Ellie Quin Book 01: The Legend of Ellie Quin (7 page)

There was little that Ellie felt she would want to bring anyway.

She zipped up the bag and slung it over her shoulder and was almost out of her cabin before she remembered her promise to Sean. From her desk drawer she pulled a mem-card out of her writing tablet and left it on her pillow where it would not easily be missed. She had written a brief note to Mum and Dad letting them know where she was going, apologizing for leaving this way and promising to write or call as soon as she was settled.

She had surprised herself with a few guilty tears whilst writing her letter…guilt for running out on them like this, without a hug or a kiss or a goodbye. She assured them she was going to be in good hands, Sean was with her, and helping her settle into the city. She cast one final glance around her room.

Not much to show for the twenty years of her life. Jonny, her stuffed tartan sausage dog, sat morosely on the end of her bed, one large cloth ear drooped miserably over his sewn-on button eyes. She picked him up and pushed him carefully into her bag. Jonny, threadbare and faded, had dutifully provided her comfort through her childhood years, soaking up tears and snot, patiently tolerating her baby gums and playing the silent participant in many a game of tug of war. She decided after so many years of sterling service, it was only fair he got to come along for the ride too.

Ellie tiptoed across the courtyard towards her dome, Betsy. As she pushed through the curtain of dangling plastic flaps she felt the warm humidity wrap itself around her. She checked the time again; it was fifteen minutes past the hour. She headed towards the exit hatch where her mask and O2 cylinder hung. She had refilled the cylinder last night so that it would give her a full hour and a half of oxygen. As she walked alongside a row of tubweeds one of them casually lashed out with its pod, catching her.

‘Ow! You little-,’

She felt her cheek. A small bump was beginning to rise. She decided there was enough time to indulge in one final, long overdue bit of payback.

‘Okay you pathetic little weed, if that’s how you want to thank me for all the tender loving care I’ve given you and your brothers, fine. This is how I’m going to thank you,’ she hissed under her breath, reached down to the base of the plant and began pulling it up out of the soil.

‘This is for all the stings, the hassle and generally being a nasty, shitty little plant.’

The tubweed began to writhe and twist in her hands, the pod swinging furiously, searching for a target. She heard the roots begin to snap beneath the soil. With one final tug she wrenched the plant out of the soil bed and threw it down on to the rubber matt floor of the dome. It continued to writhe pathetically for a few moments. The plant’s central stalk began to bend and it slowly curled up into what appeared to be a disturbingly good imitation of a human fetal position.

She felt a twinge of guilt at that.

As she continued down the row of plants towards the hatch, the other tubweeds swayed backwards slightly, keeping a respectful distance from her. It dawned on her that maybe Ted and Shona had at some point made an early sacrificial example of one of their plants and that was why their crops always seemed to behave so well for them.

Typical.
She sighed.
So NOW they want to be good little plants
.

Well it was too late; a week of Ted’s heavy-handed care and they would all be pining for the good old days of Ellie’s tender regime.

She reached the hatchway, lifted her mask and cylinder off the hook and put it on. She turned around to take one last look at her dome. She hoped that Dad’s resolve to change things over would persist. At a time when the population was increasing dramatically, this world’s ability to feed itself was met only through the costly importation of synthetic protein from other worlds. Now was the time to be a farmer growing a food crop, not oxygen-farming. Soon, maybe as little as twenty to thirty years from now, the air on Harpers Reach would be enough that the enviro-domes planet-wide would be thrown off or torn down.

She opened the hatch and quickly slipped out, closing it promptly behind her. As the hatch clicked and sealed with a hiss Ellie felt an overpowering surge of excitement.

‘Despite a hesitant start, Ms Ellie Quin is off the starting block and under way,’ she muttered quietly with a smile, vaguely remembering a children’s story about a hare and a tortoise.

She started to make her way up the rocky slope to the overlook. The purple night sky was beginning to lighten and the horizon to the north glowed with the distinctive pink of dawn approaching. Daylight was still an hour and a half away. She checked the time again. There were still thirty minutes until Sean was due. She was glad. That would give her a quiet half-hour to say goodbye to her home and family and this all-too small world of hers…and time to look towards the south and contemplate the new, much larger world ahead.

*

‘Come on Sean, where the freg are you?!’

Ellie checked the time again. It was nearly seven. The horizon was growing brighter and the new day was fast approaching. She strained her eyes to look for the telltale dust trail of his dirt-cat. She could see none. The air in her cylinder was not going to last much longer. She would have to head back down to the farm and get another one pretty soon. Ellie bit her lip in frustration. It was typical of her luck. He had arrived promptly for every study lesson she had had with him over the last four years, today he should bloody well choose to be late.

No choice. She decided to head back for some more oxygen right now whilst her family were still asleep rather than delay any longer. She scanned the horizon one last time.

Nothing.

‘Dammit.’

She let herself into the domestic dome as quietly as she could. She couldn’t hear any noises coming from Ted’s cabin, and he was always the first one up. She crept stealthily across the courtyard towards Shona’s dome. Beside her exit hatch there would be another oxygen cylinder. It would undoubtedly be full of oxygen since Shona rarely bothered with going outside. But it would also be horribly stale since she probably hadn’t checked it in months.

Ellie passed by the kitchen habi-cube and heard the soft digital chime of the v-phone. Someone had left a message.

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.