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  They moved on to their third.

  Naomi and Lebedeva gave regular updates of their actions. Valerie or Hixon responded with further instructions. Naomi’s awareness zoomed in on those little bolts, focusing on nothing else but vanquishing yet another one.

  “Mission finish ETA twenty minutes,” Lebedeva said.

  “Good,” came Valerie’s curt reply.

  Naomi kept twisting, willing her fingers to move faster. Four out of five of her main connections. Everything hurt. She swivelled her head towards Lebedeva, who was already on her fifth connection. Naomi grimaced and braced herself against the handrail, turning the torque again. And again.

  “Your readings are blipping a little, Lovelace. Glove check,” Valerie said.

  Naomi finished the fourth bolt. She released the wrench, letting it float near her chest. She wriggled her fingers, willing sensation back to the tips.

  Space debris was sharp, and even though the craft was new, it’d be easy for a small meteorite’s impact to leave a rough patch, despite shielding. A snag could cause a tear, not deep enough to cut a finger, but enough to compromise the suit. The back of her gloves looked fine. She twisted her palms and felt a stab of adrenaline.

  “You see it?” Naomi asked, staying steady. “Small tear on the left ring finger.”

  “Check it’s patching,” came Valerie’s reply.

  Panicking about the fact there was a hole in her suit while in space would do nothing except make her use her oxygen faster. Work the problem. Find the solution.

  She stared hard at the tear, at the readout displays on the small screen on her right wrist. Slight wobbles.

  Naomi’s spacesuit was brand new. No one else had worn it aside from testing. The outer layer was fitted with a new material that would theoretically heal itself. It was meant to detect the oxygen in the event of a minor puncture and release a resin to seal it.

  It wasn’t the first time Naomi had thought she would die.

  —She wakes up to flames. Calls out for her mother and breathes in smoke. Falls to her hands and knees. Can’t see. Feels her way across the room, hoping she crawls further from the flames instead of right to them. The heat has cracked the tiles of the kitchen. Blisters form on her hands and knees. She staggers out into the warm, dark night, furred with fire, rolling on the remnants of her front lawn to put out the searing heat licking up her legs, her arms—

  The pressure dipped again, the readout doing another scan. Was that a glimmer of blue around the tear of her glove?

  —Most of her hair has burned away, the scent acrid and chemical. The silver blanket the paramedics gave her crinkles. Burn gel is smeared over her face, her hands, her legs, her feet. Firefighters are like ants staring up at burning logs. Droplets of water from the hoses catch the light as they fight the flickering yellow and orange. The roof caves in, sending sparks into the sky. She feels the burst of heat on her raw, exposed skin. Her throat is a pulsing coal, red and hot. Her mother stumbles across the singed grass a few minutes later, almost untouched by fire.

  Her father never came out—

  Naomi wriggled her glove. The scan completed.

  “It’s sealed,” Naomi said, even as Hixon gave a shout from the bridge as she spied the readouts.

  “Finish the job, Lovelace,” Valerie said, as if she were any other member of the crew.

  Lebedeva drifted over to her and the last connection to the hub. Wordlessly, the cosmonaut put her wrench to one of the bolts, and Naomi took a deep breath and tried to do the same. She twisted slower, keeping the ring and pinkie fingers of her left glove out of commission. Lebedeva did most of the work of the last bolts, but then finally—finally—the ship was free.

  “Return to ship,” Valerie said.

  Naomi secured the wrench in the toolbelt at her waist and pulled on the tether, gripping the handrails as hard as she dared with her damaged glove.

  “You take the lead,” the cosmonaut instructed.

  Naomi turned her back on the hub, kept her eyes on the white hull, focusing on where each hand should go. The Earth still swirled beneath them, night fully fallen. She could see the moon, a grey-white orb, waning gibbous, hovering over the curvature of the Earth. Still so far away, even from up here.

  They took the same route back, and at the bridge, Hart floated to the window and pressed her palms to the quadruple-paned glass, a grin splitting her face. Naomi gave a salute, and Lebedeva touched her gloved hand to Hart’s bared one, separated by the tempered acrylic planes, in a high five before moving on.

  Naomi pushed herself into the airlock first. Her suit pressure had dipped again, just a little. Naomi was light-headed—was it damage or simply the pure oxygen and adrenaline? Lebedeva followed, shutting the latch and checking the seals.

  The airlock filled with the usual levels of oxygen and nitrogen. Naomi kept her breathing slow and even. When it was safe, the airlock opened. Hart and Valerie entered. Hart worked on Lebedeva’s suit and Valerie came to Naomi. She grasped Naomi’s injured glove, inspected it critically. Pressed the blue-patched hole, which held.

  “You live to fight another day,” Valerie said. Did her voice give the tiniest catch?

  “Let’s get out of here,” Naomi said.

  She shed her armoured Argo.

  Valerie connected the life support to the wall stand, keeping Naomi steadier. The gloves came off first, and Valerie gathered them into their storage bag. Naomi wore her cotton gloves underneath, and she tore them off, breathing a sigh of relief when she could clasp her bare palms together. She felt so cut off from her body while in a spacesuit. It was easy to imagine she’d find blackened fingertips from the rent in the suit once the skin was unveiled, even though the HUD showed no damage.

  Valerie undid the helmet and Naomi twisted her head from side to side, revelling in the return of something as simple as peripheral vision. Of breathing normal air. Naomi was freed from the trousers. Awkwardly, she pulled her arms through and then shimmied out of the hard upper torso.

  Next came the cooling garment, the head cap. And finally, she was free, in little more than cotton long johns threaded through with the plastic cooling and heating tubes, soaked through with sweat.

  As Valerie finished storing the suit, Naomi floated to her quarters, thankful they’d already claimed cabins when down on the ground. It was as small and cramped as she expected, but she barely took it in before shucking her clothes. She ran a hand along the faint scars on her legs from long ago burns. The rest of her skin was smooth save for the skin on her forearms where she’d crawled across the tiles. She changed into her new uniform of dark blue, fitted coveralls. Men’s sizes—she had to roll up the sleeves and ankles. She’d hem them later. There, alone, she let herself curl into a ball in mid-air, clasping her hands to her chest, squeezing her eyes shut. The adrenaline ebbed. Her limbs shook, the sweat on her skin cooling, leaving her clammy. She thought of fire and a smoke-scorched throat.

  She let go, slapped her cheeks lightly, and met the others on the bridge. Hixon had been busy. The Atalanta was nearly ready for launch.

  Valerie entered scant seconds later, heading to the console and loading the comms down to Earth.

  “Evan?” she asked. “You reading us?”

  A pause. A crackle. “Hello from Earth, Atalanta.” Evan’s voice was faint. Naomi had first met Evan Kan when he was eleven, two years older than her, not long after she’d come to live with Valerie. He lived in Singapore with his father, usually ignoring Naomi when visiting his mother, sending messages to his friends back home in a blend of English, Chinese, and Malay.

  Naomi imagined Evan there in the underground comms hub Valerie had built on one of her many pieces of land in southern California, hidden in a room of machines beneath satellite dishes and radio waves. By day, he’d still work as a postdoc research fellow at an immunology lab in La Jolla, but each night, he’d come back and sleep there.

  He wouldn’t be much help in an emergency. In a pinch, messages could be routed to
his tablet, but they’d be more easily discovered. At least until Mars, he was Valerie’s main contact on Earth, someone who could ferry through additional information if required and give them updates on how the world was reacting to what Valerie and her team had done.

  “Status update?”

  “Lockwood’s rocket is taking off in half an hour, tops. Gateway will send another craft just after if there are any issues from the ground. You better split.” Naomi had slowed them down with her minor suit malfunction.

  “Readying engines as we speak. They’re pissed off down there, I take it?” Valerie leaned towards the window again, twisting her head in the direction of Washington DC. She bared her teeth in triumph.

  “They’d skin you alive if they could. Get going. I’ll send you a report later.”

  “On it. Over and out,” Valerie said, cutting the call. “Strap in,” she said to her crew. “Let’s keep our skin.”

  Naomi made her way to her seat at the right hand of Valerie’s captain chair. She buckled herself in tight.

  Down on the surface there would be an emergency meeting of men in dark suits, red or blue ties, American-flag lapel pins. The chief of the Federal Aviation and Space Administration would be wishing he could shoot them down. The Army generals present would wish the same. Space wasn’t quite militarised, though it was on the way. Any missiles were automated, designed for incoming threats, not retaking a stolen, parked spaceship. Theoretically, they could shoot the Atalanta down, but the five women were betting that they’d baulk at wasting the amount of money that had been invested in the craft. Higher-ups in NASA would be grim-faced and nervous, wondering if anyone’s job was on the line. President Cochran himself might even be there. All of them realising a group of women had screwed them over.

  The sun angle shifted, painting the cockpit golden, shadowing the women’s faces. As the engines blared to life, Valerie started ticking tasks off on her fingers. “Take a little jaunt to Mars and its shiny new warp ring. Fold space and time. Travel ten and a half light years. Establish a hardy colony on an alien planet. Wait for Earth to build the ships to start ferrying people across. Save humanity. Sounds doable enough, right?”

  Her laugh echoed through the bridge as the ship coiled in on itself. The orbit gave them a 17,000 mile head start and they slungshot out into the stars.

  They didn’t scream this time. It was different to leaving the Earth in the capsule. Quieter, smoother, and so much more final. Soon the planet beneath them would be nothing more than a memory.

  Naomi locked eyes with Valerie, who held her head up. Beatific as a saint, she smiled.

  “It’s time to find our world.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  4 Days After Launch

  122 Days to Mars

  245 Days to Cavendish

  No amount of training or simulation could have prepared Naomi for the Atalanta.

  The engines were so quiet. She hadn’t anticipated how odd it would be to walk along the corridor of the centrifugal ring of the ship and its artificial gravity. It felt flat enough as she walked past the closed, white doors—here were the sleeping quarters, there the med bay. She patted the door of the greenhouse as she passed it. The canteen, the rec room—fully outfitted with virtual reality for much needed variety and stimulation in downtime—the gym, and the observation room, which served as a second rec room, office, or meeting room.

  The floor curved up at the end of the hallway. A perfect circle that would align with the warp ring, forever turning above the static, gravity-less main body of the ship. Once they arrived at the ring, it’d be a push of the engines, a pulse of negative energy, and they’d bend space and time. The Alcubierre drive made possible and concrete. They’d either slow down on the other side of Mars after the test jump, or they’d die horribly.

  “It’d be painless,” Hixon assured them, sipping her third cup of lukewarm tea. No boiling water allowed. As second in command, she got up before the rest of them, going through and assigning them their daily tasks. That left Valerie more time to strategise and design the base on Cavendish.

  “Liar,” Naomi pointed out mildly, sprinkling some of their precious stock of brown sugar over her instant oatmeal. If they sped past their destination, they’d be stranded until their food ran out. Not quick or painless unless they chose to help things along.

  “To be determined in one hundred and twenty-two days,” Hixon said, far too cheerily. If they survived the test jaunt, it’d be another five days’ travel back to the ring for the proper jump to Cavendish.

  Naomi’s new quarters had all the personality of a hospital room. A tiny bunk, only big enough for one. Hart and Hixon had two adjoining cabins and turned one into a bedroom, both the mattresses side by side on the floor. Each cabin had a few cupboards for storage. A miniature sink. A teeny desk and chair. Everything white, pale blue or grey. Naomi had lived in some bare studios in her time, but this was like living on a boat.

  She kept the snow globe Valerie had given her next to her bed, stuck down with some magnets just in case gravity ceased. Valerie had taken hers too and given Naomi a conspiratorial smile about it.

  Naomi had brought a small art kit with her, and in her scant downtime used too much of the precious spacecraft-approved paints brushing leaves, berries, and twisted tangles of green vines on to the fronts of cupboards, around handles, on the corner of her desk, the pocket near the bed where she stored her tablet. It was a way to let her mind drift after a long day at the lab. Valerie would think it a waste of time when she saw it, or wryly tell her she was defacing government property. But Naomi wasn’t the one who had concocted a plan to steal it.

  Once they landed on Cavendish, provided they survived, the outer ring of the ship would be broken down to form the base of the new colony as they sent back word to Earth and waited for them to finish building the ships that would ferry humanity across. Naomi would grow food both in the original greenhouse and—with luck—outside in Cavendish soil and underneath the Cavendish sun. She may as well get used to her cabin. She’d be sleeping in it for years.

  Valerie had given the team the same spiel as everyone on Earth—Cavendish was an unpopulated planet. No sign of animals larger than microfauna. Naomi didn’t expect little green or grey men with bulbous eyes and misshapen heads, of course. But Cavendish was not barren or dead; it was full of tiny photosynthetic organisms creating oxygen. Water. Sun. Bacteria. All the ingredients for life.

  Even if there were no signs of animal life larger than a few cells—and who’s to say they weren’t just better at hiding from probes and scans than they’d thought?—life was stubborn. The panspermia theory postulated that interstellar dust, meteors, and comets throughout the universe could pepper organic matter on other planets. Perhaps the same dust that helped Earth on its way had scattered across the surface of Cavendish.

  Naomi’s first job would be working with Hart to ensure the planet didn’t harbour unknown pathogens and parasites that could wipe humanity (and their food supply) out as soon as they arrived. That the crops they planned to grow wouldn’t become invasive and unbalance the ecosystem. Or that the bacteria lurking within humans’ own guts, their skin, their breath, wouldn’t do the same to the planet around them. The complex feedback loops that make up a planet could easily be knocked into a configuration that could threaten human life rather than support it. If the last hundred years should have taught humanity anything, it was that planets were more delicate than most people thought.

  Even if life wasn’t skittering away from the probes and the planet was nothing but sea, sand, rocks, and benign micro-organisms just beginning their own evolutionary experiments with multicellularity, that didn’t mean life, intelligent or otherwise, couldn’t one day evolve over the next million years. Humanity’s arrival would at best nudge it in a particular direction, and at worst disrupt it entirely.

  But humanity’s arrival meant their survival.

  Cavendish was like the Earth long before the dinosaurs. Plants develop
ed first in the water then moved to land. Cavendish had algae and fern-like or moss-like plants, but few early trees like gymnosperms. Naomi planned to start cultivating crops as soon as she arrived. Earth plants would therefore come in to fill the niche that Cavendish plants could one day fill. Naomi would essentially help the planet jump many evolutionary steps. None of them truly knew the long-term ramifications of that.

  Naomi twisted open one of the hatches in the corridor. There were passages in the spokes connecting the centre of the ship with the corridor ring. As soon as she entered the shaft and began to descend the ladder—although who knew which way was truly up or down on a rotating ring in space? Her feet grew lighter, until near the bottom (top?) she could float towards the heart of the ship. She had to move slowly, to let her blood pressure and ear canals adjust to the shift.

  Down in the main body of the ship was the bridge, the storage, and the bodies.

  Naomi pushed off the ground, swimming through the air and making her way to the storage bay. She needed a few supplies for the lab, but mostly she wanted an excuse to float again, even if it meant entering what everyone on board save Valerie had started dubbing the Crypt.

  They had discovered their surprise guests almost immediately after launch. Five cryogenically frozen members from NASA, installed by Lockwood when they took over the contract.

  Their second dinner on board the Atalanta, the five women had gathered at the round table of the canteen to properly discuss the backup crew, all a little green around the gills. Seasickness was one thing—space sickness quite another. It’d taken most of the first day for gravity on the corridor ring to activate, and longer for the crew to acclimatise. Hart had been the worst affected, followed by Naomi, who had thrown up into waste bags, hoping the plastic held. Hixon and Lebedeva had stomachs of steel, evidently, and Naomi suspected Valerie had felt queasy but would never show it.

  “I’m just as surprised as you are,” Valerie had said about the appearance of their unexpected stowaways. “Though I shouldn’t be. It makes sense logistically. I had it in an earlier version of the plans myself, but it was nixed for being too expensive and too heavy. Guess they gave Lockwood a last boost.” She’d made a sour face.