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?”