by Laura Lam
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Laura Lam
Cover design by Yeti Lambregts
Cover images by Shutterstock
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Orbit
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10104
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First Edition: May 2020
Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Wildfire, an imprint of Headline Publishing Group
Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2019954817
ISBNs: 978-0-316-46286-0 (hardcover), 978-0-316-46289-1 (ebook)
E3-20200325-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
30 Years After
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
30 Years After
Acknowledgements
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“Men could not part us with their worldly jars,
Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;
Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars:
And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,
We should but vow the faster for the stars.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning
30 Years After
In thirty years, Dr. Naomi Lovelace has never given an interview.
Whenever I asked her to tell me what happened up there, Naomi would say no one who has been to space could ever describe it to someone who hasn’t.
They could use all the pretty language they liked. You might be able to come close, she told me once—she was always complimentary about my writing—but you’d never really know what it was like. Others will judge the choices she made, what she risked, how close she came to utter destruction. Let them, she always said. I’m used to their hatred by now.
Over the years, I’ve often imagined Naomi up there, floating alone, curled up like a white comma against a black sheet of paper. Her bulky spacesuit, the tethering cable an umbilical cord back to the ship. The silence but for her own breathing and the crackle of the comms. Twisting out to gaze at the stars, their reflections shimmering across the gold-lined visor of her helmet.
I don’t know what she thought about the expanse before her, if it changed her understanding of humanity and our place within it. If that led to the decisions she made.
I’ve watched the recording of the court testimony. Even there, she’d said as little as possible. The whole world had been desperate to hear her statement, to put her on trial as much as the others.
Naomi had stood surrounded by the polished wood of the courtroom, all warm browns compared to the white metal of the Atalanta. It must have all seemed so loud, so messy, after so long breathing recycled air, drinking recycled water, seeing nothing organic except for the plants she had grown in her greenhouse.
Naomi had lifted her chin, her posture ramrod-straight in her pressed, stiff suit, her short hair only beginning to grow out again. The scratches on her cheek were still fresh. Thirty years later, they were the barest seams, hidden among the faint wrinkles. Her face was drawn, not only from what she saw among the stars, but what she’d faced when she’d returned.
Dr. Naomi Lovelace has been many things over the years. Scientist. Criminal. Villain. Hero. Famous. Infamous.
Who would she have been, if she’d never gone? In the home clips I watched of her before she left Earth, Naomi was still quiet, but a smile often hovered at the edges of her lips, as if she held a secret she wished she could share. In one clip, taken the year before she left Earth, she’d opened her Christmas presents with the careful, considered way she did everything. A scientist through and through. Lifting the tape with a plum-purple nail, peeling back the shining paper to fold it up and set it aside. Opening the cardboard top, peeking in, the dark wave of her hair covering her face. The slight laugh as she took out the snow globe Valerie had given her, her mentor looking on with her own crooked half-smile. Valerie had bought one years ago at the Kennedy Space Center, and growing up, Naomi had always played with it. They had likely been out of production for years, but Valerie had found another just the same. Naomi shook it, the blue glitter murky and opaque before it settled to reveal the little space shuttle on its little launch pad.
She brought it with her when she left Earth. It still sits on her nightstand, even though the glass is cracked and the glimmer within leaked out long ago.
I never knew the first, early incarnation of Naomi. Sometimes, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her beneath that meteorite mask. Not really.
Every anniversary, journalists try again, begging for just one feature. Or a publisher will contact me on her behalf and offer me an eye-watering deal for her memoir as one of the Atalanta 5. No one understood why she kept saying no.
I do. Naomi has never craved fame or money.
Over the years, people have tried to fill in the blanks, or simply made up lies that further poisoned her legacy. She always claimed that her past was better left forgotten—what really mattered was what happened after. What we built from the remnants and rubble.
You’ll be wondering who I am to her, but I’m not the important part of this story. I
never have been.
I’d only meant to stay with her for a week. One of my infrequent visits—always so difficult to get away and see her, and it’s so far to travel. It was easy to let too many months pass. At least I visited her, though. The rest of the family never does. She spends so much of her time alone.
I was meant to leave tomorrow, yet just half an hour ago, at two-thirty in the morning, she shook me awake. She leaned over me, greying brown hair tickling my face, her hands like claws on my shoulders.
Dark eyes wide, she said she’d tell me everything. Her face was red, splotchy with tears, her voice nothing more than a whisper, her sour breath hot on my cheek.
I’ve checked the news long enough to understand what’s set her off. Naomi will have turned off all incoming comms—the journalists are going to be circling and buzzing like flies.
They’ll dredge up all the old pain anyway, so perhaps that’s why she’s finally telling me what I want to know. Better than finding out via the news drones. She owes me that much.
I’ve gone to fetch a pen and paper—an anachronistic affectation, but writing longhand helps me think better, even if decoding my handwriting is a struggle. I’m scribbling my thoughts, trying to untangle them before I go back through.
Naomi had offered me the same silence as everyone else over the years. Given me answers so slantwise to the truth they might as well be lies. I might hear it all, tonight, but will it be worse than what I’ve imagined or managed to piece together over the years?
The night sky is so clear—spilled ink speckled with stars. Naomi always said no matter how dark the night is, you can never mistake a planetside sky for the true black of space.
I’ll start at the beginning, like she wants.
CHAPTER ONE
Launch
Michigan, USA, Earth
If it had been a normal launch, they would have made a spectacle of it all.
There would be picnic blankets laid out on the parched dirt, legs oily beneath smears of sunblock, faces shadowed by hats and hidden behind sunglasses. They’d lift their filter masks long enough to nibble at packed treats. Kids would suck down juice in silver pouches, pretending it was what the astronauts had in space. Adults would sip something stronger, enough to take the edge off and help the time pass on by.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
If this was a normal launch, the masses would be lined up along the flight path. Excited, fairground chatter would twine around the tinny music blasting from speakers. People would imagine what it must be like for the spacefarers clustered in the cockpit, their hearts in their throats as they waited. Family and friends would group four kilometres from the launch pad—as close as allowed—waving farewell even though their loved ones couldn’t see. Tears would weave salted tracks down their cheeks, and they’d be trying very hard not to remember the footage they’d seen of the Challenger shuttle, fine one moment and a fireball the next.
Seven. Six.
But this was not a normal launch.
Naomi clenched her hands into fists, then released, tension flowing out of her. She was strapped down to her chair in the depths of the shuttle, her body cocooned in a bulky spacesuit and fishbowl helmet. All her senses were dulled. Nothing touched her skin but the cotton undergarments beneath the fabric of the suit. No smell, her hearing muffled, her vision hedged in. Everything was distant, as if she were viewing herself from the outside and this was happening to someone else.
Five. Four.
There was no one waiting around the launch pad hidden on the edge of the Keweenaw Peninsula. It had been the site of secret Cold War rocket launches, and those few who had ever heard of it thought it long since decommissioned.
So there were no picnics. What had once been popular cottage country was now largely bare, acidic bedrock hostile to both vegetation and tourists. No line of cars threaded through the cracked highway that bisected the patches of dead and dying forests. No hopeful faces tilted up towards the clouds, ready to trace the arc of the rocket as it made its way up, up, and away.
That was the point.
They were all alone, the five women in the capsule strapped to this rocket. The launch pad was much larger than the tiny site where NASA had sent up rockets in the late sixties. No one knew what they had planned. The work had been done by robots and AI, the launch sequence fully automated. If the secret leaked, they would be finished before they started. It also meant if something went wrong, they were on their own.
The five of them locked eyes through the visors of their helmets. The others tried to hide the fear that must have been rattling their bones as surely as the engines. Naomi’s muscles were rigid as steel. They had come to this corner of the world in the dead of night two weeks ago. Locked themselves in a makeshift quarantine, done each and every step to ready themselves for launch. Startling at every sound, as the robots crawled along the surface of a rocket. They had to put their entire trust in machines, for humans could too easily betray them.
Right up until the end, she was afraid someone would come. Turn off the robots, disrupt the launch sequence. Pull open the hatch and drag them from the craft just as they were about to finally escape. Naomi held her breath.
The five women chanted along with the robotic voice blaring through the capsule.
“Three. Two. One.”
They’d willingly strapped themselves to a bomb and lit the fuse. Engines roared. Naomi’s teeth shook in her skull, the skin of her cheeks pressed flat against her cheekbones. The rocket rose, shuddering, hovering over the launch pad, frantically burning fuel, battling against gravity. Victory screams came from the four other women Naomi trusted with her life as the capsule veered and accelerated towards orbital velocity. Once they hit it, each second would take them eight kilometres further away from the Earth’s crust. Naomi was crushed against her seat, as if a demon crouched on her chest.
There had been so many close calls, so many setbacks. A year ago, she thought that her life’s work would never culminate in that moment. Never mind her two degrees, the cap tassels and framed certificates at the bottom of a box left behind in storage. Never mind the months of gruelling, invasive physical and psychological tests. The missed parties, dinners, dates. The relationships she’d left in the dust. She was never meant to make it to space. None of them were.
So much had been stolen from them. From all women. Naomi and her conspirators were stealing something back. Conservative politicians and their sock puppets in the media would accuse Dr. Valerie Black, CEO of Hawthorne, and her crew of stealing a spaceship. But the people on the surface were wrong.
The women were stealing a planet.
They were stealing a future.
Far below them, further every second, people would be peeking out from their windows, faces turned towards the capsule as they held their filter masks over their noses and mouths. There wouldn’t be many, in this dry pocket of the world—most had long since moved closer to slivers of green and cleaner water. The journalists would be frantically typing up their clickbait headlines, well behind the news spidering its way across social media. Fuzzy photos uploaded. A video taken with shaking hands, the plume of smoke like a comet’s tail.
The spent boosters separated, the capsule shaking. The shuttle left the last of the atmosphere behind, pushing through the vestiges of the stratosphere. Naomi went from being crushed by acceleration to abrupt weightlessness. The straps of the chair harness whooshed the air from her lungs. The troll doll Hixon had tied to her station as a good luck charm floated, twisting, plastic face frozen in a grotesque rictus.
For an hour, Naomi clutched her chair as they hurtled through space. There were no windows—all they could stare at were the readouts on the screens.
Hixon’s hands were steady on the controls even though their path was automated, her pale skin grey-blue beneath her freckles in the dim light. Valerie emanated calm and satisfaction. Hart and Lebedeva were stiff in their seats, and Naomi was unable to see anything through the reflections off th
eir visors.
Valerie was so many things to Naomi—her boss at Hawthorne, her captain. Long before that, she’d taken Naomi in when she was nine, her father dead and her mother unable to care for her. Once the world found out what they had done, Naomi would never escape the nepotism whispers that had followed every step of her career. Naomi had once moved away from Hawthorne to prove herself but was lured back to Project Atalanta as though by a siren’s song.
Valerie had handpicked the first all-female crew into interstellar space.
Just not the first authorised crew.
The government had dangled the project before Valerie, let her spend her money, her expertise, before snatching it away and replacing the crew with last-minute substitutions from NASA. It was physically impossible for the five men to do as much training, to run through the simulations, to know the ship from the inside out. President Cochran was so determined to keep those five women off the Atalanta and their destination of Cavendish, he was willing to risk everything.
Oksana Lebedeva, lead engineer, the cosmonaut who left the Roscosmos to work for Valerie under suspicious circumstances. Jerrie Hixon, their lead pilot and mathematician, who quit NASA when President Cochran was sworn into office. Her wife, Irene Hart, who followed suit when NASA edged out most of its women a few months later as Cochran’s policies began coming into effect.
It hadn’t happened in a moment, but a series of moments, as slow and insidious as the melting of the ice caps. Women had been ushered out of the workplace, so subtly that few noticed until it was too late. There had been no grand lowering of an iron curtain, with passports voided and bank accounts emptied. There had been a few men in sharp suits quoting scripture with silver tongues, but it was cursory, just enough to wrangle part of the Christian vote. Really, they were afraid of women. Or hated them. Wasn’t that much the same thing? The country saw those angry men as a fringe movement right up until one was elected president.
“ETA to the Atalanta ten minutes,” Hixon said at one point, voice clipped. Naomi could almost feel their brains ticking, their thoughts swirling through the cramped cabin.
