With energy and mass to spare, Kira put all her efforts into construction. The endeavor was not purely mechanical; along with beams and braces and metal girders, she allowed the Seed to create special chambers that it filled with an organic soup—heated bioreactors that began to produce the living materials needed for the finished product: woods stronger than any steel; seeds and buds and eggs and more besides; vines that crawled and clung and could transmit electricity as efficiently as copper cable; fungal superconductors; and a whole ecosystem of flora and fauna drawn from the Seed’s vast experience, and which it and Kira believed would work in a harmonious whole.

She moved quickly, but her efforts took time. Days passed, and still the fleets sat waiting and watching, and still she built.

From her central core grew four enormous struts that extended forward, backward, left, and right, so that they made a cross with arms of equal length. She extended the cross, meter after meter, until each strut was three and a half kilometers long and thick enough to fly a cruiser through. Then she set the Seed to joining the tips of the cross with a great equatorial ring, and from the end of each strut, a rib began to grow both up and down and curving inward, as if hugging the surface of an invisible orb.

The Seed was so large by then that Kira could hardly imagine being confined to a body the size of a human or a Wranaui. Her consciousness encompassed the whole of the structure, and she was aware of every part of it at every moment. It was, she imagined, much how a ship mind must feel. The substance of her self expanded to match the demands of the sensory input, and with that expansion came a breadth of thought she had never before experienced.

Construction was yet ongoing, but she was no longer willing to wait. Time had grown short indeed. Besides, all who watched could see what she had set out to make: a space station greater in size than any that human or Wranaui had built. Parts of it were metallic grey, but most of it was green and red, reflecting the organic material that made up the bulk of the station. It was a living thing, as much as any person, and Kira knew it would continue to grow and evolve for decades, if not centuries to come.

But, like all gardens, it needed tending.

She put her attention into several chambers close to her core, sealed them from the vacuum, filled them with air hospitable to both humans and Wranaui, gave them gravity suitable for either species, and finished them in a style that seemed fitting. To that end, she combined elements of design from the Wranaui, the Old Ones, and the part of her that was Kira, from each choosing what was most to her liking.