Paul Collins - Earthborn The

"If it had been worse, we'd have gone the way of the dinosaurs." Con sighed heavily. "He knows all that, Sarah. Now Welkin, canwe use this as a weapon? Does it always take a while to charge up?"

"With a heavy-duty power source it would be faster," he said, thinking. "But it's too slow for a weapon. Colony technicians made this model redundant before I was born." He paused to consider. "It must have come from the lower decks. They hang on to stuff like this down there."

"And I think we'd better hang on to it here," Sarah said.

"Ilija?" Con asked cautiously.

"Yeah," Sarah said. "Something's not quite right there. Can't put a finger on it. Not yet."

She turned to Welkin. "What's wrong with us, do you think?"

Welkin shrugged. "The sunlight issue is pretty major. There must be substantial pollutants as well, in which case you could speed up the process with catalytic converters." This was kids' stuff. "They eradicate the chlorine from the atmosphere and generate new ozone. It's easy."

Sarah and Con exchanged looks. "Jabbers make more sense when they talk," Sarah said, amused.

"Easy he says!" Con rolled his eyes. "How are you going to get these catawhatevers up there in the first place?"

At Welkin's consternation, Sarah laughed. "We're stirring you, Welkin."

"You wanna try on my glasses?" Con asked.

"No!" Sarah said, laughing in spite of herself.

Welkin reached out and took Con's glasses and gingerly placed them crookedly on his nose. He gasped. "I thought glasses were supposed to make you see clearer!" he said, bewildered.

"Oh, no! Con! You're a terror!"

Con took the glasses back. "I think they suit me better," he said, suppressing his mirth.

Welkin blinked his eyes, unable to see the humor. The Earthborn certainly had some strange customs!

"Here," Sarah said, seizing Con's glasses. She methodically wound some old duct tape around the bridge. "They'll never sit like they did, Con. If I could go to an optician and buy you a new pair, I would."

Con positioned them over his nose. "They never were perfect," he said.

"I promise never to make a joke about you being one-eyed about anything," Sarah said. Before Con could retaliate, she nudged him. "Truce!"

"Lucky," he joked. He put the lance away with Sarah's herb box. "It's not that safe here, but it's a damn sight safer than back at base."

"You're not wrong there," Sarah said. She gave a floorboard a heavy thud and it sprang up. Reaching down beneath the floor, she withdrew several cans and some green paper bags.

"We are celebrating," commented Con. "Good food. One can each." He held the can close to his glasses and read the label. "Peas. Swap you half-and-half for your carrots, Sarah."

Sarah smiled and handed Welkin a tin. "Dehydrated C rations. Braised sausages, braised steak and onion—we're out of Irish stew."

"And mouth-watering dark chocolate," Con put in.

"And milk powder," Sarah said with a quick smile. "Don't look so morbid, Welkin. Lives were lost fighting for this stuff." She heaved a sigh of resignation. "Gimps found that the old air base tunnels over at Tottenham were still loaded with caches of food. When the government sold the land, they probably figured it was cheaper to leave the stuff down there as landfill than pay to get it shifted."

"Very thoughtful of them," Con said, ripping into a can. He nodded to Welkin. "Get stuck into it, mate.

You'll not see its like again."

"Condensed milk in a tube and freeze-dried rice," Sarah mused, obviously relishing the pictures these items conjured. "And remember the Vegemite, Con?" she laughed.

"And the dried soup powder." Con turned to Welkin. "You'll never know what you missed," he added.

"On Colony we had hectares of hydroponic units devoted to Earth food. Rhubarb, pumpkin, cabbage, and something called beetroot— but most of us don't . . . didn't get the real stuff." He looked up and found them both staring at him.

"You've got food on board that we haven't seen or eaten in years," Sarah said. "Stuff we even forgot existed."

"And animals, I'll bet," Con said. "Horses? Cattle? Antelope? Tell us what they're like, Welkin!"

"They're just animals," Welkin said. He sat back and shrugged uncertainly. He couldn't quite figure out if they were serious or not. "Sheep and cows mostly."

"Utilitarian," Sarah concurred. "Only animals that can be used for food or clothing. Certainly nothing kept as a pet."

"But in the storage vats, they have DNA samples of everything Earth had when Colony left." Welkin looked from Sarah to Con and back again. "And bioengineers even spliced a whole series of new species from old DNA samples."

Sarah and Con exchanged excited looks. "Got any dinosaurs, aside from the elders?"

Welkin gasped and instinctively looked about, as if expecting a heavy to materialize from nowhere and drag them all off to the brig to be brainwiped. Speaking badly of the elders was strictly forbidden.

Indeed, it was the closest thing to blasphemy the Skyborn knew.

"A regular Noah's Ark," Con marveled. "The rebirthing of an entire planet."

Sarah eyed Welkin speculatively. "I guess that makes you Noah."

"Just like after it rained for forty days and forty nights," Con joined in. "Like in the Bible, Welkin." His voice had reached sudden fever pitch. "Don't you see—the return of Colony is how the Bible said it was in the beginning!"

"I remember bits of it," Welkin said slowly. "I never saw the animal bays." He dismissed their inquiring looks and concentrated on the canned food. He vaguely realized that he would have to take things slowly. There was such a thing as information overload and something else the elders had talked about.

Culture shock. Though they'd meant it the other way around. Long, long ago, European civilization had decimated more primitive societies such as the Pacific Islanders and Australian Aborigines. These groups had had no protection against the culturally domineering Western countries. Elder Tobias once remarked that even without direct extermination, the Earthborn would become extinct within a hundred years, profoundly disheartened by their evident inferiority. Welkin wasn't so sure anymore; maybe it worked both ways . . .

"It's odd, but I've just realized something," Welkin said. "Apart from you, Sarah, and Bruick, everyone's about my age. There aren't any elders."

"You're right," Sarah said. "We're anomalies—what you might call mutants. I used to think it was all the inbreeding—no new strains to vary the genetic pool. My latest theory is that some new strain of, say, autoimmune disease was unleashed during the war. Not many of us seem to mature past about eighteen."

A wave of sadness came down upon her. "I'm years older than anyone I know. All my childhood friends have died." She frowned at a dark thought. "Not all naturally, either."

"And no one in our group can have children right now," Con explained. "It's too dangerous." He looked myopically at Sarah for confirmation. "If we wanted to, we could, couldn't we, Sarah?"

Sarah's smile was fleeting. "Too limited a gene pool, really. Which is another reason we have to get out of here. Meet more people. Get this wretched planet back on track."

"It's not something we talk much about, Welkin," Con said and was thankful when the Skyborn simply nodded.

Sarah threw the empty cans into a bag and stuck it in her utilities.

Welkin took several practice steps around the table. If not for his powerful legs, he knew the splint Sarah had tied about his wound would have totally immobilized him. He moved gingerly at first andrealized with relief that his leg bore up reasonably well, all things considered.

"Walking like a local," Con said.

Welkin stumbled. Con caught him. "Just takes a bit of practice. That's all."