vat meat specimens in his lab. “It’s not that different, growing tissue compared to plants,” he’d told her. Twenty-odd years ago, Lee had made some of the early breakthroughs that had led to cloned organs that Valerie had almost turned into a thriving company before it’d been made illegal.
Josh Hines and his infuriatingly cheerful flirting. Devraj Chand standing proud as he presented his findings on life support systems to the team at NASA. Ryan Webb declaring her fit as a fiddle when she was a trainee.
All gone or soon to be.
Hixon’s face crumpled like one of her discarded calculations. Her eyes met Naomi’s in silent apology. Hixon had spent months in a tin can with Cole, following the same flight path they were on now. She probably knew things about Cole that Naomi had never discovered. Understanding passed between the two women—an instant of apology, of horrible finality.
Hart had disappeared, floating into the storage bay next door to inspect the cryopods and their readouts. Valerie went with her. The rest of them waited in the bridge, in silence. Lebedeva was twisting, round and round, her lips moving as she silently counted each turn in Russian.
“If they are undamaged… we can’t wake them up, can we?” Naomi asked the bridge.
“Not unless you know how to feed twice as many people on nutriblocks for an extra fifty-five days,” Lebedeva said from her spinning. “Or make them exhale less carbon dioxide so they do not upset the life support equilibrium. Or produce less waste that is difficult to expel. Or drink less water.”
Naomi knew this before she’d asked, but it was still a gut punch to hear it.
No way to send them back on the shuttle. This far out, if something went wrong they were meant to land on Mars to wait in the Atalanta for rescue. Even if they could spare the supplies, there wasn’t enough power to keep them cryofrozen until home. No way to keep the pods powered on the surface of Mars, either.
There was no lifeboat on this ship.
Hart floated back into the bridge, followed by Valerie. Naomi knew even before Hart shook her head. “It’s not looking good. The surge was big enough and there was enough brief defrosting that it’s almost certain the inhabitants are irrevocably damaged.”
Again, that word. As if they were inert things instead of humans who had lives as strange, complex, and messy as their own.
Cole was dead. The thought throbbed in her mind like a drumbeat.
“You say you’re almost certain?” Naomi asked.
“I am about ninety per cent. There’s a small chance the defrosting was minor enough that one or two of them are still viable.”
“We can’t feed an extra one or two, can we?” Valerie asked.
Naomi had done the math. They could feed an extra body—if it was an infant. Not a fully grown man, who with more height and weight would have higher calorie needs than any
of the other women.
“And if we wake them up and discover all five of them survived?” Valerie continued. “If they realise that’s what’s happened, they could decide to take over the mission and kill us so they could survive.”
“They wouldn’t,” Naomi said.
“They might,” Valerie pressed. “They’d be torn up about it, sure. But if they thought it was the right thing? The only choice?”
Naomi closed her eyes, did some desperate mental math. “We could maybe feed one extra, if we all took reduced rations, but it would mean we would have no buffer if anything went wrong. One more malfunction and that’s it.”
“I don’t trust Lockwood enough for that, not now,” Valerie said. “Do you?”
“So what? We just let them all die, even if we could technically save one?” Hixon asked. “This is bullshit.”
Valerie’s eyes flashed. As second in command, Hixon shouldn’t publicly disagree with her.
“This is survival,” Lebedeva said. “Do not think they would give us the same courtesy.”
“Goddammit,” Hixon said, but for all her hand-wringing, she knew as well as the rest of them that this ship was designed for five people. Not ten. Not eight. Five.
“I don’t like this either,” Valerie said. “It was another reason I took out the backup crew in my final version of the schematics of the ship. Even if there hadn’t been a surge, the pods are a drain on fuel efficiency. Yes, it’d be good to know that if something happened to one of us, someone with equivalent skills would be able to take up the reins, and it’d be useful to have a few extra hands once we landed on Cavendish. Cryogenics is hard on the body, though—it’s not without its own risks.”
“No, it’s not,” Hart said. “Sacrificing five lives to save our own. It’s hard to balance with the Hippocratic Oath, I have to admit.”
“If it’s five instead of ten, you’re saving five people,” Lebedeva pointed out.
Hart glanced at Naomi.
Five lives and something that could become a sixth.
Lebedeva continued. “Yes, I do not know these men. Not like you. I do not like this, but they are dead either way. We cannot send them back. We cannot drop them on Mars. They cannot stay here. They are already dead, whether their brains would refire again or not.”
Hixon’s shoulders slumped. She was so used to solving problems, to finding the solution no matter how tricky it was.
Their conversation floated around Naomi, growing more distant. Cole. A man she’d loved. A man she’d hated. A man who, near the end, she’d come to understand, if not forgive.
“It’s like we’re being punished for what we did,” Hixon said.
“Don’t you dare start with fate or God or any of that,” Valerie said. “If you want to blame anyone, blame Lockwood. They’re the ones who fucked up the numbers.”
“This scenario would have happened with the original crew, if the plan had gone ahead,” Lebedeva said. “They would be the ones doing this instead of us, that is all.”
“Do you even care about this? They’re just strangers to you, aren’t they?” Hixon demanded.
“It is unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate—”
“Hixon,” Valerie interrupted. “Stop.”
Hixon’s nostrils flared, but her flame of anger snuffed out. Hart went to her, wrapping an arm around her wife’s side.
Valerie caught each of their gazes. “This is hard. I recognise this. The right decisions can sometimes be the hardest. We’ll do it tomorrow morning. We will give them a funeral. A hero’s send-off.” She stared at Naomi, unblinking. “There is time for you to say your goodbyes.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
72 Days After Launch
54 Days to Mars
177 Days to Cavendish
Naomi said she’d go down to the Crypt last. She waited in the observation room while the others flitted out, one by one. She rested her chin on her knees as she stared at the expanse.
Even Lebedeva had spent some time in the Crypt, whispering Russian Orthodox liturgies over them. “Just in case,” she’d said when she’d emerged.
After Hixon had come up, her eyes red-rimmed, Naomi finally asked her what Cole had been like on the Ares mission. She wanted to know. Needed to. Some part of her still felt like this was all happening to someone else. The skin on her face was numb.
Hixon folded herself on to the other side of the windowsill, resting her forehead against the reinforced glass, gaze focused on some distant star. They could both be staring at stars that had already died long ago, their light still reaching the craft thousands of years later. “He was a good commander, all things considered.” Hixon sniffed. “One of those ones where, if you were falling behind, he’d be the one to keep pace with you and urge you forward. Even when things went tits up, he always stayed calm until the crisis was averted. That’s when the temper might come out.”
Naomi gave a mirthless laugh. “Well do I know.”
“Yeah, I suppose you would,” Hixon said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. “He was young. Bit impetuous. He always talked about his hopes for what would happen when we made it back home. He loved Mars and was as desperate as the rest of us to get there. But when he set foot on it… I don’t know. It’s not that it disappointed him. I think he was as awestruck as the rest of us. It’s just, I got the sense what he really wanted was to go back to Earth to be a man who had gone to Mars.”
Each of Hixon’s words fell into place, echoing the picture of Cole that Naomi had long since put together. “Yeah. That.”
“I’m sorry for you,” Hixon offered. “We knew all of them down there but still…”
“We said our goodbyes long ago,” Naomi said. A half-lie. “But thank you.”
Naomi stood, making her way back to the spoke leading down to the Crypt.
She took her time, clasping each rung carefully, letting her body adjust as she descended into zero gravity again.
When she reached the storage bay, she floated over the pods. In zero G, there was no up or down. Her brain recalibrated no matter which direction she faced.
She reached down a hand to rest on the blurred, opaque outline of each face. She said her goodbyes, one by one. She spoke out loud to them, her voice soft but unwavering. Sharing her memories, thanking them for what they had learned, what they had taught her. If they could speak, would they accept their fate? Or would they beg, plead, fight for the same chance at life?
Up above, Hixon was probably still running numbers, hoping for an eleventh-hour save, a way to bend the impossible to her will. Naomi saw what was in front of them, just as Valerie and Lebedeva had. Hart knew, as a doctor, but she’d be hoping for a miracle, if partly for her wife’s sake.
There was no other way. If there was, one of the five of them would have found it by now.
They hadn’t introduced the flaw to the system, but it was difficult not to feel responsible. Especially when it was people you knew. Emotion clouded logic.
She said goodbye to Cole last.
She remembered marrying under the fake stars of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, eight months after she’d met him. She still didn’t know why she raced towards marriage so quickly and why she’d agreed to such an expensive wedding. It’d been a beautiful ceremony underneath shifting nebulae in greens, blues, pinks, and purples. A kaleidoscopic projection tinging the faces of the attendees—most of whom were Cole’s friends and family rather than hers.
Valerie had walked her down the aisle. Naomi had constellations sewn into her dress—the Hydra serpent; Andromeda, the girl rescued from the sea creature; Cygnus, the swan; Lyra, the poet and musician. At the bodice, Ran, Aegir, and Cavendish had been stitched in silver thread for luck.
Cole had been sharp in his tux, backlit by the false galaxy. Valerie had officiated as well, leading them through their vows. Naomi thought she’d been telling the truth, that she was promising to stay with him until the end. Thick and thin and all in between. Naomi had
worn a ring of meteorite—she’d left it back on Earth, of course—and Cole one fashioned from a piece of the aluminium composite from the scrap metal of the Ares ship.
“That was the problem, wasn’t it?” she asked him, softly. “In the end, we loved our careers more than each other. Or you wanted to stay married to your work and you were only too happy to let me divorce from mine. You wanted to trot me out as an astronaut’s wife, but that’s not all I wanted to be.”
He’d been annoyed she’d refused to take his last name. But Lovelace was one of the few pieces of her family she had left. She liked the sound of it, the delicate image it painted in her mind. The fact it was the same as Ada Lovelace, one of the earliest programmers, who may or may not be one of her ancestors. Naomi Palmer had never felt like a name she could claim as hers.
Naomi grabbed the wall, moving herself closer. Had the surge fractured the molecular bonds or membranes in his cells, disconnecting synapses, erasing the memories they’d both shared that only she would go on to remember? If he wasn’t gone, he would be soon enough.
There was so much she could say. The sick sense of failure that they couldn’t make it work. The hatred that had somehow morphed into something almost like fondness, despite everything. Maybe they should have had one last dance on Catalina Island.
Naomi’s head turned as she heard the distant sounds of someone coming down the ladder.
Valerie closed the hatch behind her, swimming towards her in the blue darkness.
“This is hardest for you out of all of us,” she began. “I wanted to check in.”
Naomi didn’t say anything. Her hand was still on Cole’s pod.
“He was a good man,” Valerie began, then stopped.
Naomi smiled wryly. “He is as good or bad as anyone,” she said. “No more, no less.”
If he’d been chosen for the core crew, he’d still be on Earth. Home with his family, waiting for the replacement ship so he could catch up to her. Through sheer luck of the lottery, he was here with the other unlucky souls.