Firedrop Garnish

  Chapter 10 – A Veteran Alien...

  Glazkov IV crackled over Sal's head, filling the thin atmosphere of the moon AU803 within sudden, reaching fingers of blue electricity that shattered the sky like glass. Sal now served on the Klondike's first harvester crew. His skills were no longer green. He had become a veteran among the stars, a member of Captain Darringer's crew as valuable as any other. The dark visors and spacesuits that accompanied Sal onto that distant moon teeming with an alien weed now looked to Sal for direction, and for protection.

  It broke Sal's heart to know that he could not guarantee his fellow harvesters' safety. He had been powerless when an exploding airlock on one of his many hops had jettisoned a trio of fine harvester before the Klondike had even left Earth's system. He had watched a small asteroid tear away an entire corner of a harvester dropship, dragging away four more harvester friends into the stars, and Sal had waited, stranded, on AU803 for a second harvester's ride back to the Klondike while he choked to spare the oxygen he needed to survive. Sal had watched men go mad before the sight of so much firedrop sparkling it its alien field, had watched powerless, as their madness moved them to pound their helmets upon the ground until their visors shattered and their blood boiled. The harvesters put their faith in the veteran spacer Sal had become, and Sal was haunted by so many ghosts he had failed to protect, until he no longer had any desire to step another foot upon his native Earth lest the faces that there greet him in the street ask him why so many loved one had been lost to the heavens' void.

  Though his bones weakened into a spacer's frail skeleton, though he watched the loss of so many men and women, Sal still filled his nets with the wonderful firedrop.

  And though Glazkov IV sparked and loomed overhead, Sal Maddox believed it was all worthwhile to see that crimson, alien field pulsate and glow.