by Ginger Booth
“Or standing in the shape of trees,” Sass suggested.
“There’s that,” Eli allowed.
Ben rose a couple hundred meters above the treetops and laid on speed to put some serious kilometers behind them. “Time to see another biome. If there is one.”
Sass set her side of the display to watch backward, while Ben’s remained fixed ahead of them. She slipped behind the seats to watch both. The vast river stepped down altitude in amazing cataracts, and grew ever larger as tributaries joined. Aside from water, she saw precious few breaks in the forest cover. But its character gradually shifted to taller trees, different shades of dark green, bright green, and purple. Lower areas of yellow green often showed tall black standing stumps of fire regrowth, or glints of standing water.
Ben rose higher and laid on the acceleration until they sped by at 750 kph, the forest below a blur. The mountains gave way to rounder hills. They clearly followed a broad valley. Tributaries still joined the river, but no plains emerged. “This planet’s a one-trick pony. Let’s go fishing.”
“Really? Maybe we should have gone fishing back in the lake, where we were thinking of testing another settlement.”
Ben slowed, apparently scouting for his fishing hole. “I don’t think so, Sass. You want a second settlement, get the hell away from the glaciers. Can’t prove it. But that’s too much water, too much cold. One man’s uneducated opinion.”
Sass thought that through. First, Ben was better educated than she was. No, he’d never been to Earth. But he’d clearly spent bored days on research dreaming up this excursion while arm-chair quarterbacking from orbit. “You think we settled in the wrong place.”
“Yes.” But he slipped out of his seat, the ship halted over a calm side lobe of a wide stretch in the immense river’s flow. The bay was surrounded by forest, though few dead flotsam trees cluttered its banks. The air temperature read 72° F, or 22° C, fair growing weather for temperate Earth crops, a few degrees on the cool side.
He flashed her a boyish grin. “Teach me to fish, Earth woman!”
She laughed. “Ah, for one fish at a time we used a pole and… never mind. Maybe a light net?”
“Good choice! Cuz that’s what I asked Teke to make for us.”
They piled into the airlock again for close encounters of the watery kind, this time enlisting Wilder as pilot, Ben’s lazy security goon from way back. The fleet captain preferred an active pilot on duty while he did something stupid.
“Can I dive from here?” Teke hung out the open door as they hovered, crammed into the tiny space.
Ben grabbed his belt and yanked him backward. “No. You might burst a seal on your suit. We float down to the surface like petals, gang. Or, hmm.” He peered over the edge himself, then swung out on a grab bar by the door. “This water is a lot murkier than that glacier lake.”
“It’s alive,” Sass crooned. “Warmer water. Full of microscopic plants, fish –” She stopped. “Was that –?”
Yes, something definitely leapt from the water, its form hidden by flying droplets. The small silvery splash reminded her of snapper bluefish in the broad Hudson. Another soon flapped above the placid waters, and again.
“Do they breathe air?” Kassidy wondered. “Like a manatee?” The ship that brought her forbears to Mahina, the urbs, was named Manatee for the gentle freshwater mammal, already extinct by the time they left Earth.
“No –” Sass paused as a flurry of splashes came together. “Something is hunting them. They’re swimming for their lives.” That’s what snapper blues did, anyway.
Ben reached in for the net. Sass grinned and took station across from him on the outside of the shuttle, and they shook out the knotted nylon. Teke had attached floats on all four sides of some trellis webbing, the fine gauge Ben’s housekeeper Quire used to support the hydroponic peas, about an arm span square.
“So we lay this on the water and hope something leaps in?” Ben inquired.
“No.” Sass shifted back into the airlock to reconfigure the net. She plucked the floats off one side, and replaced them with some bolts and washers donated by Ben. Like Cope, he tended to keep engineering bits and pieces on his person. “You need one side to sink. That’s this side. And then we need lines to pull it up.”
Their D-rings and guylines supplied hauling lines. Kassidy pushed past to take camera station outside, on a further grab-bar, leaving one of her annoying drones to record Sass and the guys as she worked.
Ben persuaded Walker to move the shuttle at dead slow a few meters towards the flopping fish. Then Teke hurled the net. Unlike the rest of them, he’d learned to throw a net as a child. It landed on the surface folded over, but that resolved itself as the bolts dragged the side down. Against the white of the strands, instead of the murk of deep water, they could see a few shapes swim into the trap.
“Up,” Sass decreed. They didn’t need a lot of fish, only a few different ones for testing. And she didn’t want to risk catching a big predator fish. But the first haul was lost with all fins. Net management from a narrow doorway, or one-handed from the grab bars, nearly a house story above the water, proved tricky.
Since nothing big had leapt out at them, Ben approved moving the shuttle to only a meter from the surface, with the fishers rather higher. Then they had to move the shuttle again, since their thrashing with the net scared the fish to move elsewhere.
Then Teke threw again, into a veritable splash-fest of leaping fish.
“Oh, hell,” Sass murmured, spotting one of the hunting fish checking out the net. Her jaw dropped. That fish was longer than she was tall. “Sturgeon,” she breathed, the only fish she could think of like that.
Eli looked up sturgeon, and they ooh’d and ah’d.
“Do we pull it up?” Ben asked.
“No, you’ll break the net,” Sass replied. “Or dump us all overboard. He must weigh…?”
“Fifty kilos, give or take,” Eli guesstimated.
“We pull as soon as he’s out of there.”
But the sturgeon’s friends came to look, too. They quickly caught on that they could run the small fry into the net, and catch them trapped. After ten minutes of this the Spaceways team was beginning to think they should start over with a new net.
Then suddenly the slow sturgeon scattered as though small and quick as the little fish. “Now!’ Sass cried, and pulled up her corner. The others quickly joined in. They brought up a goodly catch of river weeds and several shining fish.
Yet their eyes remained glued below. A bigger creature, blubbery instead of fishy, placidly swam by.
“It is a manatee!” Kassidy shrieked. She didn’t ask for permission. She floated down at low grav, snapping her legs parallel to the water, suspended by her guyline to within a handspan of the water.
Enormous eyes blinked curiously at the bubble-headed human. He lifted a stubby arm, not a flipper, and swatted at her.
20
“Dammit!” Sass couldn’t reach to haul Kassidy away from the frightening ‘manatee.’ But the younger woman flipped upward and kicked at its swatting arm with her boots.
That arm bore some impressive claws. The enormous creature toyed with the dangling camerawoman like a tiger batting at a mouse.
“Pull me up!” Kassidy screeched.
“Trying!” Ben retorted. He managed to squeeze out the door and latch onto a grab bar for leverage. From there he hopped against the side of the shuttle a couple times to snag her line, affixed above the doorway. Bringing that back to his own grab bar gave her a few more inches clearance from the manatee’s reach. “Flip horizontal!”
“No!”
“Then recoil your line, dammit! I’m not hauling you up by hand!”
“I’ve got such a great view, though!”
“Are you taking pictures!” Ben jerked her line up three times, like a yo-yo. “Stop that!”
“Alright already!” Kassidy finally retracted her line. “Manatee don’t have arms!” She sounded incensed.
&nbs
p; “She’s fine,” Ben concluded. “She’s an idiot!” He set her swinging on her shortening safety line. Where the idiot laughed out loud.
Sass let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding, and huffed a laugh. “Don’t you two ever grow up. I mean it. This childlike innocence and disbelief in your own mortality. It’s precious. Hold onto it forever.”
Ben laughed out loud and jerked Kassidy’s line again, foiling her attempts to climb her own sorry butt back into the airlock.
“The manatee didn’t surface again,” Teke reported, more interested in the river animal than Kassidy. “I didn’t see a blowhole for it to breathe.”
Eli was more interested in their fish catch. “Perhaps land animals can breathe underwater on this planet. Oxygen levels are high. I need a sample of the water, too.”
Their net haul was still flopping in a very cramped space. Sass squatted on the door sill to study the collection.
Eli bagged the assorted water plants together. But he kept startling at the wriggly creatures. Sass saw several of them were indeed shaped like snapper bluefish. Another finger-width creature longer than herself seemed some sort of snake or worm. That one was tricky to coil into a specimen bag. Snake, she decreed, based on its sidewinder locomotion. Another beast looked like a large flounder crossed with a spiny sea robin. Its spines kept ripping open the specimen bag, so she lobotomized it with her suit knife. None of them had recognizable gills.
No, she decided, the gills were simply small, a feathery patch further down the body than on a fish, and on the bottom rather than side surfaces. The worm-snake pseudo-gills repeated down its length.
“Do we want to dissect one now, Eli? Or filet it, anyway.” She tapped a snapper.
“I want to see Sass cut open a fish!” Ben insisted. Eli shrugged acceptance.
“I know how, too,” Teke complained. “We have fish on Denali.”
“But you don’t eat fish on Denali.” Sass slipped the snapper out of its bag. In the fresh air, it resumed flapping. She cut off its head to put a stop to that, then studied its cross-section. Not much longer than her hand, even this animal featured a blubber layer. “If these are edible, I bet they’re delicious.”
She slipped a blade in the fleshiest side and sliced it open neatly, then laid it open butterfly-fashion. Eli’s helmet dove in for a closer look. She chuckled and leaned back against the wall to give him room.
Cut open, the illusion of a familiar terrestrial fish vanished. For one thing, its brain-equivalent was generous for a fish. Perhaps this little guy was a juvenile form of the sturgeon, who would grow immense and crafty over decades. But the skeletal form and organs were strange, as were the bony fins and blubbery tail.
Eli sat back on his haunches. “Cut me some meat, would you? With blubber.” He bagged that sample separately, then slipped the filleted fish into its original bag. He shook his head over the now-dead fish, and held up a plant. “It seems to have floats.”
Sass nodded. “A lot of seaweeds did that. Fresh water reeds too, I imagine.”
“I never thought to study water plants,” Eli mused. Then he swept the rest of the weedy debris out the airlock door with his boots.
“Sure we don’t want to catch a sturgeon?” Ben quipped. “Or a manatee?”
Teke said, “We’d need a gun to kill the manatee. And a meat hook to haul it up.”
“Looked smart to me,” Sass argued. “Maybe sentient. Like its namesake.”
“Are we returning to camp now?” Eli asked.
Ben gauged the lowering sunlight, and shook his head. “I want to follow the river to the ocean.”
“No,” Sass countered. “This river reaches the south of the continent. If you want to visit the ocean, we should hop the coastal range to a different river. Follow that to the sea. Save a couple thousand klicks.”
“Let’s do that,” Ben said decisively. “Clean up. Sunset drinks before dinner.”
“But we can’t land anywhere,” Sass objected. “Not in the dark, certainly.”
“Doesn’t cost much fuel to hover here overnight. We’ll see the ocean tomorrow. Need the other kind of fish.” The lead captain grinned at her.
She hadn’t realized he had no intention of returning to camp tonight. She felt guilty for leaving Clay to manage Thrive single-handedly. She’d call and apologize.
Once she surrendered the need to accomplish anything during her forced mini-vacation, she relaxed and enjoyed the evening aboard Merchant. The drinks and food were excellent, and Ben ever a lively host. Eli and Zelda kept their heads down processing their samples and all they’d learned today. The snapper proved an excellent fatty protein candidate, the spiky flounder and snake-worm inedible. Scrutiny of the manatee footage suggested he was more of a mermaid, with short arms and a blubbery tail. The freshwater weeds offered some useful compounds, such as gelatin.
Eli’s catalog of tree species mushroomed, of course. No doubt about it, this planet specialized in forest. But Ben’s theme, following the water, was bearing fruit.
Sass flew Merchant the next day, Ben in the copilot seat, as they cut west toward the coast. An old mountain range, its peaks rounded and worn, offered no habitat above the tree line. Sylvan’s rich variety of trees appeared equal to anything but deep standing water.
Her guilt over playing hooky with Ben faded overnight. Now she was eager to see ocean again, close and wild and free. His follow-the-water theme was inspired. No matter how long she lived on Mahina, she would always miss open water. He remembered that from their first trek to Denali – sweet of him.
He deserved a saltwater fish. Assuming the world ocean was salty.
The fall to the coast was steep and foggy. Zelda confirmed that based on their observations from orbit, the area remained perpetually cloud-bound. Beside her, Ben amused himself researching the American Pacific Northwest biome and British Columbia, which Sass suggested as possibly similar. An added bonus, the settlers of Denali hailed from that corner of North America.
Since visibility was poor, she flew fast and high toward the sea.
At last, sensors indicated they’d reached the verge of a coastal plain. She dove through the clouds. Underneath, a steady rain ruled in an onshore gale.
Brown dunes marched to flat pebble beach. They’d finally found a biome without tree cover, though it was a narrow one. The woods began only a few kilometers from the shore. She flew along the forest verge slowly for ten minutes or so. Thick and riotous shrub species held the front ranks, gradually giving way to sculpted trees, branches sculpted to point away from the sea. The dunes sported some anchoring plant species, and no doubt animals as well.
“Constant strong onshore wind,” Sass said. “The temperature won’t vary except with the seasons. Dank and clammy.” The current summer temperature was 53° F, or 12° C, more like Alaska than Vancouver.
“Maybe the beaches are nicer in the tropics,” Ben replied. “This is gloomy. The whole planet is chilly.”
“Eli, what are the tides here?” He and Zelda monitored Kassidy’s camera work on the big galley display.
“Don’t know. Tidal forces are 30% stronger than Earth. The moon is close.”
That certainly matched observation. The beach was broad, shallow, and rocky, festooned with snagged sea plants. High rollers crashed in for a hundred meters, then drew out. She hovered briefly over the wash zone for closeups, but the purple and green sea wrack obscured any animal species.
“How did people fish on a coast like this?” Ben asked. “The waves aren’t a problem?”
“They’re a problem,” Sass agreed. “You get past the rollers somehow. Or gather creatures from the beach.” Funny how much she knew, and how little the others did, just from having lived on Earth. She tipped them upward to save the splashing on the containers below.
“Hold for one.” Ben suddenly leaned over his control panel, laser focused, and acting aloud. “Some slippage in the containers. Locking on the grav grapples. Wonder what caused that.” With no plac
e to set them down, Merchant like Thrive still carried its full complement of eight heavily laden freight containers below.
“Shall I set down on the dunes?”
“Hell, no,” Ben replied. “Lay on some altitude, though.”
Sass elected to climb toward where the forest looked Sylvan-normal, not sculpted by the winds. Then the team piled into the shuttle for another fishing expedition while Merchant’s skeleton crew checked over the containers. Assuming rougher waters and bigger fish, Teke crafted tougher nets for today from equipment netting.
Judge flew the shuttle. Even past the rollers, the sea heaved in pyramidal waves meters tall, white-capped peaks shredding to fly before the rainy gale. Ben ordered him to keep at least four meters above the water, which meant quite a fall for the netting. The shuttle hovered with its bulk blocking the wind from the airlock where the fishers struggled.
Rain streamed across Sass’s helmet. They needed better suits for Sylvan working conditions.
Eli lost his battle to hold onto his first water sample bottle, its line ripped from his grasp by the wind. Sass and Ben barely caught him before he flew out, too. They halted to get everyone firmly anchored to the shuttle, especially Kassidy, again riding outside for a wider view and to keep out of their way wrangling the gear.
Then Teke and Sass loosed the net. The moment it dropped, it flew out like a sail despite its many holes. For a few seconds Sass feared they’d need to lower the shuttle for it to reach the water. But no, another wave heaved upward and met it. Heavy with water, its maw sank, folded diagonally.
That wouldn’t catch fish. With great difficulty, they hauled it out of the water, dripping seaweed, then dunked it again. This time they managed to lay its floats open.
Sass hung out from her grab bar as far as she could, trying to see whether any fish wandered in. “I can’t tell.”
“Give it a minute,” Teke suggested.
Sass took a gut check on that reasonable suggestion. “No. Haul it up now.” She grimly tested her line, but with one hand, she could barely budge it. On the other grab bar, Ben worked to secure his waist with a bungee cord. She followed his lead. All four of them couldn’t fit inside the airlock and still heave at maximum power – the door was too narrow.
