Surf the Milky Way

Paddling at a smooth, steady pace, Max looked over his shoulder in time to see his crewmate Claude drive his surfboard into such a crisp, hard turn that a massive splash of water flew off the back of the wave and rained down upon him.

Max, grinning the whole time, gained speed as he stroked his muscular blue arms through the brackish mixture, the water heavy from all the chunks of soil, plant material, and a variety of other debris.

Next in line to catch a wave was Blob, the origin of his nickname easy to spot, as his stomach bulged way out—a perpetual integrity test of the synthetic carbon fibers of his protective suit. As Blob stroked his thick arms and kicked with his four-toed feet, his right hand slid down the rail of his board to press the paddle booster. In a flash, the oversized surfer was propelled to his feet and sliding down the steep face. He dropped all the way to the bottom of the trough and pressed back hard on the tail of his board, fins catching, to make a huge bottom turn. If successful, he would get ahead of the crumbling whitewater and be in a good position to attempt to navigate the first of its many dangers.

From Max’s vantage point, Blob was up to the task, although his board did sag in the middle as he pumped down the line. He plowed right over a clump of plant matter, without losing much speed, and zipped out of sight.

A voice shouted from behind; it was Mike, Claude’s brother, who was paddling from calmer waters, careful to avoid the turbulent influence of the impact zone. Max smiled at Mike as the giant mutant rabbit twirled his elongated forepaws through the water as fast as he could.

“Did you see that one, Cap?” Mike was practically frothing at the mouth. “My bro was shredding! This is so epic, Max! Some of these waves—I swear—they’re gargling up logs larger than the compression rods firing the Planet Hopper!” Mike loved to make the surf conditions seem more intense than they really were—but there was no need for embellishment with the Ueharan tidal bore wave. Totally legit.

“Yeah, I saw him, all right!” Max called back. “That spray off the back of the wave was massive! He is absolutely ripping! Vern too! He got such a good one earlier!”

Wow, Max chuckled to himself at the impossibility of it all, Uehara Bay! We finally made it! This is absolutely insane! He sat on his board and slapped his hands down into the surging water as they waited for the next wave to form.

Pretty soon they were chatting about the infamous Ueharan tidal bore. It was like the rarest of unicorns for galaxy-traveling surfers like themselves. Sure, there were plenty of stories of guys surfing it, but his crew had never met someone who actually had. The wave was merely a whisper among the ashes of alien surf culture, a forgotten rumor on the wrong side of the Intergalactic Dividing Line. Not only that, but it also happened to be located on a Category C planet, as defined by the Ugovernment’s classification system, and therefore it was strictly forbidden to land there. A beautiful little green oval, sitting out on the far edge of the explored portion of the galaxy—that just so happened to have the best wave they had ever ridden.

Max was more than ready for his turn, and a bulge loomed beyond the mud flats, stretching all the way to the horizon. It was a pulse produced by the largest of the planet’s three moons, and a particularly nasty-looking wave formed. The tidal bore was about to oblige Max with all he could handle.

The captain of the Planet Hopper locked in on the trajectory he wanted to take and used shoulder, back, and arm muscles to propel himself forward. Paddling straight at the triangular, bulging, frothing peak seemed… suicidal. An alien would have to be crazy to put himself in the way of something so devastatingly powerful… something so fixated on its mission to obliterate whatever strayed in its path. In actuality, the tidal bore was a series of mini-tidal waves, slicing their way along the same stretch of coastline each Uday.

In a laser-quick motion he spun his board around and pounced to his feet.

For a nanosecond all one hundred and fifty kilos of Algorean blue-skinned beef was airborne.

When his fins caught, and he was able to put his weight on the deck of his board, the sensation came—the satisfaction that accompanied a critical drop-in. With the most difficult part behind him, he glided into the crackling trough ahead of him, pumping to gain speed. When the wave face opened up he shifted his weight from back foot to front in order to stay ahead of the foam ball.

Uh-oh. He had been too casual and his lapse in concentration might end up costing him some down time. Underwater time. And a lot of it, according to projections by the AI models they had run. If he fell he might end up like one of the many unaware creatures that didn’t make it out of range of the tidal bore, sucked under by brown, liquid tendrils, never to surface again. It was a daily carnage, occurring like clockwork, and Max would be a veritable feast for the bottom suckers. Even with a helmet on, the oxygen supply had a limit, and if he got pinned to the bottom by debris…

The oncoming section was about to throw. Max took a high line, slicing across the voluminous closing door, and made it around, but… he a hazard waited on the other side.

A chunk of hardened mud, big enough to jar him from his board, was wedged right in his path!

At the last Usecond Max was able to avoid the trouncing of a lifetime by stepping back on the tail of his board and activating the riser function. He popped over the mud chunk, hardly losing any speed, riding on triumphantly. Yesss!

Blob and Claude hooted and hollered as they flew overhead in the botcopter on their way back to the top of the headlands to do it all over again.

Max was stoked and he returned a loud roar of approval. Being the best surfer among them, Max always got to be in the best position, closest to the take off spot.

About a half kilometer into it, Max began the “fun” parts of the ride.

First came “the funnel” of the tidal bore, a portion of the river mouth much more narrow than the rest of the tributary. He liked to emulate the surfing style of the original legends, the men and women from Old Earth: Larry Bertlemenn, Gerry Lopez, Rell Sunn, Kelly Slater, the Irons brothers, Kai Lenny, Jack Zeits—human surfers who were the closest things to gods to the crew of the Planet Hopper—so he held a practiced crouch, gaining tremendous speed, allowing the bore to expend its energy, moving him free of charge—no turning or pumping or any body gyrations necessary to get his board to glide. Nothing but pure momentum from the bore…

Onward he rode, past “the funnel," and speeding under “the bridge”—a section the guys named after an experience Claude had, when he was almost taken out on an earlier ride by a fifty-meter long tree log that had been uprooted the Uday before. The gnarled bark of trunk and limbs ended up positioned like a makeshift bridge across the river. Spanning from bank to bank the log was jostled and bumped by the extreme tide shifts, until later that Uday it would be severed in two and forced downriver by the bore’s stubborn insistence.

Max opted out of the next part of the wave by hovering over the whitewater that made up the section they called “the bump a dump”. The crew called it that because it was such a bouncy, up and down part of the river wave that Blob’s bowels had activated and he was forced to use the vacuum potty in his suit. Not so fun—washing and cleaning out one’s suit after every session… but luckily for Blob a droid took care of that disgusting task for him. Max laughed at how hard he and the boys had cracked up at his whining.

The “triangle of death” was the next obstacle section for Max to overcome. A conglomeration of several veins of sub-tributaries, each overflowing with water supplied from higher up the banks of the river. A boost of momentum made the wave abruptly jut up into a triangular peak that loomed like a small hill—easily as big as the take-off portion of the wave back up at the mouth of the river.

Must be pretty shallow… He balked at the boiling pit below. He had no choice. He had to re-drop the triangle. So he did. Perfectly. Like the former champion competition surfer he was. So many meaningless trophies, he thought, this is what real surfing is all about…

It was time for the finish line. The river saved the fastest section for last, a part of the wave they aptly named “the racetrack," where the wave uncurled all its might into a wide emptying bay. It was as if the water of the bore sensed it was finally going to be allowed to rest, so it raced for the opening, eager to be free of the chaos. Max needed to pump with everything his Algorean thighs were worth, remaining ahead of the breaking lip by a fraction of a Usecond. One displacement of his weight on either rail and the bore would hit him like a guillotine. Not Captain Max of Algor, you know I’m going down like that!

Max made it to the edge of the terminus and now it was time for him to show off a little more. As the wave fizzled out, he carved a sharp-angled turn toward the bank of the river, punched the tail thruster with his heel, and launched his board up and over the edge of the bank. While in midair, he jumped off his board and activated the anti-gravity feature on his suit, snatching his board as he floated down, landing comfortably on his feet. It had to be a perfect ten-out-of-ten on the rubric scale!

While riding the botcopter back up to the take-off zone, there was the Planet Hopper, perched up on the bluff, far away from the river’s grasp, and could not help but smile at the glinting spacecraft. His pride and joy. The monitor display inside the botcopter retrieved Max’s attention, as a live image showed Blob taking off on another monster wave. Even an alien of Blob’s prodigious size was reduced to nothing more than a speck underneath the great Ueharan maw.

“Dudes!” Max yelled through the intercom, which broadcast audio throughout the ship and into the helmets of all the surfers. “Isn’t this epic? The greatest tidal bore wave of them all… way out here? I can’t believe this place is real!”

The botcopter holoscreen switched from Blob’s ride to the twins sitting on their boards at the top of the river mouth. “Beyond epic, Captain!” Mike yelped. “But check this out… Hey Claude, catch this next one with me!”

“No way, bro,” Claude, the cautious one, replied. “Too much debris in the water for a double drop!”

“Nah,” Mike gave his typical nonchalant reply. “It’s all good. Come on, here comes another pulse. Good galaxy—look at that thing spit! Follow me, bro!”

Mike lay flat, paddling straight for the hollow cylinder of fluid forming ahead of them. The breaking part of the wave’s brownish color was a sharp contrast to the rest of the translucent blue waters stretching out to sea, a testament to how much debris was in there.

Max cheered in his deep baritone, manually forcing the botcopter into hover mode so he didn’t have to use the holoscreen to check out the action below. From his bird’s-eye perspective the nasty ten meter wall of crashing water forced him to think twice about egging on the twins.

Mike let go of all regards and stroked his forepaws to put himself in position, turbo-thrusting away from the apex of the breaking wave, but giving enough room for his brother to paddle in behind him. Sliding into his drop, Mike made a couple of subtle, yet perfectly timed adjustments with the rail of his board, allowing him a nice easy line to make it around the first section of the wave, right as Claude crisscrossed in front of him. From there the twins zigzagged expertly back and forth across each other’s lines. An occasional hazard—generated by an increasing mass of plant debris and tree limbs—threatened to force the brothers to have to kick out of the wave. But slipping off the back would mean missing out on the best parts of the wave… and that wasn’t going to happen, not if Mike could help it.

Arc after arc the brothers progressed down the line in circular turns, unfazed by a jumble of animal carcasses forming a blockade of rotting flesh. The local fauna were always well-represented among the many items torn to shreds by this menacing, daily tidal bore phenomena.

Max smiled, taking his eyes off the live feed on his holoscreen for a moment to take in the scenery around him. As he rode the botcopter back to the lineup, resting his soar muscles for a moment before his next ride, in the sky three moons hung there, their pale hues peeking through the atmosphere of Uehara. It was a special planet, still unblemished by the colonization of the Milky Way. A portal back to another time, thought Max. His gaze wandered inland, up past the bay, toward the towering jungle foliage lining the sides of the massive indentation of coastline. The foothills of a great mountain range, with a forest of thick green and purple leaves, rose above the tranquil, settled waters of the wide bay. He could imagine what it would be like to be within the embrace of the forest, with branches extending up to the sky in all sorts of twisted patterns. The trees would have to wait through long eclipse periods in order to pure, unshadowed starlight.

Nearing the headlands, where he could jump off with his board back into the fray, his eyes sought out the next pulse of waves. Time to focus. Sets were lined up in rows, like Earthish question marks drawn in the sand. The bluffs of yellow-stoned headlands were sliced by fractured segments of black ore, making for a splendid backdrop for their trusty spaceship.

Whatever binary starlight was penetrating the pall of Uehara’s three moons was shining directly upon the next set of waves, illuminating their tunnel-like interiors. The blue bulges approached methodically from far beyond the mud flats, picking up more and more dark colors, as the fresh water from the sea merged with the sediment-laden waters at the river mouth. It was a particularly hollow cluster of rideable waves, and it was forming with intensity.

Probably a synchronous merging of the three moons’ gravitational fields—the peak of the swell, literally, Max thought, as he leapt from the botcopter, board under his arm.

Once airborne, he turned on the anti-gravity and allowed himself to drift through the air into a calm patch of water close enough to the take-off zone for an easy paddle. A short rest was all he needed, his arms were happy back doing what they were most accustomed to, and he made haste toward the oncoming set. Angling his board diagonally, he worked his way over so he would be in the direct line of the pulse of waves ready to explode onto the sandbars at the mouth of the river. Because of his exquisite timing, he was in perfect position, and caught the first wave of the set with ease. As always when dropping, he held his breath, even when wearing his helmet. Old habit. After making it around the first section in a flash, he settled into his riding stance and blasted turns all over the face of the wave—weaving and bobbing, slashing and carving, his board literally in tune with his mind. The revolutionary design, attached through focal points in his helmet, allowed his brain to communicate with his board, the AI adjusting the flexibility, tension and angle of his fins—while he rode.

Expensive, but worth it. Max relished the duality: just him and his board—the rider and the tool. I’m a wave magnet! Algor be praised, what a life!

***

Meanwhile, Mike and Claude had passed all the sections of the tidal bore, having the most fun at “the bridge”. Right as they passed under the massive log they held their front paws together and stepped with their back paws onto the other’s board.

“Double Carrot!” Claude yelled—if they were back home on Rabbit World, they would have earned a vegetable meal for the ages.

At the end, when their wave petered out into the open bay, they both snatched the safety bar of the botcopter, right at the exact same time, and were yanked out of the froth. A nanosecond after they lifted above the fray, a gargantuan-sized mud clump roll past the place where they had just been. It would have crushed them.

“You didn’t see that, did you bro?” Claude laughed.

“See what?” Mike replied, fiddling with his surfsuit. “My epic turns? Yeah, I saw that!”

“Never mind.” Claude shook his head.

Laughing and chattering on their ride back, Claude decided he was through surfing for the Uday. Usually the first to be back on the Hopper, Claude was ready to do a little research on hyperspace sheath emergency protocols. He took it upon himself to be the most responsible member of the crew, which meant sacrificing a few waves for the safety of the team. And the boys appreciated his dedication.

And they got to surf more waves. Win, win.

Claude flapped an ear at his brother. “Later, bro. I’m going to take a break and eat some gross synthetic veggies. I want to check out some stuff: pulsar anomaly radiation levels, hyperspace sheath maintenance, stuff like that. For our return trip. Have fun! Get a couple more good ones for me!”

Before Claude leapt off the botcopter onto the grassy bluff where the Planet Hopper sat idly, Mike shouted: “A billion out of a billion!” It was a reference back to their early surf competition Udays. Critics had given them no shot to win contests when they began their pro careers. At one point a journalist put a holo on the Uweb claiming they had a one out of a billion chance of winning.

Claude called back with a wry smile, “You know it! Now get out there and tell Blob to get barreled… and to keep his suit excretion vacuum on during the bumps.” He laughed and received a familiar grunt and nose twitch for a reply.

From Max’s vantage point, Blob looked up to the task, although his board did sag in the middle, as he pumped down the line, leapfrogging a bundle of thick green reeds caught in his path, landing the maneuver smoothly and without losing much speed. No sooner had he made it past the last danger than he had to launch himself over floating foam balls of baked mud that had hardened instantaneously due to the scalding temperatures on Uehara at midday.

A voice shouted from behind, it was Mike, Claude’s brother, who was paddling up from calmer waters, careful to avoid the turbulent influence of the impact zone leftover from Blob’s wave. Max smiled at Mike as the giant mutant rabbit twirled his elongated forepaws through the water as fast as he could.

“Did you see that one?” Mike was practically frothing at the mouth. “My bro was shredding! This is so epic, Max! Some of these waves are gargling up logs larger than the compression rods firing the Planet Hopper!” Mike loved to make the surf conditions seem more intense than they really were, usually by embellishing as much as possible—but there was no need for embellishment with the Ueharan tidal bore wave.

“Yeah, I saw him, all right!” Max called back. “That spray off the back of the wave was massive! He is absolutely ripping!”

Yes, Max thought, laughing to himself at the impossibility of it all, Uehara Bay! We finally made it! This is absolutely insane!

He sat on his board and splashed at the surging water around him, as he waited at the top of the river mouth next to Mike for the next wave to form. They chatted about the infamous Ueharan tidal bore. It was like the rarest of gems for galaxy-traveling surfers like themselves. Plenty of stories of guys surfing it, but no one had ever actually met someone who had surfed it. It was a wave that was only a whisper among the ashes of alien surf culture, a rumor long forgotten after the forming of the Intergalactic Dividing Line that separated the rest of the galaxy from it. Regardless of what side of the IDL it was on, Uehara was a Category C planet, as defined by the Ugovernment’s classification system, and therefore it was strictly forbidden to land there. A beautiful little green oval, sitting out on the far edge of the explored galaxy.

Max was more than ready for his turn, and a bulge loomed beyond the mud flats that stretched all the way to the horizon. It was another pulse, produced by the gravitational pull of Uehara’s “middle” moon, Yert, and it was a particularly nasty-looking wave that was beginning to unfurl. Uehara Bay was about to provide Max with all he could handle.

The captain of the Planet Hopper saw the line he wanted to take to intercept the wave’s trajectory, and began to use shoulder, back, and arm muscles that seemed to have been chiseled out from stone, to propel himself forward while prone on his board. Paddling straight at the triangular, bulging, frothing peak seemed… suicidal. An alien would have to be crazy to put himself in the way of something so devastatingly powerful… something so fixated on its mission to obliterate whatever was in its path. In actuality, the tidal bore was just a series of mini-tidal waves that curled their way along the same stretch of coastline each Uday, in the same huge bay, right along the same river mouth, carving the land like the serpent beasts of Dorom.

But Max knew exactly what he was doing. Despite drawing a line that appeared fated for a throttling, in a laser-quick motion he spun around one hundred and eighty degrees, tapped his tail thruster with the toe of his boots, paddled and kicked a few extra times for good luck, then pounced to his feet.

For a nanosecond all one hundred and fifty kilos of Algorean blue-skinned beef was airborne.

Then the fins of his board caught, and he was able to put his weight on the deck, arcing his back with eyes wide and a smirk on his face as he ducked under a log that was following him over the falls. After making the drop, he glided into the crackling trough ahead of him. With the critical, late take-off behind him, he followed it up by a big, cranking bottom turn, a high, smashing inner-lip turn, and then racetracked down the line to stay ahead of the foam ball.

Uh-oh. He had been too casual, not staying present, not respecting the dangers of Ueharan waves, and it appeared his lapse in concentration might end up costing him some down time. Underwater time. And a lot of it, according to projections by the AI in the models they had run hypothesizing the length of the hold down were one of them to lose control and plunge into the churning waters.

The oncoming section necessitated that Max take a high line over a watery closing door, which he did successfully, but… he hadn’t noticed the hazard on the other side. It was a piece of floating hardened mud, and it was so big that if it hit him in the head it could knock him unconscious and send his muscular body down into the muck for the omnivorous fish to dine upon. Each day many unaware creatures didn’t make it out of range of the sucking tide, squeezed by liquid brown tendrils, sucked under never to see the light of day again; it was a daily carnage that occurred like clockwork, and Max would be a veritable feast for the bottom suckers.

Incredibly, at just the last second, Max was able to avoid the trouncing of a lifetime by stepping back on the tail of his board and activating the riser function. Yesss!

Blob and Claude hooted and hollered as they flew overhead in the botcopter on their way back to the top of the headlands to do it all over again.

Got you, Uehara! Max was stoked and he returned a loud roar of approval, letting his crew know who the boss was on this ship, and who the best surfer was. The boys already knew, and because of it Max always got the best position, closest to the take off spot, because… well, he deserved it. Proven once again by moves like the one he had just managed to pull off. About a half kilometer into it, Max began the “fun” parts of the ride.

First the funnel of the tidal bore, a portion of the river mouth that was much more narrow than the rest of the tributary. He liked to emulate the surfing style of the original legends, the men and women from Old Earth: Larry Bertlemenn, Gerry Lopez, Rell Sunn, Kelly Slater, the Irons brothers, Kai Lenny, Jack Zeits—human surfers that were the closest things to gods to the crew of the Planet Hopper—so he held a practiced crouch, gaining tremendous speed, allowing the bore to expend its energy, moving him free of charge—no turning or pumping or any body gyrations necessary to get his board to glide. Just pure momentum from the bore…

Onward he rode, past “the funnel”, and then speeding under “the bridge”—a section the guys named after an experience Claude had, when he was almost taken out on an earlier ride by a fifty-meter long trepis tree log that had been uprooted the Uday before. The massive, gnarled bark of limbs crisscrossed and ended up positioned like a makeshift bridge across the river. It must have been sitting in that position, connected from bank to bank, getting jostled and bumped each Uday, a slow process of grinding, until some Uday it would be severed in two and forced downriver with the bore’s stubborn insistence.

Max opted out of the next part of the wave by hovering over the whitewater that made up the section they called “the bump a dump”. Blob named it that because it was such a bouncy, up and down part of the river wave that it made his bowels start activating and he was forced to use the vacuum potty in his suit. Not so fun—washing and cleaning out one’s suit after every session… but luckily for Blob a droid took care of that disgusting task for him.

The “triangle of death” was the next obstacle section for Max to overcome. This was a part of the bore that was a conglomeration of several veins of sub-tributaries, each overflowing with water supplied from higher up the banks of the river. A boost of momentum made the wave abruptly jut up into a triangular peak that loomed like a small hill—easily as big as the take-off portion of the wave back up at the mouth of the river.

Must be pretty shallow… He gulped as he looked down into the boiling pit below him. He had no choice. He had to re-drop the triangle. So he did. Perfectly. Like the former champion competition surfer he was. So many meaningless trophies, he thought, this is what real surfing is all about…

It was time for the finish line. The river saved the fastest section for last, a part of the wave they aptly named “the racetrack”, where the wave uncurled all its might into a wide emptying bay. It was as if the water of the bore knew it was finally going to be allowed to rest, so it raced for the opening, eager to be free of the chaos. Max needed to pump with everything his Algorean thighs were worth, and he did just that, remaining ahead of the breaking lip by a fraction of a Usecond. One displacement of his weight on either rail and the bore would hit him like a guillotine. Not Captain Max of Algor, you know I’m going down like that!

Max made it to the edge of the terminus and thought it was about time to show off for his friends—as if he hadn’t already done so. As the wave fizzled out, he carved a sharp-angled turn toward the bank of the river, punched the tail thruster with his heel, and launched his board up and over the edge of the bank. While in midair, he jumped off his board, activated the anti-gravity feature on his suit, and then slowly, smoothly, like a descending waterfowl, dropped toward the bluff, snatching his board as he floated down, then landing on his feet comfortably, with a short jog at the end necessary to scrub off gravity’s momentum. It had to be a perfect ten-out-of-ten on the rubric scale!

While riding the botcopter back up to the take-off zone, Max looked at the Planet Hopper perched up on the bluff, far away from the river’s grasp, and could not help but smile at the glinting spacecraft… his pride and joy. The monitor display inside the botcopter brought back Max’s attention as a live image showed Blob taking off on another monster wave. Even an alien of Blob’s prodigious size was reduced to nothing more than a speck underneath the great Ueharan maw.

“Dudes!” Max yelled through the intercom, which broadcast audio throughout the ship and into the AI helmets of all the surfers. “A mystical tidal bore wave? The greatest of them all… way out here? Who would have ever thought we’d get to surf this spot?”

“So epic, Captain! But check this out…” Mike egged on his brother at the top of the river mouth, trying to get him to ride the same wave—together at the same time. “Hey Claude, catch this next one with me!”

“No way, bro, too much debris in the water for a double drop,” Claude, the cautious one, replied.

“Nah,” Mike said, trying to sound cool, calm, and collected. “It’s all good. Come on, here comes another pulse. Good galaxy—look at that thing spit!”

Max watched the live feed and saw Mike pointing at a machine-like hollow cylinder of fluid forming The wave’s color—when compared with the transparent blue outer waters of the bay—resembled dark brown bile from the mouths of Cygnan equine.

Max started cheering loudly, in his deep baritone, manually forcing the botcopter into hover mode. What he saw when he peered out the window made his jaw drop. From his bird’s-eye perspective of the nasty, foaming, disintegrating mud ball it forced him to think twice about egging the brothers on to pull off the double ride.

Despite his hesitance a moment before, Max watched Claude let go of all regards, as he paddled into position, turbo-thrusting away from the apex of the breaking wave at the last possible second, but giving enough room for his brother to paddle in behind him. Sliding into his drop, Mike made a couple of subtle, yet perfectly-timed adjustments with the rail of his board, allowing him a nice easy line to make it around the breaking water of the first section of the wave just as Claude crisscrossed in front of him.

The twins zigzagged expertly back and forth across each other’s line. An occasional hazard—generated by an increasing mass of brown debris and crusty red sediment—threatened to force the brothers to have to kick out of the wave and slip off the back, in order to escape disaster. But that would mean missing out on the best parts of the wave… and Max knew that wasn’t going to happen, if they could help it.

Arc after arc the brothers progressed down the line in circular turns, unfazed by a jumble of animal carcasses that were now forming blockades of rotting flesh. The local fauna were always well-represented among the many items torn to shreds by this menacing, daily tidal bore phenomena.

Max smiled, taking his eyes off the live feed on his holoscreen for a moment to take in the scenery around him. As he rode the botcopter back to the lineup, resting his soar muscles for a moment before his next ride, in the sky three moons hung there, their pale hues peeking through the atmosphere of Uehara. It was a special planet, that much was for sure, still unblemished by the colonization of the Milky Way. A portal back to another time, thought Max. His gaze wandered inland, up past the bay, toward the towering jungle foliage lining the sides of the massive indentation of coastline. The foothills of a great mountain range, with a forest of thick green and purple leaves, rose above the tranquil, settled waters of the wide bay. He could imagine what it would be like to be within the embrace of the forest, looking up and seeing branches extending up to the sky in all sorts of twisted patterns. The trees would be desperately seeking sunshine, but would have to wait through long eclipse periods in order to get that key ingredient to life: pure, unshadowed starlight.

Nearing the headlands, where he could jump off with his board back into the fray, his eyes sought out the next pulse of waves. Time to focus. Sets were lined up in rows, like Earthish question marks drawn in the sand. The bluffs of yellow-stoned headlands were sliced by fractured segments of black ore; it made for a splendid backdrop for their trusty spaceship.

Whatever binary starlight was penetrating the pall of Uehara’s three moons was shining directly upon the next set of waves, illuminating their tunnel-like interiors. The blue bulges approached methodically from far beyond the mud flats, picking up more and more dark colors, as the fresh water from the sea began to merge with the sediment-laden waters at the river mouth. It was a particularly hollow cluster of rideable waves, and it was forming with intensity.

Probably a synchronous merging of the three moons’ gravitational fields—the peak of the swell, literally, Max thought, as he leapt from the botcopter, board under his arm.

Once airborne, he turned on the anti-gravity and allowed himself to drift through the air into a calm patch of water close enough to the take-off zone for an easy paddle. A short rest was all he needed, his arms were happy back doing what they were most accustomed to, and he made haste toward the oncoming set. Angling his board diagonally, he worked his way over so that he would be in the direct line of the pulse of waves ready to explode onto the sandbars at the mouth of the river. He barely had to use his paddle thrusters. He was moving plenty fast enough with just the huge muscles in his arms and the little boost of power that his extended-webbing gloves gave him. Because of his exquisite timing, he was in perfect position, and caught the first wave of the set with ease. As always when dropping, he held his breath, just in case. After making it around the first section in a flash, he settled into his riding stance and began blasting turns all over the face of the wave—weaving and bobbing, slashing and carving, his board doing things that could only be done on a brain-linked AI model. His board was literally in tune with his mind. The revolutionary board design allowed electrodes attached to the brain through focal points in his helmet to communicate with the flexibility and tension of the board.

Expensive, but worth it. Max relished the duality: just his board and him—the rider and tool. I’m a wave magnet! Algor be praised, what a life!