The Storm Fishers and Other Stories

turned the trigger to ‘pulse’ and threw it to Vika. He took a second for himself and did the same. In a whisper she said, “Dooris; front camera.”

  The wall mounted projection screen showed the faces of five rangers hammering away with a pulse ram, battering at their door. Behind them was another ranger, blast shield down, igniting an arc-torch. Circling them on all sides were starborn civilians. At the front of the mob stood Menelaus Peek. Many in the crowd held luminescent glow sticks illuminating images of loved ones. They chanted in a slow pulse that matched the hammering. “Justice for Kelt, salvation for all.”

  A gloved arm waived the rangers off. The torchist approached.

  Blue and green sparks flew from the nozzle as he focused the beam to the shape of a knife. Its color shifted from blue to white. The glow illuminated the Dooris. Clutch watched as the image faded like a window covered by a snowdrift.

  “Just give it to them,” Vika said.

  Clutch cracked the glass case and snatched the rock from the shelf knocking the geodes, minerals, flowers and love letters to the ground. He rushed through the family room, through the kitchen, to the door. The clanging had ceased and a slow burn flowed through the doors and a white glow appeared at the top of the crease. “Dooris open the drop box.” A six by six panel slid open. Clutch looked through to the outside hall. Menelaus grinned at his guide and pointed to the slit. He dropped the rock on the ground and yelled through the slit, “Take it and leave us alone!”

  “You can’t just take what belongs to everyone!” shouted Nebula. Dromida stepped forward and said in a low gravelly voice, “She has to learn to respect the will of the people. She has to learn justice.” Behind her the crowd fought over the rock. Clutch slid the drop box shut. The torch continued down the steel crease.

  “They don’t want just the rock,” he said.

  “What do they want?”

  “They’re saying ‘justice.’ But they mean ‘revenge.’”

  “Dooris, shut the blast door. Seal it,” Vika said. She dropped her gun and threw open a panel in the center of the family room.

  “You realize shutting the blast door will isolate your pod from any assistance I can provide, including legal council and diplomatic-”

  “Just do it!” They blast doors stayed open. Vika worked through the controls. In front of her the wall opened. Behind it was a wide viewport. And through the viewport lay a silver and gold river of stars spread out like a path home.

  “Can we make it?” she said to her husband.

  “Aim for Titan. If we hit it we have a chance.”

  “Dooris the blast doors. Now.”

  “I want you to know you were the best family I’ve ever served. I will miss you terribly. Goodspeed Spelter family.”

  “Thank you for everything. You were a friend when we needed one,” Vika said.

  The blast door clanged shut.

  The rumble came slowly at first. The pod shook and the furniture rattled, finally falling to the floor. They strapped themselves into captain’s chairs and slid to the steering controls. The screen fell from the wall, the holo-table slid forward. And a red glow appeared on the blast door.

  “Separating in three, two…”

  “Do it.”

  “…one.” Vika pressed the yellow and blue button and rockets fired for a second. The pod shook one last time. A few seconds later the detritus of their destroyed home gently lifted from the ground. Clutch swung his chair and slid toward the adjacent wall. He unbuckled, floated up and lifted the cracked screen. He manually opened the controls and brought up the sol system.

  “The Hero of Our Time is sovereign once more.”

  “Are they following us?” she said.

  “I don’t see any Ranger vehicles on the array,” he said and drew a route from the Lomonosov’s Drift to the excavation site Curiosity-Ulduvai.

  “They won’t come after us,” she said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes I do. That wasn’t the point. It never was. We lived; they won.”

  A tiny burst of blue and white from the rockets eased the boat down angle. The wan and orange of Saturn’s rings stretched before them. Lose debris clanged on the hull of the ship like rain on a titanium roof. Vika reclined in her chair. Clutch laid his arm around her shoulder and watched the rings disappear with their turn. A golden halo rushed across the window. The light raked across the ceiling, walls and finally to Spelter faces before disappearing leaving the pod dark. Beneath them the pockmarked surface of Titan soon rose in the distance. “It will be a few hours.” She rested her head on his shoulder and held his hand, and together drifted toward a beautiful home.

   

  THE STORM FISHERS

  Outside Faraday Station perlait farms rolled through craters and valleys. Wizened tree trunks set root in the topsoil of winding escarpments, and the perlait’s violet fruit swayed in the gentle spring wind. The perlait produced ruddy leaves not quite matching the Martian loam. When seen from the towers sprinkled through the station the rustling leaves resembled a wildfire. The trees produced syrup that dripped on the heads of the shufflers and the hulls of the harvesters. Quark Quill stood on his dorm room’s balcony and looked through his telescope toward the farms. It was match day, pi day, and a haboob rose from the west. He struggled to see his childhood home through the fine red silt.

  But being a farmer’s son, the obscurity eased Quark’s mind. His eyes couldn’t focus on either the fermentation silo or the main house and therefore couldn’t tell whether his parents would make the match ceremony. He couldn’t see the harvesters creeping over the hills, but he could remember their growl. Neither could he hear the songs, nor smell the sweat of labor under the freezing sun, and that was all for the better. Even without the immediate world igniting his memory, his body chilled over the rustic future from which Faraday University had helped him escape.

  Every intern-year student at Faraday felt an electricity as they anticipated their first professional assignments before graduation. Thirteen years of study, by rod or by chalk, as it was often said, led to match day. Over ninety percent of students were assigned to first choice stations. But as humans are a case by case species, the match process disabused some of the notion of fairness. Even so, before sunset most students would board cruisers and frigates for distant moons; they would exchange old friends for new faces and trade home for the first footsteps of the rest of their lives.

  When Quark entered the university his probationary adviser asked, “And what do you intend to study?” Quark remembered how he sat in the chair and without a moment’s hesitation announced, “I’m going to be a physicist. Put that down please.”

  “Physics requires permission of a researcher. You’ll need to find a sponsor to declare that major.”

  “What about chemistry? I could settle for chemical physics.”

  “All the hard sciences require a research sponsor. If you were admitted without a sponsor you can declare math, if that’s to your liking. Then - well have you heard of Doctor Spelter from physics? - he was admitted on probation as well. This is a bit of a local legend. He began in math and went door to door until someone sponsored him. He had to work in five different labs that year. Then when he had consigned himself to business administration, he was taken in by the lab of Doctor Pinhammer. And the rest, well, that’s what they study over in history.” The adviser giggled at his prowess in reciting the story to every disappointed probie that had been in Quark’s seat.

  “Will I end up in business or something?”

  “Not usually.”

  “But there is a chance?”

  “There is a chance you could get hit by a falling meteor. But you still walk down the street, yes?”

  Quark signed the declaration to the Department of Math and Statistics and enrolled in remedial algebra. Though the major had been declared he could not place into calculus. He retook the placement test every afternoon of his first semester. The day he placed, he rushed to the Farada
y Student Center and bought a piece of perlait cake with autumn icing. Each bite reminded him of home. Three weeks until the harvest break. There was no time to waste in finding his sponsor.

  And yet, by harvest he did not have a sponsor. Nor did he have a sponsor by square root day, nor by pi approximation day. He consigned himself to a math diploma.

  “It provides a lot of options come intern time.” Quark stood in the doorway to Brine Slurry’s room.

  The dooms at Faraday provided a private room attached to a communal area. Brine had been sponsored by Pinhammer before admission and spent half of his days in the M-testing lab. Brine put down the soldiering iron and stood to stretch his hopper-like legs. Brine was taller than Quark by fifth of a meter, and wiry in build. He had been raised by a farm family from Io and never paid much mind to Martian fashion. And he wore dark rimmed glasses as his parents could not afford the surgery to correct his astigmatism. In a school where politicians and investors bought seats for their children the two young men found themselves looking in the same direction, from the same outcrop. A good friend is more valuable than a metric ton of Molybdenum.

  “I thought you said you’d settle for math when the Kuiper Belt eclipses the Sun. Why did you give up?” Brine stretched his arms and popped his fingers one by one.

  That kind of question was considered impolite at Faraday. But after moving in they become fast friends. Each understood the meaning of physical