Naomi was working until exhaustion, often falling asleep on the table. Her lab was no longer her quiet corner of the ship. Valerie would come in and narrow her eyes at the darkened cylinders full of cellular debris, as if she could bring them back to life with the sheer power of her glare.

Naomi put more of their healthy algae into the harvester. Out came more nutriblocks. They had enough food for an extra few weeks. They weren’t at panic mode, not yet—Naomi had isolates of spirulina as well as a few types of chlorella in the vault that hadn’t come into contact with the other strains—but she wanted to know what exactly was going wrong before she dug into her stores. If those isolates became infected, that was that. Endgame.

Naomi, with Lebedeva’s help, centrifuged the cellular debris out of the dead culture and DNA-sequenced the remaining supernatant, which consisted mostly of the virus. So she had the virus isolated, at least.

Despite the stress, everyone else’s space illness had passed. Naomi envied the others’ easier shift from gravity to zero G if they went down to the bridge or the Crypt. Though they were all tense, they had found their rhythm. Hixon and Lebedeva checked the ship from top to bottom, working their way through systems diagnostics over the course of a few days only to start over again once they reached the end. Naomi would see them, heads together over some problem. Hixon would gesticulate wildly and Lebedeva would hunch her shoulders and focus.

Hixon and Valerie were working together to ensure they were on course as well as rechecking the Alcubierre theories, running simulation after simulation in the VR rec room. Hart helped Naomi with the crops while she battled the algae, kept tabs on everyone’s health, and ran regular full physicals.

Valerie locked herself in the observation room, her de facto office, for hours at a time, working on urban planning for the landing site on Cavendish, building digital blueprint after blueprint. Catherine Lovelace had designed the robots and tech that led to many aspects of the spaceship thirty years on, but Valerie Black’s first love had always been seeing how technology fitted into the larger whole. She loved designing buildings, cities, expanding Hawthorne into one of the few mega-companies with fingers in many industries. Tech, medicine, agriculture, distribution: so many tools that coalesced to help design a new base on another planet.

When she emerged, Valerie would flit through the spaceship, keeping an eye on everything. She sent word back to Evan every few days and asked for news updates and disseminated short reports to the crew.