Arthur was watching the proceedings on the ship's bridge from his vantage point in the back, slowly sipping some tea. The captain was busy directing his subordinates , checking the various security cameras and barking orders into his comm in preparation to leave orbit. All was going well.
The bridge wasn't anything too fancy. It was remarkably like a normal office, with people sitting at desks tapping away at keyboards and checking stuff on their screens. There were windows of course, but they looked out upon the garden surrounding the command building. Beyond the garden, on the rising slope of the centrifugal torus, he could see the medical building.
It took some getting used to the fact the ship looked more like a small village while still being in space. Some other ships of the Tongass Astronautics division were of the "submarine in space" design, complete with cramped spaces and zero gravity, but if you build a ship strong enough to haul lots of cargo and with sufficient shielding for interplanetary missions, it's also big and heavy enough that a few habitat rings.
On the longer missions, comfort is important. He remembered the first ships they used, everyone floating around and the only thing to eat was that awful algae paste from the own recycling system. Arthur took a fruit from the bowl on his desk and popped into his mind. This was much better.
The company's board had howled of course, yelling at him for giving in, but he had build an alliance with the Gaians. They handled all the biological systems, so the air here was crisp, the food was great and the interior of the habitat rings looked like a relaxing village in the woods. They did the same on the Lunar and Mars habitats. When you have a two month transit time to asteroid belt, having a homey situation helped for morale. It didn't cost much power anyway, not compared to the power needs for moving through space. Any board member complaining was invited to go on a diplomatic mission on a 'pure' ship and they shut up quickly.
The captain was making the final preparations for another trip. The route would see them loading up raw materials from Earth, mostly biological matter, and take them to the facilities in the belt. There they would take metals back to Earth where they used it to construct the orbital ring.
Gaians were paid handsomely for providing their services to maintain the air, food and recycling on the ship and the Gaians spend it on the orbital ring. It made an uneasy but functional economy. They were locked in a truce based in mutual assured destruction. Tongass could try to steal the Gaian tech but they would be sued into Oblivian by the Solar Courts over intellectual property rights. They could also kill the laws about intellectual property but then Gaians would stop using their services, and they were 90% of their business.
The departure countdown reached zero. All connections to the orbital construction facilities released. The fission reactors of the ship went into high gear, generating electricity that was directed to the engines. The thousands of ion drives on the back of the ship powered up, pushing the ship away from the facilities with a deceptively slow speed. At first it was moving away only fractions of inches, but it would gain speed. Slow and steady wins the race here.
The ship itself was was not much to look at. It was a simple cylinder of armor and radiation shielding, protecting the habitat rings, cargo and reactors on the inside. On both sides of the cylinder was a vast field of radiator panels that for some reason was shaped like a circle so the total looked like a flying saucer. The backside was now glowing blue, accelerating the ship with the blistering speed of 0.02 G.
Arthur only noticed the departure as he saw his tea ever so slightly move to the side of the cup. If he didn't know what to look for he would never have notice it. On his screens he saw the Earth turning below him. One thing was sure, this was no longer the Earth he knew. Ava, her children and the rest of the Gaians has turned on the evolution speed of nature into overdrive. There were species of animals and plants that defied the imagination. They tried to restore what they could and did their best to fill up everything else with something new.
The dark side of the planet below him showed very little bright spots of light. There were some cities left, but they were like monasteries, filled with people choosing a more ancient way of living compared to those around them. The old City where the Tongass headquarter used to be was the worst. Their old headquarter, and a large part of the city, was now a museum, the "Johnson's Classics and Cash Museum of the Industrial Age", run by the oldest man in history.
The rest of the population, billions of them, lived outside the cities where they didn't need such crude methods as artificial light to see. Arthur had seen pictures of the trees glowing in various colors. Those Gaians acted like they were living in some fairy tale.
He was glad to be traveling through space where things were sane.