by Alex Scarrow
‘Thank you,’ she said eventually. ‘You know, for saving me….and for breakfast.’
Aaron said nothing, he continued studying the autopilot’s log.
Ellie looked out of the cockpit windows. It was pitch black outside. She couldn’t recall ever having seen a night so dark.
‘It’s so dark out there. I didn’t realize it was night,’ she said in an anxious bid to break-ice with the man.
He absent-mindedly reached up and hit a switch on a panel above his seat. She heard a subdued whine, and almost immediately a blinding strip of light appeared along the bottom of each window as the blast shields outside slid upwards. She covered her face from the unbearable glare with her hands as the strip of bright light slowly widened and the cockpit became bathed with the heat and brilliance of the early morning sun. The whining ended with a clunk and tentatively she unscrewed her eyes and lowered her arms.
‘Uh, okay, I see.’
Three hundred feet below, the sun-baked clay desert rushed beneath them. She leant forward in her seat to get a better view.
‘So how old are you? Fourteen? Fifteen?’ asked Aaron.
‘Twenty,’ she answered briskly.
‘Twenty?!’Aaron spurted coffee from his lips. ‘Yeah right, and I’m six and a half. Let’s try that again shall we?’
‘I am!’ she replied, her voice rising anxiously. ‘I had a birthday yesterday.’
He cocked an eyebrow and the patronizing smile on his face widened as she maintained a hurt, indignant expression on her face. ‘No! Really…I am. I’ve got citizenship papers to prove it.’
He studied her closely and eventually conceded she might just possibly be that old at a pinch. Outcity kids seemed to age slower than city brats. She was scrawny – that was the word. Scrawny. Straight up and down, short hair like a boy and the sun-darkened upper face of someone who spent a lot of time outside with an O2 mask.
‘Okay, you can show me your papers later. But you can tell me now what the Hell you were doing out there on your own,’ he shook his head in disbelief, ‘and on foot for chrissakes!’
Ellie was about to start telling her carefully rehearsed story about the buggy breaking down and how she set out on foot to seek help, but despite having practiced the story over and over whilst she’d been out there walking, it all sounded a little bit silly and unconvincing now.
‘I ran away from home.’
He nodded slowly. That made sense. ‘Lemme’ guess….farm kid right?’
Ellie nodded mutely.
‘Heading for New Haven?’
She nodded once more, and smiled sheepishly. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’
‘Nope, not even close.’
‘Uh?’
‘That’s because we’re not heading towards New Haven,’ he added. ‘We’re heading away.’
She turned sharply in her seat to face him. ‘Not going to New Haven?! No, oh no, I was nearly there!’
Aaron laughed. ‘You were nowhere near young lady. I found you two hundred and seventy miles out from Haven, and right now we’re about four thousand miles from that crap-ola city.’
She slumped in her seat unhappily.
Aaron glanced at her, she was a pitiful sight. A child that had run away from home for whatever reason and fallen flat on her face at the very first hurdle. ‘Okay listen, we’ll be heading back that way in a few days time,’ he added.
Ellie sat up and turned towards him, ‘when?’
‘Like I said, a few days. Maybe a week.’
‘So where are you going now?’
Aaron grinned, a wide smile spread across a bristly face. ‘We’re heading somewhere about a billion times better than New Haven.’
Ellie waited for the man to elaborate, but he didn’t. She tried to imagine where on the planet could possibly be a billion times better than the planet’s one main city. Clearly he wasn’t going to add any more to that. A surprise then. Another, more important question, occurred to her.
‘What are you going to do with me?’
‘Well now…that depends. If you’re really as old as you say you are then I guess on the way back I can drop you off in New Haven, if that’s what you want. If you’re not twenty, then I’m obliged to either return you to your parents or hand you over to the authorities so they can send you back. But right now, we’re heading north. I’ve got a scheduled shipment to make and I can’t afford any detours or delays. Understand?’
Ellie nodded, ‘okay.’
She started to eat her cereal and spilled milk from the first spoonful down her chin as the shuttle bumped over a pocket of dense air. She pretended to gaze out of the cockpit window at the drab landscape whipping by as she tucked into her breakfast. But out of the corner of her eye she studied him as he meticulously checked a screen full of data. She found herself relaxing a little. This tall man with his faded cap and mop of scruffy blonde hair, his seven-day stubble and oil stained clothes seemed to be a decent enough sort.
He finally snapped off the data screen and turned to Ellie holding out a large hand towards her. ‘Since we’re on talking terms now, I suppose I better know your name. I’m Aaron Goodman.’
‘Ellie Quin,’ she replied grabbing his large rough hand and shaking it gently. She giggled at the formal gesture.
‘Well Ms Quin, tell me…do you like snow?’
‘Snow?’ She had to think about the word for a while before an image came to mind. ‘Do you mean the white stuff you see on some worlds, like sugar?’
‘That’s right. You ever seen it for yourself?’
‘Only on the toob Mr Goodman. It looks fantastic, sort of magical like fairy dust.’ She grimaced slightly at the childish simile.
Aaron laughed. ‘In that case you’re going to love where we’re going, and listen…lose the Mr Goodman crap….you can call me Captain. Or call me Aaron. Those are the options.’
CHAPTER 13
It never ceased to amaze him how quickly people can adapt to a new routine in their life. Routines, habits, patterns of behavior were a bit like music, he had decided once. They had a rhythm, a pace, even a melody of sorts, and how easy it was, it seemed, to go from humming one song to humming the next. On these regular delivery runs up to the refineries in the north, Aaron found that he always seemed to leave New Haven with a song or tune lodged in his head like an unwelcome guest. It would rattle around between his ears hour after hour, day after day, driving him mad with the repetition. But it only took a bar or two of some new catchy tune to drive it out for good, even if the damned thing had been holding his sanity hostage for several days. And life, he decided, was a little like that. It can be the same for years and years, the routine never altering, the rhythm monotonously repeated until one day, suddenly it changes. The next day you’re shuffling along to a different tune like you’ve been doing it all your life, and you can’t even remember what it was like beforehand.
This girl, this small young woman, had upset his carefully orchestrated routine.
Directly after he’d picked her up, he’d scouted the vicinity for a little more than an hour in the dark looking anxiously for some sign of wreckage from which to salvage at least a modest reward for his efforts, acutely aware that this unplanned fuel burn was eating into his already narrow profit margin. He had found nothing. Just the girl and her bag. She’d been minutes away from death when he’d knelt down beside her slight crumpled body. Each breath she unconsciously drew in was killing her with toxins and oxygen denial. He had hastily placed his O2 mask over her face and held his breath as he heaved her effortlessly up in his arms and carried her quickly back inside the shuttle. He’d gently laid her down on his bunk and swiftly launched the shuttle. For a few moments he anxiously debated whether to return to New Haven to drop her off there with the first port official he could find, or continue on his way.
A dangerously extended exposure to the atmosphere on Harpers Reach had a pretty unambiguous affect on any hapless victim. Either you got away with it or you suffered severe bra
in damage, a short coma, followed by respiratory failure and death. Returning to New Haven frankly would do her no good at all if the poor girl had sucked in two or three too many breaths. He decided to continue on his way. If she died during the night, he would wrap up the body in plasti-film and store her in the hold. When he got to the Oxxon refinery, he’d turn her body over to the one law enforcement officer up there and he could worry about what to do with it.
During that first night, he’d kept himself awake by flipping off the autopilot and taking the helm himself. He had come back from the cockpit several times to pour himself some coffee and wandered over to his bunk to feel her skin, half expecting on each occasion to find it cold and clammy and a corpse beginning to stiffen. After thirty-six hours she had finally come round.
He was relieved to find that she hadn’t been reduced to a drooling vegetative state from brain damage when she’d finally broken her silence and asked if he had some milk.
It took Ellie Quin just the first day aboard the rumbling confines of the shuttle to grow accustomed to her surroundings. The bruises on her hips and the scrapes on her shins and elbows proved an effective aid in teaching her the layout of the cabin area and, more importantly, where all the sharp edges and corners were. She found herself quickly adopting the bizarre duck-and-swerve movement patterns of Aaron as he frequently made trips up and down the length of the claustrophobic assault course, either searching for a misplaced cup of coffee or making desperately for the toilet.
By the second day aboard she decided to carve herself a useful role and nominated herself as the ‘Ship’s Cook’. The role actually extended itself to no more than bringing Aaron a fresh mug of coffee every half hour and programming the FoodSmart to spew out something interesting to eat three times a day. Aaron had only gotten round to programming about half a dozen different meal templates into the protein converter and he had been dining on just these six different meals aboard the shuttle for as long as he could remember. Ellie swiftly picked up the coding language and tapped in another dozen meal templates. The pale, turd-like protein-paste the FoodSmart squeezed out still tasted pretty similar, but at least the new turds looked and tasted slightly different. It wasn’t a lot, but it made her feel less like a spare wheel, and a bit more like a useful crew member, earning her passage on some exciting adventure.
During the fourth night Ellie awoke with a start. She felt one of Aaron’s huge hands grasping her shoulder and shaking her in a way he must have thought was gentle.
‘Wake up dozy,’ he said in a deep rumble.
‘I-I-I’m a-a-asleep,’ she muttered, her voice warbling as he shook her.
She opened her eyes. The cabin was dark and she could only just see the silhouette of the big man leaning over her.
‘Get up!’ he said. ‘Quickly, you need to see this.’
‘Wha-a-at?’ she asked, tired and reaching for his hand to remove it from her shoulder.
‘Ellie, shift your lazy buns before I tip you out,’ he said with a hint of exasperation in his voice.
‘O-o-okay, okay…I’m up.’
Aaron stopped shaking her and moved off into the darkness of the cabin towards the front of the cockpit. Still half asleep, she pulled herself up into a sitting position and then swung her feet down onto the cold metal floor.
‘Why are the lights off?’ she called out. ‘I can’t see a thing in here.’
He shouted back. ‘Just get up here as quick as you can!’
She climbed off the bunk and headed cautiously towards the cockpit. She fumbled in the dark desperately trying to avoid the hazardous clutter, holding her arms out in front of her to feel her way forward.
She caught a hip on a crate full of tools and grunted painfully. ‘Can you turn on a light back here? Before I shred myself.’
‘No, dozy-girl…you’ll need your night-eyes.’
‘For what? I can’t see anything anyway!’
‘Just stop messing around and get up here now!’
She finally made her way up towards the cockpit, pulling herself into the co-pilot’s seat. But not before barking her shin on the repair bench. The instrumentation on the control panel cast a faint amber glow onto his face. He looked excited.
‘Look out of the window and tell me what you see.’
Ellie wiped the sleep from her eyes and turned to look out of her side window. It was dark outside. She checked the time on the data screen above her seat. It was still four hours from daybreak
‘I see…night. It’s dark, so…a whole lot of darkness is what I see,’ she replied irritably, still rubbing her shin.
‘Just keep looking ahead.’
She saw him glance at the navigational display. The orange patchwork of wire frames meant nothing to her, but they grew dense towards the top of the screen, and slowly these tightly packed lines were drifting downwards.
We’re approaching something.
She looked out at the dark landscape ahead. She could just about detect the rugged, flat line of the horizon; a black featureless plain below and a very dark purple sky above. She imagined herself lying down there amongst the dust and rocks, a cold, silent, unforgiving landscape of flint and clay hundreds of thousands of square miles of relentlessly empty, featureless rubble, and many thousands of miles from the nearest settlement. She reminded herself of the warmth and scruffy comfort of the shuttle with its oily bunk and its makeshift clothesline strung across the cabin; the omnipresent smell of coffee and feet; and reminded herself how incredibly lucky she was to be up here and not down there.
‘Can you see it yet?’ Aaron asked with a hint of childlike excitement in his gravel voice.
Ellie continued to study the dark world out in front of her unsure what she was meant to be looking for. But this time she saw something that wasn’t there before. A thin, almost imperceptible, pale line along the horizon to the north separating the ground from the sky, so faint it only registered towards the periphery of her vision and faded to nothing when she focused her eyes back on it.
She looked towards Aaron. ‘I see a pale line.’
He nodded, saying nothing.
Ellie watched as the faint line slowly grew thicker and brighter. It was a pale blue line presently, and as wide as her little finger. She looked at him again, an expression of dawning realization betrayed her. He nodded and smiled, taking pleasure in the look of growing wonder on her face.
‘We’re approaching the arctic belt. We’ll be over it in a minute or two.’
‘Snow,’ she said aloud.
‘Yup, it’s pure virgin snow and ice, untouched by man from here all the way north to the refineries. I’ll take her down low when we get over it so you can get a closer look.’
Aaron watched her as she leant forward and pushed her nose against the glass to get a reflection-free view of the rapidly approaching arctic landscape ahead.
It still caught his breath after so many years. The suddenness of the change, after so much bland rustred, arid terrain, the transition was simply astounding. One second you could be flying over pre-terraformed Mars, the next you could be flying over New Europa’s untouched arctic continents, the transition between two worlds in the blink of an eye.
He took the helm, switched off the autopilot and pushed the shuttle’s nose down. She quickly dropped altitude and was soon skimming fifty feet above the ground. Ahead of them, the pale white line became a shelf of ice that loomed towards them. At the last moment Aaron pulled the shuttle’s nose up and they swooped over the top of the wall of ice and all of sudden the world below was polar north.
The snow glowed luminescent by the light of the stars and the Veil. Ellie couldn’t suppress a whimper of delight.
‘It’s beautiful isn’t it?’ he said.
‘It’s…it…I just can’t believe there’s a place…’
‘…on Harpers Reach as wonderful as this?’ he finished her words.
Ellie nodded vigorously, a smile stretched across her small pale face.
‘Check
it out.’ He hit a switch and floodlights beneath the shuttle’s delta-wings suddenly kicked in. The arctic world below exploded - an impossibly brilliant white, and the reflected glare filled the cockpit.
‘Oh my,’ was all she could manage.
‘Enjoy it, because one day soon, maybe in ten or twenty years, it’ll all be gone, and the only people who will have seen it will be you, me and the hundred or so people who work up here.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s so sad.’
‘Terraforming is pretty depressing crap, Ellie. We take a unique world, with its own amazing eco-system and environment full of things you’d never ever see again on any other world….and we trash it all to produce yet another homogenized, 35-degree, O2-rich trailer park. It’s not like anyone even bothers to survey new planets any more, to record how they once were before we wade in and redecorate. We just see another ball of real estate around a star and, before you know it, there’s a bunch of enviro-domes thrown up and several million brain-dead dome-drones moving in.’
‘But I guess we need more room…you know for more people,’ she offered half-heartedly.
‘Maybe we just don’t need any more people. Isn’t three hundred billion enough in this Universe?!’
They watched the dazzling snow scape race beneath them for a while then he snapped off the floods. The cabin was once again dimly lit by the amber glow of the data screens.
‘Many years from now, you can tell your grandchildren that there was once snow on Harpers Reach. And after they’ve finished nodding politely, they’ll cart you off to the laughing-house.’
Ellie smiled gratefully at him although in the faint light she was sure he would only be able to make out her silhouette. ‘Thanks for not letting me sleep through this.’
‘That’s okay. Hey…maybe I’ll put her down on the snow when we head back this way in a couple of days. We can have a snowball fight or make a snow man.’
‘Snow man?’
Aaron sighed. ‘It’s what people used to do a long time ago with snow, back in the days before we got used to living like lab-rats.’