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On an orbital habitat dependent on corporate seed shipments, a young hydroponic engineer risks everything to recover a hidden seed bank. With an old captain, an illicit drone, and a small child's faith, she exposes hoarded scarcity and plants a future that rewrites the ledger of need.
The hydroponic bay smelled like rain and metal. Iara kept her palm flat against the glass of the germ tray and watched the tiny translucent roots coil like silver thread. Outside the viewport, Arden-7 turned slow and deliberate, a ring of habitation modules lit by strip-lamps and the distant curdle of traffic lanes. Stars stitched the black between comm relays. Inside, the air hummed with pumps and the low, constant thrum of the habitat’s centrifuge.
She could tell the health of a plant by the tone of the pumps. When they changed pitch by a fraction, she could hear it in her teeth. She learned to parse those small betrayals the way others listened for weather. Rafi called it superstition; she called it practice. Today the pumps sang a steady note. The xenolettuce in tray four was leafing at the right angle, chloroplasts glittering like lanterns. The pollen cores that would fertilize the first flush sat in their crybed, tiny pale discs humming with micro-thermals.
A child’s voice broke the quiet. "Iara? Is my seed awake yet?"
Nelu’s cheeks were still sticky with sugar from a pilfered fruit chew. She had a freckle near her eyebrow that Iara could have counted if she tried. Iara smiled without taking her eyes from the tray.
"Not yet. Give it another hour. You remember the light cycle." She could feel the child’s impatience as a pressure behind her ribs. That impatience sat in everybody on Arden-7; scarcity sharpened clock faces. Children learned to wait like they learned to ride the maintenance rails.
Rafi came through the hatch, oil on his palms, the old man’s gait slower than the centrifuge’s rhythm. His jacket still smelled of solvent and the city below. "Supply notice this morning," he said, handing her a folded holo-paper. The letters on the sheet were neat and corporate—the kind that made people's hands go cold.
She unfolded it with methodical hands. Delphic Logistics had rerouted agricultural shipments. An embargo around the Sol-Corridor, they said. Technical delays. Security red-taped with the kind of bureaucratic patience that meant nothing good for a habitat that lived by its shipments.
Nelu’s shoulders hunched. The child’s bright eyes looked at the crybed she’d been promised. Outside, through the viewport, a freighter trailed a faint smear of exhaust and then dropped into the dark. Iara felt the room narrow the way ocean does before a storm. She closed the paper and set it beside the pumps where it would not blow away. Her fingers left a wet crescent on the ink.