by Laura Lam
Naomi tapped a finger against her lip. “It’s not like I have any better ideas for getting people to Cavendish. Do you?”
Hart made a moue with her mouth. “I mean, we’ve all got good leadership skills. That’s why we’re on the ship. But it’s a hell of a lot of responsibility I’m not sure I want. It’s not what I signed up for.”
“The four of us will have to be her checks and balances. To call her up on it if she starts believing her own mythos. We do make a good team. She chose us for a reason.”
“You think she’ll agree to that? She does not like being told she’s wrong.”
“I’ve done it before. It’s difficult, but if I make my case, she sees reason.” Naomi hesitated, then barrelled on. “I’m the reason she shared the clemency deal with the ship. She wasn’t going to. I found the message and confronted her.”
Hart whistled. “I wish I could say I’m surprised. If she’s already hiding stuff, that doesn’t bode well, does it?”
Naomi hunched her shoulders. “I know. I can’t stop asking myself what else she’s not telling us.”
Hart sucked her teeth. “You saying we should try and find out?”
Naomi hesitated, then nodded. The movement felt like a betrayal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
126 Days After Launch
5 Days to Mars
123 Days to Cavendish
“Everyone, to the rec room,” Valerie sent on the comms. “We have a message from Earth.”
It was an hour before they were all due to have their evening meal. Lebedeva slouched against the wall, arms loosely around her knees. Hixon and Hart leaned against each other, Hixon rubbing Hart’s palm with her thumb in a soothing, circular motion. Naomi stood to Valerie’s right, resisting the urge to cradle her stomach.
Valerie’s skin looked stretched tight across her bones. “I haven’t opened it yet,” she said. “We’ll all read together.”
Her eyes didn’t flick to Naomi, but Naomi felt the rebuke as much as Hart’s silent bristling.
Valerie reached forward and the message scrolled on the wall of the rec room. They read in silence. Earth had reiterated their original stance. Cochran’s fury bubbled through the officious language more than before. What the president was really saying was essentially he had been more than generous, and the Atalanta’s levels of disloyalty to America, to Earth as a whole, knew no bounds. They would not package up an exodus ship of children to send their minds to be warped on Cavendish. Basically: no deal. The Atalanta 5 were traitors, and there would be no mercy once the Atalanta II arrived on Cavendish.
He was calling their bluff.
“Well, we tried,” Hixon said. “It was ballsy, but that’s that. Prison beckons.”
“There are still options,” Naomi offered. “We can go public through Evan, can’t we?”
“We could,” Valerie agreed, narrowing her eyes at the message. “I’m not sure it’ll do much good. Even if plenty of people want to send their children, it’d take protests on a massive scale. So many still don’t believe the Earth is truly under threat, even with all the evidence in front of them. They wear the filter masks and hire private firefighters and proudly declare the sky is not falling. They’re still stuck in the system that we are trying to break. Too many people in power are in the way.”
“We’ve only been hearing from Cochran and the U.S. primarily,” Hart said. “What is the rest of the world thinking?”
Naomi was glad Valerie answered, afraid of accidentally revealing information she’d only received from Evan on the private channel.
“Some deviations. A few countries are more amenable than others. There is the chance another country might start sending ships to us, agreeing to our plans. Russia has more than enough money.”
“That they do,” Lebedeva said, blandly.
“Smaller countries could pool their resources,” Valerie continued. “Europe and its ESA. China has the capital, and India could potentially join them. Or Japan. West Africa has upped their space funding, too. The United States would be angry, because they’ve funnelled so much taxpayer money into the Cavendish probes, Atalanta, and now the Atalanta II. They’re falling into the trap of already thinking of the planet as theirs, even though they know they technically have no legal jurisdiction there.”
“Neither do we,” Naomi pointed out.
“No, but our vision echoes the underlying principles of the treaty, doesn’t it? Res communis. A planet for all of humanity, starting with its children. The United States has always liked to pretend they are the primary players here. They are not.”
A silence tinged with worry rolled off the others in waves. Only Lebedeva appeared unbothered. She hadn’t had a home in the same way the rest of them had, not for years. Being untethered like this was nothing new for her. Naomi almost envied her that.
Valerie took down the message and left the walls on the default grey grid.
“Deep down, you knew they wouldn’t agree, didn’t you?” Naomi asked. “We can’t say we didn’t try.”
Hart pressed the base of her palms against her eyes, muttering something that sounded like a curse.
“Come on,” Valerie said. “Let’s go get some dinner. We can still have the chocolate. This shouldn’t dampen the sense of accomplishment of what we’ve achieved. We already did the impossible today. This will work out. Have a little faith.” Her words were breezy, but it didn’t fool Naomi.
What’s your plan B, Valerie?
Naomi brought the precious chocolate back to her room. It rested on the desk. Fifty whole grams. Naomi had run out of paint, but the walls were covered in stylised vines. Her little zinnias were doing well, their orange blooms bright next to the snow globe shuttle Valerie had given her. She touched a velvety petal with the tip of a finger as she loaded up the tablet. The women had scattered again. Naomi brought up the ship map, and sure enough, Lebedeva was in the gym, running her steady cadence on the treadmill, or lifting weights because that was easy, that was simple. Pick up the heavy thing. Put it back down again. Count to ten. Do it again. Hart and Hixon were in their quarters, turning things over in detail. Valerie was in the observation room.
Once everyone was asleep, she planned to go back to the rec room. Dig through folders and subfolders, see if she could access Valerie’s personal drive.
She didn’t want to find any more secrets. She wanted to discover that was it—this was Valerie’s plan, which hadn’t worked as she’d hoped. Perhaps other countries in the world would finally step up, edge ahead of the U.S. in the race to Cavendish. Russia or China would have little reason to imprison the five of them for crimes against another country—though if Valerie insisted on messing with the warp ring on Cavendish, all bets were off. There were too many unknowable components. Too much uncertainty. If there was one thing Valerie hated, it was unnecessary complications.
Naomi sent Evan a message. It would be the middle of his work day back on Earth, so she wasn’t sure if she’d have a response.
Naomi Lovelace: The U.S. is angry. It’s no deal. Their offer has expired.
She sent along a summary of their conversation for him to read once he was back in the bunker. Naomi picked up a piece of chocolate and broke off a corner. She placed it on her tongue and closed her eyes in bliss as the sugar shivered along her taste buds. One hundred and twenty-six days without chocolate. She’d had a cheap candy bar the morning of the launch after breakfast, a comfort and an extra burst of quick energy she didn’t need. She remembered folding the wrapping into the tiniest gold square she could manage before throwing it away. Seemed so long ago.
By the time the little bit of chocolate dissolved, the taste of it still lingering, Naomi received a response. She sat up in surprise. Probably about nine minutes between messages with their current alignment with Earth.
Evan Kan: What will Valerie do next?
She broke off another minuscule piece of chocolate.
Naomi Lovelace: I don’t know. So much seems dependent o
n how the rest of the world responds. Do you know how I can access Valerie’s personal drive? It’ll be encrypted but with your help, maybe I can crack it. She’s been keeping a log, I know that. I’m hoping I won’t find anything, but.
She tapped her fingers against her thigh, waiting impatiently for the message to send and the reply to return. Was everyone asleep yet?
Evan Kan: But you want to check. I’ll start working up some instructions during the communication lags.
Naomi Lovelace: Thanks. Are you at work?
Technically he’d be able to route messages to his tablet, but that would have likely taken extra time, plus leave him vulnerable to discovery.
Evan Kan: I’m playing hooky. Needed a day not around people.
He wasn’t dashing off then. Naomi wouldn’t be interrupted by anyone. A chance for a proper conversation. She took another nibble of chocolate for strength as she tapped.
Naomi Lovelace: I need to tell you something. There is no easy way to say it.
Here goes. She sent the next message a minute later.
Naomi Lovelace: I’m nearly twenty-one weeks pregnant. I’m sorry for keeping it from you. Wasn’t sure it’d stick, or if I should carry on with the pregnancy. But the foetus is in good health, and Hart is monitoring everything. So I’ve decided to keep it. Her. I don’t know how involved you want to be, or not. It’s up to you. I’m not asking for anything you don’t want to offer. Valerie thinks it’s Cole’s. I haven’t corrected her.
She’d pressed send. No way to wrangle the signal back. It was a long four and a half minutes until it arrived at the base, and an even longer ten minutes before she received a response.
Evan Kan: Well. Whatever I was expecting you to say, it wasn’t this.
Naomi Lovelace: I should have told you sooner. It was a lot to take in, on top of everything else. I tried to, a few times. Chickened out. I’ve also been too afraid to ask if you regretted what happened. Or what it meant.
She closed her eyes as she pressed send. If she was going to open up to him, she might as well go all in. She wished she could see his face, though for so many years he’d been hard to read. Throughout her teen years, she’d been convinced Evan hated her. She’d been convinced she hated him. He could grasp things that took her hours of studying to understand. Learned how to break encryption just for fun. Yet he’d never had a clear plan. Stumbled about until Valerie made him go to a university. He was good at whatever he tried, whereas Naomi had to work at it.
Getting to know him had been a slow, gradual shift. The night under the juniper berries. Then they’d had a shared elective class, and at first she wasn’t sure if they were studying together more out of tolerance or because their old competitiveness meant they worked harder, determined to beat the other’s test scores (Naomi had won by three percentage points).
Though they didn’t see each other much during Naomi’s master’s, they had kept in touch with little messages and caught up around the holidays. Then that disastrous party and years of reverting to their teenage selves.
Evan Kan: In college, I saw you on your own terms, and you saw me on mine. Without Valerie pitting us against each other. She never missed a chance to point out that you were doing what was expected of you, and I was not. I resisted her plans for me at every turn. She gave up on me and focused on you.
That connection we had. That was real.
Naomi stared at the screen. She’d seen that kiss as a confusing misstep, especially once she’d tried to reach out to him at his father’s funeral. She’d taken the rebuff as a clear signal: there was nothing there. There couldn’t be. They’d missed their chance. Or she thought they had, until he showed up at her door.
She wanted to defend Valerie and say she hadn’t made them clash, but she couldn’t. When Evan elected to stay away from Valerie and grow up half a world away, Valerie had shifted her attention to Naomi. Did Evan resent that interest, even as he’d pushed it away? Without the freedom and the funding to make the Cavendish biome, Naomi would never have gotten into NASA. Never been on this ship. That was what she’d always wanted, wasn’t it?
She could imagine Evan’s response: Valerie is very good at making things seem like they were your idea all along. Haven’t you said that to me?
Another message came through.
Evan Kan: It doesn’t matter. We wasted time. Went our different directions. I know I messed up, after my dad died. I shut down. By the time I realised how I felt, you were already with Cole. So I stepped back. Tried to forget. Dated other people. Nothing stuck. Then you divorced, but you were in Scotland. I could have booked a flight. Or called. Something.
Evan Kan: Haven’t you wondered why I agreed to be Valerie’s point of contact on Earth? I didn’t do it for her.
Naomi didn’t know what she’d been expecting. A promise that he’d send the kid some birthday messages. Maybe be around once he landed on Cavendish, whenever that would be. Not this. She had wondered why Evan had agreed to man the communications base on top of his job. It wouldn’t have been out of loyalty. She thought perhaps Valerie had something over him—bailed him out of legal fees, perhaps. His hacking abilities and infernal curiosity could easily get him into just a little too much trouble.
She’d thought that last night before quarantine was simply a release of pent up physical attraction. Like a gasp after holding their breath for too long. The knowledge that it wouldn’t matter, no one would find out. Instead, he was telling her he’d wanted her for fifteen years. The whole time she was in college, and when she was married, he had been hung up on her. She’d stumbled through that crumbling marriage, for what? Evan had been there. He’d been right there.
Naomi Lovelace: We wasted so much time, letting what others would think trip us up. What do we do now?
She stewed while she waited.
Evan Kan: What we can. But I’ll be as involved as you’ll let me be and as much as I can be from here. It’s still weird. I never thought kids were in the cards for me. Much less under these circumstances. We’d win longest distance relationship.
She laughed, and it caught in her chest.
Naomi Lovelace: It’s late. Everyone will be asleep by now. I should go hunting for more secrets now that I’ve told you mine.
Evan Kan: Good luck. And thanks for telling me. Don’t know exactly where we go from here, but we’ll figure it out. I’ll send through your instructions after this message. Goodnight.
Naomi scanned what he sent, making sure she understood the steps before she turned off the tablet.
“Shitting shit,” she muttered in the darkness, but she was lighter than she’d been in weeks.
Before she went hunting through hard drives, Naomi tiptoed back to the observation room with the last square of chocolate. She curled up on the little window seat, pressing her body against the enforced panes that looked out in the darkness. She licked the gold wrapping for the last hints of chocolate.
It’d been a while since she’d sat there and stared into the abyss on her own. Mars wasn’t visible from this angle. They were speeding back to where they’d just been to go so much further. She didn’t know what it meant, for her and Evan. There were so many miles between them. Soon it would be part of a galaxy.
She stroked the rise of her belly, letting her thoughts swirl. The chocolate’s sweetness faded.
Time to upturn some stones and see what lurked underneath.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
127 Days After Launch
4 Days to Mars
122 Days to Cavendish
Naomi couldn’t crack the encryption.
She tried until two hours before the rest of the crew was due to wake up. Eventually, she had to give up and catch some sleep, hoping she’d covered her tracks well enough. She slept through breakfast—when Hart tried to wake her up, Naomi pleaded pregnancy exhaustion. Valerie officially gave her the morning off the lab, and Naomi had a brief flare of guilt until she fell back into a deep, dreamless sleep.
She was g
roggy when she woke. She fell into her work, her hands on autopilot. Harvesting algae. Setting up a new crop. Checking the others. Tending to the plants. Transforming the algae harvested yesterday into more nutriblocks. She forced herself to eat three, still vaguely warm from the machine. She wanted to gag. She had been neglecting the gym and her exercises. Gravity on the ring would mitigate the worst effects of being in space so long, but she should still be staying active. She was, if anything, at an increased risk of losing bone mass compared to the others, the foetus only too happy to leech the calcium from her bones. Little parasite.
Hours passed, her mind whirring along. She’d try again tonight, but what if she couldn’t break encryption? There was only so much Evan could direct her with from here. She had a message from him she’d missed while she’d been sleeping.
Evan Kan: Long day today, back at work, so won’t be able to check as often. There’s another illness outbreak, over by where you did that internship for Argaine in undergrad—probably not crop infestation this time, perhaps tainted water. It’s spreading fast, so aiming to contain it today. This sort of thing is only going to become more common. Let me know if you found anything? Stay safe.
Flu vaccines were growing less protective every year, making each year of Evan’s work harder. Illnesses spread as quick as wildfire in the crowded areas teeming with refugees. Even in the more affluent areas, young professionals were crammed in close quarters, renting overpriced bunk beds with up to thirty people in a dorm. If anyone had a cold, it’d jump from bunk to bunk, through those flimsy blackout curtains that gave the illusion of privacy, and then spread to the overworked people’s offices. Sick pay was something technically available but never taken.
Earth would only grow hotter, more crowded. More dangerous.