“Yes?” Her tone was polite, but the frown line that appeared between her eyes betrayed her annoyance at the interruption. “I still need a name for our base. It hasn’t come to me yet. Maybe we have to see it first.”

Like when people didn’t name their child until they held the squalling, wrapped bundle. Naomi stifled her laugh. She hadn’t even begun to consider names.

“Two years isn’t a long time,” she said instead.

“Mmm,” Valerie said, as if it didn’t bother her.

“Aren’t you worried?” Naomi asked.

“I have a plan to get them off our backs. Don’t worry. I know how to play it.” She gave a slow smile.

Valerie had always put up a brash, unbothered front for the media. She was good at making it seem like everything she said was honest and off the cuff. Naomi had lost count of the times she’d watched Valerie get people to agree to something that they thought was their idea in the first place. Naomi had to hope it’d still work ten and a half light years away. She wanted to ask what Valerie meant, but knew better. Her mentor was in one of those moods where she’d only say, “Wait and see.”

Valerie cocked her head, bird-like. “You’re not here for that. You’ve got something else chewing at you.”

Naomi stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. She tapped one of the thumbnails of the Cavendish probes on a screen and expanded it. A photo of the proposed site for the base, in grainy definition. The gymnosperms were the same ones she’d grown in the larger biome. Far older, their roots sunk deep. It was on the shores of a freshwater lake, the sand a pale pink from quartz. They’d chosen an area near the equator that would be temperate. On Cavendish, seasons changed every forty-five days. On the base, they’d be imperceptible temperature changes, but nearer the poles, seasons could swerve from 30 degrees Celcius to minus twenty degrees in a month or two.

Naomi squinted at the screen. This was where she might give birth. A toddler could run across that beach, kicking up the sand. Making castles and stomping them down only to build them up again.

“I’ve kept something from you,” Naomi said. “I needed to be sure.”

Valerie leaned back in her chair. The body language brought Naomi back to her teen years, needing Valerie’s permission for a school trip or asking for new supplies for her makeshift lab in the shed in the garden.

“Out with it, Naomi.” Her gaze had sharpened to a point.

She may as well be direct.

“I’m pregnant. Almost four months.”

Valerie’s face was inscrutable—only the tiniest flicker of an eyebrow and a glance at Naomi’s midriff gave her away.