Evan was right. Valerie never left anything to chance. She was always one, two, three steps ahead. Even when they’d been thrown off Project Atalanta, it hadn’t been long before she’d approached Naomi with her plan to steal the ship. Naomi had thought she’d been joking, but she had every step planned out. She’d put in the manual override on the ship long before NASA had thrown Hawthorne off the project.

She’d known she’d have to take it on her own terms. To reach Cavendish and have a stake in it at the start.

The women on the ship could make no claim on the exosolar planet. Not for longer than two years. As soon as the Atalanta II touched the surface, that was the end of any chance of making their utopia a reality.

But Valerie had been told she couldn’t do something over and over again, and that hadn’t stopped her. What was an outdated treaty that hadn’t been ratified by all countries of the world?

It was late. All the women on the ship would be asleep.

Naomi ghosted through the curved hallway and slipped into the rec room.

It took her a few tries to find the subfolder. She stared at the list of messages. They were all marked as read. Should she start with the most recent one, or the oldest?

It mattered little, in the end. Most of the messages were more or less the same. In the early ones, they were official, with all the pomp and circumstance:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to ensure the safety and integrity of its citizens, in accordance with other major world leaders, it is hereby ordered as follows:

… and so on. Demanding they return at once or face the consequences. Citing the specific laws they had broken. Berating them like they were a group of errant children. Small wonder Valerie had ignored those.

Naomi should find the messages frightening, but way out here, it was hard to feel intimidated. She couldn’t help but read the missives in Cochran’s voice. He had a peculiar intonation—in his speeches, he tried for gravitas but ended up speaking with that untethered transatlantic accent from old movies. Cochran was a desiccated hard-boiled egg of a man—hair too white to be from anything but a bottle, pale skin spotted with freckles. His dark eyes, blond eyebrows and eyelashes gave him the look of a skinny, naked mole rat, but with perfect, Chicklet teeth. He’d been handsome, once, but time and hatred had bleached him.

The later missives had their hot air punctured. They were more informal, with an edge of desperation.