Paul Collins - Earthborn The

Can't wait to smell the fields! See the colors! Feel the breeze — the breeze! Strong enough to knock you down sometimes! And the sea. Huge waves — so big they pick you up and throw you down. And animals . . .

And dancing. He could see the Earthborn dancing—black skins, brown and white, throwing their arms everywhere and kicking the air ... He had found dancing listed as a pagan ritual in databases.

He thought fleetingly of his sister, Lucida, and wondered if she was all right, or if Harlan Gibbs had paid her a visit, too. How far does a "bacterium of treason" spread? Or a "viral conspiracy"? Welkin didn't know. Perhaps he never would. Families were no longer the unit of childhood maturation as they had been on Earth centuries ago. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters—outdated modes of thinking, dangerous modes of thinking! Colony had done away with such sentimental and socially corrupting concepts. There was only one family that existed now: the family of humanity. And by definition that was to be found only on Colony.

Hysterical screaming broke into his thoughts. The lights dimmed, flickered, and went out. Welkin almost screamed himself. For all his officer training, for all the endless neural simulations he'd experienced, darkness was still the most dreaded cataclysm that could befall the Skyborn. A thousand souls screamed as one in a darkness blacker than space.

Colony hit. It plowed into the Earth with vast and implacable inertia. Nothing could possibly stand in its way. Welkin was thrown across the room. Somewhere deep in the ship the thrust resistors screamed as more power surged through their overheated circuits and they died. But before they expired in a spectacular shower of sparks and smoke, they did their job, the last that would be asked of them. They brought Colony safely home.

Almost immediately, a frightening cacophony of noise filled the ship in all directions: tons of hardened plastisteel twisting and buckling as the ship warped under gravity, fractures spiderwebbing through bulkheads and decking . . . Farther still, on the edge of hearing, Welkin could make out a cascade of pings and cracklings as the mighty hull cooled.

Despite his fear, he knew he was high enough up in Colony not toget crushed, although he could feel the vessel tilting as more lower decks folded in on themselves.

He prayed Lucida was somewhere safe, and he prayed that the lights would come back on.

This was worse than any nightmare. Colony was like a living organism, and like any organism it was

susceptible to disease or, in this case, contamination. Bulkheads would be ruptured, portholes smashed.

If all duty stations were still functioning, then danger spots would be quickly sealed off. Under no circumstances could they permit the skyworld to be contaminated by the insidious disease-infested environment of Earth.

Colony's last massive groan, as it settled into its final resting place, almost drowned out Captain Sobol's last ordio announcement:

"We are down. We are home."

The multitiered Colony would have burned out high in the atmosphere were it not for its shields and antigravity stabilizers. Even so, it struck Melbourne, a city in the southeast of what was once called Australia, at sixty miles an hour.

Colony's shields took the brunt of the collision, then dissolved as Colony's power overloaded and shorted. The lower levels collapsed like trodden cardboard as thousands of tons of extruded titanium concer-tinaed on impact.

The resulting shock wave toppled tall buildings in a five-mile radius. A cloud of dust shrouded Melbourne's skyline for forty-eight hours.

The pallid sun broke through on the third day.

Elder Jamieson, in charge of Earth reconnaissance, pursed his lips. Now was as good a time as any to make an initial foray. They'd need to establish safe territory from the earth scum and construct a barrier around Colony until its massive damaged infrastructure could be sealed from outside contamination. But first they needed to know what was out there.

"Leeson," he said, without turning. His subordinate, a short, thickset man, responded. "Sir?"

"We need a foraging team, to get the lay of the land. I doubtwhether the Earthborn will have much food. Supply the scouts with scanners; there might be some ancient food vaults that haven't been desecrated by the heathens."

"Yes, sir, Elder, sir."

"And Leeson."

"Elder, sir?"

Elder Jamieson turned slowly. His voice was crackly and held no pity. "Expendables, Leeson. I doubt they will last long out there. Wire them up for telemetry. I want continuous readings for all possible contaminants, infectious agents, and background radiation." He waved his hand dismissively.

"As you wish, Elder . . . sir."

"One more thing. If any of them make it back to the ship, throw them down below."

Welkin was among the fifteen-strong party that was dispatched outside. The team comprised several suspected lower deck sympathizers plus those, like Welkin, who had had the misfortune to be exposed to the "contagion." There were also three army personnel who had volunteered for this mission. One thing Colony would never be short of was dedicated zealots!

They fell about like bowling pins at first. On board Colony, where corridors were perfectly flat and even the farming and recreational areas were designed for safety, few Skyborn had ever developed the need to learn about rough terrain. They coped as poorly as Earthborn might if confronted with weightlessness.

"Take it easy," a voice rasped loudly in Welkin's headset. "All of you. Get a puncture in your suit and we're leaving you out there."

Welkin swallowed, fighting a moment of panic. Nothing could be worse than to be left in hostile territory. It was certain death.

Wearing heavy-duty work boots and a gray contamination coverall with Colony in black letters embroidered on the upper right arm, Welkin gingerly picked his way through the skeletal remains of a building. He ducked beneath twisted girders and more than once losthis balance on jagged outcrops of concrete and tangles of sharp metal.

The vid sims on Colony had said that it would be bad, but this was worse than he had imagined.

There was nothing here, just a desolate wasteland and a never-ceasing wind that keened eerily through the ancient buildings. Even the broiling, sullen sky bore no resemblance to the smog-laden atmosphere he had expected.

Could the entire planet be like this? Maybe somewhere—on another continent—it was different.

Either way, it was hard to imagine that this was the birthplace of humanity, that his ancestors had evolved on this desolate speck of mud. He looked back quickly at the quietly rumbling ship, squatting on tons of smoking rubble. Even stronger in his mind now was the silent thought that Harlan Gibbs had placed there.

Redemption. Hope. A way to rejoin Colony . . .

Welkin knew then that he must prove his loyalty to the rest of the Skyborn. He must win his way back into the folds of the only family he had ever really known. With a sudden chilling resolve that he had never felt before—that was somehow adult —he knew he would do whatever it took . . .

But right now he had to concentrate, had to stay focused. He pushed those other thoughts away. He knew why he had been sent on this mission. He was an expendable, a "discard." It was either this broken, tumbled hellscape, or the lower decks. He almost laughed, which was a strange thing in itself.

From where he was standing, he wasn't quite sure which was worse.

He tried to block out the excited voices on his headset. He felt more sadness than excitement. He felt resentment tear through him. He hadn't even been given a chance to farewell Lucida. It was just so—