Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow readers! This week, we have our first ever second story from the same author! Deborah L. Davitt also wrote The Taste of Home, which appeared in The Daily Tomorrow back in February. I hope you enjoy it—it’s much more than just a B side. —The Editor
Song in the Deeps
By Deborah L. Davitt
Thirty-four light-years from Earth, a ship bobbed in a methane sea, as Pollux B’s vast orange eye glared at the planet-child that had drifted so far from its grip. The sky caught that orange light, turning bronze, and pewter clouds sleeted hydrocarbons onto the hull.
At -172° C, the viscous rain and sea would have turned metal brittle, frangible, so that hull was a carbon-fiber web. Strong enough for the task at hand, it still felt as fragile as a soap-bubble to those aboard. All business had to be conducted inside that prolate spheroid; even in the best envirosuit money could buy, a human would freeze to death in minutes on this world.
And the company didn’t buy them the best.
“Haul in!” Dante Quinn called in the workbay as the lines tautened. The front of the ship opened, maw-like, and winches pulled a leviathan up into the bay. The beast flung its flukes, bellowing, and liquid methane hit the deck and boiled, steaming upwards like white smoke. A reporter in a borrowed envirosuit tried to get footage with her camera drone as the workers, similarly suited, closed around the creature, securing the beast. “And this doesn’t injure the leviathans?” she asked a manager over the comm system on the common band. As intimate as a whisper in their ears; as public as her eventual broadcast on the stellarnet would be.
“Absolutely not!” he replied firmly. “The accretions we’re cutting away are like pearls to an oyster. Something gets stuck in the mucus layer of a leviathan’s hide, and its body secretes resins akin to nacre around it, leaving the creature with a wart—if a pretty one. And we don’t use knives to remove the accretions, but lasers.” He chuckled. “We’re manicurists, not butchers.”
Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose have appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her Elgin-placing poetry collections, Bounded by Eternity and From Voyages Unreturning, see www.deborahldavitt.com.
Copyright © 2025 Deborah L. Davitt