Naomi entered her quarters and picked up her snow globe. The glitter shimmered. She tried untwisting the top. Tapped the bottom. It sounded hollow, but there was no catch. She clawed at it, wriggling the cheap plastic back and forth until she finally managed to pop it out.

Her fingers snaked around inside. Nothing. Empty. She stared at it in horror. She’d been so sure she was right.

Naomi threw the snow globe on the floor and it cracked, the liquid leaking out. Glitter-studded water pooled on the floor of her room. She picked it up again, managed to unscrew the top of the globe. She was careful, but she still nicked her fingers on the broken glass. She prised the shuttle off its little stand, but her hopes sunk. It was solid plastic. Not a hidden drive.

“Fuck!” She hit the wall of her cabin.

Time was ticking down, minute by minute, second by second. Valerie was knocked out. She should have made sure.

Naomi had treasured this cheap bit of tat. She’d been touched when she’d unwrapped it, to realise Valerie had gone to the effort of hunting down a matching one to remind them of that day—

She stopped.

She scrabbled up, almost slipping in the puddle left behind. She darted through the hallway, the alarm lights still pulsing, as if the ship was reminding them of how little time Earth had left.

Naomi entered Valerie’s quarters. Hixon had opened all the locks on the ring. The room was as spartan as the day they’d left Earth’s orbit, save for one thing.

Naomi picked the snow globe up from the desk, praying she wasn’t wrong again. She turned it upside down, the globe turning murky and sparkling. Valerie’s had a little clasp at the base, unlike Naomi’s. Holding her breath, she unfastened it and the bottom popped out. Inside was a sleek and silver data pod, the same size and shape as her thumbnail. She clutched it, breathing a shaky sigh. She still held the snow globe. She threw it to the bed in disgust.

She flitted to the observation room, loading the pod on the screens. “Please, please, please…” she muttered, searching. She rubbed her shoulder—it was sore from where Lebedeva had rammed her into the wall of the med bay.

She worried Valerie would have encrypted it and that would waste still more time as she had to drag Hixon away from her trajectory shift prep to break it. Guessing Valerie’s passwords would have been useless—she always chose randomised ones for maximum security. But it opened just fine. Maybe Valerie thought the snow globe was protection enough. Maybe, deep down, she wanted to be stopped.

Yes. There. The information began to load, transferring annoyingly slowly from the data pod to the ship’s drive.