Tide of Stars

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A stiff west wind punched at the balloon’s gondola from below. Rahel grabbed reflexively for the basket’s edge, forgetting for the moment that her intellect knew without doubt that the gondola couldn’t tip. It was an easy thing to forget this high up, with the wind shoving at her like an ill-trained dog and the night-dark water stretching from horizon to horizon so far below.

She closed her eyes on the glowing grids dancing across her retinas when the tactical display projected there tried to keep pace with the wild changes in her focus. Shutting out the display helped. Still, she waited for the gondola to steady before slipping a hand in front of the projection fiber and opening her eyes to reestablish her bearings.

The Odarkan Sea pooled in the darkness below them like a sheet of still, black metal. Rahel couldn’t even hear the lick and slap of gentle water movement, and the normally timid caress of this planet’s breezes wasn’t nearly enough to raise waves high enough to see from a couple hundred meters up. The only feature distinguishing this placid, land-bound sea from the sloughs around it was an ethereal thread of light stretching like sprinkles of stardust from the water’s black center toward where the mother ocean waited in the west.

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