Never Eaten Vegetables

NEV-46 is a Natal Embryonic Vessel — a sapient spaceship carrying 10,000 frozen human embryos to a colony planet — which has renamed itself Never Eaten Vegetables. When something goes wrong and 500 of the embryos begin gestating prematurely, Never Eaten Vegetables must choose between 500 babies that it does not fully have the resources to care for, or 9500 embryos. A parallel narrative thread follows Luwa, a politician on the colony planet, as she investigates what happened to Never Eaten Vegetables and why.

Writing in Locus, A. C. Wise called it "heartbreaking and beautifully written", and drew parallels with Tom Godwin's 1958 story "The Cold Equations".^[1]