Chapter One: New Melbourne

(In Which Exposition and Plot Strike an Uneasy Truce)

****

Serenity settled on the massive floating platform that served as a landing platform, spaceport, general market and dock for the Whitsundays and Victoria’s Island, as most of the people onboard braced for impact. Those who didn’t or hadn’t yet found their sea legs (mainly off-worlders) found themselves thrown off-balance by the sudden sensation of sinking. Which they were, although not very far. In the absence of the powerful anti-grav drives employed on similar, government-funded docks the world over, the cash-strapped fishermen of the New Whitsundays had fashioned massive pontoons from salvaged aluminum to supplement the long, strong cables that tethered the platform to the bedrock deep below the waves. They did the job and kept the surf from disturbing business too much, but the added weight of a Firefly displaced nearly 2000 cubic meters of water. The two men standing just out of range of the heat from Serenity’s thrusters merely swayed slightly as they waited for the cargo bay doors to open.

**

When the New Melbourne United Terraforming Company set out from Londinium to melt the crust of ice blanketing the moon that would soon become the fishing capital of the ‘verse, they came prepared. By the time they reached the Outer Rim, terraformers were very, very good at predicting what the long, invasive process would do to a world, and with all the water ice and large areas of low altitude on New Melbourne, the usable land space was going to be minimal. They could have evaporated off all that water and cast the moon the same lot as so many others: a future as an arid prairie of a world. But the Board of Trustees was too profit-conscious for that and sent ships full of sodium, gold, nitrates, and the millions of nutrients required to generate seawater that would support the hundreds of thousands of fish and mammals cloned and frozen in an embryonic holding tank. The stock of building blocks of a successful ocean