Thren Valis's Arc

Chapter 4 of 18

Thren carried both colonies back to her greenhouse. The dome sat quiet under its curved leaf plates, alive and breathing. Her beetles chewed hull plate. Her spider spun cable. But when she sketched the finished ship, she stopped cold. A living vessel needed to run on the journey home. The beetles needed food. The spider needed warmth. She had built a machine with no power to keep itself alive. Every part she grew would die the moment she left the ground. She walked the rows of her round hydroponic pools, searching each plant for a hidden answer. Ferns. Broad green leaves. Nothing stored energy. Then she reached the last pool and knelt. A cluster of flowers grew there, wide leaves catching the dome light. Below them sat three round tubers, deep red, striped with blue. She had grown them for color months ago and forgotten why. She pressed a thumb to one tuber. It was warm. Warm at night, in a cold dome, with no sun. Thren cut a tuber free and split it. Inside, the flesh glowed faint, thick as syrup. She touched two copper probes to the pulp. Her meter needle jumped and held. The tuber pushed current on its own. She stared at the reading. The plant drank light by day and stored it as a liquid charge. It was a battery that grew back what it spent. She worked through the night. She wired six tubers in a line and ran them to a single beetle nest. The glow inside the roots brightened and held steady. She fed the same line to the spider's warm patch. The spider stirred, then settled, and spun. One plant powered both colonies at once. No sun needed. No fuel to carry. By dawn the reading had not dropped. The wired tubers still pushed current, and the flowers above them had already begun to swell fresh orbs. Thren sat back against a pool and let herself breathe. She had the hull. She had the cable. Now she had a heart that fed itself. A ship built from these could keep its own systems alive across the dark between planets. Then she looked closer at the meter. The current was strong, but it was not steady. The needle climbed at midday and sank near dawn. Her colonies would eat most when the plant gave least. A ship in deep space, far from any sun, would starve the tubers slowly. She had solved power on the ground. She had not solved it for the void. And a vessel that could not steer a course could not choose to stay near a star. Thren pulled her navigation notes from the shelf. The tubers needed light to charge. To keep them charged, she had to point the ship at a sun and hold it there. Power and navigation were the same problem now. She had been avoiding the hardest piece. She could avoid it no longer.