But she was too much of a coward to spend her last night of her old life on Earth alone, counting down the hours and minutes until she flew out for quarantine and left it all behind. So she’d reached for him.

Another selfish wish.

CHAPTER TEN

61 Days After Launch

65 Days to Mars

188 Days to Cavendish

They gathered in the rec room to celebrate the Fourth of July and the fact that Naomi had successfully solved the problem of the algae. In the end, she hadn’t even needed to bioengineer the receptor.

She used evolution instead. She isolated the contaminated crops into hundreds of small samples with one cell of culture in each and waited. The spontaneously resistant cells did their work, and she isolated those cells and regrew. Three batches in a row had held. Even if it came into contact with the virus again, it was now immune. Life support was stable, and they had all the nutriblocks their hearts desired.

Naomi had scienced her way out of the mess, and she was relieved. And frustrated that she didn’t foresee the problem sooner. Cyanophages were common, and they should have been prepared for some form of contamination. Going forward, Naomi saw it as an indication that she needed to think through ways of systematically dealing with biohazards on the new planet. She wished she could be proud, but she was mostly sheepish.

Hart had stressed the importance of holidays, of carving out a routine, marking time. Otherwise, they risked a lack of varied stimulation, and everything would blur together. Naomi was already having trouble remembering what day of the week it was back on Earth.

On the Atalanta, the air always smelled the same, except for in the canteen or the greenhouse, and even that didn’t deviate day to day. The ship’s small bots sucked up the dust so it wouldn’t catch in filters and recycled everything back into the fertiliser. It was always the same temperature. When she’d been down in Antarctica, she’d been able to leave the compound, feel the bite of the cold. She’d been able to phone people back home, check the news regularly uploaded to their local server. She’d still understood the shape of events and felt a part of the world, even hunkered down at its southern pole.

But Earth was further away each day, and not simply in terms of distance. Headlines could not affect them out there, unless it had to do with the threat of Atalanta II on Cavendish’s eventual horizon. She’d skim the information Valerie disseminated from conversations with Evan, but it was difficult to spare it more than a second thought. It was callous, perhaps, but protective.