Naomi’s first job would be working with Hart to ensure the planet didn’t harbour unknown pathogens and parasites that could wipe humanity (and their food supply) out as soon as they arrived. That the crops they planned to grow wouldn’t become invasive and unbalance the ecosystem. Or that the bacteria lurking within humans’ own guts, their skin, their breath, wouldn’t do the same to the planet around them. The complex feedback loops that make up a planet could easily be knocked into a configuration that could threaten human life rather than support it. If the last hundred years should have taught humanity anything, it was that planets were more delicate than most people thought.

Even if life wasn’t skittering away from the probes and the planet was nothing but sea, sand, rocks, and benign micro-organisms just beginning their own evolutionary experiments with multicellularity, that didn’t mean life, intelligent or otherwise, couldn’t one day evolve over the next million years. Humanity’s arrival would at best nudge it in a particular direction, and at worst disrupt it entirely.

But humanity’s arrival meant their survival.

Cavendish was like the Earth long before the dinosaurs. Plants developed first in the water then moved to land. Cavendish had algae and fern-like or moss-like plants, but few early trees like gymnosperms. Naomi planned to start cultivating crops as soon as she arrived. Earth plants would therefore come in to fill the niche that Cavendish plants could one day fill. Naomi would essentially help the planet jump many evolutionary steps. None of them truly knew the long-term ramifications of that.

Naomi twisted open one of the hatches in the corridor. There were passages in the spokes connecting the centre of the ship with the corridor ring. As soon as she entered the shaft and began to descend the ladder—although who knew which way was truly up or down on a rotating ring in space? Her feet grew lighter, until near the bottom (top?) she could float towards the heart of the ship. She had to move slowly, to let her blood pressure and ear canals adjust to the shift.

Down in the main body of the ship was the bridge, the storage, and the bodies.

Naomi pushed off the ground, swimming through the air and making her way to the storage bay. She needed a few supplies for the lab, but mostly she wanted an excuse to float again, even if it meant entering what everyone on board save Valerie had started dubbing the Crypt.

They had discovered their surprise guests almost immediately after launch. Five cryogenically frozen members from NASA, installed by Lockwood when they took over the contract.