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(Crossposted from Patreon, SFW, 1380 words, Gen. Content warnings: careless handling of a corpse, children in peril.
Another Unlikely Uncertainty tale, as voted on by my patreon supporters - that means that this is in continuity with both The Stranger Who Sojourns With You and We're Young And We're Bored, if you're keeping track (although it takes place slightly before either of the previous stories.
A very big thank you to everyone who supports me on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and to everyone who generously gives my little stories their time and attention - you guys are great, and I hope you enjoy this story about a scavenging space-mermaid.)
Astal hadn’t known what to expect, when they’d found the distress signals in the void. It would take more effort than they particularly wanted to expend just now to interpret the content of the signals – the beacon was clear enough, a short loop thrumming with the kind of encoding that many of the atmosphere-dependent species in this part of the universe used in their ship-to-ship communications, but the siren would need to use some kind of artificial receiver to decode them. And Astal knew where to find such a thing, of course, they had one stashed away in their nest. But going and getting the device and listening to the broadcast properly seemed like a waste of effort, when the signal was strong enough that it must have been coming from nearby.
There were inhabited planets and moons nearer the center of this system. Nice ones, Astal understood, whatever that meant when applied to hot, bright rocks with crushing gravity and choking thick atmospheres. The sturdy little beings that liked that sort of thing didn’t often come out into the asteroid fields and dust clouds at the edges of the system, and when they did, most of them avoided the inhabited regions. ( The ones that ventured into the areas where Astal and their kind lived were usually heavily fortified, or rival scavengers… or desperate and doomed. )
Another Unlikely Uncertainty tale, as voted on by my patreon supporters - that means that this is in continuity with both The Stranger Who Sojourns With You and We're Young And We're Bored, if you're keeping track (although it takes place slightly before either of the previous stories.
A very big thank you to everyone who supports me on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and to everyone who generously gives my little stories their time and attention - you guys are great, and I hope you enjoy this story about a scavenging space-mermaid.)
Astal hadn’t known what to expect, when they’d found the distress signals in the void. It would take more effort than they particularly wanted to expend just now to interpret the content of the signals – the beacon was clear enough, a short loop thrumming with the kind of encoding that many of the atmosphere-dependent species in this part of the universe used in their ship-to-ship communications, but the siren would need to use some kind of artificial receiver to decode them. And Astal knew where to find such a thing, of course, they had one stashed away in their nest. But going and getting the device and listening to the broadcast properly seemed like a waste of effort, when the signal was strong enough that it must have been coming from nearby.
There were inhabited planets and moons nearer the center of this system. Nice ones, Astal understood, whatever that meant when applied to hot, bright rocks with crushing gravity and choking thick atmospheres. The sturdy little beings that liked that sort of thing didn’t often come out into the asteroid fields and dust clouds at the edges of the system, and when they did, most of them avoided the inhabited regions. ( The ones that ventured into the areas where Astal and their kind lived were usually heavily fortified, or rival scavengers… or desperate and doomed. )
