Chapter 2

 It was a ten-minute walk to the meeting place, no more. The transport tunnel had its own characteristic atmosphere. Not in terms of some air composition, but in general - such tunnel-streets were distinguished by their own characteristic sounds, echoes and air currents.

The pedestrian part, fenced off by a barrier, was level with the roadway, along which the platform cars drove one after another. They were mainly transporting equipment units, but there were also some loaded with unpacked ingots - the stuff that was mainly sent to Earth. Now they were transporting the largest ones - these were meter-long beams made of some kind of gray metal. Possibly tungsten.

 The smallest of the typical series were only twenty centimeters long. As a rule, these were not cheap even with the current mining of yttrium, niobium or some lanthanum. Some of this was taken from asteroids, to which unmanned devices, immune to solar activity and radiation, flew. Some was enriched in orbit, some here. They also made large single crystals, but this was mainly for their own needs.

 After all the processing and cleaning, the raw materials were awaited by a whole complex of transfer points and a road to Earth. A long flight, about a year, on a leisurely unmanned ship, just like the asteroid hunters, did not need any bio-protection.

 Somerset still could not get his head around how this entire flow of raw materials was supposed to exist in the new conditions of separatism. One flow to Earth was not enough, there was another no less important one in the opposite direction - organic matter was dragged from Earth. It could be anything, from sawdust to the shit of various animals. Some of this stuff was transported with bio-protection. Huge and expensive to operate passenger transport could carry shit.

 Providing the settlement with food was something much more complicated than growing natural plants in greenhouses and tissues of individual fruits in columns. There was also a well-known issue with meat - the matrices from which the tissues were grown had to be changed, taking new biopsies from chickens or other livestock running around the farms. It had long been known to everyone that if you ate for years what was grown from one individual chicken or pig, you could get a whole range of all sorts of diseases. And this was in the home conditions of Earth. Raising your own livestock here was considered a troublesome business, so the matrices were brought from there.

 Biosecurity in such cases could be simpler - a container the size of a suitcase could be lined with lead and boron and transported for at least a year or two. As for plants, they could not just grow on rocks, water and sunlight or artificial light alone. They could germinate and grow, for that there was hydroponics with a solution of mineral components. But for many, many generations, an external influx of organic matter was needed. We needed domestic, Earth organics - at least black soil, at least sawdust, at least shit. Thus, green biomass, plant consolidant, as it was called, although it was grown and increased by local resources, but it became full-fledged only thanks to the import of organics from the Earth. From the plant consolidant, among other things, they received what was needed for the columns of replication synthesis that grew animal cells. The food chain.

 This was only the tip of the iceberg. During the initial construction of the station-settlement, scientists came to the conclusion that it was contraindicated for a person to live in an atmosphere of sterility, that it was necessary to form their own, albeit not fully calculated, biosphere. Some microorganisms were inevitably brought in by people themselves, but some came from organics, including shit through plants and further into the biosphere cycle. And how to conduct this import, which needed constant scientific calculation and correction, in conditions of confrontation?

Ahead appeared a sign and a side corridor. Passing by and glancing into the branch, Somerset managed to notice a nondescript sign written in white on blue: "Paramedic station". Below was the note "Neuropalatine". The second should be read as nothing other than "drug cafe". At least, Somerset adhered to the radical views that all these treatment rooms were essentially real dens, it was just that the public was not from the bottom of society, and everything was controlled by a doctor. Well, and all the drugs were licensed, had their own medical purposes, and were not something from the basements of mafia chemists. Still, this did not change the essence. Somehow it resembled immersion in simplified anabiosis, but the anabiotic procedure during flights was a necessity and did not bring any relief, if we were talking about fatigue, or even more so pleasure. Accordingly, the possibility of any psychological addiction was excluded. And here, in essence, was the same thing that had always been condemned. Somerset had always gotten by with good old booze, and he had no intention of changing this line of behavior, which limited his choice of means. A hundred meters after the branch, the tunnel made a turn and another exit appeared - this one led to the transport hub.