It was what we did. It was who we were now. The Ket: less than a hundred wanderers in search of a new home.
We had encountered several sentient species. Some space-faring, most not. Some pitied us. Some attacked us. But we’d learned to defend ourselves in these last sixty-three years. We began with the Capasin Crate, copying its weapons. Then came improvements, innovations.
The MCQ3 had mutated over the years to become the Searcher, and the Searcher was a very different ship. A close examination would still reveal the original crystal formation at the heart of her, but most of what had been added was dull titanium and mineral-polymer composites. The original Z-space engines had long since been replaced, and new, fast sub-Z engines had been added as well.
Two stubby wings gave us an airfoil for penetrating atmosphere. And the weapons arrays beneath each wing, and the even dozen stubby black fighters, earned us the respect of potential foes.
“Fields up, Commander,” Menno reported.
“We’ll try the blue one first,” I said. I saw Aguella smile. I had been the commander since Farsight died, some fifty years ago. But I still resisted referring to every planet or moon by its proper sequential designation.
Aguella was docked, eyes closed to focus on the sensor readout. Her wings beat slowly, regularly. Pointlessly, too, since no one in more than six decades had beat wing for lift.
And yet, we were still Ketran. We still wanted to fly.
“The blue one it is, Commander,” Menno confirmed.
Menno was my second-in-command, the sub-commander. It was a compromise. We had come very close to civil war at one point. Menno and the fugitive Polars and some of the dazed, confused refugees we’d saved from a shattered Tropical Mid-range Low had banded together to demand a democratic form of government aboard the Searcher. Of course it was more about resisting Equatorial dominance than anything else.
Democracy was not possible on a ship in hostile space. But compromise was. The compromise was Menno. He held second dock. And he did his job very well, though he and I would never be friends.
It had become very personal. For Menno it was just another game he had to win at all costs. I didn’t deceive myself: He was playing that game still. And if he ever took my place he would have no votes: He would command.
We slipped into high orbit above the blue moon.
“It’s water,” Aguella said. Her tone showed only the slightest trace of disappointment. We had learned that planets with a large amount of water never provided the updrafts, or the atmospheric pressures we needed to sustain our crystal-based civilization.
Just that quickly the blue moon became useless to us. It was not a great surprise. I suppressed a disappointed sigh. The people looked to me. I had to set an example. My youth was long since gone and I carried too many responsibilities to be self-indulgent.
“Navigator, lay an intercept course for the white one,” I ordered.
“Wait!”
It was Aguella. I glanced at her and saw intense focus on her face. I keyed up the sensor displays; Menno did the same. But whatever she had seen, neither of us spotted it.
I memmed her. “What is it?”
She broke out two displays and highlighted them for the benefit of Menno and me. When this still failed to move me, she said impatiently, “There’s something moving … floating. In the water, through the water. Beneath the surface. See the light? There, on the dark side. A light pattern, highly refracted, of course.”
“What’s the other display?” Menno asked.
“Water current. See? The … the thing, whatever it is, is moving against the current. And it’s putting off light.”
“A large fish with chemically produced light?” I suggested. “We’ve seen that before.”
“Probably,” Aguella agreed. “But maybe not. I can’t say anything for sure but I had the impression, nothing more than an impression, that I was seeing a complex structure.”
“Crystalline?” Menno asked, disapproving.
“I don’t know,” Aguella snapped. “Not without using active sensors.”
“Too dangerous. Too much risk for what possible reward?” Menno argued. “Are you suggesting we should light up this ship on the off chance that someone, somewhere down there is living some watery mockery of our own long-dead lives? We don’t breathe water, Aguella. We don’t fly in water. This is all just pointless obsession with the past.”
The last remark was guaranteed to outrage Aguella. And it was intended to provoke me. I quickly memmed Aguella to stay silent.
In my mildest voice I said, “This ship’s mission remains clearly defined, Menno.”
“Yes, to wander the galaxy in search of what we now know to be the rarest of all environments,” he shot back. “We’ve adapted in a dozen ways, but never in this. We have enclosed fighters, and we’ve learned to live with that. We’ve long since dropped even the pretence of flying for lift. But we refuse to accept the obvious: There will never be another Ket. No more home crystals. Dozens of planets and what do we find, again and again? Surface dwellers. Surface dwellers. Nothing but surface dwellers.”
“We are of the skies!” Aguella erupted. “We do not crawl. We do not walk. We are born to a life in the skies!”
“We’re dying for that myth. No one has juvies anymore. We’re dying out as a race, all for some vision of a world that no longer exists.”
That last was a shard meant for Aguella and me. We were a declared couple, but we’d never sired. It had become an unwritten rule of our strange, cutoff, castaway civilization that we would bring no new lives into being till we had a home.
“That’s enough,” I said, calling a halt to the dissension before it spread to the other crew. “This ship has a mission. Menno, we’ll take a look at this subaqueous phenomenon of Aguella’s. No, not with active sensors. We’ll take Jicklet’s new
