“We’re clear of Fuyō’s harbor cannon. Our CNS [Circ Navigation Satellite] request for the descent’s orbital elements and reference countdown also came in. We’re at T-minus 450. Self-diagnosics are in progress... the pillar boat’s current mass is 175,500 tonnes, currently in cylindrical anchoring form, life support resources are sufficient for 47 hours, and there are no radar or optical range obstructions around... Let’s go, Die-san!”
“Let’s split.”
The moment Terra gave the all-clear, Diode made an insane comment and mashed together the swarm of fan-shaped virtual throttle panels. She commanded them to full power, but since the pillar boat’s main engines still hadn’t been formed, what ignited instead were the small RCS nozzles maintaining their heading. She was trying to quickly put some distance between themselves and Fuyō.
The harbor cannon immediately began firing in short, rapid pulses. Flames spraying from the nozzles were snuffed out one after the other.
“AAAIIEE?!” Terra shrieked as she felt the boat rattle with each explosion.
Diode clicked her tongue and carefully tweaked the throttle. She yawed to align the boat with the cannon’s direction of fire to reduce their exposure and quickly redirected the nozzles’ thrust towards the top of the hull. She was attempting to flee by diving as the boat stared down the cannon.
Just then, their boat was rushed from both sides by relatively large pink columns which pushed their boat upwards again. They were two of the Gendō pillar boats.
“Absconding the moment I lend you a ship is much too predictable, wouldn’t you agree? If you must, I would prefer that you do so through more unconventional means.”
A five-petal black flower spun on the VUI before Meika’s face appeared, along with Chūya in the twister seat. Although Terra thought he was in the middle of tracking down Pri, here he was working the front pit for this flight.Diode sighed and put her hands up in frustration.
Over her shoulder, Terra struck a tone of agreement with the callout. “Die-san, when I said let’s go, I meant let’s go fishing.”
“Are you really that stupidly earnest?”
Terra was irritated by her rude tone. “What do you mean, ‘stupid’?”
“Exactly what it sounded like. We consume some percentage of the clay once we start our descent, but right now we have a full supply of propellant. We could make it all the way to Idaho on that, and if we succeeded, wouldn’t we also be rid of all of the Gendō pursuers?” Diode turned around to face Terra and, with a fed-up voice, said, “So it’s stupid to not make our escape now.”
FBB at night was the backdrop. All through the dark clouds of the enormous gas giant, bursts of purple lightning flickered. The small girl had her back to the scene, looking down on Terra with scorn. She was dressed in a kimono—a kind of clothing Terra wasn’t used to seeing, devoid of any fasteners. It wasn’t a printed deck dress; the Gendō outfit was clean, exotic, and if not for the situation, charming in a way Terra could stare at forever.
She pointed at Fuyō, towering above that bewitching sight. “The ship! Our ship is in there! Losing it is the worst thing that could happen!”
"Weren't you just using it as a decoy to give Meika the slip earlier?”
Diode didn’t seem to understand, so Terra tried to clarify.
“That was a misunderstanding on Meika-san’s part. I actually planned on using the control pits as the decoy while trying to run away in the Insomnia instead—because that’s the escape ship I told you can get us out of this star system!”
Blinking in surprise, Diode pressed her for more answers. “So that’s what you were going on about earlier? The suspicious ship you learned about from a suspicious person, I mean.”
“That’s right,” Terra nodded, feeling exhausted. “I was able to get all the way out here thanks to that ship.”
“But–”
“We can use it to flee all the way to the GI! We really can!”
Terra cut Diode off before she could voice any further doubts. Ultimately, Terra had been the only one to hear Eda's claims, so there was no other way she could prove it when Diode tried digging deeper.
“That’s why we’ve got no choice but to obey for now, at least until we find the opportunity to run off in the Insomnia without getting shot.”
“...Well, if you say so.” Diode abruptly took her eyes off Terra and looked ahead. The loose sleeves of the kimono and her silver hair trailed little bubbles in the biofluid gel as she spun.
I want to run my fingers through her hair—Terra thought. She also wanted to do anything she could beyond that. Caress her. Hug her tight. Talk about each other. And, more than anything, tell Diode this very moment how happy she was to see her again.
A transmission spoke instead.
“Can you hear me, Kanna-san? Are you aware that it is not quite time to descend yet?”
“Yes, I hear you, and yes, I’m aware. What just happened was a small slip of the hand.”
“That was a wise answer, but next time, I will not be so understanding, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m done running away,” Diode responded before cutting comms.
She looked bored, but the two had the undeniable familiarity that came with old friendship. Terra knew it was pointless comparing herself with Meika, but she couldn’t help but think about the appeal of her tenacity during their confrontation back at port.
“Terra-san, your outfit... what is it?”
“Huh?”
Before she knew it, Diode was giving her side-eye. Terra was wearing a clumsy, undignified duct dress. One was expected to wear their best clothes when flying the pillar boat out to fish besshu with their partner, an expectation work uniforms fell far short of.
“T-this is, um... a bunch of stuff happened.”
“Hmmm... you’ve been through a lot.”
“Thanks...”
Normally, they’d have sure praise for one another's outfit, but this exchange was nothing short of terse. Terra bowed her head and felt like crying.
The boat rocked violently. The two pillar boats that had been pinning their boat in place finally backed away. The names Fisher Rokujō and Fisher Mokuren appeared on the VUI panels.
Terra had been too busy with their conversation to notice at first, but using boats to keep another boat under control was an unusual use of force. The two boats turned their aft ends to their pillar boat and splashed the two women with their rocket plumes as they separated.
Maybe it was by accident—no, there’s no way that was an accident. They’re demeaning us. And you know the reason they’re looking down on us. It was because her twister was a woman. No matter where she was, Diode was usually treated like a child. Terra always noticed it after it happened and kept the thought to herself because putting it into words was difficult.
Don’t you dare underestimate my Die-san!
“Reentry form, please,” came a robotic-sounding order from the front control pit.
Suddenly back at attention, Terra slapped her own cheeks. “R-Right.”
“Can you do it? The polar-type, I mean.”
“I can do it! Leave it to me!” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Decompression—taking the whole of the boat in her hands.
It was written in textbooks that decomping was only possible in a sufficiently relaxed state, and Terra was well aware of it. For that reason, she was uncertain whether it would go well in her current mental state, but somehow or another, she managed to start decomping.
She extended the very fringes of her awareness into remote corners of the huge vessel; she no longer heard through her ears, no longer saw through her eyes—only feeling its interior structures and thinking she was the lump of clay in the same way that her tongue felt around the inside of her mouth—and, grasping her own contours, expanded them in some places and squeezed them in others as her imagination changed her very shape and structure. A piercing tip, a sturdy clutch, and inflamed organs came into clear existence; before she knew it inside and outside ceased to matter and she was fully immersed in the feeling of vacuum in contact with the ship's twenty thousand square meter surface as if it was against her own skin; then, powerful wings, stiff nozzles, and electromagnetic eyes opening to the sight of the distant cloudtops of the horizon beyond.
No matter how many times she did it, the satisfaction—the liberation—the job brought on its own felt like reason enough for her to live. Like bringing a being into existence for the first time, Terra’s decompression breathed life into the pillar boat.
“Finished! All ready for entry!”
“...Thank you. I’ll sync our descent with the counter,” Diode acknowledged after a short while.
Several luminous points tore through a tiny corner of the vast, twenty two thousand kilometer-wide expanse of night. Those points were Terra and Meika’s pillar boats, in addition to the five Gendō pillar boats and patrol ships that accompanied them. All seven vessels were swathed in soft orange light.
Terra constantly made careful adjustments to the loaned pillar boat Meika had offered them, but noticing the light that had engulfed the pillar boat since shortly after their descent began startled her. The light wasn’t something she saw during their usual fishing.
“Die-san, does our speed seem to be a little... too fast?”
“Fast?”
“It’s too early for reentry flames to appear at this point, right? We haven’t even gone under 1000 km altitude yet.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Diode replied, turning to look around her. “Our current speed is 12.8 kilometers per second. I think that’s standard reentry speed, though.”
“So... is the atmosphere locally thicker around here?”
“Or, maybe something was put out?” Diode spun the VUI’s contact dial with a finger while she stared at Meika’s boat, which had departed shortly before them. “Meika, did you fart?”
“Excuse me? Just what are you accusing me of now?!”
“I’m pretty sure I just asked if you released gas. There’s usually not enough air at this altitude for adiabatic compression.”
“What do you mean, gas–” Meika fell silent almost the instant she opened her mouth. “Actually...”
The two could faintly hear her whispering in discussion with Chūya. Finally she pretended to clear her throat. “...Ahem. I must ask again, but do either of the two of you know anything about nishikigoi fishing?”
“A little.” “As much as you can find in reference books.”
“Oh, is that so? But you have complete mastery of the middle- and low-latitude belts, do you not?”
“I know the things that are common knowledge to the Gendō,” Diode responded, as if to tell Meika to quit treating her like an idiot. “Don’t nishikigoi show up on the news every time there’s a catch? They’re besshu that ascend from the deep, jump clear up to the ionosphere, and range between 5000 and 20,000 tonnes.”
“Then, it follows you know how a 20,000 tonne besshu makes a thousand-kilometer ascent into the ionosphere.”
“Because they can launch them—” It was Diode’s turn to cut herself off and fall silent.
Terra understood why. They couldn’t possibly launch themselves a thousand kilometers into the sky, or rather, if they did—she loosely worked through the math in her head—under FBB’s surface gravity of 2g, they would need an initial velocity of 6.3 kilometers per second. By comparison, the besshu that typically flew near the speed of sound achieved 0.4 km/s at best. (Still, not bad for a living creature.)
Diode looked back at Terra and whispered, “There weren’t any nishikigoi near the Tsunami Search’s territory.”
“Thanks to the mid-latitude location, right?” While Diode had substantial practice, she lacked in theory. Terra eagerly lent her a helping hand. “Let’s swap.”
She took over the transmission. “Meika-san, the nishikigoi use the aurora to ascend instead of something like the rocket propulsion in human spacecraft, don’t they? An aurora is the plasma generated as a result of charged particles raining down from space and colliding with the upper atmosphere, which means the nishikigoi are swimming upstream on a plasma waterfall, right?”
“Yes, that’s correct. Are you aware of how much power is generated by that waterfall?”
Terra fell silent. She could probably find the answer pretty quickly if she looked it up on her minicell, but if they were in fact already in the middle of supersonic fishing, she didn’t have the time to investigate.
“...My apologies, but could it be that was the extent of your knowledge?” Terra felt like she was being made fun of, but she couldn’t quite tell. “So earlier, regarding your—pardon my language—fart accusation and lack of familiarity with the polar atmosphere, that was not an act? You two were sincere? Did you decomp without mentally picturing auroral heat countermeasures, an anti-glare fishfinder, a protective shielding for the combustion chamber, and other things of the like first? No? Surely, you did? For a pair who hauled in as much as the first quarter’s third-ranked fishers to not do that would be...” Meika’s tone sounded halfway between worried and sneering.
Still, Terra felt like she was bluffing and replied, “Our pillar boat has all necessary functionality. What is the power of the aurora, by the way?”
“Usually more than one trillion five hundred billion watts.”
“One trillion–”
“And five hundred billion. We received a very well-timed category five stellar flare warning beginning from last night, and from additional observations of Kageuchi hammering, we may be seeing it reach a maximum of five to seven trillion.”
“...Right.”
“Terra-san? Are you okay? You do not sound well, are you still able to fish? It would be the worst if you and Kanna-san were by chance to be injured, so would you like to return?”
“And what would be the result of our contest if we did?”
“Naturally, I would win by default.”
“We’re going to give it everything we’ve got.” Terra cut the communication with a powerful karate chop swing. “Whew!”She sighed, pressing between her eyebrows.
Bubbles rose through the biofluid gel in front of Diode’s worried face. “So after all that, do you have any ideas about what that light around us might be?”
Terra momentarily paused to think, and something from the conversation with Meika sprang to mind.“Well, um... Die-san, do you know what the temperature is outside?”
“There’s no such thing as temperature up in space above a thousand kilometers in altitude.”
“As a twister, your intuition might say we’re in a vacuum, but try measuring it anyway.”
“Well, in that case...” Diode seemed to perform some sort of operation with the infrared thermometer. After a little bit, she responded, displeased. “The temperature reads 700°C even though the pressure outside is less than one millionth of an atmosphere. What even is this?”
Terra replied, “Basically, this is the zone where the high temperature atmosphere begins at the poles.”
“Because the sunlight is striking at such a low angle, right?”
“It’s not sunlight, I think it’s the effects of the aurora Meika-san mentioned earlier. For FBB, the poles are where it’s hottest.”
“So what now, then? Do we need to think of this as raising the baseline for our usual flight temperature by 700 degrees from here on out?”
“I’m not sure if the usual baselines are a good guide here. We’re already way off of them, aren’t we?”
The two fell quiet. Eventually, Diode quietly spoke. “So, the real question is, do you think we can survive rushing in like this?”
It was unlike her to take such a muted tone, but it spurred Terra’s motivation. She tapped the space in front of her and raised six VUI displays.
Firmly in control of her fear, she answered, “Since Meika-san was capable of it, there is a ship form and fishing method out there that would allow us to come back alive. I’ll do my best to figure it out—looking up data is my strong suit.”
“That’s a video distribution officer for you.”
“Yep.”
“Meika was a student herself until recently.”
“Right.”
But this isn’t about coming back alive, it’s about how we can’t lose this fishing contest.
Diode didn’t whimper about every little thing, so neither would Terra. Besides, Diode had opened a number of panels on her own VUI own.
“I was also being close-minded a moment ago. For starters, how are the besshu rushing up the aurora? Why don’t we at least try to figure out the basics, since we have about ten minutes until we arrive?”
“We probably should.”
Stars above and dark clouds below. The seven vessels crawled towards the horizon, where a lavender glow was beginning to flutter. Dawn was still a long way off—this light preceded it.
It was the crown that adorned the planet. To the humans, as significant as a grain of sand, it was a gigantic curtain of faint, dancing light stretching in either direction as far as the eye could see.
The two, like students cramming way too late for a test in the morning, still hadn’t noticed it.