A couple of titters and whispers, which Valerie ignored. She left the table and held her arms out once she reached the centre of the ballroom. Projections turned the pale scalloped shell of the ceiling into a map of the Milky Way. Gasps and murmurs made Naomi hide her smirk. Always one for dramatics, Valerie, but Naomi had to admit it was a good show. The people in the seats needed to be entertained enough to reach into their pockets.

The view pinpointed one star out of the thousands spackled across the ceiling. Formerly Epsilon Eridani, known colloquially as Ran, after the Norse goddess of the sea. Ten and a half light years away. The star was K2 class and eighty per cent the size of Earth’s sun. It was cooler and would glow orange in the sky rather than yellow-white. The star was young, a sprightly billion years old, but it had taken half that long for Earth to develop life. It had taken Earth four billion years for something to crawl out of the ocean and colonise forests and jungles.

“Cavendish. Our new world. Our frontier.”

Years ago, they’d found a gas giant, Aegir, named after Ran’s husband, the god of the ocean. Aegir was too large for life—akin to Jupiter. The smaller planet was hidden behind it in the Goldilocks zone, or the circumstellar habitable zone. Not too hot, not too cold. The right temperature for water to be liquid on the surface given the right atmospheric pressure. For life to potentially grow.

The planet was brilliant blue and green, covered with swirls of clouds. Yet instead of grand continents, there were a few just big enough to be deserving of the name. Smatterings of smaller islands dotted the oceans, though plenty of them were at least the size of Great Britain. A planet of archipelagos. Its moon was even a similar size, creating tides in those alien seas. It had oxygen and rich biodiversity in the early stages of life, well enough established to have stable elemental cycles that could sustain agriculture. Humans could theoretically live there.

“I won’t bother you with a list of the technical details, but Cavendish is closer to its star than Earth, so a year lasts one hundred and seventy-eight days. The sun is dimmer, but still warm enough to keep temperatures far more constant and habitable than Earth has become.”

The view flickered to an artist’s rendition of what it would be like to stand on the surface of Cavendish, overlooking the shore of one of the islands. It could be Earth, save for the fact that the sun was dimmer, more orange-red, and 1.6 times larger in the sky, for the smaller star of Ran had to be closer to heat Cavendish enough for life.