“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?”

“The technology for cloned organs still exists, even if it’s illegal,” Hart pointed out. “They could have applied for an exemption and gotten it.” She sounded just as doubtful.

Haven hadn’t been the only company investing in cloning. Companies providing hearts and kidneys and the like still flourished—it was only wombs that were banned. Dennis Lee would definitely have had the skills to grow organic wombs. He’d helped pioneer it. Her eyes flickered to the thin tendrils of growing vat meat on the far wall. Naomi would be able to make them, especially if Hart helped.

It could be difficult to synthesise the growth medium in situ on Cavendish, or create the scaffold of alginate for the cells to grow in gravity. More fun with algae. Or they could grow them in orbit in the main body of the Atalanta. Valerie would have blueprints for the bioreactor where everything came together—would Lebedeva or Hixon be able to create it? Could they retrofit the vat meat bioreactor? So far Naomi hadn’t had any trouble so far with her vat meat experiments, but creating a hamburger was a lot easier than a womb.

Very worst-case scenario, the women on board had something the men didn’t.

“Those caretakers Valerie selected, a lot of them have already looked after babies in artificial wombs,” Hart said.

Naomi had a sudden, strange mental image of embryos in glowing tanks parked right next to the sofa in a living room.

“You’re saying this is what she’d always planned?” Naomi’s voice was weak.

Hart popped a strawberry in her mouth. “Valerie has consistently lied to us. It’s far more likely she put them there than Lockwood. Maybe it was added security, an insurance policy she hoped never to cash in on. It also implies that she knew the backup crew would be on board when we took off. Either way, she still didn’t tell us. And that’s inexcusable.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “What if a trigger tripped when we opened the chambers and she already knows what we found?”