The Colony

Who knows? This might be the prequel to another setting.
To The Lit-awoo-erry =n.n=‘s prompt.

There were things they hadn’t planned for because they hadn’t known.

There had been people in space before; there had been people on the moon before. But when they built the first lunar colony, they were in a hurry, they had some serious issues to contend with, and they really, really needed to get a breeding population of humans and some core species of animals off the Earth, just in case.

Earth was, as far as the colonists could tell, still there. But the ship had been cannibalized for parts and there would be no going back.

And then there were the Dry Years.

Five years where the colony thrived, the animals thrived, the city grew and they figured out lunar agriculture – and not a single placental mammal carried an infant past the first trimester. None.

Five years of trying everything and nothing, nothing working.

Mira had grown up with this legend. She knew of Earth the way her grandparents had known of the moon: something hanging in the sky, something there were stories about. She knew of the Dry Period much better, because she had been the first child successfully born on Luna.

She stood at the row of incubators, looking at her first egg. The shell was soft, like a platypus’, and it had been platypus eggs that had cued the colonists into their solution.

Earth would probably be very fascinated with the genetic engineering they had come up with in five short years, and everything they had managed in the twenty-one since.

Earth, the lunar colonists said, could ask them about it when Earth sent a ship for them.

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