Submitted for the January 2024 prompt: Weather Warnings

Beyond the window, white tendrils snaked through the gray fog, lending depth to an otherwise featureless void. Sunk in meditation, I imagined them flowing through me without touching, ghosts seeking to impart wisdom from beyond. I waited for their message and received none, but no matter. I was at peace.

 

“Still here, Azhari? You’re half an hour over.”

 

So much for peace. “You’re the timekeeper now?”

 

The interloper, Marissa Ribeiro, was our meteorologist. The perpetual fog enveloping the observation deck’s three-sixty window was no mystery to her: infiltration of warmer oceanic air into the cooler air over our small landmass. But even she wasn’t immune to its summons. Best not to be. The broad deck had once been jammed with equipment. Now, it was a cavern. Most of our monitoring and recording devices had slumbered in storage for decades. Time hadn’t stilled the tingle of fear I felt when engulfed in the resulting emptiness. We all felt it. Meditation helped.

 

Ribeiro seated herself and tucked her legs into lotus position. “Only when you cut into my time.” She flashed a lopsided smile. Her honey ringlets, cascading over her ears, broke upon her shoulders. She was a vision of perpetual youth. The team, all eight of us, were in our mid-fifties, but she made me feel ancient.

 

I stood. “At least say my seismographs caught something interesting.”

 

“I would if they had. But you know Canelón. That’s its most interesting feature.” She nodded at the fog.

 

True. We’d studied this planet for nearly three decades, employing instruments ground-based and orbital. It proved geologically dead. No plate tectonics, no true continents, just this one bump in the thin planetary crust, a mass a third the size of Australia rising from a global ocean, trailing a scattering of islands. The grouping resembled the splatter of a fallen egg.

 

Being the team geologist was boring. Only our biologist, Sade Nuru, had it worse. The first decade on Canelón, she sought some flicker of life. The hope seemed justified. Although the planet orbited beyond the Goldilocks Zone, its boiling interior erupted in hydrothermal vents that kept the shallow ocean liquid. Microorganisms might well teem beneath the waves. But no dice. Nuru’s second decade birthed increasingly irrelevant explorations of chemistry-at-large, while her third devolved into apathy for all things Canelónian. Her passion, to the extent it still existed, turned to probing the psychological effects of life on a world where nothing could be seen, where nothing existed to be seen.

 

Leaving the observation deck, I made my way to the galley on the first level. Nuru sat there, alone in the space’s comforting smallness, contemplating a cup of coffee. Her dark fingers encircled the cup, her dark eyes gazed into the liquid. I drew a cup of my own from the drink station and breathed in the aroma as I slipped into a chair. “Found a new meditation subject?” I asked.

 

She smiled. “How’d you guess?”

 

“That serene aura. What insight does reconstituted freeze-dried sludge impart?”

 

Nuru pushed her cup away and stared at — or maybe beyond — me. “We were made for this,” she said.

 

I laughed. “That’s an insight?” Born on a multi-generational science vessel. Bred for the required aptitudes. Trained for our duties. Even before conception, we were destined to be abandoned on an alien world with a prefab research station and each other for company. Our only visitors were automated supply ships dropping in every decade or so. We conducted research and beamed our findings one hundred twenty light years home, one team among scores scattered like seeds in Earth’s cosmic backyard, paving the way for colonization.

 

“Not just for our jobs,” Nuru said. “For Canelón. For life in a fog.”

 

“Come on, the fog was a surprise.”

 

“It wasn’t intentional, but all we ever knew was the inside of a ship. All we saw from the viewports were white sparks in the dark. And here? The inside of this station, and outside, the fog. I wonder what that’s done to us.”

 

“Why would it have done anything?”

 

“Why do cold fingers claw at our necks when we go up there?” She pointed. “Why don’t we feel them when viewing holos of Earth’s oceans, mountains, deserts? Maybe because we surround those images. But imagine them surrounding us.”

 

I couldn’t. Who could?

 

She gazed into her coffee again. “That’s what I mean,” she said.

 

* * *

 

“Azhari! Get up here! Now!”

 

Ribeiro’s voice spilled from my wrist comm. She sounded like the wind had been knocked from her. A breached seal? Poisonous atmosphere leaching in?

 

I ran with Nuru on my heels. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

 

“Fallstreak! Right on top of us!”

 

“Fallstreak? What’s —”

 

“Get up here!”

 

We nearly fell into the lifter and ascended to the observation deck. We found Ribeiro at the western window, hands pressed to it, face nearly kissing it. Outside was… something.

 

Not nothing. Something.

 

A great hole had opened in the fog, lanced by an inverted cone of scintillating crystals spilling to the ground a kilometer northwest.

 

“What is it?” Nuru gasped.

 

“Fallstreak,” Ribeiro said. “On Earth, they’re high level. But look at this! Something caused the supercooled water in the fog to freeze out.” She shivered as though encrusted with ice. “Look at this. This land. This… It’s… It’s so big!” She pushed off the window and collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath.

 

“Oh my God,” Nuru whispered. She sank to her knees before the window and covered her face in her hands, sobbing.

 

Outside, where once was only gray, an undulating expanse of brown rock rose to a line of razor peaks that pierced a pale red sky. I’d mapped those mountains, sure, but I’d never seen them. I tottered as though drawn by their gravity, falling into them, falling into infinity. I slid down the window, maybe cried in terror, maybe not, but if so, nobody heard. It was too small a sound to fill such a void.