A giant loomed in the depths of night.
A dim glow arose from its direction, revealing the giant’s identity as a majestic cumulonimbus cloud ten times larger than its terrestrial counterparts. After the five-hour long night, dawn was arriving on planet FBB.
The first trawling with Diode completed, Terra's pillar boat had its back to the morning sun, flying west almost as if trying to return to the night.
Soon, it would be time for the egression jets.
FBB’s rotation period lasted 10 hours. The base ships and a mixed fleet orbited the planet at an altitude of 6000 kilometers, their circular, inclined orbits taking 10 hours and 33 minutes to complete. To put it simply, they were almost in a geosynchronous orbit.
Terra could more or less picture the whats and whys of a quasi-geosynchronous orbit, but if she were to explain to others, it’d sound awfully vague. What she could say is that the pillar boat descended into the planet's atmosphere, and the base ship in outer space continued traveling towards the horizon. After a single rotation ten hours later, it'd be approaching behind them, opening a time window they couldn't miss if they wanted to return.
The pillar boat’s belly was a little swollen. The besshu they had netted was stored there, but it wasn’t the splendidly performed surfer catch from 8 hours ago. Later, they’d moved to another fishing ground, and with a simple pillar trawl, caught five and a half hai, totalling 96,000 tonnes.
The average catch of a pillar boat was six hai, and seven hai were proclaimed as big catches. One hai usually equated to 10,000 or 20,000 tonnes and was calculated as such.
While five and half hai sounded quite close to six hai, it was still short several thousand tonnes. It wasn’t the worst catch, but it was unremarkable.
And because their catch had been average, Terra found it dissatisfying.
“Whyyyy… why would you go that far...”
Terra hugged her knees, sporadically complaining from the rear pit.
“We’d caught so much, and yet...”
A catch of 315,000 tonnes was absolutely absurd. Everyone would have heaped praise on them, and the clan would have profited greatly. It had been their chance to become heroes among twisters and decompas…
However, Diode didn’t respond.
“Please set up the guide-container properly. No, don’t speculate, give me the actual measurements. The Full-element!”
Right after she discarded their entire catch, she said nothing more than ‘I’ll explain after we return’.
From the moment they started netting sweet mackerel, Diode remained focused on piloting.
Following Diode’s demand, Terra ran her eyes across the sky. On it was projected the future orbital position of the base ship approaching from behind them. If she wanted to take it easy, she could predict the location based on the direction and angle of elevation, and if it flew them into the orbiting spaceship, they could make minute adjustments with their boat's systems
However, that wasn’t what Diode wanted from her.
There was no other choice, Terra requested the latest information from the navigation satellite. She was bad with numbers, but navigation was a duty for the decompa.
A full-element was composed of the orbital inclination, eccentricity, right ascension of the ascending node, argument of periapsis, mean motion, and mean anomaly of the Idaho’s orbit around the celestial body. Once acquired, they were projected onto the target-container.
“Here, is this fine?”
“All good. Let’s get on course now.”
The impact from the rear washed over them like the current of a muddy stream. The mass of over 200,000 tonnes began accelerating tremendously with the aim of reaching orbital velocity. At the same time, the impact reverberated sideways like kicks. The route-correction impulse, alongside the acceleration and gravity, swayed the two bodies in the buffering-biofluid gel.
“I wonder if this is okay… Alright, we’re now on a rendezvous’ trajectory, phew!”
The bow’s incredibly pointy nose cone cut through the high altitudes. Diode, leaning on the backrest, quietly exhaled in the cockpit. Terra, feeling very curious, intensely observed from the back with her chin resting in hand.
— In the end, just what kind of person is she?
Diode’s piloting style differed considerably from the usual twister. Terra had been too absorbed in work to tell exactly how it differed, given that it was their first day together — but the one thing that left an impression on her was how Diode would act surprisingly violent one moment, only to be bizarrely calm the next.
Speaking of, beginning from the first year of high-cruise school twisters usually added the the fundamentals of piloting a pillar boat to the curriculum on their own. Across all sixteen clans, both men and women studied the fundamentals for the sake of becoming twisters and decompas. So Diode also should have received that education.
However, since she had been raised in the Tsunami Search, her core curriculum might well be blowing in the wind.
At any rate, there was too little information.
She disappeared right after their first meeting three days ago, and their next encounter had been this morning to fish. Terra invited her to breakfast so they could talk but had been borne away by Diode’s rush to get to the fishing grounds.
They left the boarding preparation room in complete silence and descended into the atmosphere in complete silence. It was during minimal exchanges regarding their destination, fish species and weather that they found the surfers.
It had been a very, very hazy beginning. Even in normal circumstances, Diode’s overbearing proposal alone would have been concerning. But this morning, Terra had to confront her shock again. When she saw the girl show up, she really started to feel the fact that she was heading out to fish not with a man, but a woman.
She at least wanted to talk about that but hadn’t been able to.
Bearing those doubts and dissatisfactions, Terra murmured, “You’re going to operate it manually until we’ve returned, right? Ah, the reentry too?”
“Yes.”
“...You feel like doing it, so that’s what you’re going to do, is that it?”
If it was returning home, the boat could do that much on its own. However, Diode shook her head, “If we’re too showy when doing things, then we won’t have a propellant surplus, right? If I can do something more precisely than the auto, then I’m doing it with my own two hands.”
“Ah, is that so…”
“Let me turn that question around,” Diode said as she faced Terra. “What do you think of twisters who can’t reenter or reach rendezvous manually?”
“Eh?” Terra was taken aback. “Uh, it’s a bit… too soon for me to say anything. Diode-san, you’re the first person I’ve ever seen do it manually.”
"We input everything into the spaceship's boating system from the moment we embark for FBB to the moment we return, right?"
“Mhm” Terra nodded. “There’s the periodic maintenance and pre-flight checklist that you can’t depart without, right…?”
“Well, you’re spot-on.”
“Even still, is there a reason to do it manually?”
Diode stared fixedly at Terra’s eyes.
She thought that she’d just asked the obvious, but why was it so suffocating? She averted her eyes in discomfort, and Diode strongly spoke.
“I get that a lot of things aren’t really making sense to you, but I’m a twister. There are things you won’t understand unless you’re a twister. Would you please wait a little?”
“I can wait, but…”
Terra was quite troubled.
Diode’s tone changed. “Terra-san.”
Diode quickly spun around in the pit. She leveled her face with Terra’s and leaned in. It wasn’t her gaze that captured Terra’s eyes, rather, it was a gallant blade-shaped necktie wrapped around bare skin at the base of her throat.
“Am I bad at this?”
“Huh?”
“What did you think of my piloting, Terra-san? This is just my own opinion, but I think that it lives up to the standards in its own way.”
She said like she was seeking for affirmation, her averted eyes saying ‘Probably’. Her awfully meek posture disoriented Terra.
“Uh, let me see...”
How should she reply to that…?
Diode’s passionate, highly responsive piloting during flight was unlike anything she’d ever seen. In comparison to the Fundamentals teachers and no less than five previous twister partners, Diode’s abilities were from a completely different dimension. That’s how Terra felt.
And yet, why did the person in question seal her lips so tightly and make a face like a kid expecting a scolding? What words should she use in this situation? And were there any she shouldn’t?
She didn’t know, and because she didn’t know, she said the following: “…...It does meet the standards in its own way, I think. No, I wonder if it surpassed them…?”
She thought that it surpassed the standard eight-fold, but worried that it would sound like an exaggeration or a lie and tried to moderate her response.
“Is that how it is?” Diode lightly pressed her chest in relief. “If that’s the case, then please excuse me for that.”
That was all she said, confidently snorting and then shutting her mouth. She had that same overbearing attitude back when she proposed they pair up. Proud, but with a hint that she was prepared for rejection.
Noticing that, Terra started feeling strange.
— This girl, she’s different inside.
She accomplished the things that needed to be done cooly, recklessly, and unyieldingly, but that was probably only how it seemed from the outside. She put up a strong act.
— I think when I was around that age, I had trouble getting those things across to adults, too.
“Ufu.”
“What?”
“Nothing, got it. I'm leaving it to you, Diode-san.”
After she said that, she mouthed ‘Diode-san’ again and corrected herself.
“Die-san.”
“DIE?”
“Is it okay if I call you that?”
The girl immediately raised one of her eyebrows, “That sounds like you’re just telling me to die, though.”
“It was that kind of die?” Terra was surprised. Come to think of it, she did quickly mention the origin of her name when they first met. “I thought that it was a pretty die, like ‘Diana’ or ‘diamond’… Is it not good?” She innocently brought her face closer as she spoke.
Just then, the tip of Diode’s nose gently warmed. She quickly turned around to face the same direction as the cockpit and hurled sharp words at Terra.
“If you want to call me that, then fine. It’s just a name, after all.”
“Okay! Die-san.”
She didn’t respond again, but instead increased the boat’s acceleration by one level with a thump.
They flew through the vast brick-coloured sky for 30 minutes into the starry dark of outer space. Approaching the top of their orbital trajectory, the gigantic disk-shaped Idaho steadily drew near from behind. Docking wasn’t possible if they didn’t approach closely enough, but being too close posed a collision risk, so a close approach of around 500 meters was the ideal distance.
Although they already aimed for that when accelerating through the atmosphere, they were a missile flying 6000 kilometers into the sky, so it wasn’t rare to make adjustments with ten kilometers left.
This time, adjustment-free, they achieved a close approach of 545 meters. The accuracy was worthy of being a yearly record. Terra voiced ‘Oooh’ in admiration.
Once reaching a zero relative velocity rendezvous using the apoapsis jets, it was common practice to end the fuel calculation. The propellant consumption for their full journey totaled 92,500 tonnes. Since their catch was 96,000 tonnes, they had made a profit of 3500 tonnes, placing them slightly in the black.
Satisfied since this was a good performance for their first outing, Terra pretty much forgot about the discarded 310,000 tonnes — at least until they approached the catch inspection and receiving tower in Idaho’s center.
“What? Giving up one’s share? No, we can’t do that,” said the officer in charge of the catch over video communication, and that was when trouble started.
Attached to him was a nametag with ‘Bonus’ written on it. His eyelids were somewhat swollen and his back was hunched. He looked at Diode’s face and then asked.
“Whose decompa are you?”
“I’m the twister.” Diode answered with blank face. The response was absurd, so naturally, the officer didn't understand it.
“Twister? Where is he? Wait, this pillar boat belongs to the Intercontinentals. Where’s Terra-chan?”
“Ah, I’m here. Good evening, Bonus-san.”
Terra raised one of her hands in the rear pit, and in the front Diode repeated herself.
“So, as I said, I’m the twister and Terra-san is the decompa.”
Naturally, the boat’s owner Terra and the officer in charge were acquaintances. The job was supposed to operate in an assembly line fashion, but Diode was almost like an outsider interrupting it. Upon noticing that, Officer Bonus frowned.
“This sort of thing doesn’t fly, Terra-chan. A pair of women can’t be doing this. What, you went down with this girl? Wuh, and you caught something? Oh boy, this is...”
“Excuse me, but we caught five and a half hai. It’s only by a tiny bit, but we’re properly in the black—”
“No, this isn’t about whether you were in the black.” The worker closed the VUI plate on his hand and scratched his temple with his finger. “It’s fine that you’re in the black — no, that isn’t quite fine either, but this is going to turn into a violation of the reciprocity system. You had to have taken lessons, they were in your curriculum, weren't they? They're lessons for junior students.”
“Umm, have I? Maybe I didn’t take those?”
She almost certainly had, but she got the feeling that she spent the lesson drawing besshu species that she had imagined instead, thinking it had nothing to do with her. So she pleaded ignorance.
“You did take them, you just forgot, didn't you. Alright, you’d better listen up.”
Still frowning, the lecture from the officer went something like this:
It was the norm for a twister and a decompa to be spouses. The majority of married couples were composed of men and women from different clans. There were two directives they had to follow.
The first directive was bloodline mixing. The so-called preservation of genetic diversity. With the ships remaining separate for two years, if a clan’s 20,000 or so only married among themselves, the bloodlines would become too concentrated. As a result, whenever Bow-Awows were held, many among the sixteen clans’ population of 300,000 would seek to diversify their bloodlines as much as possible.
The second directive was to guarantee the stability of their society. The so-called reciprocity system aimed to redistribute the clans’ earnings. After the 16 clans dispersed, they had to support themselves with their own profits, and the next two years could see abundance or adversity. Catches weren’t uniform, so they couldn’t avoid that. However, that could also lead to conflict, so they decided to split the catch as much as possible. It was for this purpose that men and women working with pillar boats each received half of the catch.
Although they divided the catch, there was no method to send half of the catch to the husband or wife’s distantly orbiting home clan. Instead, their part could be accounted for by converting it into the equivalent monetary value, so that was what normally happened to half of the pillar boat’s earnings. Then, during a Bow Awow year, the accounts are drawn from for payment of a range of things. This way, the sixteen clans all helped one another, with the structure preserving their stability.
“I already knew that’s how it should work though...”
“Terra-chan, that’s because you’re a marriage meeting veteran.”
“You really didn't have to say that.” Terra scowled and Diode cut into the conversation.
“In that case, report that I gave up on my own clan’s share of my own will. Increase only the Endeavours’ catch. I don’t have any issues with it.”
“Erm, listen, I think that you still don’t quite get how this works. You see, you don’t have the right to do that.” He spoke as if he were lecturing a clueless child.
“It would be nice if we could take it all for ourselves, but if we did that, your clan would get nothing. In other words, we’d be stealing from them. What you say about it is irrelevant, because of how it would be seen as a public matter. That’s the rule. The reason is if we allowed individual discretion, there’d certainly be a proliferation of accumulation conspiracies to rip off money from outsiders. Our Circ society would destabilize. That’s why it’s strictly mandated that we divide the catch equally between the two parties. This is the resolution from the Bow Awow.”
To begin with, the primary purpose in holding the Bow Awow was to distribute profits between the clans. The clan suffering with the lowest profits held rights to the orbit predicted to be most productive over the next two years. It had only been thanks to those discussions that they’d made it as far as year 303.
“That’s why I can’t allow you to give up on your share. Diode-san you have the obligation to take half of the catch to send on to your clan. Alright, your real name please.”
“Real name...”
“If you can’t give it, I can’t receive it.”
The officer’s expression composed as he lifted his chin as if to say ‘This is not a negotiation’. Diode hung her head and ground her teeth.
Terra anxiously watched the two, and making up her mind, brought her pit closer to the girl’s side.
“You don’t have to do it.”
“...What?”
“If you don’t want to give your name no matter what, it’s okay. You have a reason, right?”
Diode absentmindedly opened her mouth.
“That’s–” she replied. “If I don’t give it, then we’ll have no choice but to discard it all again...”
“Well, it’s fine” Terra flapped one hand up. “After all, it was our first time, and for starters, a pair making a profit on their first trip isn’t really a thing. It was just practice, you know, practice! Us just understanding how the other works is good enough, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t good enough. Terra was lying, and in truth, she really, really, really wanted that catch. But she felt like standing up for Diode. She tried to finish her statement by smiling, but this time it was Diode who brought her face closer and spoke.
“Why are you saying that? Terra-san, I thought that there were a lot of things you wanted to know?”
“Huh?”
“Now that you have the opportunity, don’t you want to hear any of it? Like where I came from or why I’m here? And here you are, telling me it’s okay not to say anything... ”
Ah, she noticed.
Terra was a bit moved. She stopped to think for a moment and then smirked. “You haven’t told me, so Bonus-san was going to hear it first, it’s frustrating… You know?”
Hearing that, Diode’s stiff face loosened up almost as if she was laughing ‘Hah’ in relief.
After that she turned towards the official in charge again, and in a single breath said, “My alias is Diode, and my real name is Kanna Ishidoro Gendo. Ishidoro family from the Gendo clan. Do not report it to ‘Fuyo’, please. There should be no objections to that.”
“Okay, Gendo clan eh.” The blunt officer reopened the VUI on his hand and poked at the screen, then said “But the deposit information will be sent to the Gendo clan’s base ship immediately.”
“So you were hiding your name.”
“Yes, I was, but there wasn’t a deeper meaning behind it, you easily could have found it by looking it up.”
“Ooh, so you’re from the Gendo clan, Die-san.”
Terra was a little surprised. Of the sixteen modern clans, it mingled the least with the others and had a reputation for being mysterious.
“Does this mean that I can fish with Terra?” Diode glared at the officer.
He pouted and gruntled, “Not if you aren’t spouses, I don’t make the rules.” He raised his face again, clearly bothered.
“Well, it’s the fishing that’s illegal. I don’t know of any prohibitions on activities other than fishing. If it’s just going down and back, then it doesn’t fall under the fishing jurisdiction, it’s the cruising jurisdiction.”
“No fishing?”
“It would be for personal use, in other words, for playing. And since it’s not for fishing, there’ll be fees for things like the satellite or docking. You’d also have to buy medicine and the like for their general price-”
“If it’s like that then there are–” Diode stopped mid-sentence and turned around with worry. Terra gently nodded.
“So it’s fine?”
“-no objections!”
“Please entrust that to the proper department. Okay, 96,000 tonnes of sweet mackerel accepted!”
The official in charge’s face said ‘I dunno anything anymore’ as he quickly signed the VUI.