Naomi still felt nauseous, especially if she had to go down into the main body of the ship and lose her tenuous hold on gravity. As much as she’d loved floating weightless, the fear of retching up her breakfast in micogravity took the fun out of it. At night, strapped to her bed, all seemed steady enough, but her stomach still knew the ring rotated several times per minute, spiralling through the abyss towards their destination.

Naomi took a last look through her crops, running her fingers along their delicate stems and flat leaves. Promises she’d coaxed from seeds with light, water, warmth, air, and soil. She frowned, staring beyond the crops to the bioreactors against the far wall. A cluster of four cylinders began blinking, on and off, like a steady heartbeat. A sign that something within had gone wrong with the batch—too hot, too cold, a leak, or a contamination. As she watched, another two started flashing.

Naomi activated the comms panel. “Valerie?”

She’d anticipated problems from the crops, if anywhere. A plant infected with witches’ broom, or fungus or aphids somehow getting through the contamination protocols. Algae was much easier to grow—especially the strand they’d engineered for space travel.

A crackle. “Lovelace.” The use of her last name was a rebuke. A reminder to keep to the command structure. No obvious favouritism that could lead to fractures in their group.

“Dr. Black,” Naomi said, the slightest edge in her voice as another cylinder started flashing. “Houston, we have a problem.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

42 Days After Launch

84 Days to Mars

207 Days to Cavendish

The batches of algae were leeching colour. In normal light they would have changed from a deep, verdant green to opaque and milky, announcing the algae was dead. It was happening quickly. Naomi would go to bed and return to the lab the next morning to find that viruses had exploded the cells within.

She’d flushed the first batch in case of infection—sending it out of the airlock instead of recycling it into fertiliser—sterilised the bioreactors, and grown a new batch from a fresh sample. It was holding, but its levels were still lower than she’d like. One of her older batches wasn’t looking good either, and yet another showed normal growth and then sudden crashes. Lebedeva had double-checked the equipment, and all was functioning as it should. Temperatures were normal, nutrient feeds were good, and still batches were crashing in a matter of hours. So if it wasn’t their environment, it was likely a virus. And that was not as easy to fix.

If it’d been the crops failing, it’d be a problem, but it’d mean all of their food would come from nutriblocks. If algae productivity dipped too low, it’d affect the bulk of their food and, of course, their life support.