Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Orca

He was tired, but he had been for almost two years now , a continuous cycle of sleep and then wishing that he could be asleep again while being forced to go to work, to live and have a life despite everything that had happened, and all under the regime of that asshole Hunt and his minions. Hye Kelly had not taken well to the death of his wife. Its not that he wasn't prepared for something like this to happen, in her line of work the possibility of death was always hanging over their heads.

He just never thought he would be forced to see it.

To witness something so violent and so sudden happening to someone he loved was incomprehensible. It had taken him days to even come to terms with what had happened, and it was taking him years to scrape back some semblance of normality to his world.

Hye looked down at the pamphlet he had picked up from the orbital station, flipping through the first few pages absently reading over the description.

Arcadia - a starless exoplanet with a molten core, likely thrown off from obit a few billion years ago into the blackness of space where it now drifted aimlessly in the vast dark reaches of space.

Everything about it was artificial from what he read.

It had originally been bought as a shipping waystation, and terraformed over the source of five years until it was habitable. The combination of gasses created and pumped into the atmosphere trapped and circulated a surprising amount of artificially generated heat. He couldn't have said how that worked, he was a marine biologist not a physicist.

The capital city of NoxUmber had begun construction at about the same time as the waystation appeared, but it had only exploded in population density since Admiral Vir had officially been exiled from earth, perhaps that was the wrong word but that was the way he saw it.

The pamphlet boasted arcadia as the number 1 friendliest place in the galaxy for cross species couples. Where on other planets there were still laws and sanctions against certain behaviors, interspecies marriage was completely legal on Arcadia, and due to side effects resulting from the void vaccine, the planet now boasted three naturally occurring hybrids.

Their terraforming efforts had resulted in the slow build of up an ecosystem that was monitored and maintained strictly by a group of biologists. The little pictures in the pamphlets showed plenty of bioluminescent plants and other wildlife. Deer were the most common herbivore, though most of them had been genetically modified. Hybrid dog/wolves had been introduced specifically to cull the deer population. From what he understood no wolves had actually been transported from earth but their DNA had been spliced with local dogs in order to create the species that could be found on Arcadia's surface. Other animals included what were called Jeffery snakes, New Dodo, which, since they had no natural predators, were common as household pets and kept separate from the arcadia wolves, who had very specific hunting ranges.

Arcadia had likely once had liquid water Running on its surface, and still did many miles below the ground, through efforts of their scientists, he could see that they were attempting to pump water up onto the surface to make a small inland sea which they were artificially populating with their own fish and sea fauna. Hye wasn't sure how that was going to turn out. The ecosystem of the ocean was vast and complex relying heavily on microorganisms in the water to feed an ever growing food chain. He would be impressed to see how they planned on pulling that off.

Hye missed the ocean.

Real earth oceans.

He had loved them since he was a child, and still loved them even now, but, after Tala's death, he just hadn't been able to bring himself back to the water. He hadn't stepped away from the field he loved, but merely turned his attention to teaching at the professional level instead of actually doing any work.