JUFE-569, once a vessel built for delivery, had become a bridge—a small proof that seeding need not be a colonizing act but a practice of mutual tending. Its hull aged into pitted metal and fiber, its name a designation on old manifests, but the life it had carried learned to listen and to stay.
They maneuvered into an orbit nobody expected to find. The array at the planet's pulse was not a ruin but an architecture: concentric rings of reflective panels and botanical scaffolds, antennae brushed with vines. The planet was tended, its stewards hidden or woven into the very ecology. jufe-569 eng