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In a ring habitat, young hydroponic engineer Juno Aram uncovers a missing heritage seed and follows a trail that leads into salvage networks and an ancient defense lattice. A tense balance of survival and preservation forces her to choose between markets and futures. Her decisions bind people, machines, and a sleepless algorithm into a fragile covenant.
Juno Aram woke to the sound of misters cycling and the soft, mechanical cluck of nutrient valves. The sleeping lights above the basin eased into a green that tasted, in memory, like fresh metal and lemon oil. She rolled from the narrow bunk suspended against a service wall and padded across recycled-fabric flooring, feeling the familiar stiffness in her knees from last week's maintenance run. The dome smelled of algae and warm plastics, the scent of the station folded with the sweet metallic tang of electro-lytes. Her hands, so used to the slick leaves and glass stems, moved before thought, rubbing the scar along her thumb where a cutting blade had tangled with a vine's root three months back. It felt like an old promise, a mapping of risk into a body that would handle the next surprise.
The Lotus Array took most of Hab 7's eastern quadrant, a ribbon of tiered planters and hanging filaments that captured light from spectrum emitters and recycled the excess into faint bioluminescence. The plants were not lotus exactly but the name had stuck; their translucent cups opened at the right angle to catch condensate and shimmered with a blue that was almost alive. Juno loved the way the light sank into the leaves, how patterns in the veins hinted at histories she could almost read. She liked to imagine each plant kept a private archive of the habitat's seasons, that when she touched a petiole she could feel the station's yaw of last January like a pulse. Most people called it superstition. Juno called it empirical curiosity.
A small maintenance drone hovered near the third tier, its casing nicked and painted with a thrift-shop sticker that read 'PATCH ME IF FOUND'. The drone's name tag fitted badly: Nix. It chirped twice and adjusted its camera, sending a ribbon of holographic data across Juno's vision implant. She ignored the overlay at first, letting the warm mist cross her palms, then glanced to see the color plot the drone had compiled. The edges of a cluster of glass-lilies on Tier Five pulsed with an anomaly, a slow, spiraling fluorescence that didn't match their programmed rhythms. Nix beeped again, more insistent.
From across the walkway came Marta's voice, rough with years and boiled silences. Marta had been on the station since before Juno's parents met; she smelled of welding flux and black coffee and kept her hair chopped like a ship's hull. 'You're late,' Marta called, but there was a soft bend to the words. Juno smiled, the station's fatigue softened in that smile. She liked being late when it meant the plants held some secret for her alone in the morning. 'Giving the lilies a private concert,' she said, and Marta laughed, which sounded like tools warming up.
By the time the array's morning diagnostics finished their sweep, Juno had already traced the fluorescence to a single specimen with a hairline fissure along its base. The fissure glowed faintly, not with cold bioluminescence but like a memory waking, a tiny current skittering through tissue, a language she could not yet translate. She ran her gloved finger along the fissure and felt a whisper of vibration, the kind that made a tech's heart lift and a steward's brow furrow. An ordinary morning would have meant cataloging and logging and rebalancing nutrient mixes. This morning had an edge; it was a morning that smelled of unscheduled things.