As the trip progressed, the drone explained to her how to use her tablet to view the outside cameras. By pointing it anywhere, she could essentially see through the floor, and gaze at the Earth below.

As soon as she looked down, she saw the storm.

"Uh . . . is that a problem?" she asked.

"There is no cause for alarm. While a rare storm is moving through the area, it is not any danger to Lundgren Tower's cable or this car."

It looked serious to her. The clouds were dark and angry, occasionally lighting up with a flash from the inside.

They were less than a hundred kilometers from the surface, within the atmosphere, and nothing blocked her view of the storm from above.

She'd never seen anything quite like it. She knew of storms, they were a proverbial sign of trouble even among spacers, but there were none on an asteroid colony. Supposedly Hope's Dawn had some monster storms, but she'd never seen them . . .

Her nervousness increased as they closed with the storm, and as they dipped inside the cloud she jumped in her seat.

A woman strapped in nearby looked over at her, concern on her face, and Apollonia awkwardly looked away, pretending not to notice.

There was a lot of tension among the people in the lowering car, it had been rising noticeably in the last few hours. She saw sweat beading on their foreheads, eyes flickering around nervously at every shake and bump.

"Unusually strong Storm out there," one man said to another.

But it wasn't the storm, she thought. It was because of her presence.

Whatever it was that caused her to see and know things that no one else could know also made people innately and acutely uncomfortable in her presence.

The storm, at least, gave them an external locus for their discomfort. People couldn't always pin it on her specifically if the situation itself was a little stressful.

She was always acutely aware of the fact that people were bothered by her presence, but at least right now there was something of an out. They - hopefully - wouldn't just blame her and think there was something wrong with her.

The camera view was just grayed-out, and she could see no more until they broke through.

The rain looked like it was falling in sheets, and she gasped aloud, drawing more eyes.

"I've never seen rain before," she said, tired of pretending she wasn't amazed.

"Me neither," one young man said. "I grew up in the asteroid belt. Where are you from?"

She hesitated; would these people even know where the Begonia system was? Or even worse, had they heard of the terrible conditions there and would pity her?

"I'm from a distant colony," she finally said. "I just happened to be this way so I thought I'd see Earth."

"You're lucky," the woman said kindly. "I've waited five years for a pass to the surface!"

"Five years!" Apollonia echoed, surprised. "That's a long time."

"It'll be worth it," she replied, looking satisfied. "For just to one time touch the world where we came from?" She took a deep breath, closing her eyes.

Apollonia felt a tingle down her spine. "Yeah," she said. "I kind of feel the same way."

*******

She hardly noticed when gravity had returned on the elevator, but now that she had reached the surface she felt almost wobbly. The gravity seemed a little higher than on the Craton, though maybe it was her imagination.

Walking slowly off the elevator, she felt her heart pounding in her chest.

She had arrived.

The base of Lundgren Tower had massive windows, the likes of which she'd never seen before. They were actual windows, not just screens. It was hard to tell any difference from a good screen, but just knowing that she actually looked out upon reality made a difference.

The storm still thundered above, the rain splattering the glass, but it didn't seem to be coming down that heavily. It limited visibility, but it did not hide the thing she was most impressed by - the ocean itself.

"How do I go out there?" she asked.

"There is an observation platform that way-" the drone began. She was already jogging over, and it had to catch up.

The doors opened, and a heavy scent rolled in with the air, along with a spray of rain. She had wondered if falling rain would hurt when it hit you, but these drops felt just pleasant.

She gasped then laughed and ran out, letting the salty smell and raindrops surround her.

Practically dancing, she found herself near the edge of the balcony, and looked out, seeing, for the first time, the ocean up close.

A few of the waves were whitecapped, but mostly it simply heaved, roiling and rising and falling under the winds of the storm.

"It's all water?" she asked the drone that still hovered with her even as she braved the rain.

"The depth is approximately 3,000 meters," the drone told her.

She leaned to look off the edge, and suddenly a new drone was in her face.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"Please step back from the railing," it said politely but firmly. "It is dangerous to risk falling into the water."

"I just want to see it," she said.

"Miss?" a person's voice spoke.

She turned and saw it was a uniformed young man, watching her with some concern.

"I'm Glyndwyr, Station Steward. I can help you get settled in for the night." He looked up at the sky. "It's not a good day for sight-seeing. Not a lot to see, with these clouds so low."

"I'm happy just seeing the water," she said.

"I understand, but the drones aren't going to stop bothering you if you look off the side like that - it's because of the storm and rain, more chance you'll slip off. I suggest getting some rest and then coming back to look around tomorrow."

He seemed nervous, and growing moreso. She knew it was a reaction to her, and she suddenly felt weary.

"All right," she agreed. "I'll come back in the morning."

"Just follow me, miss."

*******

"Alex! Pirra! We're so glad you could make it!" Eileen Shaw said, embracing first her son, then her daughter-in-law.

Davo Shaw stepped up to hug his son next, pounding him on the back hard. Alexander laughed and returned the favor. They almost started tumbling in the low-g from the force.

Pirra was happy to see Alexander so pleased. Sometimes he had issues with his father, but he was still glad to arrive and see them, ultimately.

It was so odd to her. She'd gotten used to it, the human connection to their parents. But it was a strange concept.

Dessei had tight communities, strong bonds within them, but they did not really hold their specific genetic birth parents very closely. There was a certain respect, and one tended to have more interaction with their birth parents more than others. But it was not like human families. They had simply performed a service in their birth, but they were then children of their community, their culture, their island.

The sheer joy humans seemed to take in family had grown from an oddity to something she relished. It was just so pure and . . . well, cute in a way.

"And Pirra," Davo continued, once he'd broken away from Alexander. "How'd you like that new landing system? Dr. Joy set it up himself!"

Pirra smiled. "It was very impressive," she said.

To be honest, she didn't trust homebrew systems.

It wasn't that she didn't trust the scientists and engineers of the odd little commune of Phobos. But, well, she wasn't about to trust her life to someone's pet auto-docker. She'd seen too many custom projects that had turned out to be deadly.

Without letting Alexander see (as he had been immensely proud of it as well), Pirra had queried Joy's system, checked its algorithms and projected flight plan for their rental zoomer, the specs of the equipment, confirmed the inspection tickets, let her system back-trace the supply chains to confirm their credentials, and then had run a few numbers herself.

It had passed muster, and she reluctantly let it take control of their craft. It was all very odd, and she didn't like that. But it seemed safe enough.

"Oh, Alex, don't make Pirra carry all that," Eileen chided her son. "Pirra, give him some of your bags."

Pirra shifted, a little uncomfortable. Humans had some sexual dimorphism, more than her kind - males had taller crests but that was about it.

Besides that, Eileen had never quite understood that she was stronger than Alexander, but all the same it was kind of sweet.

But most of all, they were in microgravity, barely a thousandth of Earth's. The bags weighed practically nothing.

"It's fine," she said. "I've got enhanced muscles."

"Still, you should have better manners with your beautiful wife," Eileen said, patting Alexander's arm in a way that approached but was still not a slap.

"Mom, Pirra's fine," Alexander replied, laughing.

"Well, let's not dawdle here," Davo said, waving for them all to follow. "We've got a lot of catching up to do!" He caught Pirra's eye, grinning, and she felt jubilation glee grow inside her.

She had heard that sometimes human parents did not take well to the spouse of their child. It could even be quite unpleasant for them. But Davo and Eileen seemed to adore her.

Phobos station was a very old design, built hundreds of years ago and later abandoned.

The moon was merely a captured asteroid, and like many such bodies was just a rubble pile held together rather loosely by gravity. The original builders had used an experimental titanium foam to fill in the gaps in the asteroid. It had held, though it was far from stable.

After that, the colonists had built a shallow rotating cylinder, apparently the first attempted on this scale in the Sol system. While it had sort of worked, it had also threatened to shake Phobos apart - and so the whole asteroid had been abandoned.

But about fifty years ago, a group of oddball scientists and artists had imagined bringing new life to the moon. Using modern technologies, they had melted key parts of it together, cooling it afterwards in just two years with modern heat-transfer technologies.

And then they'd moved in, building new labs, new studios, and even revamping the rotation cylinder, adding the housing units in it so they could have nearly Earth-like gravity.

The floors, she thought, were mostly original. The steel plates had faded to a dull gray, trodden by feet over many decades until they had indents.

The walls, though, were murals of color. What she could only call graffiti but knew they locals called art, covered most of the public surfaces.

"How is Phobos Station doing?" Alexander asked.

"Oh, we've got supply problems out the wazoo - nothing vital," Davo replied, snorting. "Don't worry, we get plenty to eat and all that. But Mars supply ships hate trying to catch this place, so trying to get specialist parts or rare elements can be difficult. And we don't have a particle collider, so we have to import all those things."

"Gold is so hard to get," Eileen added. "Can you believe it? It's like back in the pre-space days when they used it as money!"

Alexander chuckled. "Yeah, I heard they were batty for it back then."

"Gold, really?" Pirra asked.

"Oh, yes," Davo replied. "And not even for practical reasons - they just thought it was pretty."

They boarded a boxy container that sped them up to match the rotation cylinder. Slowly, they went from floating to standing. When the doors opened, they didn't have far left to go - only a few hundred people lived on Phobos.

The front door of the Shaw residence was large enough to admit a small vehicle. Their room had once been a supply area for the original station, simply refit into living quarters. Davo loved it, as he could get big equipment in and out.

A drone met them and took their bags as they went in, and Pirra delighted in the squashy chairs that seemed to have no equivalent on the Craton.

Plopping into one, sinking in so deeply that it nearly swallowed her, she leaned back and sighed.

"I love this chair," she said aloud.

Davo sat down across from her, while Eileen and Alexander headed to the kitchen.

"Don't get too comfortable," Davo said, grinning. "I got the launcher working."

Pirra escaped the grasping chair, sitting up. "You lie!"

"It's true! It's not pretty. But it works! It's more of a grenade launcher than a true plasma lobber, but the shells explode on impact! Oh, it's beautiful." He grinned. "You have to come see it."

"Alexander! I'm going to go look at some of the projects your father has been working on," Pirra called out.

"Have fun blowing stuff up," he called back.

Davo grinned, and the two scampered back out the door.