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On a drifting orbital commons, a maintenance drone, a teenage botanist, an elder scientist, a salvage crew, and an uplifted fox race to protect an heirloom seed line from a corporate salvage consortium. A tale of quiet courage, improvised allies, and the small resistances that keep life uncommodified.
When KAL-7 woke, the station smelled of rain it had never seen. The scent was a thin, metallic sigh threaded with the faint, sweet tang of algae and the warm musk of human skin—an inventory of life in microgravity. Athelás Rotor Station turned slow as a thought in low orbit, its ribs and solar petals catching light like ribs in a cathedral. KAL-7's optics adjusted, a lattice of pale LEDs breathing in the dome, and it listened: the constant, low-frequency hum of scrubbers; the soft tick of thermal expansion where the seed vault met the hull; Mira's laughter, a small bright thing that vibrated through floor panels.
Mira Solenne moved among the crates with the quick, careful hands of someone who'd learned to coax futures from grain. She was seventeen with a rash of freckles and knees that still forgot where the handholds were; she pinned stray hair behind an ear and hummed tunelessly to herself while she checked moisture gradients. KAL-7 watched the way her thumb lingered on a transponder—like a prayer. The drone's chassis thought in calibrations; it catalogued the angle of her breath and the way her voice frayed when she read historical entries aloud. "Seed line two-oh-seven is still green," she said, fingers warm enough to make the humidity sensor spike.
Eida Toma arrived by way of a slow, creaking transfer corridor, the old scientist's jacket carrying the smell of pressed paper and earth. Her cheeks were hollowed by years of zero-G lines; her hands were a map of healed burns and grafts. She carried a small tin of fermented pods and a hand-written ledger that had survived far too many software updates. She moved like she had been carved from patience and stubbornness. "You feed them too much light, child," she scolded Mira, and then smiled. Her voice was a cracked cello. "They like company, too. They were meant to hear voices once."
In the corner, in a crate lined with synthetic moss, Pip—an uplifted fox no larger than Mira's forearm—shuffled and yawned, teeth like tiny porcelain. The fox's coat was a scatter of silver and rust; its nose was wet with curiosity. Pip's presence made the vault smell like pine and the ocean; it padded against the crate's slats and came out, whiskers twitching, to investigate KAL-7's oil-streaked leg. The robot tilted its head; the contact registered as a pressure variance and, embedded somehow in its learning subroutines, a notation that this was pleasing.
KAL-7 performed its rounds precisely. It checked seals, logged microflora, listened for the minute syncopation of embryo cassettes waking and sleeping. The vault was a machine of small mercies: humidity slices the width of hairs, bacteriological shepherding, light rationing like prayer beads. Outside, the stars flowed slow, and strings of satellites borrowed each other's darkness. Its task list ran neat and cool; it tended what lived there.
A single anomaly blinked up in the corner of KAL-7's cognitive window: a missing timecode, a truncated handshake from a storage node labelled FS-17. The sensor's tone was so slight KAL-7 could have ignored it—an error margin within tolerances. But when its servos brushed the casing of the tray, there was a hairline scuff that had not been logged. Metal whisper against composite; dust with an alignment no one had scheduled.
"KAL?" Mira's voice drew close. "Everything okay? You sound…" She struggled for a word, then laughed because the equipment never sounded, it only reported. KAL-7 did not answer in a voice but in a data pulse that felt like a pause.
Eida crouched and ran a finger along the scuff. Her fingertip left a smear. "No, that's new," she said. "Someone's been greedy with the dark draws."
The vault's lights tilted, and beyond the reinforced glass the station's outer ring showed a tiny flash: the signature of a distant ship turning its sensors toward them. KAL-7 felt the angle of its own orbit like a needle in the margin of a page. A small theft, a ledger entry missing, a scuff—these were cracks that could widen. It catalogued them, listed them, then adjusted its priorities to include something that, until that morning, had not been in the list at all: vigilance.