There are some anniversaries that aren't to be celebrated. You can celebrate your birthday, your primary school graduation, or the first time you successfully pilot a minisub.

            You don't celebrate the anniversary of your parents' disappearance.

            It's been a year since our parents left us to get supplies. They never came back.

Luna and Storm, our youngest sister and brother, were sitting at the other end of the pool lock, arguing about what to have for lunch. It involved pasta. They would have pasta for every meal if we let them.

I was hoping they wouldn't realize what day today was. Cloud, our oldest brother, and I had been trying, unsuccessfully, to ignore its approach. I didn't want to think about it, but as the second eldest, I had to. The time was coming. We were going to have to make a hard decision, one neither of us really wanted to make. Frankly, is twisted my stomach even thinking about it.

            "Spaghetti!" Storm hollered at Luna. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I didn't need them fighting today.

            "We had that last night," Luna shot back, which was true. Today's nervousness had already started in on me last night, so I hadn't felt like fighting them about it.

            "I want it tonight!" Storm stamped his foot, which created an echo on the deck plating. "Nova!" he wailed plaintively.

            "Mac and cheese," I called over my shoulder, making the decision for them. I turned to see Storm pouting and Luna smiled. "Storm, we can't have spaghetti every night. Luna, be gracious when you win an argument," I told them. They stared at me, neither changing their look. After a moment, Storm marched out of the lock and Luna followed.

            I sighed. I know we're getting low on flour to make pasta, so in a few days it was going to be a moot point.

Aki came up through the sea pool lock into the pool, breaking my train of thought. He's our dolphin. Yep, my best friend's a dolphin. He swam around pool's circumference twice and then stopped in front of me, sticking his head out of the water. He squeaked at me. I reached over to pat his dome and listened to his thoughts.

            Sky need another net, he thought at me. I nodded and reached behind me for one of the net bags. Sky was fishing today. Either he had a lot of fish or he'd found something interesting.

            "Here you go." I extended the bag to Aki. He took it in his beak and disappeared below the water.

            How was I talking to a dolphin? I can talk telepathically with animals, but just animals. I can't talk telepathically to those of the human persuasion. The more intelligent the animal, the better, and with humans having been the most intelligent animal on our home world Romarch, it doesn't make sense, but I'm not a scientist to be able to explain it.

            Speaking of pasta, Cloud had asked me to do an inventory of our food and power supplies today. The last one I had completed was six weeks ago. We need to know how much is left.

            There are seven of us. Cloud is the oldest. He's seventeen. My name is Nova and I'm sixteen. Sky and Star are twins and they're fourteen. Rain is eleven. Luna is ten and Storm eight. Yes, our parents had a thing about nature when they named us. I never asked them why they named us the way they did. Now I wish I had.

I left the sea pool lock and pulled out the data pad I had stuffed into my pocket earlier. It had my previous inventory in it, so all I had to was type in the new numbers. I wasn't sure how long it was going to take.

I walked through the corridors to the storage area. Next to it was our greenhouse. I was going to count what we had growing in there as well, although we had nearly picked the plants clean.

Hence the reason Sky was out with Aki fishing. We were almost out of meat and were having to supplement with fish a lot and Aki is great on finding edible ones for us.

Aki isn't a pet, but an integral part of our family. Ever since we parked our ship, Aquarius, in one hundred feet of water two years earlier on the planet Surana, Aki has been our eyes and ears in the water, teaching us about the area.

Within a week of our arrival, he found a species similar to dolphins, but somewhat larger and with more fins. We named them morfins, for the extra fins. They also communicate with sonar and clicks, so it didn't take Aki long to establish communications with them. With that communications came our first warning on this planet: beware of galocks.

That's what we named them. None of us could even begin to pronounce what Aki called them. Our voices just can't produce such high frequencies. I don't even remember how we came up with galocks, other than it resembled the sound they make when they approach. Our father had speculated it, too, was a form of sonic investigation that was lower pitched so we could hear it, which is good, because they are nasty. Like the morphins, they resemble a sea creature on our home world called giant squids.

There are some differences. They're smaller than giant squids. Their bodies are about six feet long and their tentacles another six feet or so long. They generally have about ten of them and each tentacle is lined on one side with sharp talons that they hook into their prey so they can't escape.

Mom and Dad had had a run in with one early on and had established our first rule: no one was allowed to go out alone unless they were in the minisub.

 Cloud was going to have a fit if Sky didn't get back inside before he noticed his absence. Then again, all Cloud had to do was check Aquarius' external sensors to find one brother all by his lonesome out fishing with only Aki for company.

Our supply area is divided into two rooms. One is a pantry and the other holds various equipment, including power couplers and batteries packs. A lot of what we have is recyclable, but eventually couplers wear out and battery packs don't recharge anymore and if the couplers in the greenhouse fail, we'll be in real trouble. In addition to providing fresh food, it provides oxygen to supplement our oxygen tanks. Each room has three walls with ten shelves. I decided to start with the food, even though our stores were getting so low it would be depressing.

It didn't take long to complete the first two shelves because that's all we had. We'd been moving things down as the supply disappeared to make it more accessible. We'd started with all ten shelves on all three walls filled. Now we only had one wall with two shelves.

I'd lost track of time and glanced at my watch. It'd been another half hour and Sky still wasn't back. I reached out to Aki and he told me Sky had just finished filling the second bag and was on his way back with enough fish to feed us for the rest of the week. Wonderful.

I am so sick of fish.

I tallied my inventory and sighed. It wasn't good. I had a feeling we were going to have to make that hard decision and soon.

I hooked my data pad onto my belt and closed the pantry after turning off the light. We had to save every drop of energy we could. Next stop was the equipment room.

I'd just opened the door when I felt a blast of hard fear from Aki. It was so intense it was like getting kicked in the gut. The feeling was followed by a flash of thought: Galock has Sky! Galock! Galock!

I grabbed the wall to keep from falling to my knees in instant terror. Adrenalin filled me as I turned and bolted for the sea pool lock. As I ran, I hit the first alarm I came to. The klaxon blared to life, red lights coming on everywhere. Before anyone could ask what was going on, I yelled into the com unit attached to my shoulder.

"Sky's in trouble! It's a galock!" I didn't need to say anything else.

Aki was still calling telepathically to me, now angry. I could sense he was trying to drive the galock away from Sky. His thought patterns were swirling and instead of words, his mind sometimes reverted to just images. I could see the galock snagging Sky's left leg from below, yanking him down towards it. Before he could bring his stun rod down, more tentacles rose up and wrapped around him, pulling him in even closer. Sky struggled and the water began to turn pink.

"No!" Tears threatened to blind me as my mind continued to see what was happening from Aki's eyes. The blood would attract everything for miles. If Sky was going to have any chance, we had to get him away from the galock and back into the ship.

The sea pool lock was closest, even though Aquarius has ten air locks too. I grabbed an air tank and stun rod from the shelf. There wasn't time to put on a wet suit, to worry about the water being cold. I slung the tank over my shoulders, snapped the harness around my waist, pulled the attached face guard on and just as I jumped in, I heard someone yelling my name.

The water was like ice and the shock took my breath away, but Aki's continued cries for help roused me to action. Through his mind I could see Sky's struggles weakening and I knew the galock's poisonous barbs were doing their job. The poison was a nerve toxin they used killed their prey, but they usually didn't wait that long. They started eating as soon as the toxin took effect, while their prey was still alive.    

I couldn't think about that. I swam as fast as I could towards the area I had seen in Aki's mind — a pocket of warm water near one of Aquarius' outtake valves. We'd found the warm water attracted the kind of fish that tasted the best, so we had limited our fishing to those areas. The galock must have thought the same thing.

My legs were burning but I pushed on, the vision of Sky struggling seared into my head. I turned on the stun rod and turned it up all the way. That galock was going to pay for touching my brother.

I suddenly spotted a flurry of activity in the distance and put on the steam, rod extended in front of me. I was going to jam the rod down that things throat and fry it from the inside out.

As I got closer, I realized Aki wasn't the only dolphin there — some of his morfin friends were ramming their long, hard noses at high speed into the galock's body then scurrying away from the reach of its tentacles — but it still had Sky in its grasp and he wasn't moving.

'Let my brother go!' I screamed at it telepathically and jammed the stun rod into the first tentacle I could reach. It jerked but didn't release its hold on him. I could see little ribbons of blood seeping from Sky's wounds, floating off in the current and sheer panic began to squeeze my heart. I jabbed it with the rod again and as it jerked, one of the morfin darted in, grabbing the soft outer part of the tentacle in its mouth, pulling. The tentacle came lose. I stunned it again after the morfin darted away as fast as it had come in.

The tentacle pulled back, floating in the current as if it was numb, but there were still two wrapped tight about Sky.

I jabbed at the second one, holding the rod against it, hitting the stun button again and again.

The galock reared back, pulling Sky with it. It was then that I could see his face. His face guard was cracked and his features were slack and gray tinged.

'Let him go!' I screamed telepathically and jabbed it again. Two morfins came in this time and between the three of us, we got the second tentacle off.

By then the cavalry had arrived. Cloud appeared beside me with a lit underwater torch and he bore it down on the base of the last tentacle to keep the flame away from Sky. He cut into the gray, spotted flesh. The galock pulled back in a tizzy, whipping tentacles around furiously. We both reached for Sky, ducking and dodging. Aki and the morfins interceded, getting between us and the galock, forming a speeding wall of flesh as they swam back and forth at incredible speeds.

Cloud and I both had one of Sky's arms and Cloud motioned back towards the ship. We were closer to air lock nine now and swam for it. Cloud kept turning, waving the torch to keep the galock back. It must have finally gotten the message and slinked back down into the shadows below the ship. So much for our fishing hole.

By now, I had no doubt the rest of our siblings were converging on lock nine, probably having seen us from the exterior sensor cameras.

Sky was limp and leaving a trail of pink water behind us as we drug him. With his face plate cracked, I could only assume the worst. His wetsuit was shredded up and down his left side and I could see deep gashes in his now blue-tinged skin.

The iris of the air lock was twisting open as we neared — Bless Star. We swam in as fast as we could and Cloud hit the close for the iris. It closed and the water immediately began to pump out.

Cloud and I didn't wait. We ripped off our masks and tanks and once the water was low enough, pulled off Sky's. As I had feared, it was full of water. His head hung down so his chin was on his chest, his copper hair dark with salt water. He wasn't breathing.

The hatch above us opened before the water was gone. Hands reached in and Cloud and I hefted Sky up. His weight was suddenly taken from us and he floated up and out. I scrambled to the ladder and climbed, Cloud on my heels.

Luna had used her telekinesis to lift Sky out and gently laid him on the mat one of them had placed on the floor. Star was already bending over her twin, checking for a pulse. Without a word, she started CPR and my breath caught.

"Stop the bleeding," Cloud ordered as he dropped to his knees on the other side of Sky and started to help Star by doing the chest compressions. "And get the antidote into him!"

That jumped started my brain and I dropped down beside the medical kit Star had brought with her.

Our father was a chemist, a genius, and it hadn't taken him long to develop an anti-venom for the galock poison. He'd made ten vials before he and Mom had gone for supplies. Luckily, we'd only needed one so far — Storm had found a piece of a galock tentacle during one of our forays and had picked it up before we could stop him. The barb had cut through his wetsuit glove to his forefinger and that small injury had left us with one very sick seven year old for two days.

Oh God — how much venom did Sky have in him?

I pulled out one of the vials and shoved it into a hypo and motioned Cloud out of the way while I pressed the hypo to Sky's neck, injecting the antivenin. While Star and Cloud resumed their CPR, I readied a second hypo and started to help Rain and Luna get pressure bandages on the worst of the cuts.

"He's not going to die, is he?"

I looked up and saw Storm's frightened face as he sat a few feet from us, hugging himself, his still chubby cheeks glistening with tears.

My throat tightened too much to say anything.

"Not on my watch," Cloud ground out through gritted teeth, compressing our brother's chest again and again as Star breathed for him. "Do you hear me Sky? Don't you dare do this to us!" It took me a moment to realize Cloud's face was as wet as Storm's from more than the salt water still dripping off us.