A Decent Land: An Anthology of Arks #2

Brief biographies of the first forty ships to arrive in the system Mammaria.

Part One of this anthology is available here.

6. Diseased Metropolis (Vetzsas Maias)

Vetzsas Maias was once a proud capital, but now it holds that status out of pity. It’s a shaking, traumatised invalid, with a thriving media industry. I suppose, when I meet the Musicians of Maias, it’s easy to see why creativity blooms on the back of this ancient porpoise. We herd a brood of space-faring, ageless creatures, which we tamed, and built our finest cities upon; fuelled by the very blood of the beasts.

Things went well for two-hundred generations; a symbiotic exchange took place. We fed the bioships, the bioships played host to our cities and no-one had cause to complain; there were just a few unfortunate disasters involving violent stomach upsets. Vetzsas — our name for the graceful alpha — was obedient in the extreme. She revelled in her journey, corralled by our hopes, and gladly skipped through nebulae, quasars, wormholes and rifts in the ever.

She was attractive, precocious and rippling with promise, but that was destroyed by The Gator we found on the ring of some distant planet. Vetzsas sniffed it out, and waddled her way to…