A metallic clunk.

I'm twisting fast. Nerves still hyped. Locking into a karate stance, ready for anything. No use. No fucking use at all.

Khanivore is climbing out of its life-support pod.

Timeline

2075 - JSKP germinates Eden, a bitek habitat in orbit around Jupiter, with un protectorate status.

2077 - New Kong asteroid begins ftl stardrive research project.

2085 - Eden opened for habitation.

2086 - Habitat Pallas germinated in Jupiter orbit.

Jupiter, 2090

A Second Chance at Eden

The Ithilien decelerated into Jupiter orbit at a constant twentieth of a gee, giving us a spectacular view of the gas giant's battling storm bands as we curved round towards the dark side. Even that's a misnomer, there is no such thing as true darkness down there. Lightning forks whose size could put the Amazon tributary network to shame slashed between oceanic spirals of frozen ammonia. It was awesome, beautiful, and terrifyingly large.

I had to leave the twins by themselves in the observation blister once Ithilien circularized its orbit five hundred and fifty thousand kilometres out. It took us another five hours to rendezvous with Eden; not only did we have to match orbits, but we were approaching the habitat from a high inclination as well. Captain Saldana was competent, but it was still five hours of thruster nudges, low-frequency oscillations, and transient bursts of low-gee acceleration. I spent the time strapped into my bunk, popping nausea suppressors, and trying not to analogize between Ithilien 's jockeying and a choppy sea. It wouldn't look good arriving at a new posting unable to retain my lunch. Security men are supposed to be unflappable, carved from granite, or some such nonsense anyway.

Our cabin's screen flicked through camera inputs for me. As we were still in the penumbra I got a better view of the approach via electronically amplified images than eyeballing it from the blister.

Eden was a rust-brown cylinder with hemispherical endcaps, eight kilometres long, twenty-eight hundred metres in diameter. But it had only been germinated in 2075, fifteen years ago. I talked to Pieter Zernov during the flight from Earth's O'Neill Halo, he was one of the genetics team who designed the habitats for the Jovian Sky Power corporation, and he said they expected Eden to grow out to a length of eleven kilometres eventually.

It was orientated with the endcaps pointing north/south, so it rolled along its orbit. The polyp shell was smooth, looking more like a manufactured product than anything organic. Biology could never be that neat in nature. The only break in Eden's symmetry I could see were two rings of onion-shaped nodules spaced around the rim of each endcap. Specialist extrusion glands, which spun out organic conductor cables. There were hundreds of them, eighty kilometres long, radiating out from the habitat like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, rotation keeping them perfectly straight. It was an induction system; the cables sliced through Jupiter's titanic magnetosphere to produce all the power Eden needed to run its organs, as well as providing light and heat for the interior.