by Laura Lam
She sent him an all-too-brief update—that she’d had no luck and asking if he had any other suggestions. Despite her exhaustion, she struggled to stay still. There had to be somewhere else she could look, something she could do while she waited for Evan’s next instructions. She was doing this to make sure she could trust Valerie past the warp ring and once they were on the new planet. Naomi didn’t want to doubt her. She needed to know that Valerie did plan to work with Earth once they landed, to make sure Cavendish started with peace and prosperity, like she claimed she wanted. They were on the same side, weren’t they?
Hart came to check up on Naomi just before dinner, asking how she was feeling. Hart had her own circles under her eyes. Sleep hadn’t been kind to her, either.
Naomi told her about her attempts to crack Valerie’s files. She didn’t mention Evan and that they could speak directly. She trusted Hart more than anyone else on board, but she was already risking too much.
“I’m going down in the storage bay,” Naomi said. “I need another lamp anyway. Going to have a look around.” Her neck was stiff.
Hart read between the words. “You haven’t been down there since they were defrosted, have you?”
Naomi gave a sharp jerk of her head. She’d successfully bypassed it when they’d gone down to the bridge for the jump.
“I’ve been avoiding it too. Think we all have, to be honest. I need a few things for the med bay. Let’s go down together?”
The muscles at the base of her neck loosened. “Sure.”
Their steps on the ladder of the spoke echoed until they could rappel themselves down the last section in microgravity free fall. Naomi peered into the window of the door to the storage bay, steeling herself. No one was on the bridge, the ship set to autopilot until Hixon came down to check on it in an hour or so. Naomi pushed open the door, sliding through.
It all looked much the same, save for the lack of the blue glow of the pods. Cole’s empty pod was closest to her. She still wished she could have done more, but it was on Lockwood for putting them on board in the first place. All systems were functioning smoothly since the last power surge, at least. No unexpected surprises.
Naomi took the right side of the storage bay, and Hart the left. They systematically went through every cupboard, every trunk. The chances of them finding anything was small, but at least it helped Naomi feel like she was doing something. Anything. In the spare supplies, Naomi plucked out her lamp, and Hart found the syringes she needed. Nothing looked suspicious. The area with the equipment they’d only need once they landed on Cavendish appeared untouched. No one had brought anything sentimental on board that wasn’t already in their cabins. If Valerie was hiding something, it was almost certainly in her room, and there was no chance of searching that without being found out, even if Valerie was distracted elsewhere on the ship. Naomi reached out and touched the blank face of one of the humanoid construction robots. At least a small part of her mother was on this ship, too.
“Maybe I’m trying to find something that isn’t here,” Naomi said.
Hart’s face was sympathetic. She wore her wedding ring on a gold chain around her neck, and it’d escaped from under her jumpsuit to float near her face. She tucked it back in as she put her medical supplies away. “Maybe we both are.”
“I’m letting myself be distracted. What Earth does when we land is important, but there’s nothing we can do. Either we’ll be arrested, or we won’t. We can set up infrastructure, prove our worth. Return the stolen property of the Atalanta and use the treaty to claim sanctuary. Live off the land. There are so many little islands on that world. Maybe they’ll let us live on one undisturbed.”
“All we can do is keep doing what we’re doing,” Hart agreed, readily enough. “We’ve been unconventional. We broke laws. I still don’t regret taking off. If we’ve had this many struggles on a ship we know inside and out, that replacement crew wouldn’t have stood a chance. This ship would already be dead, not just the backup crew.”
“You think so?” Naomi asked. If the botanist of the crew meant to replace the Atalanta 5 couldn’t have figured it out, they could have defrosted Lee. He would have been able to solve Naomi’s algae problem—she was sure enough of that. The power surge would have been trickier. What would have made or broken them would have been the teamwork. The camaraderie, the ability to adapt and help each other. When she was still on Earth, she would have insisted that she and the other women would have functioned as a seamless team. Yet here they were, two already breaking away.
“How much have you told Hixon?” Naomi asked. “About your suspicions?”
“Very little,” Hart admitted. “She’s so focused on the Alcubierre drive, I worry about distracting her. I—” She stopped. “For all her years out of the military, Hixon’s still very loyal. She follows orders, she doesn’t tend to question leadership. I worry that she might not agree. Think I’m looking for something that isn’t there.”
“And Lebedeva basically worships the ground Valerie walks on,” Naomi said, quiet.
“Sure. But a few months ago, I’d have sworn the same about you.”
Naomi grimaced, but didn’t correct her. She floated over to the pods, stopping in front of Cole’s.
“Do you miss him?” Hart asked.
“No,” Naomi answered honestly. “I wish he wasn’t dead, but no.”
As she moved away, her fingertips grazed the screen that had once shown Cole’s readouts, the ones that Hart had scoured for evidence that whoever was in those pods was no longer there. The screen blared bright, as if it had just been in hibernation.
Hart’s head snapped towards it. “Valerie said she disconnected those entirely from the system.”
The screen display was different, but Naomi couldn’t make out what it meant. “Hart—” she started, but Hart had already drifted to her.
Hart squinted. “This doesn’t make any sense. It says it’s still active.”
“But it’s dark, and no one’s in it,” Naomi said. “And we’ve had no other surges.”
“Yesterday Jerrie said fuel efficiency was all good. What if I just—”
Hart clicked the release on the cryopod. They both jerked back. Naomi reached for a handhold to steady herself, and Hart grabbed Naomi’s forearm.
Cole’s pod lid hissed as it released outward. Inside was empty, dark. Naomi’s skin prickled with goosebumps. At first, she put it down to nerves, an uneasiness of staring into what was essentially a coffin, but Hart’s skin was the same.
The air was colder.
Naomi grasped the lip of the cryopod. The metal was frigid. If she squinted, right at the corner was the barest glimmer. She pressed her finger against the faint, blue light.
“There’s something behind it,” Naomi whispered. “In the walls.”
A hiss as Hart opened the cryopod next to Cole’s. Who had that one belonged to? Josh? She’d already forgotten.
“Don’t see any light here,” Hart said. “But it could be fitted better?”
Naomi ran her hands along the inside of the cryopod, trying not to think of Cole, cold and stiff and gone. Her fingers found a latch. Her fingers almost burned with the cold. With a sickening certainty, she clicked it.
The back of the cryopod shifted out of the way. Cold fog rippled through the storage bay, floating, with no gravity to hold it down. Canisters of grey metal with blue tops were in a vault behind the cryopods, built into the wall. Shallow and small enough to be easily hidden. Hart found her catch, and the pod opened. All five must have them. A few canisters behind each pod.
Hart and Naomi exchanged looks. Hart went to the backup supplies and came back with two pairs of gloves to protect against the cold. Naomi reached forward, untwisting the cap, but they both knew what they would find.
More nitrogen smoke floated from the open canister. Hart shifted to her left, reached in with medical tongs. Drew out small vials, filled with pale, frozen liquid.
Naomi’s breathing grew shallow.
<
br /> Embryos. Hundreds, thousands of embryos hidden behind the cryopods that had stored the backup crew. Already fertilised. Another seed vault that neither of them had known about. Naomi would put good money down that Hixon and Lebedeva didn’t, either.
Naomi screwed the top back on, slid the canister back. They watched as the false bottom of the cryopod slid back into place. The nitro fog slowly cleared, drifting into the filters in the walls.
Hart and Naomi stared at each other.
Naomi forced herself to say the words.
“I think we found Valerie’s plan B.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
5 Years Before Launch
Houston, Texas
They would never let Naomi go into space.
Training had gone well, and she had technically graduated to the astronaut corps. But it didn’t matter.
NASA never said so outright, and those within the organisation wanted to send women up there. To treat everyone with equality, build on the strides they’d made over the last few decades. The system was already working against them. Bigotry had a way of sliding through the cracks.
It didn’t matter how hard Naomi worked. How well she placed on various tests and examinations. Her job description would always come with a desk. She was so far down on the waiting list for a mission to the moon, the ISS, or the under-construction Gateway that she might as well not be on it at all. She’d been five to ten years too late.
Naomi felt like she’d disappointed the little girl she’d once been. The quiet, nervous child who still faced her fears and went to science camp every summer and wore NASA emblazoned everything. She’d promised that girl she would go up in a rocket. Every day, she was surrounded by people who urged her patience, who assured her she still had a chance. Well qualified, hardworking men who were blissfully unaware at how so many others around them didn’t have that shot, no matter how much they proclaimed otherwise. It was Mercury 7 and 13 all over again.
Naomi didn’t grow depressed, exactly, but everything was a little more muted. At least once a week, she debated phoning up Valerie and asking if she could go back to Hawthorne. There, she had freedom, opportunities. Hawthorne was angling to usurp Lockwood out of its monopoly on space stations. There was still a chance she could go to low Earth orbit through the corporate sector.
She started looking at jobs, furtively. Late at night, when Cole was asleep. She’d scroll through them, peering at the job descriptions. They were either jobs she wasn’t quite qualified enough for, or openings that fit but were in places she didn’t want to live. Areas where the sea levels were going to rise, or the weather was increasingly violent, or there was simply nothing to do. Part of her wanted to leave the U.S.—to go further afield to countries where women had more freedom. Her father had been Scottish—she could qualify for an ancestry visa. She scrolled through the ESA website, but there wasn’t anything worth applying for.
As her eyes grew tired from the blue light of the screens, she worried her lip. If she really wanted to leave Houston, would Cole follow? Especially if it was for a job?
Cole had been raising the idea of children. An offhand comment now and again. But if there was anything she’d learned from growing up under Valerie’s roof, it was spotting when someone was pretending nonchalance to cover a calculated move. Naomi still hadn’t told him. She’d done her research. Even with PCOS, she could still potentially have a child. With the reduction in stress, her cycles had become more regular. There were options: metformin, or other medications. IVF. Adoption—there were more than enough orphans displaced by climate change, though she had the sense Cole wanted a child with his DNA. She wasn’t being fair to him, but she was afraid. He’d married her with the unspoken expectation they’d likely have kids and settle down. She didn’t want to admit to anyone, much less him, that it wouldn’t happen quite how he’d imagined.
Cole’s best friend at work, Shane Legge, and his wife had just had a baby. They went over for dinner one Friday night. Naomi held the small bundle, wrapped up in a blanket, warm against her chest. It felt nice. He smelled of talc and soap and that ineffable baby smell. She passed him back to his father, quickly, before the ache in her grew worse.
She didn’t want to have children any longer. The world was still too grim. But she wanted to want to have them. It was a subtle distinction. It was strange to grieve for something she didn’t know whether or not was right for her.
Every time children came up, she demurred. Weeks turned to months. Cole spent longer at work. She found more excuses to go back to California for visits. It was easier, to let Valerie distract her with her various projects at Hawthorne. To go to lectures and dinners full of interesting people.
For the First Man of Mars had become utterly boring to Naomi. When she was home, they sat at the dinner table in silence. Cole could feel his fame waning. Mars had been years ago. Everyone was fascinated by the Gateway and the moon again. Breakthroughs and cost reductions made it not quite so astronomically expensive to set up bases and grow food. Naomi had considered a transfer at her work to focus on the Artemis missions to the moon, save for the fact doing so would annoy Cole further.
Cole was itching to find a way back into the spotlight.
“I was thinking of doing a documentary,” he said one morning over breakfast, before work. “A production company is interested. They’d follow me around, and it’d delve into the next Ares mission preparation. I’d be able to get NASA to put me in charge of training if I did that.”
“That sounds good,” Naomi said.
Cole poured another mug of coffee. “They’d want to film both of us. They’re interested in your research, too.”
Naomi swallowed a bite of cereal. She wasn’t sure their quiet meals would make for riveting television. “You already spoke to them about this? Before asking me?”
He sensed the misstep. Hid it with another sip of orange juice to take his vitamins and pills. “I had to make sure it was viable first, Naomi. You know how that industry is. Promise you everything, blow a bunch of smoke up your ass, then disappear.”
Naomi pushed her spoon through the dregs of her cereal. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve never been good in front of the camera. Can’t they just focus on you?” She flashed him a smile. “You’re the Man of Mars, after all. I just grow some plants.”
Cole made a frustrated sound in his throat. “You always do that.”
“What?”
“Diminish your own accomplishments. You’re a leading expert in your field. The masses would love to see what you can do, how to make plants grow even in the harshest environments. Red and green plants. It’s got a certain poetry, right?”
Naomi bit her lip. It did make a sort of sense. “I’ll think about it. Okay?”
Cole beamed and knocked back his juice. He magnanimously cleaned off the table, scraping the remnants of their meal into the trash.
“I’ll be back late,” he said, kissing Naomi’s cheek. “A meeting with the production company. Unless you want to come?”
Naomi shook her head. “No, you do your thing. But do tell them I’m only a maybe. And if I want to stay out of the spotlight, that’ll be okay, right?”
Cole’s teeth were white. “Of course.”
“Cole, you forgot your—”
The door closed with a snap.
“—jacket.” It lay on the back of his chair. She picked it up, and something clattered as it fell from his pocket. She bent down to pick it up, pinching it between thumb and forefinger.
A small white pill stamped with DMAU. His birth control pill.
The door opened again. Naomi shoved the pill back into his pocket.
“Forgot my—ah, thanks,” Cole said, plucking it from her numb hands. He gave her another kiss, this time on the lips, as if he couldn’t help himself.
“Have a good day,” Naomi said, faintly.
She’d seen him put the pill on the table next to his vitamins, like he did every morning. He’d seemed so good a
t taking it every morning. She knew he’d forgotten a time or two, but he’d not known what consequences she faced. They’d stopped using condoms a few months ago. He complained they kept bunching. She wasn’t fond of them either, and so she’d relented. It didn’t matter, anyway.
But he didn’t know that.
She went to the medical cupboard, picked up his pill pack, flipped it to the back. Days of the week. Today was Wednesday. The pill was missing. Had he forgotten to take it another day… or had he palmed the pill that morning and only pretended to take it with his orange juice?
Naomi hadn’t told him about the pregnancy, but this, this was like poking holes in condoms and not telling her. Wasn’t circumventing birth control revoking consent?
She sat back down at the table, staring at the whorls of the wood. A pregnancy and a baby would be a great subplot for a documentary series about the Martian astronaut and the space botanist, wouldn’t it?
She downed her bitter coffee in one gulp.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
127 Days After Launch
4 Days to Mars
122 Days to Cavendish
“What the hell do we do about this?” Hart asked.
They were in the greenhouse. They’d put the embryos back behind the cryopods. Naomi checked the crops, dark as charcoal in the purple light. She’d be able to harvest the latest crop of strawberries soon. Eat some fresh, dry the rest for their stores. She picked the berries, one by one. Naomi snuck one, the sweetness bursting on her tongue. Hart came over and helped. If anyone peered in through the window of the door, it’d look like they were busy at work.
“If Valerie checks the map, she’d know we were both in the storage bay for close to an hour,” Naomi said. “That’ll look odd. We should get ahead of this, tell her what we know. Maybe they were put there by Lockwood and she doesn’t know they’re there. It makes sense to add them. Insurance, like our seed vault.” Even as she said the words, she realised how silly it sounded. “Why would Lockwood put embryos on an all-male space mission?”