Bluefin Day

CW: Contains themes of murder and suicide

Kelan fired at precisely the right instant and whooped as his harpoon pierced the bluefin’s brain. No struggle to wait out; no heartbreaking slow-death thrashing. He towed the beast into the hold and directed his Herring back up to where the school was circling this week’s fishing grounds. 

He made no attempt to hide the pride in his voice when he touched the intercom. “Two units requested to assist in processing a three-meter bluefin tuna. Who’s up for sushi?” 

Two Herrings immediately slipped out of the school, the autocaptain system selecting the nearest piloted vessels equipped with food prep facilities in response to Kelan’s voice command.  

The three ships rose through the school. Autocap-guided Herrings glided past them on their holding pattern, sensor fields keeping them safe from collisions. In the too-warm waters of the Dead Zone a mere hundred meters from the surface, the autocap notified them that the pressure was low enough to join their ships together. 

As the three Herrings aligned hatches and the airlocks hissed, Kelan left his command station and did a quick tidying of his living quarters. The hatch doors whooshed open. Kelan strode to the back of the ship, where his two meter by two meter workspace was now connected laterally to the workspaces of two other Herrings, creating a two meter by six meter common area. 

Kelan greeted the two other pilots with a grin and, without preamble, slid the cold-storage hold open to reveal his catch. 

Elizabeth gave a low whistle, offering a congratulatory high-five. 

Dmitry folded his beefy forearms over his sprawling chest. “Two point eight, max.” 

Elizabeth tsked and gave him a playful shove just a millisecond before Kelan did the same, and Dmitiry ricocheted between them with an exaggerated wobble. 

With the help of Dmitry’s hook and winch, they hauled the tuna up out of Kelan’s hold and into the three ship wide workspace. 

“Welp,” Elizabeth slapped her gloved hands together. “Let’s turn this thing into meat.” 

Dmitry fetched an extra butcher knife and held the handle out to Kelan with a raised eyebrow. “Know how to use one of these?” 

Kelan rolled his eyes and took the knife. “Food prep was my last rotation. I’ve only been on medical duty for a month.” 

Elizabeth’s eyebrows shot up. “A month? So, was Zhen your first medic call?” 

Dmitry glared sideways at her and wagged his head slowly from side to side. “Why you gotta bring that up? Everything that needed to be said, we said at Gunter’s trial and Zhen’s funeral.”

Elizabeth stuck a gut-slimy glove on her hip. “So what, we’re supposed to just pretend like it didn’t happen? They were our friends. Our family.” 

Kelan did his best to mediate. “This is hard for all of us. We’re all trying to make sense of it in our own ways. I mean, for Gunter of all people to succumb to something as base and depraved as possessiveness—” 

“What you mean, of all people?” Dmitry cut in. “It was his obsession with history that caused this.” 

Kelan had already heard the argument that consuming too much media from the times before Equity, when greed for resources and power drove people to atrocities and women were seen as little more than servants or decoration, had planted the seeds of jealousy in Gunter’s heart. Everyone had heard it; it was the only defense Gunter’s trial advocates had been able to come up with, and even they presented it with an air of bashfulness approaching shame. 

Elizabeth shook her head. “We don’t know that. It could’ve been some kind of genetic degeneration, like a flaw in his DNA or some kind of mental imbalance. Something that could have been treated if we caught it earlier. If he’d just said anything or showed any sign of aberrant behavior.” 

Dmitry folded his arms again, turning to stare out the view port into the eerily vacant waters of the Dead Zone. “Look, if our predecessors were selfish enough to cause this, then it stands to reason that reading all those history books and old novels would rub off on him eventually.” 

In the interest of harmony, Kelan didn’t address any of the herd of proverbial elephants in the room. He didn’t mention that Gunter had gotten some of his pre-Equity novels from Kelan’s own library. He didn’t mention Dmitry’s soft spot for late 20th century cinema, the themes of which were just as outdated and dangerous, if not more so, than Gunter’s books. He didn’t mention the fact that nearly every person in the school shared at least some of Gunter’s allegedly flawed genetic makeup, as they’d all descended from the same small group of survivors. That if it happened to Gunter, any one of them could be next. 

Kelan raised his hands, palms forward in a gesture of diplomacy. “We’ve all got lots of memories of both Zhen and Gunter, and I don’t think we need to stop talking about them. But maybe we shouldn’t mention Gunter for a while? His exile is still fresh. Unlike this tuna if we don’t get after it.” 

Dmitry and Elizabeth gave charitable snorts of laughter. The tension dissipated and they set to work together. The conversation turned toward who of their three hundred brothers and sisters would be the most excited about a half-kilo of fresh bluefin, and whose turn it was to get the belly meat as they hacked off massive slabs and weighed them into 500 gram parcels, wrapped them in seaweed, filled all their distribution pods, and stacked the rest in cold storage. 

They were hosing and scrubbing out the workspace when all three Herrings’ proximity alarms chimed at once. 

Elizabeth reached her controls first. “Who the hell is up here in the Dead Zone with their comms off?” 

Kelan’s guts clenched. He pulled up his visuals and scanned the Herring darting toward them. “It’s Gunter. Close ports.” 

The ship’s doors slid shut, and the three Herrings separated. 

“What does he want?” Dmitry’s voice dripped ice-cold in Kelan’s earpiece. 

Kelan wondered the same thing. Stripped of its autocaptain and communications, Gunter’s Herring had everything it needed to sustain life but nothing that would allow him to interface with other vessels. He was to live out his days alone in consequence of taking a life. Two, if you counted Liang Zhen’s unborn child—the child Gunter was incapable of producing.

Gunter’s ship veered downward. A spherical distribution pod ejected from its hold and Elizabeth sent out a retrieval lance. 

Panic caught in Kelan’s throat. “Elizabeth, don’t open that.” 

“Too late. It’s just a note.” She held it up to her interior cam for everyone to read the thin, shaky words scrawled onto a tiny scrap of paper.

I regret everything. Please forgive me. 

Kelan turned back to his exterior visuals and watched Gunter’s Herring descend full-speed into the dark, cold waters below. No. 

Taking manual control of his Herring, Kelan dived after Gunter beneath the school, down past the sunlight zone, down to the very limits of the pressure the Herrings could withstand. He fired his harpoon over and over in a desperate attempt to stop Gunter, but it was deflected by the Herring’s hull. All Kelan could do was watch while Gunter’s ship disappeared from view until his long-range sensors informed him of the implosion, and an ephemeral field of bubbles ascended from the destruction.