Ellie Quin Book 01: The Legend of Ellie Quin (12 page)

‘Ow!’ she yelped stunned and upset by the impact. Her face wrinkled with hurt and indignation. ‘Why did you go and do that?’

‘Snowball fight? Remember I mentioned that?’ he answered defensively. ‘That’s what you do…you pat snow into balls and you throw them at each other.’

Ellie looked down at the snow, confused. ‘Why?’

‘It’s a game,’ he added to be sure she understood.

‘Oh, I see. All right.’ She reached down and grabbed a handful and molded it into a ball and then threw it gingerly towards him. It disintegrated mid-air and merely sprayed Aaron with a fine dusting of snow.

‘Useless!’ he laughed. ‘You gotta’ pack it tight, so it lasts the flight.’

Ellie scooped up another handful and squeezed it hard, the snow fusing into hard ice between her hands. She squared up before Aaron. ‘Right then, I’m armed and dangerous.’

‘Oh I’m so-o-o scared,’ he quivered.

The ice-ball thudded against the right side of his head and he felt his ear throb with pain. ‘Okay, I think you got the idea there.’

They spent a good hour skirmishing in and around the shuttle’s landing gear, and despite the intense exertion neither of them once felt the need to draw a breath from their masks. Later on, when Aaron found he barely had the strength to stand let alone duck and dodge, he showed Ellie how a single small snowball could be rolled along the ground to quickly produce a much larger snow-boulder. Both of them were soon grunting and straining, rolling a misshapen ball four feet in diameter.

As the last light of day faded from the sky and the golden sash and the stars gradually appeared above, they put the finishing touches on a crudely constructed snowman.

‘There you go,’ he said proudly. ‘Let’s call him George.’

Ellie nodded and examined their work. ‘Not bad. Doesn’t look much like a man though.’

‘I wonder how many more of these will be made before it’s all gone.’

Ellie looked at him. ‘It’s really going to melt?
All
of it?’

‘Yup. The denser atmosphere will trap the solar heat on the surface. Harpers Reach is going to become a much warmer planet before they’re done up here,’ he said gesturing northwards towards the refineries.

‘Shame.’

‘That’s the way it is, Ellie. You can’t stop it happening, all you can do is make sure you get out there and see the wilderness and enjoy it before the rabble arrive.’

‘Instead of doing what I’m doing? Heading for New Haven?’

Aaron shrugged. ‘If that’s what you still want to do. But why don’t you set your sights higher? See if you can find a way off this fregging planet, go and find some world that’s just been colonized, eh? Another wilderness.’

Ellie nodded. ‘I’d like to do that some day.’

‘Good,’ he replied, ‘I’d hate to see that crappy city swallow you up forever. Come on then girl, we better start south. Time is money.’

As they headed back up the ramp, Ellie turned around in the doorway of the freight hold to survey the pristine white landscape one last time.

Beautiful.

CHAPTER 16

The next days passed far too quickly for Ellie. She had grown, if not comfortable, then at least accustomed to, the simple routine aboard
Lisa
. As they drew nearer to New Haven she became agitated. The city felt like it might be a daunting experience for her after the stuffy, womb-like security of Aaron’s shuttle.

Ellie decided to contact Mum and Dad as soon as she arrived at the city, just to reassure them that no harm had come to her. By now, she guessed, they might have suspected she had eloped with Sean and contacted his family. In turn, his father might have been able to get a message through to him on the army freight ship and he undoubtedly would have come clean and told them that she had been intent on getting to the city. She wondered if Sean was already in a cryogen sleep and the Freezer on its way to the next planet. If so, then there would be no way they could contact him for quite some time to find out what he knew of Ellie’s plans. Whatever information her parents had by now, she knew they would be utterly desperate with worry.

She cried quietly for a while, well away from Aaron. She knew he would see those tears as a sign that she was having second thoughts about going into the city and decide that enough was enough and take her home regardless. She was crying for Mum and Dad, for the pain she had caused them over the last few days; the pain she was causing them even now, and would continue to cause them until they received that call from her and found out she was alright.

I’m so sorry Dad, Mum.

She was going to call as soon as she could.

As soon as they landed.

*

Towards late afternoon on the fourth day heading south, Aaron had grown sullen and quiet. Ellie in turn felt nervous. They were due to arrive at New Haven that evening, only a few hours away. As the city drew nearer she felt her ambitious resolve to enter the city on her own weaken, ever so slightly.

Aaron pointed out of the window to his left. ‘Colonial plot 452? That’s where your home is?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s just a few hours in that direction. You sure you don’t want me to detour? It’s not that far out of my way.’

Ellie bit her lip, a small part of her, growing by the minute, wanted to say
yes
.

‘No,’ she answered quietly.

He shrugged. Ellie had shown him her citizenship papers and education certificates the day after she’d woken up. She
was
twenty, and was, according to the laws of Harpers Reach, no longer a minor. ‘I guess I can’t force you then. Although I’m sure you know what I think about all this,’ he said reproachfully.

‘I know.’

The pair of them sat in silence as the shuttle rumbled onwards.

‘Listen, when we get there, I’ll let you sleep here, in the shuttle, tonight. But I’m heading out tomorrow with another delivery.’

‘How long will that one take?’

‘It’s several runs between Harvest City and the Oxxon refineries. Probably three weeks in total.’

She felt a shudder of anxiety ripple through her.
Three weeks…on my own.
She had been hoping he would be around whilst she attempted to settle into the city somewhere, perhaps even had an apartment that he kept that she could rent from him until she found her own place.

‘Uh…right.’

‘We’ll only be able to set down in the short-stay loading zone of the port. That’s outside the city limits.’

‘Is that outside the dome?’

‘Yeah. You’ll need to go through Processing before they let you inside.’

‘Processing?’

Aaron turned to face her. ‘Their immigration procedure; you’ll be given a medical, they’ll want to see your papers and they’ll want to take a gene-swab. It’s a complete pain in the ass and it’ll probably take you a few hours.’

‘Can you go with me?’ she asked.

‘Sorry, I can’t. It’s for first-time arrivals only,’ he replied. ‘You sure you still want to go into New Haven?’

Ellie nodded uncertainly. ‘I can’t turn back now,’ she added weakly.

‘Sure you can. If you think the city isn’t for you. No-one’s going to blame you or laugh at you if you change your mind now. Trust me, the place is a crap-hole. I only go there because business takes me there. You want me to turn
Lisa
around right now and take you home…that’s fine by me.’

She remained silent, imagining a tearful homecoming, then some shouting, anger, disappointment from her parents. And after that was all over, finally a return to the stifling routine she had been enduring all her life. But it would be even worse than it was before, wouldn’t it? Much worse. This time her dream to run away to the city would be spent. This time she’d know for certain that she was there for the rest of her life.

‘Listen, Ellie. When we dock, stay overnight on the shuttle okay? Spend the night thinking about it. I mean re-e-eally thinking about it. If you want to go home tomorrow, I’ll take you home.’

‘Can we stay in touch if I go in?’ she asked.

‘You better had. I’ll want to know you’re doing okay in there.’

That made the decision a little easier for her. She had enough money in her bag perhaps to rent a room for several weeks. If things went really badly for her inside, then Aaron would be back in three weeks time and perhaps then she’d decide to go home. But at least she would have tried it out.

‘If it’s okay with you, I’ll stay over tonight then.’

‘And use that time to think hard about whether you’re going in, or going home?’

The thinking’s been done. I’m going in.

‘Sure, I’ll give it some real thought.’

Aaron seemed to relax a little. ‘Good.’

Ellie cast a sideways glance at him; his unshaven face, now almost qualifying as a full grown beard, his fluffy blonde ponytail that poked out from beneath his faded cap, dancing as the shuttle skimmed over a pocket of dense air. Aaron Goodman – most definitely a
good man
– was her guardian angel. She felt her anxieties ease a little. New Haven might be a daunting place to walk into on your own, but with someone like Aaron to turn to if things got ugly, she felt she had a fighting chance of making it in there.

CHAPTER 17

The city of New Haven appeared on the horizon long after the last light of day had faded. She watched the enormous enviro-dome appear as a shimmering mirage, pulsating and undulating above a cushion of heat from the sun-baked ground into the cool night air. As the shuttle skimmed the lifeless arid desert below at three hundred miles per hour, the mirage grew quickly, and soon she was seeing with her own eyes details on the gargantuan hemisphere of the enviro-dome over New Haven that she’d never seen on the toob before. The semi-transparent material of the dome, a reinforced plexitex sheath, was crisscrossed with a mesh of fine metal support struts that looked as delicate as the silk strands of a spider’s web at this distance. She guessed, up close, each of those struts was as wide as a habi-cube and hundreds of feet long. On top of the enviro-dome, at its very apex like a tuft of hair atop a shaved head, she could see a bristling mass of antennae, pylons and dishes.

As the dome grew on the horizon from something the size of a thumbnail held out at arm’s length all the way up to the spectacle ahead of her that stretched from one side of the cockpit window to the other, she could make out the foggy silhouette of the city inside. She could see the faint outlines of tall towers clustered in the middle linked by bridges, or perhaps walkways, and a carpet of lesser towers tapering downwards either side towards an irregular metropolitan skyline. Here and there, projected against the fogged dome, her eyes picked out muted neon pulses of orange, red and purple light that seemed to clamor momentarily for attention.

The shuttle rode up a small rocky ridge in the desert and descended a shallow bank that led down into what was the planet’s only significant major geological feature; an ancient meteorite crater, fifty miles in diameter. For the first time ever, Ellie saw the base of the dome.

Where dome meets clay.

Of course she had always known the city was built in a crater, and from her perch on the outlook she’d known that on the few days the atmosphere was clear enough, she was only ever going to be lucky enough to see the very top of the dome. But for some reason, she’d actually never even seen it on the toob - a shot of the bottom of the dome.

Never.

It seemed whenever a drama or news story required an establishing shot of New Haven, the curving top of the dome was shown, or a long distance shot…but never the base of the structure. Ellie had assumed the enviro-dome descended smoothly into the clay and at some point around the base circumference a huge floodlit entrance existed with a ‘Welcome to New Haven’ sign above it.

In fact, the base of the dome was overgrown with a shanty-town of low buildings, encrustations of chaotically connected habi-cubes and small, single-tenant plastex bubble-tents.

Aaron pulled to the left, steering the shuttle clockwise around the dome, following the encrustation of the shanty town, drifting onto a southerly course as the dome and the scruffy sprawl below passed them on the right.

Darkness robbed them of most of the visible details of the haphazardly-erected conurbation and only a multitude of dim, pin-prick-lights coming from thousands of individual porthole windows, and the occasional garish holographic billboard, gave the dark proto-urban tapestry below a sense of congested life.

‘It’s like that most of the way around the dome. Refugees from Celestion, and other sorts. The people inside call that mess down there ‘the Scab’. Nice huh?’

It did actually look a little like scar tissue.

‘It’s mostly built up around the north, east, south and west entrances,’ he added. ‘Then it thins out as you move around, away from one entrance and builds up again as you approach the next.’

‘Why are these people living outside?’ she asked.

‘They’re all waiting to be let in,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Beats me why. There’s so much room on this planet, but everyone who arrives here wants to pack themselves into New Haven. It’s crazy.’

An approach-vector graphic appeared on his nav-display and Aaron looked up out of the window to scan the dark ground ahead of them. Ellie followed his gaze.

‘We’re approaching the South Entrance. It’s dead ahead. That’s where the port is.’

She could see in the distance, beyond the dark carpet of shanty-homes below them, a large expanse of smooth ground bathed in pools of brilliant white light. As she watched a steady convoy of surface-to-orbit shuttles were descending vertically from the sky above, like a wagon train from Heaven, down to one particular location on the ground. She leant forward in her seat to look up into the sky above. She traced the receding procession of shuttles upwards into the deep purple of the night sky, and there she soon spotted the dark profile of a giant interstellar freighter. The front of the enormous ship glistened, its smooth carbo-steel hull reflecting the last rays of the sun in its high-orbit position above New Haven, just beyond the atmosphere of the planet.