Placing his hands on his hips, he stared at the back of Ross’s head. His brother was intent on the controls, peering into the clouds of the planet’s incomprehensibly vast and open sky. Vaporous convection currents rose up and tumbled down as the skymine continued along its random path. An asterisk symbol had been painted above the navigation panel. It was the Guiding Star, which the Roamers believed directed the paths of their lives.

“Afraid of crashing into an angry concentration of nitrogen? Or do you just like sitting in the captain’s chair and driving this big hulk nowhere?”

Ross spun, and his face lit up in a smile. “Jess! I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Decided to save you the wages of a cargo hauler.” He came forward to embrace Ross. “Help you pay off that big debt—just another part of my responsibility as your little brother.”

Ross indicated the sensor panels. “For your information, there’s an art and a skill to piloting a skymine. I still have to adjust course, raise or lower the ship. A good captain always watches for dense concentrations of gases.”

The skymine trailed a squidlike network of probes; the kilometers-long threads drifted in the clouds, picking up data and helping Ross decide where to go. Golgen’s atmospheric gases were rich with just the right mix of elements and catalysts for the Ildiran reactors to produce ekti. Also, the gas giant was close to star-trading lanes, which allowed for easy distribution of the fuel. After years of hard work, Ross was close to making a profit from his operation, despite their father’s constant pessimism.

“I presume you’ve brought gossip?” Ross paused and added ironically, “And of course, a sincere apology from Dad begging me to come home?”

Jess laughed. “If I’d brought that, I’d be here with a full Roamer celebration fleet such as the Spiral Arm has never seen.”

Ross gave him a bittersweet laugh. “One of us is still off course from the Guiding Star. Let’s go up on deck. I want to be out in the fresh air.”

They climbed through hatches, took a lift, and finally passed through a set of wind doors to a broad observation deck. The deck could be surrounded by an atmosphere field, but for now it was open to the sky itself. Ross frequently took the Blue Sky Mine down to an equilibrium level where the clouds were thick enough to be breathable and Golgen’s atmosphere was warmed by internal thermal sources.

Jess drew a deep breath of the alien air. “This isn’t something I get to do every day.”

“I do,” Ross said.

The Blue Sky Mine, like all Roamer-designed factories, was composed of three main segments: the intake/feed tanks, the processing reactors and exhaust funnels, and the ekti storage spheres. As the skymine plowed through the atmosphere, open nozzles sucked in raw gases and delivered them through processing machinery. After passing through the catalytic reactors, the rare hydrogen allotrope was siphoned off, while the waste gases spilled back out from the hot stacks.