Greenhouse

The dusky shadow of the Earth passed over the windows above the heads of the adolescents gathered on the promenade, all of them tilted back to watch. Earth’s curve crested with the glow of the sunrise, a phenomenon they’d all seen before - but for most of the recruits, like Avita, it was the first time they could remember seeing the fireworks that burst in the halo.

Molten stars broke into light trails that careened free of the pull of gravity, shattered by the impact with the atmosphere. The ashes began to sink toward the surface of the planet, but the sharp glare of the loose debris cut through the tinted glass of the station in a warning. Another 15 years, another disaster on the horizon. The moment that they had trained for came upon them.

“Brace for Impact,” came the cool, even voice of the ship's alert system as the hue of the lights turned red.

The promenade recruits shuffled with quickened breaths to their stations, just as they’d practiced countless times during drills but without the pungent scent of adrenaline. Except for Avita and her younger sister, Denna. She was only 8. “Please, Avi,” Denna’s lip quivered, “it’s Grandma.”

Avita wrapped her arms around her sister’s waist and hoisted her onto her hip. She started running but another recruit, a boy about her age, Faren, stepped in her path. “You’re leaving? If you go, you won’t be in the Comet Corps anymore.”

Tears stung her eyes as Avita pushed past her friend, rushing toward the agriculture wing of the station where they’d grown up and where her grandmother had died the previous sleep cycle. If Denna had found her before the Impact, then the Med Corps hadn’t taken away the body yet. She could still say goodbye.

Avita’s knees buckled as the floor beneath her boots shifted with a muffled boom from somewhere else in the station. Denna squeezed her sister to hold on as they hit the ground. The red lights dimmed for a moment, then started a slow pulse pattern between dark and light. Another collision rocked the station, this time further away. She ran as fast and hard as she could without interruptions from further impacts. Still, the sounds of the Comet Corps racing to fulfill the orders that came in echoed throughout the station.

Denna and Avita bid their grandmother farewell before the Med Corps finally arrived after the repair teams were deployed to the outside of the station. Avita huddled in the corner and thought about Faren. Since they were kids, they’d wanted to join the Comet Corps and brave the outside, space, and do their part to keep the station safe and secure.

It was the last hope for Earth, after all.

Now, she’d abandoned the Corps and her friends for her sister and for the corpse of her grandmother. She would be a farmer, again, like the rest of her family.

“It hit Greenhouse X,” Avita heard the older adults whisper. Her parents’ dour faces turned impossibly darker upon hearing the news. “That’s one of the experimental ones.” “Things around here are going to start getting intense.”

Faren visited months later. His muscles were becoming wiry, his eyes held a depth that only came from feeling the consuming emptiness of outside the space station. He stayed with his family, but they weren’t who he had come to see. He came to see Avita.

“Why did you run?” He asked after convincing her to take a break and sit with him in Greenhouse C, where the air purifiers grew. It had always been her favorite.

Avita sighed. “Just family stuff. Besides, I probably would’ve gotten in the way of the 65th Comet Corps team of recruits who wound up totally saving the Greenhouses.” She nudged his knee and the bronze medallion stitched into his uniform’s chest caught the light.

Faren remembered the fire, at first small until it caught the circulatory vents. Thanks to the quick thinking of the recruits, most of them on their first true mission, they were able to choke the oxygen from the room and douse the flame without further damage. “That just made a better headline. We were working on orders from the superiors, it was all their idea. I’m just the one that pulled the trigger.”

“Don’t minimize your heroism! You were always so bad at that. Your big, dumb grin gives away how proud you are of yourself.”

Faren chuckled. His lush green eyes landed his gaze on Avita. “That’s not the reason I’m grinning.”

The same year that Avita was given management of Greenhouse C, just like her father, Faren proposed. A special cross-bred flower with bright red petals made its debut at the station in Avita’s bouquet.

The Comet Corps did more than just respond to damage from the Impact. They maintained the exterior of the ship for the other 99% of the 15 year intervals between. And being considered a hero from the first day, Faren was given plenty of time to honeymoon with his new wife.

Still, it seemed that every year there was less and less damage. Some even predicted that, within their generation, they may see the end of the Impact.

On Denna’s next birthday, both their mother and father died in a terrible accident in Greenhouse X. They called it a collapse, but the details were kept from Avita in a great red envelope. It was top secret, not even Faren had permission to read the entire dossier. An accident so terrible that their bodies were unable to be returned to the civilian populace.

Theirs was only the first in a series of accidents that all traced back to Greenhouse X. A supervisor died in a fall. The ventilation system malfunctioned and suffocated a pair of scientists from the Green Corps. An employee suffered an unexpected heart attack and died while alone in the Greenhouse. Another developed an apparent allergy to one of the experimental plants that turned lethal.

From her position as manager of Greenhouse C, Avita found herself with a small amount of leverage that she intended to pry against the lid of the secrets in X.

“Once is a mistake, twice is coincidence,” Avita said in a low voice to her husband, “but five?”

“Leave it alone,” Faren insisted. “You can trust the Corps.”

Avita did trust the Corps. But the head of Greenhouse X, a scientist named Michael, remembered how she’d run from the last Impact and made a show of looking down his nose at her whenever they were in the same room. His employees were too scared of his rank in the Corps to say anything aside from the scripts that he provided them in case anyone asked about their experiments.

But there was one time where the Greenhouse projects were guarded by a single member of the Corps: during the next Impact. She had three years to study the layout plans that she managed to swipe from clipboards and find inside Corps systems that Faren’s credentials would allow her to view. In recent years, the Greenhouse went through changes including reinforcement of the large planter boxes and designs for larger planters. The ventilation system was changed and rerouted, then rerouted again.

She managed to get her hands on medical paperwork for workers who transferred out of Greenhouse X, citing anemia-induced fatigue and pain as their reason for their request. She also found a report of strange gases warping glass and melting copper alloy metals. The paper was torn and incomplete, though - an oversight from the Corps - and there wasn’t anything further to learn from it.

And she fell pregnant. Her weekly bloodwork told her three months before the next Impact. At least the next disaster was predicted to be no worse than the last, and perhaps the next generation of human refugees wouldn’t see an Impact. It could fade into history and legend.

Whatever came next in humanity’s desperate attempts at survival, Avita would make sure that her child was in no danger from Greenhouse X, or the Green Corps, or the Comet Corps. The next Impact would mark the end.

Faren barely slept, tossing and turning as he remembered the last Impact. The coldness of space wasn’t a temperature that seeped into bones, it was cold in a deep, unfeeling way. Like the metals under his feet, the shadow of the dying planet that hung above his head.

He remembered the feeling of disconnecting his tether with his squadmates. A sudden weightlessness that was only remedied with their modified magnetic gloves to hold on to the pieces of the station and guide themselves. Faren was the only one of his team that made it back. Avita would have been one of them, one of the recruits left adrift to mercifully shred their bodies against the atmosphere. If he had been smarter, he would have left with her at the promenade.

But this could be the final Impact. If he could endure the day, then he would never need to feel the fear of being outside the ship again.

Avita followed her husband and sister to the promenade, but had to leave them to return to her Greenhouse. She’d promised to stay behind and report any damage that might befall her charge. All according to plan.

She found the single member of the Corps that guarded the entrance to the Greenhouses and sent him a message to investigate a strange noise inside. When he got up from his post to report, Avita slipped behind him and into the elevator that brought her down - down to the lowest levels of the wing.

Greenhouse X was the largest of the three on this level. It emitted a soft red glow from the narrow skylights, the only light in the space. “Brace for Impact,” said the ship’s voice in her usual, flat tone.

With a forged entry card, Avita got through the doors with remarkable ease. More than she expected. At first, only the shadows of massive leaves and large, curled thorns greeted her. She stepped over vines trailing on the ground that were as thick as her leg.

For a moment, she thought that perhaps her years of paranoia were all delusion like Faren had told her. Aside from the recognizable plants being more plump than normal, the new breeds that had been cross-bred in these chambers were colorful and strange but seemed like any other that could be found even in her Greenhouse.

The walls and floor around Avita groaned and shook, knocking her to her knees. She reflexively reached one hand to her stomach. The planters along the walls rattled and tipped forward, caught by tendrils of vine that wrapped around the struts of the ceiling and walls to give Avita only seconds to react and move before they snapped and released the weight of soil and flora to crash against the tile.

Another great quake thrust Avita over the edge of a soil bed and into a tangle of roots that looped around her wrists and began to squeeze. She reeled back from the pressure, but the nerve-like white snakes of organic matter closed the noose around her limbs. They pulled at her extremities with alarming power, and Avita cried out for help - desperate and, she feared, totally alone.

Then a flame rushed past her, along with a thunderous rumble that shook her frame and sent her ears ringing. The heat forced the ropes to recede, hissing like steam against the drying dirt. The heat wafted over Avita in waves, too, and she stumbled to look upon the source of the explosion that had first saved her and now threatened to doom her.

Fire raced up the stems and trunks of thick leaves, catching on the extremities of the blooms that recoiled and flailed in response. The shrieking of steam filled the room as plants dropped and launched themselves from their pots to escape.

“Avita!”

She whirled on her heel and sprinted toward her name shouted in a voice she recognized at once. Faren. She found him on the other side of a locked door, illuminated by blue flames that lapped at the small office. “What are you doing here?” She demanded, withdrawing her hands after she gripped the doorhandle. She cried out as the heated metal burned her flesh.

“I knew you would be here!” He said, a manic smile spreading on his face. “I knew you were using the Impact as an excuse to get away!”

“How did you get inside? Open the door!”

“It’s stuck. There have to be spare cardkeys in the Green Corps suits upstairs. Hurry!”

“What?”

“There’s no time! You were right, Avita, your parents’ death wasn’t an accident.”

“How do you know that?”

He slammed a file folder on the glass screen of the door. A red folder with a large black “X” on it, just like the death records of her parents and, if her memory was to be believed, her grandmother too. “It happened in the last Impact. Whatever hit the Greenhouse it... changed something. These plants are resistant to disease, they don’t decay.”

“I have to get this fire out,” Avita’s eyes darted around the room, wondering why the automatic sprinklers hadn’t engaged yet - unless they were down from the Impact.

“Just get this door open, I’ll tell you everything.”

“I’ll get water!”

“No, don’t!”

Avita stopped on her back foot. “What? Why not?”

“The water will make them shrink,” he said. “These plants, they don’t grow with water and sunlight - it’s blood. Blood makes them grow.”

“Carnivorous plants?”

“They had them on Earth, too. It’s real, Avita, you just have to let me out. The fire probably won’t kill the plants, but uh... As for me...” He began to cough. “I know we have a population problem on this ship but, well... I’m a hero!”

“Faren, just hold on! I’ll find something!”

But the fire raged around them, and Avita found herself coughing and hacking as the protective layers on the plants started to burn and peel. They squealed as they writhed against metal and plastic, grinding away with acid and thorns that ripped through and ate away at the structure of the Greenhouse.

It was going to come down. Avita dropped to her knees and slumped against the door on the other side of her husband. “I can’t, it’s no use!”

“Avita, please! Don’t abandon humanity again! You ran from the Impact, you can’t run from this!”

She began to weep, Feran beat his fists against the reinforced glass as blue smoke choked him.

“How long did you know?” She asked.

Feran was quiet for a long while. “Since the beginning. The plants that came through the Impact, they... ate the others. The lucky ones. I swore to never tell a soul. This was how... How the Corps was going to save us. Save humanity.”

“But... What about Earth?”

“What about Earth? We’re only meant to be temporary visitors on this station, regrowing humanity to go back home. But this is home. Earth isn’t healing. That’s why we needed... population control.”

“Blood eating plants?” She coughed. “Do you really think... that would have worked?”

“I swore... my oath.”

The office became quiet.

Avita watched with heavy eyes as the plants threw themselves out of the path of the fire, holding their extremities aloft and trying to douse themselves. “These flames... they aren’t killing the plants. They’re... too strong. Fire won’t purge the growth, won’t burn away the truth of what they are.”

With the last of her strength, Avita threw herself against the thorns and spilled her blood into the systems of roots. It sizzled and steamed, but the plants reacted at once. The webs of green veins embraced her and drew her into their acidic bellies. The fire surged against the glass and exterior, uncontrollable and empowered by the wrath of nature.

Mother Nature’s name was cried in the death throes that echoed across the ship. She wore a familiar face and thrummed with mirrored heartbeats.