Bet on the Vintage

The vat is winning.

I scrub at the stain with a nylon pad and it just laughs at me. Purple rings around the waterline like a bad lipstick print. Three years of marriage and two years of divorce, and I still can't get tannin out of anything.

"Stupid grapes," I tell the vat.

The vat says nothing. Vats are smart that way.

Here's the situation. My name is Chen. I'm thirty-four, I live on Terra Nova Beta in a settlement called Frontera, and I make wine in a cargo pod that Strayker's office retrofitted for me because nobody else wanted the job. The soil out here is mineral as hell. The grapes grow weird. Everything grows weird out here. The whole planet grows weird.

And in three days, my ex-husband collects on a bet.

I dunk the pad back in the sanitizer bucket. Don't think about the bet. Think about the stain.

That's when the proximity alert blares.

I drop the pad. It's a horrible sound, that alert, a flat two-tone honk, and it only goes off for one kind of traffic. Personal shuttles. Nobody flies a personal shuttle to my pod except the supply runs, and Jenny texts first like a normal person.

The screen by the door says: SHUTTLE, REGISTRY BR-114. OCCUPANT: ONE.

I know that registry. I married that registry.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

I look down at myself. Sanitizer apron, stained overalls, purple hands. Hair in a clip that gave up hours ago. Perfect. If I'm going to be ambushed I might as well look like a crime scene.

The airlock cycles. I grab a rag and hold it like a weapon, uselessly.

Brady walks in like he owns the place.

He always did that. Six years together, two divorced, and the man still enters every room like the room should be grateful. Thirty-six years old, older than I remember, which is unfair because I remember him every day. Grey at the temples now. That's new. I hate that I noticed it in under a second.

He smells like recycled shuttle air and, God help me, confidence.

"Chen," he says.

"Brady." I fold my arms. The rag dangles. Very intimidating. "What."

"Nice place." He looks around the pod at my racks, my hoses, my one sad chair. "Cozy."

"It's a lab, not a hotel. Why are you here?"

"It's Wednesday."

"It's Wednesday," I agree. "And?"

"And the bet closes Saturday." He steps further in, and I step back, and I hate that I stepped back. "I'm here for my tasting."

My stomach does something acrobatic. I keep my face flat. Divorce taught me that. Flat face, always.

"The batch needs another forty-eight hours," I say. "Standard process. Malolactic conversion. You wouldn't know about that, you're a bug guy."

"I was married to a winemaker for three years."

"Was. Past tense. So it doesn't count."

He smiles at that. He has the nerve to smile at that. "Forty-eight hours puts us at Friday morning. Cutting it close, Chen."

"Then you should've texted instead of just landing on me."

"I did text."

I did not check my messages. I will not be telling him that. "Well. You should've called too. Or not come."

"Can I look at the tanks?"

"No!"

"Chen."

"This is a sterile facility. You're wearing a suit that's been to three settlements and a shuttle full of recycled air. I have a vintage to protect." I point at the door with the rag. "Come back Saturday. Nine sharp. Bring your money."

He holds his hands up, and for a second he just looks at me. That's the worst part of him. He doesn't argue. He looks. Like he's reading a soil sample.

"You're stalling," he says quietly.

"I'm sanitizing."

"The vat's clean."

"The vat is never clean." I scrub harder at the stain to prove a point that proves nothing. "Saturday, Brady."

He lingers in the doorway on the way out. I feel him wanting to say something. I turn my back and scrub. The airlock cycles shut and I listen to his footsteps on the gravel until I can't hear them, and then I hear them for a while longer anyway, because brains are cruel like that.

***

I call Jenny from the comms panel in the corner, hands still purple, heart going like a hummingbird on a treadmill.

She picks up on the second ring. "Supply office, Jenny speaking, if this is Strayker I already filed it."

"It's me."

"Oh no. What's wrong. You never call, you text. You text like a serial killer, all lowercase, no punctuation. Calling means panic."

"Brady's here."

Silence. Then, "Here at the colony?"

"Here at my pod. Twenty minutes ago. He wants his tasting, Jenny. Saturday. The tasting is Saturday."

"I know it's Saturday, I marked it on my calendar. I marked it 'the day Chen either gets rich or gets deported.' It's got a little star on it."

"Jenny."

"I'm being supportive."

"You're being you."

"Same thing. Okay. Okay, breathe. How bad is it?"

I look at the tanks. The tanks look back. In two of them there is what I'm calling wine, which is generous, in the way that calling a puddle a lake is generous. In the third tank there is the problem.

The harvest went sour. Not a metaphor. Actual souring. Some kind of native contamination got in during the heat spike two weeks back, and by the time I caught it, half the batch tasted like vinegar and regret. I've been doing triage ever since. Skimming, re-feeding, praying.

"It's bad," I say. "The merlot block is dead. I've got maybe a third of my volume and it's... it's young. It's not ready. Wine needs time, Jenny, and time is the one thing I don't have."

"How young?"

"Two weeks young."

She makes a sound like a kettle. "Chen, that's not wine. That's grape juice with ambition."

"Thank you, I'm aware."

"So what's in tank three?"

I hesitate. Tank three is my secret. Tank three is the thing I've been doing at four in the morning when nobody's watching, because if it works it's genius and if it doesn't it's how they describe my deportation hearing.

"Remember those yeast cultures Brady brought back from the ridge survey? Year one? The native strains?"

"You still have those? Those were in your divorce box. Nobody keeps lab samples in their divorce box."

"I kept them." I say it before I can stop myself. "There was this one strain, the orange one, the one that smelled like apricots when it bloomed. I've been growing it out. It ferments fast. Insanely fast. And it doesn't taste alien, Jenny, it tastes like... okay, it tastes like alien apricot wine, but in a good way, in a terra nova way, in a way Strayker could put on a brochure."

The line goes quiet. I can hear Jenny thinking, which is a rare and frightening thing.

"You're going to bet your visa on yeast from the divorce box," she says finally.

"I'm going to try."

"Chen. Say the terms out loud. I want to hear you say them."

Fine. Fine. I lean my forehead against the cool metal of the comms panel and say it.

"If I produce a drinkable vintage from the first harvest by the anniversary, Brady funds my expansion. Full greenhouse, second pod, the works. If I fail..." My voice does something embarrassing on the way through. "If I fail, I sign the return charter. Back to Earth. Lab reverts to colony use. Visa voids."

"And your residency's tied to the lab."

"My residency is tied to the lab," I confirm. "So it's not just going home. It's going home with nothing, in front of him, three days from now."

"Well." Jenny's voice has that dangerous brightness it gets when she's decided to be positive with extreme prejudice. "No pressure, but your alien yeast has one shot. How's it tasting today?"

I walk to tank three. Pull the sample valve. Let a finger's worth run out over my purple hand. I sniff it. I taste it.

It's alive. It's bright. It's got a weird floral thing happening at the back that I don't have a word for yet, and it is nowhere, nowhere near balanced, but there is something there. Something with a spine.

"Honestly?" I say into the comm. "It tastes like a bet I might win."

"Or a bet you'll lose spectacularly, in front of your ex-husband, while I watch."

"That too. Jenny, don't watch."

"Impossible. I'm bringing chairs. And I'm telling Strayker, because if there's a diplomatic incident on Saturday I want plausible deniability."

"Diplomatic incident?"

"You're betting your visa on alien biology and you think nobody official should know? Chen. Babe. I love you. I'm telling Strayker."

She hangs up before I can argue. Which is her whole personality.

I look at tank three. The stain is still on the other vat. The yeast is blooming, orange, apricot-sweet, three days from everything.

"Okay," I tell it. "Okay. Work fast. Work weird. It's what we do."

The yeast says nothing. But it smells like it's listening.

* * *

Morning. Or what passes for morning when your ceiling is a cargo pod wall with a clock taped to it.

I go straight to tank three. I always go straight to tank three now. It's a problem. Jenny says I have "yeast brain," which is not a real condition, but she's not wrong.

The sample valve spits into my cup and I see it immediately. The color's off. Deeper than yesterday. Almost garnet. And there's a haze in it, a fine shimmer that shouldn't be there.

"Okay," I say to nobody. "Okay, what did you do."

I pull it under the scope. And there it is. Not my yeast. Not just my yeast. Something else, mixed through it, threaded between the cells like little green commas.

Spores. Native spores.

My stomach drops through the floor of the pod, through the regolith, into the mantle.

I know where they came from. The air scrubber on the west door has been hissing for a month. I put a work order in. Strayker put it on a list. The list is long. The spores did not wait for the list.

Frontera spores have a particular quality. Everybody on this rock learns about them in week one, usually the hard way. They get in everything. Grain stores, water reclamation, the one guy's beard. They sour things. That's the official line. They sour things and then they go dormant and then Strayker yells at you.

Except.

Except I'm looking at them right now, under the scope, in my must, and they are not souring anything. The sugar reading this morning was already dropping. Fast. Faster than my yeast can account for. And the pH, which should be climbing into vinegar territory, is holding. Steady. Like something is balancing it on purpose.

I run the numbers twice. Then a third time, because the first two times I was breathing wrong.

The spores are fermenting. Not the way Earth yeast does. Some other pathway, some alien chemistry I don't have a name for, but the product is alcohol and dissolved gas and whatever that floral note is. The must is carbonating itself. In the tank. On its own.

I sit down on my one stool.

"Hey," I say to the spores. "Hi. You're not supposed to do that."

They keep doing it.

So here's my situation, laid out plain. Two days. My merlot block is dead. My surviving volume is young and thin and would get laughed off any table on Earth. And tank three, my secret shame, my divorce-box yeast, has just been hijacked by local biology into something nobody on two planets has ever tasted.

It could be poison. Statistically it is probably fine. The survey team ate things grown near that ridge and only half of them complained.

I taste it again. It's changed overnight. Sharper at the front. The apricot is still there but there's something under it now, something green and bright, like the smell of the domes after rain. The fizz hits my tongue and surprises a laugh out of me.

"You're either the best thing that ever happened to me," I tell the tank, "or the reason I get on a charter."

Story of my whole marriage, honestly.

* * *

Strayker calls at noon. Of course Jenny told Strayker.