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 their 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.
Finally, their true ship came into view on the cameras: the Atalanta. Valerie smiled. Hixon allowed herself a triumphant clap, muffled by her gloves. Naomi, Hart, and Lebedeva stayed silent and awed.
It was a beautiful craft, all smooth and white metal. A sleek, bird-like body formed the ship’s central axis, the bow showing the disk of the bridge, quadruple-reinforced windows dark, and the ion and plasma thrusters strapped to the side.
Jutting up from the ship were three spokes that led to the large, round ring—the labs, quarters, and communal spaces—that circled the ship like a halo. If they managed to pull this off and leave Earth’s orbit, the ring would turn, generating gravity. The ring perfectly matched the one built just outside Mars’ orbit and provided a set location via atomic clocks. When they’d figured out how to harvest exotic matter to create negative energy, it meant the Alcubierre theory for warp drive was no longer the realm of science fiction. A spaceship could contract space in front of it and expand behind, travelling faster than the speed of light without breaking the laws of physics.