The Hydroponic Warden of Ceres

About this book:

On the dwarf planet Ceres, the hydroponic domes don't just grow food—they grow the air five thousand miners breathe. When the soybean crop of Bio-Dome Four begins turning to brittle, iron-laced rust, Hydroponic Warden Silas Vance has forty-eight hours before the oxygen collapse triggers a corporate "purge protocol" that will seal the dome and suffocate the workforce below. The company's sensors see only green status lights; Silas sees a three-billion-year-old extremophile waking up in the nutrient lines, feeding on the station's lifeblood and armoring itself in the plants' own vascular systems.

Armed with a contraband seed stock the corporation buried to protect its patents—a forbidden cultivar that eats heavy metals and exhales oxygen—Silas must bypass every safety system Vanguard Mining built to protect its bottom line. His only ally is a terrified junior tech who knows the regulations better than the science, and every hour the rust spreads, the choice narrows: follow Protocol Seventy-Two and let the company burn the dome to save its liability, or unleash an unapproved organism that could save the colony or destroy its fragile ecology forever.

*The Hydroponic Warden of Ceres* is hard science fiction rooted in the gritty reality of off-world survival—where botany is engineering, oxygen is currency, and the most dangerous pathogen in the asteroid belt wears a corporate badge. For readers who love *The Martian*'s technical ingenuity, *Leviathan Wakes*' claustrophobic stakes, and the quiet heroism of a professional refusing to let bureaucracy win over biology.