CHAPTER 15
Despite his complaining, Konami could tell that Agro-Engineer Fitzkelly loved his job. His enjoyment was so infectious that he actually felt a bit jealous.
“No one wants to see the Sausage Factory,” said the mousy engineer. “Three quarters of the calories consumed onboard are produced here, but all anyone wants to see around here is the Garden.”
“Why do you call it the Sausage Factory?” asked Madani. She and Konami had spent most of their non-duty hours of the past few days together. “‘Cause of the vat-meat?”
Konami was pleased that he already knew the answer — Engineer Fitzkelly was one of the handful of other Aoteans onboard that used Earth idioms.
The wiry man shook his head vigorously. “No, no, it’s not just vat-meat. That’s just a fraction of what we do.” He led them to a massive tank, with clear tubes pulling off a greenish liquid. “Cyanobacteria — that’s the real staple onboard. Everything you eat — well, everything but a salad, fresh from the garden, I suppose — has cybac in it. They don’t have much taste, but in protein and carbs they make up most of our calories.”
Konami wrinkled his nose and a few Agro techs chuckled at Fitzkelly’s complaints.
The engineer sighed. “But I suppose I can show you the meat tubes, if vat-meat is your thing. Right this way—”
“I think that’s enough manufactured calories for now,” said Konami with a slight grimace. “Ilsa?”
She cleared her throat. “Yes, of course. Thanks so much, Engineer. To the Garden?”
Konami agreed.
Fitzkelly scowled and stomped away, and Konami and Madani made their way, hand-in-hand, a few compartments over to Aeroponics, also known as the Garden. Between rows and layers of fruits and vegetables and even a few decorative flowers, they walked. The walkways were so narrow that they were nearly joined at the hip, and Konami felt like a teenager again, walking with a date between the skyscrapers of Singapore.
At an alley they stopped and kissed. Since Beast’s Eve they had spent most of their free time together; Konami found he had far more of this precious resource than his girlfriend. Girlfriend… doesn’t seem so strange, all of a sudden. The glimmer of happiness and optimism, that was strange. He let himself be lost in the moment, focusing on the softness of Madani’s lips.
“Oh, I’m sorry…”
Konami looked up abruptly. His eyes widened for a moment when he realized who it was — the SNH Bigwig, Hamad Maltin.
“It’s Professor Maltin. So sorry to interrupt.”
“No problem at all,” said Madani, grinning at Konami. “The Garden is yours, right?”
Maltin smiled — the effect was somewhat remarkable: with the smile, his coarse, leathery features softened into a warm grandfather’s face. “Yes. I designed the Aeroponics compartment, years ago. Decades, ago, in fact — even before construction started.”
Madani said that it was beautiful.
“Yes, beautiful. And functional, too.” The pride was clear in Maltin’s voice. “It requires barely any power to distribute the water and nutrients into the air. Even with no power, the passive misting will keep everything alive for weeks, or more.”
“Very impressive,” said Konami, trying to involve himself once he figured out that Madani was interested. “Will this be how we grow food on Samwise?”
“To start with, yes — probably from Aotea itself, in orbit. Along with the cybac reactors and such. But hopefully, one day, we’ll be able to grow food on the surface of Samwise — without harming the native life, of course.”
“But how?” asked Madani. “We can’t know how the native vegetation will react.”
“Of course. But we’ll spend many years studying the properties and genetics of the native life forms, and before we do anything on a large scale we’ll perform quarantined experiments and tests.” He smiled. “I know many Aoteans look forward to landfall, assuming that we’ll have a bounty of fruits and vegetables… but unfortunately it will be many years before we’re eating anything different from what we eat now. The green rationing will be in effect long past the first day of settlement.”
Konami’s attention wandered while Madani and the Bigwig discussed the future of Aoteans’ agriculture in more detail, but it got him thinking. When he first arrived onboard, he had thought that everyone’s focus would be on their destination: the lush moon Samwise, which revolved around the gas giant planet called Abhoth, a dozen light years from Earth. But Samwise almost seemed to be an afterthought, at least in many conversations he’d had. He recalled one Aotean responding to his question on Samwise with “Right now we’re on Aotea. In many cycles we’ll be on Samwise. But it doesn’t matter where we are — we’re already the New Humanity. Our new society travels with us.” SNH dogma, one of the many things that kept Konami from feeling like an Aotean, seemed to consider distance from Earth, both physical and philosophical, as far more important than one’s actual location. Considering his status as one of the SNH Bigwigs, Konami would have thought Maltin would be the last person onboard to be so interested in Samwise.
He wasn’t sure why this struck him as so odd.
“So what else on this tub should we see?” asked Madani with a smirk, leaning back in the booth of one of the cafes that dotted the surface of Aotea.
Konami asked what else there was.
“The Theatre,” she answered. “And the Repro Lab. And Engineering and Nav/Ops, of course, but we’ll need special permission.”
“I don’t know, zero-g makes me queasy.”
“It’s not quite zero — we’re still accelerating, so you’ll have a little weight. A few grams, maybe.”
“Oh joy,” laughed Konami.
A server brought their coffee, foaming the top of Madani’s order with a flourish.
“That’s quite a coffee mug,” said Konami, impressed at the bowl-like mug she drank from.
“The infirmary goes through three cups per day, per person,” replied Madani. “That’s the most of any department onboard. I checked. Supply’s threatened to cut our ration.”
Konami looked at his own cup — indistinguishable from all the other cups in the café, and all the others he recalled ever seeing onboard. “Where’d you get it? Did you design it yourself at the Fab shop?”
“Oh, it was cycles ago. I was going to, but they told me at the shop that there were tons of designs in the archives that no one ever used, and it was true — there were hundreds of dishes and mugs, and it was much easier just to pick one.”
“Interesting,” said Konami, before something fizzed in his brain. “Wait, did you say there are unused designs in the Fab archives?”
“Oh yeah. I had to scroll past hundreds, and look at dozens of designs.”
He stood up in a hurry and grabbed Madani’s hand, apologizing for having to leave in a hurry and promising to call.
He made the call to Mattoso as he was leaving, asking her to meet him at Fabrication.
“So you want to see filters, but not in the catalogue? Whatever for?” asked Engineer Zubiri. Konami couldn’t recall ever seeing him outside of the Fabrication shops, and he wondered if he ever left.
Mattoso asked if they could search by physical dimensions. Konami had filled her in on his coffee mug revelation as they arrived.
“We can search by any parameter you can think of.”
“But down to the nanometer?”
Zubiri smiled. “We can go to the picometer, my dear.”
Konami read off the dimensions from his projection, and the Fab tech on watch punched it into his console.
Something tingled in Konami’s head during the seconds it took for the terminal to report back its findings. Out of billions of product designs, there was a single match.
Zubiri bended to look more closely at the screen. “That’s funny… why would there be design for a defective breathing filter?”
Konami ignored the question, his head throbbing. It had been years since he felt this way. “The scanners wouldn’t pick this up, would they, Engineer?”
“No, it fits the design perfectly, so it would pass,” answered the Fabrication department head. His eyes went wide. “Chief Inspector, does this mean that poor Mr. Muahe—”
“When was this item ordered and produced?” interrupted Mattoso.
The Fab tech read the date off the screen. “It was done in person, here, so no names were recorded.”
Konami shared a look with Mattoso. “Just a few days before Muahe died,” she said softly.
Konami beckoned her to the passageway, taking off at a fast walk.
“So we go to the XO?” asked Mattoso, almost jogging to keep up with Konami’s long strides.
“Screw the XO,” said Konami. “We’re going straight to the captain.”
“Shouldn’t we test the filter first, just to make sure?” she asked.
He paused in his tracks. “Yes, that’s a good idea. We should have all the data to share. Can you take care of that? I’ll go straight to the captain and the mayor, but while I’m waiting—” His wearable buzzed. He almost ignored it, but recognized the characteristic trill of a call from Emer. He answered it.