The gas giant’s scenery was never still. The tall, pure white clouds of crystal ammonia and the lower deck of rust-coloured clouds swirled in constant flux, almost like a muddy sea, before dissipating. But despite their fleeting nature, there were clouds that maintained their shape for a good while.
Animals, human faces, food, dresses... there were many things Terra Tell-Tale could see with her imagination. Today's scene was a spot-billed duck family. Forty-kilometer-tall altostratus pillars, tops projecting like beaks, were neatly lined up. A particularly large one was the mother, and following her were one, two, three, four… twelve ducklings.
Besshu sparkled on the fourth duckling’s back.
Terra shouted, “Besshu! I saw besshu! About 300 kilometers from us, Diode-san!”
“Where?”
“On the back of the fourth spot-billed duck daughter!”
“Spot-billed duck?”
“Ah! It was an animal from the A.D era! Endemic to Earth! A bird to be exact, um, well, the species doesn’t matter much. I saw it in one of the images imported from the Tashinniyao… Ah, that’s it! It looks a bit like the Tashinniyao!”
“I don’t understand. Mark it, please.”
Her partner responded bluntly, causing Terra’s shoulders to sag in disappointment. Ah, I did it again. She always irritated others with her incomprehensible tales. It happened all the time, but it never stopped making her feel bad.
That behaviour had led to an unpleasant nickname, Terra Tell-Tale.
This was their first time together, and compared to Terra’s previous matches, her current partner was very unusual. She’d been getting weird glances from acquaintances while at port, and despite making it clear that she wasn’t going out to play, but to fish, she couldn't help but feel like she was doing something wrong.
That’s why she really wanted this to go well, and yet...
She gazed ahead, dejected, when she suddenly took notice of it. The pillar clouds seemed off -- they were too tightly spaced.
Are pillar clouds supposed to be that close to each other…?
While Terra was deep in thought, her partner called out, puzzled. “Hey, the marker… Is something wrong, Terra-san?”
Coming back to her senses, Terra turned to the cockpit below, towards the woman she had paired up with.
Diode (or at least, that's how she’d introduced herself) was a woman who looked young for her age. Keeping with tradition, she had dressed for her job as a fisherman.
Her deck dress was a silver and black skinsuit that accentuated her body's contours and with slits which exposed the pale skin of her thin upper arms and inner thighs. Her small chest and butt were clearly outlined. The silver hair that fell to her shoulders and obscured her thin, composed eyebrows was adorned with a lace headcover. Her eyelashes were so thick they could cast a shadow.
She was stunning, dressed that boldly. When they’d first met to board the ship that morning, the sight of Diode had crushed Terra's confidence. In comparison to Diode, she felt her own victorian-style gown was too unfashionable.
Even now in the rear pit, she was enchanted. She clumsily responded to Diode’s query.
“Ah, yes, yes! I’m marking it now!” She pointed her long index finger in the direction of their objective, aiming the guide laser straight at it.
The schooling fish swam effervescently, separating and rejoining, deep blue sparkles reflecting from them. The two were still too far away to tease out individual fish, but Terra carefully observed them.
First discovered by Great Chief C.B Endeavour back in CC 18, the unique swimming creatures they’d named besshu had become an essential resource for the Circs. Although they still didn’t have a full grasp of those creatures’ workings after 285 years, the situation surrounding them greatly differed from the early days in several ways.
One was that thanks to their continuous observations over the years, they now had a vast understanding of besshu species and their distribution.
Looking at the besshu in the distance, Diode nodded. “Those are… Anchovies, probably?”
Terra and Diode could see each other, but physically speaking, they were alone in two separate pits (a measure taken to allow a problem to be cut off at the root before it reached an unaffected person, avoiding both people getting into trouble). The ship visually connected the front and back, giving the impression the two were in the same room and allowing Diode to watch Terra point at their target.
There were no windows, either — in fact, the ship was completely devoid of anything. It didn't have a bridge, hatch, captain’s quarters, dining room, telescope, or even the assortment of crates one would expect to find scattered around a spaceship’s interior. Over 300 years, all of those had gradually disappeared until only the two pits remained. Everything necessary, from controls to information, could now be found there.
Around Terra, the ship’s interior displayed the sights and sounds of the gas giant outside with an accuracy that made it indistinguishable from the real deal. Trajectory, fuselage, weather and interior status panels floated in four separate corners, positioned so they wouldn’t obstruct one’s line of sight. Two instances of the panels were present, one displayed in the interior gel and another directly through the brain. There was no way of telling them apart, nor was there a need to.
For the Circs, interacting with those VUI panels was as easy as turning a doorknob. They were controlled through gestures and eye motions, making piloting a ship as simple as that. In other words, they could do anything they needed with only a light tap, and it was with this kind of setup that the two flew their ship.
Thanks to her large chest, Terra had to drag the VUI to bring it into view before skillfully poking around the panels with all ten fingers. She entered details about the state of the school and its movement, as well as their own, and stood still for a moment before elaborating on a two-part tactical fishing plan and sending the file to the front pit.
“Our strategy!”
Terra wouldn't describe herself as capable, but still, as a decompa she always made sure to take all necessary steps to fulfill her duties.
“Schooling upstream towards the top of the pillar clouds makes them look like anchovies, so if we’re working under that belief... since anchovies can't move upwind much, the way to go about catching them is with a beam trawl downstream so they go straight into the net's mouth. At least, that's what I think.”
“Wait, why are you talking about them like…” Diode's alto voice faltered doubtfully. “They ‘look’ like anchovies? So they aren't actually anchovies? I thought something was off too, but...”
“They aren't anchovies,” Terra affirmed. “Or more like, those aren't pillar clouds, so the fish can't be anchovies.”
“Huh?”
For the first time, Diode’s dark blue eyes opened wide in surprise. “What? Those aren't pillar clouds?”
“If we observe them from the edge, they really do look like pillars, but it's a matter of positioning. If we got closer, they’d probably look more like this-” Terra opened up the second part of the tactical plan, turning it to show a schematic side view of the clouds. “They're fin-form clouds. Those aren't pillars going upwind, I'm certain that they're forming sheets instead!”
“Fin-form clouds?!” Diode shouted, comparing the plan to the scenery in front of her over and over. She stared firmly, then nodded.
“You're right, those are fin-form clouds... I’m impressed you noticed that.”
“Yeah! Their rhythm was kinda weird!”
“Rhythm?”
Diode swiftly turned towards Terra, who nodded. “Yes, the rhythm. The 13 clouds were aligned like ton-ton-ton-ton, but pillar clouds are Karman vortices so they should have been aligned like tan-ton-tan-ton instead. The biggest one shouldn't be smoother...”
“Tan-ton-tan.” Diode repeated, her voice flat.
Terra waved her hand, flustered, and started talking again. “Sorry, I'll stop. Um, what I'm saying is, since those are fin-form clouds, then anchovies aren't our quarry, but instead they’re the kind that look like they’re schooling vertically when seen edge-on. So, I mean, they're the type of prey that schools like a long curtai- Uwawaah!”
Before Terra could finish the ship accelerated greatly, causing her to lurch backwards and almost fall over. She let out a confused “Umm!”
“Do you mind if I ask?!”
“What?”
“The fish species!”
“It's a long curtain school” Diode stated bluntly, as if to say is there any need to even think about it? “Meaning it's a thin, rope-like school that rises and falls before it flattens out again — it can't be anything other than surfers.”
Terra remained quiet. She thought the same. Although it wasn't difficult to infer, there were actually three other possible species.
“And since those are surfers,” Diode continued, “They migrate at a much higher speed than the anchovies. So, they might look like they're staying put, but in reality, they're either coming straight at us or getting further away.”
“The latter, I think! They're getting harder and harder to see!”
“Yeah.”
Diode's response was short, but she sounded satisfied, feeling like a challenge had finally come.
“‘A net in pursuit is much like a bald head’ so, what are we doing about it?”
You are at a disadvantage chasing a school of fish — is what the saying meant. The net should be at the fish's destination, and their current location was the complete opposite — it was awful.
“Chasing while towing is out of the question, but they’ll scatter if we get ahead of them.”
With air resistance substantially reducing ship's speed as the net deployed, it would be easy for the school to escape. Taking another route to set up an ambush could also fail, as chances were high the fish would scatter the moment they noticed the approaching threat.
“We’ve got no choice but to trawl from below and toss our lines up quickly. We could get two hai with a single line, and we should be able to do that three times.”
“That could work too, but-” Terra interjected, licking her lips before continuing. “Could you fly straight ahead, just below the school at full speed? I'd like to deploy a purse seine.”
Diode's eyes widened, almost toddler-like. “A purse seine.”
“Yes.”
“To catch migratory fish.”
“Yes.”
“But the school’s going to scatter.”
“It'll be fine!”
“Heh, alright, go ahead.” Diode accepted the ludicrously absurd-sounding proposal easily, but despite feeling a bit more confident, Terra continued to seek her consent.
“Until I say otherwise, you have to keep going like this, and when the catch comes it'll be 10 hai all at once, okay...?”
“You sure you’re not an idiot? It's fine, do what you want.”
Diode's response was rude, and blatantly so, but now that Terra was certain she could continue with her proposal she was so happy she started trembling.
“Fuhehe, heh, I'm doing it then. Hehe.”
It really was an absurd idea. For surfers, gill nets or drift nets are usually deployed, and anyone else would dismiss a claim of being able to net 10 hai as nonsense. If Terra had suggested that to any of her previous partners, they certainly would have been dumbfounded. Moreover, netting surfers with a purse seine was something no one would have thought to do, but they were about to do just that.
Their ship then left the planet's thin stratosphere, cutting down through the fifty kilometer thick tropopause before finally piercing into the troposphere, now in front of the neatly aligned fin-form clouds.
The gas giant Fat Beach Ball had an impressive 140,000 kilometer diameter and an impressively dense atmosphere to match. So dense, the wind and storms on the orb of compressed gas occupied a different dimension from outer space entirely.
Its atmosphere consists of harmless water clouds, deathly poisonous hydrazine clouds and dusty sulfur and red phosphorus clouds — spiraling on unbreathable hydrogen and helium winds at nightmarish speeds of 400 km/h. Carelessly descending into the planet with tin can interstellar or planetary ships would leave you sanded down and your intakes clogged with powder. Deep in the atmosphere resided a sea of supercritical hydrogen, marking the terminus. There, only a 4000 ATM hell existed — a place from which no one had ever returned.
The early Circs, with their convertible wing technology still in its early stages and fearing that hell, navigated small ships weighing no more than 1000 tonnes at safe speeds. It was like they hadn’t really been living, flying that slowly, which made it hard not to feel pity for them.
The current Circs soared the skies with pillar boats.
This was the biggest difference from their past — pillar boats changed shapes. They had a flat shape while generating solar power in outer space, assumed a shape similar to a mushroom in their inertial state, and when entering the atmosphere, took on a bullet-like aerodynamic shape. Their length and mass surpassed 100 meters and 20,000 tonnes, respectively, and the most powerful of them reached almost 50,000 tonnes.
Those boats were made almost entirely of All Mass Convertible Clay.
Even middle cruise-school students knew about AMC Clay. Sleeping through class didn’t lessen their knowledge of it; AMC Clay always made its existence known one way or another. The particulars might go in one ear and out the other, but the most important aspect remained deeply ingrained into their brains—
That being, the role of the decompa was to mold the clay.
Now fifty kilometers away from the school, Terra closed her eyes and took a deep breath. As if handling a potter's wheel, she placed her arms in front of her chest, then relaxed and floated in the biofluid gel. Decompression. Expanding the imagination and drawing a clear picture. Widening, stretching, knitting the boat around themselves almost like another limb, shaping and manipulating it freely.
“10 seconds until contact!” exclaimed Diode. An advanced imaging system projected the stimuli directly into their visual cortex, giving them a 360º field of vision with multifrequency images overlapping one another. The school was now clearly visible.
Besshu had diverse morphologies, some spindle-shaped, others blade-, rope-, bag-, or even net-shaped. Their quarry was of the blade sort, silver in colour and resembling butter knives – a tell-tale sign they were surfers. Their tails faced the pillar boat as they made their escape at top speed.
They couldn’t count the exact number of fish, but from the side it looked like there were around two hundred. Deeper within the school, there could be a thousand or even two thousand.
“5, 4, 3, 2, 1, contact!”
The pair had caught up to the fish. Overhead, the school was so close it gave the impression of trying to cut their bangs. That was, of course, only an illusion, as they made sure to stay 100 meters away from the school — but what if that wasn’t really the case? Were the fish really not scraping the pillar boat's back?
Without giving weight to any of those worries, Terra began her work.
Two otter boards detached from the hull's left and right sides, knocking around in the wind as the boat sailed at supersonic speeds. Tied to them were strong ropes, spinning a net as they spooled out.
In this manner, the net was completely woven by the decompa — net stowage didn’t exist; the nets used the pillar boat's hull. They were made as needed, their spinning and weaving happening so incredibly fast it was easy to miss.
It spread like a fine pure white lace from the back of the pink pillar boat.
The sea spray above spread like wings. The long curtain school of besshu, surprised by the pillar boat blowing past them, darted left and right. The scene around them looked as if a blade had been snapped, or better yet, like a zipper had opened.
Terra was deep in a state of decompression, grinning at the spectacle. She heard her partner speaking to herself.
“The boat's too light... We haven’t caught anything yet?”
It was true, they still hadn't caught anything. The net was still growing and unfurling. It wasn't a routine surfer trawl at all: Terra had devised a purse seine, and no one had ever tried it before.
At any rate, she was almost done. “The net is complete, please perform an immelmann turn on my signal. 10, 9, 8...”
“Now I get it!”
It was Diode's turn to lick her lips. Her job as a twister had finally started.
“3, 2, 1, now!”
“Mph!”
The besshu violently rushed down towards them. Diode snorted. The hauling always started after the decompa finished laying the net, leaving the situation under the twister’s total control.
The pillar boat ascended, rolling until it was back to its original orientation. Behind it trailed an incredibly strong line.
Now located above the net, which looked more like an enormous rectangular clearing, the previously dispersed surfers all fled towards it. Meaning, the net was entirely filled with fish who had willingly shoved their heads in it.
The otter boards attached to the net's four corners neatly joined, tying it shut.
All that mass took its toll on the pillar boat, the thermonuclear engine in its stern pouring out light. Coming down from her decompression state, Terra began worrying about the gigantic catch.
“I-is it going to be okay? This is heavy...”
“It can deal with 10 hai. I've heard of hauls this big before.”
Fish squirmed in the incredibly swollen net underneath the boat. The engine's aft jet propulsion was loud, bright, and constant as it flew through the vast sea of radiant red and yellow clouds that stretched beyond view. The AMC Clay, functioning as both structure and fuel, was being ravenously consumed. It hadn’t been seen before: a twister setting out 18 nozzles.
If one or two hai was the minimum catch size, then ten hai was the maximum - meaning that the ship could handle a catch equal to its size. At the altitude where gravity was over 2G, Diode calculated their jets would chew through 35,000 tonnes just to stay put.
The 18 nozzles were distributed on the boat's bilge and stern for thrust efficiency, their placement decided through simultaneous equations. The netted fish frenzied themselves, whirling like a semifluid, requiring a high-cycle control system. In the cockpit, Diode's thoughts were a battlefield, a great calculation war of numbers clashing with one another.
It was a job the thoroughly visually-oriented Terra was not at all capable of performing – No, not just Terra. Very few Circs had that ability, true for men, but even more so for women-
Seated and surrounded by a virtual swarm of throttle panels shaped like folding fans, Diode’s fingers skillfully danced to a rhythm much like high heels clacking or a lighthearted polka on a piano.
The sight was something neither Terra nor her friends – anyone – had ever seen. A woman twister.
Even so, it wasn’t like Diode didn't feel the mental strain of adjusting the thrust to correct a push or pull of a millimeter on that 10,000 tonne weight, and that strain showed as a twitch in the corner of her mouth.
From her silhouette came an unbelievable statement: “We're putting up with 10 giganewtons. Terra-san, do you understand what you just did?”
“Eh?”
“How many hai do you think we caught?”
She didn’t need numbers to know they had a huge haul. Terra's wide net had completely shattered their expectations.
“11 hai, maybe 12-”
“18 hai, Terra Tell-Tale-san.”
Diode's pupils, now fixed on Terra, were moist and shiny like they’d been coated in an oil film.
“You’re the best!” At that moment, she lifted her thumb and motioned as if cutting her neck.
“Whyyyyy?!”
The command to discard the catch was received, the line cut and the net fell.
The sudden loss of weight sent the boat flying as Terra's scream echoed into the distance.
The Circs, who migrated from the Galactic Interactive to Fat Beach Ball 303 years ago, lived on.
Originally, there had been 24 clans, but not all survived. The Axis, Beijin, Connecticut, Frick, Moshi, Sirius, Ural and Zulu clans had disappeared, and only 16 clans remained, those being the Drone&Dongle, Endeavour, Gendo, Hebrew, Aitar, Jackoball-Trace, Keelung, Lilicia, Nuer, O’Bannon, Pollux, QOT, Radenvijaya, Tegu, Virtue and Chitin. Each clan built their own gigantic base ship and orbited FBB separately, 6000 km distant. Now in year 303 of the Circ Calendar (CC), year 8829 of the Astro Duodenum (A.D) calendar, their population numbered 304,900.
Long ago, still in the early days, the Circs had settled on organizing themselves from A to Z, considering only the first letter of their names. Their reasons had been lost to time, and the connection between the clan names and their identity grew faint. However, maintaining the clan system played a large role in preserving their diverse cultures, with each of the 16 base ships carrying a population of around 20,000.
There were the religious Hebrew, the conservation-obsessed Pollux, the argument-loving QOT... but not all clans had that strong identity, and there were also those whose values had become grainy with time, like the Aitar, Endeavour and JT. They didn't strictly limit what came in and out.
There were clans which had met their downfall, and clans which had been through hard times. Thankfully, in their 300 year history, not a single clan had fractured, but conversely, nothing big enough to spur development and prosperity was happening. The fleet's biggest – and last – innovation was the use of AMC Clay to build pillar boats, and following the completion of their industrial system they’d slowly slid down the hill of recession.
The star Mother Beach Ball provided for a stable existence, present and past, its light constantly borne on the 680,000,000 kilometers to the Circs. That light shone from the start of history and was set to keep shining until the end of time. In its dim light, the fleet too remained a constant, orbiting the gigantic white and dark brown ball, ceaselessly. However, that didn’t mean all of them wanted to orbit forever.
And the reason they were in orbit? Not all of them knew, either.