Archive of Our Own

From: Arue Niaxian, Department of Marine Biology, Deep Space Outpost 65 (Luna Division)
To: Arue Viandian, Interstellar Transport ‘Fifth Notch’ (c/o Galactic Telecorp Hyperspace Relay ZX-3)

Vianna! I was just in the middle of tidying up the kitchen when Dancer 5 stuck its head out of my ceiling vent to tell me your transport was delayed because of that dockworkers’ strike on the Y conduit. I had hoped you’d be here in time for the Festival of Screeching Gales, but no matter—maybe it’s better that you’ll be celebrating it on the ship. It’s lonely here with just the five of us from Axon octant, and the candle wax never sets quite right here on 65-Luna (I can’t prove this, but I think it has something to do with the frequency that the gravity generators run on). Honestly, I’m not even sure whether I’m going to make the broth… my order of leaves and marrow just came in, but you know I never figured out how to get mama’s recipe to reheat quite right, and I don’t have a sensitive enough kitchen scale to measure out a safe amount of tariff truffle for anything less than a dozen people. And, let’s be real, it’s not like the people from Soma octant are going to drink with us.

Anyway, there’s only so much I can tell you in this letter—yes, you and I know we can trust the encryption, but Dispatch Policy is still lagging behind the times—but one thing I am authorized to share (I checked with our comms officer and he literally sent me a little drawing of a person shrugging) is… look, I’m just going to attach a picture, because it’s better if you see it for yourself. Here:

In case the network eats it, here’s the part that’s actually relevant: that’s not a rock, or a piece of magnalauncher debris, or an iceberg, or whatever the bots are in the mood to call it. It’s an isopod exoskeleton! I sent a drone up to take lidar measurements, and based on the curvature of the surface and the arrangement of the plating, it’s from an animal that would have been about 40 meters long when it moulted. And the most exciting part is, this is almost certainly a moult from a healthy juvenile, which means they must come even bigger than that. We haven’t done any seabed scans yet—we don’t want to use the sonar until we’ve spent more time collecting data on what the existing soundscape down there is like—so this is just an educated guess, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get up to 55 or even 60 meters as adults.

The jagged parts are some kind of mineral deposit, and if you look closely you can see some flatpacks (that’s what we’re calling those dark blue animals that look a hell of a lot like manta rays… personally I think it’s a little bit rude, but their scientific name is 12 syllables long, and the texture of their fins reminded Nirast of the self-collapsing bunk bed in her quarters) wriggling around and having a snack. The ray similarity ends on the dorsal side, though. They have a huge sucker mouth on the underside, like a lamprey, and what they do is, they launch themselves out of the water and just suction on to these exoskeletons and scrape the deposits off. It’s startling at first, especially when a dozen of them fling themselves up at once, but the little plap noise they make when they land on it is actually kind of adorable. My guess is that they have a symbiotic relationship where they do this to the living ones to help keep them clean—the deposits build up shockingly fast, to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if it affected the mobility of the carapace if left unattended—and this behavior on the moult is a sort of artefact of that. To give you a better intuitive sense of scale, each flatpack is about as big as that antique table we all used to eat at in the back room of Cherrevour’s when you were working on your thesis.

Ping me when you get through customs, okay? They keep me busy here, but I’m never too busy for you.

Yours always,
— Niaxian