Chapter 11: The Independent Gods
Cato-Ikent was selfishly glad that he didn’t have to experience the Fern War firsthand. He still got the reports and memory-clouds from the versions of himself that were directly involved, but that wasn’t the same as having to actually face the destruction of a planet he’d watched for years. Or have a hopeless confrontation with his cousins, seeing them so bent and distorted, twisted into murderous monsters by the System’s architecture.
Of course, he had his own difficulties to grapple with. Mii-Es was not exactly irritating, but she kept trying to play politics against him, when there was absolutely no need for it. He was on her side, more or less, but he also had to be at least a little reserved about his capabilities and they both knew it.
Raine and Leese Ikent had at least found new purpose with what they had dubbed Project Birdnest, which was being performed out by an ice giant and its swarm of attendant moons. Less for the sake of materials as to make sure it was far away from any possible System expansion, though the Core showed that it was at least possible to take over an entire star system. He just had to hope the essence cost was so prohibitively expensive that they wouldn’t.
The complex for Birdnest was, from the outside, six habitats – three of the usual counter-rotating pairs – connected by scaffolding to big bulbs of biolabs and computronium, looking like the world’s largest benzene ring. Inside, the O’Neill cylinders were full of engineered greenery, some of it taken from the homeworld where he’d found Mii-Es’ people, some of it created whole cloth from the basic biochemical profile to fill in gaps.
It wasn’t enough just to have air and water reprocessing, or print out proteins on industrial nutrient dispensers. People couldn’t be raised in a sterile lab environment and turn out anything near sane. It might be impossible to give the avians their original homeworld – it was very thoroughly populated by a large Inner Worlds Clan – but technology could at least give them a facsimile of a natural environment.
He traipsed along the winding trail through Tropical Garden One, taking note of areas where the plants and insects seemed to be thriving, and those places where they weren’t. There were innumerable sensors and surveillance drones to keep track of these things, of course, and powerful analytics software to dive into any deficiencies, but it was always a good idea to put a genuine eye on it from time to time. Besides, the habitats were gloriously picturesque, with the massive columns rising from the curved walls to the light-tube at the center that mimicked the sun, and a panoply of brightly-colored vegetation forming the sky overhead.
Cato stopped at one of the columns, part support, part supply, and entered the elevator there, gripping the holdfasts as it began to rise. Spin-gravity dropped away as the elevator brought him to the axial transport network, and he buckled himself before he was whisked off down the tube. Despite the designs being long-tested and high-quality, there was still clanging and vibration as the capsule was handed off between the habitat and the interstitial scaffolding. The viewscreens displayed support struts crossing in front of the blue-green crescent of the ice giant, the only proof of motion once the capsule had gotten up to speed.
At the destination, the surroundings changed from the pale gray and navy blue industrial-chic of the transports to the starker white and lighter blues and greens of a medical facility as he went through decontamination. Not that it strictly needed to have atmosphere, or be accessible by human-style frames, but the feel of the architecture often influenced the attitude of those who used it. So it was a hushed place, with halls full of glass windows that faced out onto the many rooms of the biolab.
Some of them held centrifuges or spin-gravity labs, silently rotating away in ceramic and glass containment with large winking telltales, while others had massive arrays of bio-vats or chemical synthesis chambers to feed the test arrays at the heart of the facility. It might have seemed like an impossibly large amount of infrastructure, but resurrecting a nearly-extinct species – as well as their entire biosphere – with only a handful of gene samples was not a simple task.