Earth and Fire (12 page)

I was already
turning, coming round, watching the main display rather than trying to see
where I was through the drifting smoke. I lined myself up for the approach,
glanced ahead, and saw an area without flames. I came in low over it, slowed to
stalling point, and engaged hovers. Gradin wasn’t saying anything, which I
hoped meant I was in the right place. A gust of wind caught the plane, and I
fought to keep it still. Chaos, what was happening? I didn’t dare to take my
eyes off my control panel.

“Nuke it, we’ve
missed her,” said Gradin. “Climb for height, and bank right. We’ll let London
drop water and then try again.”

I hit the
thrusters, and banked right, losing all sense of direction as I flew through
smoke. As I came out of it, I caught a glimpse of another aircraft. That had to
be London, so I turned to follow it and saw its trail of water rain down on the
fire.

“Here we go
again,” said Gradin. “Last time I lowered scoops to maximum but they were still
too high. I need you to go a bit lower this time.”

Lower? If I went
any lower than last time, I’d be underground! I held my breath as I lined up
for my target, lost height, and did the balancing act between thrusters and
hovers again. How close was I getting to the flames? If they so much as touched
a wingtip …

A voice screamed
on broadcast channel. “In!”

“Up!” Gradin’s
shout came a split second later.

I hit the thrusters
and pulled back on the stick, climbing hard. Had we got the Paris Coeur pilot
or not? The plane didn’t feel sluggish, but a pilot would weigh much less than
a full load of water.

“This is New
York. Paris Coeur, how are you?” Gradin asked on Air Control channel.

“This is Paris
Coeur. You’ve got my right leg trapped in the scoop jaws, but my suit’s
triggered to protect me. Suit seems to have survived the fire but my hover
tunic is just cinders.”

“This is Air
Control. Paris Coeur, telemetry from your suit is green except for your right
leg which shows solid amber.”

“This is New
York. Breaking circuit and heading for Athens.”

I heard Gradin’s
words and turned for Athens. We’d picked up the pilot, but now a new problem
occurred to me. How did we get her down? We couldn’t just drop her over Athens
without a working hover tunic. We couldn’t land with scoops out. If we dropped her
in the sea, her heavy impact suit would sink like a stone, so …?

I didn’t need to
ask the question because Gradin was still talking on Air Control channel. “Paris
Coeur’s suit has been through a lot of heat and two triggers in fast succession.
It may not survive the stress from the scoop jaws for too long, so I suggest we
use a mobile dome instead of waiting for people to set up foam.”

We were going to
use a mobile dome? To do what exactly?

“This is Paris
Coeur. Sounds good to me.”

“This is Air
Control. We have some mobile domes set up as sleeping quarters. The one to the
west is clear of other buildings, so we’re evacuating that for you.”

Gradin swapped
from Air Control to our private channel. “Jarra, you see the western mobile
dome, the one on its own?”

I could see a
huddle of three small, grey flexiplas domes, but not one on its own. I started
to say so, then spotted the solo dome beyond them. Several figures were running
clear of it. “Yes, I see it.”

“We’re going to
use that as a nice soft landing area for the Paris Coeur pilot. She’ll bounce
on the thin flexiplas roof and slide off to the ground. Start losing height now.”

Would this
really work? Everyone seemed convinced it would but … I shook my head, dipped
the nose of the plane, and turned to line up with the mobile dome.

“A bit lower,”
said Gradin. “That’s it, now keep your height and speed constant for me.”

I was
concentrating so hard on staying level, that I didn’t see the movement of
Gradin’s hand as he opened the scoops, or realize the slight lurch of the plane
was us losing the weight of the pilot. I just heard the voice on Air Control
channel.

“This is Paris
Coeur. Safely down, thank you everyone. Anyone got a spare fire plane I could
borrow?”

Two days later, I was standing among
a crowd of strangers in impact suits. Hoods down, faces lifted to the sky, we
were laughing, glorying in the pouring rain. The hot dry weather had broken at
last, and nature had casually extinguished the fire we’d been fighting for what
seemed like an eternity.

I felt someone
tap my arm and turned to see Gradin, his sandy hair drenched with water and
clinging tightly to his head.

“Jarra, it’ll be
mayhem here for days with all the people and equipment that need to be
portalled back home. Rather than hang around fighting for a spot in the freight
portal queue, Alice is going to fly Immy back home.”

After days of
hearing Air Control refer to pilots using the names of their dig sites, it had
been strange to meet the real people and learn their actual names. Alice was the
professional pilot at London Main, and Immy was Paris Coeur. Immy had thanked
us for rescuing her, while I stood there like a nardle in awed silence. When I
thought how she’d fallen into the heart of a fire, been rescued, and insisted
on going straight back to fire fighting in a borrowed plane … Well, respect!

“I thought I’d
fly to Paris Coeur as well,” continued Gradin. “I can indulge my ego with a bit
more gratitude from Immy, and then use Paris Coeur’s freight link to get my
plane back to New York.”

I frowned at him
and he grinned back at me. “I warned you what I’m like, Jarra. You may have been
embarrassed when Immy thanked us, but I adore that sort of thing. Everyone
knows if I heroically save someone, they have to spend hours fulsomely thanking
me and telling me how wonderful I am. The last person I rescued said he’d
rather die than suffer it again.”

I couldn’t help
giggling.

“I’ll take a bit
of a detour on my way to Paris Coeur,” continued Gradin, “and drop you off at
your Next Step, but only if you stop the giggling. Come on!”

I chased after
Gradin as he dodged his way out of the crowd. Over on the landing area, one
fire plane was just taking off, while a row of others were parked neatly to one
side. We went across to the New York plane and climbed in.

“I think I’ll
set up the course to your Next Step and you can do the flying as one of your
mandatory cross-country training flights,” said Gradin. “I’ve done more than
enough work lately.”

I looked out at
the water bucketing down from the sky. “What about the rain?”

“What about it?
Were you planning to only fly in dry weather?”

Air Control
channel had shut down, so I called the ordinary broadcast channel to get
permission to launch. A man’s voice replied.

“This is Dig
Site Command. New York fire plane, please wait two more minutes before
launching to allow London fire plane to clear Athens air space.”

I shook my head
in disbelief. “They had ten planes up there fighting the fire, but now we can
only have one at a time?”

Gradin laughed.
“The rules say they have to have an Air Control channel running if they have
more than one plane in their air space, and they don’t want to make the effort
for the sake of a couple of minutes. Once we’re clear of Athens, we’ll need to
talk to Europe Air Control. I’ll do that, but you listen closely. Their
protocols are nothing like those of a dig site.”

We waited the
two minutes and then took off, flying north-west towards my Next Step. The
pouring rain made visibility bad, but it was no worse than flying through
smoke. After about twenty minutes, the rain eased and then stopped entirely. I
relaxed and enjoyed the novelty of flying over peaceful countryside.

“I’m not sure
the Principal of my Next Step will approve of me landing a plane in the grounds,”
I said.

“Chaos take your
Principal,” said Gradin. “You can land a plane wherever you like. You’re one of
the thousand now, Jarra.”

“I always have
been,” I said bitterly.

“Pay attention,”
said Gradin. “I didn’t say one
in a
thousand, but one
of the
thousand. I’m not talking about you being Handicapped, but about you being a
pilot. Less than a thousand people on Earth can fly a plane. You’re one of them
now. There’s still the technicality of you getting your licence, we’ll sort that
out this summer, but you’ve already proved to me you’re a pilot.”

Jubilation hit
me, sweeping away the bitterness. I’d helped save Athens, and this summer I’d
get my pilot’s licence.

There was a
glitter in the distance now, which had to be the flicker force fence around our
destination settlement. I watched it drift closer, flew over it, and banked
round above the rows of small homes and the shopping square, heading for the huge
dome of my Next Step. It was early evening, and I could see a few figures sitting
outside on the lawn.

I circled,
losing height, and a lot more people came running out of the main door and
stood on the lawn staring upwards. I frowned and circled again, considering
whether I should call Issette and ask her to move people off the lawn so I
could land, but they must have worked out what was happening because they all suddenly
backed off towards the dome wall.

“Please, Gradin,
don’t let me crash this time,” I said. “I don’t want to look an idiot in front
of my friends.”

He laughed. “I
won’t let you crash.”

I came into
land, frantically concentrating on the transition to hovers. Once the plane was
safely on the grass, I double checked both thrusters and hovers were shut down,
then let out a sigh of relief. I unsealed my hood, opened the cockpit, and saw my
friends running towards me.

“Hoo eee!” I
yelled at them as I climbed out.

“Jarra, Jarra,
Jarra!” Issette grabbed me and hugged me, before recoiling and holding her nose.
“You stink of smoke!”

“What the chaos
are you wearing?” asked Vina. “It looks dreadful.”

“This is an
impact suit, and it’s designed to keep you alive, not to look decorative.” I glanced
round for Cathan, planning to tease him about impact suits, but couldn’t see
him.

Gradin stuck his
head out of the cockpit. “Jarra, can you get that mob out of my way? This place
is bringing back horrible memories of when I was imprisoned in Next Step as a
kid, so I want to head on to Paris Coeur.”

I turned to face
the crowd. “Everyone move back near the dome please. The pilot wants to take
off.”

I moved out of
the way with the rest of them, and saw the Principal was standing by the main
door of Next Step, staring at the plane with a grazzed expression. I imagined
what a conversation between her and Gradin would be like and grinned.

Keon strolled up
at a leisurely pace and shook his head at me. “I give up, Jarra. I can see the
appeal, I really can, but I’m far too lazy and cowardly to give it a try.”

I watched the
plane take off. It soared upwards into the sky, banked to head in the direction
of Paris Coeur, and grew smaller and smaller until it was a distant dot. I
finally turned to look at Keon.

“Sorry, what did
you say just then? Were you thinking of learning to fly yourself?”

“Me? Fly?” Keon
laughed. “No, I was thinking of something very different, but it isn’t
important now.”

Issette
reappeared, waving her lookup. “I’ve got a vid of the landing, and a vid of the
take off, and a vid of the Principal’s face as well!”

I instinctively turned
to look at the Principal, and saw her give me her frostiest glare. “Jarra
Reeath, I want a word with you. Everyone else, go inside now, it’s time for
dinner.”

“If she
complains about you landing a plane here,” said Keon, “then ask her to point
out the section in the rules and regulations for Hospital Earth residences that
says you can’t land a plane on the lawn.”

Issette and I
giggled. It was a moment of pure triumph. I didn’t care how much the Principal
lectured me. I was one of less than a thousand people on Earth who could fly a
plane. I’d been part of the effort that saved Athens. I’d helped do something
that truly mattered, not just to people alive today but to all the future
generations of people who loved history.

Then I saw the
crowd heading inside Next Step were stopping and turning their heads. I
automatically turned as well, and saw two people had arrived through the public
portal at the edge of the lawn and were walking towards us. One of them was
Cathan. The other was a total stranger, an elderly man in formal clothes, who
looked chaos angry about something.

My mood
instantly sobered. I didn’t know what he’d done, but it looked as if Cathan was
in deep trouble.

The Principal recognized the warning
signs just as fast as the rest of us, and hurried down the steps to meet the
new arrivals. “I’m the Principal of this Next Step. Can I help you with …?”

She didn’t
manage to finish the sentence before the elderly man started talking in an
aggressive voice. “It’s completely outrageous. A prestigious interstellar medical
conference disrupted by this … this throwback boy.”

The Principal
gave him her best professional smile. “It would help me if you introduced
yourself.”

The man sighed
impatiently. “I’m Professor Reece of University Adonis. Head of the organizing committee
of the Alpha Sector Congress on Regrowth Techniques.”

“Thank you,
Professor.” The Principal turned to Cathan. “What have you been doing, Cathan?”

Cathan opened
his mouth to speak, but Professor Reece was already answering the question for
him. “He marched into our conference, interrupted a presentation by our guest
of honour, and shouted insults at him!”

“I didn’t shout
insults,” said Cathan. “I called your guest of honour my father, because he
is
my father! I tried contacting my parents when I was 14, and they didn’t want to
know me, but I’ve been following all the public information about them on the Earth
data net. My father goes to lots of medical conferences. They’ve always been on
Alpha sector worlds before, but this one was being held on Earth so it could
include a demonstration of the new regrowth tank being developed here. I had to
grab what could be my only chance to meet my father.”

The Principal shook
her head. “Cathan, your psychologist must have explained it’s better if you
just accept a parental rejection.”

“Just accepting
it may be better for my parents,” said Cathan, “but I don’t see that it’s
better for me, so I sneaked into the conference building. My father may have
pretended I was lying about being his son, but at least I forced him to meet me
face to face.”

I blinked. Now I
knew why Cathan had needed that door access code! I was quite impressed by what
he’d done, but Professor Reece clearly didn’t share my opinion. First he glared
at Cathan, and then at the Principal.

“This boy is obviously
totally delusional. An eminent medical researcher couldn’t possibly have a
throwback child.”

He took out his
lookup. “I’m calling the police to register charges against this boy for
trespass and slander. I’ll also make a complaint to Hospital Earth about the
incompetent way you’re running this institution. You’re given ridiculously
generous funding to care for these ape children, they’ve even got their own
schools and University Earth to educate them as much as their limited
capabilities allow. There’s absolutely no excuse for letting them run round out
of control like this, annoying real people.”

The Principal
gave him her coldest stare. “You don’t seem to realize that I’m Handicapped
myself.”

He gave her a
startled look, and then flushed red. “Well, that explains everything. If you’re
Handicapped, you can’t be expected to run things properly.”

The Principal
spoke to him in a cuttingly polite voice. “Should you press charges against
Cathan for trespass and slander, a Hospital Earth Child Advocate will have to present
Cathan’s parental records as evidence in his defence. Your guest of honour will
be furious about those being made public, and the resulting newzie reports will
totally destroy the reputation of your conference, but if that’s what you want …”

I saw the man’s
expression change to uncertainty. He tried to say something, but the Principal
hadn’t finished with him yet.

“Should you
register a complaint against me with Hospital Earth, I will naturally make a statement
in my own defence. This will detail how you trespassed on the property of a
private Hospital Earth residence and shouted offensive terms for the
Handicapped at its Principal.”

She glanced
round at the rest of us. “I can see at least three of the young people in my
care have been making vids of this incident. I shall include those as evidence.
I warn you that may result in you facing abusive conduct charges. You now have
thirty seconds to leave.”

The man
hesitated, then turned and stalked off back to the portal. We watched him dial
a code and vanish, then everyone cheered wildly.

“Totally zan!”
screamed one of the Fifteens.

I swear I saw a
genuine smile on the Principal’s face.

“I want to speak
to all the Seventeens now,” she said. “Everyone else should go in to dinner.”

The others
reluctantly obeyed, leaving the nine of us nervously facing the Principal. She
frowned at us for a moment before speaking.

“I know the last
year in Next Step can be a very frustrating time, and I understand you bending
the rules a little, but you’re pushing things much too far and it has to stop
right now.”

She glanced at
me. “Jarra’s fire fighting was, in my opinion, recklessly dangerous, but she had
Hospital Earth approval for it and appears to have escaped uninjured. I’m far
more worried about breaches of Hospital Earth rules, because they can lead to
you being transferred to Correctional. I’ve been doing my best to protect all
of you from that. I classified Cathan’s images as merely improper rather than
blatantly indecent to avoid a Hospital Earth Inspector being involved, but there’s
a limit to what I can cover up, and publicly confronting his father …”

She sighed. “I deeply
sympathize with your feelings, Cathan, but you mustn’t attempt to contact your parents
again. I frightened that man with the threat of publicity, so I don’t think either
he or your father will complain to Hospital Earth, but if they do you’ll be in
severe trouble. The truth is the main board of Hospital Earth are all norms,
appointed by the sectors, and they won’t want a scandal about one of their
wards disrupting a high-status Alpha sector medical conference. They won’t
appoint an advocate to defend you, just hush the whole thing up by sending you
straight to Correctional.”

“They can’t do
that,” said Cathan. “I have legal rights.”

The Principal
shook her head. “Hospital Earth can do anything they like. You’re their ward
and they have absolute authority over you. Even when you’re adult, the
situation won’t be much better, because the main board of Hospital Earth run
this planet and make its laws. That’s totally unjust, but it’s the way things
have been for hundreds of years and we have to accept it.”

She paused to
look round at us. “All of you have been acting extremely foolishly. I couldn’t
totally ignore Maeth and Ross’s behaviour because of the repeated damage to the
room sensors and wall vid in Commons, but so far I’ve managed to keep the
crucial issue of inappropriate intimacy off their records. Jarra and Issette
went to Europe Off-world, which …”

I gasped. “How
did you find out about that? The guard didn’t catch us.”

“He didn’t need
to catch you,” said the Principal. “He just needed to get close enough to scan
your genetic code. He reported the pair of you as being unauthorized intruders,
but fortunately the Europe Off-world security staff supervisor who dealt with
that report was Handicapped. She chose to call me informally about your
trespassing rather than put details on your official records.”

I remembered the
way the security guard had suddenly stopped chasing us. At the time, I’d
thought he was too tired to keep running after us, but he’d actually scanned us
and got all the information he needed.

“Vina has been
harassing her ex-boyfriend’s family,” continued the Principal, “and Ayden and Selia
have been experimenting with forbidden substances.”

They had? How
did the Principal know that, when I didn’t? Had she found something when she
was checking their rooms?

The Principal
turned to look at Keon. “I’ve no definite proof that Keon’s done anything wrong,
but I’m fully aware that he’s bright enough to have done a dozen illegal things
without being caught. Eventually, though, he’ll make a mistake.”

She shook her
head. “All of you must stop taking these silly risks. It may only be six months
until next Year Day, but that can feel like an eternity when you’re locked up
in Correctional. The therapy sessions aren’t so bad, but there’s the authorized
punishment regime, not to mention what goes on that
isn’t
authorized. I
know exactly how bad it is, because I went through Nursery, Home and Next Step
just like you, finishing with a nightmare seven months in a girls’
Correctional. That was nearly twenty years ago, but Correctionals aren’t any
better now, so think about what I’ve told you and be more sensible in future.”

She turned away
and went indoors, leaving us to exchange silent grazzed glances. We’d thought
the Principal was our enemy, but she wasn’t. She was Handicapped like us, she’d
been locked up in a Correctional herself once, and she’d been trying to protect
us from suffering the same thing.

Finally, we got
over the shock enough to follow her indoors. The others went into Commons for
dinner, but I went to my room, stripped off the heavy impact suit, and went
into the shower to wash away the sweat and smell of smoke.

As the warm
water poured over me, I was thinking about the way a bunch of off-worlders ran
our planet and decided our laws. Thinking about the society that dismissed us
as less than second-class citizens. Thinking of how Professor Reece had stood in
front of us, on the lawn of our own Next Step, talking about apes and their
limited capabilities as if we weren’t really human.

Things had been
this way for hundreds of years, and the Principal said we had to accept it, but
I didn’t agree. I hadn’t just accepted a forest fire destroying Athens, I’d
joined the others fighting to stop it, and I wanted to fight this too.

One day, I’d do
that. One day, I’d find a way to tell Reece, and all the norms like him, what it
was like to be born one of the Handicapped and live with injustice and anger. One
day, I’d prove I wasn’t just as good as the norms, I was better!

Thank you for reading Earth and
Fire. Jarra is the main character in the Earth Girl trilogy – Earth Girl, Earth
Star, and Earth Flight. I also have plans for further novellas featuring her.
You can make sure you don’t miss these and other future books by signing up to
get
new release updates
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Best wishes
from Janet Edwards