Triple lightning was followed by an asteroid shower rather than the usual thunder.
MOTE prompt
The world of the Goddess of Love was Hell in two systems.
Venus was classic, of course: insane pressures, poisonous, acidic, roasted with searing temperatures, effectively useless.
Aphrodite was bigger, gravity a third higher, denser atmosphere than Iphigenia’s, and far colder. She was bleak, heartbreaking, stormy. And some government crackpot was trying to grow potatoes there.
They sent Anais Ulanka there to oversee the project, and she hated it. She hated the dark sky, the cold wind, the thirty-hour day, the baleful moons. She hated weighing a third more than she should. She hated the heat suits and the respirator. She hated the rockets with extra punch to get them off the surface. She hated being away from her husband and her one-year-old daughter.
“This is a stupid project,” she said. “It’s a waste of resources even to try it.”
“Just a plot,” her director had said on Aphrodite Station, spreading her hands. “Just a little one. Show them the potatoes can’t be grown in the regolith. Show them the cost of getting them off of Aphrodite is prohibitive.”
“People are dying of hunger on Iphigenia while we blow resources on a garden in the outer system. This is criminal.”
“We’re trying to come up with every possible solution, including farming on Aphrodite.”
“My family farms in the Montara Sierpento. Is anyone ever going to ask one of us what works?”
“Every possible solution. The government’s working hard.”
Anais bit back what she thought about the government. They’d never had one before, needed one before. Sure, this was an emergency…but this was just more proof that the Provisional government was a bad idea. Ineffective. Dangerous. They’d left governments behind on Earth. Here was evidence they’d been right. Why, why, why…
But now she lived at the hutments, clamped into her respirator, trapped in her labs. Crushed under muggy cold layers of heavy air. Black clouds were rolling in, and the potatoes looked sickly. Or dead. Tiny white flowers withered, leaves limp. The storm boiled over the Venera Range, a cold wind rattling the anemometer’s cups into blinding speed.
“Rain’s going to kill these things,” her assistant said. “If the mold doesn’t.”
She groaned into her coms. “Let’s pull the hail sheeting over,” she said. “Come on.”
Their wearisome heaviness dragged at them, but they got the corrugated wire sheets over the quarter-hectare plot, the servos dragging them into place with human assistance. The potato leaves were too pale and too small. She wondered if anything bigger than a marble would be under the roots.
The rain began pelting, and the pellets of ice. They moved back under the eaves and stared dispirited at the unhappy potatoes. Steamed up their goggles.
“Oh, god, this is awful,” she said.
“Here it comes.”
The lightning began flickering, first over the mountains, then across the karst lands. The wind picked up, shaking the sheeting, causing the hutments to creak and a triple burst of lightning only a few kilometers away. A rumble followed it, and streaks of green fire crossed one after the other, horizon to horizon, bursting concussively, flash, flash, flash, beyond the mountains. Asteroids several meters across, she judged: the outer system was full of them. She hated them too: they privately terrified her.
“Oh, god,” she said.
Her assistant wrapped his arms around himself. “Here it comes,” he said again.
And it came. The rain, the rain, the rain.
This week’s prompt challenge was from Fiona Grey: Triple lightning was followed by an asteroid shower rather than the usual thunder. My prompt went to Buttertarted. See all the challenges and responses over at More Odds Than Ends!