For years before I took over the frontier post for Kirk and Dixon Shipping on Ventana 5, we had been getting the occasional report that companies were losing crews on Sokshun 7 … it was a straightforward job, but it was going wrong and no one could figure out why.
Sure, it was a desert world, and sure, because of the vagaries of its atmosphere one could not beam supplies down to the colonies there, but where waters were was clearly marked on maps back to the 22nd century and even the most economical shipping companies had 23rd century sensors and sent their crews fully supplied with water.
Why crews kept being found desiccated and dried far from their ships and any mapped water was a mystery that increased, and of course, there was no one to ask because those crews, to a man, did not survive.
Still, news was slow to get out because nobody wanted to give up a competitive edge and in general, freighter companies saw their ships and crews as a dime a dozen.
Not Kirk and Dixon Shipping, though. That was just not our company culture – never has been, never will be.
Before I had come out to the frontier, Capt. Rufus Dixon my best friend and partner had done a little legwork on this – there was one slightly fuzzy picture from Soxshun 7 that seemed to describe a oasis that did not seem to fit the description of any on the planet, one with a huge and bubbling spring. He had eventually resolved that image --
– and I passed that on to the nearest fleet representatives when I arrived and heard that two more crews had been lost by my competitors and that Soxshun 7's colonies were about to offer Kirk and Dixon Shipping a contract because three companies had pulled out.
“It doesn't make any money to stay around and figure it out,” I said to Captain Jhordi Gannibal of the fleet starship Galahad, “but I can't send my crews out there until I know what is going on.”
Captain Gannibal went out and looked into the matter, and called me back in a week.
“A starship can't land, and a shuttle isn't the right size,” he said. “We do have a theory, but a freighter needs to come test it.”
So, I went myself, with a crew I was paying hazard pay even with fleet backup.
The crew of the Galahad had discovered that before every incident in which a freighter crew had ended up dead, a strange storm had taken place in the planet's atmosphere in the region that ship landed in – a storm that rendered the ship's water undrinkable.
“That is amazing – that's almost pure deuterium now,” I said. “Overnight heavy water – we certainly cannot drink that in the quantities getting to the drop site for our goods requires!”
So then out we came with the maps – nearby water supplies clearly marked, not too far off the beaten path – no source would cost us more than an hour extra to refill our supplies.
But then there was another change in the regional atmosphere...
“The temperature is slowly increasing … this is going to be a very long walk for water in this heat,” my first mate Mr. Swan said to me.
“I think that's sort of the point,” I said.
It was – because all of the sudden, water appeared to spring up out of the desert in a great and beautiful fountain, just a mile distant from our present path.
“Our sensors don't report any water over there,” I said, “but our eyes, ears – we really shouldn't be able to hear that from here – and noses say that is water.”
“Imagine, Captain,” Mr. Swan said to me, “if you just landed here and didn't have water, and didn't know you were being hunted.”
Sure enough … that was an alien, hungry for salt water in the desert … the colonists on Sokshun 7 had not been thoughtful about destroying its habitat of native plants, and so the creatures had gone to hunting the colonists and those like them. The fleet worked all of this out on site because elsewhere on the planet, more remotely, these creatures were just eating their favorite desert plants in their natural habitat. Abundant replanting of the native plants outside of the colonies proved to be the key to not having to completely eradicate the species native to the planet.
As for Kirk and Dixon Shipping, we took the contract and first just bought huge supplies of salt water with us on the initial trip and lined our future route, then sent in a second ship with the actual supplies for the colony. Other crews from other companies who still had contracts (because Soxshun 7 was as large as Jupiter, with too many colonies for one company to supply) adopted the same strategies, and the deadly incidents were ended, right there.
This began as the pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09 you see in the second image -- I overlaid it a few times to give it the appearance of a fountain with a lot of water pouring out of it!