Valerie began; her speech easy, appearing unrehearsed. She’d been up half the night practising; not a word uttered by accident. She spoke as if she didn’t give a damn what people out there were saying, sharing. That she didn’t know those red words would be thrown back at her face time and time again. That her inbox and platforms wouldn’t be inundated with even more hate mail than before. That she wouldn’t have to strengthen her security detail against the inevitable death threats.

Naomi turned off her phone.

Projections of the probes and the schematics of the Alcubierre warp drive that would become so familiar to Naomi swirled above Valerie’s head.

Naomi searched for Evan in the crowd. She found him, his elbows on his knees, staring up at the screen. It had been the first time he’d really been confronted with what Valerie and Naomi were trying to do. And it’d been the first time he must have realised just how much they had up against them.

Naomi wanted to go to NASA so that she wasn’t only Valerie’s ward and the daughter of Catherine Lovelace, working away in the company that her mother and adopted mother started. She needed to prove herself on the government side, make herself invaluable to both, so that when the time came to pick a crew to go to Cavendish, she’d be one of the first names they listed.

Valerie paced slowly on her black pumps, her voice taking on a deeper timbre, an almost hypnotising cadence and rhythm as she one by one lured them all closer to Cavendish.

CHAPTER TWELVE

71 Days After Launch

55 Days to Mars

178 Days to Cavendish

It started with the lights blaring too bright, then flickering, then darkening. Naomi woke up from a deep sleep, disorientated, before everything snapped into focus.

Alarm lights blinked as violet as the grow lights of her labs—red, it had been decided, would inspire too much panic. Dread still lurked within Naomi as she stepped into her coveralls.

Years of training took over. On the way to the bridge, she checked on the greenhouse. The alarm lights were yellow there, the other end of the spectrum from purple. The backup lights for the spirulina were on—they ran on a separate generator with a double backup in case something like this happened. The air was cooler than she’d like, but it shouldn’t affect the crops short-term. It was puzzling, though. The alarms were going off, they were on backup, but none of the trackers had registered anything odd. There weren’t any detectable radiation spikes on the monitors.