The gas giant’s scenery was never still. The tall, pure white clouds of crystal ammonia and the lower deck of rust-colored clouds swirled in constant flux, almost like a muddy sea, before dissipating. But despite their fleeting nature, certain kinds of clouds often maintained their forms for a good while.
Animals, human faces, food, dresses...Terra Tell-Tale's imagination was constantly being inspired. Today's scene was a spot-billed duck family. Forty-kilometer-tall altostratus pillars, their 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 kind doesn’t matter much. I saw it in one of the images imported from the Dàxúnniǎo… Ah, that’s it! It looks just like the Dàxúnniǎo!”
“I don’t understand. Mark it, please.”
Her partner responded bluntly, and Terra’s shoulders sagged in disappointment. Ah, I did it again. She was always irritating others with her incomprehensible tales. It happened all the time, but it never stopped making her feel bad.
That behavior had given rise to an unpleasant nickname, Terra Tell-Tale.
This was their first time together, and Terra's current partner was very unusual compared to her previous matches. Acquaintances kept giving her weird glances back at port, and despite making it clear she wasn’t playing around, but going out to fish, she couldn’t help feeling like she was doing something wrong.
It was why she really wanted this to go well, and yet...
She gazed ahead, dejected, when she suddenly snapped to attention. The pillar clouds seemed off; they were too neatly 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?”
Suddenly returning 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 young, and her age was closer to teenager than woman. 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; slits 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. Compared to Diode, she felt her own Victorian-style gown was too unfashionable.
Even now, watching her from the rear pit, Terra was enchanted. She clumsily responded to Diode’s query.
“Ah, yes, yes! I’m marking it now!” She pointed her long index finger towards their objective, aiming the guide laser directly at it.
The schooling fish came into sight. They swam effervescently, separating and rejoining, deep blue sparkles reflecting from their bodies. The two fishers were still too far away to tease out individual fish, but Terra carefully observed the school.
First discovered by Great Chief C.B Endeavour back in CC 18, the unique swimming creatures they’d named besshu had become an indispensable resource to the Circs. While they still didn’t have a full grasp of those creatures’ workings even after 285 years, the state of affairs massively differed from the early days in several ways.
One such way owed itself to the Circs’ continuous observations over the years, which had provided 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 their pits were in different parts of the boat, a safety measure allowing any problems to be cut off at their source before trouble could spread to both people. The ship gave the impression the two were in the same room through a visual link between the front and back, which allowed Diode to watch Terra point at their target.
The ship had no windows—in fact, it 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 usually expected to find strewn about a spaceship interior. Those had all gradually disappeared over 300 years until only the two pits remained. From controls to information, everything necessary could now be found there.
The ship’s interior displayed the sights and sounds of the gas giant around Terra with an accuracy that made it indistinguishable from the real deal outside. Trajectory, fuselage, weather and interior status panels floated in four separate corners, positioned so as to not 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 this setup allowed only the two of them to pilot the boat.
Thanks to her large chest, Terra had to drag the VUI upwards to bring it into view before restlessly 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 a capable decompa, but still, 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 much upwind, the way to go about catching them is with a downstream beam trawl so they go straight into the net's mouth. At least, I think that's the usual approach.”
“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 the clouds edge-on, 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, and rotated 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, looking back and forth between the plan and scenery to compare. She stared firmly, then nodded.
“You're right, those are fin-form clouds... I’m impressed you noticed.”
“Yeah! Their rhythm was kinda weird!”
“Rhythm?”
Diode swiftly turned to Terra, who nodded. “Yes, the rhythm. The 13 clouds were aligned like ton-ton-ton-ton, but pillar clouds are Kármán 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, 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 rapidly accelerated, causing her to lurch backwards. 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 crests and crashes before it flattens out again—can't be anything but surfers.”
Terra remained quiet. She thought they were surfers, too. Although it wasn't a difficult inference to make, it actually could have been one of three other species.
“And since those are surfers,” Diode continued, “They migrate much faster 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 positioning 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 the 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 there was a good chance 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 at full speed, just below the school? 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 easily accepted the foolish-sounding proposal, but despite the added confidence, Terra sought further approval.
“Until I say otherwise, you have to keep going like this, and when the catch comes it'll be 10 hai all at once, is that 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. Gill nets or drift nets are usually deployed for surfers, and anyone else would dismiss a claim of being able to net 10 hai as nonsense. If Terra had suggested it to any of her previous partners, they certainly would have been dumbfounded. Netting surfers with a purse seine was something absolutely no one else would have thought of, 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 were in a different dimension from outer space altogether.
The clouds of its atmosphere consists of harmless water, deathly poisonous hydrazine, ammonia, dusty sulfur and red phosphorus—all 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. Residing deep in the atmosphere was a sea of supercritical hydrogen, the terminal point. Only a 4000 ATM hell existed there—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 at safe speeds with small ships weighing no more than 1000 tonnes. 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.
Pillar boats changed shapes; this was the biggest difference from the past. They had a flat shape while generating solar power in outer space, assumed a shape similar to a parasol mushroom during inertia naviagtion through the debris strike zone, and took on a bullet-like aerodynamic shape when entering the atmosphere. 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 almost entirely All Mass Convertible (AMC) 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:
It was that molding the clay was the decompa's role.
Now fifty kilometers 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. Expand the imagination and draw a clear picture. Widen, stretch, knit the boat around yourself like another limb, shaping and manipulating it freely.
“10 seconds to contact!” exclaimed Diode. An advanced imaging system projected stimuli directly into their visual cortex, giving them a 360º field of vision with overlapping multifrequency images. 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 color 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 just from the side alone they could see 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 the blades 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, and in the blink of an eye, flew into the distance as they caught the supersonic draft. Tied to them were strong ropes, spinning a net as they spooled out.
The net was comlpetely woven by the decompa in this way. Net stowage didn’t exist; they were sourced on-site from the pillar boat's hull. They were made as needed, their spinning and weaving happening so incredibly fast it was easy to miss.
The net spread from the back of the pink pillar boat like pure white fine lace.
Sea spray spread above 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 swung, or better yet, like a zipper had opening.
Terra was deep in a decompression state, 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 was devising a purse seine, something no one had ever tried 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!”
“Ompf!”
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. In effect, the net had been entirely filled with fish who had willingly shoved their heads in.
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 beneath 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 certainly a battlefield in a great war of calculation as numbers clashed with one another.
It was a job the thoroughly visually-oriented Terra wasn't capable of performing at all—no, not just Terra. Very few Circs had that ability, true of 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 out 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, looked like they'd been coated in a film of oil, moist and shimmering.
“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 Galactive Interactive to Fat Beach Ball 303 years ago, lived on.
There had originally 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, Itar, Jack-of-All-Trades, Keelung, Lilicia, Nuer, O’Bannon, Pollux, QOT, Radenvijaya, Tegu, Virtue and Xīnxīng. 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 those whose values had become fuzzy over time like the Itar, Endeavour and JT weren't that strict about what fell in and out of fashion.
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 the star's dim light, the fleet remained its own constant, ceaselessly orbiting the gigantic white and dark brown ball.
However, the people there didn't necessarily want to orbit forever.
And the reason they were in orbit? They didn't necessarily know.