Chapter 32: Seeds

’He... he’s asking me to design a starship weapon?’

Elena’s mind spun as a sharp intoxicating thrill detonated straight through her chest.

’Not just crawl in the dirt and turn his bolts... Design it... From scratch... An original ordnance array on a Tier-2 combat frame...’

She had spent three years at the Institute listening to stuffy old professors lecture her about how women of her standing were meant to sit on boards and inspect ledgers, not draft structural ballistics.

Her father had laughed when she handed him a theoretical rail-coupling schematic for his private yacht... laughed and patted her head.

And here was this common infuriating stray, the boy who had muzzled her on the bridge, who had cooked her flatbread, who held seven lives in his hands... looking straight at her and saying I need an engineer and that’s you.

...It made her feel a bit fulfilled.

She tried desperately to keep her face frozen in disdain.

She bit the inside of her lip and forced her sneer back into place, but the tiny proud sparkle in her pale blue eyes would not go out.

"Well..." She cleared her throat a little too fast, her voice wobbling half an octave before she dragged it back down into a drawl. "I suppose it is only logical that you would defer to the only individual on this bridge with an advanced grasp of mechanical dynamics... If I left it to you amateurs, you would strap a mining charge to the hull and blow our own bridge off."

Harper snorted from the vanguard seat. "Look at her. She’s practically glowing. Just say thank you, Princess..."

"Silence, Bell!" Elena snapped, her blush flaring hotter even as her chin stayed proudly up. "I am accepting the assignment purely out of self-preservation! If I am forced to ride in this oversized iron bucket, I intend to make sure its armament is superior to anything a common stray could conceive!"

She turned back to Leo and tightened her arms across her chest, trying very hard to look unbothered.

"I will require full access to the Foundry’s synthesis templates and the structural bus logs. Do not expect me to rush... Masterpieces require precision."

Leo smiled and shook his head slowly at her.

"Take whatever you need, Elena. It’s your project."

...Your project.

She turned her face away with a sharp huff... and her fingers were already flying across her console, pulling up stress models of the lower hull before he’d even finished the sentence.

"Wait," came Camila’s small hesitant voice.

Leo looked back down at the step.

Camila was chewing her lower lip and twisting the hem of her jacket into knots.

The spark from Sensei’s encouragement had crashed straight into reality.

"Leo... there’s a big problem," she murmured. "The bay... we have the room, we have the water and I have the talent... but I don’t have any seeds."

Silence dropped over the bridge again, and even Elena’s fingers stopped moving on her console.

"No seeds?" Harper frowned. "Didn’t the system leave some in the survival kits?"

"I checked the emergency bins when we unpacked," Jin-Ah said, shaking her head. "The standard Remnant kits contained medical gauze, water purification tablets, thermal blankets and nutrient gel packets... There were zero botanical specimens anywhere in the manifest. I checked twice."

Camila looked ready to cry again.

"You can’t harmonize an empty bucket, Leo! I can grow a sprout into a whole bush in an hour, but I can’t make life out of thin air! No seeds, no garden... We’re just sitting in an empty metal room!"

Leo stood still for three seconds, his mind racing through every compartment, every bin and every drawer they’d opened since they woke up on that dead moon.

Then his eyes lit up.

"Come with me," he said, already turning on his heel for the hatch.

Camila scrambled up off the step. "Where are we going?"

"The kitchen... Come on."

She hurried after him through the pneumatic hatch, her boots clicking softly against the deck plates as they jogged down the amber-lit corridor and into the galley, where it still smelled faintly of brushed steel and toasted flatbread from last night.

Leo marched straight past the counter to the tall pantry, threw the latch and started hauling out the sealed bins he’d unpacked the night before.

"Leo, this is food," Camila said, hovering at his elbow with her brow furrowed. "This is what we’re supposed to eat."

"It’s Earth food, Camila," Leo grinned, pulling a clear tub down from the top chiller shelf. "Where do you think real food comes from?"

THUD!

He dropped a cutting board on the prep island and slid a small knife off the magnetic rack.

Out of the chiller came three fresh plump red tomatoes, kept perfect in inert nitrogen gas like they’d been picked off the vine that morning.

He laid the first one flat, turned the blade sideways and made one careful shallow cut through the middle.

SQUISH!

The fruit fell open, its chambers packed with glistening amber gel... and nestled in the gel, dozens of tiny teardrop-shaped cream-colored seeds.

Camila’s breath caught. Her eyes went as wide as saucers.

"Seeds..." she gasped.

"Tomato seeds," Leo said, scooping a slippery cluster of twenty onto a dry paper napkin with the tip of the knife. "Dozens of them... Completely intact, unpasteurized and fresh from Earth soil."

He reached into the lower storage bin and hauled out a brown burlap sack, digging past the onions to pull out four medium-sized russet potatoes, still dusted with dry Earth dirt.

He held one up to the light and turned it until three small knobby pale-green nubs showed on the rough skin.

"Potato eyes... You don’t even need seeds for these. Cut it into chunks with an eye on each piece, put them in a wet tray, and every single one grows into a whole bush with ten more potatoes under it."

He popped open another container and pulled out two long dried red chilies and a fresh bell pepper.

CRUNCH!

The pepper split open on an ivory core studded with more than fifty flat white seeds.

"Bell peppers," he said, his grin widening as he nodded at the chilies. "Hot peppers. And the dry legume bin... pinto beans, black beans, lentils... Every dry bean in that jar is a seed waiting for water."

Camila stood at the counter with her hands hovering a few centimeters over the napkin of wet tomato seeds, and her whole face changed.

The exhaustion, the grief and the fear of the void were swept away in one dazzling wave of joy.

Her hazel eyes sparkled like polished amber under the kitchen lights and a huge breathtaking smile split her bronze face.

"Oh my God," she breathed, laughing softly as she picked up a single seed on the tip of her finger.

The moment her skin touched it, the faint golden-green glow of her talent flared around her fingers like a halo of spring sunlight.

The tiny seed seemed to shiver against her skin, drinking her in, its pale husk lighting up with a microscopic emerald speck of waking life.

"They’re alive," she whispered, happy tears welling in her eyes as she looked up at him. "Leo, they’re alive! They didn’t die in the shift! I can feel them... They’re just sleeping!"

"Can you grow them?" Leo asked, watching the green light dance across her knuckles.

"Can I grow them?!" She clutched the napkin to her chest like a bag of diamonds. "Leo, I can turn that empty room into a jungle! We’re going to have tomatoes and potatoes and beans and fresh green leaves pumping out oxygen all day long! We aren’t going to choke! We aren’t going to eat grey sludge!"

She threw her arms around his neck.

It was impulsive and overwhelming and she squeezed him tight against her chest, her soft curls brushing his jaw and her laugh ringing right against his ear, warm and bright and so close he could feel it through his ribs.

"Thank you, Leo! Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

"Oof!" Leo let out a surprised grunt, then chuckled and wrapped one arm around her waist to steady her, patting her back.

He was very aware of exactly where his hand was. "Alright, farmer... Save some of that energy for the dirt. Let’s get these back to the bridge."

Camila pulled back with her cheeks flushed a bright happy pink... and for just a second she didn’t let go of his collar, looking up at him from ten centimeters away like she’d only just noticed how close that was.

Then she let go fast, cleared her throat, gathered the napkin and the potatoes like sacred relics and marched out ahead of him down the corridor, very carefully not looking back.

"Ahem!"

...

When they stepped back onto the bridge, things had already shifted into high gear.

Ms. Tachibana stood over the central astrogation table with her hands hovering above the projector, the silver rings of her Tactical Cartography talent pulsing out from her temples and rippling through the star chart floating in the middle of the room.

"Leo," she called as he came in. "Look at this..."

He walked up to the table with Camila trailing eagerly behind him.

The projector showed a wide sweep of the local system.

Four hundred thousand kilometers off their port-stern hung the pale shattered silhouette of the dead moon they’d just left but stretched out ahead of them along vector Beta-9, roughly three hours away at sub-light burn, was a dense sprawling river of floating stone and frozen ice.

"An asteroid field," Leo said, his pilot’s instincts already mapping the drift lines, the gaps between the big rocks and the slow tumbling ones he’d want nowhere near the hull.

"Not just an asteroid field." Her dark eyes were alight with sharp precision as she zoomed in on a cluster of five-hundred-meter rocks. "My resonance is picking up extraordinary metallic density in this quadrant. Hematite, titanium veins, raw silicate... and deep deposits of crystallized tungsten."

"Tungsten?" Harper practically launched out of her chair to lean over the table. "Actual tungsten just sitting in the rocks?"

"Massive veins," Ms. Tachibana confirmed. "It appears to be the shattered core of an ancient metallic planetoid, drifting undisturbed for millennia... If we drop into the outer drift, we can use the Foundry Recall to siphon loose surface boulders, or mine the denser veins by hand."

"That fixes our ammo," Leo said, his pulse picking up. "Tungsten for the turret, titanium and iron for the Foundry and raw metal for whatever Elena designs..."

"And ice," Jin-Ah said, highlighting a scatter of glowing blue markers along the edge of the field. "Those cometary fragments contain clean water ice. If we harvest it, Camila will have unlimited water for the bay without draining life support."

"It’s perfect," Camila said, clutching her seeds with her eyes shining as she stared at the river of floating rock. "It has everything we need."

Elena didn’t say a word, but she had already pulled a titanium yield table up on her second screen.

Leo looked around the table at them, Harper hanging over the projector, Jin-Ah already plotting harvest routes, Camila hugging her napkin and Sensei with the silver rings still fading from her temples, and felt something in his chest unclench for the first time since Room 402.

Everything was lining up.

Food, air, metal and water... a clear path forward that dragged them out of the jaws of despair and gave them a real shot at carving a life out of this cold dead void.

Then...

CHIME!

A harsh discordant tone rang out of the canopy speakers.

The warm blue lights dipped as the central display was forcibly overridden, and a massive crimson-bordered timer slammed onto the middle of the glass, its numbers glowing like hot iron against the stars.

[GLOBAL REMNANT PROTOCOL: NOVICE BUFFER COUNTDOWN]

[TIME REMAINING: 48 HOURS, 14 MINUTES, 22 SECONDS]

The room went dead silent.

The dry clinical voice of the ship cut through the warmth like a sub-zero draft.

[A mandatory temporal advisory for the biological occupants... The Master Captain and his crew have performed admirably in completing the preliminary survival tutorial. However, do not mistake the current tranquility for permanent safety.]

The red numbers ticked down.

48:14:21... 48:14:20...

[The local sector remains under the dampening field of the Novice Buffer. For the next forty-eight hours, hostile manifestations are strictly capped at Level 1. The carapace worms and Void Stalkers you encountered were scavengers... infant parasites grazing on the outskirts of the dead zone.]

Camila’s hands tightened around her napkin until the paper crinkled, and a cold shiver crawled down Leo’s spine as the voice dropped flatter and darker.

[When the timer reaches zero, the dampening field dissolves. Entities above Level 1, predators with biological hyper-density, void-warp capability and organized swarm intelligence, will regain full freedom throughout this belt... The local apex hunters will begin sweeping the orbital corridors for foreign energy signatures.]

Its tone was almost mocking in its certainty.

[Use your forty-eight hours wisely, Master Captain... Harvest your rocks. Plant your little garden... Build your guns... Because after that, the welcome gifts stop.]