When people think of space greenhouses, they think of them as more or less like the ones back on Earth. Or in science fiction films, an area of the ship that would essentially be an entire forest, with trees rising from soil on the ground, and false sunlight illuminating the trunks leading to the glorious glass ceilings that looked out on to the stars.

Naomi’s domain was not green. It could be, if all the glowing LED lamps were turned off, and the normal pale lights throughout the rest of the ship turned on. Instead, everything glowed magenta. The combination of blue and red lights made the plants appear black as they soaked up the energy, nothing reflected. Naomi had long since started calling them her goth plants.

The lab was as small a footprint as possible to grow all that they needed. The walls were lined with two rows of glowing, horizontal glass tubes running across the wall in neat rows stacked from floor to ceiling, segmented every three feet so Naomi could slot the algae vials in and out as needed. She’d grown six batches of cyanobacteria so far, staggering the seven-day growth cycles.

She was often alone in her lab. Lebedeva would come in and check the hardware for the bioreactors or to service the harvester. The algae levels had to remain above a certain level, as they were part of the life support system, concentrating carbon dioxide from the air with machines and bubbling the CO2-enriched air to the bioreactors. The algae grew faster as a result, which gave the ship a buffer on carbon dioxide and oxygen levels in the air.

Hart would be in more as the weeks progressed. Naomi knew plants, but Irene Hart understood bodies. Together, they’d conduct tests to ensure the five women on board were receiving adequate nutrition and had healthy gut flora. The walls and floors throughout the ship were already peppered with radiation detectors, which all showed normal levels so far. The shields were holding. But Hart would also run full biomedical scans to ensure that they wouldn’t be riddled with cancer by Cavendish.

First, Naomi had to grow the food.

The GMO strains of spirulina were coming along nicely. She walked through the thin, purple corridor of reinforced glass tubes, checking the readings, taking down the segments with mature culture and putting them into the harvester machine that would turn them into pellets or powder. Mostly it created gummy nutriblocks the size and texture of Turkish delight but even more foul.