Saturday 29 August 2009

Commodore Hall

It’s bloody freezing. Literally. Icicles hang from every rivet and strut of the bridge. A metre of snow hides the track bed that it carries, abandoned before I was conceived. A while back the bridge followed the railway into neglect and will decay to the sad fate of its road-bearing sister a mile upriver. There, a couple of truncated, rusting pillars poke through the surface of the Forth, still frozen and glistening under a May sun.

Beyond, on the Fife shore, Rosyth rots into its grave. The scene below me, South Queensferry, is hardly less desolate: what roofs still survive sag under layers of snow. The odd plume of smoke discloses some brave soul still toughing it out, still clearing the path to his door, still keeping the drifts trimmed to below window level, from which feeble light glows.

It’s bleak alright but should I be abandoning it? God knows I've seen worse.

I gun my backpack jets and rise far enough to view the upper stories of TransHub breaching the middle of the Firth, just by the island of Inchcolm. From it steam vents, panels glitter and masts sway in a slight breeze. Civilisation. Clinging on. My last sight of my adopted homeland, my --

“Hall."

I hear this as though down a tunnel.

"Commodore Hall!"

“Aye, right enough.” I force my concentration back to the pulsing blue-red bioconsole in front of me.

Admiral Raven doesn't sound best pleased. "’Yes, ma'am’ is protocol, I believe.”

“Aye, aye, ma'am.” I almost bring myself to attention although zero-gravity has kept me exactly where I was before my wee reverie.

The fleet commander’s voice continues inside my head. “Get yourself to the Bridge. Ten minutes to departure."

Ten minutes. Twenty, counting the time it'll take the real bigwigs to bask in the glory of the launch and then hightail it back down to Luna. Twenty minutes to play my get-out-of-jail-free card if I so wish. The jail being the uncertainty of what will greet us on 18 Scorpii.

Oh, and the twelve dangerous years to get there.

No, it’s not a jail. We're leaving the jail or at least the frying pan. The other side of the Moon from us our ravaged Earth limps into oblivion. Just a personal view, mind, but one shared by the thousand-plus souls in this particular fleet, and a few thousand more who have preceded us to Eridani, Tau Ceti and Chara.

Chara. I try not to think of Chara.

I think back to Commodore Raven, "The new mods –"

"I want all senior personnel visible. That goes for the entire fleet. Understood?"

A chorus of ayes, yeses, oui’s, si’s fills the air waves as with some guilt I freeze SimPlanet 3000, whose display currently fills the main smartwall. I hadn’t been modifying anything of note. I disengage from my seat and drift away from what has been my second home for the last two years of preparation.

No, I couldn't throw all that away, nor the efforts and commitment of everyone around me, not to mention the money that's been thrown at this project. It’s money that's keeping my escape route open. The most expensive human being in history, slinking off the sinking ship. But, of the colonists, only Mamour knows that, I hope.

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