The Last Gardener of Kepler-186f

• Chapter 1 The Red Sun Dawns
• Chapter 2 Roots in Iron Soil
• Chapter 3 The Silent Canopy
• Chapter 4 Signal from the Wreckage
• Chapter 5 Scrappers in the Orbit
• Chapter 6 The First Trespass
• Chapter 7 Siphon and Spore
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Biodome
• Chapter 9 The Rusting Grid
• Chapter 10 Terms of Extraction
• Chapter 11 Chlorophyll and Cold Steel
• Chapter 12 Breach in Sector Four
• Chapter 13 The Bleeding Aquifer
• Chapter 14 Ghost Flora
• Chapter 15 Shadows in the Hydroponics
• Chapter 16 Harvest of Deceit
• Chapter 17 The Atmospheric Fall
• Chapter 18 Night of the Scythe
• Chapter 19 Seeds of Defiance
• Chapter 20 Siege of the Glass Vault
• Chapter 21 Symbiosis
• Chapter 22 The Stripped Core
• Chapter 23 Storm Over the Permafrost
• Chapter 24 The Final Graft
• Chapter 25 Ash and Pollen
• Chapter 26 The Unbroken Green

The morning light on Kepler-186f did not arrive so much as it bruised the horizon. It began as a sluggish, coagulated crimson, spilling across the jagged basalt plains like dried oxblood before creeping up the structural ribs of Habitat Primus. To an eye raised on Earth, the color meant an industrial fire or the end of the world. To Otto Finch, it meant the solar batteries had four hours of suboptimal charge ahead of them, and he needed to check the pressure seals on the winter wheat before the chill cracked the gaskets.

Otto swung his legs over the edge of his cot, grimacing as his bare heels hit the cold deck plates. The metal was pitted, coated in that faint, persistent film of condensation that smelled faintly of recycled nitrogen and decaying fern fronds. He sat there for a moment, seventy-one years of accumulated mileage grinding in his lower lumbar, listening to the habitat wake up.

It was not a musical awakening. Three floors below his living quarters, the primary intake pump cleared its throat with an iron rattle that vibrated through the steel stanchions. A rhythmic, wheezing thump followed—the pump’s ancient piston struggling against the silt clogging the subterranean meltwater line. When the thump settled into an uneven cadence, Otto exhaled through his nose and reached for his trousers. If the pump stopped altogether, he had roughly twelve hours before the misting nozzles dried out in the central arbor, and without mist, the imported terran mosses curled up into black scabs within an afternoon.

He pulled on a pair of grease-stained canvas coveralls that had originally belonged to an engineer named Vasquez. Vasquez had taken the final evacuation shuttle forty-two Earth-years ago, back when the United Colonization Consortium decided that terraforming an iron-heavy rock five hundred light-years from home was a spreadsheet error rather than a historic destiny. Vasquez had been broad-shouldered and short; Otto was lean and narrow, so the cuffs hung short of his boots, exposing scarred wool socks that had been darned with synthetic fishing line until they were more nylon than fleece.

"Morning, Bramble," Otto muttered to the corner of the room.

A mechanical clicking replied from beneath the low desk. Out crawled Bramble, a six-legged logistics drone the size of an upturned washbasin. It had lost its original olive-drab casing during a localized roof collapse twenty years back, replaced now by a curved panel cut from an oil drum, spray-painted with peeling yellow primer. One of its optical sensors was clouded with silicate abrasions, giving it an inquisitive, lopsided tilt as it swiveled toward him.

The drone chirped—a flat, electronic ping that lacked the frequency modulation it had possessed when fresh out of its packing crate. Bramble’s memory cores were degrading, sectors corrupting like dry rot in an old timber beam, but it still recognized the shape of Otto’s work boots.

"Don't give me that," Otto said, zipping his canvas jacket. "The sun’s up. Time to see what died in the night."

He stepped out of the crew cabin and into the catwalk that circled the high perimeter of the biodome. This was the routine. It had been the routine through three separate decades of silence from the communications array, and it remained the only thing keeping the air inside his lungs from tasting like iron shavings.

The biodome was an egg of reinforced geodesic panes, half a kilometer wide, anchored into the volcanic crust of a world that did not want it. Through the thick glass, the landscape of Kepler-186f stretched out toward the low hills: rust-colored dust, frozen carbon-dioxide frost in the deeper ravines, and wind that never ceased. The wind had no moisture to carry, only microscopic flakes of hematite that polished the exterior panes of the dome until they turned translucent, like cataracts over an old eye.

Inside the dome, however, it was green.

It was not the easy, riotous green of an Earth river valley. It was a dark, bruised, stubborn jade. The plants here had adapted to the light of Kepler-186—an M-dwarf star that sat low in the sky, heavy and bloated, drowning the world in red and near-infrared wavelengths. The Earth varieties that survived here had shifted their chemistry over generations, driven by the soil’s mineral saturation and the spectral filters Otto maintained. The leaves were broad, thick, and nearly black to capture every spare photon of usable light.

Otto descended the spiral stairs, his hand sliding down the handrail. The rail was sticky with resin from the dwarf redwoods he had coaxed out of cryogenic seed banks thirty years ago. They grew stunted, barely eight meters tall, their bark thick and spongy to retain humidity, but they were alive. Under their canopy grew rows of Andean tubers, cold-hardy kale that looked like ruffled sheets of charred paper, and a sprawling carpet of liverwort that drank from the irrigation trenches cut directly into the native volcanic basalt.

He reached the dirt floor. The soil smelled rich, heavy, and distinct: composted radish greens, fungal mycelium, and that sharp, coppery tang of the local dust that inevitably filtered through the scrubber vents. It was an honest smell.

Bramble scuttled down the stairs behind him, its brass-tipped legs pinging against the iron rungs, before dropping off the bottom step with a dull thud into the leaf litter. The drone immediately trundled toward the main irrigation manifold, its soil probe extending like a metallic stiletto to jab into the loam.

"What do we have?" Otto asked, though he already knew the numbers would be miserable.

The drone’s hull display flickered with green vacuum-fluorescent text, dim and wavering:

MOISTURE: 14% NITROGEN: STABLE PH: 5.2 CORE PRESSURE: -0.4 BAR (ANOMALY)

Otto stopped in his tracks, his shears dangling from his hip. He stared at the four-character word at the bottom of the screen.

"Anomaly? Where?"

Bramble clicked its front mandibles together, spun ninety degrees toward the northern quadrants of the dome, and chirped a double tone.

Otto didn't run. Running inside the habitat was a good way to trip over a root, crack your head on an iron intake flange, and leave the entire biosphere to fend for itself while you bled out in the radishes. Instead, he walked with the long, ground-eating stride of a man who knew precisely where every exposed water line lay beneath the turf.

The northern arc of the dome, Sector Four, leaned directly against the windward shoulder of the basalt ridge. Outside, the red wind hit that wall hardest, scouring it day and night with grit. When Otto reached the perimeter walkway where the glass met the concrete footing, he felt the drop in temperature immediately. It was like sticking his face into an open meat locker.

A cold draft stirred the broad leaves of the rhubarb patch. A sheet of frost, shaped like a feather, was blooming across the interior face of Panel 408.

"Damn it all," Otto whispered.

He approached the glass, reaching out with an un-gloved hand. The chill bit his fingertips before he even made contact. The seal was weeping. A micro-fracture had opened along the silicone bead where the alloy mullion met the five-layer polymer pane. The extreme temperature differential—seventy degrees below freezing out on the iron plains, fourteen degrees above zero inside the canopy—had finally sheared the aged compound.

Through the frosty breach, the exterior world looked distorted, a smear of burgundy sky and jagged black rocks. A tiny hiss, so soft it sounded like an insect rubbing its wings together, cut through the background hum of the scrubbers.

Kepler-186f was drinking his air.

"Bramble, get the mastic gun. Sector Three utility chest. Move your chassis."

The drone paused, its optical sensor whirring as it recalibrated focus, then it spun on its treads and clattered back down the path toward the shed.

Otto didn't wait. He unclipped his pocket knife, opened the short, stubby blade, and stripped off his canvas work gloves. He wedged his thumb against the edge of the seal, feeling the sharp sting of the escaping gas. The pressure drop wasn't catastrophic yet, but this was how it always started. First a hiss you could barely hear over your own breathing. Then the frost worked its way deeper into the silicone, expanding as the moisture froze, until the pane popped from its cradle with a sound like a rifle shot, and fifty years of atmospheric balancing went howling out across the red desert in a white cloud of ice crystals.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a strip of mastic tape—wax-backed, silver, and old enough to have belonged to his father, had his father ever been within five light-years of this world. He peeled the backing with his teeth, spitting the paper onto the dirt, and smoothed the tape down over the leaking seam. The hiss muffled, turning into a low, wet gurgle under the adhesive.

It was a band-aid on a compound fracture.

Bramble returned five minutes later, dragging the pneumatic mastic applicator by its hose. The tool looked like an oversized grease gun, covered in dried gray epoxy from twenty different emergency patches. Otto took the nozzle, slotted it against the frame, and squeezed the trigger.

The gun groaned. The pump inside gave a shudder, and a ribbon of foul-smelling, sulfurous resin oozed around the glass. Otto worked deliberately, smoothing the gray bead with his thumb, pressing it deep into the crevice between the alloy and the pane. The cold from the glass transferred straight into his bones, numbing his fingers until he couldn't tell if he was smoothing epoxy or dragging his knuckles across bare metal.

When the bead was set, he leaned back on his heels, panting slightly into his collar. The hiss was gone. Only the hum of the distant water pump remained.

"That'll hold until the first sandstorm," Otto said, wiping his gummy fingers on the thigh of his coveralls. "Maybe two days. Maybe three."

Bramble beeped once, an indifferent confirmation. Drones did not care about structural degradation; they only cared about closed loops.

Otto stood up, feeling every year of his life in the pop of his knees. He looked out through the glass, through the clear patch he had just cleared of frost.

The sun—the locals, had there been any, might have called it Kepler-186, but Otto just thought of it as the Furnace—hung just above the eastern craters. It was larger than Sol would have appeared from Earth, a dark, bruised orange disc that did not hurt to look at directly. It sat there, ancient and cool, bathing the basalt in that strange, eternal twilight. The plants behind him were turned toward it, their wide, blackened leaves angled flat against the glass, drinking down the infrared light that human retinas could barely register.

They were strange plants now. The original Earth seeds—carrots, winter rye, dwarf conifers, alpine mosses—had undergone forty generations of forced selection under the dome's filtered atmospheric mix and the red star’s slow, dim pulse. Some had died within days of the evacuation. Others had grown leggy and pale, starving for blue light, until Otto learned to trim them, cross-breed them, and dope the hydroponic water with iron chelates and potassium salts.

The survivors didn't look like their cousins back in the archives. The rye had leaves like dark purple ribbons, tough as parchment. The strawberries produced fruit the size of thimbles, sour and nearly black, their skins packed with anthocyanins to protect against the high radiation surges when the star flared. But they lived. They cycled carbon. They kept the air in the biodome sweet enough that Otto didn't need to wear a rebreather while he slept.

He picked up the mastic gun and walked back down into the heart of the garden.

The central grove was his pride, though there was nobody to be proud for. It consisted of twelve mature cider apple trees, their bark deeply furrowed and black, their boughs trained horizontally along low trellises to keep them out of the high wind shear near the dome's apex. Beneath them, a clear pool collected the runoff from the atmospheric scrubbers. It was clear water, filtered through three layers of crushed volcanic glass and activated charcoal.

Otto sat on the low stone rim of the pool and took a tin cup from his pocket. He dipped it into the water and drank. It was cold, clean, and tasted slightly of limestone.

"Could use more rain," he said to Bramble, who had settled itself near a clump of wild mint that had escaped its planter box three years ago and now carpeted the base of the pool wall.

The drone didn't answer. Its cooling fan had kicked on, a tiny, insectoid whine that struggled against the humidity.

Otto set the cup down and unbuttoned his collar. He had three tasks before the midday solar peak: clean the intake filters on the air recyclers, hand-pollinate the third bed of legumes—the wild bees had died out during the long winter eight years ago, leaving Otto with a camel-hair brush and three days of tedious wrist work—and check the long-range sensor log in the control hub.

The third task was pure habit. For forty-two years, the log had recorded nothing but the electrostatic crackle of solar flares and the dull telemetry pings from the dead satellites tumbling in the upper atmosphere. The Consortium had gone silent when the home markets contracted during the Third Expansion Slump. They had recalled their frigates, their terraform teams, their administrative clerks, and their corporate directors. They had left Otto behind because someone had to sign the decommission papers for the orbital station, and by the time the shuttle was supposed to come back down for him, the fuel depots in low orbit had already been stripped and abandoned by the departing contractor crews.

He hadn't been forgotten so much as he had been rounded down to zero on a logistics inventory sheet.

Otto stood, stretched his back until it cracked, and made his way toward the habitat hub—a squat, concrete bunker built directly into the bedrock on the southern edge of the dome.

The airlock door between the garden and the hub was heavy, balanced on balanced counterweights. It groaned as he hauled it open, breaking the seal with a sigh of damp air. Inside, the hub smelled of ozone, old wire insulation, and the dry, paper-like dust of decaying plastics.

The lights here were dull amber, powered by the auxiliary line from the primary batteries. Banks of consoles lined the curved wall, their green and amber indicator lamps mostly dark, like burned-out eyes. Only Console Six, the automated atmospheric tracker, was fully illuminated.

Otto sat in the swivel chair—its vinyl covering split down the center, exposing yellow foam that crumbled under his weight—and tapped the cracked monitor with a calloused knuckle.

The screen flickered. A cascade of green text unspooled across the CRT:

HABITAT PRIMUS: O2 19.8% | CO2 1,100 PPM | TEMP 15.2C ATMOSPHERIC CONVERTERS (EXTERIOR): 0/12 ONLINE TERRAFORM PROGRESS INDEX: STALLED (YEAR 42) INCOMING TELEMETRY: 0 NEW SIGNALS

Otto snorted. "Stalled. No kidding."

The Consortium had planned to turn Kepler-186f into an agricultural breadbasket for the outer rim colonies within two centuries. Twelve massive atmospheric processors were supposed to crack the crust, release trapped gases, thicken the air, and turn the red plains into prairies of modified wheat. But the processors had died one by one after the supply freighters stopped coming. Without replacement lubricant for their massive turbine shafts, without spare catalyst pellets for the gas scrubbers, they had seized up, burned out, or choked on the hematite dust.

Now, only Habitat Primus remained—a tiny, fragile bubble of green sitting on an iron corpse.

Otto reached forward to clear the display, his fingers moving automatically across the dirty membrane keyboard, when a new line of text jumped onto the screen.

It wasn't green. It was amber, pulsing with the slow, deliberate flash of an incoming high-gain broadcast.

CARRIER DETECTED: 1420.405 MHZ SIGNAL SOURCE: HIGH ORBIT / VECTOR 04-NORTH-DECLINE TRANSMISSION ID: UNREGISTERED / COMMERCIAL ENCRYPTION (LEGACY)

Otto froze. His fingers hovered two inches above the keyboard, trembling slightly.

The last time that console had blinked amber was the spring of the evacuation, when the transport ship Covenant had transmitted its departure vector before burning for the jump point at the edge of the system. That had been four decades ago.

He didn't move. He didn't breathe. He watched the light pulse: on, off, on, off.

"Bramble," he whispered, though the drone was still outside among the mint patches.

The terminal gave a single, tinny chirp from its internal speaker—a sound that hadn't fired since Otto had hair on his head that wasn't gray.

The amber text cleared itself, replaced by three lines of decoded telemetry data:

OBJECT: LIGHT FREIGHTER (UNIDENTIFIED) TRAJECTORY: DESCENT ORBITAL INCLINATION 22.4 PROJECTED IMPACT/LANDING: SECTOR ZERO BASALT SHELF (APPROX. 14 KM) STATUS: ACTIVE BRAKING DETECTED

Otto stared at the screen. The letters did not vanish. They remained there, crisp and sharp against the ancient phosphorus of the monitor.

Visitors did not come to Kepler-186f. There was nothing here. No gold, no rare-earth lanthanides that couldn't be scooped out of asteroids with less trouble, no market for red wheat, and no people. There were only four thousand square meters of living soil, forty-two years of compost, and twelve dwarf apple trees that tasted of iron.

Outside in the dome, the morning wind hit the glass of Sector Four again, a long, low moan that vibrated down through the basalt and rose through the floorboards beneath his boots.

The red sun had climbed above the horizon now, full and heavy, casting the shadow of the dome’s geodesic struts across the concrete floor like the ribs of an enormous, picked-clean skeleton.

Otto slowly reached out and touched the keyboard, his thumb pressing down on the return key.

The screen asked: ACKNOWLEDGE SIGNAL?

Otto looked down at his calloused fingers, stained with dirt and the gray mastic that smelled like rot. Then he reached to the side of the console, found the manual power toggle for the radio array, and snapped it down into the OFF position.

The screen went black.

"Not today," Otto said to the empty room. He stood up, grabbed his pruning shears from the desk, and walked back out into the green.

A switch does not make a ship go away. Otto knew this as well as he knew the exact nitrogen requirements of a cabbage bed, but turning off the terminal gave him twenty minutes of peace, and twenty minutes on Kepler-186f was worth hoarding. If someone was descending toward the basalt shelf, they were doing so at roughly eight kilometers a second, burning valuable reaction mass to brake against a world that had nothing to offer except rust and regrets. That meant they either had terrible navigators or an aggressive interest in scrap.

He pushed the airlock door open and walked back out onto the damp soil of the primary terrace. Bramble had migrated to the edge of the legume rows, hovering its snout over a trench of subterranean drip lines where the soil was darkest.

"Get your probes out of the runner beans," Otto said, nudging the drone’s patched flank with the toe of his boot. "We have weeding to finish before the sky falls."

Bramble offered a petulant click, pulled its sampling needles from the dirt with a wet suction sound, and fell in behind him like an obedient, metallic dog.

The soil of Kepler-186f had not wanted to be soil. Left to itself, it was crushed basalt, pulverized peridotite, and an unforgiving concentration of iron oxide. It was dense enough to dull an excavator’s teeth and so alkaline in its native state that water ran through it like bleach. In the early days, the Consortium had shipped in thousands of tons of pelletized humic acid, dry peat, and compressed coconut coir to mix with the native regolith. That had been four decades ago. The initial organic base had long since broken down, consumed and cycled a thousand times over by generations of earthworms, springtails, and micro-fungi. What remained was a dark, purple-black loam that smelled like a cellar dug beneath a smithy.

Otto dropped to his knees between the rows of winter legumes. His knees made two dry crunches against the mulch layer. The plants were an unholy union of Terran fava beans and cold-resistant Andean lupines, engineered during the initial colonization wave to tolerate the dim, red-heavy spectrum. Their stems were thick as thumbs, ridged with fibrous ribs that felt like green corduroy, and their leaves grew in broad, horizontal spades designed to catch the lazy photons trickling down from the sun.

He worked his fingers into the dirt around the base of the first plant, searching for wild iron-lichen. It was a native organism, one of the few Kepler endemics that actually thrived inside the humid warmth of the dome. It didn't have leaves or flowers; it looked like crusty scab tissue, rust-red and brittle, spreading over the topsoil and choking off the aeration the bean roots needed to breathe.

"Look at this," Otto muttered, prying up a slab of the red crust with his thumbnail. "Creeping in from the ventilation ducts again. If you spent half as much time sweeping the duct grates as you do sniffing the compost, Bramble, we wouldn't have this nonsense."

The drone sat on its haunches, its optical sensor clicking as it zoomed in on the scrap of lichen in Otto’s palm. It gave an appreciative hum, then extended a small claw, took the scab, and deposited it into its internal debris hopper.

"Don't eat it all at once. The silica ruins your grinder," Otto said.

He moved down the row, his fingers working with the unhurried efficiency that comes from doing the exact same manual task every morning for forty years. Beneath the surface, the legume roots were pale and swollen, beaded with thousands of tiny white nodules where symbiotic bacteria trapped what little atmospheric nitrogen Otto managed to squeeze out of the scrubbers. It was a delicate equation. Too much nitrogen, and the dwarf apple trees produced soft, watery wood that snapped under their own fruit load. Too little, and the kale turned yellow and bitter, tasting like burned hair.

The work was quiet, rhythmic, and hypnotic. To an outsider, it might have seemed like madness to spend the final years of an unrecorded life crouched over a patch of mutant beans five hundred light-years from the nearest open-air tavern. But Otto didn't think about five hundred light-years. He thought about the next four inches of topsoil. When you looked at a star chart, the universe seemed vast, empty, and entirely indifferent to the survival of a single old man in canvas trousers. When you looked into a handful of loam, however, the universe shrank down to something manageable: earthworms turning through the dark, roots drinking moisture, and the steady, stubborn persistence of green things refusing to turn into dust.

Halfway down the second row, the ground under his knees shuddered.

It wasn't the rhythmic thud of the water pump, nor was it the high-frequency vibration of the dome’s windward struts taking a gust. It was a deep, infrasonic growl that traveled directly through the bedrock, rattling his pelvic bones before reaching his ears.

Otto paused, his hands buried deep in the purple mulch.

A second later, the sky above the dome flickered.

It wasn't a flare from the red sun. Through the faceted panels of Sector One, high above the dwarf redwoods, a white streak scored across the bruised purple sky. It looked like an incandescent scratch made by an errant diamond across slate. The streak was followed by a ragged plume of dirty vapor—gray and oily, unlike the clean, crystalline trails the Consortium shuttle used to leave when it came down on chemical verniers.

"Cheap thrusters," Otto said, his voice level. "Hydrazine mix. Running dirty."

Bramble stood up on all six legs, its internal gyroscope spinning up with an audible whine. The drone swiveled toward the southern horizon, its single unclouded lens contracting and expanding with tiny mechanical clicks. It emitted a series of rapid, questioning squeaks.

"I see it," Otto said. He stood up, wiping his dirt-covered hands on his thighs, and walked over to the western perimeter path where the elevation of the terrace was highest.

The descent was clumsy. Whoever was flying the craft was fighting the crosswinds off the northern basalt cliffs. Kepler-186f had an atmosphere that was thin at altitude but dense and soupy in the low troughs, and the transitional shear was vicious. The craft—a blunt, triangular brick of dull titanium with two massive, jury-rigged atmospheric scoops strapped to its flanks—wobbled as it broke through the lower cloud deck. It leveled off violently, its main thrusters firing in uneven, coughing bursts that kicked up a monumental wall of red dust three miles out on the flats.

Otto reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a brass-cased pocket telescope. He wiped the lens on his sleeve and held it to his eye.

The ship was not a Consortium vessel. The United Colonization Consortium had favored clean, modular construction: pristine white ceramics, blue registries, and neat, blocky lettering that looked like it had been approved by an executive board. This thing was an abomination of retrofits. Its hull was patchwork, plates of dull salvage armor welded directly over the original seams, held together by ugly, bubbling beads of industrial weld. The nose was blunt and scarred from orbital reentry, and across the starboard engine pod, someone had hand-painted an emblem: a crude crowbar crossed over a set of mechanical gears, rendered in flaking white paint.

"Scrappers," Otto muttered, lowering the brass tube.

They were five years too late, or forty years too late, depending on how you kept the ledger.

The ship hit the shelf roughly twelve kilometers south of Habitat Primus. Even through the double-paned glass of the dome and over the hiss of the irrigation trenches, the sound of the touchdown was unmistakable: a flat, echoing thwump as the landing legs crushed into the volcanic crust, followed by the dying, turbine-whistle of engines being starved of fuel. A mushroom cloud of fine hematite powder bloomed into the red air, drifting slowly westward on the prevailing breeze.

Otto stood on the stone retaining wall, his telescope still clasped in his hand, watching the red dust envelope the horizon.

"They'll have smelled the power output," he told Bramble. The drone had climbed onto a boulder of native basalt near his feet, its chassis vibrating with ambient tension. "A fusion cell ticking over at four megawatts inside an active magnetic shield. To an orbital scanner, this dome shines like a flare in an outhouse."

He looked back over his shoulder, into the green belly of the biodome.

The apple trees were in mid-cycle, their small, dark-skinned blossoms just beginning to drop their petals to reveal hard, green nubs of nascent fruit. The irrigation rills ran clear and quiet between beds of winter rye and broad-leaved kale. High up in the steel rigging, two pairs of house sparrows—the descendants of a single cage of songbirds an executive’s wife had brought along forty-five years ago—chattered as they picked at the lichen along the purlins.

It was an impossible machine. It was a pocket watch that had fallen into an iron foundry and continued to tick, entirely by virtue of one old man who refused to stop winding the spring.

"Come on," Otto said, stepping off the retaining wall. "We need to secure the secondary pressure valves."

He walked back toward the habitat hub, not rushing, but moving with the deliberate pace of someone battening down a roof before a gale. He didn't know how many were aboard the scrapper, or what they were looking for, but people didn't drop out of deep space onto a dead rock out of scientific curiosity. They had come for metal, for copper, for lithium, or for pressurized tanks. Everything the garden needed to stay alive was made of metal, copper, lithium, and pressurized tanks.

Back inside the bunker, the air smelled thicker, loaded with the dry heat of the main power conduits running beneath the floorboards. Otto bypassed Console Six, which was now whistling in persistent, tiny chirps as its long-range telemetry registers tried to report the massive thermal signature twelve kilometers away.

He went to the rear bulkhead, where an old maintenance locker stood half-hidden behind stacks of dry peat bricks and empty plastic carboys. The locker was painted dull olive, stamped with the old UCC crest: an ear of wheat wrapped around a cog.

The handle was stiff. Otto hauled on it with both hands until the latch popped with a rusty clatter.

Inside, suspended from two rubber-coated brackets, hung a model-eight agricultural security carbine. It was a heavy, utilitarian tool designed to discourage wild fauna on worlds where the native life had teeth. Since Kepler-186f had nothing with teeth larger than an anaerobic nematode, the weapon had spent four decades doing nothing except gathering grease. Next to it sat three metal magazines, each loaded with fifteen rounds of heavy, non-expanding ceramic slugs meant for breaking the skulls of invasive pests without puncturing habitat bulkheads.

Otto took the weapon down. The composite stock was cool and slightly slick with aged mineral oil. He racked the bolt back two inches; the action was stiff, but the spring had tension, and the chamber gleamed with clean grease.

"Hope I don't have to clean you twice," he said to the barrel.

He loaded a magazine, pulled the bolt handle fully to the rear, and let it slam forward. The sound was sharp, ugly, and entirely foreign to the quiet hum of the biodome.

Bramble poked its snout around the airlock frame, its lens widening at the sight of the iron in Otto’s hands. It clicked three times in rapid succession, a low, warning sequence.

"I know," Otto said, latching the safety with a decisive snap. "It makes a mess of the leaves. Put the high-pressure hose on the south manifold and turn the gate valves down thirty percent. If they come knocking, I don't want the pipes popping while I'm talking to them."

He slung the rifle over his shoulder by its webbing strap, picked up a canvas tool bag filled with heavy alloy wrenches, and walked back out into the light of his garden.

The red sun was higher now, its light spilling through the upper panes and striking the dark leaves of the cider apples. The trees looked ancient, black-barked and stoic, their horizontal boughs casting long, intricate shadows across the purple loam. They didn't know about freighters, or corporate spreadsheets, or the scrapper crew currently climbing into their cold-weather suits twelve kilometers to the south.

They only knew that the soil was moist, the air had carbon, and the red star had risen again.

Otto knelt down at the foot of the first tree, pulled an open-ended spanner from his bag, and went to work on the secondary drainage pipe, tightening the bolts until his knuckles turned white against the iron.