Such as these were the epicenters of the ecological earthquakes that the human races had, for about three centuries, been unleashing on the surface. Sometimes they got their deliveries straight from the sky, other times, as in this case, from arks dispatched out of the larger surface installations. Older ones were clusters of hemispherical domes because they had been constructed before New Earth even had a breathable atmosphere. Newer ones, like this, had a somewhat more welcoming appearance. But their basic purpose was to work with beasts, bugs, and plants, and so their fragrance and the overall style of their operations lay somewhere on a continuum between farm and zoo, with the odd dash of science lab. None of it would have seemed remarkable, at least on an olfactory level, to the vast majority of human beings who had lived on Old Earth in the millennia leading up to the scientific revolution, but the people who endured that voyage in the cargo hold of the great plane/boat were fortunate that the fuselage wasn’t pressurized and that ocean air could therefore filter through it.