Naomi’s new quarters had all the personality of a hospital room. A tiny bunk, only big enough for one. Hart and Hixon had two adjoining cabins and turned one into a bedroom, both the mattresses side by side on the floor. Each cabin had a few cupboards for storage. A miniature sink. A teeny desk and chair. Everything white, pale blue or grey. Naomi had lived in some bare studios in her time, but this was like living on a boat.

She kept the snow globe Valerie had given her next to her bed, stuck down with some magnets just in case gravity ceased. Valerie had taken hers too and given Naomi a conspiratorial smile about it.

Naomi had brought a small art kit with her, and in her scant downtime used too much of the precious spacecraft-approved paints brushing leaves, berries, and twisted tangles of green vines on to the fronts of cupboards, around handles, on the corner of her desk, the pocket near the bed where she stored her tablet. It was a way to let her mind drift after a long day at the lab. Valerie would think it a waste of time when she saw it, or wryly tell her she was defacing government property. But Naomi wasn’t the one who had concocted a plan to steal it.

Once they landed on Cavendish, provided they survived, the outer ring of the ship would be broken down to form the base of the new colony as they sent back word to Earth and waited for them to finish building the ships that would ferry humanity across. Naomi would grow food both in the original greenhouse and—with luck—outside in Cavendish soil and underneath the Cavendish sun. She may as well get used to her cabin. She’d be sleeping in it for years.

Valerie had given the team the same spiel as everyone on Earth—Cavendish was an unpopulated planet. No sign of animals larger than microfauna. Naomi didn’t expect little green or grey men with bulbous eyes and misshapen heads, of course. But Cavendish was not barren or dead; it was full of tiny photosynthetic organisms creating oxygen. Water. Sun. Bacteria. All the ingredients for life.

Even if there were no signs of animal life larger than a few cells—and who’s to say they weren’t just better at hiding from probes and scans than they’d thought?—life was stubborn. The panspermia theory postulated that interstellar dust, meteors, and comets throughout the universe could pepper organic matter on other planets. Perhaps the same dust that helped Earth on its way had scattered across the surface of Cavendish.