The Pioneers

What do they do?

The Pioneers are the Settlers’ Guild, one of the five Global Guilds, which take no side. They handle what it takes to live somewhere:

• construction and civil infrastructure;
• medicine;
• cultivation.

Their founding charter has a single clause, and it is not up for negotiation: “El Vivero does not close its doors to anyone who bleeds.”

How did they begin?

They began in the wreckage of the Arca Aurora, a ship of the Flota Aura, the settlers’ fleet. The Arca crashed on Ithera in the middle of the war. By sheer physics, its Módulo de Bioingeniería y Enfermería was the only compartment with life support intact. Within hours it was full of wounded from both sides.

Sable Okoye, now their leader, was then a hydroponics technician and the ship’s nurse. She took charge in practice, because nobody else knew how to dose the stabilisation serum without using it all up on the first day.

The guild inherited that instinct: ration, prioritise and keep alive whatever can be kept alive. In Year 12 E.A. (E.A. stands for Años de Asentamiento, the settlers’ calendar) it put its charter in writing.

Who leads them?

Okoye, known as “Madre Sable”, leads them. She was once head of hydroponics and the infirmary on the Arca. Today she is general Administrator of El Vivero.

• She is warm with the wounded and ice-cold in supply negotiations.
• She keeps a paper logbook on purpose, because “digital can be erased with an Axiom” (a decree of the Zenith high command).
• In it she notes every favour owed by the Zenith and the Nadir, the system’s two factions. And she calls it in at the worst possible moment for the debtor.

Where are they?

Their seat is El Vivero, in La Cicatriz, the Arca’s impact zone, where all five Guilds have their seats. It is a dome of organic glass grown out of the original module, and the greenest and noisiest building in La Cicatriz:

• on the ground floor, seed barter;
• on the middle ring, an emergency clinic;
• at the top, Okoye’s greenhouse office, which looks out over almost the entire impact zone.

Unofficially, it is the only place in the system where Zenith and Nadir delegates have sat at the same table without an armed escort.

What does a newcomer find there?

Okoye greets recruits with the same line: “Here we heal first and ask about sides later.”

Their shop, Suministros Cívicos, sells seeds, bandages and rations, and buys plant fibre and organic waste.

Nima Ossa, the cook at El Vivero, puts it like this: “Sable says a stew that doesn’t feed three things at once is a soup with pretensions. This one feeds four, if you count pride.”

Who are they on good and bad terms with?

• With the Nadir, sympathy with limits. They share the Nadir spirit, which puts “enough” before “optimal”, without being Nadir. They work informally with the Guardabosques, the Nadir corps that watches over Ithera, on seed banks and conservation routes. But the Círculo, the assembly that governs the Nadir, deliberates very slowly. Okoye finds that unbearable when a child with a fever is waiting. “The Círculo votes while the patient gets worse” is a common complaint at El Vivero.
• With the Zenith, cold but workable. The Cátedra, their high command, funds the nanomedicine and the small-scale terraforming kit the large domes need. In return, it demands priority access to the local biology data. The friction is over ground: aggressive terraforming on the edges of La Cicatriz threatens the greenhouses. Every concession Okoye signs costs her a night’s sleep.
• With the Forge, rivals who still deal. They argue at every guild assembly. But Okoye and Torvun Ekes, its leader, privately trade fresh vegetables for recyclable scrap, without it going into any ledger.

What do they keep?

• LUMBRE, their compi, one of the Flota Aura’s small machine minds, rescued. She kept count of the sleepers, the settlers who travelled asleep. She was never lost: she was working without a body aboard the Arca Custodia, the ship that registers every new settler.
• The Semilla Original del Vivero, one of the unique relics of the founding.
• Those who reach Leyenda, their highest rank, can aim for four pieces. They are the Cúpula Perenne, the Suero Sable, the Motor de Fotosíntesis Wyrd and the Manto del Primer Vivero, Okoye’s original work coat.