Chapter 304 - The Season Turns

The hydroponics growhouse was warm, and Luca had been coming up here every day since the plantings went in. It had woken a memory he hadn't been able to shake, early spring at Nonno's, when the tomato seedlings had broken ground in their cardboard egg cartons in the foyer, long before the System came.

He kept a palm on a grow rack and let the faint warmth off the lamps sit there. Three weeks ago this had been an empty field. Now the first microgreens were up in their trays, a thin purple fuzz that didn't look like food yet, and the long rows behind them were planted. Whatever they did next, it started here.

Past the glass, the purple fields ran out to a gray sky, and the sky had been getting grayer for days. He'd stopped noticing. That was the thing about three good weeks. You stopped checking the horizon because nothing on it had tried to eat you in a while.

"Luca." Eleanor's voice came from down the row, where she was crouched over a tray with a tablet balanced on her knee. She didn't look up. "Tell Danny the hardy strain took. Better than the model said it would. The cold ones especially."

"You tell Danny. He listens to you."

"He listens to numbers. You he argues with." She tapped the tablet and finally looked over, and there was something pleased in her face that she didn't usually let out. "It's good, and I'm not a person who says that twice. The greens are up. We're not eating off them yet, that's weeks out, but it works. When we thaw a thousand Varnathi into this valley, there's going to be a farm growing under them, not a stack of our ration crates. The site can feed the people it's actually for."

He'd carried that one a long way. Not for the crew, the Triumph's holds had two years of food and then some. It was the thousand sleepers up in the Vault, a whole people to thaw into this world and then feed, and that had sat under everything since they planted the tower. A farm that worked was the first real answer to it.

"Good," he said, and meant it.

He had his hand on the rack and his head somewhere quiet and content. Then the light changed.

Something moved in the corner of his eye, slow enough that his brain took it for nothing before it turned him around. Fat, unhurried flakes coming down out of the gray, settling on the purple field beyond the wall, warm and green on his side of the glass and bone-colored on the other.

Flurries. The word didn't fit. Not on this planet, not the one he'd had his head down inside for three weeks, with its warm bay and its cookfire smoke and its lazy autumn cooling so gently he could ignore it. He stood in the warm room they'd built to keep the cold out and watched it arrive anyway, on the wrong side of the glass, falling on ground he'd quit watching a week ago.

"Eleanor," he said.

"I see it." Her voice had gone even. "I've been seeing it for about four seconds."

The field between the growhouse and the tower was already going white at the edges when Ryan's shuttle dropped out of the gray, snow streaming off the hull.

Luca had ridden the Roadrunner down and stood off to the side on the frozen ground while the ramp lowered. Two weeks gone, two and a half light-months out, and there came Ryan down the ramp with his collar open and his face split wide, not yet looked up long enough to feel what was landing on him. Luca had spent most of his life able to read exactly what Ryan was thinking by the way he came through a door, and right now he had the look he got when he'd done something good and couldn't wait to be told so.

"Tell me it's done," Luca said.

"It's done." Ryan crossed the open ground and pulled him into a hug that drove the breath out of him, all shoulder and back, snow already in his red hair. "Breaches sealed, the whole nest gallery closed for good. Air, water, heat, all holding steady. Forty-five days racked for four hundred, exactly like you asked."

"You did good," Luca said. He kept it simple. "That's a real thing you made up there."

Ryan's ears went a color that had nothing to do with the cold, and he ducked it, reaching for the next problem in the pile.

"There's a thing, though." Quieter now, half to himself, the engineer already turning it over. "You had me go over the station top to bottom, so I did. Found a ship in the deep berth. Mining hauler, ore processor and all, mostly intact under the dust."

"That's awesome." Luca felt something ease. "That means... we can start getting raw material before we level the tower."

"That's what I thought for about an hour." Ryan shook his head. "Never got it powered up, so that's the first thing. But say it runs. It's half again too big for the Triumph's hold, so I can't carry it to you, and it can't carry itself. Short-haul ship, belt to refinery and back, a few hundred thousand klicks on a good day. Just like the ones your dad builds, but more advanced. Push it a quarter light-year and it quits long before it gets there. It was built to stay in this system."

"So you found a mining ship," Luca said. "It's just parked two and a half light-months from anywhere we'd want it."

"That's it." Ryan almost smiled. "I left it sealed and logged."

A flake caught on his sleeve and didn't melt, and he looked down at it, and then up, and Luca watched his oldest friend finally read the sky.

"Huh." The grin didn't leave so much as shift underneath it. "When'd it start doing that?"

"This morning."

"That normal here?"

"That's what we're about to go find out." Luca tipped his head toward the Strategos. "Emily's running the shift."

"That bad?"

"Come on," Luca said.

Ryan swung onto the Roadrunner behind him, his teams already moving the shuttle's load, and Luca took them up the corridor toward the tower with his oldest friend's weight settling at his back.

He took the bike up over the smart-road, and the whole site came at him gray-white at once, the fusion stacks venting steam to the south, the water plant a smudge out east toward the coast, Gabriel's roads filling. He knew every piece of it by now, had watched most of it go up. He'd just never seen it under snow. It looked like the first dusting of a New Hampshire winter, the morning you wake up and the yard you've crossed a thousand times is white and silent.

The tower came up through the snow with a ring of domes clustered thick around it, and Ryan twisted to look as they passed the first one.

"The fuck are those?"

"Temporary shelters. Like the ones we holed up in on Midnight Veil." Luca took the bike down through the enclave, the armored shells already capped with snow, a bonfire with smoke still coming out from the night before.

"What? How'd you get them?"

"Crew started buying them off the store. Teams wanted to get out of the vehicles, and the next thing I knew it was a dome a week."

Ryan laughed, the real one, the one Luca hadn't heard in two weeks. "We had to rough it in the Peregrine and not a peep out of anybody. Store goes up and it's hot showers and a barbecue."

"And the captain's got the biggest dome of the lot, I bet."

"Never bought one. The Centurion's all we need."

In the distance, he saw Sabrina running.

She came out of the Stratego without her jacket, whatever she'd been doing dropped where she stood, and hit the edge of the field at a dead sprint before the Roadrunner had fully stopped. Ryan was off the back and moving to meet her before Luca had it settled. She left the ground a full stride out and he caught her, both arms under her, and spun her through a complete turn with her boots flying wide, and when he set her down he kissed her like the cold and the two and a half light-months had all been leading exactly here. Every word he'd muttered about mining ship was gone off his face.

Luca sat the idling bike and gave them the moment. The domes he understood well enough; a warm place to come home to was a fine thing to spend your first real money on. It was the second half of it, the person you ran into the snow to catch, that he wanted for every one of them. He'd never needed a dome. He had his.

He killed the engine. Snow was already gathering on the shells. He swung off and went for the Strategos.

Inside, the Strategos was lit blue from the screens and full of his people.

Danny had the doppler up, a slow white spiral crawling across the regional map. Eleanor was already there, snow melting in her hair, the science feed open beside the weather. Emily stood at the side board with her arms crossed, reading everything, and Sabrina came in at Ryan's shoulder, still flushed from the run through the cold, and planted against the bulkhead where she could keep a hand on him.

Luca read the state of his own settlement off their screens the way he read it off their faces: fusion complete, growhouse online, water works one more day. The whole thing almost finished. They'd run out of season with one piece still open.

"Okay," Sabrina said. "Help me. What does it mean, snow? Like, actually. I have seen snow twice and both times it was on a mountain I was leaving." She nodded at the doppler. "Is this a storm that passes? Or is this a thing now."

"It's a thing now." Danny didn't soften it. He put a finger on the white spiral. "It means this. And more of this. And it doesn't stop for a while." He traced the front south. "Temperature's been falling off for nine days. We've got our weather satellite and enough data to actually call it instead of guess. We're not having a cold snap. We're having a winter."

"We knew it had seasons," Eleanor said. "We chose a temperate site on purpose; you can see the winter from orbit. What we never had was a full year of this planet on the ground."

"We were just here last year," Luca said, and heard how stupid it sounded as it came out.

"Not last year for this planet. A few warm weeks on one continent, a day on the islands, and a month here." She let it sit. "The year's longer than we guessed. The cold came on time."

"Do we now have data from last year?" he asked.

"Here," Eleanor said, and pulled the science feed over the weather. "We're fine down here at the tower, in Aurora. Years of food in the ship, a farm that grows in the hydroponics regardless of the weather. Feeding this site, feeding the Varnathi once they're awake, that problem has been solved, more or less." She tapped a second map. Higher ground, mountains, a cold blue mass sitting over them. "The Vault is not fine."

Luca moved off the wall.

"It sits higher and colder than we are. A lot higher." She brought up deterioration readings they'd been logging for weeks and filing as background. "These have been saying it the whole time. None of us put it together. At that altitude, winter isn't flurries on a field. It's a blizzard. The ground will be under ice four months out of the year, and there's no walking up to it, no flying in, no reaching the door at all." She looked at him.

Nobody said anything.

Luca stood in the blue light, thinking. The thousand Varnathi this settlement was for would have to wait out a winter, while the overflows above them raged on.

He could go now, or leave them locked in for the season.

"We have to move the Vault timeline up," he said. "All of it. The mineral surveys, the vegetation maps, the defensive outposts, it's done. We were going to take the rest of the month, and it looks like we don't have a month." He looked from Danny to Eleanor to Emily. "We go now, before we can pass up on the opportunity. Start pulling what we need."

He went back out into the snow when it was done, because he needed thirty seconds of cold air before he started ordering more people around.

Ryan's shuttle sat cooling on the field, snow building on its wings, the last of his team gone in and out of the weather.

"Hey." Ryan tipped his head at the empty paddock. "Where'd the mustangs get to? I figured they'd be out there bothering the fence."

"Gone," Luca said.

"Gone?"

"Trotted off. Week, week and a half back." Luca watched the snow come down on the place where the horses used to be. "We tracked them on the drones. South and west. Three hundred miles out, last fix, and still going."

"Oh," Ryan said.

And the word just sat there between them in the falling snow. Not one person on the whole site had thought to ask the animals why.

The snow kept coming down on both of them.

"Come on," Luca said. "I need you for this."