by Alex Scarrow
Sean.
She entered the kitchen, dark except for one small safety strip-light that buzzed irritatingly. She approached the phone with a sinking heart. The display showed there was only one message, with Sean’s family home number beside it. Ellie hit the ‘play’ button.
There was Sean’s voice only, no holo image.
‘I’m really sorry…really sorry Ellie. There’s no easy way of saying this so I guess I’ll just come out with it. We’ve just been contacted. The Freezer’s arrived early and they’re calling in all the Harper’s Reach recruits. I’ve got to go right now. It only stays in port for twenty-four hours…I can’t afford to miss it. Ellie, I made you a promise and now I have to break it, which makes me feel like a complete dreg-head. So, I’m going to make you a brand new one, okay? And this is it…I will come back to you at the end of the tour of duty in eight years and I promise you that I will take you anywhere you want to go: New Haven, off-world, anywhere. Okay? We’ll travel, we’ll see as much of this universe as you want. And we’ll be together. Christ…I’ll marry you. Okay? I’ve got to go now. Dad’s warming up the buggy. I’ll write when I can.’
There was a pause. Ellie could hear his panting breath, he’d obviously been running around making frantic preparations. In the background she could hear the rotor engine revving and the sound of Sean’s mother sobbing.
‘Ellie, do this one thing for me please. Don’t go to New Haven alone, okay?’
The line stayed open a few seconds more. She heard his father gunning the throttle impatiently.
‘I’ll see you around.’
And the message ended.
Ellie stared at the blinking message indicator. It was silent in the kitchen, save for the intermittent buzzing of the safety light. The kitchen smelled of curry. Mum had cooked Balusa curry cakes for her birthday party yesterday. What a pitifully sad party that had been; Mum, Dad, Ted, Shona and two of Shona’s friends from a farm nearby and, of course, Ellie herself who, it seemed, had no friends of her own to invite. She would have invited Sean, but given their plans for this morning…
The light continued to blink.
Her twentieth birthday party was marked by a bowl of punch, some curry cakes and an awkward rendition of ‘happy birthday’, after which Shona and her gang retired to her habi-cube and Ted to a corner of the courtyard to watch a cartoon. Mum and Dad dutifully hung around sipping punch and making small talk, trying their best to look like a party in full swing.
Traditionally, her next big birthday party would be twenty-one. Ellie grimly imagined how pathetic that would be too and wondered whether by then she might have managed to get to know somebody well enough to invite.
Wow…a guest of my own.
The light continued to blink like a warning beacon.
If you don’t get out now girl, you never will.
She hit the delete button on the phone. The message was gone. Sean was never going to keep that promise anyway.
*
Ellie stood beside the caterpillar. It had blown a primer six weeks ago. Dad had tried to repair it but, basically, it needed to be replaced. He had tried to find a spare primer at the trade fair but to no avail. Sand had built up over the canvas sheeting that covered it. She lifted one corner of the cover and shook enough of it free to throw it back, exposing the driver’s side hatch.
She looked again at the time. Twenty minutes had passed since she’d last checked. The deep purple of the night sky was lightening quickly, heralding the arrival of the sun over the horizon. Ted must surely be stirring by now, she thought.
Ellie opened the hatch and climbed inside. She was looking for two things. She found the first one in the emergency box. It was an oxy-filter. It had a battery pack that lasted about twenty hours and recycled oxygen as long as the power lasted. The other thing she was looking for was the navset; a small box that gave global positioning co-ordinates and also functioned as an emergency beacon. She found this in the passenger-seat storage compartment. She flicked it on. It worked, but the battery indicator was requesting a charge. It would probably be okay for the short period of time she would need it to be on she thought. She slid the navset into her bag and slung the oxy-filter over her shoulder. Ellie planned to use Shona’s O2 cylinder until it was empty before switching to the filter.
She climbed back out of the caterpillar, pulled the canvas cover back down and started up towards the overlook.
At the top she looked briefly back down at the farm. ‘I’ll see you around.’
Ellie faced south and for the first time considered the dusty rocky world ahead. It sloped down from the overlook and evened out. In front of her lay an almost infinite plain of dust and clay, punctuated by the occasional cluster of weatherworn rocks, like islands in an ocean of rustred, that cast long streaky shadows as the sun breached the horizon.
‘My god, this is so-o-o-o-o stupid.’
She took her first step down the far-side slope.
CHAPTER 10
Aaron Goodman travelled alone.
It had taken him fifteen years of working for Oxxon as a driver to save up the money to buy his lovely, beautiful baby, Lisa. Of course, to anyone else Lisa appeared to be a shabby-looking, thirty-year old transport tug. To Aaron, it was a home as well as head office for Goodman Haulage Inc. It represented fifteen years of hard work and frugal living and was a monument to the single-mindedness and sheer determination of Aaron Goodman to work wholly for himself, and entirely by himself.
To be fair, Lisa did look a little threadbare and shabby, but she was a firmly built working ship with a well-maintained propulsion system. Quietly, he liked the fact that her hull was scoured clean of paint through years of exposure to wind-borne sand, that her once smooth and eye-pleasing contours were dented and spoiled through countless minor bumps and prangs with other working ships or docking clamps. The dull brown, pitted hull told any onlooker that she was a working vessel, that she had probably seen considerably more of this world than most other vessels her age - which, quite frankly, was a sad comment on the pioneering spirit of most of the moronic slobs that lived on Harpers Reach.
Colonists were not the same these days, he noted ruefully. Once upon a time they were the kind of people who would happily endure the hardships of frontier life. They were the pack-horse, the mule, the beast of burden of the terraforming process, only content with their lives when stoically enduring some form of physical discomfort or inconvenience. Once upon a time the Crazy People, the Mom-and-Pop teams of geologists, the frontier-professionals, real Colonists, would make it their mission to seek out the most extreme hardship Human Space could offer and then relish every moment of it. And it was crazies like those that turned a barren inhospitable lump of sulphurous rock into a world that comfortably supported human life.
Real colonists.
These days the unwashed masses, those brain-flatlined ditto-heads who presumptuously referred to themselves as ‘colonists’ were perfectly content to crowd themselves into the nearest domed city they could find on arrival. There, they were happy to live out their pointless, unadventurous lives eating junk food and watching the toob, certainly not daring to set a foot beyond the environmentally-sealed comfort and convenience of their newly discovered plastic dome-home. Not for them the hardy living within the cramped space of a caterpillar or shuttle, or the danger that comes with exploring the uncharted continents of a new world. No way. These pasty-faced, convenience-fed, brain-dead, ditto-heads were quite content to enjoy the homogenous pleasures of yet another enclosed over-crowded conurbation and leave the real work of building a new world to the likes of grubby looking veterans like Aaron Goodman.
He had spent a good chunk of his working life shipping supplies and spare parts into the Oxxon oxygen refineries in the north. The refineries required a permanent on-site team of engineers to monitor and maintain the enormous generators there. All-in-all, there were ninety-seven people, including the non-technical support staff, living up north in the austere living q
uarters built by the company over one hundred and fifty years ago. Although the living quarters, service buildings and the machinery that powered the oxygen refineries were built to last such periods of time, inevitably, now towards the latter end of their intended functional lifespan the rate of component failure for these structures was quite high. The constant maintenance and repair tasks carried out by the engineering team over time were being gradually down-graded to temporary ‘fix-its’.
It was a running joke amongst the maintenance engineers that when the refineries were finally mothballed, they would probably find the whole thing was held together with tape and string.
Everything those folks needed for a tolerably comfortable life needed to be shipped in. Aaron had once upon a time been employed as a delivery driver for Oxxon. Now he worked freelance for them, and the shuttle that was once theirs, he had bought for a song - all part of the inevitable downsizing as the refinery approached the end of its useful life. Where once there was a large team of drivers ferrying supplies up north, now it was just Aaron and his weather-beaten shuttle.
Lisa was a hundred and fifty foot long, low-altitude, transport shuttle. Her top speed was five hundred and twenty miles per hour, but her most economic speed was just over two hundred miles per hour. Aaron flew her low, very low. He did that to catch the densest strata of atmosphere, riding the top of it like a cushion, making the most of the free buoyancy. It gave him the most uplift for the least fuel burn. Generally speaking, when he needed to sleep he let the autopilot fly her at an altitude of two or three hundred feet, to be safe. If he was at the helm he would skim her sometimes as low as fifty feet off the ground.
A trip up to the Oxxon refineries usually took five days going up and four days coming back down to New Haven. Every now and then Aaron would delay the return trip a day or so. He loved the arctic terrain, the unspoiled sheets of ice and snow up north. It was, he reckoned, the only beautiful wilderness on the entire planet and one day it would all be gone as the atmosphere thickened, the world retained more of its heat and it melted away. It was a pretty depressing prospect to him that the only truly beautiful place on this ugly mud ball planet would be sacrificed to produce a breathable atmosphere so that hordes of miserable, so-called ‘colonists’ could spill out of New Haven and fill it up with their unimaginative and ugly homes.
And when that finally happened Aaron Goodman would go and take his haulage business to some new frontier world and enjoy another beautiful and remote wilderness waiting to be terraformed to death.
Sometimes he would take his shuttle a few hours further north of the refineries until he could see them no more and then set her down on the virgin snow. Often he camped out over night in the open, nothing but a heated therma-bag to sleep in and a flask of coffee for company. There was no need for an O2 mask or a small, sealed one man dome-tent, up here. The atmosphere was oxygen-rich. He would study the crisp night sky, and pretend he was some ancient Old Earth explorer marking time on a drifting iceberg in the frozen seas of Earth’s South Pole.
*
Okay, yes…I’m beginning to panic.
The plan had been to walk for a couple of hours, then flag the first low altitude craft she saw with her navset. Ellie figured she could hash together some vague story about crashing a dune buggy and seeking help on foot. The crew that picked her up might be conscientious enough to try and locate it with her pointing the way, but of course they would never find the wreckage and then of course they would be obliged to drop her off at their destination.
Hopefully New Haven.
She had been walking in a southerly direction for nearly eighteen hours now and had not seen a single craft. She was beginning to wonder whether she had drifted off course and was heading away from New Haven and thus away from the converging routes used by the various transport craft that crisscrossed the planet. Add to that she’d consumed most of the water she had brought with her and the recycler was only going to give her another two to three hours of breathable air.
To be honest, it was looking a little bit like she was going to die.
Great.
Ellie was going to die out here in the middle of nowhere and no-one was ever going to find her body. The message she had left behind at home unambiguously announced that she had run away to New Haven and would get in touch again when she was settled. Mum and Dad would be worried, and they might even be able to bribe the over-worked and undermanned and generally disinterested police force in New Haven to put out a missing person bulletin for her. But of course they would be looking in the city instead of out here in the middle of nowhere where her bones would slowly bleach in the sun and eventually be covered by sand.
Maybe some archaeologist in the distant future might discover her, but Mum and Dad sure as hell would not.
She slumped to her knees and started to whimper.
‘Stupid girl. You and your stupid dream. You’ve killed yourself, that’s what you’ve done.’
She pulled Jonny out of the bag and held him to her face. She closed her eyes and rocked gently. It was all over, before it had even fregging well got started. Tears of anger and frustration streamed down her face and she lay down on the ground hugging the stuffed dog.
‘A loser’s death, you’re a stupid loser,’ she muttered to herself.
Half an hour passed and Ellie allowed herself to drift off to sleep. She figured it might be less distressing if her recycler were to run out of power whilst she was asleep. To die that way had to be better than struggling consciously with every breath and experiencing the muscular spasms of oxygen starvation.
There was a distant rumble.
Her face jerked upwards. Her eyes opened and darted left and right desperately seeking the source of the noise. She saw it, the subtle glimmer of a thrust jet; a space-faring vessel entering orbit. It was a long way out, maybe too far to pick up the signal. But it was the only thing she had seen all day. Ellie decided to switch on the navset beacon for a few seconds.
It started to blink silently.
For a full two minutes she watched the space vessel as it slowly traced a line across the sky. She knew enough to know that if it could have received the signal the onboard navigational system would have already noted it and logged the co-ordinates. She turned off the navset to conserve its batteries. If the signal had been detected then there was a fair chance the ship might detour and investigate or dispatch a smaller surface ship to go and take a look.
Never underestimate the pulling power of salvage rights. That was something Dad had once said whilst he’d been checking the navset’s power supply.
*
A light blinked on his navigation dash. Aaron looked down at it, it was an emergency beacon. The signal only lasted a minute or so, but it was enough time for him to register the point of origin. He adjusted course slightly, it was only fifteen miles north-east - the distances he was used to travelling, that wasn’t exactly out of his way. And anyway, legislation on New Haven still permitted the universally accepted forty percent salvage law. Aaron rubbed his rough hands together and smiled.
‘Bonus time.’
He swung the shuttle round to a north-easterly course. The terrain ahead was as flat as a table top, sun baked clay with scattered rocks as far as the eye could see. Aaron was cruising at fifty feet. He decided to bring her up to get a better view of the area ahead. He could be looking for anything, something as small as a crashed or broken down personal transport to a shuttle the same size as his. He pulled back on the yoke and the rust-colored ground beneath quickly fell away. The altitude display showed one hundred and eighty feet. That was enough. He leveled off and started to scan for an early visual; a distant column of smoke; an impact scorch trail. Something. He checked the logged co-ordinates of the beacon, it was just over ten miles away.
*
Ellie watched in disbelief as the orbital freighter continued across to the southern horizon’s darkening sky and flickered momentarily as it finally exited the planet’s upper atmosph
ere.
‘What about me?’ she muttered indignantly.
A wind was beginning to pick up and she shuddered. The nights could get very cold out in the open. Very cold. Once again she reminded herself what a sad specimen she was for not preparing properly and bringing something more substantial than the clothes she had thrown on this morning.
Then a small light on the recycler’s battery pack winked on.
‘Oh..great.’
It was the low charge warning. She wondered how much stored power was left. Another half hour, or another minute? She decided to try her luck with the air. The wind was cold, it could be an oxygen pocket. She tentatively pulled the mask away from her face and took several deep breaths. A minute passed before she began to feel dizzy and nauseous and hurriedly pulled the mask back on. She frantically scanned the sky and the horizon.
Nothing.
She pulled out the navset again. This time she was not quite so worried about its battery life, the way things were going it would probably outlive her. She turned it on and set it down on the ground beside her. She lay down in the dust and turned her head to face the little black box. Its one green blinking light was a strange comfort in the gathering darkness.
The sun was breaching the horizon, swiftly on its way down and out of sight. Ellie watched as the amber circle undulated and rippled like a slick of oil on water as it descended from view. Over the space of five minutes the peach after-glow it left faded and the golden ribbon emerged like the king of the night sky, and one by one, like loyal subjects, the stars followed it.
Ellie thought of Sean. He’d probably be in New Haven right now, boarding a shuttle to take him to the huge mother-ship in orbit. What a fantastic experience that was going to be for him. To see through a viewing bay, your whole world and everything you have ever known and to watch it gradually recede and become simply a glowing disc, eventually a mere pin-prick.
At least one of them had escaped the gravitational pull of Harpers Reach. ‘Lucky you, Sean…you did it.’ There was surprisingly no bitterness in that. She was genuinely pleased for him.
