The next morning, Naomi reported for training with her fellow astronaut candidates. She threw herself into every task. She was the only woman.

When she had her first free weekend, she flew back to California, to Valerie, to ask for her help.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

119 Days After Launch

7 Days to Mars

130 Days to Cavendish

Day by day, Mars grew larger. Naomi would find excuses to go down to the observation room to watch it. When they neared the warp ring, it’d spread below them like Earth had. Naomi could just make out Mars’ two moons: the larger Phobos and the smaller Deimos.

She wished they had the time and ability to stop and set down. Naomi could walk, heavily suited, along the planet Cole had been to not long before they met. She’d see the pale blue sky turned rusted orange at the horizon. She’d kick at the reddish dust to find the true colours hiding beneath.

One day, people might live there. If the terraforming took root, shifting the planet green. At her job in Sutherland, she’d focused on growing plants on Mars as well as on the ISS and the Gateway. She’d found ways to chelate the calcium perchlorate in native Martian soil so they instead formed harmless crystals so any plants grown weren’t poisonous. There would still be the challenge of dealing with the fact that plants often concentrate heavy metals, but Naomi had been working with some of the plants used in bioremediation around the mines on Earth. She’d carefully created cassettes of genes that could be integrated into crop genomes that would allow them to survive in high-metal soils. She’d figured out how to concentrate the metals in nodules that could be removed mechanically—cleaning the soil and making the plants safe as a human food source.

It was doable, but UKSA and ESA couldn’t access the funding they’d needed to make Naomi’s work there a true success. They needed a Hawthorne with deep pockets. They needed a Valerie Black.

The Atalanta had come all this way only to see Mars from orbit. A rock that so many stories had been written about. So many myths and fears and legends.

Then they’d fit themselves into the warp ring for the test jump. The ring would help ensure the ship was an exact location for the equation and give parameters for the warp bubble for utmost accuracy.

In one week, Naomi and her crew mates would test the warp drive and see if they could indeed drag their destination closer to them through space-time. If it worked, they’d slot themselves back into the warp ring and away they’d go again. All the way to Cavendish.