Ellie Quin Book 01: The Legend of Ellie Quin (9 page)

There had certainly been no bodies so far and there probably never would be. Pacifica was all water. Any sections of the transport ship that had survived the atmosphere were now at the bottom of a very deep ocean.

For now, and maybe a day or two more, the story was being kept quiet. It was looking like a simple case of component failure and not attracting any speculation from the search team that something amiss might have happened. But until that was properly confirmed, those who knew of the incident, like Rowan Brown and his colleagues, were under orders to keep their mouths shut.

Rowan had been working for Dr Mason for several years, enough time to get to know the old man quite well.

A brilliant man. But quite untidy.

Rowan Brown inserted his thumb into the DNA-scanner and felt the lightest touch of a sensor from inside the small panel mounted beside the door. A brief moment passed before the unit hummed an approval-tone and the door to Mason’s personal research labs slid silently open.

Mason’s death was going to make big news. No matter how innocuous the findings of the incident, the temptation for the media to go looking for a conspiracy theory once they found out about his death would be almost unbearable. Rowan figured, in the end, after months, maybe years of investigation and analysis of any crash debris they were lucky to find, the death of someone as important as Mason would probably all boil down to the failure of a ten credit component.

Life really does deal the crap out pretty evenly.

He passed by the late doctor’s sealed workbench. He noticed some DNA sample slides were still inside and not locked away; presumably work of Mason’s that he’d left half-done. He could be like that. Untidy.

Rowan sighed tiredly. Tying up the loose ends and squaring everything away for Mason’s successor – Rowan was hoping it was going to be him - was going to be a major pain in the ass. Dr Mason had been in this post for nearly thirty years. He’d left a lot of clutter, both intellectual and physical, to tidy up.

He stopped for another thumb-scan and a moment later the door to the doctor’s inner-sanctum slid open.

Mason’s study.

The old man had a taste for pre-colonial wars’ hand-crafted furniture. Amidst the cool clinical blue walls and floors of the Department’s orbiting laboratories, this room, full of faux rich mahogany wood, seemed utterly out of place. Rowan had always felt he was stepping into a holo-film set from the early twentieth century when he entered this room. The wood surfaces, of course, were all actually molded plasti-carbonite veneers. Even someone like Mason would find it difficult to justify the cost of shipping genuine wooden furniture across the galaxy.

A single wide portrait window behind his desk overlooked the brilliantly lit ocean world, Pacifica. The rich cerulean blue was lightly marbled with just a few threads of cloud. Beams of reflected sunlight poured through the broad window into the small dark room, bathing it in a rich, aquatic ambience.

On the desk was an ancient, twentieth century ink blotter and writing set. Dr Mason had always preferred reading reports on paper rather than on a holo-screen. It afforded him the pleasure of being able to make his notes in the traditional way. There was no doubting the satisfaction the man had derived from using his favorite antique fountain pen. Rowan noticed that the pen was gone.

Vaporized along with him, no doubt.

The desk was covered with paper. Half-read reports with query marks, words crossed out or underlined and tidy copperplate writing filling the margins. Rowan gathered together the papers on the desk, opened a desk drawer, hastily dropped the papers in and locked it. He would have to go through all those papers at some point in the near future and organize them for his next boss. But for now, Rowan felt it would be careless and vaguely disrespectful to leave them out.

‘First things first,’ he announced to himself.

He passed his hand over a lens embedded in the desk top and a holo-screen appeared in the air before him. Mason’s access to the data server would need to be turned off from this terminal and any open or checked-out files closed and his user id number removed from the system for security reasons.

He trawled through Mason’s directories one by one, closing files that had been left open - there were quite a few.

In Rowan’s opinion, the late Doctor had few faults. The man had been a legend in the field of genetics and had run the Department for three decades with an efficiency that had been unprecedented, but, he was very careless and messy in the way he used the database. A bad habit that he must have developed over so many years with no-one brave enough to chastise him for his reckless data security infringements.

After a few minutes of tidying away Mason’s virtual workspace he came across a password-protected directory. It had a name that looked every bit as mundane as all the others.

[STATS-TEMP]

‘That’s very unlike you Doctor,’ muttered Rowan. He was constantly being nagged by the Department’s data security officer, to remind Mason to keep all his digital data locked away and password protected. But the old man shrugged that off. He never bothered with that. But this particular one, unlike most of the other folders,
was
closed and locked.

He frowned as he felt himself tugged unpleasantly between professional discretion and insatiable curiosity. It was locked, which meant it was private, even from the eyes of his immediate assistant Rowan Brown.

Private, as in, correspondence with a loved one?…poetry even?…personal essays?…pictures?…fantasies?

Mason had, after all, been just a man, flesh and blood. He had no wife, nor immediate family. In fact, he had been known to be a very solitary man. His work had been everything. If there had been a part of his life he had wished to remain secret, to keep from the public domain, perhaps it was in there?

Rowan felt a guilty stab of curiosity.

‘No, come on…the man has the right to privacy.’

He moved his hand across the shimmering holographic workspace towards the ‘PURGE’ button. Whatever the old man’s secrets were, they would die with him. As his finger hovered over the holographic icon his curiosity took a hold of him once more.

Come on, how hard would it be to unlock it. Look inside. Just a glimpse? Hmm?

‘Not very hard at all,’ he answered himself. Mason was a compulsive note-taker, a man who undoubtedly would leave some sort of password prompt, a reminder, within convenient view of his desk; a soft target for a data-cracker.

He looked around. The walls were lined with books, another of Mason’s antediluvian diversions. Many of them were replicas of famous ancient books from before the wars, before even the great Era of Expansion, back when humans were a one-world race. He cocked his head to read the gold-embossed words along the mock-leather spines.

Treasure Island, Peter Pan, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio.

The titles sounded childish to him, like nursery rhymes. He continued to scan the room. On the wall was a map of the constellations that effectively made up Human Space, beside that was an oil painting of Old Earth.

Rowan entered the word ‘EARTH’ on the keypad.

The directory remained closed. Not his password.

He quickly tried ‘TERRA’, ‘GAIA’, and ‘HOME’, but none of them had any affect either. Guilt for attempting to plunder the dead man’s secrets finally got the better of him.

‘Oh forget it,’ he said under his breath and reached once more for the purge icon.

And it was then that he saw it.

The word was written discreetly in the corner of the blotter on the desk. The ink had faded and was a faint watery blue against the pink blotting paper. More recent drops of dark blue ink, scribblings and doodles adorned the pink surface, but this one word stood out for its faintness; a word written a long time ago.

He can’t have been that careless surely?

Rowan entered the word ‘Cassandra’ and the folder opened and the data inside arranged itself across the holo-screen. He stared long and hard at the texts; the soul of Dr Mason laid bare, his thoughts, his anxieties, a stream of consciousness, essays, notes.

‘Oh my God.’

CHAPTER 12

Ellie could smell coffee, strong and bitter.

She tried to sit up, but immediately she felt the ache of exhausted muscles complaining. Instead she settled for opening her eyes and found herself trying to focus on the underside of a dirty looking canvas hammock strung only a few inches above her. It was full, and swayed with a stressed creak. She looked down the length of the bulging, oil-stained canvas and saw a hairy leg dangling over the side. It reminded her of a shank of meat. The foot swung lazily in mid air and, from where she was, she could smell the damned thing.

She could hear music playing and vaguely recognized the track. It was something her Mum and Dad listened to, folksy and embarrassing. Above her, she heard a baritone voice rumbling tunelessly along with the music.

Rather than immediately alert whoever lay above her that she was awake, Ellie decided to keep quiet for the moment and get a better handle on her surroundings. It looked like the interior of a vessel of some kind. She had seen enough on the toob to guess that, and in any case she had already detected the subtle vibration and the deep throbbing rumble. She was in transit to somewhere.

Ellie had seen interiors like this in many a toob drama, from adventurous, edge-of-the-Universe scout ships to planet-hopping trade skiffs, usually piloted by some heroic flint-faced, chisel-jawed hunk. She cast her eyes up at the pendulous swinging bulge of the straining hammock. She couldn’t imagine the leg dangling over the side belonged to someone like that.

In one of those stupid toob dramas she remembered a character saying something like ‘…pilot spends enough time out there, he ends up looking like his ship.’

She looked at the grubby interior around her; the improvised washing line suspended across the cabin and at the pasty colored shank of meat that was swaying casually in time with the music and guessed there might be some truth in that.

The hammock creaked alarmingly as the body above lurched without warning. A second leg appeared over the side and with a thud that rang through the metal floor of the cabin the hammock’s occupant dropped into view.

He was tall.
Very
tall. And thickset. Perhaps that was muscle, perhaps he was overweight, she couldn’t tell beneath the oil stained olive overalls he was wearing.

A coil of long light-colored curly hair hung over his face and he pulled it and the rest of his frizzy hair back into a bushy ponytail and pulled on a faded cap to keep the few stray locks out of his face. His cheeks sported several days’ worth of blonde fuzz.

A buzzer sounded and he leant across a bank of lights and switches to hit a button. A flap opened revealing a steaming decanter of stewed coffee and he turned towards Ellie. She snapped her eyes shut.

‘You want some?’ he grunted.

She did her best to maintain the appearance of being in a deep sleep, fighting with her eyelids to stop them fluttering and giving her away.

‘It’s okay, you know? Reheated…sure, but it’s still coffee. Well,’ he added in a baritone voice that sounded almost as deep as the vehicle’s engine. ‘
Almost
coffee.’

Ellie maintained her silence and her stillness, breathing deeply.

‘Fair enough,’ he said gruffly, pouring out a mug and turning to make his way forward from the narrow confines of the bunk area towards the even tighter space of the vessel’s cockpit.

‘Do you have any milk?’ Ellie asked hopefully.

The pilot stopped and looked back at her. ‘Oh? It’s alive,
and
it talks. Incredible.’

He carried on manoeuvring through an obstacle course of boxed supplies, holding his mug high like a trophy, past a makeshift repair bench before easing himself carefully into the pilot’s seat. Ellie was impressed at the grace and agility of his performance - not a single drop spilled.

‘Sure, I got milk,’ he shouted back at her over his shoulder. ‘It’s proto-milk, though.’

Ellie wrinkled her nose.
Proto, great.

Her stomach grumbled. She was hungry, very hungry. ‘You don’t have any cereal do you?’

Aaron nodded. ‘Yeah, I’ve got a packet of those Puffs with them marshmallow bits in, if you want some of that.’

‘Solar Nuggatz?’

‘Yeah that’s the stuff.’

Ellie smiled. They were Ted’s favorite. She swung her legs off the bunk and sat up. Her head was throbbing and her arms and legs ached intensely - a testament of how close she had come to atmospheric poisoning and asphyxiation. With a great deal of effort she stood up and shuffled towards what appeared to be ‘the galley’. She found a hatch, opened it and pulled out a box of cereal. The free toy inside was Trac Plasma, a simple unarticulated mould of one of the characters from Ted’s favorite show. Trac, or ‘the green one’ as she referred to him, seemed to be the one found in most boxes of Solar Nuggatz; the other three Plasma Rangers seemed to be a rarity.

‘You got a
Trac
,’ she announced, not sure if he’d know what she was talking about.

‘Yup, seems like that little green bastard’s in every damn packet,’ he replied over his shoulder.

Aaron watched her as she searched for a bowl. Then turned back and sipped his coffee whilst he checked the autopilot log for anything of interest. Whilst he’d been asleep there had been no significant events. The shuttle had covered just over two thousand miles at a cruise speed of three hundred miles per hour and an altitude of three hundred feet. One other shuttle had been detected briefly twelve hundred miles away and had tried making radio contact five times with the call sign ‘Ivory’.

Someone after a bit of company.

All in all it had been another typical night. Typical that is, except for finding this girl in the middle of nowhere and about two or three breaths away from permanent brain damage; and he wasn’t entirely sure yet whether or not the girl had taken a hit on that front. Aaron had quite a few questions lined up for her just as soon as she’d had something to eat and drink.