Europa

by Stan Butler

  Chapter 2

  At the same time, another group boarded a different shuttle at another station, they were a group of postgraduate geologists and engineers heading out to help establish all the mines, oil wells and much of the infrastructure needed for a colony on the planet. Among them was Lara Nyel, a planetary geologist specialising in survey techniques who was taking a few satellites she had developed to scan the world for economic deposits of ores, to try and help the colony begin paying back its setup loan from ISF. She was tall and regal in posture, often distant and was taunted for being icy and socially reclusive, emerging only for geological talks and a couple of minor events hosted by her small circle of friends. She had long, flowing black hair and piercing blue eyes. She was dressed according to fashion apart from the trousers as, like Sakara, she wore cargo trousers, in fashionable grey to go with her grey and orange top. She had only accepted this position to allow herself to finish her PHD using her satellites.

  The rest of the group was a rowdy lot, engineering geologists who had spent the past five years together leaving Lara as an outsider, and her striking features began to draw some glances. She sighed, it would be another few weeks of fending off unwanted advances. One headed over and sat next to her, he opened his mouth to ask her name and she switched her gaze from soft to harsh, a genetic trait of her family, and one very useful in such situations. He took the hint and left her alone but she knew that others wouldn’t.

  She had planned for such an eventuality and pulling a tablet out of her hand luggage, she began reading over one of the articles she had downloaded onto it.

  Damn men, she thought, why were they always so stupid around women.

  The station she was boarding at was called the Barrens spaceport and was situated near the border between Argentina and Chile in northern Argentina in the middle of the Atacama desert.

  The only reason Lara was using this spaceport was due to the fact that the Northern Argentine University of Earth Sciences was the galaxy’s best university for geology, a place she had been studying at for the past five years.

  The shuttle launched and she entered the void.