The Silence Above

The Silence Above Xuois by RomeDome.

 Above the vast blue storms of planet Xuois, where the ringed sun scattered silver fire across the upper atmosphere, three heendinburks kept watch.

 They were neither ships nor dirigibles, though the sevitan artisans called them that. They were living beings: immense organic-tech creatures evolved from the ancient noollab blimpoids, their blue-whale bodies grown through with luminous nerve-fibers, armored cartilage, weapon organs, and delicate symbiotic gardens. The small humanoid sevitans lived within their warm inner chambers, feeding them, tending their bio-machinery, and crafting new tools upon their vast skins with two-thumbed careful hands.

 Commandore Estebaño led the patrol.

 Pale and broad-bodied, he drifted ahead of the formation like a moon with a heartbeat. His armored, flanks, with offensive kinetic turrets, carried the insignia of the Otan Aerlliance, and great translucent fins shimmered behind him in the thin violet air. Foregeaux flew to port: svelte, beautiful, and fast, her battlefrigate body curled in graceful lines of pearl and gold. Boldorado guarded starboard, dark-skinned and powerful, his smaller corvette form alive with antennae, comms-organs, and defensive weapon tendrils.

 They were the I-35th Squadron of the I-5th Fleet, on the last patrol of a three-year tour along the disputed aero-atmospheric border with the Seimmoc Aermpire.

 Soon, Estebaño and Foregeaux would return to Egroegton to wed.

Their families had decided it long ago.

Boldorado knew this better than anyone.

A year earlier, when his courage had finally overcome his terror, he had asked a sevitan scribe to set down the words his own great fins could not write. The letter had been carried into Foregeaux’s inner sanctuary, past sleeping sevitan families and softly pulsing nourishment chambers.

*I love you,* it had said.

*I ask nothing. I know what was promised before either of us knew ourselves. I only wanted you to know that, in the long air above Xuois, there is one heart that turns toward yours.*

He expected no reply.

But while Estebaño attended a three-day Admiralty Conference, Foregeaux found Boldorado alone amid the high, quiet currents. Their sevitans slept below deck-flesh. The storms of Xuois rolled millions of leagues beneath them.

“I read your letter,” she told him.

Boldorado’s comms-organs dimmed with shame. “Please. Forgive & forget my hidden feelings.”

“I tried and try,” she replied.

She moved closer until the bioluminescent patterns along their bodies touched in the dark.

“ I and Estebaño were chosen,” she said. “Before our first flight. Before the Academy. Before we learned that we could desire anything else.”

“Foregeaux—”

“I love you too.”

For three days, they stayed high above the known patrol routes, wrapped together in the cold light of the ringed sun. They shared warmth through their outer sensory membranes, whispered through private comms channels, and let their sevitans believe they had merely found a quiet pocket in the winds.

They did not consummate their love. Perhaps restraint was honor. Perhaps it was fear. Perhaps both knew that crossing that final boundary would make returning to their former lives impossible.

When Estebaño returned, the three resumed their formation.

No one spoke of it.

Until the last patrol.

Two Seimmoc torpedo-destroyers appeared beyond the border shimmer, lean and ugly in the pale sky. Their weapon glands glowed beneath plated hides. A flash-message rippled through the air.

**YOU HAVE CROSSED INTO SEIMMOC TERRITORY. WITHDRAW.**

Estebaño’s voice came calm through the squadron link.

“Boldorado, return signal. We remain in Otan airspace. They are the ones approaching the line.”

Boldorado flashed the answer.

The Seimmocs replied with another accusation, sharper now. Then their gun-organs opened.

Shells hissed through the upper atmosphere. They passed over the invisible border and burst far behind the Otan patrol, scattering luminous shrapnel into the clouds.

“Commandore,” Foregeaux said, her voice clipped but urgent, “they are advancing. If they reach torpedo range, we may not have time.”

“Hold position,” Estebaño answered. “Boldorado, signal Fleet Headquarters. Request engagement authority.”

Boldorado sent the transmission. His comms tendrils flared with strain.

The Seimmoc destroyers kept coming.

Seconds stretched like years.

“Estebaño,” Foregeaux pleaded, forgetting rank, “we need to engage.”

“We wait for Fleet.”

The answer arrived just as the enemy vessels released their torpedoes.

Four living black darts dropped from the Seimmoc destroyers and accelerated through the thin air, their hungry propulsion organs screaming.

“Fleet authorizes engagement!” Boldorado cried.

But it was too late.

Estebaño saw the attack vector before either of them. The Commandore turned his colossal body across their path. His great pale battlecruiser frame eclipsed Foregeaux and Boldorado from the enemy’s sight.

“Formation break,” he ordered.

“Estebaño, no!” Foregeaux screamed.

The torpedoes struck.

One tore through the Commandore’s forward armor. A second burst inside his nourishment chambers, where sevitan attendants vanished in white fire. The third and fourth embedded deep in his living hull and detonated together.

For one impossible instant, Estebaño remained aloft.

Then the Commandore began to fall.

His body, once proud enough to lead a fleet, sank through the golden upper air toward the endless cloud-ocean of Xuois. His fins no longer answered him. Blood-light spilled from ruptured bio-tech veins. The last message he sent was not to Fleet, nor to his family, nor to the Aerlliance.

It was to Foregeaux.

“Live,” he said.

Then he disappeared beneath the storms.

The Seimmoc destroyers turned and fled back beyond the border.

Fleet Headquarters ordered the surviving heendinburks to disengage. Reinforcements were already in transit. Diplomatic signals had begun. There would be accusations, investigations, speeches beneath the vaulted chambers of Egroegton. There would be grief ceremonies and promises of retaliation.

None of it mattered to Foregeaux.

She drifted beside Boldorado on the long journey home, silent except for the trembling of her propulsion organs. Her pearl-gold body had lost its glow. The sevitans in her interior sang mourning hymns for Estebaño and the dead, their small voices muffled by layers of living flesh.

Boldorado stayed near enough that their outer membranes nearly touched.

“I am here,” he told her.

At last, as the distant lights of Egroegton appeared ahead, Foregeaux spoke.

“I betrayed him.”

“You did not kill him,” Boldorado said softly.

“No. But I betrayed what he believed we were.”

“He saved us because he loved you. Because he was Commandore. Because he was brave.”

“And I was not faithful.”

Boldorado wanted to tell her that love was not a crime. That families did not own hearts. That Estebaño’s sacrifice should not become the prison in which she buried herself alive.

But even he, who had risen from humbler currents and smaller breeding chambers, understood the weight of old families. The obligations of aerheir-lines. The ancient bargains between powerful Houses. The expectations placed upon a betrothed battlefrigate and the flagship Commandore she had been promised.

Foregeaux turned toward him. Her eyes, vast and wet with grief-light, held his.

“I will love you until my last breath,” she said. “But after this tour, there can be no us.”

Boldorado could not answer.

“You must understand,” she continued. “My family will need me to mourn Estebaño. They will need me to be worthy of him and his House. They will need the version of me that never turned from the path pre-chosen for me.”

“What will I do?” he asked.

Her voice broke.

“I do not know anymore.”

The lights of Egroegton grew brighter. Ahead waited ceremony, duty, judgment, and a future shaped by the dead.

Boldorado watched Foregeaux glide away from him toward the mourning docks, where her family’s sevitans and elders would be waiting. He did not follow.

Far below, somewhere beneath immeasurable storms, Estebaño’s wounded body fell through the dark atmosphere of Xuois.

And high above, beneath the cold rings of the sun, Boldorado remained alone in the wind—alive because another had died, loved by the one being he could never have, carrying a heart full of a future that had ended before it could begin.

*

About the Author : RomeDome is, at times, a highty flighty writer.
About the Artist : Romeo Esparrago lost his 99th luftballon.