“A contact,” Naomi said, worried to admit even that much. The blood had already rushed to her face from the lack of gravity, the skin of her cheeks hot and puffy. Her arms and legs had floated up, leaving her suspended, and her fingers and toes were cold.

A virus. Evan had mentioned it after the test jump, but she’d been so distracted she’d glossed over it. She knew that area from that first summer working at Argaine. Dry and dusty, the corn fields even more choked than when she’d been there as an undergraduate student. The nearest town had thirty-five thousand people. If it was airborne and deadly, that was a big enough node to spread. How many people had already passed through that sleepy, sunburned town? A quick, hot meal while their car charged. It was a place to pass through on the way to Los Angeles.

“If this spreads, that’ll be a catastrophe,” Naomi said. “A pandemic.”

“There’ve been plenty of outbreaks recently,” Hixon said. “That Marburg outbreak on the East Coast a few years ago. It’d been bad, but. And remember Ebola before they found a vaccine?”

“Ebola only spread through bodily fluids like blood or semen,” Hart said. “And it took them years before they had something resembling that vaccine. A sickness as lethal but airborne? It could be a modern-day plague. Wipe out a sizable percentage of the population.” Her voice was hushed.

“That means that Valerie’s plan, if it was hers, was good idea. Embryos were worth keeping,” Lebedeva said. She gave them a look, blue eyes catching on Naomi’s growing belly. “And yes, I would carry one. If I had to,” she said. “It will not come to that.”

“Stop,” Hixon said. “Let me think.” Her face tightened as she worked through the new information with the ruthless efficiency she’d learned in the military. “We are still a crew. A team. No more postulations. No more what-ifs. We speak to Valerie.”

“That’s the right answer, Hixon,” came Valerie’s voice over the comms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

127 Days After Launch

4 Days to Mars

122 Days to Cavendish

Naomi’s body jerked in mid-air, the adrenaline firing through her nerve endings.

The women had spent hundreds of hours on the Atalanta simulators and grown to know every corner of the craft after living on it for months. Even in the emergency instructions, there was nothing about being able to overhear or see someone in a room if they hadn’t accessed the comms, and Naomi had made sure they were switched off before she said a word.