by Laura Lam
“Injected Lebedeva with saline,” Naomi said. She indicated the syringe she held. “This one is sodium thiopental anaesthetic. Never even prepped the potassium chloride. You didn’t watch closely enough.” And she’d let herself be distracted by Naomi’s act as the submissive daughter before she could check if Lebedeva was actually dead.
Valerie had always seen Naomi as someone who needed to be led. Even though Naomi had just been working behind Valerie’s back with Hart and Evan, Valerie thought her adopted daughter would always be fundamentally truthful to someone’s face. Incapable of a little, simple sleight of hand.
Naomi gave her captain, her boss, her mentor, her almost-mother a smile before she pushed the syringe into the IV line.
“Nomi…” Valerie began, before her words slurred and her eyes flickered shut.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
129 Days After Launch
2 Days to Mars
43 Minutes to Change Trajectory
120 Days to Cavendish
Lebedeva sagged against the wall. “You did it.” She was clearly shaken. She’d made her peace, accepted what Naomi was about to do, and then… not died.
Naomi stared down at Valerie’s prone frame. Her head was turned to the side, her mouth open. Features softened and slack. There was grey at her temples where her dye had grown out.
“I am glad my fake death was convincing,” Lebedeva said, wryly. “You should have used the potassium chloride. Saved us all a lot of trouble.”
Naomi shook her head. She found a clean cloth to press against her cheek to help staunch the bleeding. “I won’t let her make me a killer.”
Lebedeva grunted. “What will we do with her?”
Naomi considered. “Can you carry her to the rec room? We can set that up as a cell easily enough.”
Lebedeva nodded. “Sure.”
“Okay,” Naomi said. “Valerie will be out for a few hours with that dose, so we’ll leave her tied up here for now. First priority is to finish breaking Hart and Hixon out.” She thought for a moment. “To do that, I’ll get Hixon to see if she can crack encryption on Valerie’s files from her tablet—I’ll share the information Evan gave me on that. I wasn’t successful, but she’s better with computers.” If they couldn’t unlock the rooms, they wouldn’t be able to change trajectory and Naomi wouldn’t be able to get to her snow globe.
Naomi picked up her tablet, elation sinking as she saw no new messages. Focus on the current problem. Don’t think about Earth. Don’t think about Evan sneaking into a warehouse surrounded by guns and germs.
Lebedeva wasted no more time, leaving the med bay. Naomi gave Valerie one last look and then followed.
Hart and Hixon asked what was going on, but there wasn’t time to say more than that Valerie had been captured. Naomi read the instructions for breaking the encryption through the wall, having to almost yell them in order to be heard.
Hixon blessedly made quick work of the encryption, and she found the new lock code, as well as plenty of other notes on the modifications Valerie had made to the Atalanta. Nothing on the cure or the virus, though, at least not at first glance. When the locks finally clicked open, they had less than half an hour to make the trajectory shift.
Hixon’s black eye was darkening to a lurid purple. She sprinted down to the bridge to begin prepping coordinates, trajectories, and velocities. Hart gave Naomi a brief, hard hug before following her wife, limping from when Lebedeva had tripped her. Naomi wondered what had happened between the couple behind closed doors. Whether they were still at odds or had found a truce. Lebedeva went to shift Valerie from the med bay to the rec room before she woke up.
Naomi entered her quarters and picked up her snow globe. The glitter shimmered. She tried untwisting the top. Tapped the bottom. It sounded hollow, but there was no catch. She clawed at it, wriggling the cheap plastic back and forth until she finally managed to pop it out.
Her fingers snaked around inside. Nothing. Empty. She stared at it in horror. She’d been so sure she was right.
Naomi threw the snow globe on the floor and it cracked, the liquid leaking out. Glitter-studded water pooled on the floor of her room. She picked it up again, managed to unscrew the top of the globe. She was careful, but she still nicked her fingers on the broken glass. She prised the shuttle off its little stand, but her hopes sunk. It was solid plastic. Not a hidden drive.
“Fuck!” She hit the wall of her cabin.
Time was ticking down, minute by minute, second by second. Valerie was knocked out. She should have made sure.
Naomi had treasured this cheap bit of tat. She’d been touched when she’d unwrapped it, to realise Valerie had gone to the effort of hunting down a matching one to remind them of that day—
She stopped.
She scrabbled up, almost slipping in the puddle left behind. She darted through the hallway, the alarm lights still pulsing, as if the ship was reminding them of how little time Earth had left.
Naomi entered Valerie’s quarters. Hixon had opened all the locks on the ring. The room was as spartan as the day they’d left Earth’s orbit, save for one thing.
Naomi picked the snow globe up from the desk, praying she wasn’t wrong again. She turned it upside down, the globe turning murky and sparkling. Valerie’s had a little clasp at the base, unlike Naomi’s. Holding her breath, she unfastened it and the bottom popped out. Inside was a sleek and silver data pod, the same size and shape as her thumbnail. She clutched it, breathing a shaky sigh. She still held the snow globe. She threw it to the bed in disgust.
She flitted to the observation room, loading the pod on the screens. “Please, please, please…” she muttered, searching. She rubbed her shoulder—it was sore from where Lebedeva had rammed her into the wall of the med bay.
She worried Valerie would have encrypted it and that would waste still more time as she had to drag Hixon away from her trajectory shift prep to break it. Guessing Valerie’s passwords would have been useless—she always chose randomised ones for maximum security. But it opened just fine. Maybe Valerie thought the snow globe was protection enough. Maybe, deep down, she wanted to be stopped.
Yes. There. The information began to load, transferring annoyingly slowly from the data pod to the ship’s drive.
Valerie had looked through Naomi’s microscope at the cyanophage like she’d known nothing about viruses, fully knowing what she’d helped create and was about to unleash.
She clicked open the files. The first was the formula for the virus. And then the formula for the vaccine. The notes from Bryony’s experiments, photos of magnifications of the virus under a microscope. Detailed write-ups of the virus’s morphology. Medication types and doses or other methods for treating existing cases. Everything they needed.
She sent it to Evan first. There were no notes, but her last message was marked as read. That was something, at least.
Immediately after, she fired the information off to the location of the missives the U.S. government had sent Valerie from Earth. She slid the data pod and the tablet into her pocket and climbed back down to the bridge to Hart and Hixon.
“Did she have it?” Hart asked. Lebedeva arrived, her expression questioning.
Naomi nodded, showing her the formula on the shared drives. Hart scanned it, eyes narrowed, and visibly relaxed. “Thank God.” Lebedeva let out her breath in a long, slow whistle.
“I’ve sent it to Evan and the return location of the U.S. missives. There has to be a way to relay it to everyone, though, right?” She didn’t trust the government not to weaponise or capitalise on it.
“I can do that,” Hixon said. She loaded the information and sent it as widely and broadly as she could in Earth’s direction. A satellite at Mars or near Earth should pick it up. If there were enough systems still online for them to receive it. Naomi tried not to think of Evan’s face. Of everyone she’d worked with back on Earth. Her friends, her schoolmates. The barista with a tattoo of dragon scales on her forearm who had taken Naomi�
�s coffee order every morning as she walked in to work. Naomi didn’t know her name, or anything about her, but she hoped she was all right. Naomi let out a breath. They’d done all they could.
“All right,” Hixon said. “Before next steps, I need to ask you something. All of you.”
They stared at her wordlessly.
Hixon’s face twisted towards the window, leaving her half in shadow. Mars was visible from their angle, a disk of rust. The tips of her right fingers were inked solid blue. “We have a choice. We can turn the ship around, loop Mars, and arrive at Earth in roughly another one hundred and thirty days. Or—” she paused—“we can continue on to Cavendish.”
“We don’t know if what we sent them is a viable cure,” Hart said. She checked the records again. “No confirmation yet.”
“We need to make a decision soon. As in, pretty much now,” Hixon said. “So it’s a leap of faith. We could end up pointing our way towards a nearly empty Earth.”
“The children and some teenagers will still be there no matter what,” Hart said. “The ones who were vaccinated, who didn’t succumb to some other disease or starvation. And five per cent of the adults.”
It was a grim picture. They took this in, all of them staring at Mars and its small moons, at the just-visible warp ring. Two paths.
“If we go, they will have trouble following us, whether the cure works or not,” Naomi said. “That’s what I argued with Valerie. Earth will be too distracted, too focused on survival. We could still establish a base, give growing embryos a try. Help those back on Earth build more crafts to follow.” She felt the tightness of the scabs forming on her cheek.
“You mean we basically continue Valerie’s goal, and hope we do a better job?” Hart asked.
“What’s waiting for us back on Earth, if the adults and something resembling existing society survives?” Hixon asked. “Prison, a trial?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said, thinking of the child curled up within her.
“Saving most of the adult population should hopefully get us a pardon,” Hart pointed out. “Hell, they might even let Lebedeva back into Russia.”
“Hmph,” said Lebedeva, which could’ve meant anything.
Naomi went to the window, traced the shape of Mars with a fingertip. “What needs us more? Earth, or Cavendish?”
“Earth,” Hart said, without hesitation.
After a beat, Lebedeva echoed her.
Hixon’s lips were thin. “A large part of me wants to go to Cavendish, I have to admit. It’s painful, to get this close only to turn around.”
“The cure will work,” Naomi said, more confidently than she felt. “If it doesn’t, it’s all the more reason to go back. We will return to Cavendish, I have to believe that; we just might no longer be the first. If we jumped there, what would we do with Valerie? I don’t want to be her jailer for years, until people arrive again, whenever that could be. She doesn’t deserve to set foot on that planet, even if it’s behind bars.”
On that, they all agreed.
“We could send her out of the airlock,” Lebedeva pointed out. “No longer a problem.”
“That’s tempting,” Hart said, crossing her arms.
“I told Lebedeva back in the lab—I don’t want her to turn me into a killer. Or any of us. She’s already tried.”
That silenced them.
Hixon heaved a sigh. “We go back, then. Help clean up the mess we unintentionally made.”
“Is that a unanimous decision?” Naomi asked. “It has to be all of us.”
A pause as they all worked through their thoughts. They gave longing looks at the warp ring.
One by one, they nodded.
“Let’s go home,” Naomi said.
Hixon nodded, prepping the coordinates. With a flash of clarity, Naomi realised that the pilot had remained second in command. The others were looking to Naomi for guidance. She had made the final call. Valerie had accused Naomi of trying to usurp her position as captain. Looked like she had.
Hixon walked them through what she was doing—something about gravity-assist slingshots, staging, rotation velocity, and synodic periods, which Naomi only understood about half of despite her scientific background. She had to trust that Hixon knew the numbers and would get them home in one piece.
“And we are successfully on course for Earth,” Hixon finished. “Arrival in one hundred and thirty-two days.”
It was a tiny shift, rather anticlimactic, so subtle they didn’t even feel it in the craft. But that was it. The job was done. There were no cheers. Hart let out a juddering breath, her hands in a prayer position against her lips.
Lebedeva’s eyes were still red, but Naomi suspected tears as well as pepper burns. Hixon’s eye had nearly swollen shut, but her other one was bright. She lifted her face in sad satisfaction. Naomi gripped the handrail, her feet kicking uselessly as she floated in front of the window, resting her palm over the warp ring. So close, so far.
“Goodbye, Cavendish,” she whispered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
130 Days After Launch
1 Day to Mars
121 Days to Cavendish
131 Days to Earth
Hart shook Naomi out of an uneasy sleep. She kept waking up, more faces of the possible dead flashing in her mind’s eye. What if no one could receive their message and the key to saving themselves?
“Come on,” Hart said, urgent. “We’ve got news from Earth.”
Naomi let Hart drag her from her bed and they made their way to the observation room. Naomi patted the bandage on her cheek to make sure it was still in place. It was only when they were most of the way there that she realised she’d left her tablet behind, and hadn’t checked if there was a new message.
The others were already in the observation room, and when she entered, Hixon’s wide smile, made garish by her swollen eye, caused Naomi’s legs to falter. Hart caught her, helping her to the nearest chair.
“It worked?” Naomi asked.
“The vaccine is holding,” Hixon confirmed. “New cases are slowing down. And they have better methods of supporting those who are already sick now they know how the virus behaves.”
Naomi crumpled in relief. It’d worked. It’d worked. They hadn’t changed their trajectory and bypassed the warp drive to arrive back home to a planet one-third dead.
“Extra bit of good news: Cochran died. The VP too. Both contracted the virus. Even if they hadn’t, they’d have been deposed by now, I reckon.” Hixon smirked in satisfaction. “Lots of people are blaming them for what happened. His policies loosened a lot of safety regulations for companies, so people currently think the virus was a result of that.”
“Feels a little wrong to be so happy to hear about someone’s death,” Hart said. “But eh. I’ll live.”
“So no one knows it was Valerie?” Naomi asked. The information hadn’t had anything in it to hint at Hawthorne’s involvement.
“The government, or what remains of it, does,” Hixon said. “But it doesn’t seem to have gone wide yet. So far, the public seems to think the leak was an inside job. Matter of time, though.”
“Things back home look… messy,” Lebedeva said. “Hard to know what we’ll be arriving at in a few months.”
“We’ll just have to wait and see.” Naomi paused and asked the question she feared. “Anything from Evan?”
Hixon chose her words. “Not through official channels. Have you checked your tablet?”
“No.” Naomi stood, flexing her fingers in agitation. “Excuse me.”
She turned her back on their sympathetic expressions.
The walk back to her room felt long. The ship was still pristine, clean. No more flashing lights or alarms. The same as it’d always been. Hixon and Lebedeva had been over all the systems, and everything was still working fine. If Lockwood had cut any more corners, it wasn’t obvious; nothing had broken yet. Hopefully it’d be solid enough to get them home.
Naomi entered her room and picked
up the tablet. She sat on the bed cross-legged. Centred herself, fingertips tracing the shapes of the vines beside her bed. Her desk was empty. She’d put the snow globe in a cupboard, unable to look at it. Maybe she’d chuck it out of the airlock.
She gathered the courage to press the tablet screen and wake it up. She ran through the scenarios in her head. Evan could be dead, either from infection or the resulting chaos. Shot down trying to enter the dead zone. He could be desperately ill. If the virus had caused too much damage, the cure would only do so much. She tried not to imagine him too thin, his skin sallow beneath his tan, sheened with sweat, eyes glassy.
She tapped it.
New messages.
Her heart thudded, but she clamped down tight on any hope. It could be someone using his account to tell her bad news privately.
She pressed her lips together and opened the first message.
Evan Kan: Hello from Earth, Atalanta. I’m all right, Naomi. Well, mostly.
Naomi sagged, relief flooding through her like a drug. She’d been convinced he’d be just another casualty out of many. That they’d return to a planet where the person she wanted most to see was gone.
The first message had arrived only an hour ago. What had delayed him? She kept reading.
Evan Kan: I got into the warehouse, but there was nothing there, so that was a complete bust. I was trying to find a way back out when the news broke. I turned myself in to the authorities to try and get out—they checked me and I showed no symptoms.
Evan Kan: In fact, I was immune.
Evan Kan: She must have inoculated me before she went. If I’d known, I could have tried to research the beginnings of a vaccine from the antibodies in my blood. It still likely would have taken too long.
Evan Kan: When they first told me, I worried Valerie would have given me the dubious honour of starting her plague and then leaving me alive to watch everyone around me die. But I wasn’t the index patient. Don’t know if she made me immune out of some sick sense of love, or if she wanted to punish me. Knowing her, maybe both.