Ellie Quin Book 01: The Legend of Ellie Quin (8 page)

He had spent a good chunk of his working life shipping supplies and spare parts into the Oxxon oxygen refineries in the north. The refineries required a permanent on-site team of engineers to monitor and maintain the enormous generators there. All-in-all, there were ninety-seven people, including the non-technical support staff, living up north in the austere living quarters built by the company over one hundred and fifty years ago. Although the living quarters, service buildings and the machinery that powered the oxygen refineries were built to last such periods of time, inevitably, now towards the latter end of their intended functional lifespan the rate of component failure for these structures was quite high. The constant maintenance and repair tasks carried out by the engineering team over time were being gradually down-graded to temporary ‘fix-its’.

It was a running joke amongst the maintenance engineers that when the refineries were finally mothballed, they would probably find the whole thing was held together with tape and string.

Everything those folks needed for a tolerably comfortable life needed to be shipped in. Aaron had once upon a time been employed as a delivery driver for Oxxon. Now he worked freelance for them, and the shuttle that was once theirs, he had bought for a song - all part of the inevitable downsizing as the refinery approached the end of its useful life. Where once there was a large team of drivers ferrying supplies up north, now it was just Aaron and his weather-beaten shuttle.

Lisa
was a hundred and fifty foot long, low-altitude, transport shuttle. Her top speed was five hundred and twenty miles per hour, but her most economic speed was just over two hundred miles per hour. Aaron flew her low, very low. He did that to catch the densest strata of atmosphere, riding the top of it like a cushion, making the most of the free buoyancy. It gave him the most uplift for the least fuel burn. Generally speaking, when he needed to sleep he let the autopilot fly her at an altitude of two or three hundred feet, to be safe. If he was at the helm he would skim her sometimes as low as fifty feet off the ground.

A trip up to the Oxxon refineries usually took five days going up and four days coming back down to New Haven. Every now and then Aaron would delay the return trip a day or so. He loved the arctic terrain, the unspoiled sheets of ice and snow up north. It was, he reckoned, the only beautiful wilderness on the entire planet and one day it would all be gone as the atmosphere thickened, the world retained more of its heat and it melted away. It was a pretty depressing prospect to him that the only truly beautiful place on this ugly mud ball planet would be sacrificed to produce a breathable atmosphere so that hordes of miserable, so-called ‘colonists’ could spill out of New Haven and fill it up with their unimaginative and ugly homes.

And when that finally happened Aaron Goodman would go and take his haulage business to some new frontier world and enjoy another beautiful and remote wilderness waiting to be terraformed to death.

Sometimes he would take his shuttle a few hours further north of the refineries until he could see them no more and then set her down on the virgin snow. Often he camped out over night in the open, nothing but a heated therma-bag to sleep in and a flask of coffee for company. There was no need for an O2 mask or a small, sealed one man dome-tent, up here. The atmosphere was oxygen-rich. He would study the crisp night sky, and pretend he was some ancient Old Earth explorer marking time on a drifting iceberg in the frozen seas of Earth’s South Pole.

*

Okay, yes…I’m beginning to panic.

The plan had been to walk for a couple of hours, then flag the first low altitude craft she saw with her navset. Ellie figured she could hash together some vague story about crashing a dune buggy and seeking help on foot. The crew that picked her up might be conscientious enough to try and locate it with her pointing the way, but of course they would never find the wreckage and then of course they would be obliged to drop her off at their destination.

Hopefully New Haven.

She had been walking in a southerly direction for nearly eighteen hours now and had not seen a single craft. She was beginning to wonder whether she had drifted off course and was heading away from New Haven and thus away from the converging routes used by the various transport craft that crisscrossed the planet. Add to that she’d consumed most of the water she had brought with her and the recycler was only going to give her another two to three hours of breathable air.

To be honest, it was looking a little bit like she was going to die.

Great.

Ellie was going to die out here in the middle of nowhere and no-one was ever going to find her body. The message she had left behind at home unambiguously announced that she had run away to New Haven and would get in touch again when she was settled. Mum and Dad would be worried, and they might even be able to bribe the over-worked and undermanned and generally disinterested police force in New Haven to put out a missing person bulletin for her. But of course they would be looking in the city instead of out here in the middle of nowhere where her bones would slowly bleach in the sun and eventually be covered by sand.

Maybe some archaeologist in the distant future might discover her, but Mum and Dad sure as hell would not.

She slumped to her knees and started to whimper.

‘Stupid girl. You and your stupid dream. You’ve killed yourself, that’s what you’ve done.’

She pulled Jonny out of the bag and held him to her face. She closed her eyes and rocked gently. It was all over, before it had even fregging well got started. Tears of anger and frustration streamed down her face and she lay down on the ground hugging the stuffed dog.

‘A loser’s death, you’re a stupid loser,’ she muttered to herself.

Half an hour passed and Ellie allowed herself to drift off to sleep. She figured it might be less distressing if her recycler were to run out of power whilst she was asleep. To die that way had to be better than struggling consciously with every breath and experiencing the muscular spasms of oxygen starvation.

There was a distant rumble.

Her face jerked upwards. Her eyes opened and darted left and right desperately seeking the source of the noise. She saw it, the subtle glimmer of a thrust jet; a space-faring vessel entering orbit. It was a long way out, maybe too far to pick up the signal. But it was the only thing she had seen all day. Ellie decided to switch on the navset beacon for a few seconds.

It started to blink silently.

For a full two minutes she watched the space vessel as it slowly traced a line across the sky. She knew enough to know that if it could have received the signal the onboard navigational system would have already noted it and logged the co-ordinates. She turned off the navset to conserve its batteries. If the signal had been detected then there was a fair chance the ship might detour and investigate or dispatch a smaller surface ship to go and take a look.

Never underestimate the pulling power of salvage rights
. That was something Dad had once said whilst he’d been checking the navset’s power supply.

*

A light blinked on his navigation dash. Aaron looked down at it, it was an emergency beacon. The signal only lasted a minute or so, but it was enough time for him to register the point of origin. He adjusted course slightly, it was only fifteen miles north-east - the distances he was used to travelling, that wasn’t exactly out of his way. And anyway, legislation on New Haven still permitted the universally accepted forty percent salvage law. Aaron rubbed his rough hands together and smiled.

‘Bonus time.’

He swung the shuttle round to a north-easterly course. The terrain ahead was as flat as a table top, sun baked clay with scattered rocks as far as the eye could see. Aaron was cruising at fifty feet. He decided to bring her up to get a better view of the area ahead. He could be looking for anything, something as small as a crashed or broken down personal transport to a shuttle the same size as his. He pulled back on the yoke and the rust-colored ground beneath quickly fell away. The altitude display showed one hundred and eighty feet. That was enough. He leveled off and started to scan for an early visual; a distant column of smoke; an impact scorch trail. Something. He checked the logged co-ordinates of the beacon, it was just over ten miles away.

*

Ellie watched in disbelief as the orbital freighter continued across to the southern horizon’s darkening sky and flickered momentarily as it finally exited the planet’s upper atmosphere.

‘What about me?’ she muttered indignantly.

A wind was beginning to pick up and she shuddered. The nights could get very cold out in the open. Very cold. Once again she reminded herself what a sad specimen she was for not preparing properly and bringing something more substantial than the clothes she had thrown on this morning.

Then a small light on the recycler’s battery pack winked on.

‘Oh..great.’

It was the low charge warning. She wondered how much stored power was left. Another half hour, or another minute? She decided to try her luck with the air. The wind was cold, it could be an oxygen pocket. She tentatively pulled the mask away from her face and took several deep breaths. A minute passed before she began to feel dizzy and nauseous and hurriedly pulled the mask back on. She frantically scanned the sky and the horizon.

Nothing.

She pulled out the navset again. This time she was not quite so worried about its battery life, the way things were going it would probably outlive her. She turned it on and set it down on the ground beside her. She lay down in the dust and turned her head to face the little black box. Its one green blinking light was a strange comfort in the gathering darkness.

The sun was breaching the horizon, swiftly on its way down and out of sight. Ellie watched as the amber circle undulated and rippled like a slick of oil on water as it descended from view. Over the space of five minutes the peach after-glow it left faded and the golden ribbon emerged like the king of the night sky, and one by one, like loyal subjects, the stars followed it.

Ellie thought of Sean. He’d probably be in New Haven right now, boarding a shuttle to take him to the huge mother-ship in orbit. What a fantastic experience that was going to be for him. To see through a viewing bay, your whole world and everything you have ever known and to watch it gradually recede and become simply a glowing disc, eventually a mere pin-prick.

At least one of them had escaped the gravitational pull of Harpers Reach. ‘Lucky you, Sean…you did it.’ There was surprisingly no bitterness in that. She was genuinely pleased for him.

The light on the recycler changed color. It had been green and now it had changed to red. She heard the thin reedy whine she had grown used to inside the recycler drop in tone and then cease. The red light then dimmed and finally went out.

This is it then.

The air in the mask and the machine’s ‘lungs’ would last her another minute or so then quickly degrade. She found herself thinking…

Actually, I’m not scared.

Ellie smiled. In the last minutes of her life she decided she’d discovered a profound truth, a little gem of wisdom that she would have liked to pass on to the countless millions of other pointless losers like her in the universe.

It really isn’t that bad…dying.

*

Aaron Goodman switched on the floods and descended to thirty feet as he approached. The beacon had come on again. By now he reckoned he should soon be able to pick out the dark form of any vehicle against the lighter ground. But he could see nothing yet.

The range marker began counting down the distance in hundreds of feet.

…eighteen hundred feet…

…sixteen hundred feet…

…fourteen hundred feet…

He could see nothing. He cut the speed and engaged vertical thrust to prevent the shuttle stalling and dropping. The large vehicle now pushed forward at a crawl, its pug-faced cockpit dipping downwards. The shuttle rocked and wobbled uncertainly under momentum solely from the VTOL thrusters.

…Six hundred feet…

…five hundred feet…

…four hundred feet…

The floodlights panned across the ground, picking out nothing but the occasional sharp spur of weatherworn rock. He was virtually on top of the damned beacon but he couldn’t see anything at all; no sign of a craft, crash damage, debris. Nothing.

‘So how the hell does a beacon get out here on its own?’ Aaron mumbled with growing irritation.

As the range marker counted down the last one hundred feet, his floodlights finally picked out what looked like a small body lying inert on the dusty ground.

He set the shuttle down.

CHAPTER 11

It happened from time to time, bad luck.

Life, no matter who you are or how important you are, deals out the crap pretty evenly.

Researcher Rowan Brown was pleased at the way that truism sounded. It had that kind of lived in feel, like an old saying, almost poetic. He made a mental note to try and slot it into the next conversation he was undoubtedly likely to have about his boss, the late Master Researcher, Dr Edward Mason.

Dr Mason died two days ago. Although the news was incomplete and had not officially been confirmed through normal channels, the story seemed to be that the transport ship carrying him down to Pacifica for a couple of weeks of sun and sea had lost its entry shield and disintegrated in the upper atmosphere. There had been twenty other workers from the Lab aboard and, of course, the flight crew. None of them had survived either, but the only name of significance and likely to be newsworthy when the story broke was that of Dr Mason.

Search and rescue teams had scanned the sea below the grid co-ordinate at which the craft had vanished. But being so high up, virtually in orbit, the debris spray radius was enormous. They had recovered the telemetry box which would have had a transmitter inside it, but found nothing else floating in the vicinity other than a twisted sheet of partially melted beige plastic that had been identified as a seat-mounted fold down table.