Free Her Scales Shine Like Music by Rajnar Vajra

 
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    Humble ice crystals high in the atmosphere often enrich sunsets on this cold world to glory. Mid-twilight, the sky shatters into opalescent shards, painting spectral pastels onto each ripple and wavelet of the vast lake near my shelter.
    A strange lake it is: barely salty enough and in just enough constant motion to keep from freezing over. No more than a child’s stride inward from its smooth rim, the edge drops precipitously to a depth of over four kilometers. So sayeth Artist, High King of Scanning and Analysis on Stardancer , the twistship that abandoned me here for my unwanted tour as sentry, placeholder, and legal Vigilant.
    Artist suspects the lake is artificial, created perhaps a million years ago. I can’t decide if I want him to be right. It both frightens and inspires me to imagine a species with such grandiose engineering powers. And where are they now?
    Pale hexagons, magnified snowflake ghosts, appear on the fine sand around me, heralds of the falling temperature. The air carries a sharper bite.
    While setting, the local sun doesn’t radiate enough energy to keep my parka fully charged, so I must be thrifty to stay warm through the next few hours. I stand and jump in place for a time, and then return to my featherweight chair, wrapping my arms tight around me. She’d either come to me or she wouldn’t. Most evenings, she would, but after what happened today, I’m not sure. Still, I think she’s as lonely as me. Not long ago, I only kept watch on the skies. Now I have eyes for the water.
    But my past paints specters on my present.
    *   *   *
    Deep space scouting missions are always a shot in the vasty dark.
    Even the immense Skyscreen Array can only suggest the nature of worlds hundreds of light years distant from Earth. So two months ago, when some bribable Skyscreen analyst whispered in RE’s corporate ear about G90703, a newfound marvel improbably burnished with breathable air, thus hinting at potentially obscene profits, the corporate mind drooled, but not heavily. A personal, on-site confirmation is always required for full salivation.
    Skyscreen has cataloged many auspicious planets, yet few corporations can afford to investigate them. So Research and Exploration Inc., RE for short, emitter of my paychecks, bid low and won. No miracle, considering that only RE had insider info. Thus, my bosses landed a four-solar-month exclusive to send lackeys to poke around G90703.
    First poke was us, a compact team for quick overview and resource mapping: a primary pilot, six scientists with twistship operations training, and two bodyguards (including me), with similar training. If enough gold panned out, RE would dispatch a heavier poke: multiple ships with large crews and serious equipment to investigate areas we’d believed worthy. By Global Council laws, no company could claim much of this Promising Land, but RE would get first crack at the ten thousand most promising adjacent acres.
    Stardancer bent reality into an unimaginable pretzel, and after three subjective weeks, all nine of us crowded around the main viewscreen, gazing at our gray, white, and blue destination while residual boredom faded from our eyes. To speed up scanning, Flute, High Queen of Piloting, began by “rolling against the grain.” That’s our in-house code for orbiting a planet at the equator opposite to its direction of rotation.
    Artist reported four kinds of results: expected, pleasantly surprising, disappointing, and bizarre.
    As the bribed analyst predicted, even at the equator, temperatures remained somewhat below human comfort level, and gravity didn’t have quite Earth’s tug. Artist beamed during his next revelation. Praise the Lord, the atmosphere did register as breathable straight from the box, and watering holes abounded, plus three sizable oceans. Yet deeper scans showed no signs of life, not even the fuzz of primitive vegetation. Those Earth