The *Right* Whale

Freddie Bastiat
6 min readApr 28, 2021

Starvation before Subsistence

Note: This is Part Five of the Collision series. You can read Part Four here. If you’re new to the series, you can read Part One here.

The island was starving. It needed food yesterday. And the week before that. The booming archipelagoes of Artis were not a place for the weak, especially not on the island that hired Captain Pertin and his wandering crew. He laughed to himself, remembering how he ended up sailing an ancient ship on an endless ocean looking for a myth.

He remembered an old spacer talking about a pre-fab city that had just seemingly manifested on an island which was nearly as new. Not only that, but the new city was already the wealthiest settlement in the sector after only two months of existence.

He remembered the Tajje, his ancient freighter, landing on one of the island city’s platforms: A rusty red wart on the shimmering chrome and glass skin of Caeru City. The landing pad operators couldn’t wait to get the old thing parked underground; they probably would’ve been fined for violating the city’s aesthetic regulations if any government inspector got even a glimpse of the Tajje.

He remembered the city’s amenities; there were enough on just one block to make the clerics on Clavis blush, among other physical reactions. Every food you could imagine — and more importantly, every drink — not to mention countless merchants offering everything from clothing to ship parts to ceremonial weapons.

He remembered a particularly eventful cantina visit, where he met a shifty man with turquoise jewelry, eyes, and even hair, who promised Pertin a hundred golden auxes and 20,000 credits per crew member if they did a job for him, with Pertin making five times that as captain.

He remembered spitting his ale onto the mahogany bartop, apologizing as the Turquoise Man gave the bartender a couple silver agias for his trouble. Pertin was just happy the Turquoise Man still wanted to work with him after that.

But most of all, what Pertin remembered was first hearing about the job. He and his crew had done some animal wrangling before for some clients with eccentric taste in pets, but not a whale, and certainly not a whale the size of a system patrol craft.

To make things even more fun, Pertin couldn’t even use the Tajje for this. Apparently some old bureaucratic, or maybe aristocratic — was there really a difference? — rules of the hunt made things considerably more difficult for Pertin, as he and his crew had to learn how to not only pilot a sailing ship, but actually capture a megalithic, semi-immortal whale with it.

He remembered poring over scans of old manuals from Earth; the things must’ve been millions of years old, taken from before the Sun went red giant and swallowed humanity’s ancestral home like it was a speck of dust. How the manuals survived the proceeding dozen or so galactic cycles of expansion, over-extension, and destruction was beyond him.

He remembered the month the crew had to get their ship ready for the hunt; the Turquoise Man made it clear they had to master their new ship quickly, as there would only be 3 whales captured across the planet. Not only that, but to properly raise the stakes, the denizens of the city were not allowed to eat until either one of their own came home with a whale, or until the competition was over.

He remembered trying to talk anyone in the city who would listen out of that insane idea, but nobody would have it. They insisted that it “added some tension” and “made everything more fun.” Pertin couldn’t disagree with the first statement.

He remembered learning a whole new language, a language of rigging and mizzenmasts, and yes, even poop decks. Thankfully, the last one was now more a term of art than a functional descriptor due to one of the few upgrades ship owners were allowed to make.

He remembered setting out to sea the first time, nearly crashing into the dock after a very brief jaunt at sea, where they were nearly blown off course by little more than a stiff breeze.

He remembered each day after that, his crew slowly gaining some measure of ability as they went out for an hour, then two, then four. Finally, after two-and-a-half weeks, they had their first successful mock harpooning. Rolling through his memories, Pertin was actually feeling confident about their chances when they finally set out for real.

He remembered how wrong he was.

The first day passed without a sign of a whale; for all Pertin knew they were all thousands of clicks away across Artis’ planetary ocean. The next few days were no better, with all of their mock calls, and mass drops of plankton bait not giving a hint of anything, and their deepwater submersible coming up empty as well.

The only good thing from the initial venture was the discovery least of a crustacean colony on the third day. They tasted pretty damn good, at least compared to the supposedly period-accurate slop that was on the ship. The crew took a respite, at least relative to searching for the whale and packed up a bunch of them for Caeru’s citizens.

When the ship pulled into port to resupply on the fourth day, Pertin unloaded the crustaceans himself. The Turquoise Man turned down the crustaceans, citing “the honor of the game” or some other bullshit. He wasn’t looking too good himself, his face pale and his gait not nearly as confident as their first encounter. Pertin left the crates at the docks for anyone who wanted — or frankly, needed — them.

The crew was even more hurried the next few days, searching desperately for something which in theory was impossible to miss, covering more ground in two days than they had in the prior two weeks of practice runs. The submersible even seemed to pick up something, but it was gone by the time the ancient piece of timber got within sight of its last location. Still, another crustacean colony kept the crew’s spirits from plummeting to the ocean floor.

Upon returning to Caeru, Pertin was immediately turned away by drone loadlifters, stating that the ship was only allowed to return to port once during the competition. There was not even a citizen in sight; Pertin figured they must all be holed up and unwilling to show themselves in public in such poor health.

Another manic few days led to nothing, with the biggest thing coming up on sonar not even the size of a human. During this lull, Pertin and the crew made a plan; they’d be giving the food to Caeru’s citizens no matter what. For two days and nights they drew up ideas, from using the submersible to destroy the drone charging facility to sneak in to an all-out surprise assault on the dock drones. They ended up deciding to assault the docks while the submersible brought food to the citizens.

They attacked at twilight, right as the drones working the day shift were about to enter their recharge cycle. The submersible split off a couple clicks before the port, its silver ovoid shape weighed down by countless crustaceans as it slipped under the waves.

Three dozen men armed with pulse blasters, acristeel blades, and even the ancient’s ship shrapnel launcher — apparently called a “blunderbuss” — attacked the loadlifter drones, who were quickly blown to pieces. The group scattered and took cover, waiting for a response from the city’s security systems, but none came.

After several minutes, Pertin emerged from cover. “I want three people to a building. We need to find out what happened here.”

Door after door was kicked in, all of them just leading to empty spaces with barely any signs of life; even many of the drones were gone.

The fifth dwelling turned up something useful. An oversized broadcaster was still running, and it showed the winning cities of the whaling competition. Unsurprisingly, Pertin and his crew had lost.

Pertin rolled his eyes out of reflex. There were countless different kinds of people in the galaxy, but Caeru City only housed one of them. They’d all left the second they lost, acting even more predictable than their drones’ routines. Their apathy towards everything but their status had its obvious negatives, but it had given Pertin and his crew a nice place to live, at least in the short term.

Pertin took a long walk to the cantina followed by a longer drink. Caeru City, and indeed all of Artis, was back to being nothing but a backwater to the people who shaped the galaxy. At least a little corner of it would be his backwater now.

Freddie Bastiat is a futurist who’s a fan of Yoko Taro games, college football, and the restoration of the Byzantine and Achaemenid Empires. You can find him on Bluesky @bastiat-child.bsky.social

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