“...so that's how I successfully got under his skin and dragged him into a one-on-one fight.”
Their pillar boat looked down on a morning sea of clouds. From the rear pit, Terra listened to Diode with her face buried in both hands.
“Got under his skin? You were provoking him...? Was that all an act?!”
“An act? No, it absolutely was not.” Wondering why Terra thought that, Diode turned around. The day's deckwear was a deep crimson camisole dress with gold chain stitch fringes and a pair of tights, capped off with a striking lipstick. “I didn't need one. That anger came naturally to me.”
“What about that ‘one’, ‘two’ thing?”
“Well, I wouldn't have gotten angry if the score of ‘things I personally wouldn't let slide’ stayed low, but I'd already completely lost it by the middle of the hearing, so I was enduring through sheer force of will after that.”
“It was that bad?”
In contrast to Diode's engaging outfit, Terra wore a green maxi dress with a brown bust. Although the ribbons adorning its sleeves and waist were intended to be as chic and lovely as possible, Terra had completely forgotten they wouldn't have the same bounce once submerged in the biofluid gel, and they were plastered to the dress instead.
Diode squinted an eye and stared at Terra for a moment before turning around and sighing.
“It was that bad. I mean, I thought you'd understand that those people standing tall and looking down on others are worthless...”
“So it's a bad thing to be tall?”
“I wasn't talking about you, though. Why does that bother you so much?”
“Why? Did you forget how furious you made the Clan Chief get?!” Sensing that Diode's tone had gotten prickly, Terra hardened her own. “You might think it's okay because it wasn't someone you're related to, but making other people mad like that is going to cause trouble for us in the future.”
“Heh.”
“What do you mean, ‘heh’?”
“You still consider him family, even though he's like that.”
“I don't consider him to be family, I don't even like him!”
“Hmm.”
“And also... yes, getting under his skin might have been your strategy, but you didn't have to push it that far, did you? Dishcrash-san had to apologize later. He said, ‘His Excellency also went too far.’”
“What? Who?”
“Salem Dishcrash-san, the liaison.”
“I have no idea who that is.” Now that she mentioned it, Diode had been delivered by a different liaison. “I don't want to be told how far I should have gone after the fact, especially when it's a miracle that I managed to get into a ridiculous contest with the Clan Chief like this. If I hadn't, then the boat would have just been outright seized, I'd be deported, and you'd have to go back to looking for a husband. And anyway, to begin with, since it's you—”
“What?”
Diode had started to mumble something, but replied, “Nothing.”
Both pits fell silent. As Terra reflected on the argument they just had, she began to regret it. She'd blamed the Clan Chief's temper on Diode without really meaning to, but that was the opposite of how she'd felt when Diode suddenly spoke up from the back of the Council Chamber. She wanted to say that...
There was something else she needed to ask, too. After that meeting, just where had Diode disappeared to? Why was she dressed like she was hard up?
Well, Terra could roughly imagine an answer to that—but it was just her imagination, and she could imagine away. She couldn't find the resolve to actually confirm the reality of the situation, though.
Nine days had gone by like that. Eight days earlier, the Council of Elders had promptly served them a brief describing how their judgement by bachi orca fishing would be carried out. In the meantime, Terra hadn't received any word from Diode, aside from a single minicell message reminding her to be there on time the night before they went fishing.
In other words, they had compared far fewer notes than usual.
Are we really going to be able to catch bachi orcas while we're like this? You'd never guess from how assertive we'd been.
“...Really, why did we pair up?”
The boat violently swayed once. However, there were no clouds at their current altitude.
“Put that aside. Please prepare our tactical plan,” Diode said.
“Ah, right.”
Diode's unemotional tone came as a relief to Terra, counter to her expectation. Within moments, the boat had fully entered the atmosphere, signalling the start of their fishing. From now on, that would have to take priority over their chat.
“Fishtracking!”
Terra brought up three screens: an optical pattern scan to her right, a radar scan to the left, and a lidar scan front and center—all multi-frequency scans from the fishfinder. In water, fishing boats made use of sound, but at FBB, where fishing targets could be anywhere from several dozens to hundreds of kilometers away, they had to rely primarily on electromagnetic waves. It was an effective technique because besshu, the target of their search, contained highly reflective metallic crystal structures.
However, the atmospheric properties weren't so kind as to just let electromagnetic energy pass through anything and everything.
“Currently, within a three-hundred-kilometer radius, there are forty-two besshu-like returns. Forty of those look to be things like surfers, sweet mackerel, fire mackerel and spitting trevallies... so, basically migratory fish from the surface layers.”
“Those other two big returns, are they the ones we just passed?”
“Yes. Since they're inside the big cumulus clouds, those are probably sardines or herring.”
“No luck today, huh?”
They nodded at each other. It was nice to agree on something, even if trivial.
“None of the returns resemble bachi orcas, do they?” Terra asked.
“...It might be a little late to be asking, but do you know anything about them?”
“Well, if it's just the basics...” Thinking back to her textbooks, Terra explained. Bachi orcas were heavyweight-class besshu. Their name was taken from marine mammals of the past, and although they had a similar shape and style of movement, they nonetheless differed in a number of ways. They were distinctive in that unlike other besshu, caught by the thousands or tens of thousands, they were caught by the head. They ranged between a few dozen to a hundred meters in length, and the largest individuals, surpassing the 10,000-tonne mark, were called myriads. As prey, they were generally regarded as high value due to the immense quantity of resources they yielded but made for less-than-ideal targets due to the difficulty in hauling enough heads to efficiently turn a profit. If anything, they served more as a test of fishers' strength and courage.
Diode had a question. “Do you know how they move?”
“Vertical free-swimming mobility.”
“What's that?”
“You really don't know any of the basics, Die-san.”
“Just describe what that movement actually looks like, please.”
“By vertical free-swimming mobility, I mean that when they're swimming forwards, they can breach powerfully and dive deeply, so basically what you would call a dolphin jump!”
"Don...zuu? Well, the place they do that donzuu is on the canopy of those superdense dustcloth clouds, in regions where they're nearly twenty kilometers thick. So because they're jumping out of those stupidly thick, dirty clouds, the hydrazine, red phosphorus, and bake won't let our fishtracking get through. We tracked them by following their splashes, but they tended to dive after three or four hops, and those hops were never consistent. Sometimes they'd jump right-left-left or left-right-right, so it's basically impossible to catch them just from watching their first leap. Back on the Tsunami Search, I saw them dodge the novices' guesses and send them plunging into the clouds instead. They're the type of besshu that stays unseen until they decide to show themselves."
“...”
“I can't speak in as much detail as you can, sorry.”
“Don't worry about it...”
Terra shrunk a little and started breaking into a cold sweat before she suddenly had an idea.
“So, we should look for flat clouds that the fishtracking can't penetrate and station ourselves there, right?”
Diode turned towards Terra and gave her a small grin.
“That's right.”
The pillar boat had been formed into a long, narrow rifle cartridge, and tiny airfoil controls kept it slicing through the hydrogen atmosphere over a low sea of clouds at 3000 kilometers an hour. They were within a small region of one of the planet's dark belts. To their right, off in the distance, pure white cloud layers towered ten kilometers over them like a huge rampart stretching away in both directions. Those clouds marked one of the planet's zones, but since they were composed of ammonia crystals, the pair had no business there this time.
As they dropped altitude and approached the belt's dark clouds, various patterns began to take shape. Some formed along an orderly flow, some through wildly turbulent frontal collisions, and others still formed vortices where flows simply passed one another by. In the last case, they formed incredibly beautiful spirals—Terra was always enraptured by the scenes formed in the planet's clouds.
“Any prospects?”
“Ah, sorry. I was admiring the view and got distracted.”
“What? The clouds?”
“Yeah...” Terra had expected a scolding, but the girl twister said nothing.
They flew along an arc for about an hour, but sensing they weren't searching around the right clouds, Diode posed a question to Terra.
“I know it's a bit late to be asking, but this is the airspace they inhabit, right?”
In the past, the Circs had deployed countless drones to get a rough sense of how besshu were distributed around the planet. Most fishers made use of the data acquired back then, so it stood to reason it was still valid here, too.
“No mistaking it. The Clan Chief also came down near where we did.”
“So, where is he now?”
“According to satellite, he's in the seven o'clock direction about 2,400 kilometers away. He's flying on a completely different vector, though.”
If it was just the vector, an error like that was to be expected from a planet 150,000 km in diameter.
Xeon's pillar boat wasn't the only vessel displayed on the open VUI panels surrounding Terra. More than ten boats in total had descended alongside them from Idaho, including the Council of Elders' jury boat, a rescue boat, and boats with curious onlookers. It was a spectacle.
It didn't stop there, either. Idaho's Council of Elders was using up a substantial portion of their comm satellite's bandwidth to broadcast the trial.
“We're pretty far from the Clan Chief, and there are a lot of people around. I wonder if we can trust them not to interfere.”
“What kind of person would interfere with fishing? Would he–”
“No, I certainly think he would not.”
Is the Clan Chief really someone we can trust? Terra was surprised by the sudden doubts she was having about his character. Before then, she'd never thought anything of the sort.
No, no. She shook her head; it wasn't the time to be doubting others. If our fishing's not successful, it doesn't matter whether he interferes or not, does it?
Terra took command of the fishtracking and initiated the radar's Doppler scanning mode. If the assumption was that bachi orcas lived in flat cloud stacks that were impenetrable to electromagnetic energy, then the clouds' level surfaces must have formed where there were no vortices or disturbances to disrupt them. If that were the case, using the Doppler to measure the relative speeds of the target clouds would give them a single-band visual on the right place to look.
She found an area fitting her criteria in moments.
“Die-san, 350 kilometers away at two o'clock! How about th—uwaah!”
Before she could finish, the boat swerved right. Diode was under incredible mental pressure. The 17,000 tonne mass dove into an aileron roll.
After about five minutes, a dark, reddish-brown scene resembling a plateau came into view. It was shaped by three or four currents that happened to flow in the same direction and become confluent. Here and there, deep rifts revealed cross-sections through the complex layers in delicate shades of black within the drifting clouds.
“I see... so this is a dustcloth cloud.”
A small teardrop-shaped bulge appeared on its surface, at first barely large enough to register. No sooner than clocking the bulge quickly swelling upwards, the smooth body of a fish leapt out. It forcefully glided through the hydrogen-filled atmosphere, devoid of any obstacles. Reflections sparkled brightly as its dark red back twisted, making it look nearly transparent.
Before long, it keeled to the side and fell, creating a splash that spread out in crown-like majesty. Terra brought a scale up on her display, and what at first glance had seemed like a splash of water no larger than a pinky was actually a huge, 50-meter-wide muddy swale radiating outwards.
It followed the first jump with two more identical medium-length jumps before it disappeared into the cloud's depths.
“It's a bachi. Incredible, you were right!” Diode's voice livened up. “Please begin the decomp. I know that ‘a net in pursuit is much like a bald head’, but all we can do is chase them. Optimize for speed when you make your net.”
“Ah, yes!”
Looks like it jumped about a kilometer, if we're playing it by ear. I wonder why they jump...? Ah, no—how should we go about catching it?
“Maybe... a tunnel net with a large mouth and wide mesh to reduce air resistance?”
“We'll want the mesh to be able to veer for the sake of making tiny adjustments. I—no, Terra-san, could you manage that?”
“Maybe we could use the boards for steering? I'll try!”
Decompression—this time, the cartridge-shaped main body was left practically unchanged, since the priority was speed and maneuverability. A faint, thin fiber spooled away from the boat's underside, knitting itself into a cylindrical net almost double the pillar boat's size. Otter boards surrounded the net's mouth like flower petals, allowing the net to open, close, and turn.
Terra closed her eyes as she conveyed her thoughts to the ship, and as she was finishing up the huge encumbrance below, she felt the noticeable sensation of drag.
“...Phew. Like this?”
“Let's see.” Diode swung the boat left and right, batting the fluttering net around. “Yeah, like that. Coming from you, this is surprisingly normal.”
“Sorry the way I do things isn't exactly normal!”
“But isn't that your selling point? Let's go.”
The net slowed the boat below the speed of sound. Diode increased the power and flew lower.
Terra turned up the radar's resolution, probing for any tiny undulations on the cloud's surface. She alerted Diode the moment it began to swell.
“It's coming! Ah, but it's heading off to our—”
“I'll turn!”
Their prey began to emerge, crossing from left to right as it surged forward, and Diode responded by using a lateral propulsor to indirectly match its trajectory. The gigantic bullet-shaped boat kicked up an S-shaped splash of muddy clouds in its wake.
Then, the bachi surfaced. It was a beautiful creature, uncannily similar to the whales of ancient Earth, differing only its lustrous, deep red tint. Clouds sprayed from its powerful tail as it started its long jump—but Diode couldn't attempt her catch just yet.
“Right? Err... right, probably!”
Its first jump finished, the besshu decelerated and splashed into the cloud. It raced through the next 400 meters in the shallows before surfacing once again.
“Now!”
At that moment, Diode was looming uncomfortably close to the besshu as she approached from directly behind, then—Bam—it leapt so powerfully they felt the impact of its tail against the cloud. Simultaneously, Diode maxed out the throttle to scoop up the big, powerful creature.
Terra focused on the view directly below them. Just as she was about to stretch open the net's mouth to swallow the streamlined besshu, though, it raised its right fin as if it were greeting them.
“Huh?”
The situation was thrown into chaos before they could even register that it had flapped one of its big pectoral fins. As the bachi orca keeled to the left, its right pectoral fin snagged in the passing net. As it began to fall forward into a dive, its long, powerful tail fin struck the pillar boat's hull.
The physical sense of the orca's scale, which had been hard to grasp to that moment, suddenly made itself tangible. Its lower half alone massed 2,000 tonnes. It was a thick, flying bundle of carbon muscle.
The bachi orca had initially been moving at 1,000 kilometers per hour. When its tail smashed into the pillar boat and its lone flight propulsion jet, the boat instantly began tumbling through the clouds in an ungraceful spin that continued over nearly a dozen kilometers.
“OAAAGH!” “AAAHHH!”
The advanced boating system was able to buffer against an impact to the pits, but it was useless when the boat itself was somersaulting every which way. They blacked out from the insane tumbling, and when they came to, spent five full minutes curled up and hugging their own heads.
“...Die-san, are you okaaay...”
“Well, I'm alive.”
The only thing illuminating the darkness when Terra opened her eyes was the signal lighting. Diode tinkered with the VUI, frowning.
“Looks like the boat flamed out. The net tore, too. At least we didn't split apart... All right, rebooting.”
Their boat was sinking into the cloud's interior, which looked like the cotton of yore. However, since the boat was made entirely of malleable AMC clay, even breaking apart was possible to recover from so long as the people inside the pits at the boat's center were unharmed. Diode's piloting and a simple decomp from Terra quickly restored the boat to flight, and they began to climb.
The bachi orca from earlier was naturally nowhere to be seen when they reemerged from the cloud. Terra was dejected.
“Looks like it got away.”
“Well, I guess that's what asymmetric meant.”
“But haven't you seen them before?”
“I was in the Tsunami Search. I only watched them. This is my first time attempting to catch them.”
“And you still picked a fight like this despite never doing it before?!”
“Well, I thought it would be an easy win since I'd be with you, you know?”
Just as she said that, a spinning planet icon popped up on the VUI and a robotic voice announced, “Trial boat to Terra Intercontinental Endeavour. This is to notify you Xeon Highhertz has caught his first head of bachi orca. Length 81 meters. Inertial mass 8500 tonnes.”
The two fell completely silent.
“The condition you must fulfill for a superior judgement is to exceed Xeon's catch in mass. The judgement will conclude once the trial boat marks sunset. —However, we just now observed your boat crashing. Do you require rescue?”
Terra felt a bit of emotion in those last few words, but maybe that was just her imagination. It was nothing more than a standard phrase.
“This is Diode speaking. Rescue is unnecessary. We will continue with our fishing.”
“Understood.”
The communication cut. Diode spread her arms and upped the throttle.
“Make the net's opening twice as large, please. We'll take on more than 10,000 tonnes of load instantly, so set an automatic disposal function, too.”
“O-okay.”
What would be the best shape for the net?—Wondering that, Terra suddenly understood why Xeon had kept his distance.
Four hours passed, and they hadn't caught anything.
Bachi orcas are asymmetric jumpers, meaning they display a behavior of jumping three times, right-left-left some times, left-right-right at others. However, the two realized a harsh truth as they actually took on the challenge.
Fundamentally, they had no way of telling if the next jump was going left or right.
And why couldn't they tell? They couldn't figure that out, either. The two had encountered and lunged for the bachi orcas time and again, observing them at point-blank range from nose to Ψ-shaped tail (a shape that was apparently called “bachi” in an ancient language). No matter what signs they picked up on, the following jump was never the direction they expected.
“Did you see any non-beginners while you were in the Tsunami Search?”
“I did, but it's not like I know how they chose.”
“And you don't happen to have any acquaintances who would?”
“If I did, I wouldn't have washed up here with the Endeavours.”
“Sorry this clan really only knows about sophistry and selfish, capricious decisions!”
“I didn't say that, though?”
Fishing with their strained mood hadn't been successful. Falling back on attempting to force-feed the besshu into an ill-suited net simply resulted in it tearing when the orca keeled. And since right and left were the only possibilities when it did keel, it was a 50-50 call. But for some reason, they hadn't guessed correctly even once.
“Xeon Highhertz has caught his fifth bachi orca head. Length 65 meters—”
Coming only a dozen or so minutes after the last, the unwanted announcement from the judging boat only deepened their anxiety. It would be nice to dismiss those announcements as a hoax or bluff, but since they could be verified through the video stream on the general broadcast frequency, they probably weren't.
“Why don't we watch the broadcast, Die-san?”
“You want to steal our opponent's technique in the heat of battle?!”
“When did this become a battle? I think if something's being shown in public, then there's no problem watching it.”
“But if they're openly showing it, then there's nothing to be seen!”
Diode stubbornly resisted the temptation to do some scouting, but her resolve wavered about the time Xeon made his seventh catch.
“Let's watch,” she finally yielded.
A minute was all it took to understand.
The gently curved tracks left by both Xeon's pillar boat and his prey were clearly visible on the cloud's surface in the video captured by the high-altitude broadcast boat. The moment it played a recap of all seven catches, they realized why the orcas veered left or right.
“The boat's wake...!”
“We got too close. If we'd been watching them from a higher vantage point we would have known immediately!”
“I never had this view from the Tsunami Search. It's probably just fundamental knowledge, nothing to hide. The bachi change their course,” Diode said, looking up with a pained face, “with their ventral fins, and we can't see those from directly above.”
“Even though whales don't have anything like a ventral fin?!”
“Whales? What are those?”
Diode had nailed the issue. Bachi orcas were indisputably besshu. They weren't the mammalian whales—introduced from Earth to multiple places in the Galactive Interactive—that Terra was well-acquainted with from photo books.
“Xeon Highhertz has caught his eighth bachi orca head—”
The transmission echoed. Terra faced upwards inside the slow-flying pillar boat, floating limp from exhaustion. They acted like veterans flaunting their proficiency even as they attempted something they knew nothing about. It had been awfully shameless. Unlike theirs, Xeon's bragging seemed to be the real deal, since he had caught seven—eight heads. His know-how definitely couldn't have been learned just by watching.
Terra had forgotten that besshu aren't whales, too. She couldn't blame Diode for that, she should have known it herself.
Terra moved on from that thought. Returning to the broadcast, she could see Xeon's piloting wasn't outstanding, but it obviously wasn't bad, either. It was a very mature piloting style; everything necessary, and only what was necessary. In comparison, Diode's piloting style was lively, brash... something—how do I put it? It's exciting—much better.
She didn't want this girl's skill going to waste.
“Die-san.”
“What is it?”
“Why can't you catch it?”
“Are you trying to pick a fight?”
“I'm not trying—no, let's stop this.” Terra exhaled a sigh and raised her head. “Sorry, I phrased that badly. To me, Die-san, you're a genius. Despite that, you haven't been able to catch anything. So, I assumed there had to be a reason I didn't pick up on.”
Diode reclined against an armrest in the pit's interior, as if she were gazing out at the distant sky. Then she sighed and began to speak as expected.
“I'm sorry, too. I lost it.”
“It's okay.”
“The reason I can't catch them is... well, right before they donzuu, they're avoiding us.”
“Avoiding us...”
Diode spun her whole body around. Terra moved closer to her face.
“They're different from the small fish. Instead of simply fleeing us, it's like they're predicting our next move.”
“So they're watching us?”
“Seems like it. They react when I turn the aileron or use the side jets. Maybe they have eyes. But we can't avoid using those, since we don't have another way to steer.”
“Ah, then that's an issue caused by our current form. So if that's the case, maybe we could trick them by putting the rudder where it can't be seen from below? We could even attach a surface piercing thruster to the hull to make us look like a fellow bachi breaching with a raised dorsal fin.”
“That sounds good,” Diode replied, her gaze fixed on Terra, “but even if that goes well, we can't beat him anymore.”
Diode looked off the side. On the distant horizon, the sun was beginning to set through the thick atmosphere. FBB's short day was coming to a close.
“Imitating him won't work at all. We have to abandon the fundamentals. What if we increased the number of nozzles and chased them at double speed? No... we'd run out of fuel and lose the ability to carry our catch... what if we rushed at them head-on and collided while passing them? No... if we collide too fast the boat will break up...”
Diode's desperate thinking reminded Terra of how she looked at the beer hall, the fragility of that strong face she put on. Diode may have looked experienced, but she was still only 18 years old.
Why did I pair up with that girl?—Terra had taken a liking to how Diode gave everything her all. That's right, I had forgotten. From the moment they met, even before they'd gone fishing, that's how she'd been.
Diode turned towards Terra and lashed out. “What are you smiling at, Terra-san?! Think through this together with me!” Terra unintentionally burst into laughter.
“Die-san, you're so desperate.”
“What?! What are you saying? WHAT are you saying?!”
“I think it's nice that you're like this.”
“What are you sayinggg...” Diode's screaming trailed off as her shock lost its momentum. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get like that.” Her shoulders drooped as she apologized. Terra returned to her thoughts.
“So, we've got no hints in this situation. I don't know if this is a path forward, but... I've been wondering about something for a while.”
“What is it? At this point...”
“It's ‘why do they jump like that?’”
“Aren't they chasing prey?”
“Do they look like they're chasing prey?”
“Now that you mention it...”
Terra nodded as Diode gently shook her head. “It doesn't, does it? The dolphins on Earth don't have a specific reason to jump like that. They do it just for fun, and I think they do it as a group. But well, bachi aren't dolphins or whales, are they?”
“Right.”
“And besshu eat each other, right?”
Diode raised an eyebrow, “Right.”
“And they don't look like they're eating. So, what if it's the opposite?”
Their eyes met. Terra's breath caught as she looked into dark blue eyes. Before long, the girl's long eyelashes shot up as her eyes opened wide. “So, there's something behind them?”
“There has to be something, right? And at this rate, I'm not sure if—”
“It doesn't matter if it's useful or a waste of time, let's fish for it?”
Now it was Terra's turn to freeze at an incredibly direct proposal.
“S...so it comes down to this?”
“Comes down to what? Did you have something other than fishing in mind when you brought that up?”
“No, somehow, that's just where my mind drifted...”
“Let's fish,” Diode firmly stated before turning her back to Terra. She expanded the VUI panel once again and accelerated the boat. “I'm going to take us there, but I'm trusting you to catch it.”
“H–how?”
“It's your job to think of a way. No, actually, to imagine a way.” Diode looked at Terra and gave her the day's best smile. “You can do whatever you want. I'll definitely fly all out, so please decompress with everything you've got.”
“Only a few seconds remain to sunset. Ten—five, four, three, two, one. The day has ended and the judgement is complete.”
“Phew! It's over.”
The twister Xeon Highhertz Endeavour turned his pillar boat away from the twilight. He had been setting up to chase the last head, but time ran out just before he reached the approach. Still, he was certain his catch had been sufficient.
“Pohi, how many did I catch?”
“A total of 11 heads massing 69,100 tonnes,” his decompa—in other words, his wife—Pohi Nootka replied bluntly. “You were certainly enthusiastic, even though it wasn't necessary to go all out with it.”
“It was necessary to teach impertinent kids like them the difference in our power. Besides, I didn't go all out, I would say this was a mere 70% effort.”
“Well, you are childish like that.” Pohi turned away. Although she said that, she still played her role of a proper decompa. That is fine—thought Xeon. Those two should be like Pohi and do as they're told, and yet, despite the fact they stood to lose nothing by doing just that...
“Clan Chief, may I inquire as to Your Excellency's results?”
“Not bad, Salem.”
Xeon reported his results to the liaison in the trial boat as soon as contact had been established. Pohi butted in before they could finish.
“Salem, how did it go for those girls?”
“Their final catch was one head.”
“I see...”
“They put on that huge production, and that's all they have to show?!” Pohi shut her mouth as Xeon burst into laughter. “I watched the broadcast myself, but in the middle of it, it looked more as if they were testing out a number of things. Have they figured out how the bachi can see us?”
“That was not the case, but Your Excellency does understand the workings, no?”
“Of course. I would not be able to catch them if I didn't.”
Bachi orcas have infrared vision—that was the conclusion Xeon reached after many years of experience. The radar frequencies were not able to penetrate through dirty air like dustcloth clouds, but a band of infrared waves could. Since the pillar boat is visible at those wavelengths, it was possible to trick the orcas by cooling the bottom of the pillar boat. That prevented the orcas from noticing they'd made a mistake until the very last second, massively improving the odds of a successful catch.
It was a secret technique, one he kept from rookies and close friends alike.
“So we shall be seizing their boat. Seems like this will be a very unsatisfying conclusion.”
“Then that is your decision. However, Your Excellency... there is one detail, if you would allow me to explain?”
“What?”
“The catch they have brought in, that single bachi orca, weighs approximately 58,000 tonnes.”
Xeon was speechless.
“Heeh...!” Pohi exclaimed, leaning forward.
“58,000? That isn't a mistake? My, my. Doesn't that surpass last year's weight record? Maybe even the year before last?”
“It is an all-time weight record, Madam. Until now, the record mass was 14,600 tonnes.”
“Oh my, oh my! What now, dear?”
Xeon shooed off his wife, who seemed inexplicably merry, and spoke to the liaison.
“Whether in mass or in numbers, I am victorious. Am I correct?”
“It is as you say, Your Excellency.”
“Then, there should be no questions.”
“Yes, that is true. However, following Your Excellency's instructions, their catch of the 58,000 tonne bachi orca was broadcast to the entirety of Circs. Thus far, they have been commended by the Jack-of-All-Trades and Radenvijaya clan seats on the Council of Elders. Conversely, Gendo clan has filed a declaration that they intend to rescue the maiden that we, the ‘crafty Endeavour clan’, set up as a twister using any means necessary.”
“Gendo or the like have nothing to do with me!”
While Xeon might yell that, he could still recognize that the situation had become a mess. Punishing fishers officially commended by other clans would call his own abilities into question. That was the entire purpose of exchanging commendations and criticisms, and while it was routine for the Circs, it wasn't wise to simply ignore them.
As for the declaration from Gendo clan, it was a groundless accusation based on a misunderstanding, which allowed him to go against their wishes. He would just as well be admitting their claim if he turned over that girl named Diode.
“So they think I am going to completely change my stance and praise that little missy to death just because of that? I absolutely will not do that!”
“Indeed, it is true you wouldn't. Therefore, for now, I believe you should proceed with the punishment as planned from the start.”
Xeon ground his teeth, expression souring as he took notice of what his liaison Dishcrash was hinting at.
“It does not matter what you believe, and neither does the expectation of gain held by the other elders. However, if a more satisfactory compromise is available, I would not be opposed.”
“So you're leaving it to him, is what you mean.”
“Be silent!” Xeon yelled at Pohi, who had butted in, then gave a signal with his eyes.
“Well then, if you will excuse me.” Dishcrash cut the communication.
The Clan Chief was ultimately uninterested in what his liaison did or didn't do.
“Hey, Die-san, what do you think that was about just now? What do you think? Hey!”
“Well, who knows, I don't know anything about unknown messages sent by unknown elders like that.”
At the exit of Idaho's arrival terminal, a tall, excited woman detained a small, dejected woman in attempted conversation. They wore jumpers and pants like they had just finished a walk around the neighborhood, but the subject of their conversation was nowhere near that breezy.
“Dishcrash-san said, ‘to follow the ruling, we will seize the boat at first, however–’. He said, ‘however’! He even winked! It must mean something like that, right? It's definitely something good, isn't it?”
“I said that I don't know.”
“Huh, really?! By the way, Die-san, why are you this down about it? Our catch weighed 58,000 tonnes! 58,000 tonnes! Bonus-san's soul left his body when we tried to haul it through the fish gate, didn't it?! Isn't that a huge triumph?! There really was an even bigger monster chasing the bachi, it was so chilling! But you were like, zoooom! And then woooom! Then we just gulped it down!”
“Seriously, can you please stop acting like an idiot in public?!” Diode shouted at Terra, who was being loud and gesturing wildly, and bared her small fangs as she rushed out of the lobby. In fact, the arrival terminal was packed with people who had seen the broadcast and rushed in for a glance at the historic catch as it was processed into resources.
“Die-san!”
This time, Terra was going to make sure that she couldn't run away. She slinked after the girl, keeping pace with Diode from behind exactly like a wolf would stalk its prey.
“I'm sorry, I was only thinking of the impact our feat would have and got carried away.”
“That I could tell, at least...”
“But I think Dishcrash-san really can live up to our expectations. He promised he wouldn't tell anyone else, since the way we caught the bachi is our own secret method!”
Diode used the microgravitational ambient, a condition spanning to the outskirts of Fisherman's Wharf, to kick off into midair. Grabbing onto plumbing, she turned around. “Listen!”
“Yeah?”
“You keep going on about Dishcrash this, Dishcrash that. It's annoying!”
“It does kind of sound like crashing dishes.”
“He doesn't matter one bit. You're really the incredible one here, don't you think?!”
“Huh?”
“When that 140 meter long besshu went like ‘zoooom’ right before our eyes, when you ‘woooomed’ at it with the decomp, and when you ‘gulped’ it down with the entire boat, all of that was something I've never seen before. I've never even heard of anything like it! Aren't anxiety and composure opposites? Are you the kind of person that produces adrenaline and oxytocin at the same time?!”
“That's an insult I don't even get the meaning of.”
“At any rate!” Diode gulped, returning to a neutral expression before continuing, “I did not have the courage to go after another one of those beasts while we were already carrying the one we had, so in the end, we lost. It was my fault.”
“Is that why you're so down?”
“I mean, it was a fight that I picked.”
“Not really.” Terra gently smiled and extended her hand. “It was our fight. When you said all those things back then, I was happy.”
“Terra-san...” Upon seeing Terra's extended hand, Diode grimaced. “Why didn't you say that sooner! Instead of talking about how the Clan Chief was mad or whatever...”
“I'm sorry I wasn't honest about it... Since I'm older, I felt like those were things that needed to be said. Thank you.”
“Ngh...” Hanging her head, Diode accepted Terra's hand. It looked like she wasn't going to run away anymore.
Her hand is so small.
Terra felt it. Diode's fingers were small and slender, but they moved with the speed and accuracy of an ancient pianist when she operated the boat. An incredibly strong, cute hand. When the girl had grasped her hand on the night they first met, it was cold as ice.
Even now—no. Now it's warm. Blood flowed through it, gradually warming it up a little. A familiar scent of smoked medicinal herbs faintly wafted from her body. Her downcast face turned away.
An ear peeked through silver hair. The moment Terra caught sight of it, she felt warmth gently spreading from the tap of hot water that had opened within her breast.
—Mm...?
“Um, Die-san.”
“...Yes?” Her response was fuzzy, just a whisper. Terra brought her face closer and replied with a whisper of her own.
“Why don't you come with me, and stay at my place?”
“Why...?”
“Why?” A reason, a reason... There's one. “Die-san, you've been living rough, haven't you?”
Diode's slender shoulders moved in surprise, and as she turned to face Terra, she flushed with embarrassment.
“...So I've been found out?”
“It's closer to intuition, since you were dressed like a boy back at the meeting with the Council of Elders. That meant you must have been sleeping somewhere a girl really shouldn't.”
“......”
“I should have noticed soon after the Bow Awow ended, since you weren't staying in any of our ship's hotels.” And I should have gone looking for you then, without any weird hang-ups. “Where have you been crashing? Under the cleaning duct basin? In the food ingredient composting area? Or–”
“Well... whether the Bow Awow was happening or not, whether it was with the JTs or Endeavours, if I need to sleep then one way or another I'll make those places work,” Diode murmured with an awkward expression. “They'd be pretty unimaginable to you, so I'd prefer if you didn't imagine them in the first place...”
“What... is that supposed to mean?”
“That it wasn't somewhere decent.”
“Then that's bad, isn't it?! Please! Stay at my place!”
“But a deportation order is coming from the Council of Elders.”
“There's probably not going to be one. No, even if there is, we'll refuse it!”
“There's no use...” Diode gently let go of the hand that had been holding hers as she said that, like she'd suddenly remembered it. “Listen, Terra-san, there's something I'd like to ask.”
“Yes?”
“Are you always so ready to invite strangers to stay over?”
“Absolutely not,” Terra said, shaking her head. “Die-san, you aren't a stranger, you know?”
Looking slightly downward, Diode immediately asked, “Then, what am I to you?”
A heavy package had finally arrived.
If we're not strangers, then... just what are we? Coworkers? Friends? Accomplices? Partners? All of those felt a little off the mark. The ways in which those terms didn't quite fit... Terra had a sense that they were extremely important.
“For now, we are sharing a boat.” Terra was carefully placing the heavy package on a shelf. “You and I both absolutely need each other. So, don't you think it would be good to live somewhere in easy sight of one another?”
Diode's eyes wandered about for a few seconds as she sighed. “Yeah.” She nodded one, two, three times. “You're probably right, since you might suddenly get swept away”
“Isn't it the other way around?”
“You think?”
They looked into one other's eyes, taking in their feelings. Those eyes said, That's fine—or so I think. Probably.
“Yeah I... don't think that will be the case.”
“Me neither.”
“But you're the one who has it the hardest, of course.”
“Sure, of course.”
“So, taking all of that into consideration—thinking strategically—why don't you come live together with me?”
Diode made a face Terra could tell was to hide her feelings and slowly nodded.
“Alright—there really is no other choice.”