Tina had put out the seeds just for fun, to remind her of home. She didn’t have enough proper growth medium, because the farm didn’t use it, so she used pellets from the materials recycler as anchoring substance and dried goose poo for fertiliser. Rex made up an installation of a rack of pipes with cups that held the substrate and tubes that circulated fresh air laced with nutrients over the roots. Being cactuses, they didn’t need much water, and were happy with a daily spray of humid air that was supplied to the more demanding edible vegetation that took up the other half of the growth chamber. It was just that those plants, the lettuces and little tomatoes, remained neatly in their pots. The cactuses did not. They wandered all over the gym.
Several even grew handfulls of fruit—something Tina had rarely seen in her fifteen years at Gandama. They didn’t appear to move quite as much as they had in her yard at Gandama, but displayed interesting growth forms Tina hadn’t observed before, with one of the plants deciding to grow leaves. They were broad, waxy ones, grey-blue in colour.
She didn’t want to discard them, even if she might have to lop some of them to fit into whatever space she could organise in the cabins behind the controls. There were four of those, two for sleeping and the rest for the stuff they needed to survive while the habitat was stowed and before they arrived at the station. They would have to go in with the geese.
Chapter Three
Tina didn’t like leaving big tasks to the last minute—and feared that if she didn’t start on the cactuses now, they would run out of space and would have to discard them—so she started packing them up the next morning.
She took a large knife and cut off long fronds and other growths.
While piling them into a bucket to be incinerated, she wished she had time to perform DNA analysis on them. She had already done this during the journey, using the few simple tools she had: a kit from the onboard agriculture set, a program on her pocket reader and a handful of implements from the onboard “kitchen”.
Unreliable as those results were, they appeared to confirm what she already knew: some trigger had made the plants turn on their third DNA strand that produced profoundly different growths. The ones she was putting into the bin and carting off to the incinerator were different yet again.
The plants were adapting to the surrounding space incredibly fast.
She wondered if it was Gandama that had turned the plants into cactuses, because that was the best way to guarantee survival: spikes to prevent being eaten by armadillos, leafless trunks to conserve water. It confirmed observations she had made, and would be interesting to add these latest developments to the paper that was going to be published, except it was too late for that.
When she finished cutting, she had to persuade the cactuses to sit in their pots. She needed to tie them up so that the medium didn’t go floating all over the ship, and carry them up through the centre of the rotating arm into one of the cabins that was already full with far too many other supplies.
They simply had to reserve the other cabin for food and other essentials.
She floated around the cabin in zero-g, checking contents of containers to see if they really needed to be in here. For the most part, they did. During the last week of flight, they needed access to tools, spare parts for vital services, recycler filters and various cleaning products. The vacuum cleaner was definitely essential.
What was worse, they needed to build a pen in here for the geese, because she didn’t want them in the cabin with the food, and although Rasa had said they could sleep in her cabin, Tina would be sleeping in the same cabin and she didn’t want the geese in there. They never shut up.
Which meant there was less space for the cactuses, especially since the geese would probably take a bite out of them given half the chance.
And that meant she had to sort the cactuses into ones she definitely wanted to keep and ones she’d be happy to risk sticking into the cargo hold—where there was plenty of space, but it was unheated and she was afraid that the cactuses would freeze.
During all this, Finn sat at the controls. She had taught him how to operate the ship after leaving Kelso. Although he didn’t have an official licence, he had flown ships before, both inside the massive maintenance halls in the Force where he didn’t need a licence as long as he stayed inside, and when he was underage and still lived with his family.
Tina wanted someone else beside her capable of flying the ship well enough so that she didn’t need to stay on board all the time. Also so that she had a backup pilot.
After a few trips to the gym to pick up cactuses, Rex came to join Finn by sitting in the second pilot seat, and then Rasa joined them as well. Their chatter annoyed Tina.
“Come on, we have lots of work to do.”
“But mum, we’re just having a break for lunch.”
“No eating in here, if we can avoid it.”
“I’m not eating.”
“Just warning you.”
“And then you say that I’m grumpy,” Finn said.
“I’ll quit being grumpy when the work is done.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re getting to it.”
Rex and Rasa pushed off from the seats behind the pilot and floated back to the tube that went into the habitat. Tina went back to the farm.
After a couple more trips she got something to eat as well, before heading up to ask if
