Space Colony One
It’s time to say goodbye to Space Colony One with one final snippet. I haven’t completed the novel yet but to keep to my schedule I need to set it aside for now. Next week, I begin work on A Very Carrie Christmas, my second standalone novella starring transgalactic intercultural community crisis liaison officer, Carrie Hatchett.
I published Carrie Hatchett’s Christmas in time for the festive season last year, and I’m hoping to follow suit with a second feel-good scifi romp this November. So, please prepare yourself for a different tone altogether in next week’s snippet!
Chapter Four
Ethan waited for Cariad in the lot outside the shuttle station. A regular shuttle schedule of three arrivals and departures per day had begun to run, and Cariad had mailed to say she would be on the noon arrival. Ethan had watched the shuttle fly in, appearing from out of the sky as if by magic. To him, Nova Fortuna was now no more than a stationary point of light at night, and in the daytime the starship was entirely invisible.
As a Gen, he now required special permission to return to his old home. The new rule rankled, especially because Wokens like Cariad could come and go as they pleased. The reason given was that their roles were mostly scientific and performed aboard the starship, while Ethan’s and the other Gens’ jobs were confined to the settlement or nearby it. Yet the delineation was clear: the Woken had freedom to travel that the Gens did not.
The planetside dwellers had quietly pushed back by taking control of the skimmers. Nova Fortuna had brought thirty of the fusion-powered land vehicles to the new world. They would run for around three years before their energy ran out, but the technology to refuel or replace them was unlikely to have been developed by that time. Consequently, the Manual stated that they must only be used when absolutely necessary, such as for emergencies and transportation of materials or equipment that was too heavy to move by any other method.
The Gens had taken it upon themselves to bend the parameters of what constituted absolutely necessary use and routinely used the skimmers on trips outside the settlement. Massive road making machines were already crawling slowly across the landscape outside the town, and solar-powered electric vehicles to run on them were being assembled from kits, but neither were ready for use yet. The Gens were nervous about venturing into the wild with no means of escape from predatory organisms than their own two feet. Also, they had quickly picked up on how much more convenient it was to ride a skimmer than to walk. After growing up aboard a starship, they weren’t used to traveling long distances on foot.
Ethan was looking forward to taking Cariad for a ride. He’d packed some food so they wouldn’t have to return to the settlement to eat when they got hungry.
Shuttle passengers began to emerge from the station exit, and Ethan smiled as he saw Cariad’s familiar figure among them.
She spotted him seated in the skimmer and waved in recognition. “Hi,” she said as she approached. “How did you get permission to take one of these? I thought we were hiking out there. I wore my walking boots.”
“All the farmers can use them.”
Cariad’s eyebrows lifted. “All the farmers? But aren’t you supposed to be—?”
“Saving them for emergencies? Strictly speaking yes, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?”
Cariad looked dubious. She opened the door and climbed in. There were seats for six, but the rear four were folded down to make room for a load. The skimmer briefly dipped under the extra weight then returned to its former elevation.
“What happened to your face?” Cariad asked when she saw Ethan close up.
He’d forgotten they hadn’t seen each other since the bombing at the stadium.
“Just an injury from the explosion. The scar’s fading now. How’s your arm?”
“It’s getting better. The doctor said just another few days and it’ll be good as new.”
“Good. And your head?”
“It’s fine. I heard you pulled me out of the wreckage. I wanted to thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. Anyone would have done it.”
“I know, but…” She drifted to silence, apparently unsure how to frame what she wanted to say. “It’s good to be planetside again. I always feel a little claustrophobic aboard ship, even though it’s as big as a small town. There’s something weird about living in an entirely artificial environment. I never quite got used to it.”
“I never minded it. Living aboard Nova Fortuna was all I knew before we came here. In fact, the first time I came planetside, the idea that I could walk for years and never walk in the same place twice freaked me out a little, though I wouldn’t admit it to Lauren.”
Cariad’s expression turned sympathetic, but the atmosphere between them became awkward. Ethan wondered if it was the first time he had mentioned his dead girlfriend to her. He couldn’t remember. Thinking about Lauren remained almost unbearably painful. Maybe he hadn’t talked about her up until then.
“It’s about time we left,” he said, starting up the skimmer. He reversed the machine from the curb and pulled out of the lot. Once they were through the gate in the electric fence, he set the skimmer to automatic.
Cariad gave a surprised, oh, as it left the road and set off through the fern-like trees that surrounded the settlement.
Ethan chuckled. “It doesn’t pay much attention to roads. When you’re floating thirty centimeters high, there’s no need for them.”
“I would have thought there might be some need for them,” Cariad replied.
“Nope. It goes around anything that’s in the way, moving or not, or it rises up and passes over it. They’re very safe. You never went in in a skimmer back on Earth?”
“They were new technology. Anti-gravity propulsion was newly invented, and the FTL starship engine scientists had hopes it would lead them to a breakthrough. The engineers had barely run all the safety tests on the skimmers before they were loaded onto Nova Fortuna. I hadn’t even seen one in real life, only in vids.”
“This is really your first time in a skimmer?” A wave of delight washed over Ethan.
Read Space Colony One Part IV here.