First Soil
Day 1, Kepler-442b. The soil here is not soil — it is regolith, mineral dust that has never known a root or a worm or the slow patient chemistry of decomposition. Dr. Valentina Orozco knelt at the edge of the first excavation trench and let it run through her gloved fingers, watching the pale grey particles scatter in the thin wind that came down from the basalt ridges to the north. The atmospheric processors hummed behind her, vast as cathedrals, converting the planet's carbon dioxide into something her lungs could use, and the sound was the sound of a world being rewritten from its first sentence.
They had named the landing site Esperanza, which the crew — fourteen engineers, three biologists, one geologist, and Valentina, who held the title of Chief Terraforming Officer and the private conviction that the title was absurd — had chosen by vote on the third day of orbital survey. The plain stretched to the horizon in every direction, flat and mineral and colourless, interrupted only by the distant teeth of the mountain range and the occasional outcrop of volcanic glass that caught the light of the red dwarf sun and threw it back in shards of amber and rust. It was, by any human measure, barren. It was, by the measure of what they had come to do, a blank page.
The first seed went into the modified soil on the forty-third day. Valentina planted it herself — a strain of