The mechanical arms reach into their supply area and come back with a bag of white powder and drop it on the bunk.

I pick up the bag. Of course it’s a powder. Why would they include the liquid in the long-term storage? The water system of the Hail Mary is a closed loop. Water goes into me, it comes out of me in various ways, and then it’s purified and reused.

I take the package to the lab, open it up, and pour some powder in a beaker.

I add a little water, give it a stir, and it becomes a milky-white slurry. I give it a sniff. It doesn’t really smell like anything. So I take a sip.

It takes effort, but I resist the urge to spit it out. It tastes like aspirin. That nasty pill-like taste. I’m going to have to eat this Bitter Pill Chow™ every meal for several years.

Maybe a coma isn’t that bad.

I set the beaker aside. I’ll deal with that misery when the time comes. For now, I’m going to work on the beetles.

I have four little Taumoeba farms, courtesy of Rocky. Each one is a steel-ish capsule no larger than my hand. I say “steel-ish” because it’s some Eridian alloy of steel that humans haven’t invented yet. It’s much harder than any metal alloys we have, but not harder than diamond-cutting tools.

We went back and forth on the mini-farm casing. The obvious first choice was to make it out of xenonite. The problem is: How would Earth scientists get in? None of our tools would be able to cut it. The only option would be extremely high heat. And that risks harming the Taumoeba inside.

I suggested a xenonite container with a lid. Something that could be clamped down tight like a pressure door. I’d leave instructions on the USB stick on how to safely open it. Rocky rejected that idea right away. No matter how good the seal was, it wouldn’t be perfect. Over the two years that the farm will experience during the trip, enough air could leak out to suffocate the Taumoeba inside. He insisted the whole farm be a single, completely sealed container. Probably a good idea.

So we settled on Eridian steel. It’s strong, it doesn’t oxidize easily, and it’s extremely durable. Earth can cut it open with a diamond saw. And hey, they’ll probably analyze it to learn how to make their own. Everyone wins!

His approach for the farms themselves was simple. Inside, there’s an active colony of Taumoeba and a Venus-like atmosphere. Also, there’s a coil of very thin steel-ish tubing full of Astrophage. The Taumoeba can only get at the outermost layer, so they have to work their way down the tube, which has a total length of about 20 meters. Some basic experimentation tells us that will last the small Taumoeba population several years. As for waste products—they’ll just stew in their own poop. The capsule will gain methane and lose carbon dioxide over time, but it doesn’t matter. Though it’s a small volume by human standards, it’s a vast, gigantic cavern to the tiny microbes inside.