Ellie Quin Book 3: Beneath the Neon Sky (The Ellie Quin Series) Read online

  The last passenger was an old man, probably in his mid-sixties by the look of him. He hadn’t said a great deal so far, but had gazed with an obvious pleasure at the chaotic comings and goings of vessels great and small from the port, and the intricate web of geodesic metal struts that lined the outside of the dome. Ellie suspected he was an old time colonist coming out one last time to see how much the world had changed.

  She dressed quickly in the uniform that Jez had picked out for both of them to wear. For once it seemed Jez had been able to exercise some degree of restraint over her more flamboyant taste in clothing, and had selected some navy blue, form-hugging neoprene polo-necked tops, white miniskirts and navy-blue leggings for them to wear. She had also picked out some clothing for Aaron; crisp clean white slacks and a navy blue blazer with white braided epaulettes. But Aaron wasn’t playing ball. He had resolutely refused to wear them, and showed no signs yet of weakening, despite Jez’s constant badgering and nagging.

  Ellie ducked and looked into the mirror beside the FoodSmart. She smoothed down her lank and lifeless mouse-brown hair and quickly applied a little liner and lipstick, still feeling a touch self-conscious at the thought of wearing cosmetics. She definitely enjoyed seeing her face transformed into something that looked prettier, more glamorous like Jez, but it still felt…bogus, like she was a child playing at being all grown up.

  Ellie took several steps to the aft of the cabin, to a door in the bulkhead that led down into the cargo hold – now known as the Passenger’s Suite.

  She opened the door and let herself in. The glow strip on the ceiling was turned down, and most of the pale illumination in here came from the growing light of dawn streaming in from the two wide viewing windows.

  Curtains…we’ll have to install some curtains for the next trip.

  She looked around the suite. She couldn’t see anyone up just yet. The couches, arranged in a semi-circle facing one of the windows, were all closed and being used as individual sleeping pods. She tiptoed quietly in, walked silently across the carpeted floor towards the FoodSmart and started to prepare breakfast.

  *

  Aaron awoke from his fitful sleep as the smell of freshly made coffee drifted up into the cockpit from the hold. He also detected the savory smell of grilled fagurters and toasted wheat sheets. Ellie must be up already and tending to their guests, he decided. He stretched in his seat, his legs long enough to reach across and nudge the armrest on the co-pilot’s seat next to him.

  The jimp, curled up on the seat like a lap dog, stirred briefly and muttered something unintelligible and then was still once more. Aaron wondered whether the creature was dreaming. He wondered if any of the thousands of different models of genetic products out there actually dreamed. He cast a glance sideways at him….

  Him?

  Ellie’s incessant campaign to humanize the jimp was beginning to take a hold. But it wasn’t a good idea really. The jimp’s license expiry was only a few months off. That was why Aaron had been able to buy him so cheaply. When it did expire, the pigment in the manufacturer’s logo on his – it’s - head would change color to red, and Harvey would very soon after curl up and die. Ellie was going to find that quite hard to deal with if she continued treating the thing like a surrogate child.

  Aaron heard Ellie greeting one of the guests with a chirpy good morning.

  He was relieved not to have to interact with the passengers. In fact, so far he hadn’t once stepped back into the hold to meet any of them, despite a couple of polite requests from one of the couples to meet the ship’s Captain. He really didn’t envy Ellie’s and Jez’s role; having to mix it with them, cater to their every whim. Piloting, he had assured both girls, was a full time job, and even though the auto-helm was on the case most of the time, there needed to be someone on hand, in the cockpit, who could handle the vessel in case there was a problem.

  He wasn’t entirely sure they’d bought all that. But since it was his ship, his money they had spent converting her into a leisure barge and his loss if it all went belly up, he decided it didn’t really matter if they did or not. He wasn’t going to wear that damned uniform Jez had given him, and he doubly wasn’t going to go back into the…Passenger Suite….and strut around like a pompous idiot to impress their paying guests and indulge in polite chitter chatter with them.

  He’d feel like an utter moron.

  Aaron was nervous that this whole enterprise was going to be found out for what it was by those people back there; a quick and corny cash-in. That some bright spark was going to notice that they’d been accommodated in a rusty old freight container, and the ship was nothing more than an ageing tug, splashed with white paint.

  Still, so far so good. There had been no grumbles as yet, at least none that Ellie or Jez had reported. And, of course, he noted with a warm glow of satisfaction, the money was already tucked up safely in the bank; four and a half thousand creds of it already.

  He settled back in his padded seat and felt the heat of the morning sun as it emerged with a fan-like explosion of rays over the mostly flat and featureless horizon ahead.

  *

  They approached the arctic line towards evening on the second day. They watched the distant, thin ribbon of white ahead of them slowly thicken as the shuttle hurtled towards it. Jez stood behind the pilot’s seat and gazed, slack-jawed at the approaching spectacle.

  ‘Oh-my-crud, this is in-cred-ible! I can’t believe I’m seeing this with my own eyes!’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a breathtaking sight alright,’ said Aaron.

  ‘I mean, after days of seeing just so much orange mud…it’s, like, I dunno…startling,’ she continued. ‘It’s like the edge of the world, or something.’

  Ellie came forward. ‘Great isn’t it?’

  Jez, beaming, turned to her. ‘Fregg, you know what Ellie? I’m so totally glad we met.’ She grabbed her in a crushing headlock and planted a kiss on her forehead.

  Harvey cocked his head inquisitively, whilst Aaron rolled his eyes and sighed. ‘Sheeesh…let’s ease up on the girly excitement and try and keep things professional back there, okay?’

  Jez nodded, still smiling. ‘Don’t worry Aaron. They’ll think I’ve been living out here all my natural life. I’m pretty good at bluffing it.’

  She had suggested giving the passengers a little tour-guide routine; just some background spiel, a few facts, a few figures and an explanation of why it was all one day going to vanish - just enough that their customers felt like they were getting their money’s worth.

  ‘Okay so most of the detail is a load of crud I’ve looked up on the GEO channel, or made up, but fregg, they’re not going to know, are they?’ she said.

  ‘Just as long as it sounds correct,’ said Aaron, ‘and they don’t figure that we’re a bunch of rank amateurs having our first go at this.’

  Ellie placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Jez’s good at razzing, they’ll believe every little word of nonsense she tells them back there.’

  ‘It’s all crap,’ Jez smiled and spun round on her heels. ‘But I’ll have them believing I’m an expert,’ she muttered with a flick of her jet black hair, and making her way down the cabin towards the aft bulkhead door.

  ‘Is she always so sure of herself?’ asked Aaron.

  Ellie watched her open the door and enter the passenger suite. ‘Always.’

  *

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are rapidly approaching this world’s arctic shelf. If you care to look out of the viewing windows on either side…’

  Most of the passengers had been staring lackadaisically at the toob, watching some imported off-world chat-show. With Jez’s loud announcement breaking the fug of creeping boredom, the toob was instantly forgotten and all ten passengers crowded to either side of the suite to look out at the approaching spectacle.

  Jez joined the billboard brothers, Corin, and one of the middle-aged couples in one window and stared out at the approaching ice sheet, now as thick as a thumb held out at arm’s length. She had anticipated that the transition from non-arctic to arctic would have been gradual; starting with small patches of ice and snow that gradually grew in size and density. She couldn’t have been more wrong. As they drew closer, hugging the dusty ground below them, she could see they were approaching a towering wall of ancient ice, several hundred feet tall. Its base was littered with shattered blocks of ice, a glittering rubble heap of shards and glistening faceted boulders of melting ice.

  ‘As you can see, if you look at the bottom of the shelf approaching us, there is a lot of freshly broken ice. That’s ice that has broken away from the shelf as it continues to melt and withdraw northwards.’

  Jez had tried to find some information on the arctic region of Harpers Reach on the Toob-GEO Interactive channel. Despite a heroic effort on her part, she had found very little on it. After a long time patiently scanning through the lists of content, and being sidetracked a couple of times by a juicy celebrity gossip page, she had eventually found a menu devoted to natural history and a page of historic notes on the Big Warming of Old Earth. Jez decided the facts and figures she pulled up there, dating from the first half of the 21st century onwards, were probably good enough to pass as data harvested from below.

  ‘Detailed measurements taken here, over the last twenty years…’

  Go on then girl, make it sound authentic and official.

  ‘…conducted by the Colonial Bureau of Arctic Studies, have shown that the shelf is withdrawing northwards by three miles every year. That the ice-mass of the north polar region is decreasing by two-and-a-half percent every year, as the temperature of the planet warms up,’ she announced, checking out of the corner of her eyes to see whether she was being given any skeptical frowns. Encouraged, she tried to remem
ber some more of the little factoids she had read on the dying days of Old Earth’s polar caps.

  ‘If you look at the ice face itself, you’ll see different layers of white and grey. That’s where the density of the ice changes and is a reflection of environmental changes here on Harpers Reach from long before man settled on the planet. As you can see, there have been climate changes in the past, but this time round the warming will eventually melt all of it.’

  ‘So why IS the world warming up?’ asked the middle aged lady next to her.

  Jez concentrated for a moment as she recalled the detailed explanation Aaron had given her a few days ago. Somewhat bored and irritated by his lecturing tone, she hadn’t listened to all of it but, but she could recall enough of it to parrot-it-back.

  ‘As the atmosphere thickens across the planet, thanks to the work of the Oxxon refineries right at the very top of the world, the surface heat of the ground, warmed by the sun, is then trapped beneath it. The atmosphere functions a bit like a one way mirror, allowing…’

  Crud, technical words coming up. I hope I get this right….

  ‘…infrared and microwave energy in one way, but not out the other. In effect, functioning like a layer of insulation,’ Jez said, proud with herself that for a few moments there, she’d managed to sound vaguely like an egg-head, even if she didn’t really understand the first thing of what she had just been saying.

  The shuttle began to rise in altitude as the mottled white wall ahead of them loomed up large and intimidating. As the final thousand yards distance dwindled, the shuttle rose and dramatically skimmed over the top of the cliff with only a few dozen yards to spare.

  Jez heard a collective out-letting of breath from either side of her. Ahead, the landscape was a brilliant, glittering, plain of white, punctuated here and there by enormous cracks and crevasses that snaked all the way to the edge of the arctic shelf. A world of orange and brown had suddenly been replaced with one of white, blues and subtle violets, in the blink of an eye.

  She felt a passing surge of emotion that almost threatened the precise line of her lips. She wasn’t sure what it was…pride, sadness, loss?…or perhaps a dawning glimmer of realization that she was privileged enough to see something so beautiful; something that would one day be little more than a footnote on some other planet’s Toob-Interactive menu list.

  As the doomed icy wilderness rushed past beneath them she felt like she was beginning to understand why Aaron and Ellie had spoken of it with a mixture of wonder and sadness. She decided to let their passengers enjoy the next few minutes in silence. She understood that what they could take in with their own eyes would mean far more to them than any hastily collated info-babble she could fill their ears with.

  It was all a load of baloney anyway. Even Jez had to admit, there really were moments in your life when the best thing you can do is just shut up for a minute.

  OMNIPEDIA:

  [Human Universe open source digital encyclopedia]

  Article: ‘The Legend of Ellie Quin’ > The Eco-collapse of Harpers Reach

  Several hundred years after Ellie Quin’s death, Harpers Reach was once more a deserted planet; it became yet another cautionary lesson in how not to terraform a world.

  The problem had been a miscalculation of the frozen water available. There simply wasn’t enough to create a thick enough and sustainable atmosphere. The thin atmosphere that was produced, soon succumbed to the naturally occurring chlorine and sulfur seepage from beneath the planet’s surface. A process that quickly eroded the already meager ozone coverage above the tropospheric layer.

  Arguably, if the population holed-up in New Haven and Harvest City had been convinced to decamp from their protective domes earlier, once breathable air had become reliable enough, and had pro-actively cultivated the land with UV-resistant oxygen producing crops…they might have turned the tide and consolidated the planet’s atmosphere in time to make it indefinitely sustainable.

  This didn’t happen though.

  As the decades passed after the Oxxon refineries had closed down, the atmosphere gradually decayed to the point at which there was no longer a possibility that life could ever be led outside without the need of an oxygen mask. The one shot they had at turning the planet into a habitable world had been spent and wasted.

  The two cities became over-crowded and conditions inside both domes eventually became unsustainable. When it became clear that Harpers Reach was unlikely to mature into a viable planet that could one day contribute to the economy of Human Space, trade links withered and commercial deliveries began to wane.

  There are many varying accounts of the last fifty years of life on that planet. Some of these historical accounts are truly biblical and utterly grisly in their depiction of the final years. There are tales from New Haven of mass die-offs through suffocation and starvation. Tales of order breaking down and the city divided into various factions that fought viciously for the dwindling resources available. There are horrible tales of barbarism, butchery and cannibalism as the remaining, doomed city dwellers struggled desperately to survive against ever lengthening odds.

  But these are all tales.

  The world, of course, did eventually die; however, most of the inhabitants of the city migrated, as had those of Celestion, to other, better managed, colony worlds in the sector. A few of the more adventurous colonists remained on that muddy, orange world, enduring terrible hardship for several more generations, convinced that the world might one day be wrestled back under control. But records show the last of these isolated and tiny communities died off four hundred years ago.

  Since then, as far as it is known, Harpers Reach has remained uninhabited by anyone. From time to time, archaeological parties have been known to fly down into the ruined city of New Haven in order to spend a few months wandering beneath the domed roof amongst the dust-coated towers and streets and the dark shells of tall buildings.

  There are some wonderfully shot images of that place; poignant compositions of interiors that once were homes, of dust-coated cups and plates set for final meals that never quite happened, of shop fronts still open for business but containing nothing but ghosts of the past.

  It is remarkable how much remains preserved, even to this day.

  User Comment > Gallis234

  Hey, I once did a dig there with the System History Circle. You know it’s weird, the buildings are still standing. Like a giant ghost city. Very creepy place. See my instaweb page. Cool holos of it.

  User Comment > Gerry-Stay-at-home Monstuh

  My mum sucks on goosti-gorkins when she thinks I’m not looking.

  User Comment > Lebby-Chik890

  Sucks ‘em? She’s doin’ it all wrong Stay-at-home.

  User Comment > Anonymous

  Gallis, did you feel the eyes of the dead on you as you picked around New Haven? There was a holo-frightener on the old toob about a bunch of kids visiting an old abandoned dome-city. Didn’t end so well for the kids.

  CHAPTER 6

  Deacon looked out of the long and wide lounge window at the city below. New Haven was like so many other new world cities; untidy, overcrowded and garish. Every spare surface seemed to be filled with animated commercial images, the sky littered with floating billboards. It was one big, vulgar, tasteless bazaar that seemed to be poorly controlled by the city authorities.

  It wasn’t as if it even had any unique charm. There was nothing out there that was uniquely of this world, nothing that identified this city, this world, from hundreds of others like it. Most of the logos he spotted amongst the chaos of flickering, flashing, brightly colored graphics were ones that he had seen over and over again with monotonous regularity; the same old companies selling the same old rubbish to the gullible herds throughout Human Space.

  It was totally homogenous, generic. New Haven was as instantly forgettable as most of the other cities he had visited in his life; a ramshackle bubble packed full of good little consumer-sheep, passively grazing on protein-poor fast food and gazing listlessly at holographic commercials.