Nobody said Rock Hauling would be easy. Throughout settled space, terraforming is the fuel that drives the interstellar economy. For some worlds, this is easy. For others, lacking resources, or on the periphery, this is an unattainable dream. Throug...
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TOMAS II
Tomas sipped his lunch from a tube.
To be fair, it wasn't really 'lunch'. They all ate two meals a day on the ship. It was long-haul fare; Gelled protein and dehydrated powder packets so fake you could positively taste the synthetic in the flavoring. Every ten days, they'd spice things up with an extra serving of fruits and veggies from the hydroponics module, and a single cube of real Quama jerky. For the humans, at least. The aliens had it better. Less of them meant just a little more space for their delicacies. And there were always more humans than aliens. He'd triple-checked the supply manifests the instant he'd found out the ship's carrying capacity, so long ago. A dry weight just shy of one million tons, and carrying over half again that much. By the time they were almost back, he knew, they'd be down to reclaim. That meant waste products processed into a paste, recycled urine, and, if things got bad enough, mandatory bloodletting of those who were tasked with non-essential duties, so they could all share the iron content and protein, once the ichor had been sterilized, and everything useful leeched out of it into the reclaimers.
And of course, everyone knew the tales of astronavigator brains or course correction files misjudging things, or getting stranded when they had their reactors or their drive nacelles holed or melted in freak accidents. That's when people who wasted away got chucked in the reclaim processors. But that was normal life on the poorer planets. The real horror stories were on stranded ships when starving, desperate people began to draw straws.
He shook his head, the old ritual banishing his habitual anxiousness for a moment. They weren't there, and things wouldn't get that bad. And anyways, they still had a good hundred and ten days of solid food left before they would have to supplement it with waste products or reclaim. They had another eighty days of hydroponics left, before they'd have to sift through the waste processors for essential vitamins, and there was another nine meals with that one, mouth-watering, thumb-sized cube of Quama jerky per serving left.
But today, zipped up and buckled as they were into their voidsuits, it was paste. A mashed, watery sludge that met both their hydration and protein needs, with a little bit of vitamins thrown in for good measure. And bone and muscle density supplements, of course. They'd brought a lot of those. Some people feared brittlebone and ataxia more than starvation.
