“This is called a biofabricator,” Lucky said from beside her, watching Dust with wide, observant eyes. Judging her reaction, probably. “It takes culture proteins grown by algal vats…” She trailed off her string of almost meaningless alien words. “It does what a mare’s womb does, only without a mare. They’re critical for slower-than-light space travel, at least the way we did it. Nobody ever seriously talked about making an ark, which was about the only other way people knew of when I left.”