Salvation полностью

With a degree of privacy assured, I squatted down and crapped out the biopackage I’d brought along. The human anal cavity has traditionally been a smuggler favorite for most of our existence on Earth. It made me really proud to carry that fine institution on into the starflight era. Yeah, right.

The biopackage resembled miniature frogspawn, which wasn’t a bad analogy. I split it in two and dropped each half into the glasses I’d prepared. From my little medical kit, I took six indigestion tablets and put three in each glass. They foamed away on the surface, dissolving quickly.

You could have eaten the tablets—not that they would’ve done anything for your indigestion. However, they turned the water into a perfect nutrient solution; there was also a hormone released that would trigger the eggs into growth.

That phase would take six hours.

I shoved the glasses into the cupboard under the basin, then set the cologne bottle to release a spray every quarter of an hour to keep anesthetizing the plant fibers. Wearing a new shirt, and smelling like a Bel-Air gigolo, I went out to join the delegation for our tour.

—

All the Salvation of Life’s biochambers were ovoids measuring eight kilometers along their axis, with a four-kilometer diameter at their midpoint. The first one, where our quarters were, had a globe of light suspended in the exact center, shining a warm slightly orange-hued radiance out across the whole chamber. Human space habitats tended to have landscapes across the cylinder floor, leaving the endwalls clear. The Olyix biospheres were completely shrouded in vegetation. Trees with fleshy, purple-tinged leaves never grew to the size you found in terrestrial forests, and there didn’t seem to be much variety, either; to my mind they resembled giant bonsai—dumb comparison, but realistic enough. Their branches tangled together deftly, playing host to dozens of smaller plants, like the orchid-equivalents in my yurt, along with vines and ragged strings of trailing moss that hung in huge curtains. The loam was covered in the yellow moss-grass, riddled with patches in differing shades, making the ground look like an intricately stained mosaic rug. Little streams threaded their way through it all, bubbling down the slopes from the axis to empty into reed-packed ponds that were spread around the equator.

Humans would have deployed fleets of remotes to trim and maintain the plants. The Olyix with their biological oriented solutions allowed the plants to grow as their nature intended. According to Eol-2, the biochambers had reached equilibrium thousands of years ago. Supplied with light, warmth, and water, they would continue with minimal intervention indefinitely. Small birds resembling overgrown dragonflies buzzed about, while giant snail-equivalent creatures slid along the ground, eating every fallen leaf and leaving a film of rich mulch in their wake. Larger dead branches and trunks were swiftly reduced to powdery loam by a profusion of fungi.

Our delegation was impressed by the slower, more sedate life on show. I suppose it made sense, given how long the voyage was going to take.

Eol-2 took us into the second biochamber on a car that could have been modeled on pre–quantum spatial entanglement era human vehicles. It drove itself through a broad tunnel that had junctions every few hundred meters, with tunnels curving away out of sight. Despite a plethora of discreet recordings made continuously ever since the arkship had arrived, humans had never fully mapped out the maze of passages and caverns that riddled the Salvation’s interior.

The second biosphere was identical in shape to the first. The difference was in climate, which was more temperate, housing a different genera of plants, while the third was the warmest of the three, but dry, verging on a desert environment. Certainly the plants lacked the jumbled-up density found in the first two.

“Our three biochambers contain a vibrant range of our home world biota,” Eol-2 explained to us as we walked about on the short reddish moss of the third biochamber, making polite sounds about yet another tiny dull flower sticking up out of tufts of drab gray-green leaves minutely different from the last. “Beyond here is the engineering section, which is not open to this delegation.”

I looked around at my fellow delegates, seeing their poorly concealed expressions of relief. Everyone was profoundly bored; the last thing they wanted now was to walk along halls of incomprehensible machinery, listening to an unending monotonous commentary on power couplings and confinement chamber integrity.

I kept my own, darker, amusement in check. The engineering and propulsion section of Salvation of Life was actually a lot smaller than the Olyix claimed. Eol-2, like all the Olyix, had lied to us. Salvation of Life contained a fourth biochamber.

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