A Celestial Rodentia adventure: Prepare for Lift-Off (3/4)
The sun was not even all the way up yet when Nova tiptoed into the ready room, careful not to wake anyone. She wasn't sneaking off to explore. She was checking on her plants.
In the corner, under a soft purple-pink glow, sat a small tray of what looked like tiny green cushions. Each one held a seedling, its roots tucked into a spongy pad instead of loose dirt. Nova leaned close and breathed in the warm, damp, growing smell. Two new leaves had unfurled overnight on the little lettuce in the third row. She wheeked so softly only the plants could hear her.
"Good morning, you two," she whispered to a pair of curling pea shoots. "Big day today. Try to look impressive."
Today was the Life Systems Trial, the last big test before the Celestial Rodentia would be cleared to fly. Three systems would be graded: the machine that made air and water, the machine that kept muscles and bones strong, and Nova's greenhouse. She already knew, in the quiet worried part of her stomach, which one everyone thought was the least important. Rocky's machines had thunder and sparks. Starlight's readouts blinked important-looking numbers. Her plants just sat there, growing, one slow leaf at a time, which was not exactly the sort of thing that made anyone gasp.
Nova was the crew's biologist and botanist, the one who got excited about root systems the way Gizmo got excited about being first at things. She loved it, truly. But loving a job and worrying nobody else sees the point of it can sit in the same stomach at the same time, and hers had been doing exactly that for days.
She told herself it didn't matter. She told herself that twice more before breakfast, and once again on the way to the training wing, just to be sure.
✦ ✦ ✦
By the time the rest of the crew gathered in the training wing, the life systems specialist was waiting for them with a clipboard and a smile that meant business. She was the person in charge of making sure six guinea pigs could survive months away from Earth without so much as a sniffle.
"Three stations," she said, pointing down a long hallway with three doors. "Recycler Room, Strength Bay, Greenhouse Dome. Each one keeps you alive in its own way. Let's see how they hold up."
Gizmo bounced on his paws. "Finally! I've been waiting all week for this."
"You've been waiting all week for the snack afterward," Cosmo said.
"That too."
✦ ✦ ✦
The Recycler Room hummed like a giant, patient beehive. Starlight and Rocky stood proudly beside a machine covered in coiled tubes and one glowing blue dial.
"This," Rocky announced, thumping the side of it gently, "turns the air you breathe out, and even the sweat off your fur, right back into clean water. Then it splits some of that water apart with a little jolt of electricity, and out comes fresh oxygen for you to breathe again."
"Wait," said Luna. "You're saying we're going to drink our own breath?"
"Basically," Starlight said, trying not to smile. "About nine out of every ten drops of water on this ship will get used again and again. Nothing goes to waste out there. Space doesn't hand out free refills."
Cosmo made a face somewhere between impressed and horrified. "So when I say 'this water tastes familiar,' I'll be right."
"Don't think about it too hard," Starlight said. "It works. That's what matters."
Nova leaned in to study the coiled tubing, genuinely curious despite the little knot in her stomach. "What happens to the carbon dioxide part? The part we breathe out that we don't want to breathe back in?"
"Good question," Rocky said, surprised, and pointed to a smaller unit bolted beside the main machine. "That gets caught here, in a filter packed so tight it grabs carbon dioxide molecules out of the air the way a sieve catches noodles out of soup water. Different size, different hole. It just sorts itself out."
The specialist checked a reading on her clipboard and nodded, pleased. "Recycler Room: excellent."
Rocky puffed up so much Starlight had to nudge him toward the door before his head got stuck.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Strength Bay looked nothing like a gym. There were no barbells, no dumbbells, nothing that could roll away and float off in a room with no gravity to hold it down. Instead, there was a frame with two sealed metal cylinders and a set of handles.
"No weights up there," the specialist explained, "so we build resistance a different way. Push or pull on these handles, and a vacuum inside the cylinders pushes back, like an invisible friend leaning against you. Your muscles and bones don't know the difference. They still have to work."
Luna gave the handles a pull and raised her eyebrows. "That's stronger than it looks."
"It has to be," the specialist said. "Muscles and bones get lazy fast when nothing pushes back on them. Without machines like this, a body can lose a real chunk of its strength on a long trip. This is how we make sure you all come home just as strong as you left."
Gizmo hopped up to try it and immediately tried to leap onto the frame like it was a springboard.
He did not get very far. He sort of thudded.
"Careful," the specialist laughed. "This one's built for pushing and pulling, not jumping. Guinea pigs have strong back legs, some of the strongest for their size of any animal in this building, but you're not natural jumpers. Better to leave the leaping to the crickets."
"I knew that," Gizmo said, dusting himself off with great dignity.
"You did not," said Nova, and for the first time all morning, she laughed too.
The specialist made another note. "Strength Bay: excellent."
Two stations down. One to go.
✦ ✦ ✦
The Greenhouse Dome was Nova's station, and the moment the door slid open, the whole crew blinked in the sudden rosy-purple light.
"Whoa," Cosmo said. "It's like walking into a sunset."
"The lights are tuned to the colors plants use best," Nova said, some of her nervousness melting into pride now that she was standing among her own rows of green. "Red and blue light. Plants don't need the green part much, so it bounces right back out at us, that's why everything looks pink."
She showed them the growing pillows, soft padded squares that held water and nutrients close to the roots. "In real microgravity, water doesn't sink into soil the normal way. It just floats around in wobbly little balls. These pillows soak it up and hold it steady, so the roots always have what they need."
She'd grown lettuce, a little kale, some herbs, and one determined zinnia that had bloomed a whole week early.
"You grew all this since we got here?" Luna asked, touching a lettuce leaf so gently it barely bent.
"Six weeks," Nova said. "Well, six weeks and about forty tiny disasters. The first batch didn't make it. Neither did the second. Third time worked."
"Nobody told us there were two batches that didn't make it," Luna said.
"Nobody asked," Nova said, lighter than she meant it, and immediately wished she hadn't said it quite like that.
The crew admired the dome for a polite minute more. Rocky peeked at his own reflection in the Recycler Room's shiny dial through the doorway. Gizmo's stomach growled, loud enough that Cosmo snorted. The specialist glanced at her clipboard, and for a second Nova was sure she saw her scribbling faster here than she had at the other two stations, like this was the station to get through quickly before lunch.
"Greenhouse Dome," the specialist said. "Passing."
Not excellent. Passing.
Nova smiled anyway, because that's what you did, but the smile didn't quite reach all the way up.
✦ ✦ ✦
They gathered afterward in the debrief room, six guinea pigs and one very satisfied-looking clipboard. The specialist set it down and looked at all of them, and something about her expression made even Cosmo stop mid-joke.
"I want to tell you a story," she said. "A long time ago, sailors used to go on ocean voyages that lasted for months. They had plenty of food. Salted meat, hard biscuits, barrels and barrels of it. And yet on the longest trips, they started getting sick. Weak. Their gums bled. Nobody understood why, because they weren't starving. They just weren't getting one very small thing their bodies needed and couldn't make on their own. A vitamin, found fresh in fruits and vegetables, that breaks down and fades the longer food sits in storage."
She looked around the room.
"Guinea pigs have the exact same problem. Your bodies can't make that vitamin either, no matter how well you eat. You have to get it fresh, again and again, or over a long enough trip, you'd get sick in exactly the same way those old sailors did. It doesn't matter how perfect your air is, or how strong your muscles stay. Without a steady supply of fresh, growing food, none of it is enough."
She turned to Nova.
"Which means the Greenhouse Dome isn't the smallest system on this ship. It's the one none of the others can replace."
The room went very quiet. Rocky, mid-chew on absolutely nothing, forgot to close his mouth.
"Also," the specialist added, flipping back a page, "I noticed something in your grow logs from four days ago. A few of your seedlings were looking pale, weren't they?"
Nova's ears went warm. "I, um. Yes. I didn't want to bother anyone, so I looked it up myself and adjusted the nutrient mix. They perked back up by the next day."
"You caught a problem before anyone even knew to look for it," the specialist said. "That's not a small job. That's the whole job. The Recycler Room and the Strength Bay only had to work today, once, for a test. Your dome has to work every single day, quietly, for the whole trip, or none of us find out until it's too late to fix. That's a harder kind of excellent. It just doesn't come with sparks."
Gizmo turned to Nova with the exact wide-eyed look he'd worn the day he learned about being first into space. "You've basically been running the most important system on this ship this whole time. While we were staring at our own reflections."
"I was not staring at my reflection," said Rocky, staring at his reflection in a nearby window.
Nova didn't know what to do with all the eyes suddenly on her, so she did the thing guinea pigs do when something wonderful and a little too big happens all at once. She popcorned, straight up, all four paws off the ground, landing in a pile of pea shoots she'd forgotten she was still holding.
✦ ✦ ✦
That evening, the whole crew crowded into the Greenhouse Dome, which had never once fit six guinea pigs comfortably before. Nova handed out little pots and a scoop each of soft growing medium.
"Everybody gets a seed," she said. "You're each planting something you'll have to check on every single day. No skipping. Plants notice."
"What if I talk to mine?" Cosmo asked, already crouched low and murmuring something encouraging to his pot.
"Plants can't hear you," Nova said.
"They can't prove that."
Luna planted hers with the same careful precision she used for navigation, measuring the depth twice. Starlight tucked hers in like she was tucking in a very small, very green baby. Rocky, to nobody's surprise, tried to build his a tiny reinforced fence out of twigs before Nova gently pointed out that seedlings don't generally need to be defended from anything.
Gizmo planted his last, patting the soil down with great seriousness. "For the record," he told his pot, "I still think I'd be a natural at growing things too."
"You'll water it upside down within the week," Nova said.
"...Maybe."
As the pink light settled over six guinea pigs and six new seeds, the propulsion engineer leaned into the doorway, wiping fuel-stained paws on a rag.
"Don't get too comfortable in the sunset room," she said, grinning. "Now that you've got food and air and strong legs sorted, we've got one more thing standing between you and the stars. Fuel. As in, exactly how much of it takes to lift six guinea pigs and this whole ship clean off the ground. Meet me at the launch pad tomorrow, and bring your calculators."
"We don't have calculators," Cosmo said. "We have Gizmo."
"Close enough," said the propulsion engineer, and disappeared down the hall, already laughing.
Nova looked around at her crewmates, elbow-deep in soil, arguing gently about whose seedling would sprout first, and felt something settle warm and quiet in her chest. Not because anyone had told her she mattered.
She'd already known that, quietly, every morning before anyone else was awake.
It was just nice to be seen.
The End... for now.
A Celestial Rodentia adventure, brought to you by GCAGE.
What we learned in this episode
- Air and water get reused, again and again. About nine out of every ten drops of water on a long space voyage get cleaned and recycled instead of thrown away, and fresh oxygen can even be made by splitting some of that recycled water apart with electricity.
- Carbon dioxide gets filtered out of the air using material packed so tightly it catches those specific molecules and lets everything else pass through, like a very picky sieve.
- Muscles and bones need something to push against. In microgravity there's no weight to lift, so exercise machines use sealed, airless cylinders instead of barbells, giving muscles and bones the resistance they need to stay strong.
- Guinea pigs have powerful back legs, but they're not natural jumpers. All that strength is built for quick sprints and sudden stops, not for leaping.
- Growing plants without gravity takes special tricks. Water doesn't soak into loose soil in microgravity, it floats in wobbly blobs, so plants are grown in water-holding pillows instead. Grow lights tuned to the red and blue light plants use best often glow pink, since the green light bounces back out unused.
- Guinea pigs can't make their own vitamin C, just like humans. They have to get it fresh from food, again and again, or they can get seriously sick over time, even if everything else about their care is perfect.