Verdant Ink 🏳️‍🌈 (wlw)

4: Amine X

Boarding a scouter so soon after the accident had been ambitious. Every rung she climbed up the gleaming step-ladder brought new dread clenching in Pelin's gut. Not that this was her usual craft. Pelin's favourite scouter had limped back scorched to the Miranda carrying a near-dead 301 three days earlier, presumably sent straight from the hangar to the workshops for repair.

After a month of avoiding 301's bored stare from the navigation deck on every terraforming mission, that morning Pelin found herself craning her neck towards 301's empty seat every few minutes, cold sweat soaking into her flight-suit as the horror of the Karinja ambush advanced and retreated over and over again in her stomach.

She dismissed the roiling nausea and concentrated on navigation, but fractured images preyed on her. 301 pale and weeping, her body mangled. Black gobs of viscous blood. 301's pained smile as she repeated Pelin's name, and her own pretty name. Midori.

Reliving the past three days could wait. The control panel lit up at the approach of the scouter to the target planet, Messier-E, a little rocky land of blistering sands and mountains of ice.

Tidally-locked to its red dwarf star, one side of Messier-E was permanently sun-baked, bright and lifeless, the other side equally lifeless in eternal darkness and cold. Scrubbing hot winds swirled on the sun-facing side, tailing off as the scouter plunged into the upper atmosphere, aiming for the concentric zones of intermediate climate in between the burning and frigid extremities of the planet.

Setting the scouter to hover just above Messier-E's stratosphere, Pelin surveyed the incident light falling on the planet's circular belt of sweet habitable dusk. The great red stellar disc hung just above the horizon in an orange sky.

The planet was one of a few rocky bodies in a soon-to-be-colonised area of the galaxy, close to the Karinja. The General was adamant that Pelin should race to terraform the rocky planetoids of the Messier Cluster before the Karinja could claim it.

Creating habitable planets of thriving plants, and therefore oxygen, was the only thing keeping the Karinja from terrorising new colonisers. Karinja forces had dwindled as they kept to planets with NOX-laden atmospheres, unable to set foot on lush green oxygen-heavy planets created through Pelin's expert terraforming.

The General was always gleeful at how fitting a demise it was for such an evil species. The Karinja had taken so many lives of Alliance agents, after all. Of Pelin's cohort only she and Seven had survived.

Bathed in red-orange light and blanketed in a weakly acidic atmosphere of CO2 and NOX, Pelin knew what the little planet needed. She loaded the pod of her carefully-formulated nucleotide mixture into the missile bay, set the coordinates, and fired. Jammed with Pelin's expertly-crafted soup of amines, phosphates and buffers, the pod sped towards the planet, crashing into a shallow sea.

A few months, and the nucleotides and growth factors would self-assemble, and the planet would soon be home to a carpet of algae. A few years, and it would host simple plants, ferns and cycads, but not as Pelin had known them on Earth. Differences in atmosphere, orbital period, light wavelength, and truly exotic plants would emerge from Pelin's chemical seeding. Oxygen levels would stabilise between nineteen and twenty-two per cent depending on what Pelin deemed best for the zone, ready for humans.

Not Earth, but home all the same.

Fearing oxygen, the Karinja would be stopped without raising a single weapon, without deploying a single bomb. The war would be won by spreading turf across every rock in the galactic spiral arm.

Pelin scanned the contents of the second pod, the one that General-four had instructed her to test. It contained a new set of amines and growth factors, sent from the labs on the Shiva colonies. Faster kinetics, more resilient self-assembly, General-four had wanted Pelin to be the first to test the new chemical cocktail, Amine X.