The physicists back on Midgard thought what they were seeing was all due to interference from interstellar dust. Cute, right?
We haven’t been wasting the summer. Hieronymus Marshall is a jackass, but he isn’t stupid, and he wants this colony to live. We’ve been stockpiling food, studying the local fauna to figure out how they survive the winters, building out the dome to accommodate the first round of decanted embryos, releasing engineered algae that are supposed to begin the work of pushing the atmosphere further toward something we can breathe, etc., etc., etc.
The problem is that it all takes time, and that’s something we don’t have an infinite supply of. All the things that keep us alive here take enormous amounts of power, and right now the only real power source we have is the Drakkar’s antimatter reactor, still spinning away under the hub, slowly drawing down the last of the fuel supply that brought us here.
Which brings me back to Maggie Ling, hustling another me down Spoke Three toward the hub. Without the reactor, we might just barely be able to get by, as long as the weather holds.
That’s the thing, though. The weather is not going to hold.
I’VE SPENT ALMOST all of my work shifts since my resignation with Agriculture. This isn’t because I have a green thumb or anything. It’s mostly by default. I don’t have the qualifications to do anything useful for Physics or Biology or Engineering. Amundsen in Security is tight with Marshall and also is still down on me for losing consciousness while Cat and I were fighting creepers on the perimeter two years ago, so he mostly wants nothing to do with me these days. I’ll probably get to spend some time changing diapers in the crèche once they start pulling babies out of cold storage, but that’s still on hold at the moment, pending a bit more confidence that we can keep them alive once they’re decanted.
So, that leaves me with Agriculture. On this day, in fact, I’m hanging with Jamie Harrison, taking care of the rabbits.
You might be wondering why we keep rabbits in a closed-loop ecological system. Raising animals for meat can be a net source of calories in a place where they can more or less fend for themselves, staying alive by eating things like grass and weeds that we wouldn’t or couldn’t eat. On Niflheim, though, that kind of thing is still entirely aspirational. Rabbits can’t eat the lichen and ferns that surround the dome now. The proteins that the natives use here are folded the wrong way for Union life. Instead we feed them tomato vines and potato greens and protein slurry, some of which gets converted into edible rabbit parts but most of which just gets burned up by their stupid mammalian metabolisms or turned into poop. At the end of the day, every kcal of edible rabbit meat costs us about three kcal of other stuff that we could conceivably have just eaten ourselves, as well as a huge pile of stuff that we can’t eat, but that could have gone back into the cycler. Rabbits are a massive luxury item in a place that is notably short on pretty much any other type of luxury. So, why do we do it?
Well, for one, rabbits are cute. Numerous psychological studies over the past thousand years of the diaspora have shown that humans need a certain amount of cuddliness in their lives, and rabbits are the only things on Niflheim that provide that for us.
Of course, they’re also delicious. As soon as they reach full growth, it’s off to the kitchen with these guys. In the meantime, though, they’re a lot more fun to hang around with than most of the people in this colony.
Jamie, on the other hand, is neither cute nor fun to hang around with.
Rabbits on Niflheim are treated essentially the same way maximum-security prisoners were treated back on Midgard. They spend the vast majority of their time crammed into three small hutches pushed up against a wall next to the hydroponics tanks. Once a day, we let them out one hutch at a time into a slightly larger space bounded by a bulkhead on two sides and a short white wire fence on the other. They hop around a little, get whatever exercise they can, hang out with anyone who (a) needs a cuteness fix and (b) has sterilized themselves to Jamie’s satisfaction, and then get plopped back into the hutch for another day, where they while away the time eating, pooping, and making more rabbits.
It’s not a terrible life.
It’s better than mine in a lot of ways, if I’m being honest.
If I had any choice about my duty cycles, I’d probably spend most of them here. I don’t, though. I get to hang with the rabbits during working hours when Jamie puts in a request for my services, and that only happens on two occasions. One is culling day, which is when I get to go through the hutches and pick out the males who are big enough for eating and the females who are old enough that their reproduction has started to slow down. The other, like today, is hutch-cleaning day.
The good thing about hutch-cleaning day is that Jamie doesn’t trust me to do it properly. That means I get to spend the day wrangling the rabbits while he does most of the actual work.
I’ve just finished pulling the last of the kits out of Hutch One and dropping them off in the exercise yard when the door to the corridor slides open and Berto steps through.
Great.
“Hey,” he says. “How’s my dinner doing?”
I sigh, straighten, and turn to face him. He steps over the fence and crouches down to stroke a kit’s ears with one finger.
“Hands off, Gomez,” Jamie says without turning away from whatever he’s doing in the hutch. “You’re not sterile.”
Berto laughs. “Sterile? These things are rats in fancy suits, Jamie. You’re literally scooping piles of shit out of their house right now. If anyone should be worried about contamination, it’s me.”
“This is not a debate,” Jamie says. “Get your hands off of my animals or get out of my space. I can have Security down here in less than a minute.”
Berto’s smile disappears, and it looks like he’s going to argue. In the end, though, he shakes his head and stands.
“Jamie’s right,” I say. “You know that, don’t you? These poor guys spend nine-tenths of their time crawling all over each other in the hutches. If you get one of them sick, they’ll all be dead in a week, and it’s not like we have a backup supply around here anywhere.”
“Whatever,” Berto says. “I didn’t come down here to play with the bunnies.”
I wait for him to go on. After a long five seconds, I raise one eyebrow and say, “So…”
His expression shifts from annoyed to confused. “So, what?”
I roll my eyes. “Why did you come down here, Berto?”
He grins. “Oh. I was bored, mostly. Didn’t Nasha tell you?”
Now it’s my turn to be confused. “Tell me what?”
“We’re grounded,” he says. “No more aerial reconnaissance until further notice.”
Huh.
“No,” I say. “Nasha didn’t mention that. When did this happen?”
“I found out this morning when I showed up for my shift. Maybe they haven’t told her yet?”
“Yeah. Maybe. Did they tell you why?”
He shakes his head. “Not really. The tech on duty said something about not being able to charge the gravitic grids, but that doesn’t make any sense. We’ve got an antimatter reactor, right? It’s not like we need to ration power.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You wouldn’t think so.”
“Not like it matters. I’m pretty confident at this point that there’s nothing out there that’s a threat to us other than the creepers, and I haven’t seen one of them within five klicks of the dome since the weather turned. Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather be flying than … well, than pretty much anything, I guess. I’m not kidding myself, though. Aerial reconnaissance at this point is a waste of time and resources.”