by Chris Hechtl
The thought of having a hazard on board made him grimace, not at the danger but at the name connection. “Make sure we've got the fuel they promised. And we are not, categorically not going to Hazzard. I don't care what sort of deal they offer us. I've heard too much crap about that Hodges guy and his crooked sheriff,” he said climbing into the shuttle and dogging the hatch behind him with a bit of fumbling.
“Okay,” Connie called out from the area near the front. That had to be the cockpit he thought.
“Let's see if we can find Hank McCoy again. See if he's willing to help set us up. I bet he's got too much work. Maybe he'll toss us a bone to get us on our feet,” Eric said, on his way to the cockpit as well.
Aquarius
Proofread by Thomas Burrows, Wayne Gaskin
Cast:
Brrfrak: Young male Ssilli
Sputtersque: Young female Ssilli
Clank: Adult male Ssilli, tinker
Sslisquishapa: Female elder Ssilli
RaspAlka: Male Ssilli elder, hunter. No nonsense elder
Noeyes: Past Keeper. Passed away from old age.
Horathians of Marengo:
Captain Bellerose
Petty Officer Second Class Blake Hale
Doctor Cloutier
Petty Officer Third Class Kelsea Travere
Chief Engineer Vincent Faver (last name means blacksmith in French)
Bellamy D'Angelo: Shuttle pilot, aka Angel or Angelo
Mackey d'Bird: Cargo Master
Oswald: Copilot
Bruno: Life support tech
Beasley: Mascot hound of the ship
“The seas are tasting saltier each year,” Brrfrak said, blowing mist as he surfaced. Unlike others of his kind, he spent as much time as he could on the surface, not in the underwater caverns they had eked out under the surface.
His job was to get lungfuls of air, deposit some into his swim bladders, refill, and then carry the air down to the community caverns. There he was to exhale it all. It seemed like a waste of time. He never changed the level of air in the caverns, and many in the community complained about his bad breath.
Each time one of his people did a job outside the caverns, they had to do the same thing anyway. It had become more than a routine and tradition. But since he and Sputtersque spent so much time on the surface anyway, the elders had assigned them the task. That was fine; if they lingered on the surface, they could enjoy the night sky and talk. Clank had figured out that their exhaled breath was toxic over time, so he'd devised a way to trap air in bladder fish and in pod leaves then bring them in to pop.
So now they had to bring bladder fish and pod leaves in as well, which tended to be tiring, since the first struggled and the second had a lot of buoyancy to overcome to get to the right depth. It also meant they had to spend time gathering them. They'd quickly stripped the area closest to the caverns of both resources.
He did prefer the pods over the bladder fish. The fish were prickly when provoked. They also tended to squirm and struggle and didn't taste good. The pods he'd learned to carefully cut open, squeeze with a tentacle, then once it was empty, bring it back to the surface and refill with air. The plant parts he didn't need were used by others in the community. The pods once refilled with air would seal if he cupped them under water and pressed the edges of the holes together patiently for a few seconds. Once healed he could stick it into the handy net Clank had woven for him to keep them under control and switch over to the next pod.
Which was what he was doing with several of his tentacles as his eyes looked up to the sky. Nictitating membranes shielded his eyes from the waves. He did his best to lift his head out of the water to see better.
Once he'd sent a sonar pulse into the sky. He'd spent hours trying to find the right modulation and frequency, but a return answer had been denied. Clank had sputtered and explained to him that the stars were too far away to get a return in his lifetime.
And it wasn't possible since there was no air beyond the horizon. That concept he was still wrestling with.
“Do you think there are others out there?” he asked. When his partner didn't respond, he nudged her.
She looked up, then ran the soft backside of a tentacle over his briefly. “Sorry,” she burbled. “Distracted.”
“More of the plants?”
“Fish.”
Their world had been seeded with life long ago several times. The last time was when the ship that had brought their kind to the world had deliberately crashed onto the planet after ejecting it's hyperdrive and some gear into the local star.
“Looks like eye size. Nice for snacking. But there is something else,” she said.
“Predator?” Brrfrak asked, looking down and quickly scanning the area. They were both using the chrometophores in their skin to mimic the sky above to keep predators from becoming too interested in them. Most of the time it worked but a few times they'd had a close call. He'd even lost a tentacle once to a sharp tooth swimmer.
“No,” Sputtersque said, running her tentacle over his once more, then along his flank where he had a gotten his first scar.
He scanned again and noted the school of fish. It wasn't a bait ball, but it was a nice group. He sent a pulse to the hunters with a second level sound image of the school and its vector. He received a brief reply from RaspAlka a moment later.
“So? Catch them!” the elder hunter had sent bluntly.
Brrfrak blew a raspberry, momentarily distracted by the vexing reply. He bobbed a bit in the waves, then ducked down to study the school.
“Don't bother,” his partner urged. “They are too small and aren't worth the expenditure of energy, not while we are loaded down. All they need to do is dive and you'd lose them,” she warned.
“True,” he said, giving up the hunt. He returned to looking upwards. “They are so pretty,” he murmured.
“Yes. I wish we could go there. Anywhere would be better than here,” Sputtersque sighed.
“I too wish to see, but I don't know if it is better,” Brrfrak admitted.
“You? Afraid?” Sputtersque asked, sounding disappointed.
“I am remembering what Noeyes said,” Brrfrak said. “About how the waters of other seas may be worse than the ones we leave behind,” he quoted carefully.
“I do miss him,” Sputtersque said quietly.
“Sorry. I did not mean to cause heartache,” Brrfrak said, touching her gently. She wrapped her tentacle around his in what passed as a brief embrace of apology for their kind before she disengaged.
“Come, we must finish for the day. Tomorrow is another day,” she urged. “I'd like to get to sleep without listening to RaspAlka razz you about not bringing fish in.”
“He can go blow his load,” Brrfrak sputtered, finishing the pod refilling with some haste. When Sputtersque wanted to move, he hurried up. It was better and safer to travel in company. He had no fear of being left alone despite being on the surface. He did, however, fear for her safety without his company.
As he finished the last of the pods, he began to inhale and exhale deeply in preparation to dive. The swim while under the buoyancy load would be hard. Clank had come up with an idea after talking to Noeyes before the elder Past Keeper's passing. He had promised to create a buoy of pods with a woven plant strand that kept it anchored to the bottom by rocks. The idea was to allow the Ssilli to pull themselves down to the bottom to counter the buoyancy of their load, then load up with nearby rocks to even themselves out and keep themselves in the depths as they swam to into the cavern.
That was the theory, but the Thing Shaper was far too busy with repairing nets and tools to be able to work on the project. And even if he had the time, there were so many other projects that he also wished to attend to.
“Ready?”
“I'll follow you,” Brrfrak said as he finished filling his breathing bladders.
“You'd better,” Sputtersque teased as she dove. He immediately sank beneath the waves to follow.
@^
&##{==
They had surfaced above the colony but had lingered overlong in their task so the tide had brought them some distance away. They had to spend time and energy swimming against it as well as the buoyancy of the pods and their swim bladders before they could get to the entrance of the caverns.
A series of clicks alerted the Hunter/Gather at the entrance of their approach. He didn't rise to aide them, just silently watched as they awkwardly got to the bottom nearby then loaded themselves up with what rocks they could find to help them stabilize before they swam for the entrance to the caverns.
They didn't need their sonar to illuminate the murky depths the closer they got to the caverns. It was lit from within by the plants and animals kept for that purpose.
Their failing colony had been eked out over hundreds of orbits of the local star. At one time there had been a dozen colonies, now there was just the one. The metals and plastics from their crashed ship had long gone away; it had all rusted or been worn to nubs that a few of the elders wore to mark their status. Brrfrak thought it was to weigh down all the hot air.
Rock Shapers still worked at the caverns but more to repair them than to expand them. There was no point in expanding. There was plenty of room within the community caverns and each family unit had its own cavern to occupy should they wish to do so for privacy. Their population was declining every revolution. Infection, age, and poisons were common killers right along with the occasional death by a predator. One or two shapers died when a rock pile collapsed during a ground quake.
The true killer was the lack of new larvae each year. The weather and the planet were slowly turning against them.
Aquarius had been a planned whale and dolphin colony in the sector for decades during the early days of the Founding of the Federation. The Terran fins had nearly bankrupted themselves in the effort to terraform the planet. They had been forced to abandon the effort and had sold the rights to the star system to the Ssilli during a trade agreement. The Ssilli council had worked to further the terraforming, but the project had been abandoned by their people because it would have taken regular intervention by terraformers to make sure it remained habitable. It would also be dependent on outside sources for materials, indenturing the colony.
The Xenos had hunted them, seeking out each colony and destroying it utterly. Since Aquarius had been abandoned a century before the fateful journey to the Xeno galaxy, it was reasoned that they would ignore it. It was also in the Rho sector, which was considered behind enemy lines.
It had to have been the generous blessings by Lady Luck and skill to have gotten the desperate ship to the sector in the first place. The deliberate crashing of the ship had sent tidal waves across the planet and had killed much of the crew. But those that had survived had gotten what they had wanted, a place to hide from the monsters. The monsters had rampaged through the galaxy, and according to the elders, they had wiped out all life. All while their people had hidden themselves.
Brrfrak wasn't so sure it was all just empty stars up there. If they could survive here, that gave small but some odds that others with the same thoughts had done the same thing elsewhere. But no matter how often he had laid out his reasoning to the elders all had scoffed at the idea.
They had countered with simple but undeniable logic. They had yet to see a ship come to Aquarius, so therefore life and civilization no longer existed.
It had taken him many day cycles before he'd come up with an elegant logical counter to their argument; no visitors had come … yet.
Since he had no way to prove life did exist elsewhere and they had no way to disprove it, he considered the matter still open for debate. But his zest to argue it without an end had earned him the contempt and ire of RaspAlka. He considered the entire subject a waste of time.
He might be right. But was it so wrong to dream? To hope that others survived?
Brrfrak used his tentacles to keep his body away from the abrasive ceiling as they moved within the caverns. He had to be careful; the stone could easily cut him. He did not want to risk an infection, nor one of the Life Seeker's wrath at being so careless.
Nor did he want his blood spoor in the water to attract the predators lurking in the depths.
The inner caverns were quite large. They had been shaped by the Rock Shapers over many years. The Rock Shapers were ever patient but slow. They worked during the day to move rocks to the cavern. Only because the elders had decreed that some rocks be left out for balance explained how the two air swimmers could bring their loads into the caverns.
He saw some of Sputtersque's load start to escape the confines of her net. He couldn't help her; his tentacles and fins were full. In annoyance she ignored the pods as they rose to the top of the cavern and then bobbed there. Two overripe with air and rolling against the rock popped, spilling their air to form pools there. Once the pods emptied themselves, they fell into the depths to be snapped at by some of the tiny cleaner fish that lurked in the shelter of the bottom.
Two other pods didn't rupture, but they had to pass them by until they got into the inner chambers.
“Sometimes I wonder why we don't just stay on the surface somewhere,” Brrfrak clicked in a tight aside to her. She waggled her fins to maneuver but didn't respond.
The underwater caverns were a series of flattened ovals. Corridors led off from the main caverns. Each of the sides of the caverns were pockmarked with shelves both underwater and above. Some held cages and treasures; others were large enough for a Ssilli to curl up on and nap if they didn't wish to drift.
The caverns were lit by bioluminescent plants and animals. The animals were caged and tended to constantly by the Life Shapers. There were more pens and containers for food and materials, but many were empty. There was no need for excess since the elders had calculated the colony had enough to survive until the warm seasons came again.
Brrfrak and Clank hadn't been so sure. They'd argued strenuously that the community should continue to commit to hunting and gathering in order to allow them to supplement their rations in case the cold season lasted longer as it had in the past. The elders had taken their opinions into account and had even increased the quotas.
The extra work hadn't made either Ssilli popular with the rest of the community. But hopefully they would understand in time and forgive them. They didn't wish to go through another deep rationing time like the revolution before the last.
As they came into the main cavern, the ceiling lifted abruptly. Above them was the massive air pocket. Pods and other buoyant items bobbed there. The two Ssilli rose, letting go of their rocks in order to get to the surface. Once there they unloaded the nets with practiced ease, then squeezed out the air from each pod with methodical precision.
“If either of you need to use the waste area, do so before the next cycle. The Plant Shapers will be shutting it down to clean it out for their composting,” Sslisquishapa advised. “Tomorrow all will need to go outside well away from the caverns until the job is completed.”
“Yes, Elder,” Sputtersque said dutifully.
“I expect you two to aide in their efforts when you aren't playing on the surface,” the elder stated.
“We do not play. We talk and fill the pods,” Brrfrak retorted, making a show of emptying a pod in front of her eyestalks. “It is the work you have tasked us with.”
“Besides, we can't see the stars during daylight,” Sputtersque said quietly.
“That too,” Brrfrak admitted.
“Did you bring in any of the … I see not,” the elder said sarcastically.
“We cannot keep our load and chase fish at the same time elder,” Brrfrak replied tightly. He was exhausted from the swim and tired from other similar exercises he had performed all day. Her lecturing him and berating them on their past time wasn't something he wished to put up with.
He knew instantly that his attempt at returning her sarcasm was the wrong approach. Her colors pulsed in anger before she suppressed it.
“Your insolenc
e will not be tolerated. I expect you to hunt on your own tomorrow. You can do that as well as help the Plant Shapers and your usual duties,” the elder said, taking herself off with a flourish of color, fins, and tentacles.
“Sorry,” he murmured to Sputtersque. She merely sighed in irritation and continued her task silently. After a moment he did so as well.
@^&##{==
Sslisquishapa swam away, vexed by the youngling. He was still a larva at heart; there was proof of that. The self-centered “I know better than you, the elder” attitude was insufferable for her to deal with. She shook herself, attempting to get control of her feelings before she informed the other elders of her new orders and punishment. She knew she would find support in RaspAlka but not Clank or some of the Rock Shapers. They did not understand her; no, they needed to bend or break the insolence out of the child before he did something else that was foolish.
She did have to admit that his and her youngling's fascination with the night sky was relatively harmless, except for the unwanted exposure to the predators it brought the two of them. She made a mental note to talk to the elders about curtailing such pursuits in the future.
They had to bring it to the end. Their exposure and possible attack by a predator could endanger not only their lives but the lives of others who would respond to their defense if called. They could not afford the injuries or loss such dangers could entail.
No, she was right. They needed to grow up and face the world as it is now. It would be a harsh lesson, but better from her than from life itself.
@^&##{==
At dawn the following morning the community departed the caverns for the surface then went on to their various assigned tasks for the day. A very small group remained behind in the caverns. One of the older hunters Brrfrra, two of the sick, and a dozen larvae and younglings in the crèche.