Escaping the Sun

by Rhett Goreman

  Each new bubble was to add the latest contribution onto the gigantic honeycomb, or rather frog-spawn-like structure, that covered about a third of the Moon’s surface at that time.

  The thick membrane provided a number of vital functions. First, it retained the atmosphere necessary for habitation. Second, it was highly insulating, keeping out the extremes of hot and cold. Third, it turned from being crystal clear during the night time to completely black when in full sun - so protecting its occupants from the intense solar radiation. Furthermore, whenever it was bathed in sunlight the membrane also generated electricity. In this way, the whole honeycomb structure could provide an alternative source of power to keep essential services running in an emergency.

  *

  An indication on the dashboard showed the current work shift was coming to an end, and so Khonen radioed his team to return to their homes for some rest. However, he did not turn his own bulldozer around just yet. He switched off his team radio and sat there quietly, parked in the centre of the ground they had been clearing. From that vantage point, he could see through the membrane of one of the nearby completed bubbles - and with the aid of an external video camera, equipped with a telephoto lens, an image of a girl called Suran flashed up on a screen built into the dashboard.

  Khonen had hardly been able to wait for the shift to finish so he could get a glimpse of her once again. He had been admiring Suran from afar for some time, never plucking up enough courage to actually speak with her. He knew she was human because she had lovely brown hair; but he also knew not all humans liked or even trusted the Elite. He admired not only her appearance but the way she had obtained an important scientific and managerial position - the type of role normally dominated by the Elite.

  He panned and zoomed the camera to get a closer look at her and realised he was in trouble. Every time he saw her his mouth dried up, his heart raced, and he started to get butterflies in his stomach.

  *

  With her long, caramel brown, hair tied back in a bun, Suran had a cheeky almost elfin like face. She was the chief botanist in charge of the largest Arboretum on the Moon. Today, she was sat cross legged on a large wooden platform, built part way up some of the tallest trees in her collection. She was surrounded by a group of about twenty human children, all about seven or eight years old. Surprisingly, the children had not minded being dragged away from their Ether based learning facilities. They had thoroughly enjoyed climbing a short rope ladder up to the platform and were genuinely excited to be allowed to touch and feel samples of the plants around them.

  The children sat there, good as gold. They were keen to hear about their place in the universe from a real live expert.

  Suran welcomed the children to her den. She then told them, she thought the platform they were sitting upon was the best spot, on the whole of the Moon, from which to gaze at the heavens and think about how fragile life is.

  Like everyone else, she looked forward to the Moon becoming the spaceship Cerrina. She couldn’t wait to get a better look at other heavenly bodies, such as the planet Mars, that they would eventually be flying by.

  With open arms she said, ‘We all have our part to play in looking after the trees and plants around us. They are just as important as the bubbles we live in. In fact, these plants provide much of the oxygen we breath, the best of the food we eat, and many of our medicines.’

  ‘Now then, I have been asked by your teachers to help explain for you just where these plants have come from and what is going to happen to them. Well, it’s a fascinating story, and one that is important for everyone here to understand.’

  ‘Fortunately, it is not yet daybreak and the dome over our heads is still clear. Does anyone know what the Earth looks like?’

  A dozen hands shot up. Picking out one little boy she said, ‘Yes, Jalen isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Miss. That’s the Earth there,’ he said pointing towards a striking silver crescent shining brightly in an otherwise pitch black sky.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Suran.

  ‘It’s hard to imagine that if we had been here a billion years ago, the Earth would have looked quite different to how it does today. The atmosphere back then was clear and we would have been able to see blue oceans of salty water covering most of the planet. We believe the oceans were teaming with sea creatures, and there were areas of land completely covered in forests packed full of wild animals.’

  ‘Does anyone know what rain is?’

  Again the hands went up, and one little girl rapidly quoted the entire weather cycle of evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and collection.

  ‘Well done, that’s absolutely right - but has anyone actually seen rain?’ This time there were no hands to show.

  ‘Watch this,’ she said.

  Suran, then pressed a few buttons on the arm of her pink skin tight uniform and the entire Arboretum filled with sprays of fresh water - dripping on everything except the platform they were all sitting on. Her audience gasped.

  ‘It is our understanding,’ she said, ‘that these were the conditions that trees and plants, just like the ones you see around us, evolved and grew up in since the dawn of time. They did this on their own, without our help. But as you probably know, almost all life on Earth was destroyed by the Great Asteroid impact about a billion years ago.’

  ‘Well fortunately for us, just before that asteroid arrived, our ancestors had finally realised they were over farming and polluting the planet. Many plants and animals were already becoming extinct. So they had the foresight to take genetic samples from themselves and every other living thing. They stored the samples in deep underground vaults.’

  ‘It is from one such vault that the Elite were gradually brought back to life, and if it were not for the Elite we would not be here today. You and I are all children of the Elite.’

  Jalen put his hand up again. ‘Who brought the Elite back to life?’ he asked.

  ‘The Ether brought the Elite back to life,’ said Suran. All the children nodded knowingly. ‘The Ether has been with us for all time, it provides us with knowledge, and guides us in times of trouble. It tells the High Elite what they must do to preserve humanity. It told them the Earth was dying and when and how they must leave the Earth behind.’

  ‘Over the past thousand years, the Elite have constructed enough spaceships to create this great colony on the Moon. The trees and plants around us were all brought here as seedlings reconstituted from samples discovered in those vaults on Earth.’

  ‘Now do we all know what is happening to our Sun?’

  A girl called Quiana shouted out, ‘It’s going to get redder and redder and bigger and bigger until the Earth and the other two planets between us and the Sun are swallowed up inside it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Suran. Then she reassured everyone, ‘But not for some time yet. In fact, not for another four billion years or more. The problem is: even now, the Sun’s heat is getting stronger and stronger and we simply can’t stay where we are. That is why I am so pleased for you to be here with me now, at the most exciting time of all, because it is our job to carry these trees and plants with us to a safe distance from the swelling Sun. When we arrive at our destination, we will ride out the coming storms of radiation that the Ether has told us to expect. Eventually, billions of years from now, the Sun will shrink down to become a very much smaller but more stable white dwarf star. It is then hoped the High Elite will discover a suitable place for us to settle down, start over, plant the descendants of these very trees, grow our own crops under blue skies, and enjoy cool clear air, oceans and rain once again.’

  ‘Do you have any questions?’

  Lots of hands waived high in the air.

  ‘The little girl right at the back please.’

  ‘Is it true there is another spaceship apart from this one?’ asked the little girl.

  ‘Yes, that is true,’ said Suran. ‘It is called the Paricianne, and it is actually a starship. It’s tiny compared to Cerrina,
but it is much much faster. It will be taking a handful of people, and an archive of plant life, far far away - to another galaxy even. Think of it as a backup plan. Its passengers are heroes. They are setting off on an adventure that will take them millions of years to complete. They must be really brave. They know they will have to be frozen, put to sleep in suspended animation, for such a long time that they might not live to tell their tale. They are humankind’s last hope should the coming storms here be more severe than we expect, or if indeed our Sun were to explode.’

  The children all looked a little pale now, at the thought of the Sun exploding - the same blistering Sun that would soon be rising over the distant mountains.

  Clapping her hands, Suran shouted out, ‘Not to worry. Your very own mobile home, Cerrina, is our best hope of escaping the Sun and with children as bright as you are to look after these trees and plants, we have nothing to worry about at all.’

  ‘Who wants to play in the rain?’

  The class dissolved into chaos. Happy, giggling, screaming children climbed down the ladders, and ran around the trees playing hide and seek, chasing after each other, getting themselves thoroughly muddy and soaking wet. Climbing, running, jumping and splashing mud around was so much fun in the low gravity - not that these children would ever know anything different.

  ‘I do hope their parents remember to bring towels and a change of clothes,’ Suran thought. However, there was no cause for concern. The Ether would remind them.

  Chapter 13 – The Scavengers

  I gradually woke up, but kept my eyes closed for fear of what I might see. The possibility that the whole minefield experience had just been a dream fleetingly crossed my mind. Perhaps I was still in the revival room and I would find myself back in a stasis pod with that angel looking over me. Unfortunately, that particularly happy bubble of thought soon burst.

  I became increasingly aware of my actual surroundings. I was sat in a pool of mud, legs outstretched in front of me. Torrential rain pounded on the top of my head. It felt like I was sitting in a hot shower trying to recover from a hangover. I was bruised and breathless. My hands were tied behind my back.

  I could hear metallic bits and pieces being turned over, and thrown to one side. Someone was looking for something. It sounded like I was sat in the middle of a rubbish tip being sifted through by one of those raiding parties we had seen on our way back to Atlanton Base. I could also hear raised voices. There was a heated argument taking place not far behind me.

  I tentatively opened my eyes and immediately wished I had kept them closed. The whole scene was bathed in the dim glow of a stormy dawn, now streaked with the colours of smoked fish. Directly in front of me sat the Elite driver of our Hippo. Like me, he had his legs stretched straight out in front of him, his feet almost touching mine. He too had his hands tied behind him.

  The rain was having little difficulty in washing away a ripple of bright red blood that was running down the driver’s pure-white uniform and into the mud. It was horrifically clear he had not died from injuries sustained in the crash. He had been shot, probably at very close range, precisely through the middle of his forehead, with a medieval looking arrow. His back was propped up against one of the wheels of the vehicle he had been driving. The arrow pinned him to the massive tyre.

  Behind the driver, our Hippo had come to rest at a rakish angle, and it was half buried in mud and rubble. There were rough looking, bare chested, weather beaten human men climbing all over it. Any of the Hippo’s contents, or external fittings, that could be easily removed by brute force, now lay in a pile on the ground just in front of the broken cabin.

  Looking up, to the left and then to the right, I could see I was sat in the bottom of what looked like a steep sided quarry. There were a number of dark holes around the walls of the quarry and that gave me the feeling I was in some kind of amphitheatre.

  I twisted my head more, in order to look over my shoulder. I saw long, glistening wet, white hair and the back of a pure-white uniform. It had to be the Elite girl who had either kidnapped me, rescued me, or was about to get us both killed. I had no idea which. Her back was pressed up against mine, our tied hands were bound together.

  She must have felt me turn my head, and so she turned hers towards me and whispered, ‘You’re awake.’

  ‘Are they going to kill us?’ I asked.

  ‘Probably,’ she said.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Scavengers,’ she replied. ‘They have found a way to live in the ancient mine workings that now riddle this planet.’

  I began to reflect on what had happened to me in the past couple of hours. A flurry of questions flooded into my mind. I tried, and probably failed, to put them in a sensible order.

  ‘Wait a minute, now I remember. When you revived me, you told me the bunker’s life support systems were failing, but you can’t have been telling me the truth. I am sure I saw your driver trigger the massive explosion that blew the bunker to smithereens.’

  In hushed tones, the Elite girl protested, ‘I had nothing to do with that explosion, you have to believe me.’

  I continued my inquisition, ‘You also said my father was busy nearby. That was also a lie, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I am sorry about that but if I hadn’t said those things would you have left the bunker so quickly? Had I taken a moment longer to get you out of there, then I am sure we would have been left behind.’

  She continued, putting two and two together, ‘And if our driver really had a secret agenda to blow up that bunker, then I am certain both of us would have been killed in the explosion.’

  ‘There’s a strong chance we might never know the answer to that question,’ I professed. ‘He doesn’t look too well at the moment.’

  ‘I know,’ said the girl, and she started to cry.

  A lump came in my throat, and we both fell quiet.

  The two men who had been arguing moved closer. The one behind tried to impede their progress, but to no avail.

  A gargantuan unshaven, square jawed, brute of a man with angry penetrating eyes, now towered over us. He had thick muscular arms and legs. His enormous hairy stomach eclipsed what view of the orange sky we had. Like the other Scavengers he was wearing a sturdy necklace having a large painted stone hanging off it. He also wore a loin cloth and moccasins which were both made from what looked like segmented armour plate. Over one of his shoulders was a makeshift long bow and he had a quiver full of arrows slung over the other shoulder. Attached to his waist was an alarming array of crudely fashioned knives.

  He grabbed hold of the girl’s hair, jerking her head back. His huge knuckles knocking my head forward at the same time.

  ‘I say we kill her now,’ demanded the man. He shouted those words with such force that the rain lashing down his face turned to steam as it ran from off his lips.

  ‘There’s been enough killing already, Makhar,’ said the more restrained one. ‘We need to show the Elite that their own mission to preserve humanity should include the ability to show mercy and compassion.’

  Although similarly dressed, and not such a large build, the second man was clearly the leader of this group of Scavengers. He was the only one wearing a metal amulet on his right arm. Furthermore, several other men gathered round to support him, pointing an assortment of longbows and crossbows at Makhar.

  Tightening his grip on the girl’s hair, Makhar protested, ‘Listen to me, Woynek. At this very moment, she could be telling the whole of the Elite where to find us.’ As he spoke he flicked his eyes around the group, testing the depth of support for their leader.

  Woynek calmly continued with his voice of reason, ‘Look, the Elite won’t come after us down here. They are scared of the dark in our tunnels. They are scared of us. I’m sure I can persuade this one to give us some useful information.’

  Frustrated and embarrassed, Makhar finally realised he had not won over his peers and abruptly released his grip on the girl’s hair. Then he turned his wrath on me. ‘W
hat about this one?’ he said with venom on his tongue.

  ‘He is human. He is one of us,’ countered Woynek.

  ‘Yes, but he could be a spy,’ argued Makhar.

  Woynek smiled and finally seemed to regain control of the situation, ‘Then again, he is not dressed like a spy. He could be one of their horrific experiments. No, we need to learn more from these two. We’ll bring them with us into the tunnels while we decide what we should do with them. But if they show us the slightest sign of trouble, then you can kill them.’

  The group of men lowered their weapons, and went back to their mound of loot. They filled their arms with as much as they could carry and formed a surprisingly orderly line. Clambering over a pile of rocks, they disappeared into one of the holes I had previously noticed in the quarry wall.

  Makhar, reached between our backs and wrenched our tied hands into the air forcing us onto our feet. ‘Move,’ he commanded.

  Pressing our backs together, the girl and I started walking sideways, crab style, over the rocks, trying to catch up with the rest of the men. Every time we stumbled, Makhar was there to ‘encourage’ us back onto our feet using his fists.

  It was only slightly cooler in the tunnel, but at least we were no longer being beaten by either the rain or Makhar. The way forward was pitch black. However, every one of the Scavengers had a stick of green glowing chemicals, hung from their waist, that lit the walls of the tunnel around them.

  Another source of light was the Elite girl’s uniform. The pure-white material gave off an ice-white light easily bright enough to read by.

  We passed many side passages. Most of them looked unsafe, about to collapse. Others were supposed to be sealed with plastic sheeting, now perished and partly torn. Some were marked with dusty faded signs that read, ‘Danger - Explosion Hazard’.

  The line of men spilled out into a large chamber that provided a sort of hub with a number of tunnels leading off in all directions.

  Woynek’s voice echoed loudly around the chamber, ‘We will make camp here for a while.’