“All the more reason to ask her. She came clean the other times. When she had to.” Naomi’s mouth tasted of iron. “We should talk to Hixon and Lebedeva first. Though, what if they know?” She realised how that sounded. Hixon was the second in command. If Valerie told the pilot it was top secret, would that military history mean Hixon would follow orders? Keep it from even her own wife? Lebedeva was fiercely loyal to Valerie. “God. What if they all already know and we’re the ones left in the dark?”

“No.” Hart shook her head, too hard. “Jerrie hates the idea of being pregnant. I mean hates. The idea of disembodied babies growing in vats would have given her nightmares. And if they failed or couldn’t grow on Cavendish and there was even the slightest possibility that Valerie would ask us to carry the embryos—this is not something she’d keep quiet about. She wouldn’t do it even if it meant saving humanity. I’d carry two to spare her it. If I had to.” Her lips were stained dark with strawberry juice.

Naomi gave her a small smile, despite the tingling in her fingertips. “I suppose that’s a spot of sweetness in this horror.” Her smile faded. “She wouldn’t make us carry them, surely.” One womb on board was already occupied. Was that why Valerie had taken the news so well?

Hart made a derisive noise in her throat. “She’d frame it as a choice. Not sure it actually would be.”

Naomi left Hart to the strawberries, taking down the algae tubes for that day’s harvest as an excuse to gather herself. The batches were all growing as they should. No flickering lights, the algae a vibrant purple beneath the glow lights, not milky from contaminants. She hoped she never saw the tubes pulsing again.

As she loaded yesterday’s algae into the nutriblock machine, a terrible thought unfurled in Naomi’s mind. So awful she almost didn’t mention it to Hart, but if she didn’t speak it, the thought would burrow its way deeper.

“If she added the embryos, they’d have been a last-minute addition,” Naomi said slowly. “She must have bribed someone to look the other way as the robots brought the embryos up and hid them as they installed Cole and the others.”

Hart gave a grunt. “Wouldn’t have been easy. Wonder how much she paid? And what else could have been done with that money.”

“It wouldn’t have gone through the same quality checks as everything else. What if—what if that addition was the reason for the power surge? It’d explain why Hixon was so frustrated by the calculations.”

Hart’s hands fell still. She picked a strawberry leaf, twirled it in her hands. “You’re saying Valerie could have been responsible for their deaths?”