The cobalt sky was smattered with wind-whipped clouds. The breeze moved all of the flags—and some of the ships—in the marina. Aliey walked through the air currents unphased, her dark-brown hair drawn back.
“You sure about going out today in this? The crops probably can wait another day. Especially since you won’t be getting back anytime soon in *that* thing.” Came a voice from a boat about halfway down Slip C.
“Thanks Kell, but I’ll be fine. This old crop-duster has more life left in it than you think. Don’t you Monty?” Aliey half-turned to face Kell, but kept walking down the slip, her hand running down the hull of the Monticello, an old trawler repurposed for aquaculture. This time, none of the rust got on her hand; that was one out of two 50-50 bets she’d won today. The second was a bit higher stakes.
“If you insist Aliey. BUT if she sinks, tell your parents that I told you so.” Kel smirked, lounging by the wheel of his boat, a two-thirds finished beer in his hand, and partially in his salt-and-pepper beard.
“And when we have the best yield this cycle, I’ll make sure to forget to apply the friends-and-family discount to your purchase.” Aliey teased as she climbed on deck, waving goodbye to Kell as she fired everything up.
The engine was first, with the brisk temperature outside helping it to start smoothly. The Monticello crawled out of its slip, but that was due to the no-wake rules rather than (another) malfunction.
Starting the engine also started up the auto-nav system, which would direct Monty to the family plot without any further intervention from Aliey. Moving to the lower deck, Aliey checked the fertilizer tanks; one was 90% full, the other 87%, well more than enough for a once-over before the storm hit. The display screen centered between the two of them showed a minor algae bloom in the Northwest corner of the patch, but that the water in the plot was otherwise within its normal range.
Aliey accounted for whatever deviations that were present with tweaks in the fertilizer ingredients, 15% more photoplankton for the clams, 8.7% less diatoms for the mussels, and finally an extra .63% salinity to make up for the excess of freshwater going into the ocean because of snowmelt.
By the time Aliey was done with her fine-tuning, the Monticello was nearly to her family’s plot a couple miles out into the ocean. Aliey figured that Monty would have broken down for a good along time ago if her family had one of the newer, further plots, not that she’d ever say as much to Kell.
Taking over the steering controls from the autopilot, Aliey steered towards the algae bloom, the sky and water both nearly the same shade of slate-gray, with the water a couple touches more blue. Monty turned Northwest, skirting the border of the plot to begin its maintenance duties.
The bloom was as stark as it was small, maybe a couple thousand square feet of bright red growth with the appearance of dyed pine branches someone had dropped in the ocean. Once she set the course for the requisite number of passes, Aliey walked below deck again, ignoring the first console and the fertilizer tanks on either side of it. Past the wall behind the first console was a second console, directly below a tank filled with sea urchins, their spikes creating miniscule scratches on the glass.
“And they said an all-natural algaecide made by farmers themselves was impossible.” Aliey smirked, setting their release time for 45 seconds at the second-slowest opening speed.
Going back above-deck, Aliey checked the display as Monty brushed up against the bloom, struggling just a bit to get above the growth; some was probably stuck in the propeller again. She groaned and growled as Aliey rolled her eyes, pushing the throttle further until she was all the way above it, and sure enough, a few streaks of bright red came flying past the propeller and onto a neighboring plot.
Checking the release display, the urchins were making their way out, latching onto the algae and hopefully starting to feed, though it was much too early to see whether or not they actually were feeding. Each pass was less eventful than the prior one, at least until the final pass, when the sky opened up, but only about as much as the Monticello’s urchin tanks, a drizzle that scarcely got Aliey’s hair wet.
Knowing there was more to come, and wanting to prove Kell wrong, Aliey upped the throttle just a bit for the fertilization rounds, the fertilizer trailing behind the trawler the way fish nets used to in Monty’s heyday, well before The Split. The passes were as routine as ever, with the tanks set to slow-release as they provided that extra bit of nutrition which Aliey bet would literally pay off in the future. The rain was starting to come down more, but the sea was still calm for now, not dispersing the nutrients too far from their intended targets.
Her rounds finished, Aliey beamed to herself just a bit. Shows what Kell knew. He seemed more than content with his neighboring plot’s mediocre yields. Taking a look over Monty’s bow, she noticed there was a bit of the algae bloom had bled into his plot. It would only be another couple minutes total, including getting Monty there; a small price to pay for doing the right thing.
Aliey set a course for the Northeast corner of Kell’s plot while tweaking the urchin tank’s mechanism settings, as the bloom was just an uneven blob scarcely bigger than the Monticello. One pass, maybe thirty seconds at most, and the job was done.
The bow was perfectly aligned with the floating scarlet mass and easily rolled over the first three-quarters of it before a sputter followed by near-silence.
“Shit.” Aliey checked the display screens; the urchin release tank was malfunctioning; its sensor had stopped reading anything. As Aliey turned to go below deck, she saw something in the water circling the boat; apparently it had viewed the urchins as a free lunch. She opened the first door on the left after descending the stairs, grabbing the midnight blue diving suit with its miniature breather and oxygen tank. Just as important as those were the diving knife, with its trapezoidal nine-inch blade, and the one-handed blunderbuss, which in a contrast to its original use, was filled with non-lethal ammo and could be fired underwater.
As Aliey got changed, she heard the distinct crack of lightning hitting the now-foamy sea, maybe even a ship in the marina as well. Aliey stood on the precipice of the Monticello’s stern and turned her eyes back to the ocean.
Aliey took a deep breath climbed out of the trawler, her oxygen tank making her just top-heavy enough that she nearly teetered into the frothing water without needing to use the rusty-red ladder on Monty’s port side. Her gray-and-black glove caught the side of the ladder and after taking a deep breath, she went down the ladder as the water lapped, and then whipped, at her back.
Aliey dove right underneath Monty to confirm the damage. The external release mechanism was indeed nowhere to be found, with thin scratches circling where it was scarcely five minutes earlier. At least the emergency seal had activated, stopping all the remaining urchins from being released into the water. She worked her way around the perimeter of the patch, the suit’s lights providing just enough illumination to see the flap of a tail on the starboard side.
The tail flipped in the water, and the sea lion turned towards the boat; it was nearly as long as the Monticello was wide, and its jaws could’ve swallowed any of Aliey’s limbs whole with scarcely a struggle. Its sides were pockmarked with sea urchins, with droplets of blood a few shades darker than the algae tinting the water. Aliey had dealt with sea lions before, but this one was different, agitated and very obviously sizing her up. She fumbled with the blunderbuss as it lunged at her, bits of metal, algae, shells, and sea urchins in its maw as it attempted to latch on to Aliey.
Shielding her face with her right forearm, Aliey screamed in pain as a pair of canines tore into the suit, adding an even deeper shade of red to the two already in the water. A hurried punch to the sea lion’s eye with her left fist got the beast to back off, but just seconds later it started to size Aliey up again. She struggled to keep her suit’s lights on it as even wounded, the sea lion’s agility made it far too unpredictable. Aliey circled on the spot, trying to patch the suit while not exposing herself too much. She heard a roar from below but couldn’t see a thing, not until the lightning gave her just the glimpse she needed.
The sea lion’s jaws were open again, going straight towards her right foot. Using the lightning’s flashes to help her aim, Aliey fired the blunderbuss, its tranq canister’s going right down the sea lion’s gullet. Within three seconds, its eyes closed and it was starting to sink.
“Shit. What’s the point of that being non-lethal again?” Aliey said, diving towards the sleeping animal. The thing weighed at least half a ton; it wasn’t going anywhere, not with Aliey’s strength, nor with the suit’s rudimentary drive unit, which for good for routine small-boat maintenance, sightseeing, and not much else. For once she wished Kell was here.
She slowed the fall for a bit, but knew it would have to go back up for air soon. “That’s it; air.” she thought to herself, detaching the emergency buoyancy packs in the elbows of the suit. They’d last a few hours each; hopefully more than enough for the tranq canisters to wear off.
She attached them to the sides of the sea lion’s sleek torso, and they both started to float to the surface at a leisurely pace; the buoyancy units couldn’t exactly move 1,500 total pounds all that quickly. Aliey used that time to pick off the thirty or so sea urchins attached to the sea lion’s body; no wonder it was so aggressive.
After one final check back on the ocean’s choppy surface, Aliey used the suit’s drive unit to get back to the Monticello, which was still bucking a bit but otherwise undamaged.
“All right girl; let’s get back home.” Aliey said, wiping the salty sweat and seawater off her brow. Not a bad evening’s work for a kid and an ancient farmer decades past her prime.